Jonathan Leeman on the Church as Embassy | Faith & Politics #16

Jonathan Leeman — president of 9Marks and author of Political Church: The Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ's Rule — joins James Spencer for the eleventh episode in the faith and politics series.

Leeman uses "political" functionally rather than partisanly: all of life falls under the rule of Christ, and the local congregation is meant to exemplify what that rule looks like. His central image is the embassy. Soil is just dirt until an authority consecrates it as belonging somewhere — and when a congregation gathers in Christ's name, it becomes something like the temporary geography of his kingdom, holding a deputized authority to declare who belongs and what the gospel is.

From there: why the Bible functions as a constitution rather than a legal code, and Leeman's distinction between straight line and jagged line issues — those where the path from text to political conclusion is direct, and the far larger set where Christians can reason faithfully and land in different places. He argues most of the trouble in churches comes from treating the second kind as the first.

He closes on where political formation actually begins.

Go deeper: Christians & Politics

Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
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Chapters:

00:00 9Marks and what it exists to do

01:33 Which church, and what "political" means

04:57 Philemon and resituating what's already there

08:43 Why an embassy

11:04 Consecrated soil and the geography of the kingdom

15:33 What church authority actually is

20:23 Delegated versus deputized

22:06 The scattered church as political threat

23:50 Telling governments their limits

28:03 The Bible as constitution, not case law

34:41 Sending people into political vocations

41:07 Wisdom from God to do justice

43:04 Straight line and jagged line issues

46:38 Where political formation begins

 

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