The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation

Paul
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Christ is the One in Whom in all things consist and humanity is not the measure of all things. If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder then the most fundamental act of resistance is to discover and live according to the deep, divine order of the heavens and the earth.   In this podcast we want to look at the big model of the universe that the Bible and Christian history provides. It is a mind and heart expanding vision of reality. It is not confined to the limits of our bodily senses - but tries to embrace levels fo reality that are not normally accessible or tangible to our exiled life on earth. We live on this side of the cosmic curtain - and therefore the highest and greatest dimensions of reality are hidden to us… yet these dimensions exist and are the most fundamental framework for the whole of the heavens and the earth. Throughout this series we want to pick away at all the threads  of reality to see how they all join together - how they all find common meaning and reason in the great divine logic - the One who is the Logos, the LORD Jesus Christ - the greatest that both heaven and earth has to offer. Colossians 1:15-23If you can support what we do, please give to the Biblical Frameworks charity so that these resources can continue to be madehttps://www.stewardship.org.uk/partners/20098901

  1. 5d ago

    Episode 173 - 1 Samuel 8 And The Birth Of The Centralised State

    1 Samuel 8 is one of the Bible’s most quoted passages on politics, and it is often used as a proof text against monarchy. We think that misses the point. The anger in the chapter is not aimed at “having a king” in the abstract, but at rejecting the Lord as king and demanding a ruler made in the image of the surrounding nations, chosen by human preference and powered by appetite. We walk through the contrast Scripture itself provides: Deuteronomy 17 sketches a king selected by God, limited by law, trained in humility, and required to live with the word of God in his hands every day. Then Samuel’s warning lands with its grim refrain: “he will take”. Sons and daughters, land and produce, labour and property, until the people end up serving the very system they demanded. Read carefully, it sounds less like a medieval throne and more like the modern centralised state: conscription, bureaucracy, central taxation, compulsory acquisition and a politics that promises care while steadily expanding control. From there we follow the story beyond Saul into David, a king who is anything but spotless yet shows what accountability looks like when confronted by God’s word. We trace the Davidic covenant in 2 Samuel 7, the prophets’ long defence of that promise through national failure, and the way the Christmas narrative becomes a political announcement: the true King has arrived. If you care about Christian political theology, biblical government, or how Scripture critiques power without rejecting authority, this conversation is for you. Subscribe for more, share it with a friend who loves talking politics, and leave us a review to help others find the show. What do you think 1 Samuel 8 is really warning us about today? The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

  2. Sep 24

    Episode 172 - From Melchizedek To King Charles III

    Power feels like a human project until you read the Bible closely. We follow the Scripture’s repeated claim that rulers are “raised up” by God, and that authority is conferred from above, not assembled from committees, ballots, or sheer force. That one idea turns a lot of modern assumptions upside down, especially when you bring 1 Samuel, Israel’s monarchy, and the language of anointing into view.  We start with Melchizedek in Genesis 14, the first king named in the Bible, who meets Abraham with bread and wine and quietly re-orders the map of reality: the true throne stands above the kingdoms of the age. From there we track Israel’s early governance under Moses, the tribal heads gathered around the tabernacle, and the book of Judges where deliverers appear with a consistent refrain: “the Lord raised up”. Then we step into 1 Samuel to see Saul and David as kings made through anointing, and we sit with the unsettling moment when David publicly grieves Saul’s death because the office remains sacred even when the man is broken.  The pattern also reaches beyond Israel. Isaiah calls Cyrus the Lord’s anointed, Romans 9 speaks of Pharaoh being raised up, and Jeremiah names Nebuchadnezzar God’s servant, pushing us into real political theology about providence and responsibility. Everything culminates in Jesus Christ, anointed with the Holy Spirit, who shares that anointing with his people and reframes leadership as service under the true King. We even connect the theme to the British coronation rite and the anointing of King Charles III, asking what those ancient actions still remember.  If you want a richer biblical view of authority, kingship, and anointing, listen now, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review. Where do you find this most challenging: honouring the office, criticising the ruler, or believing God is still at work? The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

  3. Sep 17

    Episode 171 - The Only Proper Democracy In The New Testament Kills God

    A battered prisoner stands in front of a provincial governor, and the governor tries to remind him who holds the cards: “Don’t you realise I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” The reply from Jesus is only one sentence, but it detonates every inflated claim the state can make: “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” We take that moment in John 18–19 as the Bible’s most important political scene and ask what it reveals about government, truth, and the Kingdom of God.  We look closely at Pontius Pilate as a familiar type: the anxious career official who prizes stability and optics over justice, and who asks “What is truth?” before walking out of the room. From there we trace the episode’s core argument in Christian political theology: political authority is real and should be honoured, yet it is always borrowed and therefore never ultimate. That one sentence to Pilate becomes the seedbed for Romans 13, 1 Peter 2, and the New Testament’s wider teaching on the state, prayer for rulers, and the limits of obedience.  Then we turn to the crowd and the two “votes” that morning: Barabbas over Jesus, and the shouted demand, “Crucify him.” We sit with the chilling line, “We have no king but Caesar,” and what it suggests about popular sovereignty when it becomes a substitute saviour. Finally, we treat the resurrection not only as spiritual comfort but as a political reversal, the divine throne overruling the verdicts of governor and mob and enthroning Jesus as Lord and Christ. If you want a clearer, more bracing framework for Christian engagement in politics, press play, then subscribe, share, and leave a review with the line you cannot stop thinking about. The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

  4. Sep 10

    Episode 170 - Why Kings And Kingdoms Shape The Whole Bible

    If you open the Bible at random and read for ten minutes, how long before you run into a king, a throne, a kingdom, or a rival ruler? We tried the thought experiment and then followed the trail, and it leads somewhere bigger than most modern Christian habits of reading Scripture. What we often treat as background metaphor is presented as the Bible’s central grammar: God rules, creation is his realm, and Jesus is not mainly a private comfort but the King of Kings. We walk from Genesis as royal proclamation, through Eden as a royal garden and humanity’s commissioned dominion, into Exodus as a direct showdown between Pharaoh and the Lord. From there we trace the tabernacle as a throne room in the centre of Israel’s camp, Judges’ diagnosis of life without a true king, and the long royal history of Samuel and Kings. The Psalms sing the reign of God, the prophets speak with monarchs in view, and Daniel’s visions insist that heaven’s throne outranks every empire. Even Proverbs and Ecclesiastes arrive framed as royal wisdom, training a people to see authority clearly. Then the New Testament turns the volume up: “the kingdom of God is near”, parables packed with rulers and subjects, and a Christmas story that reads like coronation and regime-change rather than sentiment. Acts makes the political edge impossible to miss when opponents summarise the message as defying Caesar by saying there is another king, Jesus. We also name three reasons modern Western Christians miss this: translating “kingdom” into vague “influence”, boxing faith away from politics, and accepting a secular bargain that allows belief only if it stays private. If you care about biblical theology, the kingdom of God, Christian political theology, or simply reading Scripture more honestly, this conversation will stretch you. Subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review, then tell us where you see kingship most clearly when you read the Bible. The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

  5. Sep 3

    Episode 169 - How Trinitarian Theology Shapes Power And Politics

    Power is never just procedural. The way we imagine God quietly trains us to imagine law, legitimacy, leadership, and even what we think a “good” society should feel like. We take up an ancient Christian teaching with surprisingly sharp political edges: the monarchy of the Father, the claim that the one God is first named as “the Father Almighty”, the personal source who eternally begets the Son and eternally breathes out the Spirit, without rivalry and without inequality.  From that foundation we follow a line of Trinitarian political theology: if your default picture of God is an impersonal essence, you will likely prefer impersonal systems, offices, and constitutional mechanisms that can feel stable yet strangely faceless. If you picture God mainly as a fellowship of equals, you may lean towards participatory democracy where legitimacy lives in consensus, yet becomes fragile when the conversation breaks. If you picture God as Father, Son, and Spirit with the Father as source, you start to expect authority to be relational, delegated, and accountable, with a unity that has a face rather than a machine-like neutrality.  We then work through four claimed strengths of this “monarchy of the Father” grammar: vertical authority that is still relational, power that is generative rather than competitive, plurality without flattening everything into a single level, and an internal check against tyranny when rulers refuse to give, delegate, and remain corrigible. The episode closes with the Cappadocian Fathers’ importance for Nicene language, and with the question that won’t go away: what kind of God is leaking into our politics right now? Subscribe for the rest of the series, share this with someone who loves political philosophy, and leave a review with your sharpest disagreement or hardest question. The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

  6. Aug 27

    Episode 168 - The Lord’s Prayer Trains Us To Look Up

    Power feels like it’s everywhere and nowhere at once: in polls, feeds, factions, and the constant demand to have an opinion. We push back on that modern instinct by asking a simple question with massive consequences: does political authority rise from below, or descend from above? Drawing on Scripture, we argue the Bible treats power less like a liquid that “belongs to the people” and more like a ray of light that falls from the throne of the Father, resting on the one he appoints and ordering life beneath. Daniel 4 sits at the centre of the argument. Nebuchadnezzar boasts that Babylon is his own achievement, and heaven answers immediately by stripping his authority until he confesses that God’s dominion is eternal. That story exposes a common confusion, even among Christians: the problem is not that rulers fail to glorify the crowd, but that they claim the glory that belongs to the enthroned Son. We also explore Francis Oakley’s history of the “descending theme” to show how recent the modern “ascending theory of power” really is, and why a horizontal view of authority breeds rivalry, influence-chasing, and social friction. From there we turn pastoral and practical. The Lord’s Prayer forms a vertical posture: give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us, and yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory. We contrast those verbs with the exhausting grammar of modern politics that tells citizens they must carry the future on their shoulders. We close by calling the church what the New Testament calls it: an embassy of heaven, receiving its legitimacy from Christ’s throne rather than from a referendum. If this reorients how you think about Christian political theology, share it with a friend, subscribe for the rest of the series, and leave a review. What would change in your life if you stopped trying to be the source? The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

  7. Aug 20

    Episode 167 - If Jesus Reigns Now, Our Politics Must Change

    Politics is noisy because we keep asking the wrong first question. We’re trained to start with “who should rule?” and then hunt for the best human mechanism, while the Bible starts somewhere else entirely: the throne in heaven, already occupied, already active, already decisive for everything happening on earth. We walk through a gallery of Scripture that refuses to let Jesus be reduced to a private comfort or a future hope. Hebrews presents the Son sustaining all things and then sitting down in finished authority. Colossians names thrones, rulers and authorities as created through him and for him. Philippians and Matthew 28 speak in the past tense and the present tense: God has exalted him; all authority on earth has been given to him. That means Christian mission is not an attempt to make Jesus king of a place, but a public announcement that the King is already reigning and a call for the nations to bow. Then we bring it down to street level: what changes for a Christian’s political life if prime ministers, presidents, courts, corporations and empires hold only borrowed authority? Why should elections never become ultimate fear or ultimate hope? And if Jesus is King of Kings, why do we often pray as if we’re speaking to someone with no real power? We end at Revelation’s throne room, where the Lamb’s blood is the legitimacy of his reign, and with the strange political relief that comes from admitting we are not running anything. If this reframes your view of Christian political theology, the kingdom of God and authority, subscribe, share the episode with a friend and leave a review. What’s the hardest part of living as if Jesus is truly on the throne right now? The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

  8. Aug 13

    Episode 166 - Stop Treating Elections Like A Sacrament

    Elections can make Christians feel like the fate of righteousness hangs on a cross in a ballot box. We push back on that pressure and name the confusion underneath it: mistaking a kingdom that comes down from heaven for a kingdom that gets voted into office. Yes, we think voting can be a legitimate act of conscience, neighbour love, and limited stewardship. No, we do not think it is a sacrament, a command, or the engine of the Kingdom of God.  We take seriously one of the strongest arguments you will hear in Christian political engagement: that in a democracy every citizen is given a leadership role, so voting becomes a duty tied to providing for those under our care. Then we slow down and ask harder questions about calling, anointing, and whether Christians must accept the identity a political system assigns. From there we return to biblical political theology and the surprisingly simple shape of New Testament instruction: submit to authorities (Romans 13), pray for rulers (1 Timothy 2), and obey God rather than humans when there is a direct clash (Acts 5, with Daniel in the background).  We also look at the apostles and Peter under Nero to see what faithful Christian politics actually looks like when the stakes are real. The point is not passivity. It is a different centre of gravity: the radical revolution of church life, daily holiness, costly love, shared community, and steady prayer, rather than constant mobilisation and low-grade spiritual despair over election results. If you feel worn out by democratic anxiety, we end with a thought experiment designed to lift the weight off your shoulders and put it where it belongs.  If this challenged you, subscribe, share it with a friend who is politically tired, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation. What part of your political burden are you ready to put down? The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

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Christ is the One in Whom in all things consist and humanity is not the measure of all things. If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder then the most fundamental act of resistance is to discover and live according to the deep, divine order of the heavens and the earth.   In this podcast we want to look at the big model of the universe that the Bible and Christian history provides. It is a mind and heart expanding vision of reality. It is not confined to the limits of our bodily senses - but tries to embrace levels fo reality that are not normally accessible or tangible to our exiled life on earth. We live on this side of the cosmic curtain - and therefore the highest and greatest dimensions of reality are hidden to us… yet these dimensions exist and are the most fundamental framework for the whole of the heavens and the earth. Throughout this series we want to pick away at all the threads  of reality to see how they all join together - how they all find common meaning and reason in the great divine logic - the One who is the Logos, the LORD Jesus Christ - the greatest that both heaven and earth has to offer. Colossians 1:15-23If you can support what we do, please give to the Biblical Frameworks charity so that these resources can continue to be madehttps://www.stewardship.org.uk/partners/20098901

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