What Does "Christ Is King" Actually Mean?
Jordan Ballor joins me on Acton Line to unpack the upside-down logic of Christ's kingdom
“Christ is King” has become one of the internet’s most ubiquitous memes. It shows up in comment sections, social media bios, and heated online debates. It’s doubtful that most of its users know what they’re really saying. And honestly? They’re not alone.
Jordan Ballor, executive director of First Liberty’s Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy, whose feature essay “The Upside-Down Kingdom of Jesus of Nazareth” appears in the latest issue of Religion & Liberty. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jordan on this week’s episode of Acton Line to dig into the essay and the deeper theological vision behind it.
Jordan’s argument begins where you might not expect, with Pontius Pilate. When Pilate affixed that sign to the cross reading Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudæorum (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews), he unwittingly provided a concise summary of Jesus’s true identity. His proper name, his home region, and his title are all captured by a Roman governor who had no idea what he was really writing.
From there, Jordan traces the radical implications of Christ’s kingship through Scripture, the church fathers, Abraham Kuyper, C.S. Lewis, and a haunting medieval English poem called “Pearl.”
The core insight is this: Christ’s kingdom operates on a completely different logic than the kingdoms of this world. Jesus told James and John, who wanted seats of honor at his right and left hand, that in his kingdom whoever would be great must be a servant, and whoever would be first must be slave of all. That’s not how worldly power works. Worldly power runs top-down: the stronger rule over the weaker. Christ inverts the whole thing.
Jordan frames this through two images Jesus himself used. The kingdom is like a pearl of great price, it causes us to revalue everything else in our lives in light of its surpassing worth. Fame and greatness in God’s kingdom and fame and greatness on earth, as Lewis’s guide says in The Great Divorce, are two quite different things. And the kingdom is like a leaven working from the inside out, transforming the hearts of God’s people and through them acting as an agent of renewal in the wider world.
What I find especially compelling about Jordan’s essay is that it refuses to let us settle for either of two common errors. We can’t pursue a kingdom without a king, and throw ourselves into social and political projects while forgetting who Christ actually is, but neither can we claim a king without a kingdom and retreat into a purely spiritual piety that has nothing to say about the world God made and loves. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, but it exists for this world—for its redemption, restoration, and consummation.
This has profound implications for how Christians think about vocation, stewardship, and public life. If Christ is our king, then we are his stewards, each set in charge of some corner of his creation. As Jordan puts it, Christ takes us in our worldly situations, our families, our careers, our communities, and claims us for his own. He reorients our loyalties, and those newly ordered loyalties free us to serve God and neighbor through our various callings.
Or, as Lewis wrote: “Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
This conversation is one of those episodes where I came away thinking differently about something I thought I already understood. If you engage with the “Christ is King” discourse online (please don’t!), or if you’ve ever wondered what it would actually look like to take that claim seriously, I’d encourage you to give this one a listen.
Watch or listen to the full episode of Acton Line.
Read Jordan’s full essay, “The Upside-Down Kingdom of Jesus of Nazareth,” in Religion & Liberty.
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