Ep 285: Romans and the Mission of God with Jeff Roper

Preorder my new book Politics, Economics and New Testament Interpretation here: https://libertarianchristians.com/store/politics-economics-and-new-testament-interpretation/

In this episode I talk with Dr. Jeff Roper about his book To the Ends of the Earth: Romans and the Mission of God, out now on Wipf and Stock. In this book Roper reads Paul’s letter to Rome not as a work of abstract theology but as a missionary appeal to a culturally diverse church. Roper explains the social and cultural background of the church in Rome, the tension between Jews and Gentiles, Roman attitudes towards the Spanish barbarians Paul seeks to evangelize, and the diversity within the Roman congregation. We discuss how the main themes of Romans contribute to this larger missionary goal, and why Paul is concerned about contextualizing his gospel to ensure that people from every tribe, tongue, and nation place their faith in Jesus. He then shows how Romans is a fruitful framework for thinking about missions today, and how the Western church should embrace the cross-cultural missionary challenge of Romans. 

Media Referenced:

To the Ends of the Earth: https://a.co/d/0h90GSvr

Jeff Roper Website: www.jeffroper.com

Foursquare Missions: www.foursquaremissions.org

Jeff Roper Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeff.roper.7/

Sign up for LCI’s 2026 Conference in Cincinnati, OH on Saturday, October 17! Many LCI content creators, including myself, will be speaking at the event, and it will be an excellent opportunity to connect with likeminded, liberty-loving Christians. Check out the event and sign up here: https://libertarianchristians.com/conference/

The Protestant Libertarian Podcast is a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and a part of the Christians For Liberty Network. The Libertarian Christian Institute can be found at www.libertarianchristians.com. 

Questions, comments, suggestions? Please reach out to me at theprotestantlibertarian@gmail.com.  You can also follow the podcast on Twitter: @prolibertypod, and YouTube, @ProLibertyPod, where you will get shorts and other exclusive video content. For more about the show, you can go to theprotestantlibertarianpodcast.com. If you like the show and want to support it, you can! Go to libertarianchristians.com, where you can donate to LCI and buy The Protestant Libertarian Podcast Merch! Also, please consider giving me a star rating and leaving me a review, it really helps expand the show’s profile! Thanks!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

All right, everybody. I want to take a quick break from the show to let you all know that my brand new book, Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation, where I argue definitively that the New Testament does not endorse modern authoritarian socialism, is now available for pre-order. The release date is going to be Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. And you can go to libertarianchristians.com, click on the book tab at the top of the page, and then select my book. You can pre-order the physical copy through LibertarianChristians.com and you can go to Amazon and pre-order the ebook version, the Kindle version of that book over there. And of course, on September 15th, you'll be able to find the physical copy on Amazon and in many other places where books are sold. I'm extremely excited about this book. This is a culmination of my life's work. I know that many of you guys have asked me about it over the last several months, and I'm so ready to get into your hands. Let's go ahead and make this a big hit, get these ideas out there. Again, go and pre-order the book at libertarianchristians.com or at Amazon.com. You can search my name or the title of the book. Thank you guys very much. This is the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I really hope that you guys enjoy today's show. We'll be discussing this book on the show today. Dr. Roper, welcome to the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Hey, thank you so much, Alex. It's a joy and honor to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

So this is your first time on the show. So before we get started today, introduce my audience to yourself, your background, and your work.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

Okay. Yeah, great. Well, um I'm Jeff. I'm married to my wife Debbie. We've been married for uh 39 years so far. We have uh six kids, 13 grandkids so far. And uh we've been involved in ministry, boy, since uh for more than 40 years as well. And um just really enjoy helping people discover what it means to to follow Jesus and become everything he dreamed about when he created them.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Yeah. So you are you're a missy, a missiologist, and I'm I'm pretty sure that this is the first time I've ever had a missiologist on the show. There may be some listeners that are unfamiliar with that term. So, first of all, tell me what is a missiologist, and then number two, what got you interested in that discipline?

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Yeah, yeah, great. Yeah, missiologist basically means I've uh I practice things the expansion of the gospel and the theology behind how does the gospel expand into new frontiers and what does it look like when it crosses boundaries and borders, and what are the best practices of getting the gospel out into uh different contexts uh without uh unnecessarily exporting our own cultural uh interpretations of that gospel. What got me into it was uh, well, basically the call of God. When I was when I was a young man, uh new believer, uh, this was back in the the days of the Soviet Union when that that existed, and me growing up in the United States, that was the arch enemy, and I was fascinated with the underground church in the Soviet Union. And I was reading this book uh about by this guy who had been a member of the KGB, whose job was to infiltrate the underground church and find out who the believers were and arrest them. Well, he ended up getting uh born again himself and fled the Soviet Union and died under uh strange circumstances. But while reading that book, uh I felt like God spoke to him and said, you'll have a ministry there. Now, of course, back then, you know, that was like, you know, today God's showing up and saying, hey, you're gonna minister in North Korea. Good luck. You know, you know, I'm thinking, hey, is there anybody else up there I can talk to about this assignment? And uh I didn't know what to do with that, but it just really planted a love uh for the nations in my heart, in the sense of how do we how do we get the gospel uh to every nation, kindred, tribe, and tongue? Because if they're all going to be gathered around the throne of Jesus, you know, that we read about in the culmination of Revelation, how do we get there? And how do I play my part in God's mission to upright a world that's fallen over?

SPEAKER_01 4:55

Yeah, I I love that. And that dovetails with a lot of Paul's interest in Romans, but that leads me to the next question. Uh, anyone who's familiar with biblical scholarship, and you know, a lot of my listeners listen to the show because they're interested in biblical scholarship know that Romans might be the most controversial and contentious book in the entire Bible. Like there have been uh hundreds and thousands of commentaries written on Romans. Every single word in that letter is hotly debated. So, as a missiologist, what made you want to wade into that debate and write a book on Romans?

SPEAKER_02 5:26

Well, uh boy, I know. Uh I understood once I started studying it why Augustine got to verse seven of chapter one and quit. Well, for me, it actually was uh was an existential situation. Uh, having been involved in mission work within our movement of churches for a long time, about 15 years ago, I was at a critical moment where I had become very um, very angry and embittered towards the U.S. church because of its consumption of all resources upon itself. That it was just simply, you know, everything that they were doing was measured by how does this benefit my local church. And the realization that Jesus didn't die on the cross so that pastors could have careers and churches could and Christians could have nice buildings. I allowed that that to get really inside of me and start eating at me and some getting bitter about it. And during that season, uh I was listening to a series of lectures by Luke Timothy Johnson, and he had mentioned that Paul wrote Romans as a missionary appeal letter. And you ever had one of those times where somebody says something, or maybe you're reading a verse, and you just feel internally all the brakes hit, and you go, wait a minute. And I'd read I'd read Romans all my life as a believer, and I had never thought about the fact that it was a missionary appeal letter. And as a missionary, I've written thousands of appeal letters, and I've never written anything like Romans. Mine are normally, hey, God loves you, give us money, we want to reach new people for Jesus. Um it got me curious, and I began uh a 15-year journey of reading Romans, studying Romans, and it ultimately ended up in uh my PhD uh as well as uh, and then my dissertation I turned into this book that we're talking about. But what it did, Romans, what Romans did for me was it healed my heart and saved my ministry because it helped me see that ultimately what Paul was doing in Romans was he was addressing a church that was in cultural bondage. The Roman and we'll get into that as we unpack this, but this is what that this is the spoiler alert. Paul engaged the Roman congregations because they are they were in bondage to cultural compromise. By he engaged them to overcome that by engaging them in the mission of God to reach the despised barbarians of Spain. And by doing that, he caused them to look beyond their own cultural biases and to look at what Jesus, what God has done in Christ, and how that overturns all of our claims of superiority and all the culture war things that we get caught up in. And I came away from that with two fundamental things that shifted how I engage in everything that I do. And the first one is that there are frontiers that we'll never reach without a deeper level of engagement with the local church. And secondly, there are things facing, challenges facing local churches that they will never overcome until they re-engage in the mission of God. And that became the recalibration of everything about me. And it healed that bitterness. It caused me to realize that I was as much a contributor to that problem that I was mad about as were those churches. And now my Romans has completely uh reshaped my thinking and really saved my ministry and my sanity.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

And I really what I one of the things I really appreciate about your commentary on Romans is that while it does focus on uh the mission of God, you take the time to carefully outline the background of Roman, what Paul, what Romans, what Paul is trying to do there. And so I want to talk obviously about how this intersects with the mission of God, but I want to go through some of the background issues in Romans as well, because it is really important. If we're going to draw any sort of modern application out of Romans, we have to make sure we understand it on its terms first. So you start out in the book describing the wider historical and cultural background. So for a reader of Romans, what do they need to know about the wider world in which Romans was written?

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Yeah, that's a that's a key question there. And actually, as I studied Romans, I became even more convinced of the importance of understanding the context in which the letter was written. Uh, because if you don't understand the context, then you don't have a framework by which to interpret what is the TD is actually saying. You know, you know, you and I, we can have a conversation and I can say certain catchphrases like culture war or make America great or woke. And you and I, we don't have to explain those terms. They're culturally context, that we've got them in a cult. Well, Romans is the same way. Every New Testament letter of Paul's, uh, and every new every letter in the Bible is said in a particular context. And this one, uh, one of the shifts that I discovered was I had always read Romans as a as a compendium of Christian doctrine, as as Melanchthon had put it, and much of the reformed teachers and stuff, and many of the people I had listened to and learned from, that Romans was a compendium of Christian doctrine. But as I studied it more deeply, I found, well, it actually isn't, because there are a lot of Christian doctrines that we would consider essential doctrines. He never even talks about. But what is what he's addressing there historically, you know, keep in mind, and these are the clues that we get from the letter. He writes in chapter chapter 15, he talks about how uh there is no no more room for me in these places. You know, he talked about how his ministry went from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, and Illyricum is modern-day Albania. And he's looking around and going, there is no, and he's writing from Corinth, so he circled the entire Mediterranean basin, and he's going, There is no room left for me in these parts. I must go somewhere else. Now, Paul is deeply rooted in the Hebrew scriptures, and especially the book of Isaiah. In fact, there are so many uh references and allusions and echoes of Isaiah in Paul's letter to the Romans that biblical scholars have a hard time agreeing on how many times it actually shows up. But what we can determine is that Paul is reading Isaiah, and he's reading things about the the coastland shall wait for his law, Tarshish. He reads about Tarshus. And we find Tarshus referenced in other places in the Bible. Well, Tarshus is Spain, and so Paul is reading Isaiah, and he's shaped his entire ministry after the sermon songs of Isaiah, and he's going, Hey, Tarshus, they're waiting for the gospel. I've got to get the gospel to Tarshus, I've got to get it to Spain. So I want to get there. And for some reason, and this is what I was processing in my mind, why did he contact the Roman congregations? Because he had never been there, he didn't plant those churches, he had planted a lot of other churches that he had relationship with. Why was he engaging the Roman congregations? And that again goes back to why what uh what I mentioned at the beginning of what was this cultural compromise that they were engaged in. Well, the background of that story is in the year 49. Well, let's back it up even further. We don't know how the church in Rome got started, but the best that we can figure out is that on the day of Pentecost, it references amongst those 14 or so uh nations and geographies that are mentioned in in Acts chapter 2. It says they were Jews from Rome who were there. So the best we could tell is these Jews from Rome on the day of Pentecost heard the gospel, accepted Jesus as the Messiah, and they go back to Rome and they begin proclaiming the gospel in the synagogues. Well, over time, this created such a stir amongst the Jews in Rome that that uh Claudius the emperor got so fed up with their arguments that he expelled all the Jews in the year 49. All the Jews in in Rome were expelled from the city. So you picture this, you've got for the first, maybe the first time in Christian history, you've got this con these congregations that were comprised of Jews and Gentiles trying to learn how to live together with their cultural differences, because the gospel would start in a synagogue. He would reach both Jews and the God-fearing Gentiles who attended, and they would eventually get kicked out. And now you've got these congregations that are made up of Jewish believers and Gentile believers. And now, for the first time, there are no Gentile believers. They're no longer having to navigate how do we as Gentiles get along with these Jews with their obsession with dates and food and you know, so uh boy, the first service after the Jews got expelled, bacon double cheeseburgers were on the church potluck menu because they didn't have to worry about all these Jewish customs and everything. And this went on for five years. Now you can imagine how this church that had lost its key leadership of the of the Jewish leaders now is exclusively Gentile. Over a five-year period, they have really become an indigenous Gentile congregation. Well, Claudius died five years after the expulsion. The the edict uh was lifted, the Jews were allowed to come back in, and now they're coming back in, and these were the many of these were the founders of these congregations, and they're coming back in and not they're not being welcomed anymore. And they start having these fights, and we read about them uh in Romans where Paul is talking about the strong and the weak. And uh, you know, we often sometimes we confuse that language, uh, like when Paul uses it in other places. But in this context, the best we can determine is that the strong, the people who called themselves the strong were the Gentile believers who did not see themselves as being obligated to keep the rituals and traditions of the Jewish culture. They considered themselves, we are the strong, we are free in Jesus. We're not like you weak Gentiles over here who you have to worry about, you know, can you eat this food? Can you eat that food? Do you worship on this? We're not like you weak people, we're not caught up in all the rules, we're just free in the spirit. And then, of course, the Jews are going, hey, wait, hold on just a minute. It was to our father Abraham that God gave the covenant. We have the promises, we have the scriptures, we have everything, we are actually the ones that God has chosen. And Paul steps into that and he doesn't take sides, he actually just tells them, welcome one another. And he does that in such a way that he bypasses all of their theological and cultural arguments and says, Let's get past all of that and let's talk about Jesus. What did Jesus do? Because if he's going to get to Spain, the Spain in Spain they were called barbarians, and you'll find that language throughout Romans. Well, barbarian was just a word that, you know, we think of barbarian, like, you know, and I used to watch uh Vikings on TV and on those were barbarians. They're a mean, nasty people. They go in there and kill people and do all that stuff. Well, that's our concept of barbarian, but actually that word is the automatopoetic word that just simply means when the Greek speaker heard these people speak, it sounded in their ear like bar, bar, bar, bar, bar. So they used to call them barbarians. Well, this the people in Spain were considered barbarians. They were on the edge of the empire. They weren't considered human, they were subhuman, not worth, they were only there to be dominated, not to be converted. And that was the mindset of the Roman congreg of the Roman world. And the Roman congregation had been somewhat sub uh seduced by that culture, and Paul's trying to get them set free from it. You know, the the Corinthian church was was morally compromised, the Galatian church was doctrinally compromised, yet the Roman church was culturally compromised. The Roman culture of the of the Greco-Roman world had so infiltrated that church that they were blinded to the realities of the gospel. And that's why this letter is so deep and so rich, is Paul is dismantling it from the inside out. And by casting their eyes on Spain, he knew that he'd have to overcome their resistance because these were despised people. The Spaniards were despised people, they were barbarians. But how would they be able to not despise them if they were already despising one another? I grew up in the American South and I would hear stories. I I left there when I was 19, but I would hear stories, and I still hear them, of you know, big churches in the in the deep south that back back in the day would spend, raise thousands of dollars for mission work to Africa, but would fire the pastor if he allowed an African American to come to church. Yeah. You know, that was the kind of situation that we were dealing with, that we were dealing with similar enrollments. And so Paul is getting them to stop despising one another, to welcome one another, and by doing, by casting their eyes to the frontiers to say, this is what God has done in Jesus to upright the world. How should we then live as the people of God? And through that partnership that the church would be formed, he's trying to do two things. He's trying to form a community shaped by the gospel, and he's trying to reach a people who have not yet been reached because it's going to take a different strategy and a different method. Because in Spain, uh, you know, Paul had spent his entire apostolic ministry starting in synagogues. Well, in Spain, there were not enough Jews in Spain at that time to actually have any synagogues. So he was going to have to have a completely different style and technique to reach the barbarians there. And he could leverage those relationships in Rome as the capital of the empire. There would be strategic relationships that he could build that would help him make connections into the uh into Spain. So those were all the things that we explore uh in the book. And as you can see, it's a very rich and complex book, but uh full of the mission of God. Once you start seeing certain things, the whole book comes alive in a different way.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

That's and that's really one of the things that I've really appreciated about the turn in New Testament scholarship over the last 50, 50 or 60 years or so, is that for a long time Romans was treated as kind of this abstract theological treatise that Paul was opining about these grand uh theological ideas and that that was the function of Romans. It was intended to be a systematic theology, but it's not. It's a letter that's direct that's directly addressing a lot of the cultural and social issues that you just raised. And so I want I want to ask you about Romans then as a document. So Romans is obviously a letter, it's not just kind of like an abstract work, right? So that that has to, as you say in the book, that has to influence and impact our reading of Romans. We have to understand that Paul is trying to communicate something very specific, but then there are these main. Main themes that run through Romans. So, based on your reading of Romans and its its goal of kind of increasing missions and transcending these cultural barriers, how does Romans as a letter fit into that? And then what are some of the main themes that we need to be aware of? And how does that contribute to Paul's overall goal?

SPEAKER_02 22:17

Yeah, as a, you know, because as the letter, all of all of Paul's letters that we have available to us are all situational. You know, there he didn't write abstract uh theology, at least that we have any reference to. Everything he wrote was addressing something. So uh that was what he was doing here. So understanding that, and even that shows us how he how he would deal with a conflict like this. And that was one of the one of the things that I really took to heart myself in Romans was sometimes, you know, wherever you're at on a political spectrum right now in American society, um, you know, you can start with arguments of whatever your version of your political or economic policies are, and you're just going to argue with people up one side and down the other, and you're really not going to convince anybody. Yeah. But if you start with Jesus, what did God do in Christ? And how does that then, when you really look at the implications of it, how does that dismantle all of the culture that we have built, like in the Roman system of uh cultures of honor and shame, where they were trying to build honor amongst some people and shame others? Um, you know, you have slavery, slavery is prominent. A third of the Roman population were enslaved people. But Paul dismantles slavery from the inside out. And this is one of those things where, you know, if you just read the Bible as a surface, it never addresses slavery as a bad thing. You know, and Paul addressed, you know, he, you know, you find places, you know, slaves submit to your masters as to the Lord and stuff like that. And, you know, and that's been really used against human beings in a terrible way. But when you realize what Paul is doing in Romans, like in you know, actually, my favorite chapter of all of the chapters of Romans is chapter 16. Because that there you finally get the gospel with human faces in it. Right, right. And you've got about 30 people mentioned there, and about a third of them are women, and about a third of them are either enslaved or formerly enslaved people. Uh, Quartus is one. His Quartus, his name means four, so he's probably somebody's fourth slave. And then there's this little phrase in there I Tertius, who wrote this letter, also greet you in the Lord. And Tertius is a word that means three. He was probably someone's third slave. And it was the custom back in that day that whenever a letter was written, it was written by an emmanuel Mintis who was generally an enslaved person or formerly enslaved, a lower class person. And you would never know that that person engaged in writing the letter. They were never allowed to show up in the letter. And yet here is Paul letting Tertius go, hey, by the way, I'm here too. I'm saying hi to you. And by doing these things, by showing humanity after they have been impacted by the gospel, Paul was subversively dismantling all these cultures of oppression, of dominance, of cult, uh, of honor and shame, so that you would eventually be reaching a point where if God has redeemed everyone and we're all equal in Jesus, is it actually right for me to own another human being? You know, you go through a theological process, and you're not going through a revolutionary process because, you know, this is in Romans 13 where Paul talks about submitting to authority. Well, he's trying to avoid these Christians rising up in armed conflict. They weren't uh radicals in that sense that engaged in uh hostile violence. They were they were submitting as an act of subversion, that as they were infiltrated within the culture by their very actions, they would act assault and light. There would be light in darkness, you know, and that light would eventually expel the darkness of slavery. You know, so those things were happening. And then so you find like the righteousness of God. You ask about some of the themes that keep coming up. The righteousness of God. And uh I was taught the righteousness of God is well, you got to do the right things, you know, you got to keep the rules. You know, that's the righteousness of God. And that, you know, when you when Adam sinned, well, that just stinks for all of us. We all inherited his guilt. And you're just the uh if you ever read uh Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, holy cow, this guy really just paints a nasty picture of humanity. And then, you know, thank God, you know, and then eventually you hear the gospel being preached, and it sounds like Jesus came to save us from God because God's out there to kill us, right? You know, because we're just so filthy. Well, that's not what righteous the righteousness of God means. Uh remember, Paul is a is a Hebrew, he's a he's been saturated in the in the Hebrew Bible in the first testament. And and the righteousness of God is a phrase that is relational in its meaning, in its context, that it refers to God's passionate commitment to restore relationship with people, that he is faithful to his promise to restore people to his covenant. And so when we talk about the righteousness of God, that when that Jesus established the righteousness of God, he is, you know, chapter one of Romans says, you know, you Gentiles, you can't be bragging about yourself because you really go down this spiral that's really ugly. And in chapter two, he goes, you know what, you know, you Jews, you really can't boast either. You know, the Gentiles suppress the knowledge of God, and you Jews, you twist the knowledge of God. So what neither Gentiles nor Jews can do, God did in Jesus. So he's uprighted the world, he's shown his righteousness. He is he is radically committed to restoring covenant faithfulness with people through Jesus. And so he's he's trying to help them understand that it's not our relationship with God and one another as well, is not transactional, but it's it's covenantal and it's relational, that we are bound together because of what God did in Christ, and that creates us into a new humanity. And so those things, God's faithfulness, radical welcome, you know, there's multiple things throughout the scriptures of in Romans about about welcoming one another, about embracing each other. Um, and of course, you know, the uh the pinnacle of the letter is actually probably Romans 8, you know, that follows this chiasm that, you know, that that typical biblical way of writing, that the actually the centerpiece of the Bible, the of that narrative of that letter, the centerpiece is generally the point. You know, so the first half reaches to that point and then it flows out of that point. And that is Romans 8, you know, where what God did, what God did in Christ, and now is fulfilling in the Spirit by creating us to be people in the Spirit, and then out of that everything else flows, and he's going to restore what he has, what was lost, he's restoring through the work of the spirit because of Jesus. And calling people to a faithful life that demonstrates that.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

Yeah, and and this says a lot about Paul and his like not only not only his missionary strategy, which is obviously a major theme in your book, but then also his vision for creation, like what exactly Paul thought that he was doing. And so I want you to talk about what Romans tells us about Paul's identity and about his missional objective. So, based on on everything you've said so far, what does Romans tell us about the goals that Paul wanted to achieve for this world? And and for the Roman church, of course.

SPEAKER_02 30:40

Yeah, yeah. Um, well, he summed it up with a simple phrase for the obedience of faith among the nations, that what he's what everything that drove Paul, what this this consuming passion for the glory of God revealed in Jesus, and what Jesus had done on the cross. And so now what Paul is everything that's driving him is to shape a people that reflects that glory in the way that they encounter Jesus Christ, one another, and the world that we live in. That, you know, and he talks about this, that it's ultimately it's not just about individual salvation. You know, if I remember reading a tract, The Roman Road of Salvation, you know, and it and it it was it was a great little track, and a lot of people got touched by it, but it was a very individualistic uh message, and that the salvation that Paul is aiming at is not just individualistic and it's not just ecclesiastical, it's not just so that Christians can be saved, but it's actually that the entire cosmos would be would would experience the regeneration of that everything that happened in Adam is reversed in Christ. And that you know, when when sin, he said that sin entered the world, sin entered the cosmos, and he and he goes into this process in Romans 5 through 8, and he's talking about that sin entered the cosmos and what it does, and what that does to us is because sin reigns through death in us, and the corruption that happens in us because of this of sin influencing us and us choosing disobedience, and that grafts us into this what Paul called a body of death. And he said, Who's going to deliver me from this body of death? That body of death is the the uh opposite of the body of Christ. That through death we're joined to this body of death, and in Christ we actually become, because we've been given life, we are now joined to the body of Christ. And Paul is now pointing all of creation back to this incredible thing of what God did in Jesus. That he's going to, that he is renewing creation ultimately to, you know, in Jesus Christ. And that's that doxology that he ends in Romans 11, you know, the wisdom, the power, the magnificence of God. He he's bringing that to fruition in Christ. And so, uh, you know, in the early chapters of the book, I broke up the chapters into Romans as mission theology for the nations and Romans as missional theology for the church. That, you know, the church must be engaged in the mission of God. It's not just the work of missionaries. We are all engaged in this process by which God, God is actually the one who has the mission. He's the one who's pursuing, he's the one who is uprighting. And we get caught up in that because we get to experience it as the first fruit. And we go into this process by which we begin to then share with the announcement of God is restoring all things, he's making all things new in Jesus Christ. And that was what drove the apostle Paul was the glory of God revealed in Jesus, and that everyone should experience this, regardless of class, culture, ethnicity, and uh ultimately for the obedience of faith among the nations.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Our first conference in almost 10 years will be held in the Cincinnati area on October 17th, 2026, and we want you to be there. The Christians for Liberty 2026 conference will be held at the Village Vineyard Church in South Lebanon, Ohio, which is in the Greater Cincinnati area. This conference will feature guest speakers, interviews, and a panel with authors from our upcoming book, Four Views Reconciling Faith and Freedom. While all of these sessions will be recorded, and that means you'll be participating in live Christians for Liberty Network podcasts. There's stuff at this conference that you simply won't get on a podcast. You'll get to meet some of your favorite thinkers in the Liberty Movement and build relationships with other advocates for faith and freedom. And the earlier you order, the better the deal you'll get on your past. Get yours now at libertarian Christians.com/slash conference. See you there.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Yeah, and this really gets to the heart of one of the main themes of your book. And that's the idea that Paul had to contextualize the gospel for his audience. And I know, you know, here in 15 minutes or so, as you start talking about the missional implications of this, this will come back into our conversation. But it really does strike me how you, and and and you do such a great job of presenting this in your book, but how Paul is willing to accommodate his language to meet the needs of the people that he's writing to. And I think that we live in an American context where Christians are always like, well, we got to hit them with the truth. You know, we got to hit them with the hard truth no matter what it does to them. But Paul's a lot more nuanced and thoughtful than that. So talk to us about how Paul contextualizes his gospel for the Romans, given the situation that they're facing in Rome and his larger agenda.

SPEAKER_02 36:17

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Thank you. Um well the contextualization of the gospel is rooted in the incarnation that you know God in the in uh contextualized contextualization is the fundamental missionary practice because it means that you are tran you are the one crossing the boundary. You know, that so you we see this in in uh just even in the his history of the scriptures, that Paul is using the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, and now and then he's using the language of the Romans, because they had you know they had words like gospel, they had words like peace, they had words like Lord, but those were all political terms, and those were things like uh, you know, uh Caesar Augustus brought peace to the world. This was good news, this was the gospel, and uh uh it was a um common confession, Caesar is Lord. And that's why, you know, you you read let in one of Paul's other letters in in Corinthians, he said, Well, nobody can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. Now, if you don't know the context, if you don't know what that phrase means, because you know, any pagan can just say, Oh yeah, Jesus is Lord, and doesn't mean anything to but in their context, if you only only way you could say Jesus is Lord in their context was you've been made strong by the Spirit because that might cost you your life to declare there's another Lord besides Caesar, because that was an act of rebellion against the emperor, and that was the death sentence. You know, so you had to have the Spirit of God to have that kind of boldness and courage. And so, Paul, throughout Romans, he's contextualizing the gospel so that it gets down to the where the rubber meets the road of where these people are at, and he translates the the gospel message into a way that they can understand it. And this is always the challenge for any of us is how do we translate the content without compromising the content? And uh, you know, and and and you know, you see this because sometimes you feel like, well, I'm just doing contextualization when what you're really doing is trying to sell Christianity to the cheapest bidder. Right. And you know, so you've got to figure out how do we how do we translate uh even like the phrase the righteousness of God, does that serve us well these days? You know, I don't I don't necessarily know that it does. Right uh because of the bag the religious baggage that we've now attached to it. Uh and so you know, learning to contextualize to be able to communicate the gospel freshly to people, you know. So you take American culture, you know, for our American audience, what are the points of contact that uh of language and experience that they are having that we can translate the gospel into that? Uh, you know, you think of you think of things like uh anxiety or alienation or isolation, those are human experiences deeply felt uh by by people. And we would call we can contextualize the gospel to speak to those issues. Um the thing that we don't want to do is ever in that translation of the gospel do it in such a way that negates the power of the gospel, right? You know, that that there's still only Jesus, the death, burial, resurrection of Jesus. So it's a it's a much, as you mentioned, yeah, it's something far broader and deeper than uh a few minutes can help can can allow us to explain it, but it is everything about what God is doing to make clear the message so that ultimately what people if people reject the gospel, let it be the gospel they're rejecting, not our translation of the gospel that they're rejecting or they're what they think is the gospel. Uh, you know, and I've I've uh been working with people who say, Well, I don't believe in God, or I no longer am a believer. You know, they've deconstructed their faith. And I said, Well, tell me about the God you don't believe in. And they tell me, and I go, Yeah, I don't believe in that God either. You know, I you and I don't believe, you know, we're I'm not gonna argue with you of the existence of that God because the God you describe described is a monster. Let's talk about the God revealed by Jesus. And going back to him, that that is to me is always the center point of contextualization, of talking about Jesus and how does that communicate to people in whatever context that they might be in.

SPEAKER_01 41:39

Yeah, you talk in your book about the four square church. So I want you to define that concept for us. What is the four square church and how does it relate to your reading of Romans?

SPEAKER_02 41:47

Yeah, well, the Four Square Church is a uh denomination that started in America uh during the early days of the Pentecostal revival that started in 1906 and it was started in Los Angeles by an evangelist woman named uh Amy Simple McPherson in 1923. And uh it became a and the foursquare is you know, people ask, well, why didn't you guys name your church after a uh kid's game? Uh uh you know, because there's a game called Foursquare in this. Well, actually, back in the day, that was a word that actually had meaning. When somebody was four square uh back in the early 1900s, it meant you they they faced squarely in every direction. You could count on them no matter what. And uh the founder of Foursquare preached the gospel, she called it the foursquare gospel that Jesus is the savior, Jesus is the healer, Jesus is the baptizer with the Holy Spirit, and Jesus is our coming king. And no matter what situation you face in your life, what need you have, the gospel is foursquare. You can count on it. It hits you right where you are, it helps you right where you are. And it became a really a missions movement. You know, here in the U.S., uh we maybe have it's just under 2,000 churches throughout the U.S., but around the world it's uh well over 160,000 churches. And I've lost count of how many nations, 100 and 160, maybe more, uh because it's been primarily a missions movement. And so how Romans really affected me and my, andor force where affected me and reading Romans and vice versa, the they really were symbiotic because of my role within the denomination to fulfill me, to work in missions in the Middle East and North Africa and Central Asia and in Europe. But also to mobilize the US church to be engaged in mission, as well as overseeing missions. Work and working with our national churches and everything. Romans began to inform me on going through that middle pathway of mobilizing and strengthening the local churches in the U.S. and our other partner churches around the world, as well as strengthening the emerging disciple-making movements that were developing in unreached places. And so for me, Romans became uh such a template for how to do mission. In some ways, you know, if Paul was reading Isaiah and letting Isaiah shape how he did mission, I'm reading Romans and letting that shape how I do mission. And that which is why the second half of the book is actually uh all practical, where I get into what does partnership look like? What, you know, and I get into our relationship with the Western District of churches, and we've talked about as well how Foursquare developed in uh is developing in Romania and in Egypt and uh Kazakhstan and Turkey, just to illustrate how in each one of these phases they are at different stages of development and the partnership looks differently and their maturity looks different. And but how Romans can help guide us, as well as the rest of the scriptures, guide us through. How does a church planting movement, a disciple-making movement, go from making disciples to planting churches to developing leaders to planting more churches to reaching new frontiers with the gospel so that becomes an ever-increasing cycle of life that gets the gospel to the frontiers and equips people to be uh in ministry, equips people to live life of reconciliation with God and with others. And that's so that that's a broad overview of how Romans has really shaped my interaction within Foursquare and Foursquare within my reading of Romans.

SPEAKER_01 46:05

Yeah, I love that. And obviously, this this touches um significantly on international missions. And, you know, there is kind of this big question. I'm a seventh-grade social studies teacher, and at the end of every year, we do it unit on the age of exploration. So we talk about the missionary activity of European colonists, and there's a sense in which many of them did go out to legitimately proclaim the gospel and to bring people into Christianity, but then with embedded within that was oftentimes the assumption that in order for someone to become Christian, they also had to become Western as well. So it wasn't just a matter of embracing the faith of the Roman Catholic Church or whatever, it was a matter of adopting all of those cultural practices, which is why I think a lot of people can rightly look back at that time and criticize a lot of the missionary activity that happened. And so we're kind of dealing, I think, to a certain extent with that problem today, where the Western world, we have a lot of financial resources, we have uh a lot of um a lot at our disposal to minister to people that are living in the third world. How do we do that in a way that is not like a form of cultural imperialism? You know, how do we do that in a way that like honors them as authentic human beings with real valid cultures and not just say, you know, the West is the best and you can't be a Christian if you don't act like us?

SPEAKER_02 47:12

Oh boy, yeah. Tell me about it. That our our colonial history has really we have we're paying a dear price for that. Uh even in you know, in the US, you know, I have one of my children is uh forced where missionary to uh the Yakima Nation. It's the largest tribe of indigenous Americans in uh the Washington into what in Washington state. And you know, when you look at uh when the American colon, when the European colonizers came to America and started taking over the nation and subjugating indigenous peoples, you know, they started crushing them and it created barriers to the gospel that even to this day we can't we can't seem to overcome. And it was because they had not, and this is where this is where in myssiology we spend we spend the beginning part of the gospel going into frontiers, contextualizing the gospel so it communicates to the culture, and we will spend the rest of eternity trying to keep the culture from taking over the gospel. Right. And so that we end up exporting our version of what Christianity looks like. And so one of the things that we do, like when we deploy workers, uh missionaires to the field, uh we generally tell them their first, at least their first two years, we don't expect you to go out and change the world. We actually expect you to go learn the language, learn the culture, and learn how the gospel is going to be contextualized in that environment. And part of that whole process is they have to peel away their understanding of the gospel because, you know, like my understanding of the gospel came to me through an American context, which meant the gospel was capitalist, that the gospel was um anti-government, you know, all of these different things. And when I first started working in Russia in the mid-90s, and I met a missionary who was from Great Britain who was also a socialist, yeah, in my mind, my mind just exploded. You know, that can't be. Those, those two, you know, those those don't those can't happen in the same human being because I had such a strong cultural interpretation of the gospel. And that's where, and even some of the stuff that even you know, with uh multiculturalism and immigration and mass migration, mass migration is becoming the singular, most transformative movement in the world today. You know, the 20th century was shaped by ideologies, you know, communism, capitalism, socialism, all of those isms. Well, we're not we're not dealing with that much anymore as as far as what's really shaping culture. What's really shaping culture now is the mass migration of people. And that these people come with different ideas, and we're having to learn, and this is forcing us all to go, well, which part of my gospel is actually just cultural interpretation of that gospel? You know, for example, I think I use this in the book. Um, the Bible says honor one another. Well, we all can agree on that. Right. What does that look like? I have a neighbor down the street, they're Asian, and their form of honor is when he's walking down the street, she is literally 10 paces behind him. Everywhere they go, every time I see them, she's walking 10 paces behind him. Well, my Dutch friends, that their heads would explode if they saw something like that. You know, they're very egalitarian. Um my Dutch friends, and most of my European, I, you know, I work in Europe and I'm in Europe most of the last 30 years, and I've become more European. The European is much more prone to say, you know, Alex, I love you too much to lie to you. I'm gonna tell you, I don't like your haircut. Right. Now, I'm not, I don't have a con, you know, I'm just picking on some arbitrary thing, you know, but they will tell you what they think about something. Yeah, they don't mean that as a dishonor, they mean it as an honor. I respect you too much to lie to you. Whereas, you know, somebody else would say, oh no, you never say that. That's so disrespectful. And uh, you know, so to one, it's an act of honor. To another culture, no, you would never do that. You would shame them. That's that's dishonoring them. You know, so we have to learn what is, you know, the Bible says honor one another, but the culture tells you how you do that. And uh, you know, I had a conflict recently with somebody. I was functioning in my very uh typical European way of just addressing an issue outright and being very direct with the person. And the way they took it, because they ministered and lived in a very different culture that was much more honor-shamed, they took it as a me, I was shaming them. I was dishonoring them. So we weren't dealing with, you know, in my mind, I'm dealing with the facts of this was a behavioral thing that you did, and I need to talk to you about it. And to them, they're dealing with you've dishonored me. I'm and now I'm something different. I've been diminished as a human being. And so, even in that, having to learn how, you know, even my own culture is I have to be conscious of it because I work in so many different cultural contexts. You know, and so each one of us in ministering to people, you know, in a multicultural environment now, what is it that communicates honor to that person that you're talking to, being sensitive to them, and not being so worried about being, hey, I'm an American, and this way we do it in America. Well, if you're a Christian, you ought to be worried about how you do it as a Christian, not how you do it as an American. Or, you know, if you're, you know, British or Dutch or German or Singhalese or anything else. It's first of all, what can what is the culture of Jesus? And how do we first of all communicate that? And I think that's where, again, going back to Romans, uh, in our current context, Romans, the Roman congregations were culturally compromised. And how much are we culturally compromised that we can't separate our political and economic philosophies from what we believe that the gospel teaches? And to me, that is where the for us, the rubber meets the road right now of rediscovering. If anything else, I think the last 10 years or so has revealed that the modern American evangelical church by and large is bankrupt when it comes to the gospel. We don't understand really what the gospel is. We understand our cultural interpretation of the gospel and calling us back to this is who Jesus is, this is what God has revealed to us about who He is like in Jesus Christ. Now, what are the consequences of that for how we live? Not as Americans, but as Christians. And I think if we can get back to that, then that will unleash the gospel in a new and powerful way.

SPEAKER_01 55:14

Yeah. Yes, yes. It's a great segue of my final question to you, too. You have a obviously a career missions work, so you really have your finger on the pulse of this here. One of the things that you know, I go to a Nazarene church, and one of the things that's been really interesting over the last 10, 15, even 20 years is that Christianity has been exploding in Southeast Asia and Africa. I mean, to the point where in the Nazarene church, there are congregations in Africa that are bigger than any of the ones we have in the United States. It's it's pretty wild to see. So, you know, kind of going back to what you were saying, you know, Christians in the West, we still kind of think, well, missions is all about us going over there. But in in I can see a scenario in 20 years where, you know, people from the third world will have to come to the United States to evangelize us. So I I want to get your perspective on all that. Where do you think the future of missions is heading? And, you know, we can't predict the future, as you said, but over the next 10, 20 years, what developments do you see in that field?

SPEAKER_02 56:04

Yeah, well, you know, you're really right on with that because Christianity is exploding in a lot of different places and it's dying in some places. Interestingly enough, uh you know, we've got several places, regions in the world that are post-Christian. Uh the oldest post-Christian region in the world is actually the Middle East and North Africa. Uh, that used to be the epicenter of Christianity. And as uh Christianity in those regions became much more identified with their national culture became what we would call uh nationalistic in the broadest sense, meaning that they no longer saw themselves as Christians who happened to be Greek, they were Greek Christians. Or you take whatever culture, country.

SPEAKER_01 56:58

Right.

SPEAKER_02 56:59

They saw themselves that the the country came before the faith. And that is always the uh the death roes of a dying religion. Nationalism is the final stage of the death of Christendom in every context. Happened in the Middle East, happened in Europe, you know, during the uh 1930s, uh 1940s in Europe. It would be very common to you go to the cathedral in Cologne, you go into a lot of these churches, and you would see altars draped with swastikas because they had just completely merged the political agendas with religion. And consequently, Christianity died in Europe as a post-Christian region of the world. And we see a lot of that happening, and it's continued to happen in the U.S. We keep mixing up religion and uh Christianity and Americanism, and we need to really do our best to keep them separate in our own hearts and minds to not confuse the two. Yeah, be as patriotic as you can possibly be, but please remember your faith is different than your loyalty to your country. Um and so consequently, for Christianity, in some ways, for Christianity to come back to some of these regions, they're going to have to be remissionized by the spiritual grandchildren or great-great-great-grandchildren who are now taking the gospel back to these countries. You know, we see this in a number of countries. Now, and of course, they're going through the same birth pains that, you know, we talked about colonialism. Uh, when we when we exported Christianity to other places in the world, we exported a colonial version of it. Well, now when it's being re-imported, you go into Great Britain and there's the multitudes of African churches in Great Britain from the former British colonies, and these people are coming back to Great Britain and they're bringing with them their African culture, and they're planting African, you know, Nigerian or Ghanan churches. Well, they're exporting their culture now, as well as the gospel, and they're going to have to go through the same process where they go, wait a minute, you know what? That's Nigerian, and this is Great Britain. We need to get rid of that, but let's keep the gospel. What is the gospel? And and so that's where you start teaching people how to think like a missionary. So this is where I think globalization can actually be our best friend. That really getting to a point where we have a globalized Christianity where you and I not only you're you're Nazarene, I'm Foursquare, not only could we have a conversation, we're fellow Americans, but you know, sitting with somebody from an Asian context or somebody from an East European context, that globalism has forced us to be able to do this. Uh, not only because they live next door to us, but because we can't do anything without encountering them. And thank thankfully, the, you know, with online communication and this the speed of everything that we have accessible now, we can rediscover uh truly a uh Catholic faith. Not Catholic in the Roman sense, but in the lower C, lowercase C, a universal faith that not only, you know, we don't say we don't have a word for that other than Catholic. Because, you know, Catholic, the word itself doesn't just mean global, it expands geography, but it also expands time. You know, so it means what has always been been believed by everywhere, by everyone in all places at all times. And that's what we, you know, that's what we really want to contend for, is getting back to actually what is the gospel. And I so I think that the future mission is that learning to, and I work in a lot of most of the places I work are post-Christian. And uh, like I mean, you know, Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, and Europe. And we have to overcome the stumbling blocks of what they think we're trying to present to them. And I describe it as uh imagine, you know, if you have if you have a dear friend, maybe your sister or something like that, that's been married to an abusive man, and he's just beating the daylights out of her for 20 years, and she finally gets free from that. And someday later somebody comes up and says, Hey, you know what, I've got this guy I'd like you to meet. And she goes, you know what, I've had enough of that. I've been abused enough in my life, I don't need that. Well, that's exactly what it's like when we're trying to introduce Christianity in these places, is they have experienced religious persecution. They've experienced the intolerance of religion. And they're going, you know what, we've been abused by Christianity enough. We don't want it. And we're having to show them by our lifestyles that that's not what we're introducing. We're not introducing you Christendom, a colonial Christendom. We are trying to reintroduce you to Jesus. And he's very much, he is very different than those people that claim to represent him. And so I think that's where we're at now. And for, you know, the implications for us in the West is are we able to let go of the idolatries of our own Western culture and mindset and our sense of cultural superiority? Uh I posted a on on Facebook recently, I posted a picture of a of an indigenous person in um Australia. And I had I had written a little commentary about something about it. And somebody posted on there, but yeah, well, but yeah, but look at their culture. It's so bad. Why can't they be like normal people and have good culture? And, you know, why do they have to live like, you know, they just went on this whole cultural pirade, as though having cell phones in the internet is a better life than what this person has. You know, this person lives with their family, they love what they do, they have a to them, they have a quality of life that is rich and beautiful. And yet being judged by cultures, like, well, you know, I hey after cell phones and internet, what else? You know, how about quality of life? How about significant relationships with other people and with your God? And I think that's where the future of mission is at. Um, you know, because we're so much of the need, felt need type stuff, or entertainment as evangelism type things, we just can't compete. But the quality of life issues, the actual things that make us human, technology can't fix that. It can't meet those fundamental needs that we have for community, for relationship, for identity, for knowing who we are, where we're going. I am convinced only the gospel does that. And I so I think for us, constantly peeling back all the barnacles that try to get on the hole of the ship of the gospel and keeping the gospel, the gospel, and its purity and its simplicity. That's what we have to be about.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:47

Yeah, I love it. Well, Jeff, thank you again so much for taking the time to talk with me today. The book is To the Ends of the Earth, Romans and the Mission of God. Highly recommend to everyone listening to this show right now. Before I let you go, uh, you've obviously, like I said, you've you've written before. Um, you are involved in a lot of organizations. Where can people find your work and find what you're into?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:06

Yeah, uh, well, I'm I I'm on Facebook if you want to go there. I know if you're young, you don't do that anymore. It's about as prominent as my space, but I'm still there. I do have a website, jeffroper.com, that I'm not it I update from time to time. Uh I'm there. And um those would probably be the best places. I don't do much on X or Twitter. Never did comprehend that. And um, but yeah, you can connect with me on those two platforms, probably the easiest.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:40

All right, perfect. Well, again, Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:43

Hey, thank you so much for your time, Alex. I really've enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:48

Thank you for listening to another episode of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to me at the Protestant Libertarian at gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter. You can follow me at the handle at Pro Liberty Pod. Again, that is at Pro Liberty Pod. And you can also visit me at the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com. At the Protestant Libertarian Podcast.com, you can also support the Christian for Liberty Network and the Libertarian Christian Institute. Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and we will see you next Tuesday.