Natural vs covenantal identity: ethnic blood & soil vs Christ’s blood & kingdom

Issue #158

In the early 1800s, there was a Māori chief who lived around Matamata — better known today as Hobbiton — which is about 50 minutes’ drive from me. I pass the sign for the turnoff every Sunday, on my way to church.

Through the work of missionaries in that area, this Māori chief became a Christian. In time, his daughter Tarore became somewhat famous, because she had memorized large portions of the gospel of Luke in Māori. Supported by her father, she would minister to hundreds of Māori at a time, by reciting parts of Luke from memory.

In October of 1836, there was a violent, cannibalistic conflict between Māori tribes around the Matamata area — and Tarore’s father took her, and fled to Wairere Falls in the Kaimai ranges, to protect her. But that night, they were attacked by a war party from Rotorua (where my church is).

A warrior named Paora Te Uita murdered Tarore, and ritualistically mutilated her corpse.

The Māori law of utu required revenge for her death. But her father, because he believed the gospel, instead spoke at her funeral to say:

Do not rise up to obtain satisfaction for her. God will do that.

The warrior who killed Tarore returned to Rotorua — with the Māori gospel he had stolen from her body. He was curious about it, but he was also illiterate — so he asked an educated ex-slave to read the book to him.

As you can probably guess, when he heard the gospel, he was converted. And he sought out Tarore’s father, and he begged his forgiveness, and they were reconciled.

They made peace, through the blood of Christ.

My reasons for telling this story will become clear later, but let me now step back for a moment.

The church right now is struggling with what you might call tribalism. Tribalism covers a pretty broad range of issues, from racism and antisemitism (whatever you take those to mean), to Christian Nationalism and MAGA.

The common issue that connects them all is the relationship between the natural identities that God has given us, and the covenantal identity we share in Christ. How do we relate and order these various bonds — along with the affections and proclivities and dispositions that arise from them?

In one ditch, if you show any affection for those you share natural bonds with — kin and countrymen — or you suggest that they are important, you are assumed to be denying the vital spiritual bond we all share through union with Christ.

In the other ditch, if you suggest that the spiritual bond between Christians is in any way superior to the natural bond between kin or countrymen, you are assumed to be seeking the destruction of those natural bonds, and the disintegration of your nation and culture under the false guise of piety.

You’re either a racist, or a globalist.

These are the issues that threaten to divide the church today. This is the providence of God — the church always has to deal with new issues, because God is sanctifying the world through her. So it is right that when these questions arise in our nations, the church should wrestle with them to find answers, so that we may disciple those nations.

Take this post as part of that wrestling.

Where the issue lies

I believe the true heart of all these issues is not really tribalism, as I have called it — issues like Christian Nationalism and MAGA and antisemitism and racism (whatever you take those to mean). Tribalism is merely the symptom.

The disease is an identity crisis.

The tribalism is a natural response to this identity crisis — and the identity crisis in turn is a result of the church failing to teach, failing to clearly articulate, a foundational doctrine that we could call covenantal integration.

This is a doctrine with enormous application. I believe it is crucial — absolutely central — to understanding the errors that are being made right now in the “reformational church,” as it were…and to avoiding them. Many Reformed men are being divided over these tribal issues, even though beforetimes you would have thought they were strongly united. A lot of relatively theologically-inclined, seemingly well-meaning people, are being thrown into confusion and animosity; and many don’t seem to even understand the arguments of the other side when they are stated in (what seem to me) very clear, straightforward theological terms.

My concern is the peace of Christ’s church. Not false peace; not “peace, peace, when there is no peace.” Being able to identify and rebuke error is of great importance; false teaching must be corrected. Warfare is sometimes necessary for peace. But there is also no use identifying the error, and going to war against it, if your tactics for trying to correct it actually produce more of that error, rather than less. And that is what I am seeing happening right now.

I am pretty sure that covenantal integration is at the heart of this problem — this “identity crisis.” I think we can trace most of the current confusion to a lack of appreciation or awareness for how foundational and pervasive a thing covenant truly is.

Covenant is not just a few agreements that God makes with some people in the Bible.

Covenant is the foundation of existence.

Covenant is everywhere.

Covenant as a cosmic foundation

One way to think about this is: covenants are the rules of reality. They are the blueprint for how the cosmos is supposed to work — the natural world, human society, and the spiritual realm. All of these worlds are ordered and structured by covenant; and how they connect is ordered and structured by covenant. What is the relationship between man and animal? That’s a covenant summarized in Genesis 1 and 9. What is the relationship between man and angels? That’s a covenant that we don’t know much about, but is mentioned in places like Psalm 8:5—he made us a little lower than the angels. What is the relationship between man and God? That is a covenant which is also made in Genesis 1 and 9, and in other places, and is changed and adjusted across time, until we learn of an enormous change that takes place when God becomes man. Why would he do that? How does it change things? Ephesians 1 summarizes some of this, telling us that God made Jesus:

to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and he put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all. (Ephesians 1:20–22)

We learn here that we, the church, are Christ’s body — and as Paul makes clear in Ephesians 2:6, he “raised us up with him, and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.” In other words, although man is made a little lower than the angels, some men are now above all angels, because they have been integrated into Christ by covenant.

This integration into Christ by covenant trumps the previous creational covenant which describes our natural place as lower than the angels.

Let me say this again slightly differently. There is a creational covenant that prescribes the natural places of angels and men. And there is the New Covenant, which describes the place of Christ, which is far above both men and angels. And when we are integrated into that New Covenant — when we are integrated into Christ — our place compared to the angels, and other men, therefore changes. We are integrated into Christ, and so his place is our place. We are raised with him to sit in the heavenly places.

Now, why do I say integration? Usually we would speak of union with Christ, or maybe incorporation into Christ. But integration is a word that helps us understand this a little better by bringing in another more familiar biblical concept:

These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God. (Revelation 3:14)

The word beginning here in the Greek is arche, from which we get words like archangel and archbishop. It refers to being first, not just in time, but in order. Christ is the arche of the creation of God in the sense that “from him and through him and unto him are all things” (Romans 11:36), or as Paul says in another place:

…in him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers [these all being terms for different tiers of angelic beings]; all things have been created through him, and unto him; and he is before all things, and in him all things consist. (Colossians 1:16–17)

This latter phrase could also be translated, “in him all things hold together” — it is the same ideas as Ephesians 1:10, where he describes God’s purpose as “to sum up all things in Christ,” or to “unite all things in Christ” (ESV), or “bring together all things in Christ” (LEB).

This is what I mean by integration.

It is about much more than just our personal salvation. Our personal salvation is just our small part in the cosmic integration that Christ is bringing about. It is why in Colossians 3, Paul says, “there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is all, and in all” (Colossians 3:9–11). There can be no dividing wall of hostility any longer between these groups, because we are all integrated into Christ.

But this is something that affects everything: everything in heaven, and everything on earth.

Integration means fitting different parts together to create a whole. It is about unifying separate, and often previously hostile things into a single essence. It creates a bond between things — which means that covenantal integration is fundamentally, foundationally about love.

This is why Paul immediately goes on in Colossians 3:14 to say very straightforwardly: “above all these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfection” (or “perfect bond”).

The whole purpose and end of this covenantal integration — the very thing that it brings about — is a perfect bond between previously unbonded or disconnected or even opposing things.

Which is to say, it establishes love between things.

Not love as a feeling — although feelings certainly should follow — but love as a covenantal reality.

Integration and order

Now, when you integrate parts into a whole like this — when you fit different pieces together so they all work as one thing — let me point out something that may seem obvious but is very, very important.

You don’t do it willy-nilly.

There is a proper order that you must follow.

Think of a jigsaw puzzle. When you open the box, it is disintegrated. It is a jumble of parts, all mixed up at random. To fit the puzzle together, to create a unified picture, you have to integrate each of these parts into the whole. But you can’t just put any old part in any old place. You can’t arrange them however you want. They won’t go together except in exactly the right way. The edges have to go at the edge. The center has to be at the center. There is a proper way to put together the jigsaw.

There is only one way to integrate all the parts into a single, unified, complete puzzle.

Or, to get closer to the point I want to make: think of a family. There is only one proper way for all the members of a family to be integrated into a single, united, complete household. The father must be the head. The mother must be beneath and yet also beside him. The children must be under them. You cannot make the baby the head. It is impossible — even if you tried whimsically to do it, nature will not allow it. “Gaga googoo” is not a command anyone can follow. Neither can you make the wife the head. You can try to force it, but nature will cause the family to suffer. It will not function properly. The whole family must be integrated, summed up in, fitted together, in the true head: the father — who in turn must be under Christ, who in turn is under God. “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God…” Nevertheless, there is more to the proper order also: “neither is the woman without the man, nor the man without the woman, in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man, so is the man also by the woman; but all things are of [— which is to say, all things are summed up in, all things are integrated in —] God” (1 Corinthians 11:3, 11–12).

But a family integrates much more together than just its members. Many families have pets.

Do they love their pets? Yes, they do. Their pets are integrated into the whole, are they not? And if they are properly, rightly, fittingly integrated, then those pets are indeed loved in the biblical sense. Love is expressed in the ways that fit the hierarchy; in ways that fit the one doing the loving, and the one being loved. A pet is below you; it is another kind of being, a lesser being. We don’t love pets like we love our children, but we do love them.

Moreover, a family even integrates things that aren’t even alive at all. A family has many assets. Scripture treats property as part of us, in some sense. That is why it is wrong to steal. You are taking someone’s substance. The house, the car, the bed, the furniture, the utensils, the dinnerware, the appliances…all of these things, from the most expensive and important to the most trivial or whimsical, are integrated into the family’s identity. They are loved, in the ways appropriate to what they are. This is why if someone steals your car, you feel personally violated.

In the same way that a family — or more correctly a household — integrates all these different kinds of things, God in Christ is integrating all things in the world together, into a great household. Paul tells us in Ephesians 1:22–23 that God “put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.” The church is the center of integration, and through Christ, we own all the things he is integrating. All creation is ours in him, and the purpose of the gospel is to establish that reality in the world.

But the center of that reality is the church itself.

The entire sweep of the biblical narrative is a story of redemption which starts with, is grounded upon, saturated in, and aimed toward the idea of Yahweh creating a household for himself. In Luke 3:38 we read that Adam was the son of God. God’s created family is an extension of the triune family. Israel as a people is a family, the “house of Israel,” descended from one father, Abraham, and described as God’s son: “out of Egypt I called my son.” When we, the new Israel, come before God, Jesus bids us do so not as one would come before a king, or a warrior — though he certainly is those things — but as our Father who art in heaven (Luke 11:2; Matthew 6:9). We are his sons — the household of faith.

Covenant as ordering love

Just as in a human household, in God’s household there are rules. We have to know how to love. We have to know where every part is supposed to fit into the whole. We have to know its function. We have to know if it is doing a good job, or a bad job. We have to know what to do to fix it if there is a problem.

In other words, how the parts fit together, how they are integrated, must be regulated. There must be some kind of rule to it. Something to keep it structured: to establish and uphold the right order of how everything fits together. Something to govern it.

This is what covenant does. It orders love, or establishes the right order of the relationship, preventing it from becoming sentimental or confused. It preventing our emotions, our affections, running away with us. It provides the proper order for them. An ordo amoris.

This is why, when Jesus is asked, “Teacher, which commandment is the greatest in the law?” his answer is:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. A second, now, is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments the whole law hangeth, and the prophets. (Matthew 22:36–40)

This is also why in John 14:15 he can flip it around and say, “If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments.” To love God is to keep his commandments, because those commandments, that covenant, literally describes what love looks like and how it is supposed to work. To love God is to keep his commands, and the greatest command is to love God.

Covenant is the rule-structure for love. The ordo amoris is covenantal.

It is because of covenant that we can know that a woman who talks about loving her fur-babies like real children is acting foolishly and wickedly and contrary to God’s purpose. Covenant is how we can know that a man who smites his sinning children with the rod is loving his children, not hating them. Covenant is how we can know that a man must not feed someone else’s children at the expense of his own.

I don’t mean that there is an explicit written covenant for every such truth. I mean that the existence of those truths indicates that there is a covenant describing them — just as Scripture shows us that the existence of regular days and nights indicates that there is a covenant for them too:

Thus saith Yahweh: If ye can break my covenant with the day, and my covenant with the night, so that there shall not be day and night in their appointed time; then also my covenant may be broken with David my servant… (Jeremiah 33:20–21)

The regular “laws” of nature are actually covenants. What that means is more a topic for True Magic — but suffice to say for now, as a culture, we have been mutilating and ultimately discarding the idea of covenant for a long time.

This rebellion is catastrophic, because as you hopefully see now, covenants are foundational to reality — and so to every realm of society as well.

We tend to notice only those covenants which are explicitly cut between two parties: covenants that are written down and recorded.

But covenants are everywhere.

For example, men naturally enter into the covenant with Adam when they are born. They don’t choose it — it just happens. By the same token, we are entered into covenants with our fathers and our rulers when we are born. The marriage covenant issues forth in children, who are naturally under that covenant. The constitution of a nation issues forth in citizens, whose babies are naturally under that constitution, that covenant. But this is true even when no formal covenant is made. Not having a formal covenant can certainly confuse matters, and make them messy and murky; particularly in cases where it is clearly patterned in God’s word that a formal covenant is necessary to ensure the right order of the relationship. In New Zealand, for instance, de facto marriage is an overturning of the proper, formal covenantal order — and has done great harm, though ironically being regulated covenantally now in the civil realm, just like marriage. Or, a nation that arises organically and never constitutes formally makes problems for itself; and the same is true of a church. It may know that it has an identity — it has become naturally constituted together as a body so there is an implicit, natural covenant. But that identity needs to be properly “brought forth,” if you will, by the power of the word that God has given us as an image of himself.

Words must be set down to establish the identity formally. It must be named and described.

Covenant and identity

Now, what does this have to do with tribalism? Well, the Western world has rejected this organic understanding of society regulated by covenant — but nature abhors a vacuum. When we rebel against something fundamental to natural order, we always end up filling that void with some twisted version of the very thing we discarded.

This is why identity politics has swept through our culture so successfully—especially among young people, who are, of all of us, the generation most afflicted with fatherlessness; the generation most lacking covenant heads. Covenant and identity are intimately linked.

This becomes clearer if you think about how the constitution of a nation or a church is a covenant. It “constitutes” the body by naming and describing the body: effectively speaking the body into existence. It is the written form of the body’s identity. And this is true even when the covenant is a natural, implicit, organic, unwritten one. Because the whole world is upheld by the word of God’s power, there is always the divine word behind the form of creation — even when we have not ourselves put that word into our own words.

So covenant is the foundation of identity. In a covenantal system, everyone is integrated into one body, with a common head. People share responsibility and identity with that head. He represents you, but you also represent him. You participate and find meaning in the life of a well-formed body, sharing a common identity that brings satisfaction, purpose, and inclusion.

So another way to talk about this which may also be helpful is to say that covenant is existential: it has to do with existence. The existence of each covenant member is constituted in their covenant head, and in the body that grows from him. As members of the body, we exist in and from the body. This is the picture that Scripture presupposes.

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But who does the dishes?

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So what happens if you abandon this covenantal understanding of reality?

Well, you inevitably have an existential crisis. An identity crisis.

This is what has happened in the West; it is where all the woke garbage comes from. That’s why it’s called identity politics. You have all these people who are…

1. Firstly rejecting integration into a head and body as fundamental to who they are — so they make themselves the ones who must decide their own identity and meaning;

2. But secondly, because they haven’t actually changed their nature as a covenantal creature — they inevitably seek solidarity with others who identify the same way they do.

That sounds like a great idea until you realize…that’s not a natural body. There is no covenant head regulating and mediating authority and justice and right order — and certainly not one doing it in behalf of God’s power and righteousness — so you end up with a vicious and radically unstable society:

You have the illusion of freedom, with everyone getting to decide who he is and what he can do. But instead of making people more fulfilled and happier, they break down in existential angst. Radical individualism subjects its members to futility and emptiness and nakedness, because individuals can’t help needing participation and meaning in a larger body. But when the only bodies are groups that are defined by some arbitrary and unnatural and meaningless shibboleth — whether it’s being gay or being a Star Wars fan or whatever — shared meaning between different groups becomes impossible. There is no commonality between them. No body to connect and unite them. No head to integrate their diversity. That’s the exact thing they got rid of. So what was once a body is essentially dissected into individual members that try to find wholeness in being parts. They try to make a whole body out of arms, and another whole body out of eyes, and so on.

Needless to say, a grotesque collection of separated body parts cannot be a living body.

Oversteering to nature without covenants

Now, what I’m describing is woke radical individualism. We’ve been suffering under that for a while, and now the pendulum is inevitably swinging. A lot of reformational Christians are fed up with it, and they want a solution. Unfortunately, the natural way that we try to create solutions is very often by creating a mirror image of the problem. We oversteer.

You’ve probably noticed this with the red pill movement. In response to feminism, they created anti-feminism — when what we actually needed was non-feminism. Anti-feminism is the opposite of feminism; instead of women hating on men, it’s men hating on women. We need non-feminism; gendered piety.

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Red pill as another religion

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In the same way, now, in response to wokism, we are getting anti-wokism. In fact, it is quite often very obviously an exact mirror image: if everyone gets to find their identity in not being white, we are going to find our identity in being white. If you’re going to be against whiteness, we’re going to be against blackness. That kind of thing.

But I am less concerned with dealing with actual racists (by which I mean those with true ethnic vainglory and/or hatred) than with the more subtle or sophisticated kinds of tribalism. The ones that seem more plausible, and therefore are more challenging to discern the error in, and to know how to answer.

These are also born out of the same covenantal identity crisis, but they propose more persuasive, and more virtuous-seeming solutions. They aren’t creating pure mirror images of the things they hate. Rather, they are looking to recover the creational structures that got torn down: the kinds of natural, implicit covenants that I’ve been talking about.

Things like families and nations.

Blood and soil, in other words.

These sorts of brothers are saying, hey, we should never have dissolved the natural bonds of blood and soil. We should never have pretended that our ancestry doesn’t matter to who we are. We should never have believed that the place we were born and raised doesn’t have any bearing on our identity. Of course these things matter. We are literally constituted by our ancestry, and shaped by our land. These things are basic and natural to who we are. Blood and soil are fundamental to our very existence.

Now to this I say: yes and amen. I do want to adjust the phrase slightly to stock and soil, because that is how scripture actually speaks — for we are all made out of one blood:

He made also of one blood every nation of men, to dwell upon all the face of the earth (Acts 17:26)

Nonetheless, we are not all of one stock: Paul, for instance, describes himself as circumcised on the eighth day, of the stock of Israel (Phil 3:5). Biblically, it is stock and soil that constitute us — not blood and soil.

But either way, here is the problem I want to draw your attention to; the fundamental, foundational issue that is driving so much confusion and dissension among men in the church today:–

Without recovering stock and soil as covenantal categories, we have simply traded one arbitrary identity for another.

It may be a more compelling identity. It may be a more natural identity, because it is built into us at an intuitive level. It may be even a less destructive identity, all things considered. But at the theological level, we are still operating in the enemy’s categories. We have rejected one form of identity politics only to fall into another. We aren’t defining ourselves by our supposed sexual orientation; we are instead defining ourselves by our stock and our soil.

Now, you will say to me, “But Bnonn, sexual orientation doesn’t define us; stock and soil do.” Didn’t I even just admit to that? Stock and soil constitute who we are?

Yes — but let me ask you a question in turn: Are the people advocating stock and soil speaking of them as covenantal things? Do they understand them as being regulated and defined by the word of God, under the authority of the Lord Jesus as the head of all covenants?

Are stock and soil integrated into the arche of Christ?

In my observation, that is not how they understand them.

When they speak of stock and soil — or blood and soil — they mean people who look like me, and people who act like me.

That’s a natural starting point, but it is not sufficient for a Christian approach to identity. It is wholly, woefully insufficient.

There are many ways to prove this, but the simplest way is simply to show that is infinitely reducible. How much do people have to look like you and act like you? How close do they have to be by blood? How close do they have to live — to be “your people?”

This is where you finally get to see the significance of Tarore. You may not know much about the Māori, but here in New Zealand, we think of them as a single people.

Do you know why we think of them as a single people?

Because of Christ integrating all things into himself.

Before Christ came to the Māori, they were not a single people. They might have looked the same, and spoken the same language. They shared the same blood and lived in the same land. But they hated each other. They were a disintegrated people. They had disintegrated, in fact, as far as the natural constraints of the world and their evil desires would allow. Because they hated each other, they wanted to murder and eat each other — which meant that they had to work in groups, because no man can survive alone, or just in his nuclear family. So “blood” to them didn’t mean Māori, as a people. It meant a tribe large enough to murder and kill other tribes without being wiped out. “Soil” to them didn’t mean New Zealand. It meant as much land as they could hold against other tribes.

Blood and soil without Christ constrict down to the minimum viable identity possible to keep nonexistence at bay.

That’s it. That’s the best you will get with blood and soil without Christ.

Staving off nonexistence.

It’s not much of a basis for an identity.

Union with Christ

for as many as were baptized into Christ did put on Christ; there is not here Jew or Greek, there is not here slave nor freeman, there is not here male and female, for all ye are one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:27–28)

Christ as the integration point for every covenantal reality is foundational, fundamental, indispensable, to keep those other natural bonds meaningful and properly ordered.

Many Christians have forgotten this because they have the luxury of working within a society that still coasts on the momentum of having had these things integrated into Christ in the first place.

It is a kind of cultural amnesia.

It is identical to the R2k error. Brian Mattson wrote a book called Cultural Amnesia, showing how only a society that has had its moral norms integrated into Christ could imagine that Christ was not necessary to rightly order moral behavior — that people would just naturally agree on how to behave without reference to his law.

In the same way, only a society that has had the natural bonds of stock and soil integrated into Christ could imagine that Christ was not necessary to rightly order the natural bonds of stock and soil — that those natural bonds would order themselves just fine without reference to him.

We know otherwise. 200 years ago, stock and soil was the ordering principle, the integrating principle, of Aotearoa — the Māori name for New Zealand.

Savage gangs of degenerates murdered and mutilated and devoured each other under the bonds of blood and soil.

Then the gospel came.

Stephen Wolfe once said that “Christ’s righteousness provides no means of cooperation and covenant to achieve the most basic goods of civil society.”

That is a demonic statement. Only Christ’s righteousness provides the means of cooperation and covenant to achieve the most basic goods of civil society. Because only Christ’s covenant provides the regulative structure for properly ordering all of the natural bonds that God has built into creation. Only Christ’s love can bring all of our natural affections together into a coherent, righteous bond of perfect unity. Only Christ’s lordship can conquer and capture every thought and inclination of our hearts — training and disciplining and subduing them until we attain unto full maturity and perfection.

Only grace restores nature — and so only grace can restore the natural bonds of creation to their proper place in Christ.

Until next month,

Bnonn

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