We are told, often, that the gospel is not political — that Jesus stayed out of politics and so should the church. The vocabulary of the New Testament says otherwise. The words the first Christians used for Jesus were not pious coinages borrowed from the synagogue but political words taken from Caesar.
Lord. Savior. Gospel. Epiphany. Each belonged to the imperial cult before the church laid hands on it. In the Roman world, Lord and Savior were Caesar’s titles. There is a gate at Ephesus — the city where Timothy pastored, the city to which Paul’s letters traveled — that proclaimed Caesar as Lord and Savior of the world. An inscription from the same era hails Augustus as a savior sent by providence, the man who ended war and ordered peace, whose birth was good news for the whole earth. The Greek for that good news is euangelion. Gospel. Caesar’s gospel was that Caesar is Lord, a gift from the heavens, the savior who delivered his people from their enemies. The emperor’s accession, even his birthday, could be announced as euangelion. N.T. Wright observes that, to the Roman mind, Augustus had accomplished the kind of thing only a god could.
So when Paul writes that our Savior Christ Jesus abolished death, he is not reaching for therapeutic comfort but making a political claim with a stolen word. If Caesar is Savior because he defeated Rome’s enemies and brought peace, how much more is Jesus Savior, who defeated the last enemy, death itself. “Jesus is Lord” was no devotional sentiment in that world but treason — a flat denial of the one sentence Rome required every subject to affirm. The most basic confession of the church was, from the first day, a collision with the gospel of Caesar.
This is what made early Rome, in the terms of the last essay, a beast. The imperial cult was a Babel in its purest form — the political shape of a man’s aspiration to divinity — and when it turned to persecute the church that would not say “Caesar is Lord,” it became bestial. Nero lit Christians as torches in his garden. Rome began its dealings with the church in open religious war.
Then something happened that ran the Egypt story backward. Egypt moved from guardian to Babel to beast, declining across the book of Exodus until God broke it. Rome moved the other way. The empire that began as a beast, hunting the people of God, bent over the next three centuries toward a guardian — a state that protected the church rather than consuming it. The hinge was Constantine, after whom the empire’s posture toward Christians shifted from hostility to favor, and its laws began, slowly and unevenly, to move toward the function Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 assign a government: punish evil, protect those who do good.
This is the exact point where Christians lose their heads, so let me put the question plainly: can a nation be converted? In the ordinary sense of the word, no — and it is not close. A nation cannot be born again. It cannot be justified, sanctified, or glorified. Those words name what God does to persons, to souls he regenerates one at a time, and they do not transfer to a collective. Constantine’s decree did not regenerate Rome. The establishment of Christianity was not the conversion of Romans; it did not make the population born again, and it never could. A great many baptized subjects of a Christian empire were no more saved than their pagan grandfathers.
But there is a second sense of the word, and Leithart’s model supplies it. A nation cannot be converted the way a man is, yet a nation can plainly be moved from one function to another. Egypt went guardian to beast; Rome went beast to guardian.