When The Bible Goes To Washington with Kaitlyn Scheiss

Patrick Miller 1:00 

When's the last time you heard a politician quote the Bible? Or maybe a different question? When's the last time you heard a pastor quote the Bible to talk about politics? My guess is probably in the last week, if not the last month in America, we are constantly using the Bible in our public discourse, which hides a question how are we interpreting the Bible? How are we using it? How are we deploying it? And maybe how are we abusing it? And her recent book, the ballot in the Bible? Caitlin chess seeks to answer that exact question by looking at how the Bible has been used throughout American history to various ends. In this particular conversation, we are going to talk about a lot of different Bible passages and how they've been used, but maybe more importantly, explore how can we faithfully interpret the Bible in a way that actually allows us to be formed by Jesus for our political and public engagement. Caitlin is not just the author of the ballot and the Bible. She's also the author of the liturgy of politics, her writing has appeared in The New York Times Christianity Today, Christ and pop culture, among other places, and she is currently a doctoral student at Duke Divinity School. If you're a podcast fan, you might recognize her if you listen to the Holy post, which has some similar conversations to the ones that we have here on truth over tribe. This was a fantastic, interesting conversation. I can't wait for you to hear it. Let's hop in.

Kaitlyn shares, it's great having you on the podcast today.

Kaitlyn Scheiss 2:36 

It's great to be here.

Patrick Miller 2:38 

I really enjoyed your latest book, The ballot and the Bible. And we're going to do a high level overview of what you discussed. But I would encourage anybody listening to this, if you find any of this conversation, fascinating to pick up the book, and they'll be able to get your well written thoughts on the subject, not just the off the cuff question asking, inside the book, you explore how the Bible has been used and abused in American politics. But I want to start with a personal question. When did you first realize that the Bible was being interpreted and deployed by politicians and even pastors for political ends in dramatically different ways? That's

Kaitlyn Scheiss 3:14 

a great question. And honestly, I route a lot of the work that I do now, which I really do see as like my life's work. I don't think I'm gonna pivot ever from talking about faith and politics. I think this is like my lot for life. And I really read a lot of it in being a college student, I went to Liberty University, and I was there from 2012 to 2016. So I was there. My last couple years in the heat if people are familiar of politicians on campus national media on campus, Jerry Falwell, Jr, was the president at the time, and he was one of the earliest evangelical supporters of Trump. So there was just a lot of political activity and attention paid to campus. I mean, literally, like national media, just like stopping students walking around campus, and like, what do you think about whatever's happening politically? Were you ever stopped? I was not no. But I watched friends of mine. And I did watch Friends of mine to like, you know, publish things about like, what a Liberty student thinks about what's happening, or Bernie Sanders came to campus. And I had a friend who wrote for The Atlantic about, you know, voting for Bernie Sanders. And so it was just strange to be in a place where like, there was a lot of attention to what we thought. And we had to go to convocation, our version of Chapel three times a week. And in that season, it was a lot of politicians, of Christians and non Christian politicians that were speaking, which is a strange experience to like, go into this big stadium, sing a bunch of worship songs, and then have a politician get up on stage and talk sometimes not a Christian politician to and not really, even if they are a Christian politician, not necessarily talking about Christian things, or you know, preaching or executing scripture. And as a student who's like, you're already in this formative time where you're trying to figure out like, what do I think about these questions? Am I sort of changing from what my parents or my home church thought? What am I keeping? What am I criticizing? I was in this like hotbed of conversation about this. And often it wasn't. And this is, I think, really shapes the book that I wrote. It wasn't so much Here's a blatant misinterpretation, it was often, I don't know, you keep using this language, for example, about freedom from scripture. But the like background picture behind you is like a waving American flag and a bald eagle. And I'm just confused about if like, we have the same concept of freedom that scripture has or that God has when he's talking about this with the people of God. And so it was really more of like a kind of emotional, visceral experience to like, be in this group of people, I could feel our affections being shaped by the people that we're speaking by the music that we were singing. And that really, I think, just like set me off from the rest of my life going, I want to spend some time thinking about not only how we are spiritually formed for our political lives, but really crucially for Christians, especially American Christians, in particular, how biblical language and ideas get used to motivate political ends, regardless of if it's good interpretation or not. What does that do to us that we use scripture in this kind of way?

Patrick Miller 5:52 

I know the average person when they hear you know, for example, a politician using biblical language around liberty, they don't tend to ask, okay, how have you interpreted this passage from Paul, about freedom about Christian liberty? How have you interpreted it, what we tend to do is simply say, Do I like to take or do I not like to take agree with the tape? Or do I disagree with the tape, and very rarely asked the question, how is that particular individual interpreting the Bible? And do I agree with their interpretive method? And so why do you think it's important to attend to that last question? I don't think for many Christians, it's something we spend much time thinking about. Yeah,

Kaitlyn Scheiss 6:31 

I think you're totally right. And I think it spans the political spectrum, not only because we like the idea of divine sanction for the political positions we were already going to hold. But also, we recognize that this language is really powerful. These stories, this language, even for people who are not Christians, we recognize that politicians can use this, because it gives us this sense of transcendence, it draws on a larger story about our country, again, right or left, we like telling a positive story about who we are, whether it's in the past or in the present, we've overcome or we need to get back but there's still some story about we are good, or we've been good. And God has been involved in that has favored us. To your question about why it's so important. It's like, well, it's really powerful. It really does shape people's lives. And it doesn't just shape our policies, the policies, we support the politicians we support, the way we learn to interpret Scripture, in this really formative part of our lives, right? The work of politics is not just the work of kind of mentally assenting, to different policies that we think are good or bad for good rational reasons. It's getting swept up in a story about what kind of community we want to belong to who we are, and who are the good guys and the bad guys and the US and then them. And when you learn to interpret Scripture in that kind of really powerful emotional, formative context, it doesn't stay there. So you might say, oh, yeah, you know, when politicians throughout the last 50 years have drawn on the language of a city on a hill to describe America, it's not really a big deal. They're just taking this language that's been kind of common American language at this point. But then you stop and think well, all of the ideas that we are imbuing into this concept, what does a shining city on a hill look like? It looks like financial prosperity and military strength and a certain modern vision of what a powerful and good community looks like. We don't just keep that interpretation of a shining city on a hill for this politician who's using it. We then later are sitting in church reading the Sermon on the Mount. And we come across this language. And we think that's what that means. And that I think, has disastrous consequences, not just for our politics, we can be easily swayed to support things that aren't really faithful or good just because someone texts a Bible verse on it. But then more frightening to me. We ended up really misunderstanding God's word, because we've been careless in kind of what we have consumed of our political media of politicians. And we've just sort of assumed, hey, that's a win for our team. If someone's using the Bible, not, Oh, am I being shaped and formed into the kind of person that doesn't recognize in a totally different context, that this is not good interpretation of Scripture. And then we can be really grievously wrong about what God demands that we do.

Patrick Miller 8:54 

That's really interesting, I hadn't actually thought about the way in which we are in this interpretive spiral. You know, it's us, the city on a hill example, I read Jesus talking about Israel, and the church, being a city on a hill. And then I hear, you know, politicians using that exact same language, I hadn't thought about the way in which what they say the city on the hill is then gets loaded into what I'm reading in the Bible. And I might not even be aware of the fact that I've loaded all of these ideas that really don't come from the Bible at all into that language. When we're talking about the idea of scriptural interpretation. And as I talked to most people, what I'd say the average evangelical would say is, hey, I read the Bible, literally, you know, the Bible is God's word. It's, it's without error. It's not super complex. I just read it literally. And I tried to go forward with the literal interpretation. Of course, sometimes that can be used as a bludgeon and politics. Well, this is just the literal meaning and I'm clearly right, and you're clearly wrong. And so I want to start with a big question that pulls us out of the political arena for a bit which is this. Does anyone read the Bible literally?

Kaitlyn Scheiss 9:55 

Yeah, I mean, no one reads it literally all the time. No one thinks that God lives really has a mighty hand and outstretched arm that's floating in the sky that's protecting God's people. We recognize that there's different genres, different forms of language, figurative language that were intended to interpret with the intent of what that language was supposed to communicate. I think more importantly, though, I don't think people just think, Oh, I come and read literally, I think they also just, even if they're not using the word, literally, they're just like, I'm just reading the words on the page. And this is what they mean, without either an acknowledgement that people have had just a variety of ways of interpreting many of our, you know, really important texts, especially in our political lives. But obviously, the massive theological disputes we've had throughout Christian history. But also to know that we don't just inherit a text that comes with nothing like there's not a Bible that drops from the sky, the people of God pass down this word through generations. And that includes the wisdom of the Church, which is not inspired the way the text is, but gives us some sense of, Well, here's where we've gotten really wrong and interpreting it. Here's an example of faithfulness. And so even in a really kind of small sense, I was raised in a church and I did a wanna, and I did Sunday school, and someone taught me the Bible. And it's impossible for me to sit down and read the Bible without remembering my mom sitting and reading it to me and answering my questions and helping me understand what these words meant. And that's not a bad thing. There's error that can come that way. The youth pastor, that was like 22. And it's not fair to really criticize the bad interpretation that he had, but it does affect you. And it can bring error into your interpretation. But no one's coming with a blank slate, no one's like, I'm just reading the words on the page. And this is what they say, you're not only bringing the theology, hopefully, that's been handed down to you in the church, you're also bringing your own biases of the political moment, you're in the culture that you were raised. And some of that is a gift. Some of that's really good. I've learned a lot from Christians in other contexts around the world that, for example, actually understand like farming and agriculture, and that's like an intimate part of their life. And they can help me understand things in Scripture that my life doesn't really help me understand. But then there's the bad things that we bring to and so I don't think anyone's just reading. And no one is just reading literally. However, I also think sometimes the like, literal reading can be used in an overly pejorative way, like a negative way to to say, Oh, those literal lists, they just take the Bible, literally. And they're not really thinking theologically. They're not very sophisticated in their reading. And I think American History teaches us that some of the most literal readings, for example, the abolitionist who saw on the Exodus, a God who literally frees enslaved people and wants that to be true in the future as well. That's a literal reading that saying, No, God literally did this. And that's really positive. So I think we can go wrong and multiple ways we can kind of say, Oh, I'm reading literally, and you're not. So I'm really taking scripture seriously. Or we can say, oh, my gosh, those, you know, backwards literalist that don't recognize all the theology that needs to come in, when sometimes we should take things really seriously and literally, but we actually need the guidance, both of the Holy Spirit the community that we're in and the guidance of the church before us to know what to take literally what to take figuratively what needs to be reconciled with what other parts of Scripture, we won't automatically know how to do that just sitting alone in our room reading our Bibles.

Patrick Miller 13:00 

Yeah, some of the best wisdom I ever received on reading the Bible was your goal shouldn't be necessarily to read the Bible. Literally, it should be to read the Bible literarily to read it as a document that was written in a time and a place in genres that people understood, and sometimes we understand, and sometimes we don't. But when we read it, literarily, we can make sense of things like Jesus calling himself a door. When I imagined in my head, I don't quite literally imagine a door, but he did say I am the door. We understand that because intuitively, we know what metaphors are and what similes are. And so we can hear this and say, okay, he's not calling himself a wooden door. He's describing something about his character, and who he is. But I think for us in the modern church, we may not be aware of the history or the historical debate that created this entire conversation of I read the Bible, literally, or no, we shouldn't do that. And it goes back to the late 1800s, early 1900s. And what's called the modernist debate between fundamentalists and social gospel or so maybe if you could just give us a brief history lesson, put on your teacher hat for a moment and tell us a bit about that debate, and how it shaped the conversation around reading the Bible. Literally.

Kaitlyn Scheiss 14:05 

Yes, oh, that's a really important question. The fundamentalist modernist controversy, which really doesn't start splitting Christians, denominations, traditions, families, until the 1920s, or 30s. There's build up prior to that. But that's really when it starts to kind of be like, No, we can't be in the same community anymore, is in part motivated by some really important questions about what Scripture is how we treat it, and how we use other ways of knowing things to interpret Scripture. So the modernists are saying, well, actually, like, we can't just take this kind of rote, literal approach to scripture. But they're also kind of jettison some important parts of Scripture. They're relying on new ways of reading the Bible new historical evidence and saying, let's kind of pull out these miracles because they're really not relevant today. We know that none of that stuff happens. That was just like the untrained pre modern mind kind of trying to explain things, but also then trying to say what parts of Scripture Do we not have great manuscript evidence for Okay, let's check that owes, and a new theological approach to many things, but said all of these kind of historical particularities that's just the human excess on top of like the real divine truth. So let's get rid of that stuff and get to the real divine truth underneath. And it's simple. And it's not kind of caught up in the particulars of these stories. Whereas the fundamentalist, partially to maintain what Christians have historically said. And then as humans are prone to do also in reaction to what you know, the modernists are doing, say, No, we actually need to take the Bible, literally, we need to resist many of the new historical changes that are coming and many of the new kind of liberal theology from Europe. And so we're gonna have a literal approach to Scripture, which again, they were not consistent, and no one's doing that 100% of the time. But so there was a good and bad they're saying, No, we actually really believe that this is God's Word. We believe God does miracles did in the past and continues. And that's important. And when we're reading scripture to see that the downside of the kind of fundamentalist side of this, it was kind of as you were just describing, instead of saying, this is a literary text handed down, that teaches us theological truth, it strangely became important to them to kind of route this in a particular way of thinking about how humans know, we need to have kind of absolute certainty about this, it needs to be rooted in historical events that happened by standards that we can use, you know, in our modern context, scientific, historical, our way of knowing what truth is, is now applied to the Bible. Instead of asking, what is the Bible trying to tell us? Maybe it's not, you know, using modern standards of science or history, but we're gonna kind of hold it to that, because we need to fight against the modernists that are showing all these suppose that errors are contradictions, we have to hold to this very literal reading of Scripture. And then as you said, what also gets kind of caught up in this is a question about what it means to be a Christian in a broken world. The kind of modernist side of this tends to be in institutions and churches that said, part of what it means to be a Christian is to respond to what the prophets say in what Jesus says, and seek good and flourishing material conditions for the poor and the vulnerable. So let's really care about that. The more conservative fundamentalist side was initially prior to this split very involved in that kind of social reform work building hospitals and orphanages and seeking better conditions for laborers. And yet in this kind of fight, they feel like it's really important to say no, the Gospel says that Jesus Christ died for our sins, and we need to focus on telling people that message. And so in this fight, you can totally see how both there's like legitimate theological difference. One of them is saying no, really what it means to be the church is to seek this kind of social reform. And one is saying, what really matters is to spread the gospel and change people's hearts. They both have like truth there, that's really important. But as humans often do, instead of trying to see where we agree or see what we can learn from the other side, what often ended up happening in that period was, well, if you say this, I have to be against that. So if you're for social reform, I have to be against social reform, and vice versa. If you're for personal evangelization, I have to be against that. And then we really have splits that continue to shape what we think is important today, even though there have consistently been voices who said, this is a false choice. We don't have to choose between social work and evangelism. We don't also have to choose between these two kind of equally bad ways of reading the Bible that both really say modern historical and scientific standards are what we should use to judge the Bible. One of them just saying the Bible holds up against those, the other saying, No, it doesn't. Those are not good options, either. There's a different way that says, we receive this text as theological truth. And we should read it as a literary document that's been handed down through the people of God that really uniquely belongs to the people of God, not the scientist or the historian with their standards for judging it. It's such

Patrick Miller 18:34 

a fabulous illustration of how polarization pulls apart things that actually belong together. And Justin Gibbon, he talks about oppositional politics, if you're for it, I'm against it. And that's how I decided that I'm going to believe and again, it's an illustration of if you have a oppositional mindset, you'll end up denying things that are true simply because you want to win an argument against your enemy. But I appreciate what you're saying, you know, someone once said, on one side, he had a group of people who said that our modern scientific textbooks say that we can't trust Genesis. And then you had a different group of people that said, Oh, no, actually, Genesis is the textbook and it neither sides stopped to think, well, maybe we're both Rog, maybe we need to read this text as what it presents itself to be, which is not a scientific textbook, it turns out and when you do that, it's rich. And it's full of beauty and meaning and worth. And it's really helpful to show how these ideas that belong together were separated. But on a popular level, as you just highlighted, the debate separated between fundamentalists who emphasize personal salvation and evangelism and social gospel authors who are emphasizing the public and social consequences of believing the Gospel. How has that rift that divide continue to move forward into history? In fact, there was one chapter in your book where you talk about George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who were both very public about their faith, and they kind of epitomize these two different trajectories. So could you share a bit more about that? As

Kaitlyn Scheiss 19:56 

you said, it's just really heartbreaking to know that we've kind of created this fall choice so that you know, different traditions and people feel like they have to pick a side. And yet that has had implications for us throughout the last, you know, 50 100 years. They think we see it both in the way that a lot of kind of evangelical, more conservative Christians do feel some suspicion or uneasiness about being too involved in social reform work. I mean, I remember being in seminary and first hearing someone use the social gospel as a pejorative, like, oh, they believe the social gospel, which in its most basic definition, just kind of means like the gospel has social implications, which if we're being honest, both conservatives and liberals agree on that we might disagree about what those social implications are, or what institution should do them. But we all think that the gospel is not solely an individual, spiritual, personal thing. But one side has been tempted to at least articulate it that way, or to think that the kind of spiritual condition of people is so preeminent above their material conditions that we don't even have to follow. The actual command of Jesus to like take care of the poor are the words of the prophets that very often said, it doesn't even matter if you're following the religious duties that I told you to do. If you're mistreating people, if you're not seeking justice, and pleading the cause of the widow and the foreigner in the orphan, I don't even care. I'm not listening to your prayers. It says in Isaiah one. So we really did often ignore portions of Scripture. There's this incredible line from a theologian earlier in this period, John Warwick Montgomery, where he says, you know, the liberals use the visible scissors of destructive historical criticism, this method at the time to kind of determine what parts of this are accurate, historically, and what aren't. And they get rid of chunks of Scripture using their interpretive methods. But we conservatives and you speaking as a conservative, he said, we use the invisible scissors of just ignoring the passages that make us politically uncomfortable. And that's probably true of both sides, right? Just ignoring either in the prophets, what the prophets have to say about sexual morality or what the prophets have to say about economic injustice. We're selective and our interpretation of those things. And then, as you said, I think George Bush and Obama are a good example, too, of how we continue to have that kind of divide. George Bush, really, I mean, his main kind of public Christian presence was, I'm one of you guys. Like, trust me, Billy Graham helped me convert, like, how evangelical can you get than having Billy Graham, you know, be the one to lead you to Christ? Am I gonna fetus? Yes. And so he would kind of just rely on this as an identity marker. He was remarkably silent about Christian practice, or where he went to church or who was advising him, I think, which maybe that privacy is good. But he didn't really talk about Scripture shaping policy. In fact, some of his advisers made very clear that he is not using scripture to shape policy, they were worried he would be perceived as you know, theocratic. And so he said, No, this is my personal comfort, my personal guide, this is not about policy. Whereas Obama became a Christian, working in community organizing in Chicago, which is deeply connected throughout American history to churches, who said, what really matters for our response to the gospel is seeking good flourishing communities. And that requires us to do the work of organizing politically to seek those conditions. And so he often talked about Christianity in terms of the community that he belonged to, and the language of Scripture, which has its own pitfalls, right, he would often talk about, we need to reclaim the kind of moral language of our country, which has often been scripture and drew on the social reform tradition of Christianity, the pitfall for him could be, we might use language and might use that to kind of signal to people that we're Christian, but is that really the content or the real power of scripture in forming the policies that we support? Or is it just kind of similar window dressing, whether it's identity or language, part of the reason that Obama, you know, spent his entire presidency trying to convince people he wasn't Muslim, was because he came from a Christian tradition that was different than the one evangelicals were often familiar with, and again, might have had legitimate theological differences with and yet, our history made us convinced that they were irreconcilable, that we can't learn anything from them that we are in opposition to them, that we can be really thrilled with this, like Texas Methodist who Billy Graham converted. But we really can't find any common ground with this black community organizer from Chicago, who had remarkably orthodox language for describing his Christian faith, but might have had real significant political disagreements with the majority of evangelicals in America.

Patrick Miller 24:03 

I want to have some fun now and go through some passages that have been used throughout American history to various political ends, because I think it illustrates the point that we're already discussing, which is that we are all interpreters of the Bible. Even if you're not a Christian, if you hear the Bible, you have now become an interpreter of the Bible. And the way in which we interpret those passages has real ramifications for our life together. And as you already pointed out, how we read the Bible going forward. And so I'm gonna go through a few you have so many in the book, but I'm gonna pick my favorites because I'm doing the interview. So let's start with Second Chronicles 714. I'll go ahead and read it and then you can take us to class and tell us how this has been interpreted and applied in American history. So here's the passage. If my people who are called by my name, humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. Okay, so how has this been used in history?

This is a favorite of the last, you know, 50 ish years of American politics that goes a little back further than that. But this has been a huge favorite, including Reagan, who swore in with his hand on a Bible open to this passage. And so we're like really interested, especially in the Moral Majority period in this kind of language. And I think it's important to say that that's become more significant than it was in the past, in part, because in the period in which, you know, the, like, early to middle 20th century, as a lot of more conservative Christians are becoming at least more obviously, politically active. And the Moral Majority begins in the middle of the 20th century as like a movement for conservative Christians to seek a better government, from their perspective, according to their standards, there was a great emphasis on reclaiming a particular story about America as a Christian nation. And so of course, you're gonna go to passages that kind of talk about our community or the land, and kind of want to tell a certain story about us and where we come from, I think it'd be easy to look at this passage from Second Chronicles and say, Oh, that's about Israel. That's not about us. And that's true. I think that's an important question to ask who is being addressed here? And does that apply? I don't actually think that's the biggest problem with this verse. And many the other ones I deal with in the book, there's a good question to be asked about, is it Israel? Is it the church? Is it other nations, there are passages in scripture that talks about the nations in general that we should heed? I think the bigger problem with this verse is the more insidious one and the one that deals more with the condition of our heart than like a list of rules for interpreting the Bible. And it's the way that we can take a verse like this, stick it up on a, you know, wall art, or embroider it on a pillow, and associated with certain images and ideas about American prosperity and goodness. So it goes back to the same shining city on a hill question of, you know, what is our idea of healing a land? What do we think that that looks like what is a healed land, we bring a lot of our distinctly American modern ideas about what healing looks like into that passage. And then that really highlights why it's a problem. This is a promise to Israel and not to us, which is to say, we are not promised any earthly nation today is not promised healing, at least according to the terms that we have decided healing should look like. And so it is good for every nation to turn and seek God. It's good for communities and individuals within those nations to seek God and repent of their sins. But we as a nation, are not promised healing at all, we are awaiting a fuller healing and eternity for the people of God. And that doesn't seem like a big deal. Like we're just sort of confusing terms, or we're not understanding who is being addressed. What matters is what kind of end are we oriented towards? Are we oriented towards an end of the redemption and restoration of our bodies and all creation in which we live in community? And God is present with God's people from every nation and every time? Or are we awaiting America becoming financially prosperous, and militarily strong. And it's easy for us to think that we're awaiting that first. And by the way that were formed in our political lives and the way that we slowly learned to interpret these verses really awaiting that second. And that can be really disastrous for Christians, I think,

I think it can be too. And, to your point, as I hear people to play this passage, maybe I'm more curmudgeonly than you because well, I say that because my first thought is, this is not just written to Israel, it's riffing on God's covenant promises to Israel, He gave them a land and he said, If you do X, Y, and Z, and we walk in this certain way, in our life together, these are going to be the results that come from it. And that's a particular promise for particular people and a particular time and a particular place. And it's not a universal life usable promise, it's not something that he offers to Babylon. It's not something that he offers to Egypt, it's not something that he offers to anyone else. And yet I can hear someone may be critiquing us and saying, but let's just pause for a second, everything you're saying is true. My ultimate hope is in the resurrection. But isn't national humility and repentance? Isn't that a good thing? Won't God honor that kind of collective heart in a nation? That doesn't this give us some general principle or picture of how he engages nations in the world? How would you respond to that

part of the reason I feel more like cautious, maybe less curmudgeonly is because I really do want us I want, especially American Christians, to still go to the Old Testament and see indications of how God intends human communities to function. What kind of God God is and what that means for us. I don't want us to kind of harden off all of the Old Testament and say, well, that's for Israel. And that really has nothing to say to us. The problem is not only as you described, that, that we're kind of appropriating a covenant that we are not party to, which is bad. So that's not something that we should be doing. But also I think it causes us to miss what's in the Old Testament, that is actually a covenant for us that does describe earthly nations today. We often focus on the particulars for Israel, which is Christians, we should because there's so much theological richness for us to learn there, as the people of God grafted into that people, which is a miracle, and we praise God for that. But also, there is a covenant in the Old Testament, the New Way of covenant that is made with all of creation, including all nations, and it is the covenant that's often used to judge other nations that are not Israel throughout the rest of the Old Testament. And the terms of that covenant are not as you just described, if you follow the These laws you will be blessed. And if you disobey them and worship idols, you will not be blessed. The nations are not held accountable to that level of specificity when it comes to worship of God, they are held accountable for how they treat humans made in the image of God. If you remember the end of Noah and his family coming out of the ark, we remember the rainbow with Noah with his cute animals, we forget the covenant that's made there that is very explicitly made with all of creation, so that you're not just shed blood because those humans are made in the image of God. And then the rest of the Old Testament, when it condemns the nations that are not Israel, it doesn't condemn them for not, you know, observing the Sabbath, it condemns them for enslaving people, for killing people for misusing the labor of people and for mistreating those made in the image of God. And so I think the problem is not just that we appropriate a covenant that's not ours, which is disastrous enough. In the case of American history, it has often caused us to really mistreat those made in the image of God, because we've appropriated this promise of land and said, This is our land God has given us to possess and mistreated those who are already on that land. But also, it causes us to miss that we actually are part of a covenant, we're part of a covenant that all of creation is part of. And we do get some instruction from that about how our nation as a nation should function. And we shouldn't miss that, because we're focused on this other covenant that's not ours.

Okay, let's go on to another passage, Mark 1217. This is in several gospels, but we're going to do Mark's version. And this is Jesus. He's speaking to a rather diverse crowd of people, Pharisees. Herodians. People don't typically agree and they're trying to trap him. But let's just get to the text because that's what gets discussed not the context. Here's the passage render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God, the things that are God's. Okay, so how has this passage been interpreted and applied in American history?

Yeah, I should say there's a much longer history Christian theologians have gone to this passage for a very long time before America. But I think it's important to say, as you mentioned, like this is Jesus's like, crafty response to like, avoid being trapped into like a dilemma that he doesn't want to be trapped into. And it's strange that we take this sort of confusing response and then extrapolate this like massive theology off of this one strange answer, which we have a tendency to do with Jesus's like strange sayings. But in this case, we often have used this as a picture for Christian political life given to Caesar what is Caesar's means that there's like one set of rules for our political life, you follow the rules that Caesar gives, and you just kind of follow the ways of the world, and then give to God the things that are God's in our personal life and our church life, there's a different set of rules, and we turn the other cheek. And we give you know, more than was asked, we go further mile, you know, in the political world, we given to Caesar what is Caesar's means we follow the rules of the world, it's really a distortion of what could be a good picture truly, of like you do have two different sets of authority, you do have a certain at least the limited obligation to obey earthly authorities. This goes back to something like Romans 13, where we do have a sense of a larger biblical theology of human authorities are not automatically illegitimate, because God has ultimate authority, the authority is limited, but Christians are not called to just completely separate themselves from political groups or nations, we still have obligations there. And yet on the other side, your ultimate obligation is to God. So there is a sense of like a to authority, problem or question, there is a sense of a larger theology of Christian life. But what we've often done is so entirely separated them and said, your political life and your personal life are entirely separate. And in your political life, you can follow whatever the world normally does, the way of Jesus doesn't actually hold up in public life. And so you need to just do what Caesar does, which is to really not understand what's happening. When Jesus says this, it's both to forget that when he says, and give to God, what is God's knowing what the rest of Scripture says about what we owe God, that means everything that really kind of relativizes the obligation that you have to Caesar, but also ignores the fact that you have to take this one kind of strange thing of Jesus, and see what it means in the context of the whole rest of Scripture. So you have other passages like Romans 13, that remind us that there is in Scripture, a description of the legitimacy of human authorities, you also have something like x 529, where it says we must obey God rather than human beings. So you also have reason to think that sometimes your obligation to God completely trumps your obligation to earthly authorities. And that certainly is happening if your obligation to earthly authorities are requiring you to act in ways that are not consistent with Christ character, to deny what God is requiring that you do. And so instead of seeing in this a picture of just follow whatever rules you want in the public square, and then follow what Christ says, in the personal world, it's better to see in this picture, the fact that we do have two sets of obligations. God's is Ultimate and relativizes, this other one, and yet for the early church, who again, the Gospels written to help them understand who Jesus is, and then the Epistles helping them sort out some big theological questions might have been tempted to say, I don't know maybe there's no legitimate authority over us. Maybe we should completely kind of isolate ourselves from the larger sinful and persecuting world and over and over again, in the gospels in the Epistles the message is actually you do have obligations to your larger community. You give them to Caesar what is Caesar's in that sense, but don't beat him. To think that that means that you can follow whatever rules the political situation you're in sets because Christ's way calls you to something harder and more challenging than that.

Yeah, in the book, you point out that often the second half of this verse is left out to God the things that are God's we just like to say give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and this was used especially to defend President Trump's rather infamously poor character, and you were at Liberty University with one of the favorite users of the SEC. So tell us how give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, how was that deployed to defend Donald Trump's character in particular?

I'm honestly kind of proud of this. Because when I was a student at Liberty, and Jerry Falwell, Jr, would say, Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's often, like you said, leaving off the second half, I remember telling people I think what he's doing is like, a kind of perverted version of the two kingdoms, theology and two kingdoms is often associated with Martin Luther, this idea that there are these two realms of authority, which again, all Christian theologians, or history are grappling with this sense that there's like these two realms are these two sources of authority. Augustine does this from the very beginning of Christian theology. But a really perverted version of this that says, like, these two kingdoms are completely separate and run by separate roles. And I had multiple people telling me like, I think you're giving him too much credit actually, like I don't think he's thought that much about this. I don't think he has this like coherent Political Theology. And then it was not long after I was there that he gave an interview where he said what he meant by given to Caesar what is Caesar's is, there are two kingdoms, the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom. And his description of this, which is not Luthers description, by the way, was in the earthly kingdom, you hid back in the heavenly kingdom, you turn the other cheek, but in the earthly kingdom, you hit back. And so it was not only used to say, hey, we follow the ways of the world and politics, we don't try and maintain a consistent Christian character in our personal life in our political lives. It was also used to say, in our political lives, we have different standards for what makes good leaders and what kind of moral standards we should hold people too. And so what matters now is that we have someone to fight for us not that we have someone that has treated women, well, that speaks highly of other people who are different from him, who really consistently shows good character, what matters is we have someone that can play by the rules of the world, because in the earthly kingdom, that's what's required. And that's really dangerous. It's not just dangerous when it comes to Trump, which people could have a variety of kind of ways of thinking for how they might have justified a vote for him, this particular way of justifying that vote is incredibly dangerous, because it's often you I mean, really follow is relying on a logic, the Christians have used throughout history to justify even greater evils and abuses than this, this is the same kind of way of thinking of the German Christians during the Nazi regime that said, look, we've got to just kind of go by the ways of the world, when it comes to politics, we need someone to fight for us, in our personal lives, we might follow the way of Jesus, but that has nothing to say to our political lives. And really faithful Christians in that period, one of their harshest criticisms was no like, those are not two separate realms, you don't get to isolate yourself from the real, ethical, moral impacts of what's happening politically, you have an obligation to do something about that. And so again, that's not to say that, you know, this is exactly the same situation. But just to say that that's a logic that leads us in really, really scary places.

And this is how you end up with pastors like Robert Jeffress, saying things like, I'm not voting for a pastor, I'm voting for a president and I want the toughest sob that I can find to be in that position, because the rules are different in this other kingdom. Now, I always like to point out that we're talking out of both sides of our mouth, because if on the one hand, we want to say, Jesus has ethics, around sex, and sexuality, and LGBTQ issues, those are really important for our social order. And we should legislate some of that, and we should bring that into our policymaking. But then on the other side, we say Jesus's ethics about how we treat our enemies. Those ones though they don't apply in our public life, they don't lie in our social orders with one another, I mean, actually kind of goes back to the whole, not everybody reads the Bible literally. Well, even when we start trying to say there's a different set of rules inside of the political kingdom than there is inside of God's kingdom, which is just a different political kingdom, we are talking out of both sides of our mouth, and there's a real danger to doing that. Another passage that you highlight in a book that I really enjoy, it comes from the Sermon on the Mount. And this is Matthew 514 to 16. We've already discussed it briefly, but this one probably has the longest pedigree in American history, or one of the longest pedigrees in American history, whereas the last two are a bit more recent. So let's read this. Jesus said, You are the light of the world, a town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on a stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. So how has this passage been interpreted and applied in American history?

This is one of my favorite parts of the book too, because it's such an interesting story of how we narrate our history as a nation. So this was first I mean, probably first years in American history in 1630 by John Winthrop, who was the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He wrote something that was maybe a sermon, maybe not a sermon. We don't know if he ever gave it or under what context he gave it in. But this piece of writing called a model of Christian charity, and in it he references this line from Jesus and says we will be the city upon a hill. And it's clear by the way he uses that the what he means is that this new group of colonists coming to America will be a moral light to the nations that they will be, you know exemplars of a flourishing community. And he does a bunch of other things. He uses a lot of other biblical passages in this piece of writing, he ends with this reference that we said before Deuteronomy 30, that God will bless you in the land he's given you to possess, so dangerous coming to this new land and just telling God that you are now in a covenant with him, and he has given you this land, and He will bless you. But then doing some other more positive things. John Winthrop also quoted from the prophets to say, hey, we will be judged if we do not take care of the poor and the foreigner in our communities, which is not the line that people then went to, you know, hundreds of years later to talk about the founding of America as being this place where we knew God would judge us if we didn't take care of the poor. But that was this kind of complicated document that he wrote. So he references this, it mostly gets forgotten for most of American history, in part, because in the period in which he wrote it, it was common to use language like that we were much more Biblically literate, and people used more references. We mostly forget about it until JFK uses it in a speech during his candidacy for president. He's from Massachusetts, he wants to draw on his kind of history of Massachusetts. And he wants to use this language to kind of tell a certain story and a tumultuous period of American history, about who we are and where we come from, that we come from this beleaguered band of colonists who just wanted to create a flourishing community that was glorifying to God. He uses it a little bit. It's Reagan that really uses it. He uses it constantly throughout his career. And I think it's important to say he doesn't often say what he means by it. I mean, it really at this point, this is Reagan's language. In 2016, Hillary Clinton said, we're still Reagan's shining city on a hill, like we have forgotten that these are the words of Jesus. This is Reagan's catchphrase. But at the very end of his presidency, he in his farewell speech, he says, I've never really explained what I mean by this. And this is what I mean, and I'm paraphrasing him. But he basically gives this image of a flourishing community with good commerce and a strong nation, as we've said, in parts onto this verse, all of these very American ideas of success and prosperity. And so now that phrase has not only been so completely disassociated from Jesus, that we don't even know that he said it. It was used in both of these original two GOP primary debates over the last couple of months. Neither time was Jesus mentioned, it was just Reagan's shining city on a hill and how were you going to be in the legacy of Reagan and making us feel good about being Americans again. So not only are we likely to forget that this actually was originally used to describe the people of God, not any earthly nation, but I think you'd get an even more importantly than misunderstanding the audience, we forget that just a few verses before Jesus uses this image that we have decided is an image of strength and goodness and righteousness. Before that he's in the Beatitudes. Blessed are the meek and the persecuted in the poor in spirit, which is not the language that Reagan went to, to describe America, let's be blessed, because we're persecuted and meek, important spirit. And so I think that's the bigger danger here too, is not just that we misunderstand who is addressed, which is crucially important, but also that we forget that this image that Jesus gave to the people of God, even for us is not an image of our strength and prosperity or our self righteousness, but that it's an image of us, testifying to the world existing for the sake of the larger world, not just for ourselves, in our persecution in our meekness in our poor in spirit experience. And that's a very different description than what Reagan does with it. And at this point, I think we should be preaching more about this passage, because it's been so co opted and taken over in a political context, that it almost seems like we need some reeducation to happen to understand where this even comes from. Because it is a powerful image for the people of God to understand ourselves as it's not either for America or the image, as it's been described by politicians in American history. And I appreciate

the contrast that you make between the austerity of the Puritans who probably would not have included the kind of Commerce and the level of life that we have today and their vision of what it meant to be sitting on the Hill that it was very much rooted in now. We want to care for those who are poor and weak among us, which again, is somewhat different than what Reagan laid out. But I think you also draw out the broader point, which is, we are, in a sense, co opting the covenant identity of God's people what it means to be followers of Jesus, what it means to be members of his kingdom, which is a alternative policy, a different way of doing life together, we've co opted it, and we've applied it to the nation. And until this conversation, I never really thought about the fact that there are probably plenty of Christians who read the sermon on the mount and forget the Beatitudes when they get to this part. And they begin to load into it all of the ideas, the optimism, the American optimism that Reagan and his forebears loaded into this particular phrase, but it seems like that is maybe the big concern that you are wrestling with is the way in which we co opt covenant promises and we apply them to particular nation and the way we co opt a covenant identity what it means to be the people of God and then we apply it to a particular people group in a particular nation and a particular place. And so I guess one of the questions I have in the midst of this is you already said why you think it's a troubling move is, why is this such a temptation? Is this a universal temptation for all humans at all time is to be rather nationalistic and just miss apply biblical covenantal identities and promises to their particular nation? Is this something that we see all over the place just a uniquely American phenomenon?

I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, on one hand, like, Scripture tells us that we are sinful and narcissistic, and self centered. And so we will read all sorts of passages and assume there about whatever sense of community we have. And I think one of the great failures of the American church has been that we have a stronger sense of community with our fellow Americans than we do with the global historic church. So we are going to be prone to make those kinds of mistakes in general as humans. But it's also important to say that, you know, America has a unique history, not only are we founded in a period in which there's a lot of interest around the Western world, in thinking about the Old Testament, in particular, as a model for political life. So we inherit this really particular tradition. But also, we're the strange kind of country founded in this unique period where we both are a very religious country. And it has mattered to us historically, that we are a religious country. But we also have never had a state church. And so we haven't had the history that other Western nations have had. Have, yes, it's really important to us that we're Christian, but we root that identity in the church that's associated with us, the Church of England, right. So like, that's our sense of National Christian identity that's fading now, but it still exists. Whereas for us from the very beginning of our sense of national identity, what's left if it's not state church, but it's very important that we're Christian, and that the shared identity, or a mostly Protestant nation, it's the Bible. So of course, we're going to be like, it's really important that we use the Bible to describe our sense of shared national Christian identity, which is also why I think we've had more heated debates about what the Bible means and other modern nations have often had, because it's like this is our sense of what unites us as a Christian nation. And this is why the Civil War period is so disastrous. Mark Noll calls this the theological crisis, because up until that period, most at least white Americans could convince themselves, we might have some theological differences. And we did. I mean, we really had a lot of theological differences early in our nation's history, but we could still sort of convince ourselves, what unites us is the Bible, and we all care about the Bible, and we want to interpret the Bible. And what the Civil War taught us was, we actually have incredibly divergent interpretations of what this means for our common life together. Some people are saying, the Bible demands that slavery end, some people aren't just saying the Bible allows slavery, it's saying the Bible demands that we live in this kind of plantation ethic. And this is what God has blessed is our owning of slaves and the kind of hierarchical social order that we have. That was disastrous, because it wasn't just oh, we have a theological difference, or we interpret Scripture differently. Not only is it this incredibly important moral question, but it's really getting at the heart of our sense of identity as a nation, which was, we are bound together by being People of the Book, even if we have denominational differences. What unites us is not a state church, but our interpretation of Scripture. And what we learned in that period. And what we've learned over and over again, is actually scripture is also the battleground for most of our differences.

If I've read you correctly, it seemed to me as though you were most positive about the interpretive tradition exemplified in historic black churches. And that's not to paint it as a monolith. there's disagreement in just about every Protestant tradition, including the historic black church, but I am curious, what is it about that particular tradition that oriented differently towards how they apply and interpret the Bible?

Yeah, one of the examples that I give in the book in the Civil War era is that a lot of biblical scholars will go to that period, like I just said, and say, Okay, this is a really important period of biblical interpretation. Let's look at what the differences were. And they'll mostly focus on what slaveholding or slavery defending white people said versus what abolitionist white people said. And both of those are relying on, as we talked about, with the fundamentalist, modernist controversy. They're both relying on pretty modern ways of reading scripture. One side is saying, Look, God said it, I believe it that settles it. And you know, Paul says, slaves obey your masters, Abraham own slaves. There we go. The Bible defends slavery. But it still is this approach that says, Scripture is a rulebook for me and all times in places, I don't have to do any interpretive work to understand it, God said it, I believe it, that settles it. The other side is applying some of these new interpretation methods for the Bible, new theology. And they're saying, we're still looking for universal rules for all times in places, but we're going to kind of get rid of some of the historical particularity and just look at the gem of theological truth underneath. And that's a love and so love demands that we ended slavery, which I agree with the conclusion of that, but both of these are pretty modern ways of interpreting scripture. What many enslaved and free black Americans did in this period, was instead say, actually, scripture tells a story that I am a part of, and I want to take very seriously how it describes God and how it describes God's people. And I'm going to see myself in the story and ask what does that mean for me here and now? What does that say God is what does that say about God's people? And how does that motivate the work I'm doing in the world today? And that's very different than either saying, okay, these are the rules. This is what God said, and I don't have to do any interpretive work or saying, I have to get rid of all this historical particularity. No, it's saying I am grafted into that this was given as a word to a particular people at a particular time in place. The miracle, though, is that not that I get rid of that particularity the miracles that I'm grafted into it. And as the people of God, we can take this story and see ourselves in it and have it motivate our political work. And part of the reason I'm so in love with reading, especially black American interpreters of Scripture, is because I think they just take Scripture more seriously than even the conservatives have throughout history. I mean, I read them and I go, you're reading passages in the Old Testament that I have never heard, you know, very conservative pastor ever preached on, you're going to these stories, you're asking what that means for the power dynamics in your political context, what that means for your church and how your church functions. And you're doing what Richard Baucom says, We need to have a more imaginative, but also a more disciplined reading of Scripture. And I often see that in black Christians interpreting scripture, this like imagination, James Cohen says that like in his church he grew up in, I just fully believed that Abraham could walk in the door, like we talked like, these were our people, and the Word was alive. And Jesus might just come in and flip some tables in our church. And that's how it was, but also more disciplined in the sense of recognizing what harsh words there are for people who both misuse scripture and for people who abuse those made in God's image. And that combination. Again, not perfect, there are plenty of times that black interpreters have gone wrong. But in general, I both see those kind of features of really faithful interpretation. And think there is something unique about being in a position where you have often been the oppressed and marginalized people in a community that helps you see things that the people who have financial interests do interpret the Bible in a way that justifies the position that they are in, don't see. And I think learning from those perspectives is really important.

Yeah. So the Bible is kind of a minority report on the empire in general, in the sense that Israel is a weak nation at its best amongst very powerful empires that run roughshod over it. And so it can be hard if you are a member of the most powerful nation in the world, and you are a white person. So you're a part of the largest demographic at historically held the most power inside of that nation, to see at times the anti Imperial critiques that are baked straight into scripture, because you are a part of a very similar system. But what I also appreciate about what you're saying, in the black tradition, the historic black church tradition, there's a way in which interpreters have read the Bible and understood their life with the grain of the story and seeing themselves as a part of a story. As an actor in a story, which somewhat sidesteps the let's find the theological gem underneath the rough stuff, because it's not necessarily looking for timeless truth. It's understanding, well, this isn't entirely a timeless story in the sense that it is a story with a history, it has a directionality, it's headed somewhere, I want to look at one other Bible passage, one that Martin Luther King famously used in his I Have a Dream speech, just to ask you to help us understand how he's interpreting this passage and how he's applying it to his historical context during the civil rights movement. So this is Amos 524. And my guess is most people, if you recognize this, you don't recognize it from Amos, you probably do. From Dr. King's speech. So here we go. But let justice roll on like a river righteousness, like a never failing stream. So how does King deploy this passage? In his context? Yeah,

I mean, this is such a good example of what I have found so helpful. And the larger kind of black church tradition in America, which is often missing in American Christians use of Scripture is we don't have a lot of eschatology going on, like we don't have a lot of times we don't have a lot of new creation, or we tend to be looking at passages that we think, you know, describe current political situations, and that that's the instruction that we need. Black Christians have often because again, of the position they've been in where both they've been under conditions of slavery and marginalization and oppression, but also they've seen in the Civil Rights Movement as a good example of, we won some games, but things are still really hard. Like, it hasn't fixed everything. There have been great disappointments, right. Even thinking about emancipation, after emancipation, you have this period of reconstruction, where it's like, okay, actually, a ton of black politicians are being elected, there's some economic growth. And then the backlash of the Jim Crow South means that so many of those gains are just set way back further. So this is a people that is accustomed to disappointment in the political sphere. And so I think King draws on this language from Amos. That is a kind of eschatological description of like, we are awaiting full justice in eternity that God has promised. So I think a lot of people read his speech, and they mostly focus on the things that he's saying right here. And right now, I want to live in a country where my children are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, which is true. He wanted to see legal and social changes in the here and now that would make a more flourishing more just society. But that was not motivated. by a belief that he had to fix everything here and now and the weight of the world was on his shoulders to create a just society. It was motivated by the fact that ultimately, Christ has promised to return and restore and redeem all things and create the justice that we have so often tried to seek and have not fully created and the communities that we have been in someone else I referenced in the book, which I feel like I just have to talk about her every time even if you don't ask about her because she's my just favorite biblical interpreter is Mariah W. Stewart, who was an abolitionist and women's rights activist, she does very similar thing, she goes to the language and revelation of like people begging for the rocks to fall on them because of the judgment they're receiving. And basically says, You people who are mistreating Africans, that will be you one day like you will face God's judgment for the way you have mistreated those made in His image. I think that's such an important political witness for us, not only because I think it's a really faithful interpretation of Scripture to say, hey, these descriptions of coming justice have often inspired faithful work in the here and now. But the kind of faithful work they've inspired is not the kind that says, because we have to create God's kingdom on earth, we can justify cutting any corners that need to be cut, sacrificing whatever needs to be sacrificed, mistreating other people, because the ends justify the meat, we're getting God's kingdom to Earth, like we can justify anything to do that. The black church tradition has very often relied on these passages that are really focused on the coming redemption and coming justice, to say we seek justice now. But there are certain political options that are off the table for us, because we don't have to create it, God will create it in the future. So we can respond to violence with non violence, we can respond to mistreatment, with goodwill and kindness. And that doesn't just come out of nowhere that comes from deep practice and work in the church and spiritual formation. But it also comes from a theology that says, God demands us to seek justice now, but he doesn't expect us to create it on this earth, we don't have that weight on our shoulders. And we don't have to secure it as if no one else will do it for us. God ultimately will create on Earth, the justice and the restoration and the redemption that we're seeking. Now,

let me push back for just a second. And this is a debate that I have been wrestling with in my own mind, because I by and large, agree with everything you just said, and I have a lot of resonance with the interpretive tradition that you're celebrating here, I would agree. And yet sometimes I start to fear I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. And what I mean when I say that is, I'm going to be critical of the person who seems to be applying the covenant promises of God for Israel to America and saying, Hey, if we're humble, and if we repent, God's going to heal our land, with one side. But then on the other side, I'm saying, but these passages from the book of Amos, where he's critiquing Israel, for its lack of justice, for its failure to care for the poor. Well, that passage I can apply. And sometimes what ends up happening is we end up applying or I end up applying the covenantal curses to our nation. So I say, hey, all of the warnings that God has for Israel, that if you don't obey me, and you don't walk in my ways, these terrible things are going to happen. I started applying those to America to you know, I would say maybe prophetically critique America. But I'm not willing to do the other side of saying, hey, but also the blessings they apply to. How do you wrestle with this? Because I mean, even in the historic black tradition, the example of the excess is great. Not everybody who is using the example of the Exodus was a black Christian. They weren't all necessarily worshiping God, in other words, that there's an incongruence between the people of God and those who are saying something like this is happening. How do you wrestle with that?

I'm so glad you asked that question, because it's probably the only current regret I have about the book. I'm sure I will have more later. But the only current regret I have is that I didn't more directly address this because I think you're 100% right, there is a tension here. And it's part of the reason why I didn't want to say things too strongly about the people who are appropriating Old Testament passages, because I heard that, because I do think there's room for that. And then even in the section where I'm talking about Winthrop in the book, I say like I want to do what he did, which is see himself in this story to see that the Old Testament means something for our political life today. I think one of the differences that distinguishes the way many white American Christians have used these passages and many black American Christians, and I should say most because again, I think failures of interpretation have happened on both sides. And faithfulness has happened to both groups of people. One of the differences though, is how often white American Christians because of their connection to and how deeply they were loyal to the American nation, did more directly apply these to the nation as a whole did what Winthrop said and said, Hey, He literally says, like, we are making a covenant with God, and God is ratifying this covenant with us. And we've often used similar language, the black church, while there have been some people who said, you know, this is for all black Americans that we are appropriate in the Exodus, we often forget, we really kind of secularize the civil rights movement and forget that this is happening in churches with preachers. It's moving out into the streets and institutions, but it is often really deeply motivated by genuine Christian conviction and attempts at Faithful biblical interpretation. So very often people are saying they're not saying that like America is going through the Exodus. They're saying, We are the people of God who are oppressed. Now as the people of God had been oppressed in the past. We are going to call on these promises for who got it This. So that's part of it is like, I do think there's a difference in what audience is primarily being addressed. But the other thing I do think is a question of specificity. I think where we very often gone wrong is when we've said, Yeah, we get these promises that God gave to Israel land, or these promises of particular blessing, if what we're doing instead, which black Christians have often done is said, Hey, let's look at who God reveals Himself to be in this. What are the things God cares about? God does not demand that America follow the Jubilee, for example, that we actually kind of go through the mechanics of what the people of God were required to do in terms of returning land to people, and kind of forgiving debts at a certain period of time. We actually, though, can see that what God cares about when it comes to human communities is that they flourish well, and that they have mechanisms for dealing with generational injustice is that compound over time? I think that's a real difference. And you see this even in like the 60s and 70s. There's a lot of Christian conversations about what the Bible says about economics. There's a big difference between saying, Okay, let's rip the Jubilee out of its context and say, God demands we follow these particular regulations in America, and saying, Hey, let's work out together, what policies we need, that makes sense of the fact that as God has revealed in the Old Testament, human communities affected by sin will have these kinds of problems and need mechanisms to prevent that from happening. Those are different approaches. I think one of those is a real biblical theological approach. One of those is actually a sidestepping of the hard work of both doing theology and listening to the Holy Spirit and saying, What is the word of God for the people of God, here and now, which is, I think, again, the last kind of difference here, which is, many white Christians early in our country, similarly, went to the Exodus and said, We are coming out of like god forsaken England, or wherever all the various places they're coming from, we are now in the promised land that God is providing for us, we are coming out of enslavement. They very rarely, incredibly, rarely, shockingly, rarely recognize that that same story that they were applying to themselves and seeing such political and theological power in it might apply to the enslaved people increasingly coming to their shores. That lack of recognition tells me that they were not correctly seeing themselves in the story. They were doing a good thing to go to the Old Testament and say, let's see what stories here have resonance with what's happening. How can these stories still speak through the Holy Spirit test today? But they really incorrectly identified their role in that story. There were not, you know, pastors in the south in the civil war that were like, Yeah, we're Pharaoh, you all are calling yourself, you know, enslaved Israel, we're fair, we missed what role we were playing, and what the demand of scripture on us was. And I do think the unique position the black church has been in has helped them see it, they were correct to see themselves in this story in this particular place, not all of them at every instance. And many people actually, throughout American history, I think, have done this kind of overly specific interpretation. There have been some, like black nationalist movements that have said, No, we're literally Israel, God is literally promising us a land. I think that's a failure and interpretation too. But the general tradition has often instead said, Who is God in this story? And what does that mean for us? And that's a practice of interpretation that I think we should really be learning from.

It goes back to what you said earlier, which is, am I reading the Bible with the grain of the story? Am I seeing myself as a character who has a role to play in the story? Am I attending well to the story, so I don't mistake myself for the character. These are really important questions we have to wrestle with, and we're going to make mistakes that's inevitable. In the book, you end with Jeremiah 29, one of my favorite passages, which is Jeremiah's letter to the exiles. And I have found exile to be a very helpful framework for thinking about what it looks like to live in our moment, partially from what I said earlier, because exile implies the fact that we do live inside of the empire that we are in some sense, exiles who are citizens of a different kingdom, living in a different kingdom have been called to seek the flourishing and shalom of that kingdom, and yet also flee from it and resist it. And it's complicated. And you look at the story of the exiles and who's right, you know, Daniel, he gets thrown into the lion's den, to become a feast for them, you know, rather than fighting his enemies, and then, you know, Esther throws a feast to destroy her enemies. Even the stories in the exiles seem bizarrely contradictory and difficult to walk through. And so I appreciate the way you end the book by giving us maybe a narrative or a story that we can start to step into. I think one of the things I'm wrestling with in our own cultural moment, is how we manage some of the hot button Hot Topic, difficult issues that we're facing. I'm thinking there's so many that we could go into, but I'm thinking about someone listening to this, who maybe has more resonance with the right and they would say, hey, look, here's the deal. I do think that I see myself in the story of Israel in the Exodus. And so they look at a problem a terrible injustice, like abortion, they say, Look, I'm here and I am trying to defend the lives of unborn people. And you know what Pharaoh did Pharaoh killed a lot of babies so we can have a real conversation about who's Pharaoh and who's Israel. And in a similar way, we're facing similar questions around LGBTQ issues less about life, but more fundamental really about how do we have a flourishing order where we take good care of our children where we make sure that we're not just teaching them the right things, but not misleading them or causing them to make decisions that have, you know, irreversible damage. And so one of the things I've wrestled with is that often with the exile image, it seems like we're very comfortable saying, Hey, this is going to make us speak loudly about issues of racial injustice, but not as loudly about issues of pro life issues, abortion or LGBTQ issues. So how do you navigate? I mean, how do we as exiles make sure that we're not being calibrated even as exiles to care about one side of issues, but not the other side of issues? And instead say, Hey, I care about all the issues. And this is the story that I'm in?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think one of the things we need to do is read more of Scripture, read it widely read it across the canon, because what we tend to do is a political situation presents itself and we go, Hey, let's go to a concordance and like, look up the verses that are relevant to this. And then we're reading a lot of bias into it, right, like what words do we look up in the concordance, we're already having our own bias about, like, what do we think is relevant? And what do we not think is right? You know, by the way,

I want to beat the person who's actually using it in court. Because what we're really doing is we're going to Bible gateway, searching for the word, which is, in some ways, almost worst, because then I am just getting the verse with the word right, at least with the concordance, I have to flip to the passage and see it.

No, that's totally true. And that is often how even if we were reading a physical Bible, we still tend to have that kind of approach of like, let's make a list of 10 verses for this political issue and 10 verses against it, right? We've all seen like a voter guide that does that. And I think that much harder. But better work is saying, Hey, we as a community, and again, this is not you as an individual. This is you in a community in your church, weekend and week out. We expect that when we come to Scripture, it will say something about both our personal life and our spiritual condition, and the community that we live in and what God demands us do in this community that were a part of. And we spent six months reading Jeremiah, and we don't come in going like we're answering XYZ political question, we come in saying, we expect that God will speak to our public lives in this and we're going to explore together what that might be. And I say that because if there's anything in American history teaches us, it's that we often forge scripture to be answers to questions, Scripture is not asking. And it's important that we find practices and habits of reading it, that put us in a position of saying, I'm not coming in with a preconceived idea of what you will say, or how God might move through this, like I might come in with some good theology about this, you know, whatever book we're in, or whatever genre or section and that's wonderful. But I'm not coming in saying, I know what God will ask of me here. And now in this text, I'm open to the Holy Spirit working in the community of people that I'm a part of, to help us together, discern, maybe in this time in place, the emphasis does need to be sexual ethics. Maybe in this time and place, the emphasis actually needs to be economic justice. And it won't be the same for every church and every time and every place. And we'll have to do some like really serious work together to overcome the really strong biases that we have about assuming what Scripture will say what it will talk about. But maybe I'm just like naive enough to think that like the Holy Spirit still works, those ways. And like, in our communities together, we can if we are earnestly trying to seek that and not looking for cover for the political positions we already hold, I think history does still show us that the Holy Spirit works in those ways. There were Christians in churches that said, the plantation ethic, the enslavement of humans, made in God's image is God's word. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, and often through relationship with people who are different from them, especially enslaved and free black Americans. There were Christians that said, Actually, no, I can see that my bias is making me make this interpretation. And there is another way to do this. And there is more in Scripture than just this one passage that we're using to justify our great evil, it's not impossible for us to see what we might be missing. I think it just takes a different kind of Bible reading and a different kind of work and community than we're often accustomed to. But

I do think our global media environment makes this worse, not better. Because to your point, if we need to do this, as a people, as a group of people is located in place, and the needs of a particular place is actually going to be different. I mean, I'm a Midwestern er, and one of the things I'm very attuned to is that if I get sucked into a debate with a Southerner, or an East Coast person, or West Coast person, the things that we care about the things that we're concerned about, the desires that we have, are actually quite different. And it's not because one person is bad and one person is good. It's because we're living in a different context. So let me end this interview with a very particular story. And the question at the end of the story is going to be how does this person go to the Bible to figure out what's next in my life? Okay, this is a complex story. Are you ready? Is it gonna be hard? Because we can talk about ideas, but then that complex has to come down into real life. This was a local story. Our local school district took a number of middle school students to a diversity event that celebrates Martin Luther King's legacy. So usually it's focused on civil rights and racial issues. But this particular one, there was a drag queen performance at The events and parents weren't alerted ahead of time. It's not totally clear whether the school district knew. And in the aftermath of that the school district superintendent responded and said, Well, you know what, we didn't do anything wrong, we're not going to change our policy, don't expect anything different, as parents are saying, Hey, can you just let us know in the features like this? Is it going to happen? And the answer was essentially, no, we don't need to we've had this policy since the 50s. It doesn't need to change. And one of the students who was at this event was an autistic student. And this particular student had, according to his parent wanted to go on field trips for a very long time, but because of his autism, was often refused the opportunity to attend those field trips. He's not verbal, so he can communicate to you what he's feeling. But you can't really have a conversation. It's not a two way conversation. And typically, when he communicates himself, he uses what he sees in television and shows. So he'll quote lines from movies or performances or things that he sees. And he was invited to go to this in part because of the diversity event. And he was a student with autism. And this was thrilling, I mean, just absolutely thrilling for the family who was Christian, because the mom said, now's our chance, we can show that he can go on field trips. And so he goes on the field trip, he comes back the mom, here's what happens, and she has no way to communicate with her son, what did you see? Can we have a conversation about this? It's not possible. And she knows that he's highly attuned to entertainment and what's happening. And that's often how he expresses himself. And she was relatively stonewalled in the process of trying to write this wrong. But she's a Christian, who's sitting here saying,

How do I go to my Bible? How do I use my Bible to figure out what I'm supposed to do next? Do I not say anything to the principal? Do I say something? Do

I try to reach out to the superintendent? Do I not? Do I try to rally people to a cause? And say, we need to change this thing? Or do I remain silent and quietly move forward? I know this is a really particular situation. But for her, he's okay. Here's how the Bible can play a role in you figuring out what's the next right step in your life. Yeah,

I mean, my initial response to that is just that woman needs to be going to not only scripture, but to reading it with the people in her community. I hesitate to give a strong like answer to this in part because I think the really beautiful thing about the people of God is that someone who is agonizing over something like that, and I sympathize with her. I mean, that is such a challenging question is not without resources. scripturally but also is not without resources, hopefully in the people of God to say like, who here both know Scripture well, and can help me see like, Are there parallels and stories that I'm not thinking of? Or are there verses that are not coming to mind for me, but also, that someone could really respond with wisdom about the particulars of the situation, that by the grace of God, there might be people in her community that say, Hey, I didn't go through this exact thing. But I know what it's like to have this kind of question of, should I speak up? And if I should, how should I do it? Or should I gather people? And so part of it is also, I think, relying on the immediate community that you're in to help you and then, you know, doing the like, double work of as they try and help you, you testing that against scripture with other people saying, Okay, someone said, Hey, here's the answer, you know, something that's just like, clearly counter to how Scripture teaches we treat people for example, if someone in her community was like, No, this is how you show up to someone's house and you threaten fight them or what you know, you could go okay, here's the scripture that helps us realize that that's not an appropriate option. But I do appreciate you asking the question, in part because it gives me an opportunity to say, this is such a good example of what is so challenging about this, which is that we have been formed as people to think that the way that scripture forms and shapes our political life is by a voter guide approach to Scripture, here are the 10 policies, that scripture helps us support. Here are the 10 things that Scripture says we should do, instead of saying, the real challenge for each of us, is asking what is the word here and now, and that requires the work of both saying, Hey, I've been spending years of my life already, just reading scripture across the canon, different genres, etc. But I've been doing it in community and reading it with others and community has also given me some wisdom about who has good skills, and helping me with this, like we are all involved by the Holy Spirit and help each other. But if I've been in a Bible study for two years, and I've seen this person who has this kind of role in our public life together, has this wisdom about scripture, and I can go to them and say, help me figure out how to do this. I trust you. I've seen your character. I've seen how you go to Scripture consistently. That's the kind of work over time that can help us approach this question. And it's also the reason why I don't have a particular answer for this woman, because I do think it is always a challenge of hearing now what is the Word of God to this group of people in this time and place? It could be that a very similar situation in a different part of the country with a different person, I mean, that you also have to kind of know, what kind of person am I do I have the character and the background and the kind of contentedness in Christ that I can do this public thing and I won't kind of lose my soul in the process. That's a pastoral question. That's a community question. That's not just what Scripture Have you speak up or not? It's kinda community helped me discern if I have the virtues described in Scripture that makes me the kind of person that can do this thing that I'm wondering if I should do or not.

I think there's a lot of wisdom there. Number one, it's slow. You He has Speaking for myself, even as a parent. When I feel as though someone's threatening my child in particular, my response is not usually slowness, my response is rapidity, and aggressiveness typically. And as you pointed out, Jesus actually has some things to say about how we respond to our enemies, and how we treat them. And sometimes the situation makes that challenging. But what I also appreciate is, I think what we're in desperate need of right now is a more polyphonic approach a multi chromatic approach to public engagement that says that inside the church, different people are going to respond to public issues in different ways that might actually seem contradictory to one another, but in God's providence, end up working out for the common good. So you might be the state legislator who says, I'm going to file suit against the school district for what they did, because I want to apply pressure to try to change a situation. But you might also be the person who's actually on the school board, he's not going to make a public statement, it's going to work quietly behind the scenes, someone might call that guy, well, you're a corroborate, right, you're corrupt. And they might get the other guy say, You're a bulldog, you know, fight away too hard, you're being mean and angry, when maybe in God's providence, they both have an important role to play in working out the ends that he wants to work out, which is again, why I love the idea of exile because there isn't a monolithic exile, but none of them look the same. They all manage this differently. And so I appreciate your wisdom in saying slow down, get connected into community seek wisdom, so that you can seek the shalom of the city, that particular city that you're in. So thank you so much for being on the show with us today. If people want to follow you engage with what you're doing, how can they hear more,

I am on Twitter and on Instagram. So you can find me there. You can also go to Kaitlan chess.com, to find the two books that I've written but also I wrote for 2020 Some spiritual practices and prayers for an election season that are just like able to download on there that I would recommend to people and you can always listen to the Holy post, which I am on every other week and enjoy everything but news of the but I enjoy.

That's fantastic. Oh, well. I do hope anybody listening to this will go pick up your latest book and check out your website. Caitlin chess.com. That's s ch I ESS. So you know, last name. I really do. David, would you mind praying for everybody listening? Sure.

To learn thank you for the opportunity to spend time thinking about your word which I always love God, I pray that you would continually be working in us guiding us to the passages we need to read, provoking us in the moment and our relationships in our community, to act to say a hard word to sacrifice on behalf of others. To reconcile with those we need to be reconciled with God. I pray that scripture would continually be shaping not only our personal lives, but our public lives and I pray for the guidance and the comfort that we need to do that. Well. It's in Your Son's name I pray. Amen.

Amen. Thanks for being with us today.