Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 271 Skye Jethani Returns - What If Jesus Was Serious About Justice?
I’m excited to have Skye Jethani back on the podcast. When we talk about justice, we often think in binary terms - judgment or mercy, punishment or forgiveness. But as Skye argues, the biblical vision of justice is far more nuanced and holistic. At its core, justice is about the proper ordering of relationships - between humanity and God, as well as between individuals and communities. It's not just about retribution, but about restoring the shalom, the wholeness and flourishing, that God intended for his creation. This understanding upends many of our assumptions about justice, both in the church and in society. He challenges the popular American Christian idea that justice is something the government does, not the church. And he unpacks how this bifurcation between the "vertical" and "horizontal" dimensions of justice has deeply distorted our theology and our engagement with the world. But Skye also offers a compelling alternative - a vision of justice that holds together judgment and mercy, individual transformation and systemic change. It's a vision rooted in the cosmic victory of Christ on the cross, where the powers of evil were defeated and a new order was established. This is a conversation that spans creation, Christology, and the church's role in pursuing righteousness. Skye draws on Scripture, church history, and his own experience to paint a rich, nuanced portrait of justice that challenges us to rethink our assumptions and expand our imaginations. So join us as we reckon with justice.
Skye Jethani is an award-winning author, speaker, and co-host of the Holy Post Podcast and co-founder of Holy Post Media. Skye has written more than a dozen books and served as an editor and executive at Christianity Today for more than a decade. Raised in a religiously and ethnically diverse family, his curiosity about faith led him to study comparative religion before entering seminary and pastoral ministry. With a unique ability to connect Christian thought and contemporary culture, his voice has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post, and he’s spoken to audiences throughout the world as diverse as the U.S. Naval Academy, The Chautauqua Institution, and the Lausanne Movement.
Skye's Book:
What If Jesus Was Serious About Justice?
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You cannot lose the supernatural reconciliation of Christ and the cross, because it's what ends up being the engine that drives our work towards justice in the world. And on the flip side, if you only ever talk about, well, I'm good with God, you know, I've been reconciled to Jesus, and you don't engage in the pursuit of justice in the world, then there's something terribly broken about what you think you have in your relationship with God, they always are linked together.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ to look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, Today, my guest is Sky chitani. I'm excited to have him back. We talk about justice, and when we talk about justice, we often think in binary terms, judgment or mercy, punishment or forgiveness, but as Sky argues, the biblical vision of justice is far more nuanced and holistic. At its core, justice is about the proper ordering of relationships between humanity and God, as well as between individuals and communities. It's not just about retribution, but about restoring the shalom, the wholeness and flourishing that God intended for His creation. This understanding upends many of our assumptions about justice, both the church and in society. He challenges the popular American Christian idea that justice is something that the government does not the church, and he unpacks how this bifurcation between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of Justice has deeply distorted our theology and our engagement with the world. The sky also offers a compelling alternative, a vision of justice that holds together judgment and mercy, individual transformation and systemic change. It's a vision rooted in the cosmic victory of Christ on the cross, where the powers of evil were defeated and a new order was established. This is a conversation that spans creation, Christology and the church's role in pursuing righteousness. Sky draws on scripture, church history and his own experience to paint a rich, nuanced portrait of justice that challenges us to rethink our assumptions and expand our imaginations. So join us as we reckon with justice, here is my conversation with Sky. Jatani, Sky, welcome back to shifting culture. Excited to have you back. I'm happy to be here. I want to dive straight in to okay, we're not going to have any nice little platitudes. We're just going to go and go and what do you think the the popular American Christian idea of justice is at the moment where we stand today.
Skye Jethani:Let me, let me narrow it even further. The popular white American idea of justice is that justice is something the government does. It's not something the church does. And ultimate justice is coming in the future, when Christ returns, and there's going to be some kind of blood bath of his enemies. But as long as we are with him, we're all good. It's not anything we ever have to
Joshua Johnson:worry about. You have this this book, What if Jesus was serious about justice? And so we have to figure out, What if Jesus was serious and what he meant when he said justice, he talked about justice, and it's all over. Jesus is talking about justice. So what then is Jesus talking about? If it's not just a punitive governmental thing, what's Jesus ultimately saying? That
Skye Jethani:is the question, isn't it? The argument I'm making in the book is you cannot understand what Jesus or the New Testament, says about justice without understanding the Old Testament vision of justice. Because, of course, Jesus is a first century Jew, and he roots his vision of God and justice and all these things in the Old Testament Scriptures. And when you go back and you look in both the Old Testament and the New Testament in Hebrew and in Greek, the word that is sometimes translated or the words that are sometimes translated as justice in our English Bibles are the same words that are translated righteousness. And I don't know too many Christians who are upset when people are talking about righteousness in the church, but some people flip out when you talk about justice, especially if it has a social dimension to it, if it's social justice, you know, as Glenn Beck said, you know, run screaming from your church because they're apparently Marxist or something. But no one gets upset about righteousness. The Scripture has a ton to say about righteousness, slash justice, all over the place, and the simplest way to define it is biblically speaking justice or righteousness refers to the proper ordering of relationships that things are as they should be, just as they should be, and so the pursuit of righteousness or justice is the restoration of right relationship in the realm of Van. Originalism, which, again, most white Christians have no problem with. We talk all the time by having a right relationship with God, which means you turn away from your sin, you accept what Christ has done for you on the cross, you give your allegiance to Jesus, and you now are righteous before God. You have a right relationship with Him. That's wonderful. Great all for it, but then we get really uncomfortable when we talk about having a righteous relationship, or a just relationship among people on a human level, in the community. And yet, Scripture never ever separates that vertical right relationship with God from the horizontal right relationships among people, they always go together. And we can unpack all the various ways that's revealed in Scripture. But that's precisely what a lot of the contemporary, modern white American church has done, at least for the last 150 to 200 years, is said those two things are separate. They don't go together. And so one side of the white church in America is all about evangelism and having a right relationship with God, but ignores the social or horizontal dimension. And then there's another part of the white church in America that's all about the horizontal stuff and all about social justice and all about, you know, fixing society. And they don't talk a lot about having a right relationship with God or forgiveness of sins or the resurrection and crucifixion of Jesus, and so we've bifurcated these things in the white American church in a way that is not biblical. It's not historical, and it's not what the global church has done. It's a unique problem because of American history that we need to be honest about and fix as we engage with Scripture and our sisters and brothers, historically and globally.
Joshua Johnson:So when and why did this bifurcation start? How did it get split?
Skye Jethani:Yeah, that is a great question. The easiest one word answer is slavery. So when you go back into the 19th century, the mid 1800s or even before that, look at early the early American republic, there was the first Great Awakening before the revolution, led by George Whitfield, the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s with John Finnie and some of the Charles Finney, excuse me, and many of those. When you look at those revivals, you saw two things, individuals repenting of their sin and turning to faith in Christ. And out of those revivals came social reform movements, movements to abolish slavery in the 19th century, movements to reform prisons, all kinds of reform movements because they were inheriting a form of Christianity that brought these two things together, the horizontal and the vertical. But around the mid 1800s when the abolitionist movement was really taken off, there were a lot of Christians, white Christians in America, who were got incredibly uncomfortable with the biblical implication of social justice. And at the same time, there was this upstart theological school from the UK that came across the pond to North America that didn't get a lot of traction until the years leading up to the Civil War. And the years immediately after the Civil War, there were churches along the border states between the union and the Confederacy that were being torn apart on this question of slavery. And after the Civil War, they were being torn apart over the question of, what do you do with the emancipated slaves? Should they be integrated? Should they have equal rights? Should they have the vote? All this was ripping the country apart, ripping churches apart, but this upstart theological school came along and it said it didn't matter, society doesn't matter, government doesn't matter. Justice doesn't matter. Slavery doesn't matter. Poverty doesn't matter because the whole world is destined for destruction and doom. It's all going to burn, and the only thing that matters is preaching the gospel to save souls. And a whole bunch of church leaders in America heard that and thought, That's it. That's how I get out of talking about this really uncomfortable topic, and it's how I avoid my church splitting in half. And though this theology came from England, it never really got a lot of traction there, but it came to America, and people ate this up because it gave an excuse for white church leaders to bypass the controversy. And I mean, still true today. I've been a pastor. A lot of us in pastoral ministry like we don't want to wade into controversial things, and here came a theology that gave us a quote, unquote biblical excuse not to engage it. And so we've been living in the legacy of that for the last 150 200 years, where a big section of Bible believing Christians in America, white Bible believing Christians just don't think these social issues or justice issues ultimately matter, and actually get angry when you talk about them. And then the other side of the church that thinks all that matters are these social issues, and that side tended to jettison orthodox teachings about the virgin birth. It's the divinity of Jesus, the crucifixion, the resurrection, they got rid of all that. And so that's a unique problem in the American context, because of slavery and reconstruction that most parts of the rest of the world, except where we have exported it, didn't suffer from.
Joshua Johnson:So tell me what is the then, the typical problem of churches that just focus on the vertical and what's the typical problem that that churches just focus on the horizontal elements of justice, righteousness of justice? Yeah, I mean
Skye Jethani:the typical problem. Let's talk about the vertical guys first. That's the more the culture I come out of those churches will talk a lot about personal forgiveness, a lot about personal morality, a lot about reconciliation with God. But what they forget is, as I said earlier, the Old Testament and the New Testament never separate that from our horizontal relationship. And in fact, this is the really crazy part. The horizontal always comes first. I'll give you two examples. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, if you're at the altar to present your gift to the Lord and there, remember your brother has something against you, leave your gift. First, go, be reconciled to your brother, then come and offer your gift to the Lord. Make horizontal reconciliation the priority over the vertical. Then Paul talks about this in Ephesians chapter two, talking about the wall of hostility, is what he calls it between Jew and Gentile. But he says, through the cross, Christ has reconciled us to one another, tearing down this wall of hostility and made us into one new person, and then together, reconciled us to God, the Father. There, Paul is saying that the reconciling work of the cross is first horizontal. It's first the reconciliation between estranged, broken relationships among people, and then reconciled to God, the Father. And he's echoing the Old Testament. There. He's echoing the prophets in which God rejects the worship of his people. I mean, this is super strong. In the book of Isaiah, He rejects the worship of his people, he says, Your hearts are far from me. Why not? Because they weren't having emotional worship gatherings, but because they were mistreating the poor. They were mistreating widows and orphans. They were they were mistreating their workers and God rejects their worship because of the way they're treating one another. That's the theme you see throughout the Bible. Remember when the expert in the law came to Jesus and said, What's the greatest commandment? It's fascinating that Jesus gives him two commandments. He doesn't respond with one. He responds with two. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. Why does he respond with two? Because he's echoing the Old Testament prophets. You cannot love God and not love those made in His image. They always go together. So the great danger of the traditions that emphasize the vertical and ignore the horizontal is we lose them both. We completely lose what the gospel is really all about. The danger on the other side, of course, is what's the point in seeking to heal humanity and all the brokenness of society and culture, if it's not for any Ultimate Reconciliation that is accomplished through the power of the cross and the resurrection, and you can't really heal society if you're not also healing the broken relationship people have with their Creator. So the essence of biblical justice is the right ordering of relationships that includes our relationship with God. It includes our relationship with one another. It includes our relationship between different groups of people. And if you don't see all of that as the work of the gospel and what Jesus has accomplished on the cross, then you are either willfully ignoring massive parts of the Bible, or you are perverting the gospel in order to fit a cultural assumption that makes you comfortable,
Joshua Johnson:yes. And so when Jesus comes on the scene and he goes into the synagogue in Luke chapter four, he opens up the scroll of Isaiah, reads from Isaiah 61 it seems to me, like in some facets of our culture today, the same thing that happened back then would happen now that after Jesus reads this, the Jews are all excited that, hey, we're going to be set free. Everything's gonna be good. And then Jesus says, I know what you're thinking, but remember naming the Syrian that he was healed, and not any of the Jews were healed in the days of Elisha, the days of Elijah, he went to the widow of Zarephath. So basically, this justice is for all people. It's not just for the Jews. The Jews then want to throw them off a cliff, right and kill them. It feels like we have some some aspects of that right now. Why, as somebody who is the so called Messiah, as somebody Jesus coming and the Jews, think that it's one way and then it's for all people? Why is it so offensive this this justice of Jesus? Why is it so offensive to. Our so called humanity and the Jews today,
Skye Jethani:who? This is a big one. You have to remember the context. The Jews had been living under foreign occupation and persecution for hundreds of years, right? First, the Babylonians and the Persians and the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, and they feel like we've been under the boot of these pagan, Gentile foreigners, and they want their vindication. And Jesus comes along and says, it's here, I'm the Messiah. God's promises are being fulfilled, and they celebrate. They're excited. And then, you know, the story you're telling is he reminds them, but it's not just for you, it's for everybody. And they get angry because they want it just for themselves, because what they really want is not the right ordering of relationships. They don't want justice. What they want is vindication. They want superiority. They want God to be a tribal deity that favors them above everyone else, and they've forgotten their own scriptures. I'll give you an example, one of my favorites, and I talk about this in my book a little bit. At the burning bush, when Moses encounters the Lord, He says to Moses, I have come down because I have heard the cries of my people. They're slaves in Egypt, and he says, I'm going to rescue them from the injustice that the Egyptians are doing. It's an amazing, tender, beautiful moment of God caring for this persecuted group of people. Well, you fast forward the story, and after God has liberated them, and he's rescued them out of Egypt, and he's given them His law, he says to them, Listen, I'm going to lead you into your own land. And there's foreigners there, and you need to welcome them, and you need to not mistreat them, because if you mistreat the foreigners among you the way the Egyptians mistreated you, I will surely hear their cry, and I will come down, I will rescue them, and I will punish you. What's crazy is the Lord uses the exact same language from the burning bush scene where he's coming down to rescue his people from the Egyptians. And he says, I will do that, except you're going to be the Egyptians that get punished, and the foreigners among your people are the ones I'm going to rescue. And the reason why this is important is we fall into the trap. And I think the Jews in the synagogue in Nazareth fell into this trap of thinking, well, we're special because we're God's chosen people. He's he rescues us because we are His people, not because we are persecuted and maligned. But what you see in Scripture is no, no. God is impartial. He will hear the cries and rescue whoever it is that's being oppressed, even if the ones doing the oppression are claiming the name of God. And that's a lesson we really need to hear in the American church today, because there are a lot of Americans walking around, American Christians walking around going, Hey, we belong to Jesus, therefore we should be in charge, and we should it's okay if we mistreat people. It's okay if we're because we are persecuted or we think we're the ones who are bad. And along comes the scriptures and says, no, no, no, no, no, you actually are going to be judged more severely because you know better. You have been rescued by God. You know his word. If you mistreat other people in the name of Christ, the judgment for you will be severe because he will hear the cries even of the people who don't know him whom you are persecuting and mistreating. So this view of God's justice, it's not blind justice, like we often think about it, but it is impartial justice, and don't assume your label, your identity, your nationality, your religious label, exempts you from God's judgment, or that he favors you because you have a Christian label. That's a very dangerous assumption to make when you look at how that's abused throughout Scripture.
Joshua Johnson:So let's get into the the big conflicts in this world. There's a lot of people that have been subjugated by different regimes and empires throughout history. They get freedom and they win their their so called justice, and then they then subjugate other people, and it's a cycle of freedom and subjugation over and over and over again. How does the way that Jesus sees justice in here break us out of that pattern and give us a place that there is there is judgment, but there is mercy, and we can be better after somebody is freed from subjugation.
Skye Jethani:Yeah. I mean, he tells parables about this, and this is why it's so important that we not separate this topic of justice from the topic of mercy, there's the parable of the unmerciful servant right who owes an enormous debt to the king. The king forgives it, but then the debt that is owed to the servant, He does not forgive. And so the king says, You wicked servant, I forgave your debt. Why didn't you forgive the debt of your servant? And he puts his debt back, I don't know. Throw. Him in jail. And this is where the vertical and the horizontal are always connected. The way it's supposed to work is we come to recognize how truly indebted we are to God because of our own evil, and we come to recognize the mercy He has shown to us, and that ought to then spill over into the mercy we show to others. This is exactly what was going on in Exodus. God rescued his people from the oppression of the Egyptians, and he says to them, you know what it's like to be a foreign people who are oppressed. Don't do that to other people. Your gratitude toward me is represented in the in the kindness and mercy in which you treat foreigners among you. So so if we don't recognize the depth of our own broken relationship with God and the mercy and forgiveness he's shown us, we're unlikely to show that mercy and kindness to others. That's where we get into huge trouble. So going back to the the bifurcation in the American church, this is why you just you cannot lose the supernatural reconciliation of Christ and the cross, because it's what ends up being the engine that drives our work towards justice in the world. And on the flip side, if you only ever talk about, well, I'm good with God, you know, I've been reconciled to Jesus, and you don't engage in the pursuit of justice in the world, then there's something terribly broken about what you think you have in your relationship with God, they always are linked together.
Joshua Johnson:Your very first section, you talk about order and chaos, and we're going back into the Old Testament and what and really the creation narrative where God creates order out of chaos, the hover the spirit hovers over the chaos. I think we often get a disordered view of order. Our ordered view is disordered. How does the way that we're thinking about order and justice, and I think in America, particularly right now, in our culture, we're having a debate around, I think law and order, right? Yeah. So where does that play in, especially within our culture today, of what is a right view of order and chaos and what that looks
Skye Jethani:like? Yeah. I mean, that's a huge question. These These categories are set up in the Genesis creation narrative, and I owe a debt to folks like John Walton and other Old Testament scholars that have really drawn these themes out. Clearly, one of the things that's dramatic about the Genesis creation narrative, and if it's very much within Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, is we assume that God created all these material things. But that's not actually in the text. What's in the text from the beginning is there's this world, and it's full of water, and it's chaotic. And then God starts to separate and order. It separates the sky from the sea, the ocean from the land, the night from the day, and and then he fills these different things. And of course, after each day says it's good, it's good, it's good. The idea here is he's putting things in proper order and proper relationship to each other. And then you get into chapter two, and it's the garden. And he puts in the garden of every tree that is good for food, and mentions the rivers and the natural resources that are there, and on and on. And what comes out of that is this Jewish Hebraic understanding that shalom, which we translate as peace, is better translated as the peace that comes from wholeness, from completeness, that Shalom is the establishing of the right ordering of relationships so that a community can flourish. There's all the ingredients are there, and everything is properly ordered so that flourishing can occur. And then when you get the breaking of that shalom, with the rebellion of the man and the woman, all that you see the breaking of all of this order so that things can no longer flourish. They're in the wilderness. There's not enough to eat, there's a limited supply of resources. There's death around the corner, all these terrible things. So when we talk about biblical justice or ordering, our mind should be thinking about, how do we arrange things in a society, in a community, in a church, wherever it might be. How do we in a family? How do we arrange things so that everyone can flourish? And part of that is, yeah, we want to see people in right ordering of relationship with their Creator. That's part of what we do as believers. It also means we want to make sure that people have access to food, that they have access to education opportunity, that they're treated fairly, that, you know, no one is is maligned because they're a foreigner or there was this is why Paul says there's neither Jew nor Greek, male or female. We are all one in Christ like these. This is the reordering of things in the church, and through the power of Christ and His resurrection so that everyone can flourish again. And then the image you get at the end of the scriptures is a world people get hung up on this sometimes, like in Revelation, it says there's no more sea. The ocean is gone. And I don't take that literally. I think it's metaphorical. Why? Because in the beginning of Genesis, all you see is the sea. There's just. Ocean. It's just, and that's a symbol of chaos for the ancient world. And what Revelation is saying is there's no more disorder. There's no more chaos. It's not just that the waters are contained. They don't exist because there's no place for evil or chaos to have any part in God's new creation. It's all ordered so everyone can flourish perfectly. So I think about justice as what is our calling as believers now, in our relationships with God, with one another, as a citizen in this country, to seek the ordering of things so everyone can flourish. And that's where we need the wisdom of the Scriptures, the guidance of the Holy Spirit our sisters and brothers in Christ, the witness of the historic church to inform us as we are given that calling in this time and in this place. So
Joshua Johnson:what can happen now, in this like now and not yet, time that we live in that we know that everything will be ordered, but it's still chaotic. What's the call to to to believers in Christ, to justice and to see order amidst the chaos of this world.
Skye Jethani:Well, I think it begins by looking at Jesus himself. His ministry on the earth was not just the proclamation of reconciliation with God. He did say that repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and he invited people into that reality. But what else did he do? He made sure people had enough to eat. He healed their bodies. He raised the dead. He called people to be reconciled to one another, even the assembly of the 12 Apostles. He picks a tax collector who works for the enemy and a zealot, a terrorist who wants to kill the Romans, and he calls them into community together, and he says, everyone will know you belong to me if you love one another. That's social reconciliation between estranged groups, right? So he does all of that in his own ministry. So then when you ask the question, well, what are we supposed to do, individually or as his collective people? I go, we're supposed to do all of that. And it's exactly what you see in the book of Acts. They shared everything so that people had enough to eat. They were reconciled across unbelievable barriers, Jew and Gentile. You know, they they sold their property so that no one was in need like they did all of the things Jesus did as well. So now you project forward to today, and there's, there's a healthy debate going on here, where I agree that the Christian community of the church is supposed to be a foretaste of that new creation, of that perfectly ordered world. But then there's the added dimension of what about our individual callings and vocations in this world, I just am blessed when I meet Christians who are called to be teachers or lawyers or artists or, dare I say it, even a political leader, and they and they go into those vocations, seeking the shalom of the world, seeking to order things rightly as best they can. Will it be perfect? Of course not. But we, we give people a foretaste, a glimpse of what is to come when we pursue those things. This is what William Wilberforce did as he spent decades of his life trying to end the slave trade as a political leader in England. It's what the abolitionists did in the 19th century here in the US, and we continue to do that work when we reform broken systems in which people are hurt to make them closer to what they ought to be. Will we do it perfectly? No, but we try, and we keep moving in that direction, because we are the citizens of the new heaven and the new earth, and we are to manifest that here and now, just like Jesus did,
Joshua Johnson:beautiful that's good. At the very beginning of your book, you talk about your improvisational work, right? Yeah, improv. But I want to get there, because in improv, you have a yes and type of work, right? And we usually see things in an either or, we see black and white, but you're, you're calling for a both and type approach when we're looking at justice. So I think one of the your sections is judgment and mercy. And I think that a lot of people have an either or stance on judgment and mercy, and they get mad at either side because they only see like it's all judgment or it's all mercy, right? And the Justice Jesus is talking about. How do those go together? Great question.
Skye Jethani:If we go back to our core definition of biblical justice is the right ordering of relationships, or if broken the restoration of the right ordering of the relationship, then when you look at how mercy or judgment are employed in Scripture, you understand that God employs one or the other, or both, or in some combination, toward the pursuit of restoring the proper ordering of relationship. But it can't usually be entirely one or the other. What comes to mind is the story of Zacchaeus, the wee little man who climbs the tree to see Jesus. He was a tax collector, and when he encounters Jesus, He says to him, I. I'm going to return everything I've stolen fourfold to all the people I've cheated because tax collectors back then were scoundrels, and they would collect more money than was required, and they'd pocket the difference, and that's what they did. And there you see, Zacchaeus is trying to restore a right relationship between himself and God and his community by making right what he did, wrong, restitution, right, that you could consider that judgment or punishment or whatever he's trying to make up for the wrong he's done, but, and that's good and right. But you also see throughout the gospel stories, Jesus talking about the importance of forgiveness. Peter comes in one time and says, Lord, How many times must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me seven times? And Jesus says no 70 times seven, which is kind of a rabbinical way of saying without end, like infinite forgiveness. Why? Because, in order for a relationship to be restored, you need the person who's done wrong, Zacchaeus, to correct his wrong, to repent and to try to make it right. But the restoration of that relationship also requires the person who was wronged to show mercy and forgiveness. It takes two to tango, and so the Lord also employs judgment and employs mercy toward the end of right ordering of things. And that happens in different degrees and different circumstances at different times. But rather than viewing mercy and judgment as these diametrically opposed forces. I joking. They talk about them as peanut butter and jelly in in the book where they actually they're different, yes, but they go together. They're complimentary, and they're both employed with wisdom to seek the restoration of right ordering. What
Joshua Johnson:does that then look like for us when we we think about judgment? I'm thinking about this. I went to see a Broadway touring production of the show parade on Sunday, and it tells the story of Leo Frank, who's a Jewish man in the 19 teens who was basically wrongfully accused of murdering a 13 year old girl, and he's in Georgia, and basically the governor figures out that he didn't do it. He commutes his sentence from hanging to life in prison, and then a big mob kidnaps him and lynches him because they want they want judgment. They want to see somebody pay for what happens to this 13 year old girl. And we all want people to pay for those things. But what is that so practically? Then what? What's our call in the middle of like judgment and how much mercy do we have on people? How much forgiveness? What is the the interplay between all of those things for us, where we have some mercy, but there is also judgment that is happening?
Skye Jethani:Yeah, I mean this. We can talk about this theoretically. You know, in the abstract, when you are actually a victim of real evil and injustice, it ceases to be theoretical. And I don't want to, I don't want to talk flippantly, especially to people who might be listening to this, who have experienced incredible trauma and injustice and and grief in their life at the hands of of evil. But this is where we need to begin by asking, Which side of this equation are we on? Am I the perpetrator? Am I the victim? If I'm the perpetrator, I know what my calling in Christ is. It's to repent, it's to confess, it's to seek restitution if it's possible. If I'm the victim, my responsibility is to show mercy and forgive. That's different if I am a police officer or if I'm a government or if I'm God, for that matter, Romans 13 talks about the role of government is to restrain evil and to punish evildoers. Right? That's a different doesn't mean that we don't have a judicial system in which there are consequences for terrible actions. It doesn't mean the government should just show mercy to everybody that's done anything wrong. That's a different dynamic, and it's a reflection of our trust that ultimate justice is executed only by God Himself, who sees all things perfectly. And so our job is not to seek vengeance, as Romans talks about, leave room for the vengeance of God, but show kindness even to your enemy. Our role here, if we are on the victim side of this thing is not to diminish evil when it's present, but not to be controlled by it, by not by not forgiving and not showing mercy. So it is, and I've encountered people who have experienced awful, awful things, and one of the most miraculous things you. Will ever see is somebody who's a who's experienced true evil reach a place of forgiveness and mercy. One book I'll recommend on this is Desmond Tutu wrote a book that no future without forgiveness, and it's hard book, really painful book to read, but powerful. So when you say, what is our responsibility? I'm using air quotes. It depends who's the we you're talking about, right? So, yeah, it gets really hard, and this is where we need wisdom and understanding. And even within the church, sometimes it's like Paul talks about casting out the brother who's engaged in terrible immorality, but the goal is the right restoration of relationship. The goal is let him face the consequences of what he's chosen so that hopefully he will turn back and be restored. It's not punitive, it's not punishment. It's supposed to be redemptive, reconciling. That's the goal of our human pursuit of justice,
Joshua Johnson:human pursuit of justice. So then what? What does the relationship with hell look like? Right? So, eternal judgment. You wrote about it, so I did talk about it. What are some misconceptions we have about how I think you write about a misconception of our immortal bodies as well. So what? What are these misconceptions? Is there eternal torment in hell?
Skye Jethani:Yeah, you, I think you mentioned probably the single biggest misconception which most of us have been taught, if you've grown up in kind of a western culture of Christianity, most of us have been taught that human beings are intrinsically immortal period, and yet that is not taught anywhere in the Bible. It's just not and so where did it come from? Well, it came from Plato. It came from Greek philosophy and Tertullian in the second century, who was a Christian writer, wrote about, all souls are immortal, and he cites Plato. He doesn't cite the Bible. He just says, This is a fact that everyone knows, because Plato said it, everyone every human being is immortal. Well, if you believe that every human being is intrinsically immortal, you're gonna have a real hard time reading the Bible, because what does it mean, then that the wages of sin is death? And what is John 316 the most famous verse in the Bible. What does that mean? God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish. What does that mean, right? So when the problem is, when you bring in that Greek assumption, you have to change the meaning of words in the Bible. Paul didn't really mean that the wages of sin is death. What he meant to say, because no one can really die. What he meant to say is, The wages of sin is eternal, conscious torture, forever and ever, ever. And you know, John didn't really mean, or Jesus didn't really mean, in the Gospel of John, that anyone who believes in me will not perish. He meant you'll not be tortured forever, like, no, like sometimes the Bible means what it says. And going all the way back to Genesis three, if you eat of the tree, you will surely die. Right? That? I mean, it's just over. I could there's hundreds of passages of Bible that talk about this. So if you buy the Greek idea of all human beings are immortal creatures, and those who are who belong to God will live in eternity with Him, then you have to ask answer the question, well, what happens to those who don't belong to God? Well, then you find yourself moving backwards into this idea of, well, they must be tortured in hell for eternity, because you can't really die. And that's the assumption that Jesus didn't hold Paul didn't hold the Old Testament, doesn't hold the Bible, just does not hold that view that people are intrinsically immortal. And so yeah, that then changes how you read all these texts about hell and what's really going on there, including in Revelation and elsewhere. And that's the whole last what, 20% of my book is all dealing with that stuff. And I am not, I am not a Universalist. I don't believe Scripture teaches at all. Everyone will be saved. I just don't see that there at all, either? Yeah, and I don't want to dismiss church history and things that have been taught for a long time. I get that, but at the end of the day, we have to actually see what's in Scripture and not just import our assumptions, though they may be old, and let that warp how we read the text.
Joshua Johnson:So then what happened at the cross and the resurrection, Jesus, as we have been told, descended into hell, and he defeats death. So is there a defeat of death? And there is a life that comes from it. And if that's not for everyone who's it for,
Skye Jethani:right? Um, yeah, first of all, our translations get weird, because sometimes words that mean Hades are translated as hell and they're not the same thing. Hades is just a general Greek word for the realm of the dead, whereas Gehenna, the most common word used for Hell, is more of a place of retribution. Of. Punishment. It's not just the realm of the dead. So when Scripture speaks of Jesus descending to hell, it's actually Hades. It's the realm of the dead. It's not this torture chamber in our medieval imaginations. And yes, he defeats death. The problem is that Scripture is clear, if you give your allegiance to Jesus, then you get to live in eternity with Jesus, because he's you're the one who but you are free to reject Him and choose death. So while death has been defeated, even in the in Revelation, it talks about the Lake of Fire, all those who don't belong to the lamb are thrown into the lake of fire, and so is the devil and his angels and death itself is thrown into the lake of fire. That's kind of, you know, should make you go, maybe there's something non literal going on here, because it is apocalyptic literature, but that the imagery is that everyone that is not who does not belong to Christ and does not belong in His eternal kingdom is destroyed. It's done away with it's pitched, thrown in the scrap heap, including death itself. Death is no more. So it isn't that everyone gets to escape death. It said death and everyone who belongs to death dies. Some people call that view annihilationism. That's kind of the theological term for it. And where I I agree with that in general, but I think where I a piece that gets lost in some annihilationist theology is it doesn't take seriously the many passages of both the Old and New Testament that speak of each person having to give an account for what they've done and being repaid for what they have done. Meaning, there's a proportional kind of judgment here. So there are some who would argue if, if you are outside of of God, if you're outside of Christ, then you die and that's it, and game over, you're just dead. Wages of sin is death, yes, but I think there's an intermediate space here where we all give an account both the righteous and the unrighteous. We are proportionally paid back either either reward or punishment for what we've done. Paul talks about that for the righteous in First Corinthians three, not everyone will get the same reward depends and not everyone will get the same punishment. I don't believe Adolf Hitler is going to be punished to the same degree as a, you know, an unscrupulous tax accountant. Like there are differences here, and that needs to be factored into the way we think about God's justice and even our view of hell, that it's not eternal conscious torment for everyone, and there are different degrees of punishment based on the evil people have done. But the ultimate destiny of those lost is death. I'm just
Joshua Johnson:gonna give my life to Jesus and say, I'm yours Jesus, and I'll I'll figure out everything else. That's a good place to start. Where'd I go? Good place to start. Good place to start. What else happened at the cross? One of the things that you said that really, I think, impacted me, like, made me sit up and think, is, like, he kind of, like, defeated the evil within me on the cross, I usually think, Oh, he's just, he, like, growing up. He's saving me, right? It's, it's about me, right? But it's not just about me, but maybe it's he's defeating the evil that I perpetrate in the world as well. How does that interplay happen for for people? What is what does that look like? How does that change our relationship to how we actually view what happens on the cross?
Skye Jethani:Yeah, I was a friend of Buechner who said that the gospel is bad news before it's good news. So there's a very old doctrine that's known by the Latin phrase Christus Victor just means the victory of Christ, rooted in passages like Colossians, chapter one and elsewhere, that speaks about Jesus defeating every enemy through the cross, disarming the powers and authorities in the heavenly realms, things like that. And so there's this sort of cosmic understanding that on the cross, all the evil of the world, all the enemies of God, did their very worst to Jesus, just poured out all of their injustice and horrors on onto Jesus. The world did its worst, but he absorbed all of that died and broke free in the resurrection and defeated them through his victory over the worst they could do. Well, Theologically speaking, I'm one of those enemies. Paul talks about, we are enemies of God, right, children of wrath. And another way of thinking about it is there's all of these powers in the world that are claiming God's throne, that are saying we want to be in charge. We want to be the king. This is Adam and Eve in the garden. Does God really say that if you leave the tree, you'll surely die? No, no, you'll be like him. Really? We get to be like God. We get to be in control. They're usurpers. It's a coup. They want to be in charge. I am one of the people who's trying to take God's place in the universe. I think I'm in charge. I and because of that, I also have perpetrated terrible things in this world, evil, selfishness, injustice, greed, lust, anger. You go on down the list. I am one of the enemies of God that was defeated through Jesus on the cross. He has thrown me down from my false assumption of taking the throne and killed me. I have died with Christ on that cross. He killed me on that cross. Paul talks about this in Romans chapter six, but if I give my allegiance to him as the rightful king, I'm also raised to new life with him. I get to share in his victory. This is what's so stunning. This what has Paul, you know in Romans just amazed is I was an enemy worthy of being defeated on that cross, and He did defeat me, and then he welcomed me to reign with Him and seated me in the heavenly places with him. You know, it's just crazy. It's mind blowing. It's mind blowing. That's the madness. So that's where you see both the judgment of God on the cross and His mercy at the same both the one who is just and who justifies. It's just incredible. It's an amazing message, and you have to have both parts of it, if you only see it as, yeah, I was in trouble, but you know, Jesus rescued me on the cross, and thank you. I mean, you got half of it, but you also have to admit I'm the one who put him there, and I'm the rebel, I'm the enemy, and I was defeated. And all this crazy talk about me being in charge and taking the threat. I'm giving that up. I'm done. That's not the road I'm on anymore, and that's what the cross forces us to wrestle with. So
Joshua Johnson:thinking through all of these like restoring right relationships with each other and with God, and does that change the way that we view or think about evangelism or sharing who Jesus is, what he has done for us, and inviting people and to follow him.
Skye Jethani:Yeah, I think it does. And if you look at the book of Acts, there's, depending on how you parse it, there's seven or eight gospel presentations in the book of Acts. We were thinking of Peter on the day of Pentecost, and then there's Paul and Athens and these other stories. And when you look at the way they present the message, and they do it different ways to different audiences, it's remarkable what they always talk about and what they never talk about. For example, they never talk about hell. Never comes up in their evangelistic preaching. It seems to be kind of a must for a lot of American evangelistic preaching. They also never talk about heaven. They don't talk about going to heaven when you die. That's not their message. What do they talk about? They talk about the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. What they talk about is how Jesus has had victory over every enemy, and how he is the rightful king over all the world, and they invite people to give their allegiance to this risen King. And if you give your allegiance to this risen King, you get all the benefits of it. Your sins are forgiven. You have eternal life with Him. You will reign forever with Him. And you've been empowered, then by His indwelling Spirit, to be an agent of reconciliation yourself, which means you can now call others to allegiance to Jesus, but you can also be empowered the way Jesus was to restore right relationships in the world, to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, to reconcile those who are estranged, to seek forgiveness of like all of that stuff that Jesus ministry did, that the early church, that you are now part of that work, that calling of the new people of God in the world. So yeah, I think it does change how we go about evangelizing people, and our understanding of what our mission really is as the church. It is both horizontal and vertical, and it it's bigger than just rescuing disincarnate souls off of a burning ship. That's
Joshua Johnson:so good. That's really good. If you could speak to the the American church in our cultural moment today, in light of what we've been talking about today, what do you hope to see the American church rise up and do and be in this day and age that we live in? Oh gosh, that's a huge question.
Skye Jethani:Well, first of all, I want to say that there are, there are parts of the American church that are doing what we're called to do and be unfortunately, there's a lot of parts that are not. And I think we need to recognize the way our own American history, particularly in the White Church, has warped our understanding of justice, warped our understanding of the gospel, warped our understanding of our mission. And then there are three great four, I'll go four great. Sources we can turn to to correct that broken vision. One is scripture, obviously, if we read it, hopefully aware of our own biases and lenses, we can see this fuller vision of how things go. The second is, we should look to our sisters and brothers in the church in America who do not suffer from this bifurcated vision, especially the black church. When you look at the stats, which Americans read the Bible the most frequently, it's African Americans. Which Americans have the most Orthodox theology? It's African Americans. Which church in America has historically kept evangelism and justice together, horizontal and vertical, united. It's the black church in America. I'm not saying every black church in America has great theology. I'm sure there are deviant ones here and there, but for the most part, our sisters and brothers in the black church in our own country have not suffered from this problem the way the white church has. I think we ought to turn to them and and use them and other immigrant churches that haven't had the same history as a resource for us to get this right. The third source is look at the historic church, as I mentioned earlier, this broken model really is only 150 200 years old. Go back and read earlier church writers and from different parts of the world and different centuries, and they have this unified understanding of what we are to be as the people of Christ. Then the fourth which should permeate all of them is the Spirit of God. Is to recognize that he will lead us into truth and wisdom if we're open to what he has for us through our brothers and sisters, historically in the church today and in the scriptures. So what I would want to see, rather than prescribing some specific outcome, is a posture of humility in the white church in America that says maybe we don't have it all figured out right. Maybe we need to go back to the Scriptures. Maybe we need to listen to parts of the church we've just dismissed and not listened to, and maybe we need to learn from those who've come before us the great cloud of witnesses and repent. That's what I'd love to see. Amen,
Joshua Johnson:me too. Amen, let's see it. I want to see it. I'm praying for that right now. Skye, this was fantastic. I love this conversation. I want to get a couple recommendations from you, anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend, oh my gosh,
Skye Jethani:reading or watching lately. I I mean, some of the stuff I'm reading right now, I'm not sure I want to recommend, because it's going to depress people too much, because I'm reading constantly for interviews I'm doing on my show, man, I'm trying to think of what I would really, really recommend. There's a my colleague here at the holy post, Esau McCauley. He's also a professor at Wheaton. He wrote a memoir last year called how far to the promised land. I mean, that's fantastic. Amazing, absolutely amazing. My other colleague, Caitlin chess, wrote a book last year called the Bible and the ballot, which is about how the scripture has been used in American politics, and it kind of touches on a lot of the stuff I've been talking about here, which I think would help people out quite a bit. What am I watching? I haven't I just have started watching severance, like I missed season one, so I'm going back and watching season one. I'm just getting into that that's entertaining, but that's kind of it right now. As far as like stuff, I'm really gonna recommend, because everything else, like I said, is too depressing.
Joshua Johnson:I'm glad, I'm glad you're choosing a lot of great stuff to read on your for your own interviews that are just depressing. Yeah, well,
Skye Jethani:they're, you know, they're related to current events and, yeah, yeah, stuff going on, and it's hard, it can be so go
Joshua Johnson:listen to Holy posts for some depressing
Skye Jethani:Well, I like to think I'm reading it for you see, I don't necessarily have to.
Joshua Johnson:That's good. I was just joking. It's great. It's fantastic. Holy post. Go find that I know you do a daily devotional with God daily wants people to go sign up for that. And how could people go out and get your book? What if Jesus was serious about justice and then just get the whole series? Is there anywhere you'd like to point people to you? I
Skye Jethani:don't really care, because, you know, most of the money goes to the publisher anyway, it's the same for me either way. But whatever's convenient for you, I know Brazos, the publisher, really wants me to say, Go to their website and get it from them directly, although my guess is, don't tell anybody. I'm saying this, they probably don't have free shipping the way that you'd get if you're on Amazon Prime or something like that. So you know, do do what you need to do to get the book bulk orders. By all means, go to Brazos, get the bulk order directly from the publisher. You'll save money doing that. But,
Joshua Johnson:yeah, that's great. You know, I loved watching only murders in the building. Oh, yeah. Razas is a character like his, uh, his character, name, his process. Is in the in the show. And I just, I always find that hilarious, that the publisher and this character and only murders kind of the same name. Yeah, the same name. It's fantastic. Anywhere else you'd like to point people
Skye Jethani:to just holy post.com you can get all the stuff we're doing there, and there's a ton of content and podcasts. We have multiple shows now, and lots of videos on the holy post YouTube channel that we're always producing. So thank you for letting me talk about the book and for your great questions. Yeah,
Joshua Johnson:thank you. This is a fantastic conversation. I love talking with you and going deep in justice. And thank you for actually receiving those difficult questions and thinking, thinking deeply about those and the work that you do in your writing and holy posts and everything you do is fantastic. You're a gift to the body of Christ. So thank you, and thank you for this conversation. Thanks so much.
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