Ep. 437 Michael Rhodes - The Gospel is Political (Just Not How You Think)

In this episode, Michael Rhodes claims the gospel is inherently political, and "the Lord reigns" was never just a private comfort but a statement about who actually runs the world. We name the two instincts that keep so many of us stuck: retreating into a safe bubble or chasing the halls of power, and why a more holistic approach is necessary. And we get practical: city council meetings, speed bumps, a libertarian business owner whose whole politics quietly rearranged once he started hiring single moms. In a moment when faith and politics have collapsed into the culture war, this feels like a third way, or a faithful way - a politics you can practice this week, on your own street, as a small taste of the beauty of the Kingdom of God.

Michael J. Rhodes (PhD, Trinity College / University of Aberdeen) is lecturer in Old Testament at Carey Baptist College in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is the author of several books, including Reimagining Biblical Politics, Just Discipleship, Formative Feasting,and Practicing the King's Economy (with Robby Holt and Brian Fikkert). Rhodes (an ordained EPC pastor) and his family currently live in South Auckland, where they are part of an intentional community engaged in Christian community development.

Michael's Book:

Reimagining Biblical Politics

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Transcript

Michael Rhodes: 0:00

We live in a complicated world, and people are stressed, and they see things, and they don't know what to do, and political discipleship is about being fixed on Jesus, filled with the Spirit, immersed in Scripture, so that collectively we can discern what are our options right now. A

Joshua Johnson: 0:31

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 look like Jesus. I'm your host Joshua Johnson. Today we were talking about biblical politics. Politics is a fraught word. It is a place where right now we have tried to figure out what faith and politics, the merging of the two, look like, and it has devolved into culture war. So, where does it start? Do the politics and biblical politics start on the street, where you say, "Hey, my kids are playing, I want to keep them safe, so let's help get speed bumps. Or does it start in the voting booth? Do we have to say we have to have the ear of the president? Let's try to get our way. Where does it start? What do we do? How do we discern what is faithful in the midst of all of this? That's why Michael Rhodes is here today. Michael spent 12 years in South Memphis, and now he teaches Old Testament in South Auckland, one of the most diverse and most disenfranchised zip codes on the planet. His new book, Reimagining Biblical Politics, is an honest accounting of some of the things that his own discipleship left out. In this conversation, we get into why the gospel was political long before it was personal. The Lord reigns was always a claim about who actually runs the world, and we name the two instincts that

paralyze most Christians: 1:51

either retreating into a safe bubble or chasing the halls of power. Michael says that we need both wings to be able to fly, and we'll get into a distinction of what that looks like. We also get practical city council meetings, speed bumps, a libertarian business owner whose whole politics quietly rearranged once he started hiring single moms. Remember, we're living in this moment when faith and politics have collapsed into the culture war, so in this conversation we try to offer something different. So join us as we discern what does it look like to faithfully follow Jesus in the midst of engaging biblical politics. Here is my conversation with Michael Rhodes. Michael, welcome to Shifting Culture. Excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks, Josh. It's great to be here. You've lived around the world and in different communities, and we're going to be talking about your book, Reimagining Biblical Politics. And so just give me a little bit of like a biographical journey of like where you lived and how that shaped the way that you think about biblical politics.

Unknown: 3:06

Yeah, that's a great question, Josh. And it's funny because you said you've lived all around the world. I think of myself as a Memphian, so of my 40 years of life, like I don't know, I think 30 of them or something, 29 or 30 of.. I've been in Memphis. So Memphis is in my blood, that's definitely home. Some of my most formative experiences have been there, but I did go to college on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, at Covenant College, and that was a really transformative experience. Part of what was happening there was like a kid from the South who loved Jesus, really loved the Bible, and who'd begun to discover before he left home there was all sorts of stuff in there I hadn't really thought about, like God's heart for the poor and for justice and mercy, and so I sort of, that got deepened at Covenant, because I studied community development there, and spent a summer in Kenya, and so working on an ag development project with the Anglicans, and that was really cool, so I went back to do that for two years, right after I got married, right after school. That was transformative for many reasons, but one was our church was the most multicultural, multi-class community I'd ever seen. We sang in six different languages, we had people across the economic spectrum, and it really helped us realize that we'd come to Kenya to help, or whatever, but really our home community of Memphis had all sorts of problems that we were tangled up in, and so we really felt almost commissioned by our Kenyan family to go back home, and so we spent 12 years in Memphis, living in a South Memphis neighborhood, overwhelmingly black community, a beautiful community with really rich and also very tragic history, and we're part of a Christian community development group there, and a church plant there, which is really, again, transformative. My wife and I are kind of, I think, realizing like our shared. Vision sense of call is something to do with helping the church hear and respond to God's good news for the poor, but the things that sort of emerged was on the one hand we were going to do that by by living in certain communities that have been marginalized and and that I was going to contribute to that mission probably best by by connecting believers to what scripture says and how scripture shapes us for this work, so I went back and got a PhD while I was kind of involved in various community development things. I taught at a majority, I taught community development strategies at a majority black Bible college for bivocational pastors in Memphis for a bit, and then God, like, totally blew up our world by calling us to New Zealand, and so I'm a cradle Presbyterian, but I worked for the Anglicans, and then I sort of accidentally worked for Baptists in the South, and then now I work for Carrie Baptist College in New Zealand, and I teach Old Testament here, which has been wild, but the thread is still there, because we live in South Auckland, which is one of the more economically disenfranchised zip codes in the country, but also one of the most diverse zip codes on the planet. And my wife works, Rebecca, she - we're part of a Christian intentional community there, and my wife, that's sort of her job, and so she's involved all sorts of cool stuff, and our family through her, and then I teach courses here, so that's the biography. What does that do with politics? Well, like I think when I left university, I'd gotten just like supercharged about God's heart for the poor and for justice and for racial reconciliation. The church I grew up in had an explicitly segregated policy in the 1950s like we barred black people from church, so that story, that stuff was real, and my church was grappling with that, they taught me that, right, so they were a part of my discipleship in a positive way, but like that story was very like when I realized that God cared about those things, it was explosive, and we sort of, we're going to be a part of what God's out to in the world, you know, we're going to move into communities that are struggling, and we're going to be part of church, but if you'd asked us what that had to do with politics, we would have been like, huh, like we thought that, like we were trying to avoid, it's like it's not politics, it's the gospel, you know, that was kind of the kind of mode, and it just turned out that it was absolutely impossible to live in South Memphis for 12 years, from 2010 to 2022 or whatever it was, and, and not think about politics. The gospel demanded we engage politically in all sorts of ways, and some of those things are the obvious ones, like there was lots of upheaval during those years. There was marching and protests and advocacy during those years. There were contested elections, there was, and those things ripped churches apart, and we were in a multi-ethnic, multi-class church in the South, and so we were struggling with that as a community. So some of it's the obvious political stuff, but a lot of it was just like politics is about public life, not just how you vote, so politics is also the neighbor next door is being oppressed by a slum lord, you know, it's also just like my neighbors can't find work, you know, it's also just what are we going to do together about the violence in our community, which was significant. So all the academic work I've done has basically been an attempt to figure out the parts of my discipleship that I feel like we're lacking, and so if you look at the books that I've written, practicing the king's economy, economic discipleship, just discipleship, discipleship worrying towards justice. What's the third in the triad? I didn't know it was a trilogy when I got started, and those three books are very - each is very different from each other. But about three weeks ago, I realized I've written a triad called What Michael Didn't Have that he needed, you know, to be a disciple. So this one's about politics, so that's how I got here.

Joshua Johnson: 9:05

Amazing, how is the gospel inherently political? Then some people think it's just Jesus saved me, I get to go to heaven. This is great, but how is it inherently political?

Unknown: 9:16

One of the things that would have been remarkably obvious to any one in the biblical world, but is really hard for us to realize is that so much of the Bible's language is drawn from the political sphere. So, throughout the Bible, what I think the unifying thread, there's a lot of diversity in the Bible's politics, right, and we can talk about that, but my belief is that the unifying thread, the Bible's primary political message, is that God reigns, and God, or the Lord, is king, or the way Jesus puts it, He comes proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, all of those words were a real. Originally deeply political, because Israel was always suffering under bad kings, others bad kings, and then occasionally often their own, and the same in the New Testament period, they were constantly being buffeted and hammered by these oppressive rulers, and so if you were someone declaring the reign of God, the kingdom of God, and again, this is the on the shores of the Red Sea, the Israelites saying the Lord reigns at the center of the psalm, the Psalms, Psalm scholars say, the center of Israel's hymn book, The Lord is king, the Lord reigns, Isaiah, who gives us gospel language, Isaiah is the first person to use gospel language in a way that is obviously connected to Jesus' language of the gospel, and what does he say? How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who declare good tidings, who say your God reigns. Jesus, the kingdom of the good news of the kingdom of God. Paul in Acts, what is he doing at the end? He's proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God in Revelation. What are they singing? King of kings, Lord of lords. You know, like, so, so this really is central, and all of the language it's drawn directly from the political sphere, and this is especially true in the New Testament, where words like gospel, the one who brings peace, savior, these were all words that were applied to Caesar before they were applied to Jesus. Caesar was called Savior of the world. Caesar was called the Son of God. He brought a gospel that would bring peace, and so when the New Testament uses that language, it's claiming for God something that the rulers of this world demand for themselves, and so there is a public political significance to scripture that is very obvious in its own world, but very difficult for us to reclaim and remember

Joshua Johnson: 11:58

if Jesus is Lord, if the first Christians that said Jesus is king, and we're going to follow Jesus as king, and we're going to figure out how, then we should live in a place where there is a Caesar, it is Rome, there is empire, there's a kingdom there, but we are now part of a kingdom where Jesus is a king, but we're living within this kingdom that has an earthly king, and we're trying to figure out what politics looks like in the middle of that.

Unknown: 12:30

Yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 12:32

where do we start? Like, how do we figure out how to, how to engage? Where are we at? What kind of questions do we need to ask to start to figure out how do we live.

Unknown: 12:44

Yeah, that's a great, that's that's a great way to put it. This book, Reimagining Biblical Politics, was a genuine research project for me, and so I tried to sort of come fresh to the text in many places and say, okay, how does it hold together? And something that emerged for me as I wrestled with these texts, is that actually, if the Lord Rains is kind of a headline, from that headline, there's two separate sets of questions that we need to ask, and one of those questions I have called outpost politics, and at the risk of making people think of the guys with the buckles on their hats, the other set of questions I've called Pilgrim politics, so outpost and Pilgrim politics, and what I mean by that is, if God reigns, the first political question is, How do we, who acknowledge His reign and pledge ourselves to His kingdom, live our lives together as citizens of that kingdom, and then the second question is, How do we go out and engage the political players, cultures, communities, neighborhoods, etc. of the world around us that are under God's reign, but do not acknowledge that reign, and that's what I call pilgrim politics, and so this lens has been really helpful for me, and you can almost see it, maybe in Jesus' words, about like us being a city on a hill. So a city on a hill is sort of separate, you can see it from a distance, it's an outpost of God's kingdom. The salt of the earth is dispersed, it's like pilgrims, we are engaging, and so one set of questions are, How do we live together as an outpost of God's kingdom? And this is really exciting, because the Bible has so much to say in Israel, in the Old Testament, in the community of faith, in the New Testament, calling us to live this counter-cultural, God-honoring way of holiness and love and mercy and justice and generosity, so when Jesus says to forgive one another and to love each other and to show mercy to each other and to share your possessions, this, these are when we embrace them, these are political. Actions right, like when we learn to live as siblings of Jesus. These are political actions, because they establish a public community in the midst of the world that shows a signpost or a glimpse of what God's reign and ways like in the world, and so one thing I want to say in this book is that helping the church to be the church in all of its richness, its material public richness, is a political action. So, if you think about political actions, political issues that you care about, and in order to create a resource, this is an Assad, but in order to create a resource that will help a partisan church pursue political discipleship, unlike in all my other work in this book, I have studiously avoided contemporary American politics. So I tell stories from church history, and I tell stories from the global church, but almost never do I name so you can keep me in that space, if that's best for this podcast, or you can tempt me to venture an opinion, but like just think about the issues you might care about: immigrants, refugees, the unborn, like economic well-being, employment, people with disabilities, inclusion for people. Just pick a political issue, a public issue that you care about. One question, the Bible plays on us, is what it look like for the people of God to live a solution to those challenges in our own lives, and and part of what happens in our hyper partisan, hyper toxic, politically disastrous age is that we demand a quality of life from the state that we're not coming anywhere close to living in our own lives, and so I mean, Jesus says, "Carry your cross. So, what's it look like to carry our crosses in relation to the stuff God cares about in our common life together? And, man, once you get into it, like the case I make in the book, is that the Torah's laws give us a lot of guidance here, and, and, and the sermon on the mount gives us a lot of guidance here, and, and, and, and Paul gives us a lot of guidance here, you know, and it's the, it's the stuff, it's forgiveness and mercy and kindness and generosity and sharing, it's, it's, it's living like family, it's those kind of things, and then on the pilgrim political side, it becomes very diverse. What the Bible says. One of the pebbles in my shoe that kept me walking on this on this journey is that when in my political discipleship, so many people thought once we'd said Romans 13, we were done, right? Like, okay, settled, whatever the case says, we're good to go, we're good to go, obey, you know, chapter in First Peter, you know, honor the honor the emperor, like done and dusted, as we say here in New Zealand, but actually, if you look at what the New Testament actually does, first of all, Paul doesn't even obey Caesar all the time, Paul escapes a legal judicial procedure in Acts and Corinth. He, his friends help him climb out a window and run away. Right, so like, first of all, that's not even a good representation of Paul, but if you take in the full scope, you do have this emphasis on obedience, on collaboration with the broader culture, seeking the flourishing of the city, what Miroslav Volf calls soft difference in First Peter, but you also have midwives who lie to the pharaoh, disobey the pharaoh, because they fear God rather than than than the pharaoh, and God blesses and rewards him, and, and yeah, Jeremiah says seek the flourishing of the city, but, but John says you should be preparing to sing Kumbaya when God burns it down, right? That's Revelation, and there's no truce with Babylon, right, and everything in between, and some sometimes God's people refuse to collaborate, and then you get figures like Daniel and Nehemiah and Ezra and Esther and Joseph, and by the way, I don't think all those characters the Bible gives us as, as unblemished saint hero stories. Some of those stories I think are we're invited to to ask hard questions of, but nevertheless, the sort of toolbox for political engagement in our pilgrim politics is quite complicated, and one of the things I want to do in this book is give people their Bibles back, because we live in a complicated world, and people are stressed, and they see things, and they don't know what to do, and political discipleship is about being fixed on Jesus, filled with the Spirit, immersed in Scripture, so that collectively we can discern what are our options right now. That's what Christians ought to be doing in their pilgrim politics. They should be going, "This is what we care about, this is what God cares about. We care about this thing because God cares about what. How do we discern together what faithful action looks like? And we cannot do that unless we are deep. Rooted in scripture, and I wrote this book because even though I have strong opinions on contemporary politics, my observation is that biblical political discipleship is pretty thin across the board, and across the aisle is what I mean there, and so I'm, and it was thin in my life, it was thin, and it is thin in my life, I'm trying to grow it. That's what this is all about.

Joshua Johnson: 20:24

I have a lot of people that come in two different areas. One, they're like, we're just going to actually do pilgrim politics, and we're gonna go out, and we're gonna, yes, I don't know, we call it making disciples, and you know, doing caring for the marginalized and doing that work, but we don't give a crap about the Kingdom outposts of us and us living the way that we're supposed to be living, and like rearranging ourselves of actually giving gener generously, and so I have people that are there and they don't care about that. I also have some people that are like we're the outposts and we're going to isolate ourselves and we do not engage in poker politics, we're not going out there, we're just going to stay right here in our safe little bubble and we can't do it. How do you help people ask questions or get to a step to see that both of these are necessary for our life, our life as a disciple of Jesus, our life as a church together. How do we get people to open their eyes that both are necessary? Yeah, I mean, look, like in some ways I'm like an amateur practitioner on the way in terms of trying to participate in God's mission in my own community, and because I don't do a lot of contemporary American politics, I don't tell a lot of my own stories, but my own stories have been things like getting involved with a long-term advocacy campaign

Unknown: 23:40

in our city around a public issue, it's been going, taking slumlords to court with lawyers from my church. It's been working with the residents association, trying to get speed bumps. It's been my wife serving on it's a bunch of like piddly small, mostly insignificant things, right, but but real things that emerged from from life, so I'm an amateur disciple who has some expertise in scripture. So part of the way I'm trying to help the church is just bringing to the surface that those two camps are just missing huge swaths of what God says, and so to the first camp that's, you know, obsessed with kind of getting out there and doing the work of justice and mercy, and etc, but but isn't sort of like as emphasizing sort of the communal transformation of our own lives, like I would just remind people the kingdom of God only becomes bad news because sinners can be welcomed in through the blood of Jesus, like think about the kingdom of God, think about that language, or like a lot of New Testament scholars have said that, you know, in an era where kingdoms remind us of, like, Lord of the Rings, which we like, a more appropriate translation to the first century, and that would be more provocative, would be Empire of God. Okay, so think about the Empire of God, and then when Paul says, while we were enemies, right, that's where humans start. So it is foolish to act like we can simply promote the political agenda of the king without ourselves being welcomed in to the kingdom through God's work in Christ, and seeking to help others find that as well, and even more, I would say, like on the US being transformed versus our advocacy. Christians talk a lot about the common good, but it seems to me that in the Bible we don't have anything to offer the common good unless we are seeking to become the uncommonly good people of Jesus at our best, and this is true in history, like think about the example of public hospitals, they begin with the outrageous sacrificial life sacrificing care of the poor by Christians, some of whom were called - I tell this story briefly in the book - the Reckless Ones, because they were staying behind during the plagues. And then they create hospitals at their own expense, and and then when the state recognizes Christianity, and there's an opportunity, then all of a sudden you get public hospitals, right, but the history there is there's an uncommon, over the top, Christlike commitment, you know, so if we want to tell the state, I love in New Zealand, they had this program where New Zealand government had a refugee quota like. You can take this many, but at some stage they had a program where churches could say we will support in increasing that quota, and I think at our best our public witness begins by we can go to the pilgrim politics with something to say if we are gaining experience accompanying the poor, caring for the dying, welcoming the outsider, finding employment for the job seeker, tutoring the kids. That when we're doing that in our own life, that's when we have something to offer. And I think you just see that throughout the scriptures. So that's the one camp. On the other camp, and this is the camp that I grew up in, more like, where people might say, like, oh, you know, why doesn't the church just do that, and that's the church's job, that's not the state's job, you know, and I, it is one of those places where you just kind of go, I can proof text to you that that's wrong, right, because Deuteronomy says the community of faith should care for the poor and about justice, Acts says the church should care for the poor and care about justice, but Daniel, when he works for Nebuchadnezzar, and he wants to tell Nebuchadnezzar how to make Babylon great again, in chapter four, what does he say? He says, if you want to extend your reign, atone for your sins in righteousness, and by showing mercy to the oppressed. When Daniel gets a shot, he tells the state not be nicer to us. He says, do justice for the poor. The end of Proverbs, just before the Proverbs 31 woman. It's interesting, you get kind of two pictures of wise women in the, in the end of the book, the famous one, Proverbs 31 woman. We won't talk about her, because there's so much to unpack. I love her, widely misunderstood, but just before that, what you have is King Lemuel, who is not Israelite. You will search Samuel and kings in vain for Lemuel. This is wisdom from outside Israel, and what he reports is his mother saying,"Don't open your mouth to indulge in your own pleasures, open your mouth to defend the rights of the poor, that's what political power is for. So, this idea that there is this hard division between caring for the poor, caring for the good of others, that somehow the church's job and we have no responsibilities, it is biblical nonsense, right? But even beyond those explicit examples, you've got the models of of of seeking the flourishing of the city of getting involved in the mundane realities, and think about seeking the flourishing scene, Jeremiah 29 in the land of your enemies in the everyday work of making a neighborhood of building families of engaging in commerce. Think about how you have to get involved when you raise a family in a place, when you get involved in a neighborhood, when you get involved in buying and selling, like these things knit you into the fabric of a place. You care about them, and its flourishing will be your flourishing, and I actually think that's a lot of what's going on in the parts of the New Testament that sounds more like compromise to some people, you know, Paul saying, like, yeah, submit to the governing authorities, or it's clearer in Peter, where Peter's like, you're doing this to silence the accusations of the foolish. You're doing this to win space for people to encounter Jesus, and, and a lot of scholar, Bruce Winter, in particular, has connected these passages where it talks about the church doing good, you're doing good to all, and he's connected to them. This is this Greco-Roman practice of benefaction, which is about doing public good in public, and he's suggesting that part of what what looks like quietism to us is not quietism, it's it's collaboration, it's critical collaboration, it's constructive engagement, and I get, you know, this is the kind of thing, just to say one more thing about this, for both of these groups, I get kind of like breakout in hives when I hear Christians, especially in America, talk about how things have never been worse, you know. We used to be able to do that, but now we can't, or the scene is just so dysfunction, because I mean, if you read the Bible against its history, I mean every single moment in biblical history was harder to be a person of faith, politically speaking, than our moment. And Jeremiah still thought you should get out there and see the flourishing of the city, and Daniel still thought, and Proverbs gives a lot of advice on this, you should still tell the ruler how to seek justice and mercy, you know. So, anyways, that's that's kind of how I mean, I'm coming off hot because I'm getting excited, but, but I want this to be - believe it or not - I want this to be a winsome invitation, because I think both of those groups, and I've lived on either side of those groups, I really have. I have lived this kind of Jekyll-Hyde thing, where I vacillate back and forth between those grapes. I really, I'm not just saying that, I mean that, but I think when you do that, the Latin American evangelicals associated with Mission Integral, holistic mission, they said that talking about which was more important, evangelism or social action, was like talking about which wing of the plane is most important, the left wing or the right wing, and I think if you're flying with one wing, you sense somewhere in your gut that you are not flying at full capacity, and I think it's invigorating and inspiring and enlivening to say, oh my goodness, God's called us this kind of a way of life that's woven together, you know, that's has integrity.

Joshua Johnson: 32:27

We do a little skit with that evangelism social action as a, as a bird, and you know, only one wing. So, what happens with one wing? Yeah, you just fly in circles, you're just going in circles, right? That's really good. That's a good, yeah, that's

Unknown: 32:41

good. I like that.

Joshua Johnson: 32:43

So, yeah, it's really helpful. Like, we need both, we need both things. Yes, this is because we, you've been talking about how discernment and context really matters, and this is how we actually engage in politics. What faithful politics looks like, discernment can go off the rails sometimes. Yes, but we do have a Holy Spirit with us that is good news, will help us discern, which is great. But how do we make sure, not make sure that it doesn't go off the rails? Like, I don't want, like, guard rails, but I kind of do. I want to make sure that we, these are like, we know, like, God's heart for the marginalized, like, we know the big story. How do we start to then read the Bible without maybe proof texting or doing, like, pulling out what we want to prove that my earthly empire politics is what I want the Bible to prove. Yeah, that yeah, that's the one we're going to engage in. Yeah, it's

Unknown: 33:46

a fantastic question, Josh. And it's a question I really wrestle with, because my, my deepest fear for this book, if people pick it up, is that they'll go, "Oh, that was a great Bible study, and so what I do in the book is, you know, I've got a bunch of chapters on the each chapter is on a different portion of scripture, and along the way I invite readers to come with an issue they care about, they think God cares about, and then allow that section of scripture to pose questions to them. So I'm hoping it is a spiritually formative encounter with scripture as we go, but that's actually not the landing place for me. The landing place is the final chapter where I dress head on this issue of discernment, and what I do is invite people to first imagine a gathering of Christians on a Sunday morning that has been shaped by what scripture says about public life, and this is really important to me. I'm a conservative Presbyterian, and so I am a part of a tradition that actually believes under most circumstances the pastor from the pulpit has neither the authority or the expertise to tell people exactly how to apply God's word in their partisan political lives, so I am from a tradition, and I believe even though there's dangers in this tradition, I think it is right that, especially in a sermon where we are announcing, we're announcing that thus saith the Lord, the Bible says, for instance, in Deuteronomy 10, I, the Lord, love the vulnerable immigrant, giving them food and shelter. Therefore, you will love the immigrant, for you have been an immigrant. The preacher is obligated to read that text, thus saith the Lord. And if we shy away from it, because immigration is a hot topic. We are failing our duty as the local church, as preachers of the gospel, that is part of our mandate. But that text does not tell us exactly what number of immigrants should be allowed into a particular polity, does not tell us how, or exactly how, or on what terms, and all of those issues are not only discernible in themselves, right, like debatable, but if we're asking questions about voting, and I do think part of my slick thing would be to say national elections are not the most important political thing Christians do by a long stretch, so if we could focus more locally, blah blah blah blah blah. Yes. Amen. Hallelujah. All caveats aside, when we go to questions like party politics, we're not just discerning about any one issue, we're discerning about a whole basket of issues tied to an actual human person, and so the amount of discernment there is significant, and the Bible does not mandate. It, and therefore the preacher has neither the authority nor the mandate nor the expertise to bind people's consciences with the word of God to particular parts and things. Most of the time, I do think there are limit cases, and one task of political discipleship to me, it seems to me, is to discern, is to, it's become the sort of person who could discern the limit cases of that, right? I think you could name Hitler from this pulpit, and everybody agrees with that, but nobody knows how we decide exactly, and so Christians argue about when we've reached limit cases. That's an important question, but in general, that's the kind of approach that I'm committed to, and so because of that, what I want to imagine is what does it look like a church service that's really saturated in scriptures, political message, and it would include things like drawing our attention, like coming to God and worshiping Him as the one sovereign Lord of our lives, and then calling people in prayers of repentance to identify the way they've given their allegiance to other gods and lords, including political ones, to ask quite political questions like Who in whom is your trust? Who got you enraged at your neighbor this week by playing on your political fears? Where are we surrendering ourselves to false political powers and stories? It would include scriptural preaching, and I do hope this book is for more than preachers, but goodness, I hope it helps preachers, because you can preach these texts, you can preach these texts, and we must preach these texts. So we should be announcing, you know, these stories of the midwives, and these stories of salmon seeking, slum seeking, and the story of Amos's confrontation with God on our side, kind of patriotism, both for the church and for our nation. Would you be looking, and so we're preaching these things, we're inviting people to the table of the king. So the idea is it starts with genuine discipleship into God's political vision. And then what I imagine I invite the reader to imagine is what happens next when you leave the sanctuary and you head to the coffee hour, and you know what's going to happen is everybody's fired up, you know, there's the warm glow, and then you immediately start talking about what you're going to do, and you're furious at each other, you know, if you're still in a church that has political diversity, which not all of them do anymore, but you're really going to go, wait a minute, how do we live this out, and so what I invite the reader to go through is a process whereby a group of Christians who are undergoing political discipleship could discern together an issue they care about and how God might be calling them to act on it in a way that tolerates and celebrates legitimate differences in discernment and decision making, but also looks for common ground, and that chapter was really shaped by a really cool curriculum on political discipleship by the Center for Public Justice. So I drew, drew on that some, and I also drew on some, some themes that at the end of the book I went, "Okay, well, what are the themes of God's agenda that sort of have emerged for me, and, and you know, they're like allegiance to God alone, sacrificial love and service, justice, and shalom seeking, and I sort of unpack those, but these are things that have emerged as kind of a basket of goods in the Christian political agenda, but I'm also saying discerning what we do involves going well. What are we looking at? And then, which, like, an exercise I've done with my students that was really fun. It said, 'Pick an issue. And then I drew up on the board, like, midwives, Jeremiah, the Shalom Seeker, John of Revelation, who thinks, you know, it's basically come out of her, my people, you know. And then Daniel, who gets involved and works, and I just said, How would each of these figures, what would they come up with to do about this issue? And it was so powerful, because you all of a sudden are going, okay, let's say we care about foster kids, we got a lot of options, and now we might be able to go, okay, well, or maybe sometimes it's like, hey, you're gonna go your way and I go mine, you know, and sometimes we're gonna go, oh, we actually can agree on this, and, and sometimes we go, we've got options, or sometimes we're gonna go, that option is is not available to us, you know, like sometimes when I think to the Christians who are politically disengaged, and they go, oh, it's so much the community of faith in the Bible. I just think, dude, can you imagine how happy Paul and Peter would have been if, if the regime ever asked their opinion like that? They would have been delighted, and in fact, in Acts, Paul does tell the regime, and he gives one guy this apparently terrifying lecture on justice, self control, and the coming judgment. How's that for a political, a political rally, you know? So, but anyways, the point is, I think, I think we can, we've got to devote time, and this is where the kind of narrow constraints I placed around. The pulpit, a moment ago, that is not the local church's work, neither begins or ends in the preaching moment. So, I think the local church has the responsibility to say, "Thus say the Lord, but then to convene the priesthood of all believers and say, "You've heard the word of the Lord, now we're going to work together to discern and decide what to do

Joshua Johnson: 43:02

in your book, you have a whole section of what Pilgrim politics looks like within the halls of power, so within collaboration with with government and power and empire, it said it's a tricky thing to engage, yes, that there's compromise sometimes people turn to the dark side sometimes. Yes, people, yes, people are able to say Jesus is Lord. There is difficult. There are some, some Christians that say, right now, hey, look, we have that, you're the of, yes, the halls of power, let's use it. And there's been some compromise. So,

Unknown: 43:41

what is what does that look like to collaborate with the halls of power? Yeah, so in the book, the figures that I look at in the halls of power are Joseph, Daniel, the sages of Proverbs, who provide a lot of teaching on on political counsel and the role of authorities, I love the book of Proverbs on that, it's really fascinating, Ezra and Nehemiah, and then Esther, so I guess that's five or six chapters or something, and I think that most of those paradigms texts show that on some instances collaboration is possible, on some instances, collaboration is impossible, and it's very easy to fall off on the wrong side. So, for instance, you know someone like Joseph - I've argued in great detail, and this may be the point where I lose all your listeners, but I promise the Bible

Joshua Johnson: 44:38

into this.

Unknown: 44:40

I love the Bible. I consider myself an evangelical. I really do think the text of Genesis says a lot of good things about Joseph, but problematizes aspects of Joseph's political participation, mainly in chapter 47 where it explicitly says he provides for his family through generous gifts, but he saves the Egyptians by permanently enslaving them, and in that text he shows special favor to his people, and he treats the Egyptians in a way that the law, at least, would excruciate. So, like Jacob Milgrom, one of the most poor commentaries on Leviticus, says the jubilee or law is quietly saying don't do what Joseph did in Egypt, like point for point, and I think the narrator is actually setting you up quite clearly and cleverly to see that this problematic political behavior, which is a part of Joseph's rich life, which includes a lot of beauty and virtue and saving lives, but I think the problematic aspect sets up the Exodus, and so, for instance, you know, Joseph's getting his family jobs as administrators over over livestock. The next time we hear about administrators in the Bible, they're the administrators of slave service that Pharaoh puts over the Israelites. The good land that Joseph gets for his people is called Goshen everywhere in Genesis, and then right when, when we're talking about Joseph's, what I think are problematic policies, the narrator also calls it Ramses, which is weird, because Ramses hasn't been built yet, but Genesis tells Exodus tells us it's enslaved Israelites who are going to build Ramses, so why would the narrator all of a sudden remind you of that city right when it tells you about Joseph enslaving the Egyptians for Pharaoh? I think the point is, live by the political sword, die by the political sword, and so you know you see that, and then someone like Daniel, I do think is a sort of ideal depiction of the public exercise of political power, and I think he gives us a really powerful model of what it looks like, because sometimes Daniel is willing to work for even deeply problematic rulers and deeply problematic regimes like Nebuchadnezzar, but there's some he won't work for, so the principle is you have to draw the line somewhere, and the second principle is the ruler that Daniel criticizes in some ways the most is the ruler he works for. He constantly calls out Nebuchadnezzar, who is his boss. So two signs that we've sold out when we're in the halls of power. One is we keep moving the goal lines, we keep saying, well, if it becomes this, I'll, I'll pull out, or I would never do that. And then we just, you know, like the frog in the pot, you know. But another sign that I think all of us have to ask, and I mean, I am wrestling with this myself, I wrote one political party. A letter, for the first time in a long time, in the last three months, complaining about a set of issues that I have always believed in, but I have never really complained publicly about, because I was convicted on this very point. The sign of faithful collaboration is that you criticize the hell out of your political team, and I mean hell there theologically, like so. So the question I would ask for collaborators is, where are you challenging, and if you're not challenging, if you're not finding anything in challenge, it's really easy for me to say that's that's like a sellout moment, but I do want to say, as funny, I did some of, I did the work on on Joseph and Daniel in a book called Just Discipleship, so for like real Bible nerds, and that's a little bit more of an academic book, so for real Bible nerds, if you, if you read Reimagine Biblical Politics, you're like, I want more, you know, there's there's two chapters there for you, but I was giving that talk a couple years ago at a conference and a woman raised her hand in the back and goes, okay, do Esther, and I was like, I can't, because I don't know what it means, you know. So that was one of my big research projects for this book, was the book of Esther, and one of the arguments that I make about the book of Esther is that people have been arguing about what Esther is and what it means since the ink dried on the scroll, and that means that either the storyteller was bad at their job because they couldn't communicate, or what I think is that this is a story that is ambiguous by design, and it is the most political book in the Bible, and so what I would say is I think the get one of the gifts of Esther is to remind us we have to act when we have opportunities to influence in the halls of power, we have to decide, which is an act, whatever we decide, but our own actions, the rightness and goodness and virtue of our own actions, God's relationship to those actions, his perspective on them is often shrouded from our view, and so that's the last chapter, almost in the book, because I realized one of the gifts that Esther gives us is a gift of humility. It's the humility to say we have to act, but, but we can't claim certainty, and we have to remain open, and, and the sort of story that I connect that to is, is, you know, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who, who, like the characters in Esther, engage politically in a bunch of different ways. He was kind of a spy. He worked in the government in a government office to avoid military recruitment. At one stage, he used his connections to get that job. He, he taught in a legal seminary, so he kind of did a bunch of the different, wildly different strategies, and he was tangentially involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and when he reflected on that, he said, I don't know if I did the right thing, like there was ambiguity. He didn't take the next step of saying I know we were holy, and they, you know, and I think that's that's really important for us. It's particularly important if we're going to do this discernment thing in in congregations that are divided deeply divide along partisan lines.

Joshua Johnson: 50:44

Well, I know that we don't get access to halls of power a lot, but we do have a lot to be able to do something in our local neighborhood. If we have a group where you, you talk about, you know, creative minorities there, so if we're a creative minority, if we're a little group, what is something that we can do to engage our neighborhood, so that we could see a little taste of the kingdom here and now. Yeah, well, before I answer that, I do want to say I think we have more access to the halls of power than we think we do,

Unknown: 51:22

and one of the things I want to emerge from the book is that if Daniel and Esther and Ezra, Neuman, Joseph, and all his dudes in Proverbs, and occasionally Paul and Jesus found avenues to speak directly to the powerful, we who live in a representative democracy, which does not just give us the right to vote, it gives us the right to provide feedback to our elected representatives, to write letters to the editor, to convene publicly, and all sorts of, you know, the right to assemble. These are not things the Bible teaches us, they are tools that are available to us, and so I do want to push on the kind of narrative that downplays the extent of our agency as counselors to the authorities, you might, you might say, but I love your, your question, and I don't know how to answer, except for to say, like in my life, public missional action has bubbled up from a group of people who love Jesus living and worshiping together in a place that they're paying attention to, and to people they're paying attention to. So, like, when I wrote Just Discipleship, one reviewer in the development stage had some critical feedback, because they said, you know, Rhodes is acting like. So you know all the racial issues in America are black, white racial issues, and you know all the justice issues are like this, and I changed some of the language because I tried to make clear to say I'm not saying these are all the issues, I'm saying these were my issues as an upper middle class white boy living in a 97% black neighborhood that supports urban zip code in the state of Tennessee. These are case studies that emerged from my life, and so I think Christians, and this is another reason to like sort of try to say it's not that I don't think the national conversation is important. I think it is really important. I think it's really important right now, but if we can focus equal or more attention on the local, then we can pay attention to what's going on in specific communities, and what are the beautiful opportunities that are bubbling up in those communities for us to partner with and become a part of the ecosystem there, and what are the real deep brokennesses that we might be led to pull the threads on, you know, and my hunch is, if, if the body of believers does that, some of you will feel called to move more and more into the directly partisan statecraft area of politics, even if that's going to your city council, and a lot of, a lot of times, Christians are just like, we just don't know. Most time, anybody can go to a city council meeting, anybody can speak about anything, right? So, like, it's, you know, school board meetings, yeah, like these things are actually quite open. Residents association meetings, and you might show up at your resident association meeting and find that it's a homeowners association meeting, and they're all trying to figure out how to get rid of the five affordable housing things on the end of the block, and that might be pushing one direction, or you might find, like we found recently in our neighborhood, like kids are getting almost hit by cars, so we need speed bumps, and it's the small seek the flourishing city, but then you pull on that thread, and all of a sudden, some of you, because of calling and disposition and opportunity, may do be doing more direct pilgrim political stuff. I'll tell a story I from that I discovered when I was writing my first book, Practicing the King's Economy, which is about political discipleship. But basically, there's a guy I know who's a business owner, and politically he is historically incredibly right-leaning, libertarian-oriented, you know, that's his thing, but he got convinced by people that his business was a space where he could seek to go to the city and love his neighbor, and so he started hiring teen moms and young, young single mothers who were living at a halfway house that he'd previously been donating to, and this was really transformational for them. It was transformational for the company. It was also transformational for him, and as he pulled on that thread, this guy who basically, you know, would maybe sometimes say things like the government has no role, or whatever, would run into political issues like what's sometimes called the cliff, where if someone who's on government assistance starts making money because the assistance doesn't taper off, it drops off. There's this cliff where you get a promotion for, you know, two grand more a year, and you lose like $7,000 in child care subsidies, or whatever, and it's a stupid, it's a stupid design, and all of a sudden my friend is getting into the weeds of that and talking to social workers and writing his, I think he wrote an elected leader, and and all of a sudden he's realizing, like, oh, actually there's some political issues that I care about related, and obviously it doesn't mean that his whole political philosophy changes, you know, but I let me tell you another story. My friend Caleb Campbell, who wrote this book, Disarming Leviathan, I don't think he'd mind me telling this story, but, but he told me, you know, we've got people in our churches who are Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian in our church, and ideologically, but we have there in Arizona, we, we can and have discerned together some core commitments we hold from scripture related to, in this case, immigrants across those philosophy differences, and they've actually gone, as I understand it, to their local local officials and said, "Hey, we are followers of Jesus, and we disagree on the mechanics of exactly what you should do, but here's some core convictions that we are demanding you honor, whatever y'all come up with, and I think that's like a pretty powerful, like everyone talks about how we need less partisan and we need more collaborative blah blah, but we're all being eaten alive by the algorithms and the toxic nonsense coming from, you know, the rage baiting and all that's a pretty powerful example of starting with something and then, you know, following the thread. So, I guess that's what some things I'd say. Okay,

Joshua Johnson: 57:41

reimagining biblical politics is really fantastic. How can people connect with you and what you're doing? Where would you like to point people to?

Unknown: 57:50

Yeah, so I mean, I'd love for people to buy the book and share the book and use the book, obviously, but another resource is I'm creating a full season podcast on the book that's tied to my Substack, which is called Crossroads, which is a terrible pun on my name, so Cross, and then R H O D E S, but it's, it's my Substack is Weekly-ish reflections of this intersection of faith and public life, and you know, if you've been listening to this conversation, you should know I do tell people what I really think about specific issues there, so reader beware. But the first season of the Crossroads podcast is devoted to this book, and my friend Marshall Teague and I talk about every chapter, and then I interview people who tell stories about faithful political discipleship from around the world and church history, and some of those conversations are incredible. So already you can order or pre-order the book, and you can check out the Crossroads Podcast, and subscribe to that, so that when episodes come out, you can listen to it, and you can sign up for my weekly substack if you want to engage my work more generally. I also work at Carrie Baptist College, and you can find my email there, so feel free to track me down that way.

Joshua Johnson: 59:06

Sounds good. And if you want to go and just hang out in New Zealand, go find my Zealands as well. I'm ready to go

Unknown: 59:15

towards The Hobbits. I'll point you towards The Hobbits. That's

Joshua Johnson: 59:17

good. I've been to Hobbiton. We, my wife and I went on our honeymoon. We went to New Zealand, and all throughout the South and North Island, and it was incredible. And so you've always dreamed of living there for a little while, but haven't made it back yet. But I wish I wish I could give everybody the gift of living in New Zealand for a little while. Yes, it would be amazing. Well, Michael, thank you for this conversation. It was fantastic. Thank you for walking us through reimagining biblical politics and what that looks like. Really enjoyed talking to you. It was a lot of fun, and hopefully people got a lot of good stuff out of it, and now they got a lot of questions that they could do better and deeper research within the book and the podcasts in your substack, so thanks, Michael. That's great. Thanks, Josh. This is really fun.

Unknown: 1:00:16

Thank.