Throughout history, powerful Christians have understood Daniel 7 to show them that God has chosen them to be divinely appointed world rulers––but then behave more like the beasts than the “nobodies” that God actually chooses to rule. From Constantine’s theologians claiming to establish the kingdom of the saints, to Charlemagne’s biographer describing his kingdom as the renewed fourth empire, to American notions of manifest destiny that drew on the language of Daniel 7: empire after empire has claimed what they think is Daniel’s promise of eternal global domination. Those claiming to be the holy ones became the beast, speaking arrogant words and making war on the vulnerable communities who suffer under systems of domination.

Does that sound political to you? Good, because it is. It’s God’s politics for the pious and for the polis. And that means it’s politics and religion all mashed up and intermixed and inextricable all the way down because that’s the way it is with this Lord who will brook no rivals, suffer no competitors, answer to no president or congress, and who loves righteousness and justice equally and always.

I’m not yet sure what to do in a world without Walter. But I know what he’d do—he’d go back to the text. And what do you know? Just like Walter said it would, the Bible has resources for us to think about the crisis of this day.