In Seoul, the Fourth Lausanne Congress has gathered to address what it feels are the foremost struggles within the Church on a global level. Each time they gather, they release a statement that builds upon the original Lausanne statement, with Manilla and Cape Town being the subsequent iterations. In a world wrought with war and mass migration crises, the Lausanne Congress addresses the former but neglects the latter in The Seoul Statement.
What begins as a very generic faith statement slowly devolves into the typical internationalist slop that would be expected of this movement, in which everything becomes a gospel issue and the language is too ambiguous to mean anything. When addressing gender, they delineate, though not entirely, gender from sex, which is a modern concept as the two were interchangeable prior to the 1940’s.
- The biblical account of creation recognises that humans are created as sexual beings with clearly identifiable physical characteristics as male and female and relational characteristics as man and woman. The “sex” of an individual refers to the biological characteristics that distinguish male from female, whereas “gender” refers to the psychological, social, and cultural associations with being male or female. The Bible unambiguously affirms that human beings, both male and female, bear the image of God, representing the Creator in the care of his created earth. (Gen 1:26-28; 2:22-23)
Adopting the false premise that sex and gender are distinguishable opens the door to transgenderism and reinforces the egalitarian compromise of the Lausanne Movement.
Their repentance for undefined mistreatments of “same-sex attracted Christians” ambiguously opens the door to Side B theology.
But there is an emphasis on rebutting nationalism in the latter planks.
We repent of our failures to condemn and restrain violence by remaining silent, by promoting nationalism, or by unjustly supporting conflicts through deficient theological justification.
Without biblical support, the Lausanne movement decries nationalism as a sin requiring repentance and automatically equates it with ethnonationalism or racial supremacy. The subtext is that they blame “nationalism” for all the wars transpiring around the world, most notably in Ukraine. As an aside, the Ukraine War arose not due to nationalist impulses, but because America, through Zelensky (who is not Ukrainian), provoked the war through NATO incursion after staging a coup in 2014. The war has only served to decimate the Ukrainian ethnos while enriching the military-industrial complex.
The statement proceeds to struggle session over past grievances, attributing blame to the church irrespective of the underlying context.
We acknowledge with grief and shame the complicity of Christians in some of the most destructive contexts of ethnic violence and oppression, and the lamentable silence of large parts of the church when such conflicts take place. Such contexts include the history and legacy of racism and black slavery; the holocaust against Jews; apartheid; ‘ethnic cleansing’; inter-Christian sectarian violence; decimation of indigenous populations; political and ethnic violence; Palestinian suffering; caste oppression and tribal genocide.
Blanket condemning slavery is theologically ridiculous when Scripture does not condemn ownership of slaves as a sin. The “legacy of racism” is a buzzword often attributed to every racial disparity or police killing of a Black man. The Seoul Statement employs this loaded term which BLM and CRT advocates actively employ in discourse. The apartheid in South Africa was a superior system to what succeeded it, and a reasonable policy to protect the whites who created the very nation of South Africa. Just as the Civil Rights Act deteriorated American cities, so too did the rise of the ANC in South Africa contribute to the decline of the entire nation. The same was seen in Rhodesia, which was the real Wakanda. Both these nations became failed states. The “decimation of indigenous populations” is largely ahistorical, rooted in the hyperbolic notion that disease and colonizers wiped out millions of Indians who never existed in the American continents. This perception is caused by massive overestimates of populations in the New World at the time of Columbus when there were around 40 million in total.
But what is a nation? According to the statement, they delineate the modern nation-state from ethnicity, despite being in South Korea, which is a nation-state linked to ethnicity and has a strict immigration policy.
We echo the Cape Town Commitment in calling “for repentance for the many times Christians have been complicit in such evils by silence, apathy or presumed neutrality, or by providing defective theological justification for these.” Much of this defective theological justification arises from a failure to distinguish between the “nations” of Scripture and modern “nation-states” and from a failure to think biblically about nationality. In Scripture, nations were culturally distinct peoples whose identities were shaped by historical attachment to loosely defined territory, the worship of a god (or gods) whose rule over a people was exercised through a king. By contrast, “nation-states” (or “nations” in the modern sense) are governments that administer internationally recognized political sovereignty by means of constitutionally ordered institutions and laws, over territories with clearly demarcated borders and the individuals and peoples who live within them. Most modern nation-states govern multiple peoples, that is, groups within their borders who do not derive their collective identity from nationality alone but from ethnicity, race, country of origin, and the many other forms of collective identity that enrich the modern world. In terms of identity, these culturally distinct groups are often closer to the peoples that formed the “nations” of Scripture than to modern states. We affirm that every modern state is accountable to the divine demand for the just and merciful treatment of both the individuals and peoples over whom it exercises sovereignty as well as those of its neighbours.
By delineating nation from ethnos, the Lausanne Movement is seeking to lump all nations under a post-Westphalian System. The Westphalian System, which arose out of the specific context of the 30 Years War, asserted the right of sovereignty of individual nation-states to determine their domestic affairs without international interference, creating the modern concept of the nation-state. The Westphalian System inherently links the blood to the soil, which is the basis for assigning sovereignty to a given nation-state. This conception, which was born out of Christian thought, was usurped by the ascendence of globalism, whether in liberal democratic or communist form. This is why interventionism is performed under the guise of “humanitarianism” so as not to disrupt the paradigm. If anything, the world is trending back towards a more Westphalian understanding under leaders like Putin, Trump, and Xi Jinping. This means that national identity and interests will determine foreign policy more than universal abstractions like communism, human rights, or democracy. The twentieth century saw tens of millions die from wars fought over abstractions and interventionism. By arguing that “silence is violence,” Lausanne is advocating for greater intervention or global policing over the domestic affairs of individual nations, which would violate the right of sovereignty foundational to the conception of the nation-state. So they fail to understand what a nation is and the current paradigm of geopolitics.
Contrary to their claim, most nations even today are comprised primarily of one ethnicity. Between China, India, Japan, and South Korea, most humans live in ethnically homogenous societies, which have a distinct, prevailing culture that reflects the dominant ethnicity of their nation-state. There is a false assumption that all nations are some melting pot and it was always that way when most of the immigration crises happening in the West began in the 1960s.
It is critically important that Christians think clearly about biblical peoples when they (e.g. Israelites, Egyptians, Syrians) are associated by name, history, geography, or ancestry with modern nation-states (e.g. Israel, Egypt, Syria) and the peoples who live under the political sovereignty of these states (Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Copts, Druze, Armenians, Kurds, and many more). God is fulfilling his promises to all these peoples—both Jews and Gentiles—through the good news of Jesus, the Messiah. In the Middle East, and elsewhere, Christian leaders must work to correct theological errors that provide ideological justification for unjust violence against innocent civilians or seek to legitimise violations of international humanitarian law.
The statement’s appeal to extrabiblical international law is a fundamental problem with the Lausanne movement. Furthermore, the overall statement hints at sympathies for the Palestinians but ultimately does not explicitly condemn Zionism which has been used to justify the nation-state of Israel, the War in Iraq, and the regime change efforts that destabilized the Middle East during the Arab Spring.
It appears that the statement attacks Christian Nationalism with a strawman argument that they seek to wield the “state rather than the gospel” which is a negation of Two Kingdoms Theology. Most Christian Nationalists adhere to classical Two Kingdoms Theology and sphere sovereignty.
We lament that some Christians have looked to the state rather than the gospel as the key means for bringing about God’s intentions for the world. This takes an especially regrettable form when wed to nationalism—here defined as the belief that every state should have a single, national culture and no other—or ethnonationalism—which is the belief that every ethnic group should have its own state. This is a great evil in our world. We lament that many Christians have been sadly complicit in it, as well as in the claims of ethnic and racial supremacy it fosters. Against this, we assert that no modern state is able to claim or will ever be able to claim to be the special agent of God’s saving rule.
Based on the language of the statement, one should not link ethnos to nation-states, meaning that each nation is just an economic zone defined by a set of boundaries that must be maintained in perpetuity. Like the liberals today, they equate Nationalism to claims of “racial supremacy” which is just a product of what is commonly called, The Post War Consensus. The idea that no ethnicity can have its own unique nation (except one) is a reflection from the Second World War, not from Scripture and it is contrary to nature.
If a nation cannot define itself on grounds of ethnos, that is being a distinct people, then the argument being posited is one in favor of mass immigration, because anyone can be German, British, Irish, Korean, or American. The problem of mass immigration being weaponized against local populations remains absent from the Seoul Statement. They see multicultural nations as enriching “the modern world” when it erases culture, history, and human bonds. This is without delving into the third-world behaviors they bring with them. If a nation seeks to protect its unique, homogenous culture, that would be ethnonationalism according to this statement. If a government seeks remigration or mass deportations to the preservation of its prevailing culture, that too is racial supremacy. Under the Seoul Statement, people groups have no right to a nation of their own self-determination, but rather must accept that nations must be multicultural economic zones. Again, there was not a single verse of Scripture cited in this entire section.
The Lausanne Movement is not Christianity, but rather Internationalism masquerading with Christianese.
