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The Ballot and the Bible - Kaitlyn Schiess
98 Plays1 year ago
American politicians have referenced the Bible in support of all sorts of policies. In this episode, Matt and Nick connected with Kaitlyn Schiess to discuss the bizarre ways that scripture has been used and abused in the politics of slavery, the Cold War, civil rights, and how better Bible reading leads to better politics.
Resources Referenced: The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here and The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor by Kaitlyn Schiess
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction to Caitlin Shess and Her Work
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, it's The Repair Dimes Podcast. Today we're excited to have Caitlin Shess with us. She's a doctoral student at Duke Divinity School, and she's the author of The Liturgy of Politics and the Ballot and the Bible, which is the subject of our discussion today.
00:00:27
Speaker
Caitlin, it's been said that there are three things that should not be discussed in play company. Politics, religion, and money. Your book covers
Should Money Have Been Included in the Book?
00:00:34
Speaker
two of these. Did you consider adding a finances section and just go for the clean sweep of the type of topics? There is a chapter on kind of economics and economic policy in like the 70s and 80s. So in some ways, I think all three are covered. Yeah. We'll count it. There we go. Three out of
Caitlin's Journey into Political Theology
00:00:49
Speaker
three. What got you interested in writing about Christianity and politics?
00:00:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, part of it comes down to the fact that I was a college student during the 2016 election and I was at Liberty University, so a school that, if anyone is unfamiliar, had a lot of national media attention during 2016. Our former president was very involved in the 2016 election and it wasn't just kind of his political involvement that made that a kind of
00:01:13
Speaker
intense place for thinking about politics. There were just a lot of politicians on campus. There was a lot of national media on campus. And so at a pretty formative age, this question of faith in politics was posed really starkly to me. Not just this question of like, okay, there's politicians on campus, but
00:01:29
Speaker
It was a Christian school. So I was taking theology classes, Bible classes. We were worshipping together before the politicians that were speaking would come on stage. And so that clash of politics and faith was very present to us. And then I kind of left that thinking. And my degree was in history and politics. And so I was in that world very deeply, went to seminary thinking, I'm going to go do the holy godly thing and leave those other worldly things behind. And then my first semester of seminary, the 2016 election, was still happening.
00:01:58
Speaker
And a lot of my peers were asking really important questions about not just kind of theologically how we should think about politics, but a lot of them were preparing to be pastors, Bible study teachers, leading small groups, etc., counseling people in churches. And they were thinking, what is my role in this? What should the church be saying? What should we be teaching? Especially for people who were already at that stage, you know, either volunteering at their church or were already on staff at their church.
00:02:21
Speaker
They felt very aware, and I myself included, about how deeply the political world around us was shaping not just the political life of people in our churches, but their spiritual lives, their understanding of scripture, their understanding of their neighbor.
Pursuing a Doctorate for Faithful Political Resources
00:02:34
Speaker
And we're really feeling like we have an obligation to do something, but I don't know what to do. And so early in seminary, I thought there have to be more resources for this. And as I studied more and more, I realized the Christian tradition has such rich resources for thinking about our political life. We don't have to reinvent the wheel, actually.
00:02:50
Speaker
And then at some point along there, I kind of realized, I think this is the rest of my life. I think I'm going to just keep thinking about this forever and started my doctoral program with that goal of getting more resources for thinking, not just for the academy, but for the church about how we live faithful political lives. What inspired you specifically to want to write The Ballad in the Bible?
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, so I wrote my first book in 2020, The Liturgy of Politics, and then I spent some of that time on Zoom, understandably, because it was 2020, and then some of that time in person in the years following, talking mostly to churches or to Christian schools, to students at Christian schools about faith and politics.
00:03:25
Speaker
And over that period of time, I realized the number two, like top two questions I kept getting asked were, one, some Bible verse, they would just come up and be like, okay, give it a Caesar with a Caesars or Romans 13 or Jeremiah 29. Just tell me what, like explain that one to me. But then the number one question that I would get asked the most often was from Christians saying, how do I have a relationship with my family members, with the people in my church?
00:03:48
Speaker
with the people in my neighborhood where we have such deep political disagreements. And it was overwhelmingly people asking about how to have a healthier relationship with people who were also Christians and not just kind of peace, like not just ignoring the topic and kind of just keeping whatever relationship we had.
00:04:04
Speaker
But how do we have meaningful conversations about this? Because it feels important to all of us. Politics involves these big fundamental questions about who we are as creatures, what kind of communities we should live in, what things are most important in our life together. So of course they matter. We don't want to just ignore
Using Historical Examples to Discuss Bible and Politics
00:04:19
Speaker
them. But it was mostly Christians asking me, how do I have a better conversation with other Christians about politics?
00:04:24
Speaker
And so those two things together and the fact that I think most Christian conversations about our lives should involve Scripture, I just thought I wanted to write something that helped us think better about how we read the Bible for our political lives. But I also had spent enough time with churches and Christians and Christian schools to realize that if I wrote a book that was like, okay,
00:04:41
Speaker
Let's start with all the hot topic political issues of this day. Let's work out what the Bible says about those. It would only increase the temperature. People's walls are up. They're ready to fight. I already know what you think and you already know what I think. And I didn't think that would be a helpful way to start the conversation. And I don't think that what we really most need right now is just someone saying, here's the answers.
00:04:58
Speaker
to these questions. We have a lot of people saying mad about all sorts of political questions. So I wanted to give historical examples, both to kind of give us things that feel relevant to us as Americans, you know, these stories from American history, what was, how was the Bible used in the Revolutionary War? How was it used in the early 20th century in the midst of two world wars? Like those feel like relevant questions to us as Americans, but they feel distanced enough that no one's like, you know, not speaking to each other at the Thanksgiving table because of the Revolutionary War and how you're using the Bible.
00:05:28
Speaker
But I also wanted for us to inherit habits of reading the Bible from our American context, not just our kind of whatever our particular tradition or denomination is, we inherit habits of reading the Bible from those places too. But as Americans, we inherit certain habits, especially when it comes to those passages that most often come up in political discussions. And so I wanted to give us examples to think through tangibly that weren't so hot at the moment. But I also wanted us to say, let's examine some things that we inherit.
00:05:56
Speaker
some things that are good and then some things that are not and spend some time evaluating what things we want to take with us and what things we really want to discard.
Dangers of Misinterpreting Biblical Promises
00:06:03
Speaker
Yeah, let's get into your book a little bit, the ballot and the Bible. You talk about how we read the Bible often like it's written to America. This concept of a city upon a hill. You say in your book on page 9, the city upon a hill image exemplifies a common problem. We pluck promises of provision or judgment that were given to Israel or the church and apply them wholesale to America. We misapply promises because we misunderstand who is being addressed.
00:06:28
Speaker
We are often narcissistic and nationalistic readers, seeing our own nation as the subject of every promise or command. This problem might be the besetting sin of American political theology. So what's sort of the danger in taking biblical promises to Israel or to the church and applying them wholesale to America, the United States?
00:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think I should say first, some of this impulse is not bad. I think some people, when they're doing this, they're trying to see the relevance of biblical passages for their political life today. And I think they're right too to say that biblical passages have import for our political lives as well as our personal lives.
00:07:04
Speaker
So that's important and that's good. But it's tricky because we often take promises, as you just read, that are just not for us. So first of all, we're misunderstanding who the subject is. This promise does teach us something about who God is and what God desires for human communities. But if it's not a promise directly for us, we'll state claim to it. And sometimes with disastrous effects, you know, the first chapter of the book talks about
00:07:26
Speaker
early settlers who took promises of land from Deuteronomy and said, this is true of us now. God has given us this land in America. Not only is that just kind of wrong, God did not give you this particular land, but in the case of the American founding, it was often used to justify violence against indigenous people who were there. And so that's really tangible negative effects of misusing those passages. I think the other thing that's really important that's lost
00:07:50
Speaker
is that so much of Scripture has something to say to nations that are not Israel or to groups of people that are not the church and will miss those important things if we take promises that are not ours or promises of judgment that are not ours. So the Old Testament talks a lot about the other nations that are not Israel and the demands placed upon them are different. The nations are not judged in the prophecies against the nations for not following the Mosaic law, which was not given to them.
00:08:14
Speaker
But they are judged for how they treat human beings made in God's image, for enslaving them, for mistreating them, for physically harming them, for murdering them. And so there are instructions for earthly nations that are not Israel that we will miss or we'll kind of miss the real kind of import of them. We might say, oh, yeah, that's true of us, but not really hear the really hard word that the prophets have for those nations when we're so focused on these things that are really not for us.
00:08:37
Speaker
The same is true with things about the church. We can get really confused if we say, this is talking about all of America, when really this might be a hard word for just the portion of America that are part of the people of God. And so we can get confused about what's given there. I think the real important thing too is not just that we misunderstand who is being addressed. Oftentimes when we take those passages that are for Israel or the church and apply them to America,
00:08:58
Speaker
We also kind of warp the words of those promises. So we might say, this is like the classic one that everyone wants to go to is if my people who are called by my name turn and pray to God, then I will bless them and heal their land. Not only do we misunderstand that that's not a promise to America, but I do think it's true,
Integrating Scripture's Historical Context into Modern Faith
00:09:15
Speaker
right? That God wants all people to turn and pray to him and repent. Like those are good things. We import though that promise of healing their land, what healing looks like. We import all of our modern ideas of what flourishing communities look like.
00:09:28
Speaker
This is true of the city on a hill line that has often been used in American context. It's not just that that was not a description of America. It was a description of the people of God. It's that our idea of what a shining city on a hill looks like is all of our ideas about military might and financial prosperity. And we can forget that in that particular instance, that's coming from the Sermon on the Mount. A few verses before that, Jesus is talking about how the persecuted and the meek are blessed. And that really actually rubs against our kind of modern ideas of what a good flourishing life looks like.
00:09:56
Speaker
So I think the problem is not just that we misapply these promises. That's huge. That can have disastrous effects and it has an American history. It's also that once we start doing that, we're kind of playing fast and loose with lots of other things too. We take words out of their context. We apply them with different things. And I think that's actually more insidious. It's easy to say, hey, city on a hill, that's not America. That's the people of God. What's harder is actually also your idea of what a good city is.
00:10:21
Speaker
is all of your own kind of modern American ideas about what a good community is, not biblical ideas about what a good community is.
00:10:27
Speaker
kind of dealing with this tension between trying to understand that the Bible is for us, but not to us. You write to this, the Bible is not a riddle to be solved or a mess of historical stories we need to sift through to find gems of truth underneath. Scripture is given to us as a gift of particularity, a word given to a particular people at a particular place. The miracle is not that we can get rid of that particularity, but that we are grafted into it. What do you think it means to read Scripture as a gift of particularity and one that we are grafted into?
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm so glad that you pulled that line, because this is like the tension for me, is I think sometimes we ease this tension by saying, and this is what people will say about all sorts of Bible passages. One of the ones I think about a lot is people will get upset about Jeremiah 2911, for I know the plans I have for you to be like, that's not for you. That was for Israel and exile. And that's true. It's an important note. Maybe don't crochet that on your pillow in your living room. We may or may not have said something like that on our podcast, Kate, so you're stepping on our toes here. But at the same time,
00:11:26
Speaker
Is that a true thing about the people of God today? That God has plans to prosper you and not to harm you? Yes. And Christians throughout Christian history have turned to the exile, and especially this letter to the exiles in Jeremiah 29, and seen greater spiritual truth than just this letter to this people at this particular time in this particular place.
00:11:44
Speaker
So I want us to say this is still really important to you. And sometimes I think we can be overly nitpicky in some of our, you know, oh, that's not actually for you. But what happens when we do that too casually is that we end up in a place where we forget the particularity. We think that the goal is just getting rid of all of that. And this is often true of Christians who have really good motives for it, right? Like we're uncomfortable. This is true of one of my favorite theologians of all time, Augustine. His conversion story is partially a story of him being really uncomfortable
00:12:12
Speaker
with the messy, earthy, violent stories of the Old Testament and finding a lot of hope in the
Allegorical vs Historical Readings of Scripture
00:12:17
Speaker
allegories that St. Ambrose was preaching and going, okay, well, actually, there's greater spiritual truth here. I don't have to worry about these messy particularities. Later in his development as a theologian, he realizes, actually, those particularities are good, too. There's greater spiritual truth here than just the historical and particular story, but that historical and particular story should not be just discarded in the pursuit of this greater spiritual truth.
00:12:39
Speaker
holding that tension is really challenging and trying to figure out how to do that when it comes to particular theological questions, especially I'm precepting for an Old Testament class this semester. So I just spent this morning talking to all of my students about dispensationalism and supercessionism and how we think about Israel and the church. So there's all these big, messy questions that can come along with this. But I think at the very base Christian level, when we are reading all of Scripture,
00:13:02
Speaker
we should be able to say, there's particularity here. This is speaking to a particular time in a particular place. But that doesn't absolve us of responsibility to incorporate this into our theology, because in the miracle of God's providence, this was a word to a particular people at a particular place, and it is a word to us here and now. How you figure that out, that's like all of the theology that we have to work through and the fights we have. But at the very base level, I think affirming that tension is a good starting place.
Biblical Interpretation in Historical Contexts
00:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, you talk about the idea of, and the dangers sometimes of proof texting, which we've thought about quite a bit. I think we've probably mentioned in our podcast before, if we haven't yet, we definitely will at some stage should talk about proof texting more. But you talk about very egregious examples of where Americans have proof texted the Bible to support things as horrible as slavery. Yeah. So what was the difference in hermeneutical approach between those who use the Bible to support slavery and those who oppose slavery also based on the reading of the Bible?
00:13:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this has been an area of interest for a lot of people is kind of evaluating how the Bible was used throughout American history, but especially in the antebellum and then Civil War eras when it comes to the question of slavery, because the Bible was so significant to most Americans culturally at that point that it was the battleground for our conversations about slavery. I think one thing that's important to note is that a lot of people who look back at that history focus the debate around white Southerners who wanted to defend slavery and how they use the Bible to do that.
00:14:25
Speaker
versus white Northerners or Southerners who were abolitionists and against slavery. And there's interesting things we can learn when we look at that. We can see some differences in the North, especially among abolitionists in general. There was an emphasis on not proof texting, on saying, okay, let's look at the whole Council of Scripture. What does God say about the value of human beings? What kind of God is he? Like, what does he do with those that are marginalized and enslaved and harmed?
00:14:50
Speaker
in the story of the Exodus, for example. They didn't focus on that very often, actually, but they would look to a variety of stories throughout scripture and say, what does it look like for God to care about those who are vulnerable? God is love, they would say. And so love is in opposition to enslaving other human beings. Whereas in the South, there was often a lot of kind of isolated emphasis on the commands that Paul gives for slaves to obey their masters, but also a lot of emphasis on Abraham, like the patriarchs owning slaves, means that that must be blessed,
00:15:17
Speaker
which is such a strange way to read the Old Testament that anything they did was good because we know that that's not true. What I think is interesting is that the debate is often framed in that way. What were white people in the North and white people in the South? White pro-slavery people, white abolitionist people, what were they saying about the Bible? There's not enough attention, this is changing, but there hasn't been historically enough attention to what Black Americans, enslaved and free, were doing with the Bible.
00:15:38
Speaker
which was honestly neither of those kind of ways that people were doing it. In the South it was often particular proof texting versus abolitionists often sort of forgot about the particularity of scripture. They said let's just let's not focus on the details. God is love that answers these questions. Wouldn't
00:15:53
Speaker
slave and free Black Americans were very often doing with Scripture was as this line that you just read was grafting themselves into that particularity, saying this is the God who freed the slaves in Egypt. That God is the same God today. That liberating God will liberate us. And both as kind of motivation to say God is against slavery, and that's kind of a theological truth we want to proclaim, but also real resources for addressing their own conditions.
00:16:17
Speaker
for saying, we can resist this. There's precedent in Scripture. The Hebrew midwives were not following the law exactly when they saved human beings made in God's image because they were being mistreated. But also to say, we so strongly believe, and I talk about in the book, Mariah W. Stewart, one of my heroes of the faith now who wrote a lot about this, she would say, we so strongly believe that God will one day make all things right, that ultimate justice is coming. But actually, there are some options for seeking justice today that are off the table for us.
00:16:45
Speaker
We don't use violence in response to violence. We don't separate ourselves from those we disagree with. We actually really want to change the communities that we're in, but there are options to do that that are off the table for us because God will come and make all things right. That doesn't mean we don't do anything now. It does mean that we wait in hope and expectation and we live as faithfully as we can now. We don't have to have the weight of the world on our shoulders because Christ is going to return and make all things right. So that is like,
00:17:10
Speaker
incredible witness in this period where a lot of the biblical exegesis that's happening is really, I mean, it's easy to see from our perspective now how warped it was. But sometimes I think we forget when we're feeling really discouraged by Christians who have misused Scripture throughout our history, that there have been really significant examples, not just of people correctly interpreting Scripture.
00:17:29
Speaker
There were communities in that period who saw so clearly not only what God says about the value of human beings, but the demand of God on them in that moment. This is what God is asking us to do here and now, and actually believed it so much that it really sometimes cost them their lives, cost them prosperity in this life. And that's a huge witness to me. It's not just that they correctly interpreted Scripture, but they interpreted it so clearly and saw the demand on their own lives and were willing to sacrifice for it.
00:17:57
Speaker
Read another quote out of your book here because I really like
Marginalized Perspectives Correcting Interpretations
00:17:59
Speaker
this. If there's any universal moral prescription in scripture, it's the one white slaveholders and slavery defenders most often missed. Sin will warp our moral intuition and biblical interpretation. We need the stories of scripture and the witness of marginalized and oppressed people today to help us see clearly and hear the word of the Lord in our particular time and place.
00:18:19
Speaker
So, how can the stories of Scripture and the witness of marginalized and oppressed people guard us against our tendency to want to warp our biblical interpretations?
00:18:27
Speaker
Yeah, thank you for pulling that line. I think it's important. It's strange to me that often we'll read scripture in just Bible studies in our churches and we'll notice that over and over and over again in the Old and New Testament, there are stories where the expected religious leader misses what God would demand of us here and now, but the person that you don't expect, right? This is like the genealogy of Jesus in the beginning of Matthew. Like the women that are mentioned there are reminders to us that it's not always the people of God. It's not always the kind of
00:18:55
Speaker
seemingly most righteous person or most theologically educated person who correctly identifies what God would have us do here and now. And that I think is a lesson to us in our own context now to say, I really care about theological education. I really care about, you know, right doctrine. And sometimes it is those of us that have all of that together that actually miss where the Spirit is moving here and now.
00:19:16
Speaker
because pride creeps in, because we're comfortable, because we live in a world that kind of works for us pretty well. And so I think it's important for us, as we're learning to interpret scripture, to not only read good commentaries and have good theology and learn how to have good hermeneutics, but also to say, who are the people that we're listening to? There might be things that we're really missing. There might be demands of God upon us here and now that we can't see because we benefit so well for the injustice in the communities that we're in currently.
00:19:45
Speaker
An example of this actually going back to the genealogy in Matthew, I remember in Seminary a professor telling us, and I've never fact checked this, so I apologize if this is wrong, but I remember a professor telling us that a lot of people, you know, had never really noticed before in the story of Rahab, which we often kind of say, oh, Rahab is the prostitute, so that's part of the story, is that you're surprised that she's the one that not only does the faithful thing in hiding the spies,
00:20:08
Speaker
She actually is the only one who proclaims, like, your God is trustworthy, your God is powerful, we are scared. Like, this statement of faith comes from this Gentile who is also a prostitute. This professor pointed out, though, that, like, we often kind of set up the story, like, okay, Rahab's obviously the unrighteous person here, and then we're supposed to be surprised that she actually knows who God is. But why do the spies, the first thing they do when they get to the city is go to a prostitute's house? Those were not hidden. People knew where to go for that. So why do they do that?
00:20:35
Speaker
And this professor said, you know, lots of interpreters have really missed that detail that maybe the story is actually trying to highlight that the spies that were going into the land maybe didn't have the purest of intentions. Maybe actually it's not just that she's faithful. It's that they're actually being unfaithful until women interpreters looked at it and went, OK, come on, we know how
00:20:53
Speaker
this work. So we don't want you know, we're not coming in with an automatic assumption that she's the bad guy. And so maybe we see something that other people didn't see. And that's always stuck with me as an example of something that's very deeply in the text. There's a lot of like literary reasons to think that that is an emphasis of this story is the spies were actually being unfaithful. There's a bunch of weird kind of double entendres in that text about them going to a prostitutes house. So it's there. It's not like we're adding anything or reading into the story.
00:21:18
Speaker
But people's biases, of course, shape their interpretation. And so people, you know, majority of interpreters for most of Christian history, not all, but the majority were men. It took women reading it to say, hey, I think you're missing this thing that is there. The Holy Spirit intended this to be part of the story, but we were missing it. And I think that's true in our communities today, especially when it comes to questions about money. I think it's been true in our history and it's still true today when it comes to issues of racial injustice. There's all sorts of things that it's hard for us to see, not just what this text means,
00:21:47
Speaker
but also what it demands of us here in this moment because we benefit from things that, you know, from the injustice in our communities. One thing I wanted to tag along with what you just said there, that's something we actually mentioned in one of our podcast episodes is we talk a lot in our introductory series, the podcast about hermeneutics, how to read the Bible. One of the things we touched on in that context is listening to people who share an experience with the biblical writer. Basically, they're closer
00:22:13
Speaker
culturally, experientially with the people who wrote the Bible sometimes than we are in a very removed environment. However, many years later in a very different social environment where we have social and political cache and I like to say and cache. And so one of the things we talked about was, and it's funny you brought this up in this context too, was the historic black Christian tradition in the United States and how often when they
00:22:40
Speaker
will bring forth interpretations or traditional interpretations, expounding ideas of liberation, ideas of God as fortress, God as deliverer. It just lands with a lot more weight because there's an experience there in the American tradition. So we talked about Isaw Macaulay doing that well, obviously in today's context as well. It's interesting because I'm hearing you say that same type of thing sometimes with women interpreters.
00:23:06
Speaker
where if you have predominantly only men interpreting the Bible and talking about it in the public space with that social cache, sometimes it's just missed that, for example, this story about the spies going into the prostitute. There's probably something else going on there that a woman might pick up on that a man just, you know,
00:23:24
Speaker
not attuned to because of obvious reasons, obvious reasons of potential vulnerability in that context and other things like that. So it's interesting to hear that connection and something we'd actually talked about previously as well with that shared experience, but it's important to listen to people who share experiences with the biblical characters and with the biblical authors.
00:23:44
Speaker
It also just speaks to that need to interact with the biblical text corporately and with people from outside of our own traditions and outside of our own typical cultural groups where we like to divide up and interact with people who share similar life situations and approaches as ourselves.
Socioeconomic Diversity in Church and Interpretation
00:24:00
Speaker
There's a lot that can be missed when we do that.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah. And I think especially like you were just saying about, about money, like I think that's, I think in some churches, at least we've gotten a little better in the last few years when it comes to other questions of race or gender, we recognize that we have some, some biases. We're not perfect. And some churches haven't talked much about that at all. But even among the ones who have, I think money is kind of the remaining challenging thing of like, we really don't realize how much
00:24:26
Speaker
our assumptions about the text are shaped by not just what's comfortable for us, like I said, but also what's just normal for us. Some of us live in more diverse communities racially than existed in the past, but it is still really hard to find churches or communities that are pretty diverse socioeconomically.
00:24:44
Speaker
So understanding how someone might read certain texts when they really are living in poverty is hard for us. Like in our churches, even we might, I mean, most of our churches are not very racially diverse in the US either. But even if they are, it's really hard for us to live in true community across socioeconomic lines. And so much of scripture talks about money in ways that we either avoid or I don't think read as strongly as it is because we're kind of committed to remaining in the class that we're in and the comfort that we're in.
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah, we're very good at spiritualizing those texts very quickly. Yes, yes. Diving back in particular into your book again here, you talk about how we read the Bible to oftentimes just justify the actions that we're already taking as a community.
Impact of Dispensational Eschatology on Politics
00:25:28
Speaker
So you give the example of Cold War eschatology.
00:25:31
Speaker
During the Cold War era, politics was full of biblical imagery and language, and so our question to you is, what role did dispensational eschatology in particular play in Cold War era politics?
00:25:45
Speaker
a big question. Yeah, I mean, it's important. But it also again, it's hard. I mean, y'all are young enough to like, it's hard to kind of put yourself in the mindset of how frightened you would be. I mean, you're, you're not that far off from World War Two. Many people's families are still deeply implicated by the number of deaths and trauma that they experienced then.
00:26:06
Speaker
now you're in this other global conflict where the possibility of truly like worldwide extinction is on the table for the first time. That's terrifying. And there's so many international developments happening that it makes sense that people would kind of try and line them up with passages in scripture that they always felt were sort of cryptic and strange. So I think one of the things we learn from that era is that the emotional
00:26:30
Speaker
pull of interpretation is significant. We are drawn to certain interpretations in part because they're comforting to us. We are scared and we're looking for comfort. We're angry and we're looking for something to justify that anger. We're looking to be comforted, even if it's not by the right kind of comfort. And scripture should offer a response to the emotions that we are feeling, but those emotions also shape what kind of answers we go looking for and what kind of interpretations that we have.
00:26:56
Speaker
It's also true in this period that dispensationalism, this system for understanding all of scripture, but especially for understanding a certain timeline of the end times was really popular, not only because people were afraid and looking for something that was comforting, but also because of one really popular nonfiction book, How Lindsay's the Late Great Planet Earth, which if you read it, it's not the most well-written thing in the world, but it is very simple. It's comforting to people to say, hey, this guy just tells it like it is.
00:27:23
Speaker
Scripture is confusing and hard. Revelation, Daniel, they're scary and confusing. This guy just lays it out and it's very clear. This is where you've got huge popularity of all the charts. I just got a book the other day from the 70s that has at the end a full-on cartoon version at the end where you pull out the whole timeline. It's very simple and it's straightforward and it's comforting to know that in a world where it feels like anything could change at any moment,
00:27:45
Speaker
countries and who's in charge of them, weapons and what's being used. My whole life, the currency that I use, the kind of international configuration of things, everything could just change. But no, actually, I know what's coming in the future. And that's comforting. That was really popular. And then also, you can't really talk about this without talking about prior to the Left Behind books, which don't come out until the 90s. I think people forget that. Prior to Left Behind books, there's tons of rapture fiction books that are popular in the 70s and 80s.
00:28:12
Speaker
So not only do you have the emotional pull of, I'm looking for someone that will just tell me this is the order of events and that's comforting. You also have people who want to feel like they're involved in some grand cosmic drama. And so the fiction gives you an opportunity to feel exciting and powerful. And, you know, in these stories, even the people who are left behind, once they become Christians,
00:28:33
Speaker
they have the possibility to do powerful things for God and be involved in sort of like action movie thriller kind of story. That's appealing to some people, not to me, but to some people that is very appealing. And so in that period, that really shapes the imagination of people, not just their imagination for, okay, this is the timeline of the end times, because as you all know, you know, the dispensationalists do not all agree with each other. So it's not just that people learn a particular story of the end times.
00:28:59
Speaker
they do learn a certain approach to scripture that says, okay, well, if I'm reading Hal Lindsey and this is how he reads the Bible, what I learn is that the Bible is a riddle or a puzzle. God is trying to deceive me and I have to outsmart him by all of my charts and rules and timelines. I think what a lot of people both learned is Revelation and Daniel are scary books. I just did a Revelation Bible study with my church this last year and so many of the people in it said, I haven't wanted to read this book.
00:29:27
Speaker
It's scary. It's confusing, and I only have heard bad things, so I don't want to read it. So I think it turned off a lot of people actually to that, even though they were really invested in the end times scenarios. They didn't actually want to read the book because it's scary and dark. And it also taught people not just when it comes to Revelation, but when it comes to all of scripture,
00:29:46
Speaker
This is just puzzle pieces and I'm fitting them together. And it really led, I think, a lot of people to learn to disregard the narrative arc, the literary structure of the text because it taught you that you have to, you know, kind of the like person in the basement with the red string connecting all the little pieces.
00:30:02
Speaker
It teaches you to treat the Bible like data points that can be resorted and kind of computerized rather than a coherent story that we receive in its form for a reason that we're supposed to read as a story. And that's what concerns me more than just the kind of eschatology that people learn. That concerns me too. But more than that, I've seen even people who have rejected that particular form of eschatology
00:30:25
Speaker
still retain this sense that the Bible is just a bunch of data points. And if you stick it into a computer or you kind of put it into your own little system, it'll pop out the right answer. And I think that really disregards the role of community and the Holy Spirit in our interpretations. But it also, I think, really makes us treat the whole of the text as something that it isn't. We make it sound like the form we receive it in doesn't matter. It's just data points when actually the form that we receive it in does really matter.
00:30:51
Speaker
How did this popular theological movement of this 70s, let's say 60s, 70s, 80s, how did this influence politics, politicians in the way they talked or vice versa? Yeah. I mean, it's funny. There was a debate where Reagan was explicitly asked if he was allowing biblical prophecies to shape international foreign policy. And it's interesting that he was even asked the question and that he had to say like, no, no, no, I'm not. I'm just sort of interested in what biblical scholars say about this.
00:31:17
Speaker
So in some ways it shapes the imagination for people in a way that I do think was really dangerous. Instead of thinking of particular conflicts between nations and leaders, they took on this cosmic scale. Like now everything happens at that level.
00:31:33
Speaker
A lot of people will forget that it's in this period, especially early Cold War, where a lot of our kind of American patriotic civil religious symbols come to be. In God We Trust, right? In God We Trust. Yeah, is added in part to say, as America, we are the Christian nation.
00:31:48
Speaker
against, you know, atheistic communism. So all of a sudden, our international conflicts aren't just economic, they're not just political, they are religious, and they're cosmic, not just religious, but literally, like, if you're reading some of these books, whether it's the fiction or the nonfiction, it's telling you that this fight between the US and the USSR is not just
00:32:06
Speaker
religious even, you know, we have different religious beliefs, but it's like this is leading to the grand cosmic conflict for all time. Yeah, Gog and Magog or something like that. Yeah, which you can then justify a bunch of political, nationalistic action that way, if you feel like you're on the right side of that battling against the enemy that you see in Revelation that you think you are fulfilling in your context today.
00:32:27
Speaker
It's really scary. I mean, this was true of Billy Graham, who I respect in lots of ways, but Billy Graham, Dwight Eisenhower, a bunch of people at this time said, this is the moment in history. We are living at the center of history. If you think you're living at the center of history, you can justify a lot of things and you can stoke a lot of fears for people. I mean, I think the other part of this is not just about leaders who made decisions based on these things.
00:32:48
Speaker
I think skeptical enough to know that sometimes, you know, people will use religious language and rhetoric, even though it is not what they actually believe. But what it was really powerful to do was to scare a lot of people. And fear is a powerful motivator to vote a certain way, to act a certain way, to think about your neighbors in a certain way. And I think that continues to have long term effects, even if it's not couched in terms of, you know, sometimes it still is of US capitalism, Christianity versus atheistic communism.
00:33:15
Speaker
It takes different forms today, but it still is often used to kind of justify not only how we vote, which I think matters, but what I think matters even more is it's often used to justify the way that we mistreat our neighbors and just our interpersonal relationships in our communities. Yeah. So going back a little bit to this idea of reading Scripture with all its particularities and then seeing that this story that Scripture is telling is now a story that we fit into.
00:33:40
Speaker
That's what we want to be doing. And unfortunately, that doesn't happen a lot of times. It sounds to me almost like what dispensationalism has done is it's taken all these data points of Scripture and it's kind of reformed them into this story that is really compelling for people. And this narrative now for them kind of helps them understand the world around them. Part of the reason you see so much, you know, fiction work being so central to this rise and kind of this draw of dispensationalism.
00:34:04
Speaker
I mean, do you think that's part of what was going on is just that it told a more compelling story than maybe a good reading of the Bible would for a lot of people?
00:34:11
Speaker
Totally. And it's also true that, you know, throughout all of American history, honestly, there's been ebbs and flows of how much we are influenced by especially new kind of biblical scholarship coming out of Europe. In this period, a lot of the kind of popular, more left-leaning religious institutions, scholars, pastors, were relying on a form of biblical scholarship that really said, you know, this is just an ancient historical text.
00:34:35
Speaker
and it doesn't really apply to your life. And so in comparison to this is strange, and you can't really trust it, and also it really has nothing to do with you, the dispensationalist said, this has everything to do with you, and right now, and the politics of right now, and that is not only appealing, I think that is true. The part that it has everything to do with you has everything to do with your political life now, that's true. It's just the way that they made it relevant to your life was not accurate, I don't think. But I think it's important to note that this wasn't just what was more appealing or not, which is really important.
00:35:04
Speaker
But also, it was appealing because I think it's true. I think it is true that Scripture says something to us now in our political lives. And responding to the distortions of that truth that existed in dispensationalism with, no, no, no, let's leave that back in the past. Put it back in its first century context. Put it back in its ancient context. Leave it there.
00:35:21
Speaker
is not a helpful response because humans are hungry for their political lives and their social lives to mean something more than just the demands of this moment than just the materialism of this moment. And I think it should mean more. There should be some sense of a larger transcendent truth about who we are as creatures and what our communities are for that should impact our political lives. I just don't think it should be the version of that that happened in Cold War dispensationalism.
00:35:46
Speaker
So studying Daniel in Revelation recently, do you think you were able to find ways that that story being told with all its particularities is still connected to our story that we're living today?
00:35:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the lucky thing when I was doing this revelation study with my church, my church has way too many New Testament scholars. There's so many of them. And my church is across the street from Duke's campus. So just a ton of us that are all at this church. And it was great to kind of alternate between them who had a lot of expertise in the first century political context and what John might have meant in their political context to the churches in Rome. And then also to say, there's a lot of parallels between the kind of
00:36:23
Speaker
you know, idolatry that was going on, the political temptations that were going on, the challenges, and our own context. And I think that's important to say there is truth to this. This is a first century text, and we should look at it in its first century context. But it doesn't stay there, in part because the Holy Spirit continues to use
00:36:39
Speaker
the Word of God among the lives of the people of God. But I do think looking at that original context and then saying, what are the parallels here and how are people using it now is really important. One of the most consistent themes that we saw that was true then and is true now, which I've already mentioned, so much of revelation is concerned with wealth.
Wealth, Idolatry, and True Biblical Understanding
00:36:58
Speaker
and the way that it distorts communities and the way that it causes us to worship idols. And so for our church, a pretty wealthy church in a pretty wealthy city in America, that's what felt most relevant to us constantly. We just felt like every chapter we were going to, we went, gosh, this is another word for us that's really hard for us to hear. Yeah, the critique of a lot of the aspects or a lot of the elements of the Babylon in Revelation, the critiques of that, I mean, they feel
00:37:26
Speaker
like a critique of us as much as we are similar sometimes to that babylon or which is Rome obviously that the author is critiquing and in that sense obviously it's something we've said before too it's a it's a slogan by now but the bible wasn't written to us but it is for us and it's in it's in reading the text as it was designed to communicate to its particular audience that we then extract and find wisdom wisdom for us today and
00:37:55
Speaker
Yeah, when we miss that, when we just leave it in the past as irrelevant, then that does kind of open the door to someone with maybe some more sensationalized interpretations to be like, no, this is really relevant and maybe misread it a bunch, but it sounds so much more compelling. So that's kind of interesting that that can happen.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think kind of speaking to this idea of seeing the text in such a way that we see the story, we see our graph that into it, and that should have real implications for the way that we live, for the way that we change the way we live sometimes. This is from your book. It's in a section that is looking specifically at the social gospel, but I think what you're talking to here applies much more broadly as well.
00:38:31
Speaker
Rather than focusing on literal interpretations of Scripture, we should examine the hermeneutics we're bringing to the text. Why do we prioritize this passage over this other one? Why do we emphasize what we emphasize? Ultimately, the social gospel challenges us to take Scripture seriously. Does Jesus' ministry confront us with a radically different set of priorities than our own ministries? Does the communal life of Israel or the early church place an obligation on us to show our lives differently?
00:38:57
Speaker
How do you encourage Christians to move in their vital rating towards something that can actually challenge them to take the text seriously beyond just worrying about whether or not we're literal or not?
00:39:08
Speaker
Yeah, someone just asked me recently, like, how do I know when to take it literally and when to take it figuratively? And that's an important question. And there's lots of resources we can have for what is the intention here is supposed to be kind of a historical account of something or not. There's lots of examples that we could give of like, you know, God does not literally have a mighty hand and outstretched arm, like we have other theological reasons for thinking that. But I think more importantly than just is this literal or not, because that gets used sort of just as a weapon back and forth.
00:39:33
Speaker
And now that I'm in a more liberal theological context, it's funny how it gets used the opposite way. Like where I went to seminary, it was like, of course, we read this literally, and that's very important. Now it's like a derogatory term, like the literalists, and they're so literal about it. I don't think it's a helpful word. I mean, all of us are taking it literally sometimes and not other times for good reasons often, but often for unexamined reasons. I think the more challenging thing, and you mentioned this earlier, Matt, is like,
00:40:01
Speaker
Do we spiritualize the things that are just hard words for us? Do we just take the things that we don't want to follow and say, oh, that has this greater spiritual meaning? One of the books that I examine in my book is a book on economics from a Christian perspective. And it's wild how selective it is. And this book was a significant book for some people in the 80s era.
00:40:23
Speaker
of, okay, so the Jubilee, you know, this law that says that the land is returned every 60 years and that people's, you know, debts are forgiven, etc. That's a spiritual reality according to this person. That doesn't have any effect on our political, economic, social life together. That's fulfilled in the Jubilee that Jesus, you know, creates by his death and resurrection on the cross.
00:40:42
Speaker
However, when it talks about, you know, in 1 Samuel 8, the kind of demands of a king and how that will cause, you know, tyranny of the people, that proves that any tax above 10% is tyranny and disallowed by Scripture. It seems like a selective reading with my preconceived notion going into the text and finding what I want to find there. Yes, which is why I feel like most of the time when I talk about this with people,
00:41:06
Speaker
I get to a point where I realize what they want is a list of rules.
Reading Widely to Unveil Biases
00:41:10
Speaker
Give me the 10 rules for interpreting the scripture for politics and that'll make sure I never make a mistake. And I think looking at the history, what it does is it way complicates that story because there are tons of people on both sides of all kinds of questions in our history that had what we might consider better or worse theology, hermeneutics, etc., but who still got things very wrong.
00:41:28
Speaker
And often when you look at where they went wrong, sometimes it was their theology or they were misreading the scripture because of the rules of hermeneutics that they had accepted. More often though, it was looking at the conditions of their heart. It was looking at the sin they wanted to justify or the biases they inherited from their community. That's much harder work for us to do, to say, okay, it's not just do I have a rule for when verses should be taken literally or when they shouldn't.
00:41:52
Speaker
It's, okay, I've really searched my own heart. I've asked my community to help me ask hard questions. I've read a variety of voices from different perspectives, socioeconomically, racially, around the world, across time. And I've suddenly realized that when I read St. Basil talking about money, that sounds so wacky to me compared to my own church context. Maybe that uncovers something in me.
00:42:14
Speaker
Maybe it's not him that's wacky. Maybe it's me that's wacky. Maybe there's something really actually distorted and wrong in my theology and practice when it comes to money. But I couldn't hear that, not because I didn't have the right hermeneutics, but because I, as a sinful person, wanted to justify my own sinfulness. And it takes all this other spiritual formation work for me to be able to read rightly.
00:42:33
Speaker
It takes the hermeneutics too, it takes the theology, it takes listening to the right kind of good Orthodox voices, but it also requires spiritual formation to say, am I the kind of person who can hear this word? Or am I the kind of person who, even if I'm following the right rules, finds some kind of loophole to get out of actually practicing it in my life?
00:42:50
Speaker
What are some practical steps you would encourage? Maybe a group of people who are committed to wanting to read the Bible honestly and take it seriously. Are there any practical steps you would give them to say, hey, yes, as you're moving forward, here are some of the questions you can be asking yourselves, the things you can start to try to do consistently to move towards a more serious reading of the Bible.
00:43:09
Speaker
The first thing I'll say is such an annoying one, but it's read more and read more widely. I have been in a lot of churches in my Christian life that really functionally ignored the Old Testament, first of all, and not just ignored it, but kind of would selectively go there.
00:43:25
Speaker
We might pull a proverb, we might go to a little story, but we weren't reading this as a narrative, as a whole story that's given to us. So reading more scripture in bigger chunks I think is really important. I think it can be beneficial for some people to get a version of the Bible that doesn't have the chapter or verse markings because those can be sort of distracting and implicitly actually have some theology behind them that you might be unaware of.
00:43:48
Speaker
especially if yours has headings that say, this is the main summary of what's here. And you might miss stuff that's not involved in that summary that someone else gave. Maybe this is a good place to stop. Yeah, OK, I'm done for the day. Now that was a good thing. And then you miss the next thing that might really change what's happening right before that. Yeah, again, lots of theology can actually be really implicit in where you stop certain things, because you're making decisions about, OK, this verse shapes this whole paragraph, and then I mark it as such. Well, maybe it's not. Maybe this other one does. So I would just say read more and read more widely.
00:44:18
Speaker
and read different voices. A lot of people will say, I'd love to read in community in my church. My church is not that diverse in a variety of ways. That's fair. Some of that's outside of your control. We have a history of neighborhoods being segregated in our country that makes it really hard for that not to be true.
00:44:34
Speaker
And you might not be in a position of authority in your church to do much about it. We have more access than we've ever had to voices, interpreters throughout history and around the world. One of the goals I had for the book was to say, I've given you some examples of some people to read. I mentioned Mariah Stewart earlier, an incredible interpreter of Scripture, David Walker, another, you know, her teacher really, who was an incredible interpreter of Scripture.
00:44:54
Speaker
So reading more widely around the world across time, like I said about Basil, it can really just discomfort you in some ways that can be really helpful. And then I think it can be helpful to work out some questions for yourself. You know, in some small groups that I have been or Bible studies, we've had some regular questions we've asked that takes really seriously our emotional responses to things because as embodied full humans, those really matter. And so asking, why does this discomfort me?
00:45:18
Speaker
or why am I nervous about this? Why does this make me angry? Why does this make me sad? Those are the kinds of questions that can also reveal not just where I might be misinterpreting things, but where there might be just like a bigger theological issue. Like I'm uncomfortable with these kinds of things, maybe because I misunderstand the larger story that's being told about who God is or how human communities should function. Or maybe there's a sin that needs to be addressed in me. Maybe there's a bias in me that needs to be addressed. So I think being in the kind of community that even if it isn't,
00:45:47
Speaker
ideally diverse, can help you ask some of those hard questions and can read some other people with you, I think is really important.
Politicians' Use of Scripture and Fear in Politics
00:45:53
Speaker
And that can lead you to having some, you know, better interpretations, hopefully, but also having some better responses to what God might be asking of your community. Yeah, appreciate that. That's some practical advice for communal reading of the Bible.
00:46:05
Speaker
Let's shift towards politics a little bit as we start to wrap here. What do you say to someone who may agree that while politicians may misuse the Bible sometimes in their quoting of it, our present crisis and culture wars is so visceral. It's so important. We're at a point in history where the end is near that we as Christians, we have to stand lockstep with our political leaders who are going to protect us in this crisis moment.
00:46:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, another way to say this too that I've heard a lot of people say is basically like, yeah, that wasn't a great interpretation of Scripture, but I just like that they're on our team. I like that they're talking about Christianity in public. They're quoting Scripture in public. I think the first thing I would say is I don't want us to treat Scripture like a tool for our own ends.
00:46:50
Speaker
And even if I like the politician, if they are doing that, I'm worried. I'm worried about what that says to me, but also to people who are not Christians, about how we think about what our faith is for, what it means. And so that worries me. Anytime a politician uses scripture, which I want them to use scripture, I want them to use it well. But I think the first question I'm always asking is, is this teaching us to treat scripture like a tool for our own ends?
00:47:14
Speaker
which we have often learned to do in American history. We've treated scripture like free-floating wisdom, that we can just sort of take any turn of phrase we like, any story that feels kind of powerful and just apply it to any moment, and that can have disastrous results. And the other thing I would say is, I think you need to ask who benefits from you being afraid.
00:47:33
Speaker
who benefits from you believing that this is the moment. This is the crisis. Anything can be justified. It's probably not you. It's probably not your neighbors. It's probably not your kids. It's probably not your family who benefits from you being so afraid. In fact, it probably causes fractures in your relationships. It can cause pain in your neighborhood. So interrogating.
00:47:52
Speaker
really asking yourself and especially asking other people in your family. I think this is one of the pastoral responsibilities right now is in a really kind, compassionate way, working through what we're afraid of and why. And this is also why I tell people all the time, I think the most politically important doctrine of the Christian faith right now is the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, that we are truly awaiting the redemption of all things and the resurrection of our bodies.
Resurrection Doctrine and Fearless Political Engagement
00:48:15
Speaker
And this is true. We see this in the history of the black church in America, especially.
00:48:19
Speaker
Like I said earlier, that doesn't mean that we escape from political responsibilities. It means that we work as faithfully as we possibly can with the knowledge that ultimately all things will be made right, not because of the things that we did, but because Christ returns and makes all things right. And that, I think we should be preaching about it more. I think we should be, instead of, you know, I think a great sermon or Bible study series on politics and a theology of politics can be fine. I also think it can just make us angrier at each other.
00:48:45
Speaker
But a lot of teaching and preaching about the resurrection of the body and the redemption of all things and how that should change our relationships, it should change our public lives, I think that can have some real effects on us. That's interesting. You're so right. The doctrine of the resurrection gives us the freedom to not fear so much that we put all of our political priorities on self-preservation. Preservation of people like me, preservation of my own, my own group, the people close to me.
00:49:12
Speaker
I think that's hard. It's a hard pill to swallow because I think we are naturally inclined to protect me and to protect mine. And politicians know that. Politicians, if anyone, are the masters of making you afraid of something that might harm you, right? So then you run to their feet as your savior. And so when they use keywords, like even if they quote the Bible, even out of context, it signals to us, they're on our team, they're going to protect us. It does seem like a natural instinct to want to protect oneself.
00:49:41
Speaker
So what is the, there should be our Christian theology towards self-preservation or towards protection of people different than me, or do we have to choose? I mean, one of my favorite people, Matt Zorin, who works for World Relief, he'll do these trips with people to the US-Mexico border to talk about, you know, better immigration policy and how Christians should advocate for better immigration policy. And one of the things that I've heard him say a couple of times is like, we're just not promised safety. We are told to love our neighbors. We're not told to only love our neighbors if it is safe.
00:50:10
Speaker
for us. This is the story of the Good Samaritan, right? Like we forget that part of the story is not just like who's willing to sacrifice, who has the money, who's willing to endanger themselves. This guy was beat up on the road. That means the road is not a safe place for you to be, especially if you're leaning over to help someone, you're in a vulnerable position. So I think we have every theological reason to think that we should be faithful in spite of danger.
00:50:33
Speaker
But I also think, to your point, it's important to acknowledge that people have very real, justified reasons for being afraid, or for feeling like the world that we live in is unstable. We do live in a scary world. It is broken by sin, and so in big ways and small, we live among brokenness, and people with power can use that against us.
00:50:55
Speaker
One of the most kind of convicting moments that I had recently in my own church context, the pastor was preaching a sermon on the Sermon on the Mount and the section on loving your enemies. She really said nothing about politics. She didn't really say anything about, you know, any particular kind of social economic question. She did talk about the fact that kind of, as you just said, people benefit by pitting us against each other by saying, here's who your people are and here's who your enemies are. But she didn't even really say anything specific.
00:51:19
Speaker
After the sermon, my church is small enough. We have prayer requests before we pray together. A woman stands up and she says, you know, I don't want to get political, but I think I have to get political. And we're all going like, oh my gosh, what is she going to say? And she says, I was really convicted during this sermon because I think a lot about the crisis at our border. And I think a lot about how scared I am that people will cross the border and hurt me and my family.
00:51:41
Speaker
And I've never thought before about the fact that I'm really only thinking about myself and my own safety. And I'm not really thinking about people at the border who might be scared, who children who might be vulnerable. I'm never thinking about them. And so she was asking for prayer for those people and also for her, you know, that she could she would repent of this.
00:51:57
Speaker
It was a stunning moment for me because I just thought, okay, the Holy Spirit is real. The Holy Spirit is working in people's lives and taking the faithfulness of this pastor who preached a just basic sermon on what the text said, and the Holy Spirit used it to convict someone of a really particular issue in their life.
00:52:15
Speaker
And I say all of that both because I just think that story is like it's been encouraging to me. But also to say, you know, in response to your question, I think part of it is we ask the Holy Spirit for help for ourselves and for our communities to say, show me where fear is preventing me from living faithfully. Show me where I am focused solely on myself.
00:52:34
Speaker
Show me where I should fight for me or my family for things that are reasonable, but also show me where I have confused what actually is required for my safety and goodness, and where I have treated people like enemies that are not my enemy, and where my flourishing is actually bound up in the flourishing of my neighbors, as Jeremiah 29 talks about. Asking for that, I think, is huge. Again, it's like we could give all the right, here's a list of the 10 right theological things to say. At the end of the day, I think a huge part of it is asking the Holy Spirit to make clear for us in this time and this place what is demanded of us now.
00:53:04
Speaker
Isn't that amazing how much the doctrine of the resurrection of our bodies and of the creation liberates us to live in love as opposed to living in fear? Because there's no fear in love. Matt and I have talked about this and we're actually going to drop this podcast in the series of conversations that we're having around power, around violence and things of that nature.
00:53:25
Speaker
And fear and love just can't coincide. You live by one or the other. The doctrine of the resurrection gives us a liberty to not fear, to not make all of our decisions, even political decisions, based on fear and self-preservation. So as we go into the world, as we interact with our politicians who are trying to stoke those fears, to have us run to their feet, we can be liberated from all that and we can maybe see more clearly when we're making our political decisions when we are
00:53:51
Speaker
making the tough call to vote for this not great person over this not great person, which is always the case in a fallen world, right? But we can just be totally liberated from that culture war of fear going on, whether you lean right or lean left. Yeah. I think that's a perfect place to end. Caitlin, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. It's been an absolute pleasure getting to talk to you. Thank you both.