New View Overview ---> New View Main Page, abxn Main Page. About this Page. Contact.

Please feel free to use and share this content, or this link: "abxn.org/nv/human.agendas.html"

Human Agendas - Political and Personal

We humans are called to shepherd Creation, as God's representatives (See Representing God), not to seek our human agendas. We are called to work with God in the Gospel of Christ in all its dimensions (see below).

Human agendas pervade society's ideas at a deep level, infecting all, though they change over the centuries, agendas of:

left versus right; right versus left
economic growth
technology
national security and identity
group identity
Whig versus Tory
Parliament versus Crown
Imperial ambitions
Protestand versus Roman Catholic
Roman Empire
Greek versus Barbarian
and other similar agendas that pervaded the societies of China, India, the Americas and elsewhere in similar ways.

(For more on recent agendas, see Bob Goudwzaard's excellent short Idols of Our Time).

When you are a superpower it is the more difficult to resist being sucked into whatever human agendas are current at the time. Unless, your leaders are courageous, committed and humble enough to the Gospel of CHrist to do so, and move towards God's original mandate for human beings. That has only very occasionally happened, and most Christendom, though wearing the name of Christ as a cloak, has in heart followed human agendas - hence I seldom defend Christendom, but only the Gospel of Christ.

The Gospel of Christ is that which, according to the prophecy given to Nebuchadnezzar, collapses the entire edifice of empire and human pride, and replaces it with a mountain of love and humility described in the Beattitudes. It has three dimensions:

To make us acceptable to God again by atoning for our sin, especially the sin of heart (reinstated by the Reformation);
To let us experience living with God here and now, not just waiting for heaven (reinstated by the Holiness and Pentecostal movements);
So we regain our mandate of shepherding the Rest of Creation in the ways God would (being reinstated now, though partially in the justice movements).

That has helped me make sense of a puzzle I had long pondered: how the personal and public-political both work. Individuals do wonderful things against the grain - yet our personal agendas cannot escape the influence of humanity's agendas, whether current or past. Unless one is completely committed to Christ, not just in the first dimension of personal salvation, not just in the second of the Holy Spirit, but also in the third of tsedeq and radah, shepherding the rest of Creation in loving rightness.

This page, URL= "http://abxn.org/nv/human.agendas.html", is part of the on-going work in developing a 'New View' in theology and practice that is appropriate to the days that are coming upon us. Comments, queries welcome by emailing

at kgsvr.net

Compiled by Andrew Basden as part of his reflections from a Christian perspective. Copyright (c) Andrew Basden to latest date below, but you may use this material for almost any purpose, but subject to certain conditions.

Written on the Amiga with Protext in the style of classic HTML.

Created: 5 May 2021. Last updated: