(RNS) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth concluded his speech to the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Nashville last week by declaring, “Christ is king.” His remarks had traced what he described as a direct line from biblical faith to the American founding, into the present political moment. For Americans steeped in civil religion, such language resonates deeply. It sounds familiar, reassuring — even pious.

In fact, Hegseth’s phrase points to the way our political rhetoric often borrows Christian language without attending to its history in Scripture — or to the message of Christian hope itself. Modern appropriations of phrases like “Christ is king” can subtly transform what was once a radical proclamation into an earthbound slogan.

To understand why this matters, it helps to know a little of Christian eschatology — the doctrine of the end of all things.

The Hebrew Bible’s eschatological vision is grounded in God’s faithfulness. Israel’s story unfolds around a simple but profound conviction: God has made promises — to Abraham, to David, to the people delivered from Egypt. Those promises have not yet reached their fullness, but because God is faithful, history can’t simply collapse into disappointment. If the present doesn’t reflect the promise, the future must. 

The prophets give that hope shape. Isaiah, an eighth-century BCE Israelite, envisioned a day when swords are beaten into plowshares, when the wolf lies down with the lamb, when the nations stream to Zion not in conquest but in peace.

These promises are rooted in Israel’s particular covenant story, yet they look beyond mere national restoration. Even in its earliest layers, Israel’s hope contains universal horizons — “through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” God tells Abraham when he made his covenant. After the Israelites were conquered, exiled and under foreign domination, that horizon widened further. The anticipated reign of God becomes not simply the vindication of a nation, but the renewal of creation itself.

This hope was never just a political triumph. It was about God’s sovereign action to set things right — to judge injustice, to heal the wounded and to dwell again with God’s people. By the time Jesus steps onto the scene, he is stepping into a story thick with deferred promise and restless expectation. Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God. His message was not simply that God would reign, but that the reign of God had already begun.

Jesus’ kingdom announcement disrupted expectations: It was not centered on political power or territorial dominion, but on God’s justice, mercy and reconciliation breaking into the here and now. The earliest Christian interpreters — Irenaeus, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor — carried forward this understanding. For them, Christian eschatology was not merely future oriented. It was moving toward the fullness of a kingdom already inaugurated in Jesus and anticipated in the church’s worship and sacramental life.

Irenaeus insisted that Christ recapitulates humanity, summing up all things in the way of love. Gregory of Nyssa saw the Christian life as a journey of endless growth into the divine likeness. Maximus imagined the cosmos united in Christ, with each creature’s freedom participating in the universal reconciliation.

None of these teachers envisioned the kingdom as a political regime. None equated Christian hope with the rise or renewal of an empire. Their eschatology was expansive — cosmic — and grounded in God’s restorative purposes for all creation.

In response to Rome’s fall in 410, Augustine wrote to help Christians understand how the temporal — the collapse of the known world — and the eternal — heaven above — intersect. The love of self characterizes the earthly city; the love of God, the City of God. Importantly, Augustine doesn’t equate the City of God with any earthly political entity, any nation — not even the visible institutional church. The City of God is ultimately pilgrim and future-oriented. It is not the same as Rome, Constantinople or Washington.

Now, centuries later, we find political rhetoric that does the opposite: It sacralizes the nation by borrowing Christian language, suggesting that the legitimacy of a political project depends on its proximity to some presumed biblical through-line. This is not the Augustine we read; it is a version of Augustine reshaped by modern political needs.

When political leaders appropriate phrases such as “Christ is king,” they risk inverting the delicate relationship between church and state that Augustine worked so carefully to articulate. In his own time, the church — newly entangled with imperial power — faced the temptation to mistake political stability for divine purpose, and so Augustine labored to relativize empire, rather than sanctify it.

Today, the dynamic often runs in the opposite direction: Political institutions, sensing fragility or division, reach for the language of the church to secure moral gravity. In both cases, theology is pressed into service for projects it was never meant to guarantee.

For Christians especially in this season of Lent, there is another story to tell.

Christian eschatology is not primarily about the triumph of a political agenda. It is about the kingdom of God — a reality already begun in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It is about justice that flows like a river, peace that is not simply the absence of conflict and a reign that turns logos into love.

To proclaim “Christ is king” is to point not to any nation or political project, but to the crucified and risen Lord whose sovereignty unsettles the powers of this world. It is to say that our ultimate hope is embedded not in civil triumph but in divine transformation.

In Lent, we remember that kingship was revealed most profoundly on a cross. We recall that the kingdom grows not through coercion but through lives shaped by mercy, humility and self-giving love. And we confess that our ultimate allegiance is to a king whose crown was thorns and whose kingdom does not waver with the shifting winds of political fortune.

Christ is king. But his reign is not Washington’s or Rome’s or any other city’s. It is the reign of God’s steadfast love, a kingdom already breaking in among us and yet to be revealed in its fullness.

(The Rev. Michael W. DeLashmutt is dean of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and senior vice president at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, where he also serves as associate professor of theology. His most recent book is “A Lived Theology of Everyday Life.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)