Bothering with Politics
What’re you teaching on at church this week?” my dad asked.
“We’re starting a series on the Bible and politics,” I answered.
“Yikes! Couldn’t do that series at our church.”
Maybe you can relate to my dad. I certainly knew what he meant. Just ask yourself: What do you feel when you think about politics? I guarantee those feelings aren’t all positive. Nothing is more likely to turn a family dinner ugly than politics. Why bother trying to tackle the subject in church? When I led a series on Song of Songs, it felt far less controversial. We may be the first Christians in history who find it easier to talk openly about sex than about politics!
After a bit more conversation, though, my veteran-adult-Sunday-school-teacher father started to get excited. The kind of conversation we hosted at our church—and the kind of conversation this book invites you into—was quite different from what the phrase “the Bible and politics” suggested to him at first.
Why Bother with Politics in the First Place?
Before going further, I want to convince you that Christians not only can talk about politics in church but that we must. Not because the church needs to stay “relevant” or keep up with the latest social trend. Not because congregations should be constantly publishing statements supporting this party or that policy. We must talk about politics in church because what the Bible says about politics is good news. To miss out on the Bible and politics is to miss out on part of the gospel.
Let’s start with an exercise that will help you see what I mean. What Bible passages come to mind when you think about politics? Think about your formative Christian experiences at home, at church, or in Christian ministry. What biblical texts were on the “greatest hits” list? What passages did people lean on to help them think through a Christian approach to political issues?
I wonder if your list includes any of what’s on mine. Did you include Jesus’s command to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Matt. 22:15–22 ESV)? What about Paul’s “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” (Rom. 13:1)? For those of us who believe that all of Scripture is God’s Word, these texts are essential to the Bible’s political message. But oftentimes our “greatest hits” lists don’t include the most important political message of all. It’s a message Peter preached in the very first sermon of the early church.
It happens at Pentecost. When the Holy Spirit falls on the disciples, they praise God in the languages of “every people under heaven” (Acts 2:6). When some accuse them of being drunk, Peter sets them straight. His sermon cuts his hearers to the heart and leads three thousand people to repent of their sins, believe in Jesus, embrace baptism, and receive the Holy Spirit. Here’s how Peter wraps up this scorcher of a sermon: “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:36 NIV).
That is the primary political teaching of the Bible: Jesus is Lord. Everything else the Bible says about politics—absolutely everything—flows from this one fundamental, world-altering claim. God reigns. The Crucified and Risen One is Israel’s Messiah and the King of the world. Jesus is Lord.
This political teaching runs right through the biblical story. In Exodus 15, Israel stands on the shore of the Red Sea. They’ve just watched Yahweh drown their genocidal enemies in its waters. Here at the beginning of Israel’s life as a liberated nation, the people sing a song celebrating Yahweh’s victory over the world’s most powerful ruler: “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” (Exod. 15:1).
Pharaoh had enslaved God’s people and killed their children. He looked like the most important player on the political scene and even claimed to be a god. But on the other side of the Red Sea, the Israelites sang the truth: “The Lord will reign forever and ever” (Exod. 15:18). There it is again. The central political message of the Bible: The Lord reigns.
Or flip over to Israel’s hymnbook. We may not associate church music with politics, but the Psalms sure do. In fact, “Yahweh reigns” is arguably the central theological message of Israel’s hymnal (see, e.g., Pss. 93:1; 95:3; 146:10).
Or check out Isaiah. This prince of prophets was really the first to use “gospel” language to describe God’s work in the world. While Christians often debate exactly what the “gospel” includes, Isaiah gives us an important summary: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news [gospel], who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns’” (Isa. 52:7).1 “Your God reigns” isn’t just the central political message of the Bible; it is perhaps the clearest shorthand summary of the gospel itself.
Why is God’s rule good news? Because this king’s rule brings the kind of peace that causes citizens to flourish. Because God’s good news announces that the generous, gentle, loving, just, merciful Creator of the universe is coming to rescue and renew his broken world. Indeed, God loves his world so much that he is coming to take up residence within it.
That’s why Jesus shows up declaring “the good news of the kingdom of God.” Indeed, he was “sent for this purpose,” to proclaim a kingdom that “brings good news to the poor,” announces “release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind,” sets “free those who are oppressed,” and embraces the Lord’s Jubilee Year (Luke 4:18–19, 43). That’s why the book of Acts ends with Paul “proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ [the Messiah] with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:30). The starting point for political discipleship is nothing less than the gospel itself, and the gospel itself is nothing less than this: The gentle, enemy-loving, hypocrisy-confronting, outsider-welcoming, feast-throwing, lost-seeking, demon-exorcising, hungry-feeding, friend-making, cross-carrying Jew from Nazareth is the world’s ruler. He comes to make the blessings of his reign flow far as the curse of pain, brokenness, and death is found.
That’s why the end of the biblical story reveals a day when Jesus’s reign will be established “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). By triumphing over death and bringing God’s new creation, Jesus wins the title “King of kings and Lord of lords” (Rev. 19:16). Or as Paul would have it, because Jesus humbled himself to the point of death on a cross, “God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9–11).
If we want to talk about politics and the Bible, we don’t start by talking about how Christians relate to a particular party, platform, or administration. We start by standing before this world-reorienting mystery: God reigns. The one “who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20) runs the universe.
Putting Our Politics in Place
Once we acknowledge the Bible’s primary political message, we can begin to put our other political questions in their proper place. We can also begin to group those political questions into two broad categories.
First, if the Bible’s primary political claim is that God is King, we need to ask how those of us who acknowledge God’s reign arrange our lives together as citizens of God’s kingdom. Let’s call this “outpost politics.” Outpost politics asks how disciples of King Jesus practice political discipleship by living together as an outpost of his kingdom.
Guidance for how disciples live out allegiance to God together is everywhere in Scripture. In the Old Testament, God formed his people as a national political community under his divine rule. He gave them laws to help them live under his lordship in every area of life—the way they farmed; the way they bought, borrowed, and sold; the way they formed families and raised children; the way they organized their shared calendars.
God does not call the church to form a national political community living under God’s law in that same way. But the New Testament makes clear that God does call the church to be a community that lives out his generous, just, righteous, merciful, and holy way in every area of life, including by creatively applying the Old Testament’s teaching on God’s reign in our own context. We are like “a city built on a hill,” Jesus says (Matt. 5:14). Because our citizenship is in God’s kingdom (Phil. 3:20), Paul tells the Philippians to “live citizen lives worthy of the good news of the King” (1:27, author’s translation [AT]). Because of God’s outlandish grace, there exists a people who confess that Jesus is Lord and await his return. Outpost politics asks, How do we live out that confession together as a community?
But of course, even if God’s people perfectly accept God’s gracious guidance and live it out perfectly together (spoiler alert: we don’t), we still face a second challenge. Jesus not only gathers his disciples together as a “city on a hill,” but he sends them out into the world to live as the “salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13). As we accept this mission, God’s people find themselves living in and alongside political communities that do not recognize the fundamental political truth that the Lord reigns. How should salty citizens of God’s kingdom engage with these other kingdoms, political associations, and cultural groups in which we find ourselves? Let’s call this “pilgrim politics.”
Here, too, the Bible gives us guidance. Scripture is filled with stories of God’s people engaging other cultures, institutions, and political powers that do not recognize the Lord’s reign. Often God’s people do this as relatively powerless minorities living within other political communities. Occasionally, these relatively powerless minorities find themselves with substantial influence in those communities.
When we respond to Jesus’s invitation to be the salt of the earth in our pilgrim politics, we don’t just engage the state and its representatives. Christians are called to live out God’s good news in every sphere of the societies in which we live. What does it mean to live out the good news of God’s kingdom alongside those who do not pledge allegiance to Jesus in our workplaces, parents’ groups, sports clubs, poverty alleviation efforts, residents’ associations, neighborhoods, arts and culture initiatives, political associations, and more?
Your Politics Is Too Small!
It all sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Some of you may even have started placing the passages on your greatest hits into their various circles. “Okay, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ that goes in the outpost politics circle, and ‘Submit to the authorities’ goes in the pilgrim politics circle.” And hey, presto! We’re done.
Not quite. In addition to starting our conversation about the Bible and politics in the wrong place, we sometimes get further off track by ignoring much of what the Bible says about the topic.
I’ve never read J. B. Phillips’s Your God Is Too Small, but I love the title. Perhaps our politics is too small as well. Even if we remember that politics begins with confessing Jesus is Lord, if we cherry-pick a handful of the biblical texts that speak to how we live that out and ignore the rest, we’ll end up with a political vision far smaller and flimsier than the Bible’s own. If we restrict ourselves to Romans 13 and Matthew 22 for imagining our pilgrim political lives, for instance, we’ll miss out on what Daniel, Revelation, Esther, Joseph, the Hebrew midwives, Peter, Moses, and many more have to say (all of whom we’ll explore in this book). Neglecting these texts isn’t just a failure to prepare for your next round of Bible trivia. When we ignore these voices, we reject resources the Spirit gives us for our political discipleship.
But even when we try to listen to the full breadth and depth of Scripture’s political witness, we run into yet another problem (who said politics is easy?). Esther and Nehemiah, Paul and John, those brave Hebrew midwives and Jeremiah’s beleaguered exiles all agree that God reigns. But the ways they live out that political commitment vary, sometimes dramatically. “Submit to the governing authorities,” Paul says. “But God blessed us with families when we lied to Pharaoh and saved Israelite boys from death!” the midwives reply. Even if we sense that the various biblical figures sing from a shared hymnal, this great choir of political witnesses doesn’t always seem to be singing from the same page. And the very diversity of songs they sing can make it hard for us to imagine how to sing along. What’s an aspiring political disciple to do?
Step Back and See the Yoda
When I was a kid, my mom bought me a poster of Master Yoda. While any poster of my favorite Jedi knight was sure to be a winner, what made this poster particularly cool was that it was a photomosaic. Photomosaics are large pictures made up of hundreds or even thousands of smaller photo images. In the case of my Yoda poster, each individual image was a scene from the Star Wars franchise. If you got close enough, you could see Luke fighting Darth Vader or Princess Leia giving orders to the rebel fleet. But when you took a step back, each of these individual images came together to create a big image of Yoda himself.
My Yoda photomosaic gives us a glimpse of how the Bible “does” politics. Each biblical text is like one of those individual frames: It offers a true, reliable depiction of one scene from the larger story. But it’s only when you step back and see how all the individual scenes stand alongside one another that you get the full picture. In fact, if you only have a couple frames to work with, you may misunderstand the story completely. My Yoda poster had dark scenes of loss and chaos standing alongside bright scenes of desert sands and joyful Ewoks. But it is these very differences of color and mood and shape that enable each individual frame to contribute to the overall image.
If we take that photomosaic metaphor as a guide, reimagining biblical politics requires us to do two things. First, we need to study the individual political voices in the Bible. We’ll attend to what they tell us all on their own. We’ll work hard to understand how they function within the biblical books in which we find them and in light of what we know about the period of biblical history in which they occur. We’ll ask questions like, How would we understand the Bible’s politics if all we had was this one snapshot?
But we won’t stop there. We’ll also step back and see how the individual snapshots hang together. When we discover tensions between the snapshots, we won’t assume the Bible is contradicting itself. Nor will we pretend the tensions don’t exist. Instead, we’ll see the diverse political images as part of how the Bible offers us a bigger, better, more adequate photomosaic that holds all the diverse images together in one beautiful frame.
To use another metaphor, perhaps we can imagine the Bible’s great cloud of political witnesses as a group of church members who gather in the church basement to try sorting out how to live out their allegiance to God in a very specific situation their community faces. Each witness brings to the table their shared conviction that God reigns. They also bring their distinct personality and unique experiences with other contexts to the conversation. As we’ll see, Joseph brings his experience of getting promoted to Pharaoh’s cabinet, while John brings his community’s experience of living under a Roman Empire gone off the rails. Jeremiah brings his quiet hopes for the people of God to seek the good of the city alongside their Babylonian neighbors, while the Hebrew midwives bring their excruciating experience of being called to be killers rather than birth coaches. When they try to work out together what political faithfulness looks like, is it any surprise the conversation gets a bit heated?
Let’s be clear: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, for re-proof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). These various biblical voices do not contradict one another in a way that makes any one voice untrue. But one way Scripture trains us for righteousness in our politics is by inviting us to sit down and listen in as these voices dialogue and debate how God called his people to live out their allegiance to God’s kingdom in different times and places.
The diversity of the Bible’s political teaching is a “feature” rather than a “bug,” a gift for political disciples to receive rather than a problem to be solved. Listening to these dialogues and debates within the Bible can help us take the next step in our lives as political disciples: dialoguing and debating with one another about what faithful political practice might look like in our own lives.
For too long, our political discipleship has been impoverished because we’ve only listened to a few of Scripture’s many voices. It’s time to pull up a chair and join the far grander political discussion found in Scripture, even if we bring an awful lot of baggage and a fair bit of pain to the table. It’s time to reimagine biblical politics.
Content taken from Reimagining Biblical Politics by Michael J. Rhodes, ©2026. Used by permission of Baker Academic.
