What Is Biblical Justice? A Conversation with Michael Rhodes

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined by Dr. Michael Rhodes. Michael is the author of Just Discipleship, Biblical Justice in an Unjust World. And we'll be discussing that book and a variety of other topics as he's on today. But he's also written Formative Feasting, Practicing the King's Economy, which is a book on feasting in the Old Testament, which I find pretty fascinating. He's had numerous articles in Christianity Today and the Biblical Mind. And he spent more than 14 years in community development and urban ministry work. So a lot of what we're going to talk about today is rooted in his very real, very practical experience, which is fantastic. He's currently an ordained minister and dean pastor in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and serving as a lecturer in Old Testament at Cary Baptist College. So, Michael, welcome to the program. Thanks for being here. Thanks, James. It's really fun to be here talking about discipleship. Yeah, absolutely. Anytime I get a chance to talk about discipleship and the Old Testament, this is sort of the sweet spot. So, man, I enjoyed the book. I read through Just Discipleship and really marinated on it. So I have plenty of questions. But I think the best place to start really is just giving people the story that you begin the book with. Why is this topic such an area of passion for you? Why did you get interested in the first place? Talk some folks through that. Yeah, well, I think so my story really is that I grew up in this wonderful church with wonderful parents who really taught me that you find life in a relationship with Jesus and you figure out how to live life with Jesus by listening to his word. And those are sort of the primary emphases of discipleship for me, have always been. But our church was also a very affluent congregation in Memphis, Tennessee, which is one of the poorest cities in America and one of the cities with the highest wealth disparity. And it was also a congregation that had a long troubled racial history. Memphis is a majority black city, and we were an almost exclusively white congregation with a racist, documentably racist history. And we were seeking to overcome these failures when I was growing up at the church. And so the church was bringing in people like Ron Sider and John Perkins to talk about poverty and race, not because the culture was telling them to, or not because, you know, Christianity had nothing to say about these issues, but because actually they were saying, look at the Bible, you love the Bible, you love Jesus. Good. Look at how often they're talking about these things in the Bible. And so that was sort of the second conversion experience for me. I went to Covenant College. I studied community development. I wanted to be involved with kind of holistic mission. And my wife, Rebecca, and I worked on an ag development project in Kenya for two years. And then we were living and working in a South Memphis community on a Christian community development project there for an organization called Advance Memphis for five years. But along the way, I started recognizing that for my own life, you know, if my ancestors ignored, you know, the do justice, love mercy stuff a bit in their discipleship, my generation knew that the Bible called us to do justice. We were waking up to that, but we weren't good at it. We hadn't been formed for it. And actually, that was a discipleship issue, you know? It's one thing to know that God wants something of us. It's another thing to be becoming the sorts of people who do what God wants for us. And so while working in community development, I sort of felt led back into academic study of the Bible because I wanted to know what resources Scripture had for helping us become just, become righteous. And so my first book, Practicing the King's Economy with Brian Ficker and Robbie Holt was all about discipleship in our economic lives. And this book is really another look at that topic, not focusing specifically on economic issues, but focusing on justice more broadly. And that's one reason why it's a weird book, you know? There's a lot of race stuff in here, but it's almost all black and white. And that's not because I think black-white issues are the only ethnic racial issues in America or our world. It's just because I was living in a community that was over 97% African-American as a white dude from a Christian community with a lot of racism, you know? There's a sort of spattering of contemporary issues that I'm wrestling with in sort of no systematic order, that just the questions that were raised for my community trying to follow Jesus in this particular context. So in some ways, the book is a little bit—it's not very systematic in that sense, but what is systematic is the attempt to say, what resources does Scripture have for helping us become just in light of these crises and issues that were emerging for us as we were living primarily in South Memphis while I was writing this book? So, you know, when you deal with issues of justice, especially today, even if you're running into—at least in America, right? You're running into sort of the conservative liberal agenda. You're running into, you know, there's the history of the social gospel that we kind of have to deal with. There's all these different things. How do you navigate that when people are looking at your book and talking to you about this topic and just saying, well, yeah, sure, justice. I know what that's a code word for. Right? Yeah. So, I mean, props to InterVarsity Press who published this book. When I pitched them the book, they came back to me and they said, you know, we've got lots of books on justice. This book needs to be a book that could be used in a Bible class. We want a book that's academic and it's rooted in Scripture, not in an academic way, with academic rigor. And that appealed to me because I wanted to write for people who were like we were in the church that I was growing up in. People who were willing to be convinced by Scripture, you know? And so, it's funny. I think one of the things that's strange is that I think when I was 28, it was easier to talk about justice and evangelicalism than it is now that I'm 38. So one of the things that I did not anticipate in writing this book is that in some ways the conversation would have gotten so much worse in the church. And so, how do I approach that? One thing I want to say is everybody argues about what justice is. And if you look at justice language in the Bible, the first thing I want to say is sort of, well, maybe that's understandable because in the Bible justice is a huge word. It's like holiness. It's like wisdom. It's like righteousness with which it's closely paired. These are macro concepts. And so, they're too big for easy definition. So it's not surprising that we argue about them. What is surprising is that so often conservatives and liberals, whatever your quotation marks are, even when we talk about biblical justice, we actually don't lean on the Bible very much. It's amazing how many allegedly biblical justice accounts begin with something like rendered to each his due, which is a fine way of getting at certain aspects of justice, but is a Greco-Roman idea. And it's not the way the Bible primarily talks about righteousness and justice, which is the really thick concept. So what I did in the book was I tried to say, let's try to understand what righteousness and justice is by looking at what righteousness and justice does. And part of this is my interest in discipleship. So I wanted to think particularly deeply about how we become just. And so, in the book, I look at Job 29 where Job talks about how he clothed himself in justice and righteousness and then looked at what he does. And what he does is, you know, he says, I was a father to the fatherless. I caused the widow's heart to sing. The dying person blessed me. I went to court with the outsider. I was eyes for the blind, feet to the lame. I smashed the fangs of the wicked and snatched their victims from their teeth. And it's really this powerful depiction of justice in the Old Testament and the New, I think, as really being about, John Golden Gate says, justice and righteousness are usually about the faithful exercise of power in community. They're about the faithful exercise of our agency. What's in our hand? What's in our lives? What's in our hearts? How do we use it well in community? And in the Bible, exercising power faithfully always is first about the vulnerable, the broken, the oppressed, the marginalized, the poor, which is why in that Job passage, Job clothes himself in justice and righteousness. And then he talks about nine different disadvantaged groups in six verses, you know? It's remarkable. So it's actually not that far off, I think, from Cornel West, you know, who famously says.

Justice is what love looks like in public, not just an abstract concept to regulate our institutions, but a fire in our bones to promote the well-being of all. I think that's pretty good. So that's kind of in my first chapter of the book. I'm really trying to say, tell the story of the Bible as a story in which Jesus brings justice to victory. It's really important to me that this is a key to the biblical story. And then to say, this is the kind of justice and righteousness, at least in part, that we're talking about. I think it's really important to emphasize that the Bible talks about justice and that it's not a simple concept. I mean, these things wrapped up together, that righteousness, justice language. We sort of think we master them, but usually what we do is we cut out a narrow sliver of that pie and then pretend that's the whole pie. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So in the Old Testament, justice and righteousness is also in touch with your life with God, out of which the faithful exercise of power flows. And I think there's even a sense in which justice is sort of written into the fabric of creation. You know, God is just in the sense that God faithfully exercises God's power. And so the world that he creates, I think, just like the sages in Proverbs say, the Lord founded the world by wisdom. So God's wise fingerprints are all over the place. Wisdom goes with the grain of God's universe. The same could be said for justice, that the faithful exercise of power resonates with the structures of the created world. This is a huge concept. And it also, it's interesting. As soon as you kind of see that, you start realizing the places where the way we talk about justice and righteousness are out of touch. And the tradition that I was raised in, you know, justice kind of rendered to each their due. And that means that justice is a bad thing. We wish that God wouldn't be just because, you know, if God were just towards us, we'd be condemned. Now, obviously, there's something to that. What's interesting is that the saints are always praying for God's justice. Read the Psalms. And in Matthew, Matthew says Jesus is the one who brings justice to victory. And as a result, in him, the nations will put their hope. So the nations, the Psalms say, the nations and creation long for God's justice. So that kind of makes you, it's like smelling salts to wake you up. This word is not working exactly like we might think, you know? That's right. That's right. Yeah, I mean, I think when you describe it like that, the faithful exercise of power and in terms of justice, you begin to make sense of preferential treatment of the poor, which I know John Perkins, you kind of write, and I've read some of his work, but you write in your book, you know, he talked about that when he came to your church. And he does talk an awful lot about that. But I think sometimes when people hear that aspect of it, now it becomes sort of this justice is only a social mandate. It's only a decision to care for those who are downtrodden. And these days, you know, that sort of gets intermingled with, unfortunately, intermingled with sort of that Marxist oppressed, oppressor mentality and all those kind of things. But if we actually look at it, it's much bigger than that. And it doesn't involve that, but there's also sort of what I would think of as check and balance, you know, verses, something like Leviticus 19.15 where, you know, you should not do, be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness, you should show you judge one another. And so it's like, you're not just, oh, they're poor, so we're automatically going to give them whatever they want, you know. There is that exercise, that appropriate and faithful exercise of power doesn't simply privilege one group over another, but it does gesture toward the necessity of setting something right in the world. And to the extent that we have it within our power to do that, we should do that. Is that a...? Yeah, I think that's helpful. I mean, it's funny, you know, for those of us who are in more conservative spaces, and, you know, one reason why some of the Old Testament unsettles us is because it sounds like the Marxists in our circles. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide. Or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Right. The Bible talks a lot more about oppressed classes. And not just the Old Testament. James, woe to you, rich, the wages that you failed to pay the workers are crying out to your ground. And here's the mycros international version. You're going to hell as a result. You know, it's really strong language. That's right. So there's a resonance there with some of those Marxist ideas. And at the same time, I think, and I haven't read a ton of Marx, but my understanding of Marxism is sort of antagonism between groups all the way down. Certainly the Bible doesn't embrace that. A great example of this, a great example of this, which I talk about a bit in the book, is 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul says famously, the body of Christ is a body and every member has a part to play and you can't denigrate one another, which we think is great. Everyone, every audience member is going to be excited about that. Very few of us have taken seriously what Paul says in that same context, which he says, he says, but the parts of the body that seem less presentable actually get greater honor. And he's talking about genitals. It's a funny way, you know, we talk about hands and feet and he's sort of talking about private parts. And he's using the metaphor to say your private parts, which you might think of as embarrassing or whatever, actually get greater attention. What's the point? Paul says, just so God has arranged the body of Christ to give greater honor to the parts that lack it. Now think about how like mind melting that is. God's saying in the church, we need to understand which groups are getting their rear ends handed to them out there. Those groups get greater honor. If you're looking for a preferential option for the poor, there it is. But Paul says that there may be equality. That's his next line. Why do you do the preference so there may be equality? And then he starts talking about weeping with those who are weeping and mourning with those who are mourning. So it's this beautiful depiction of, I think Nicholas Wolterstorff says, you know, God's justice is preferential not because he has sort of an innate preference for this or that group, but because injustice is not equitably distributed. That's right. That's right. Things need to be righted. But you're absolutely right. There is that impulse of, you know, don't, don't, don't show privilege to the great or to the least, you know? That's right. So I think, I think, yeah, it is, you know, a topic where soaking in the, in the cadence of Scripture on these issues would really transform us. And it's one of these places as an evangelical speaking to an evangelical, speaking to Christian evangelical's in most of my context. One of my deep griefs, and this is not an endorsement of everything on the liberal or progressive side, but one of my deep griefs about conservatives is that we often say we need biblical justice and then immediately demonstrate that we don't, we have not soaked in the cadences of Scripture. You know? So we say biblical justice with our words, but the way we talk about it after that bears so little resemblance oftentimes to kind of the rhythms and patterns of justice speak in the Bible. And so this book is really an invitation to root ourselves in Scripture, you know? And then from there to engage our world in this sort of dialogue. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, when you're talking about the conservatives and, you know, the way that biblical justice is affirmed, but then not practiced, right? Or affirmed, but in sort of, we might say in an anemic way, in a very partial way. You know, as I've looked into politics, one of the things that I've just sort of been really convicted about is the, I suppose, the assertion that I always knew that Christianity is bigger than conservatism. In other words, conservatism can't.

have the same values that Christians have. They can't encompass them because conservatism doesn't see Christ as essential. And so there's an ambiguity to the justice that comes in conservatism. It's always going to be conceptual. It's always going to be ambiguous. And I think it's always going to be limited because there are limited human resources, and there's going to be a limitation on the selflessness that is exercised by someone who is just captivated by a conservative ideology or a conservative political stance or theory or what have you versus what we could have as Christians, which is a transformed heart and mind that is so in tune with the Scriptures and has such a recognition of God's presence that now there's no fear in enacting justice because we all have plenty. There's no lack of abundance. There's no fear for the future. There's no anxiety about where we're going or what's going to happen. We have that all mapped out for us, and so discipleship becomes a posture that we adopt because we know where it ends. Yeah, that's right. And so we're living towards God's coming kingdom. Yeah. And I think, you know, the political theologian David Koizis talks about political visions and illusions. I think his book is Political Visions and Illusions, and he talks about ideologies, you know. And I think one of the things that complicates the discussion of justice is we really don't know yet what Scripture is calling the people of God to as the people of God. We haven't paid enough attention to that. And so a lot of what this book is argued for us, let's pay attention to what the Bible is calling the people of God to become and to be in their lives and their practice of justice and et cetera. But the other thing that we've failed to do is notice that having become shaped by God in the Bible, there are all these examples of God's people then encountering the political systems around them. That's right. They actually do engage politics in that sense. Yeah. And one of the things that strikes me is that when they do so, they have the same agenda, you know. When Daniel confronts Nebuchadnezzar and tells him how to preserve his reign in Babylon, he says, break off your sins with righteousness and do justice for the oppressed. So the justice component is still there. But man, if you read Daniel, it's clear it's pretty complicated to pursue that, not as a member of the people of God among the people of God, but in the context of an empire that is in many ways hostile to God and God's ways and God's purposes. Now, I'm not trying to draw any direct lines to our contemporary context, except for just to say it seems to me that we need to soak in the scriptures to really understand what is the— you know, the Psalms say the Lord loves righteousness and justice. Righteousness and justice are the foundation of God's throne. So we need to soak in and seek that kind of righteousness and justice. We can learn that from the Bible and begin practicing it together. And we need to pay closer attention to how the Bible gives us glimpses of what it might look like to work towards structural change in our society, which is going to involve engaging debates about parties and platforms and ideologies without becoming captive to them, you know? There's a quote—one thing I do in the book, I'm looking at, in a chapter on feasting, I'm looking at the way that Deuteronomy offers sort of just structures, you know, this is how you do land debt forgiveness. But it also offers the feast as a practice where people are learning to be just together by becoming family with the vulnerable. And it seems to me that there is in Deuteronomy, therefore, again, if we're talking about things that we tend to separate, the recognition that justice ultimately has to come from the heart, you know, from transformed lives, and justice also requires good, just structures. And I was really excited to discover along the way of the research of that chapter that Dr. King talked about this on a regular basis, you know? So Dr. King will say things like, we're not going to—I'm loosely quoting here, but something to the effect of, we're not going to get what we want to get until the unwritten law of love is written on every human heart, you know? What's going to end segregation? What's going to end white supremacy and classism? It's going to be the unwritten law written on every human heart. But then in other places, King will say things like, it may be true that a law against lynching can't make a person love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important too. And then he goes on to say, which is even more surprising to many of us, but I think deeply resonant with the Bible, is that just structures actually make it easier to become just. So structures that, for instance, unpick racial segregation make it easier for people to move towards God's heart for inclusion and diversity and unity together, you know? And structures that are broken make it harder. Mary Hirschfield, the Catholic theologian and economist, draws on this outrageous research that shows wealthy households—take a wealthy household, and you put them in a mixed-income neighborhood versus a ghetto of affluence, same income level. The household in the ghetto of affluence is less generous than the affluent household in the mixed-income community, which seems to suggest that communities that look structurally more like God's design togetherness make it easier to be generous. That's remarkable, you know? So there's all sorts of these surprises along the way about how Christians can be faithfully exercising power both at the structural level but at also the individual heart and the church and the community. I totally agree on the structural side. So I used to oversee an aviation program. I was dean of an undergraduate school, and they had an aviation program. And then my wife worked at a healthcare organization. She was at a hospital system. And both of them practiced what they called the high reliabilities. They're high-reliability organizations. And sort of the mantra in both was make it easy for people to make the right decision. Make it easy for people to make the right decision. It wasn't about—yes, it was sort of about curtailing mistakes, right? You want to—the way you structure things, you're trying to make it harder for them to make a bad decision. But the way they talked about it was let's make it easy for people to make the right decision. And so, to me, when you're talking about the structuring of society and what that looks like, it rings true to say, yeah, we should become—the way these structures are set up, they do have an influence on us. I've seen it on that more micro-organizational level, and so it makes intuitive sense to me that if you expanded it out, it's going to have some effect. Now, to your point, you know, and I appreciate, like, Dr. Martin Luther King's, you know, a law against lynching isn't going to keep people from wanting to lynch me, but it'll keep them from doing it, right? Like, there will be negative consequences to that. I think that gets into some of those issues of, you know, two worlds kind of ideas, you know, whether it's Augustine's City of God and the City of Man, City of God, whether it's the two kingdoms theology of Lutherans or what have you, and I'm not saying we need to subscribe to either one of those, but the reality is that those governments and civil society just in general have the function of curtailing some of this stuff. Yes. Yeah, that's right. And then you have the church working alongside that, doing different things. And I think that points to some of the tensions that you raised when you were talking through, let's say, restitution in the book. Yep, yep. You know, that sort of challenge of what does the church do with this particular issue? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I'm happy to talk about that chapter, but I do just want to say there again that I think the next project that I'm working on, the next book that I'm working on, is a book on politics and the Bible. So I've been reading a lot about this, and it's really—Christians have really wrestled with these matters. But one of the things that's been surprising to me is that I kind of grew up with the subconscious belief that the church has one set of goals, which I might have identified with, like, love, justice, and mercy, and the state has a completely different set of goals. And so one of the surprises for me is just actually when the biblical authors talk about the ruling authorities, they talk about justice. And not just in the sort of, like Paul, you know, the state wields a sword. That kind of resonates with, I think, the way we think. But Paul also says in that context that the state—not the state—the governing authorities can praise the good. And if you look, for instance, at the end of Proverbs, at the end of Proverbs, you've got a foreign king, King Liliol, not an Israelite, talking about what his foreign queen mother told him. And what she's saying is, don't open your mouth, O king, to guzzle down wine and rich food, which is what kings get to do in the ancient world, but open your mouth to defend the rights of the poor and the oppressed. So there's a more resonance in the goal of what we're about as Christians and what we should be advocating for

in our local and regional and national political life, but there are legitimate differences in the way that we pursue those things. There's new complexities, and there's lots of room for discernment here, not least because if you look at the way all the different figures in the Bible who interacted with the ruling authorities, they don't all do it the same way. And in fact, some of them seem to stand in some tension with each other. You know, Paul says, you know, submit to the governing authorities. God put them there. The author of Revelation says the ruling authorities are monsters, you know, and when God slays them, we'll all hold hands and sing about it. I don't think there, I don't think they're seeing different truths exactly. Like I wouldn't describe them as contradicting each other, but they are showing us how complex it is for Christians to acknowledge the lordship of Jesus and then work to seek the good of our communities, as Jeremiah puts it, in a world that's complicated. So that's maybe that's a bit to the side. No, it's not. It's actually really helpful. I think as I've looked into Christians in politics, one of the things that I've really tried to think through is the provisionality of nations. Yeah, yeah. And so as you think about that, you are going to tend to see, even though they have very similar aims, which I agree with you on that, I think they have, there's a trajectory toward justice and righteousness, which are ultimately going to lend themselves to God's order because God is just, because God is righteous. Any order that he has set up is going to gesture toward that order. I tend to like the way Oliver Donovan describes it. They're secondary theaters to the witness of God's glory. So they're secondary witnesses. So they're sort of gesturing that way, but they can't exactly point directly to the triune God. They can just sort of gesture to that justice. But then there's this other aspect of them that they are provisional, that they're on a timeframe. And so you're probably going to end up seeing, and I don't know whether I would go this far, but I'll say it to you because you're an Old Testament guy and people will understand the context, but I kind of think of it through the lens of Genesis 15, 16, the iniquity of the Amorites has not yet been fulfilled. And then you look at something like the Day of Atonement that comes around every year. It's almost as if the nations build up enough iniquity that eventually God just says, we're done. Now we need to restart. Something has to happen here almost in order for justice to be done. Now that's a very difficult thing to demonstrate from the biblical record, but that's just my sort of musing on it, I suppose. Yeah, I mean, it's really difficult to think about. I mean, you look at the prophets or whatever who God reveals to them in some startling ways how God is at work through and with the nations. You definitely feel like you're on surprising territory, you know? Right. You know, Jeremiah 25, right? Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar are going to be my servant to exile the Jewish people, but they will not go unpunished for doing so. And you're just sitting there like... Yeah, that's a head-scratcher, eh? It's a rough one, man. I think, I'm not sure that the Bible gives us... Yeah, it is interesting to get into sort of political theology through church history and how these different Christian figures have tried to understand the relationship of the people of God and the governing authorities in the places where they are. And I'm not... I don't know enough about that to wager much, but I am really uncomfortable with the kind of treatment of the political communities that we're a part of as sort of having totally separate agendas or as being sort of completely separate. So I'm really cautious about any kind of two kingdoms idea because it seems to me, just in my 1 Corinthians 9 thing, seek the good of the city. It seems to be saying, or Daniel, look at Daniel doing it in the cabinet of the guy who raised Jerusalem to the ground. There seems to be this recognition that we can seek the good of the city in a variety of different ways in a variety of different contexts. What does seem to me, what the kind of those who draw a distinction between, those who are more skeptical about the good that the state can do, what they help us see is that there are always going to be limits to that and that the state cannot become... Well, I think they show us the quest to create sort of Christian nations is misguided, you know? Because, I mean, I was just reading something by Nicholas Wolterstorff, and he was just pointing out that everywhere the Christians go in the New Testament, Paul proclaims the gospel in these places. Some receive it. Yes. And some don't. And as a result, the idea that you could have a Christian nation is just impossible out of the gate because no nation is going to have all of its citizens pledge their allegiance to Jesus. And no church will be comprised solely of people from any particular nation. So the gospel, it seems to me, militates both in the need for conversion and also in the peaceableness of the gospel to militate against the kind of takeover mentality. Let's take over and rule, which seems to be gaining some appeal in certain quarters, this kind of Christian takeover and rule mentality. I think that road is closed to us by, for all sorts of reasons, by the New Testament. But so is the kind of opposite impulse, which is like, these places are going to go to hell and, you know, let's just bunker down in the church, you know? I think what I'm, and particularly in my chapters on Joseph and Daniel, I'm trying to look at two figures who engage their political communities and the dangers they face and how those might illuminate some of our own challenges and prospects. Well, in the very different ways that they do that. Daniel is very integrated into Babylonian society, just almost by fiat, right? It's going to happen. To some degree, this is going to happen. You're doing this. But then he's resisting. And this is the language I tend to like. Instead of separation, I like distinction. Yeah. That, you know, Christians are distinct within the societies with which they live. They're not separate, but distinct. And so Daniel exercises a distinction within the Babylonian context. And I think that comes out really well in your chapters. The other one you note is Joseph, which I'm feeling like people are probably less familiar with. So I'd kind of like to focus there. Because what Joseph does in Egypt is very different than what Daniel does in Babylon. Well, what's one thing that's interesting is that Jewish interpreters have always drawn these figures into conversation. They've always drawn Joseph, Daniel, and often Esther into conversation. And Joseph sort of works as a prototype to which the others are responding. I was not aware of that when I got started in this book. But that is the way the book lays it out. So first I look at Joseph. He's sort of the first member of God's people who sort of really succeeds, politically speaking, in kind of government role. You know, he's the second highest in the land. And because Joseph plays an important role in saving God's people, and there's a lot to like about Joseph. Yeah. There really is. But because of that, Christians have often missed some of the aspects of Joseph's practice that I think the author of Genesis is drawing our attention to. Right? So Joseph not only gets promoted to work for the Pharaoh, he not only takes an Egyptian name, he also marries into an Egyptian priestly family. He claims to practice divination. He names his children, God has helped me forget my father's house. Forget Israel's house. And the rabbinic early Jewish commentators were really frustrated that he never makes any effort to go find his father. That's right. He's the second most powerful person in the world and he doesn't make any effort to go. Now, everyone debates why. But what's really interesting is that when Joseph starts to reconcile with his family... Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? 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He's collected all the grain of Egypt, so he has authority over the grain of Egypt in the good years so that he can provide in the bad years. But in Genesis 47, we're told two times that Joseph uses his political authority to provide for his family by giving them these gifts, gifts of land in the land of Goshen and whatever. It tells us that, and these are like bookends. In the middle of those bookends, in chapter 47, are how Joseph takes care of the Egyptians. And the way that he takes care of the Egyptians is by enslaving them, taking their land in perpetuity, taking all their livestock for Pharaoh. And I think, I make this argument in some detail in the book, that in all of these ways, we are seeing Joseph act in exploitative ways that not only sound a little bit like what the Israelites will experience later under another Pharaoh, who knew not Joseph, but actually the storyteller wants us to make that connection. And he's showing us that some of what Joseph does actually paves the way for the oppression of his people. And I draw a connection there between what I see as an impulse in certain brands of Christian politics in America to try to gain power much more forcefully than Joseph did, but the parallel is that we often seek to use power for us and ourselves first. And so, you know, all the statistics in the 2016 election where evangelicals say we're less likely than their neighbors to say that they hoped their vote benefited people who had suffered, people who had been disadvantaged in our community, and more likely than their neighbors to say, I hope my vote benefits me and people like me. And I think Joseph shows us why that's appealing and also shows us where it leads. And I think Daniel then provides a counterpart because Daniel, like Joseph, rises to power in a foreign imperial context. He collaborates like Joseph does. But what we see Daniel doing that we never see Joseph doing is resisting full assimilation into the community. He refuses the imperial food. He has a prayer and fasting regimen. You know, in Genesis, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob all talk to God. Joseph never does. You know? So Daniel is portrayed as having this discipleship, right? So that allows him to have a different kind of witness. And so when Daniel gets the opportunity to tell Nebuchadnezzar how to run the show, he doesn't say, hey, here's a great idea. Why don't you take a whole bunch of stuff from the people and then you'll have more power? What he says is, do justice for the poor. Relent. Do righteousness. And then your reign might be prolonged. And I think that's a better voice for our politics today. Daniel does not try to make Babylon Israel. He prays back towards the land. He knows that God is king. And I think as Christians, we need to know that Christ is king. And that's our first political message. Lord of the universe. But then because Daniel knows that and because he remembers it, then in his Babylonian context, he can seek the good of the city for all. He can seek the good for all the people. And I hope that those chapters help others as they've helped me reflect more deeply on what it is that we're supposed to be doing with our significant influence in this society. You know, because we do have enfranchised voters with the right to free speech and assembly, have way more influence than most biblical characters did in our society. And I think we should be using it. But I think we should be using it in ways that draw deeply on our knowledge that Christ is King, our commitment to justice, our love of neighbor, you know, and our desire to seek the flourishing of all people in our societies. And don't you think, so, number one, I love the treatment of Joseph. It led me back to Joseph's original dream between he and his brothers, which is sort of often debated as well, is why would Joseph tell them this? Isn't it sort of arrogant that Joseph would tell them this, you know? But then you look at the way he interprets the Pharaoh's dream, the actions he takes afterwards, the way he sets himself up, and you say, no, that dream was actually relatively accurate. It was, he's enacting this destiny for himself, and it's relatively callous. And that's not to say that Joseph was not a devout man. I mean, we see what he does with Potiphar's wife and all those kind of things. Like, he remains faithful, but he's also relatively authoritarian in the way that he handles himself. Yes, and that's right. And it's interesting because he's at the beginning of the Torah, and the Torah absolutely rejects this way of politics, at least in Israel, right? There will be, there's basically no king in the Torah. And if you are, if you do have a king, you can't act like this. Joseph charges, I think, 20% of interest. There's no interest in the Torah. He takes the land forever. The land goes back to the landowner in the year of Jubilee. So, you know, one, the world expert on Leviticus thinks that the Jubilee chapter in Leviticus 25 and that the subtext is don't be like Joseph in Egypt because his practice. Now, it may be that, because another thing is we need to think about how Joseph is a victim and how he lacks some things that Daniel has. So Joseph doesn't have the law. So maybe he's reminding us, this is as good as we can get without guidance from God. But we have guidance from God. We know what God's political program is, right? We've seen it. And so we ought to have a more Daniel-like political practice, I think. Well, and we see that play itself out when Israel rejects God as king in 1 Samuel. And then the way that David, now there's some debate about this in Old Testament circles too, but whether or not David is innocent in his dealings with Saul. I mean, the way I tend to read it is you say, well, David never kills his way to the throne. He never does any sort of action against an Israelite that would lead him to take the throne from Saul. And even after he takes the throne, he leaves Saul's kin alone. So he's not trying to consolidate power. And all of that sort of gestures back to the same idea that you're talking about is that God is king. And so that narrative is crafted to remind people that this isn't about David. This is about God placing David, God establishing David. Yes. What's interesting is, and we've gotten really far afield. We're really, I'm really like, let the reader know that the stuff I say in the book, I'm more confident of than what I'm throwing out here, you know, in this very interesting fun conversation. But, you know, the actual end of David's life in the Bible is in 1 Kings. Go look at the speech that David gives to his son Solomon. It starts out, it sounds like Deuteronomy. Do justice. Follow the law. Do the kind of king. And that kind of king is exactly how you're describing it. They're not power obsessed. They're not money obsessed. They're not women obsessed. They're not idolaters. You know, be just. And then, and then, like on a dime, David shifts and go, now be wise and kill all these people, including some people that I promised not to kill. That's right. Sounds like a mafia boss. Right. And I think, I think, I'm not sure, but my hunch is that the author of Kings is reminding us that too often God's people know what God's just way looks like. But when they turn in their political lives, they choose a false wisdom disconnected from God's justice. And one of the biblical teachings is that justice has to be informed by wisdom and wisdom has to be oriented towards justice. So I think that last glimpse of David is deeply problematic and it's reminding us, hey, in politics, God's way is often divorced from our practice in the name of an alleged wisdom. Don't be like that. Don't do that, you know. And it's, yeah, it's really interesting you say that because when I read that narrative in 1 Kings, I keep wanting Abigail to come on the scene and calm David down. Because, you know, you see him, you see him get wrathful and angry in 1 Samuel. He's going to go kill Nabal in that narrative. And then Abigail's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's just, just think about what you're doing here for a second, David. And so what I think you're seeing there is David's worst aspects coming out as he's talking to his son and trying to think forward of what his son is actually going to face and maybe not want him to face that same thing. And so what takes over? Well, hey, do what's in your power to get rid of these people. They're going to cause you problems. Just boot them. And it becomes that, what you're saying is that false wisdom that creates this sort of odd cycle in which God's people refuse to do the justice of God, refuse to fully trust him and lead themselves into these moments where everything goes wrong. Yes, that's right. And I love that you brought up Abigail because I do think she then represents in the narrative in 1 Samuel, the role of wisdom and of wise counsel in relationship to politics.

Yeah, this is a theme that I've begun to see more and more in Proverbs. One of the things that Proverbs wants to say to us is political authorities need counsel and good counsel will lead them surely down the path of injustice. I mean, sorry, bad counsel will and good counsel will lead them towards God's justice. And if we receive that as Christians, then we can immediately go, oh, where am I a counselor to the authorities? And in what ways? And often I would suggest that Christians are using our counselor voice to actually push our leaders towards injustice. We are making them talk dismissively about orphans and immigrants and widows to get our votes, you know, and this is deeply problematic. So, oh, man, we have so much more we could talk about, James. Can we have a part two? I know, I know. We can do a part two. I would love to do a part two. I think we've got tons more we could explore, but I know you're getting close on time and I know you have a hard stop. So let me do this. Let me ask you the question that I tend to close the episodes with, with everybody. And I think this will be a nice point of closure. So what do you, what topic do you think that Christians should be thinking about today to make them more faithful disciples of Jesus Christ? Well, I, you know, I mean, I would say two things. One is in, in justice discipleship, I do a lot of work to try to help the people of God think about how our lives, where we live and how we live our worship. You know, I have a whole chapter on singing justice songs and the Psalms. Our sort of discipleship in the body of Christ, how that that can be deeply rooted in God's heart for the orphan, the immigrant and the refugee and their contemporary equivalents. And so I think that, you know, in sort of, in sort of this book, I'm sort of making that claim. That's where we really need to be faithful. So that would be part A. Part B is, as I say, I'm working on a new book on politics in the Bible that is not going to talk very much, if at all, about any of our contemporary political landscape. It's just going to say, can we pay really close attention to all the different ways that the people of God from Genesis to Revelation are navigating this tension, you know, from the midwives in Egypt who refuse Pharaoh's command to kill the babies. You can tell him smart lies, you know, and God works with them, to Daniel and his advocacy to Esther and her impossible choices to John's vision of the monsters to Jesus, you know, and what I really want to be suggesting there. My fear is that people are going to get to the end of the book and go politics, the Bible book that never talks about our political situation. But my, and I want to talk about our political situations. You can probably tell, but my, my sense is that politics has gotten so toxic. And once again, we are saying things about politics and what politics is about and what political discipleship is about that do not have roots in scripture. And we need to get back there and we need to soak into that so that we can be faithful in this day and age as citizens of Jesus kingdom amid and among the kingdoms of this world, which also belong to him. So that's kind of what I would say. Fantastic, man. Well, I know politics is a big issue. I know justice is a big issue and I would just recommend everybody just politics. I love reading the book. I love the Old Testament stuff, man. It's, I totally vibe on it, as you can tell. We, we dug in to some, a variety of areas, but this was a great conversation. I really appreciate you being on the show. Thanks James. It's great talking to you. All right. Thanks everybody. And we'll see you on the next episode of thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Our world can feel chaotic and uncertain, but we don't have to live enslaved to fear. Christ has promised me and you his peace and throughout scripture has provided powerful tools and practical steps to help us experience greater freedom. I'm Jennifer Slattery, lead host of the Faith Over Fear podcast, inviting you to join me and my team as together we learn how to starve our fears and feed our faith. Subscribe at lifeaudio.com or wherever you access podcast content.