Dru Johnson:
Well, you’re in for a treat today. We are going to run an episode, the first episode, of another podcast by Michael Rhodes. If you’ve listened to this podcast for long enough, you’ve heard Michael Rhodes’ voice. Maybe you’ve seen him. his previous book is Just Discipleship. This new book coming out is called Reimagining Biblical Politics. Do I have that right? Reimagining Biblical Politics. What Scripture says about public life and why it matters by Michael Rhodes. this is a great book. What Michael has done is he is actually
started a limited run podcast series with a colleague down in New Zealand where they’re just going to talk about many of the practical issues of his book on politics, what it means, where it shows up in scripture, and then how Christians and churches can think about being politically engaged and not probably what you’re thinking by political engagement, but what it might mean for Christians to be politically engaged in a healthy way. So I hope you enjoy.
If you like these kinds of podcasts, I hope that you will like and subscribe. You’ll give us that golden five star rating that we’re always looking for. And if you want to give to the effort here, you can at WWW. No, you don’t even need the WWW. It’s just thebiblicalmind dot org slash give. And now to episode one of the Cross Rhodes podcast.
speaker-0 (00:11.702)
The Bible calls us to live as disciples of Jesus in every area of our lives, including politics. But how do we live as faithful political disciples when politics is so often complicated and even toxic? Welcome to Reimagining Biblical Politics, a podcast conversation between me, Michael Rhodes, a biblical scholar, and my very good friend Marshall Teague. We’re gonna skip the hot takes and instead immerse ourselves in the startling, strange, beautiful, and all too often neglected world of biblical politics.
Hearing what God actually says about how we can follow Jesus in public life. If that feels like a conversation you need, welcome to Reimagining Biblical Politics.
speaker-0 (00:58.166)
Hey everybody, welcome to Reimagining Biblical Politics, season one of the Crossroads Podcast. I’m Michael Rhodes and I’m here with my good friend Marshall. Hey, hey Marshall. How you doing? And in this season we’re gonna be talking about biblical politics.
speaker-1 (01:08.317)
Glad to be here.
speaker-1 (01:13.198)
Before we into anything, why are you talking about this? Like give me the give me your story into this.
speaker-0 (01:18.656)
Marshall and I are good buddies from college and we both were kind of raised in very strong Christian families and I know and Christian churches. I know for myself, the church that I was raised in did like a phenomenal job of teaching me the life worth living is following Jesus. Like that’s the road to the good life is to follow Jesus. And the way that you learn what it looks like to follow Jesus is through scripture. So I got right out of the gate this real passion for Jesus and for scripture.
But our church community was also a church that was like had a long history of of racism, frankly. We were in Memphis in the American South, and we were a very affluent community in a very poor city. And so as I was growing up, our church brought in Christian leaders who said, We’re glad you love Jesus, we’re glad you love Scripture, but have you noticed all the stuff that the Bible says about mission and all the stuff the Bible says about the poor and all all the Bible stuff says about justice? And that was almost like a second conversion for me. So
My wife Rebecca and I, you know, after college, we really felt ourselves called to be on mission with Jesus, to be disciples who are following Jesus, and especially around communities that were struggling economically and that sort of thing. So we’ve lived and worked in Nairobi, Kenya for twelve years in a low income community in Memphis. And now I live in Auckland in New Zealand and and we live in a beautiful but economically marginalized community in South Auckland. And all along the way, like from the very beginning, we were excited about God’s kingdom.
But we also discovered at different points as we went along, or at least I did, that there were things like my discipleship did not prepare me for this. Like as I was working, for instance, with people who were coming out of incarceration looking for work in South Memphis and trying to help employers hire them. That was my job for a bit. I just kept thinking like my discipleship and the discipleship of the people I’m talking to has not equipped us to think through this.
speaker-1 (03:15.066)
Which I think a lot of people probably have that experience, you know. Yeah.
speaker-0 (03:30.188)
Yeah, that what does God think about this? And how shall we then live? So I think all of us have these kind of gaps. I’m a Bible scholar now, I teach Bible for a living at Carrie Baptist College. But what drives my research is this desire to see what does scripture say? How might scripture resource our discipleship for all of life, and particularly in relationship to these areas where I felt like I was lacking. And one of the biggest of those is politics. Even though Rebecca and I, when we got started on our journey, were we’re really amped God’s kingdom.
If you’d asked us what that had to do with politics, we would have been like, what what are you talking about? Like that’s different. Like politics is this other thing. We want to stay out of politics. You know, it’s like an ugly word. Yeah. And yet trying to follow Jesus in our South Memphis community, for instance, all the time thrust these political questions on us.
How are we going to arrange our life together with our neighbors? Like, what are we going to do about this public event? Are we going to participate in this thing or that thing? What are we going to do about the neighbor getting evicted? And so public life, political life, we couldn’t avoid it. That drove me to want to know what does scripture have to say about politics and public life? And that’s the impetus, the starting point for this book, reimagining biblical politics. Pretty quickly, what I realized is.
We have to talk about politics as Christians because at its heart, the gospel is the good news that God reigns, that God rules, that the Lord is king. You know, it’s everywhere in the Bible from the shores of the Red Sea when the liberated Israelites are singing, the Lord reigns. It’s the climax of the Psalms, the Lord reigns, let the heavens rejoice. It’s what Jesus comes preaching, the good news of the kingdom of God. And all of a sudden, you know, for penny drops and you go, we have to think about political life because
At the heart of the gospel is this political announcement, the Lord reigns. And that’s the headline of biblical politics, is that God is king, the Lord reigns. And then we need to ask, well, what does scripture say to us? How does it shape us? How does it open our eyes and catalyze our imaginations to follow Jesus in our world if it’s true that God reigns and we’re citizens of his kingdom? Yeah. So that’s how I got to the book. And that’s how I got to this podcast.
speaker-1 (05:48.376)
I definitely relate to well, especially regarding politics, but I definitely relate to feeling lost in that. Mm. How does my faith inform how I think about this? I feel like that has been left to the Wild West, right? So in growing up in a church, like you said, it’s just here’s how we think about this here’s how we think about this category of things, here’s how we think about this. We’re gonna have tons of teaching, we’ll have Sunday schools, we’ll have all these topics on this.
speaker-0 (06:13.132)
Yes. Money, sex, generosity.
speaker-1 (06:16.674)
Right. But when it pu comes to politics, I don’t hear much in my church. Like we kind of avoid it, you know? It’s just putting a black box that we put in the back closet that nobody touches. And everybody has to go figure out on their own. I don’t feel like I’m figuring that out successfully.
speaker-0 (06:30.402)
Yes, and it’s funny ’cause that reminds me of this conversation to have with dad really early on. this project also started in part as a Sunday school class, an adult Sunday school class at downtown church where I was involved for twelve years in Memphis. And my dad asked me, ’cause he’s like a veteran Sunday school teacher, like, what are you doing in your class? It’s like, we’re gonna talk about Bible and politics. And he’s like, couldn’t do that at our church. Right. You know, and I knew what he meant because he thought it was gonna be like all these sort of like partisan talking points, or you know, like hot button contemporary issues.
In fact if you like Yes. If if you ask people what does the Bible say about politics, if you come up with your top ten list, right? People come up with a few one liners, you know, let everyone submit to the governing authority.
speaker-1 (07:09.39)
I think it’s generous that people have a top ten. I think it’s a top or more
speaker-0 (07:12.418)
Maybe two. Maybe three, right? But but actually, how do we live like God reigns? That the Bible is dripping with that question. And so one of my goals in this podcast and our conversations and in the book is to say actually scripture has enormous resources for for cultivating our imaginations as to how we live as citizens of God’s kingdom in every area of our life. And when we think politically, we often reduce the Bible to a few of those one-liners.
Rather than getting on the one hand, the grand claim, the big picture, the headline for biblical politics, God reigns. But then on the other hand, all the many diverse, interesting, provocative, profound ways scripture works out that message that God reigns in different contexts and places and whatnot.
speaker-1 (08:01.1)
Yeah, when you say God reigns, that’s kind of your primary starting point, right? Like as the Bible being a political voice. Yes. When you talk about that, I can summon songs that we’ve sung. I can summon Don’t don’t actually hold me to this, but I can think of scripture that talks about that. But I do not think of that as political speech.
speaker-0 (08:19.384)
Yes. Yes. So one thing we’ll talk about repeatedly in our time together, I I expect, is the way that so much of the language in the Bible that we think of as church language, peace, savior, king, gospel, we know we modern Western people, that language comes to us first through the church. It doesn’t sound political to us. Correct. But for the entirety of the Bible.
All those words were used in political context before they were used in the Bible. The Israelites knew about other kings before they knew God was king. You know, like Jesus’ disciples had heard about other gospels, like Caesar’s gospel before they heard Jesus announcing his savior, bringer of peace. These are all titles that were used for like political rulers. So the original hearers of scripture would have known that the Bible was dripping in political language.
speaker-1 (09:15.246)
That’s lost on me.
speaker-0 (09:16.142)
Well, and it it’s it’s ironic because in some ways the triumph of Christianity in our lives means that language that started out was sort of drawn almost from sort of what you might call worldly politics and then appropriated to make claims about God has sort of gotten cut off from that source, so we don’t get the power of it, you know. Like if the Bible used language of like president, Congress, legislators, mayors, we’d get what this was like for them. Yeah.
Another reason why we shy away from this, another reason why my dad was like, you know, I don’t I don’t want to do that at our church, is because we don’t want churches like preaching partisan talking points. And we’ll talk about why that is. It really is a bad idea under most circumstances for pastors to be preaching this party, that party, this platform, that platform. Because all of our political parties and platforms and leaders are such mixed bags, and the Bible’s ethics and the Bible’s concerns are so vast and
our ability to influence things is so various at different times and places. It’s not like we a blueprint to say every Christian, every place should be going for betting on that horse, you know? The local church should not be preaching vote for so and so and what and whatnot. And that’s what we want to avoid, right? But I think sometimes our desire to avoid that means we abandon the subject altogether. And what we’re going to be exploring here is that actually we have a lot of work to do just to say what does the Bible show us God’s people have to do to follow Jesus?
in their political lives. And we can root ourselves there. We can saturate or we can marinate in those texts. And then from that begin to discern together how in different ways we might begin to work this out in our in our times and places.
speaker-1 (10:56.534)
Yeah. Well, reading your book, the you make a very good argument that the Bible talks about this a l and I was shocked that not only in like w in parts of scripture, but throughout it’s it is voicing opinion, right? Yes. And that opinion is often contradictory. And that was surprising.
speaker-0 (11:08.142)
Yes.
speaker-0 (11:16.974)
What do you mean that opinion is also contradictory?
speaker-1 (11:19.128)
Assumption was that scripture would create a kind of nice intro paragraph, three bullet points, conclusion, and it’s pretty and it’s it’s fairly easy easy to apply. Whereas the things that you chose to write about often seem like they have completely different messages.
speaker-0 (11:29.418)
Yeah, that’s right. Okay.
speaker-0 (11:39.688)
Okay, let’s talk about that ’cause one of the things I discovered as I sort of thought, okay, I really wanna think about the resources that scripture offers to us as political disciples. One thing that was striking was this reality that the Lord reigns, God is king, that that fundamental primary message really does run from like the first page of scripture where God is portrayed as the creator king of the cosmos, all the way to the last page of scripture where God is reigning in a new heavens and a new earth, world without end.
So like that message is consistent throughout. That was a surprise. The other surprise, though, was how once you get past that fundamental claim, it helps you go, okay, that introduces a couple different questions. Like if God reigns, one set of questions we need to ask is how do we as God’s people who acknowledge God’s reign, who know that God is king, how do we live our lives together as citizens of God’s kingdom?
How do we as the church, how do we as the followers of Jesus, how do we arrange our lives as a community of citizens of this other kingdom? And in this podcast and in my writing, I’ve found it helpful to call that set of questions outpost politics. Like how do God’s people live as, as Jesus puts it, a city on a hill, right? A community that shows the world a glimpse of God’s reign and way because they organize their lives.
As followers of Jesus, as citizens of this other king and this other kingdom. That’s one whole set of questions. And the Bible addresses that all the time. Right? All the time. The Bible is saying it’s seeking to shape a people at different times and places to live out their allegiance to God’s kingdom. And so that’s one whole set of pol properly speaking, Christian political discipleship questions. How do we live out God’s way in public? But there’s another entire set of questions.
Which is how do we who are citizens of God’s kingdom who know that God’s king, how do we interact with the nations and communities and cultures and neighborhoods and places around us who do not know that God is king and do not acknowledge God’s reign? How do we engage with those who are not yet citizens of God’s kingdom and who don’t accept that the Lord reigns? And I want to call that pilgrim politics, which hopefully doesn’t give people pictures of the guys with the black hats and the buckles on them, you know? But
speaker-0 (14:01.292)
But what I mean by that is like we are, in a sense, sojourners, if you like. We’re pilgrims, we’re outsiders in all these communities, in a sense, because our primary allegiance is elsewhere. But God calls us in various ways to live like he’s on the throne in relationship to those other thrones. And what’s interesting is, especially there, God’s people do that in so many different ways. On your top ten list is, you know, for most people, is like Romans 13, let everyone be subject to the governing authorities.
That’s one thing Paul says about pilgrim politics. But like as we’ll see, the midwives in Egypt lie to Pharaoh directly, and God rewards them for that.
speaker-1 (14:39.798)
And this is part of the the contradictory nature.
speaker-0 (14:41.942)
That’s right, that’s right. And Daniel and Joseph go to work for rulers, but John in Revelation acts like if you did that, you’d be a total sellout, right? And it gets even more confusing, like even in one book, Proverbs kind of says the king is great and he’s put there to do good things, and the king is terrible and he’s like a growling bear. In the same book.
Right. And so you use the word contradiction. I wouldn’t really use that word contradiction. I would picture what’s going on. It’s more like a conversation across scripture. Or an image I use a lot in my teaching is when I was a kid, my mom got me this picture of Yoda, this poster of Jedi message I’ve got your attention.
speaker-1 (15:20.51)
I’m listening. I was starting to tune out when you’re talking about the Bible, but I am back in now that we’re back home.
speaker-0 (15:27.278)
It was a the cool thing about the post-reviewed was that it was a photomosaic. So if you got close, you could see thousands of images from the Star Wars franchise. And each image from the Star Wars franchise is a true image, right? Like that’s a real picture of Luke and Darth Vader from Empire Strikes Back. Like those Ewoks, it’s a perfectly true image capturing that one moment, you know, when they’re with the Ewoks or whatever. But when you zoom back
speaker-1 (15:42.537)
Still from what?
speaker-0 (15:54.408)
All those different images come together to form this one picture of Yoda. And I think that photomosaic is an image that helps us understand how the Bible works on this and many issues. Each individual text tells us something true and important and vital that can contribute to our political discipleship. But when we zoom out and we see how these different pieces hold together.
That’s when we get the bigger picture. And it’s interesting because like in that Yoda photo mosaic, the pictures look quite different. Like some are bright and sandy, you know, from Luke at the beginning, and some are like dark and darthvatary. But those contrasts of light and dark is how you get the bigger picture. The danger is we’ve tried to shrink biblical politics to like a few one-liners. And I imagine this like great cloud of witnesses that’s given us the Bible being like, Wait, hang on a minute. Like we gave you all these books, we gave you thousands of years of us wrestling with what this looked like in different
Times and places. And you shrunk that down to a sentence. It’s more complicated than that. But that complexity, those tensions, this is actually a gift because our political lives are complex and rife with tension. So I think that’s one reason why I’m excited about talking about so much scripture in this podcast is because I I want people to get a glimpse of this like vast horizon, like this whole deep, deep well of life-giving water that we can put our roots down in.
And then hopefully produce better fruit as political disciples because we’re rooted in this interesting, complex, provocative, diverse testimony in the Bible to what it means to live like God’s on the throne.
speaker-1 (17:31.436)
I mean, going forward in and future episodes. Yeah. My assumption is we get to walk through all the diverse
As you say, non contradictory. But the photomosaics. Yes. We have like the dark images, you know, the light images, all of the ones that seem different. So going forward in future episodes, I can expect that, right? You’ll investigate a bunch of that scripture. Yes. That you would say is actually speaking to how we as Christians should think and should wrap our heads politically. When I think about politics, I think of
speaker-0 (18:07.342)
Elephant or donkey.
speaker-1 (18:08.758)
Where b BBC and CNN Fox, you know, like where wherever people that’s what I think but my guess is everybody’s gonna have their own kind of definition. So why don’t you give us a working definition of w what politics means going forward for this conversation?
speaker-0 (18:22.188)
Yeah, it’s interesting when you read like theologians and even philosophers and whatnot talk about politics, they actually have a hard time defining it in many ways. In this conversation that we’re gonna be having and in reimagining biblical politics, I I use the language in t basically two different ways. One is what you’re alluding to, it’s like statecraft. You know, it’s like laws and nations and and public political institutions and all that. And and those run from like
speaker-0 (18:48.608)
In in an American system, like from the big presidential federal stuff all the way down to like the local school board, right? So that’s a huge range of stuff. Right. But politics is also the art and practice of crafting a common life. And from that perspective, politics is also about the art of crafting a common life as the people of God in that outpost sense. Yeah. And so when I talk about politics, I’m talking about how do we live our lives in pol in public as God’s people.
As well as how do we engage those nations and places and institutions around us that don’t acknowledge God’s reign.
speaker-1 (19:23.148)
When I naturally think about that’s that’s a wider definition. That’s super helpful.
speaker-0 (19:28.096)
Right. So I think this will this this conversation will have application for for every Christian everywhere, even those who are like, Man, I really I’m just not nearly as interested in electoral politics. Those things are important, they’ll be touched on, but what we mean here by biblical politics is much broader. It’s about public life, it’s about how we live and engage our world together and as ambassadors of God’s kingdom.
speaker-1 (19:52.372)
Going forward at in future episodes, the way I hear you breaking that down, I just want to make sure I’m tracking right, is when you talk about outpost politics, that’s kind of the body of Jesus together and how they operate as a unit together. Right. Like as a as a culture, a family. Like that’s like kind of inward thinking, right? Like how
speaker-0 (20:14.134)
I wouldn’t say inward thinking because it has public significance. Gotcha. Right? The city on a hill is something that the whole world can see. Okay. For Jesus. But you’re right, it is how we as citizens of God’s kingdom live out that allegiance together and publicly as Christians. Gotcha. Yeah.
speaker-1 (20:33.196)
And then pilgrim politics, that is more directly with the world, the context that we’re
speaker-0 (20:39.904)
Yes. How do we engage the school board? How do we engage the city council? How do we engage state, federal elections, etcetera?
speaker-1 (20:48.098)
Gotcha. Okay, question for you. So when you talk about the with a primary message, is God reigns. Yes. I think most Christians, I think, would go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that’s like that that’s not anything new. But when you say it in a political sense, I I tend to divorce that. Like when I hear God reigns, it’s a bit divorced from reality. You know, like as a Christian, I believe that, I profess that, but I don’t connect that politically. So
speaker-0 (21:16.194)
Yes.
speaker-1 (21:17.344)
It it’s more of just like an ethereal kind of idea. Yes. Right. But here you’re saying no scripture is talking very specifically.
speaker-0 (21:23.914)
I absolutely think most of us struggle to connect God’s reign over all things with the mundane details of our lives. Right. And that’s not just true with politics. That’s true with everything. You know, it is is hard to believe that my true security is in God, not in how much money’s in my bank account or my career or whatever. Yeah. Just like it’s hard to believe that God’s on his throne and that that’s what matters, not primarily who’s winning the latest election or whatever. But I think that’s why, you know, the goal is to.
Re-imagine our political lives by rooting ourselves in scripture. Because what we’ll see again and again is if it’s hard for us to believe that God’s on the throne, man, the biblical authors had all those reasons and then some, right? Like their world was chaos. Like I love it when people are like, world’s getting really bad lately. I’m like, man, have you read about like the Assyrians? Like, do you know what Rome was like? Like, we’re gonna talk about that throughout this.
Series. And what we’ll see is like they had good reasons to be skeptical. And yet the witness of scripture is that when the penny dropped, when they got that the Lord was on his throne, it did transform. It did touch the ground. This is not a faith that walks six inches above the grass. Yeah. This is a a discipleship that is able to wade into the nitty-gritty. And that again is why the diversity of things scripture says is so important. Because political life, both outpost and pilgrim, is messy and it takes place in a fallen, broken
Imperfect world and it’s not simple. So hallelujah, we have a messy book that shows us God’s messy people working that out for better or for worse in that imperfect world. Yeah. So I think we’re gonna see that each each time we get together.
speaker-1 (23:01.858)
That’s great. All right. Before we wrap up, my next question is if this is a podcast about the Bible, reimagining biblical politics, and us being like thinking about how we’re discipled in that, are we gonna be discussing actual current events? Are like are you we gonna be talking about party politics? Like give me an idea of going forward in future episodes what that it’s gonna look like as far as like actually I I wanna say applying it, but
speaker-0 (23:07.651)
Yeah.
speaker-0 (23:26.54)
I think one decision that we’ve made with reimagining biblical politics, both in the book and in the podcast, is to actually create a resource that is essentially devoid of hot takes about contemporary American politics. And I honestly think this is a really dangerous decision because readers might think it doesn’t really matter what’s going on in our world, that there are no important choices to be made. And actually the whole book
The whole conversation is gonna be showing you that when God’s people tr try to live out their faith, there are important decisions to be made, that they have to get involved oftentimes, that they they have to make political decisions in the nitty gritty. And I am gonna choose not to give you my opinion on the nitty-gritty specifics of American politics. And I think that’s a risk, you know? But the reason why I wanted to create a resource with the book and the podcast that avoids those hot takes is because.
Politics in America and in other parts of the world has become so toxic that we almost lose our minds as soon as we begin talking about contemporary issues. And the partisan division is so deep. We we almost can’t see each other. We almost can’t see the issues anymore. We’re we’re looking at at different visions of the world. Let me just give you one like study about this. So they’ve done these studies where they show clips of protesters having an encounter with the police.
Liberals describe those encounters with the police more violently if they’re told they’re pro-life protesters than if they’re told they’re gay pride protesters. Okay. And conservatives do the exact opposite. So right now, we are so caught up in a toxic partisan political culture, even if you put the video on screen, we’re seeing a different world. Now you take that and layer it on top of the fact.
That most of us have spent so little time in scripture thinking what the Bible actually says. We’re trying to fight that battle with a few one-liners ripped out of context. And so what I’m saying is, let’s strip everything down for a moment. Let’s take a step back. Let’s go back to the shared foundation that every Christian of every denomination, of every political persuasion, is beholden to, which is God’s word. Let’s go back there and like let’s actually see what’s going on in these texts. And maybe the Bible can actually become
speaker-0 (25:45.964)
Like a safe space for people who are confused and hurting and broken and divided to say, what’s actually going on here? And of course, the goal is that in the end, as the biblical political message is explored, maybe in these episodes or the book, or in sermons, or in teaching or whatever, Christians then go, okay, now we need to circle up the chairs and discern how do we live in relationship to that school board issue or to that thing going down at the end of the street.
Or in this election or that election, so that we can make those wisdom decisions together, those practical rubber meets the road discipleship decisions together, having fixed ourselves, rooted ourselves, soaked ourselves in this text that we are all, whatever our political persuasion as Christians, absolutely committed to. And so I’m hoping that this is a resource that any church could use, that any Christian group could use, that any body of believers could come and say, We’re gonna explore what’s going on in the Bible, and then
That will give us a foundation to argue about what the heck we should do in our world. And so in it what you will have, I am going to tell some stories throughout about how God’s people have engaged practically and politically in church history and in the global church. But we are gonna almost entirely avoid the American hot takes. And again, I know that’s gonna bother some people. Some people are gonna think that’s cowardly. You know, I’ve got a substack. I’ve written books like Just Discipleship. You if you wanna know what I think more directly, I I’m I’m on record in a variety of ways.
This is what I’ve discovered about myself in this process. I have been insufficiently rooted. My discipleship has been insufficiently rooted in God’s kingdom vision as it’s unfolded to us in the Bible. And so my convictions, I want my political hot takes to be further rooted in what God actually says about his plans and purposes for the world and what that makes a difference for public life. And so that’s the kind of conversation we’re inviting people into.
And I hope people will share this podcast with people whose partisan politics are entirely different for them. And maybe that’s a way to begin.
speaker-1 (27:48.45)
Big assumption there is that they have friends who have different opinions.
speaker-0 (27:52.142)
Well, and that and that and that’s a problem. But many of us, yeah, that’s exactly right, ’cause the partisan divide. But still, I think there are many Christian groups where there is actually this division that we don’t know what to do with. And and I think church leaders often don’t know what to do with ’cause they, you pastors know it’s not their job to preach donkey or elephant from the pulpit, but they don’t know what then should we say. And scripture says a whole lot. And so I’m hoping this helps Christian leaders and and disciples in the pews to begin to wrestle these issues. What I will say is one one thing I hope you do is you go through with us.
Is go, my goodness, what are the political agendas the Bible’s putting on the map that aren’t on my map? Right? That’s a good question to ask as we go through. But another question, you could do it right now is you could say, Well, what are the political issues I care a lot about? E either in terms of the the life of God’s people or in the way we engage the political authorities around us. Think about one you care about. And then as we go to these different parts of scripture, ask, how might this discussion about scripture help me reimagine?
what faithful engagement on that issue would look like. And I think if listeners do that, you’ll be discovering this content, rubber meets the road each and every week. And hopefully that preps you at the end or towards the end or in the middle to circle up some chairs with your friends and say, hi, no, we got some disagreements. But what are we going to do about this, given that God says what God says right here in scripture?
speaker-1 (28:54.893)
Yeah.
speaker-1 (29:06.478)
Okay, that’s great. Give me the direction we’re headed. Where are we starting for the next episode?
speaker-0 (29:10.035)
Next time up, we’re talking about the Torah.
speaker-1 (29:12.46)
Great. Well thank you for your time. And we will
speaker-0 (29:15.424)
Okay.
speaker-0 (29:22.978)
Hey, thanks for listening to Reimagining Biblical Politics. If you found this episode helpful, we’d love to get a good rating or a comment from you wherever you’re listening. Even more, we’d love for you to share this episode with friends, family, others that you can discuss the content with. If you want to go deeper, you can check out my book on which this podcast is based by the same name, Reimagining Biblical Politics, or you can follow me on Substack at Michael Jroads.substack.com.
Yeah.
speaker-0 (29:59.224)
Yeah,
