A King Like the Nations: The Easter Luncheon and the Theology Behind the Prayers

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Speaker 1: 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 doctor 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 doctor James Spencer. I'm joined by doctor Asheesh Varma, and today we're going to discuss something. It's probably going to go well beyond the event that we're going to discuss. But there was a luncheon. It's usually referred to as the Easter Luncheon online. It's been since April first now that this luncheon took place. There's been a lot of comments about certain remarks made at this meeting, particularly by Paula White Kine, who is Trump's sort of faith leader in the White House. As many of you listen to the program before, note I've talked about Christian nationalism a good bit We've talked a fair amount about American civil religion, but when I actually listen to some of the prayers and some of those speeches at this luncheon event, it just felt like there was a necessity to address it, and I didn't want to address it in the moment as a reaction. I wanted to kind of wait a little bit, step back and give more of a reason theological response to it. And so that's what we're going to try to do today. The event's gone, it's probably out of the news cycle to a large extent, But I think there's some really deeper theological implications than just the evangelical clutching of pearls that happens when someone says something goofy, and we really do need to get to the root of it, because if we don't, we're The danger, I think is that people clean up their language and they don't represent what they're really thinking. They clean it up enough that most of us will accept it, and I think that's a real problem. So understanding the roots of this problem, the deeper dynamics of this problem, and how what I would argue is civil religion and maybe some Christian nationalism mixed in but how we are bowing down to a sacred social order that is not Christian. It's a sacred social order that is very American, and we need to be very careful about that. So I'll leave it there and welcome Ashish. Thanks for being here, brother.

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Speaker 2: Thanks, thanks for having me, Thanks for your intro. I think the issue here is that that we have concerns for the sake of the church. Yes, right, and so what we want to do is address that. Certainly, some of these issues are going to sound like we're trying to stand in a political box just because lines have been drawn in modern history of what issues belong to what party, and that's that's just not the intent, right. So this is an hour and two minute program. The first forty two and a half minutes of it were Trump before anyone else came to the podium, and then the final twenty minutes or so were seven these seven so called faith leaders who were coming up in succession, with varying amounts of time given to them. That's to say that there's so much we could talk about that we can't talk about we just don't have time for it. And in that forty two and a half minutes, the goal here is not to call out all of the political issues you or I might have, well, you know, one way or the other with Trump. The goal here is to talk about the theological dynamics and what it means for the church, and just to ask, in some ways, what are we doing?

00:04:00
Speaker 1: Yeah?

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Speaker 2: And so it's worth noting that whatever we don't talk about, it doesn't mean that wasn't important. Yeah, there's limited space. It is worth saying that in that forty two and a half minutes, there's about five minutes accumulative, right, And it's hard to say precisely five minutes because it's scattered, but about five minutes cumulatively of prepared remarks concerning Easter from Trump himself, whereas the other thirty seven or so minutes are him speaking off the kuff about everything except Easter.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: And to me, that's part of the initial concern when this is called a Easter lunch for and with faith leaders, right, where was Easter?

00:04:44
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:04:44
Speaker 2: And when we did finally see Easter, there were some troubling remarks to say, the least.

00:04:49
Speaker 1: Less recognizable than you would have liked it to be. I'll say this I because again I talk about politics on the show an awful lot, and I try to keep it in that theological register. And so just so people know, I'm working on a piece on James tall Rico, who is a Democratic senator or Republican or something like that. He's a House of Reps person down in Texas, and he's been fairly popular recently for using the Bible and arguing from scripture for particular policy issues. And my concern is not with the policy issues, although I wouldn't agree with everything he says. My concern always is that the Bible is being co opted by political discourse, and it's being co opted very poorly most of the time. What I see when people are using the Bible or theological language, and we see it here at this Easter lunch, what we see is that the Bible is being abstracted from its theological matrix. There's no particular necessity for Christ, there's no particular necessity for glorifying the trying God, and the Bible is being pulled in. Theology is being pulled in to a very political conversation and used to legitimate, very specific political agendas. Just if we go back to an old Bonhoeffer quote, right, he wasn't speaking to politics. He was speaking to Christian people, and he says something like, has it not become clear in the way that we have discussed these things today, gentlemen, that we have become more enamored with our own thoughts than with the Bible. We need to be reading the Bible not for ourselves, but against ourselves. What he meant by that was that we need to be reading the Bible expecting to be transformed, expecting to be changed, and not expecting the Bible to affirm all of our agendas. And I think that that is if I'm you know, I'm biblical studies guy, right, So from the at the end of the day, like, I just hate seeing the Bible drawn into these type of conversations, abstracted from that broader theological understanding the reality of the trying God, and used as if it's sort of a bludgeon or a cudgel to push a theological agenda through. And that's what I see happening here in this Easter lunch. And it makes it even more disturbing that much of this was done via prayer. I you know, I had visions going back to Lauren Winner's work of the dangers of Christian practice and the deformation of different Christian practices. While I was watching this, I was like, if I'm sure many listeners may not have read that book, But essentially she argues that we can use practices like prayer in a very abusive and inappropriate manner, and she gives examples of how that's been done throughout history. Some of these prayers that were offered seem really to echo exactly what she's talking about in her book. So I'll leave it there, Ashiesh, but just to say, like, this isn't about politics. It's not about one side or the other. It's not about partisanism. It is about politics, it's not about being partisan. This is about us figuring out why it is that the Bible should be used to authorize any political agenda or any political policy in the way that seems to have been done at this launch.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the things you said, I know what you mean by it, but I think it's worth clarifying. You said it drives you nuts. Not a direct quote. When the Bible is used to push through theological agendas could be interpreted as saying the Bible therefore it doesn't have meaning for what we're doing today. It lives entirely in the past. And now I know you don't.

00:08:56
Speaker 1: I do not mean that.

00:08:57
Speaker 2: Yes, So the issue here again is not precisely theology being done. The issue is what the theology is in service to. And I think you and I we've discussed ahead of time. We've discussed a few times a shared concern that the theology here is being done in service to a particular set of political ideals that have been foisted onto the public, as if we're supposed to bely that these just star straightforwardly and obviously the Bible's concerns, or straightforwardly and obviously what the Bible is even teaching, Yeah, and done in this particular moment, not just in service to those ideals, but in bolstering the particular image of a nation which itself needs to be scrutinized, circled around the body of one particular man in this moment, right so that they repeated frame refrain, wasn't this Roman sort of statement of we pray for our leaders and we recognize the Lord can be at work Therein it was a specific elevation of the president as an anointed one, right, as one who, in the words of Miss White Cain. She referred to him repeatedly as the one who is in charge, precisely because Jesus rose from the dead, and because Jesus rose from the dead, he is the instrument and the person put there as the protector of the church. Now, that was pretty alarming to me. I'm even inclined, and I came to this judgment. I looked up online just to get the names of the people right, and in that process I learned others were calling her heretical. That was the word that came to my mind almost right away. And I think it's worth bearing that the word heresy in its advent, right in the way that it comes about why it's used within the church, is a word that means the use of one form of reality to colonize another. And so the idea is that the idea of America and what it is in the minds of particular people and arguably as a theological claim, is being used here to colonize and therefore put into its own service Jesus. Right, So, rather than circling around the body of Jesus, the Jewish Man born of the virgin son of a carpenter, fulfilling the old Testament the prophet like under Moses the King in the line of David the Priest and the order of Melchizedic, and having everything encircled around him to rethink our structures in our way of thinking. He's instead being put into service on the idea of what America is, or at least the idea of America as a particular political party envisions it or a subset of that party, and also what this one presidential figure would like it to be around his very self.

00:12:00
Speaker 1: That's heresy, Yeah, And I think I agree with you on Paulo wait Kane. I think that her comments were scattered, informed by her background and at least sort of somewhat of quasi prosperity gospel sort of ministry, Like you can see that coming out in all of her comments. And I think her equation between Trump's victory and Jesus' victory is problematic on a whole series of levels, right, and not least of which is the fact that he did lose to Biden not that long ago, so was Biden's victory. Also this same sort of because Christ has victory, Biden had victory, and if not, how do we know? Like I think there are just all these sort of latent assumptions coming into this that we see this is going to appeal to people who Trump are already sort of pro Trump and always Trump and will never disagree with Trump, and who demonize previous presidents, but venerate this one. And I think it has it. It's theologically unnuanced, it's deeply problematic, and it just it can't be held with any degree of certainty or scrutiny. If you dig into that claim, you'll never be able to demonstrate it. And I think that the other aspect of her conversation that really bothered me was the equation when she's talking about, you know, Jesus and he suffered and he was wrongfully arrested, and you know, all these different things, but you never really reference the fact that Jesus is experiencing all that because he's being faithful to God. It's because he's aligning himself with the Kingdom of God and doing the Lord's will. Now he has all of this friction with the world, that's what's happening. That was not partisan politics that God Jesus. It was not Jesus upsetting some sort of status quo by going after one policy as opposed to another. He's representing the Kingdom of God and that kingdom was rejected, and so I think there's a Christian context for the suffering. I know there's a Christian context for the suffering that Jesus suffered, and to say that Trump has suffered in that same way and for those same reasons is very difficult. And that's why I think she makes it generic. Right. It's as if Trump hauld walk down the street and stubbed a tow. That's persecution of some sort because he's trying to make America great again. And I just think her whole argument, in her whole thought process, if you're not careful and look at it carefully. And a lot of people have critiqued her portion of this, but I think if you're not careful, you can start to think, oh, these surface level sort of connections that she's making might actually make sense, and I would just say, no, they really don't. Suffering is not just the same across the board. I would say, first, Peter makes this distinction when he talks about suffering. As a Christian, you have these passages where it's clear that suffering for righteousness, suffering for being a Christian is a very different thing than just suffering because you've done something wrong or you're confronting a different party. I think the equation there is has deeper theological problems than many of the commentators I watched.

00:15:50
Speaker 2: Notice, yeah, to that point, the details matter, yes, Right, we look at things like the Sermon on the Mount and what Jesus does beginning with the beatitudes, but really throughout it where he's he's taking previous understandings that religious leaders have placed upon the people, and Jesus is challenging them. But he's not challenging them so as to break with the tradition of the Jewish covenant covenants with the Jewish law Torah. What he's doing in those moments is he's he's calling out to the people to say, there's been a certain burden placed upon you in the name of the covenants that God has made with the Jewish people, beginning with the Abrahamic Covenant, right, and those burdens of it im placed on you don't actually get at what the covenants are about.

00:16:48
Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 2: The short version of it is that he sees the religious leaders having various levels of interaction with the Roman imperial government. That's over them, some to see their identities fulfilled through Rome, others to see themselves as biding their times as they work with Rome and together expecting a messiah who is in the order of David and established as the king as David was, in order to set themselves up as rivals of Rome, and ultimately the step step on Rome. Right, it's to flip the script and Jesus rightly recognizes that that process would make Israel no different than the other empires around them in the present or the past, right, Yeah. And so he's calling them out, and he's he's liberating the people on the margins. He's liberating those who've been crushed by these these poor uses of the Covenant.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: And it is that that gets him ultimately to Holy Week. Is coming into the city of Jerusalem on palm Sunday, is being greeted by one group of people with palms, while with others being plotted against to go to the cross. And it's that that he submits himself to and not an incidental detail in scripture is that his death comes outside of the city, right, Meaning it's outside of the locusts of powers, and his resurrection comes now from the depths of the earth. The very womb of the earth is what that tomb is in order to raise it up to the hope of a new creation. Right, so Jesus is the first fruits of that. That's not even remotely what we see Trump doing. No, setting aside the moral failures that have been written about plenty, he represents precisely the status quo of an imperial reality that relegates some to an underling position at the expense of the powerful, at the expense of whoever's at the center of this. The fact that he lost an election and the fact that people don't like him is not even remotely the same thing as the persecuse in Jesus is undertaking. But the removal of details is what you have to do in the case of someone like miss White Kinane in order to put forth any sort of similarity. And what's startling is that she marched through various aspects of the life of Christ and remarkable vagueness, yes, and made every single one of them about our president, right except the death of Christ, right, because Trump, of course didn't die.

00:19:31
Speaker 1: Didn't die, right, And I thought, oh, this.

00:19:33
Speaker 2: Is an important point of breaking only to get to the resurrection, in which she then affirms the resurrection as the power in which Donald Trump was raised, meaning it's giving Trump this notion of resurrection argument or presumably from persecution, so that now we're living. And whether she used the words or not, the theological thrust of her claim in some sort of new heavens and new Earth and eschatological kingdom as theologians like to say, Yeah, that Trump is ushered in and that tenor carried forth in more and less subtle ways from most of the people that followed her. Right, she took the most time.

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Speaker 1: And it's interesting, you know, we think about details, we jump off Paul Away came for a minute and jump into Franklin Graham. He does the same thing. He just doesn't do it with Jesus, and so I think people give him a little bit more of a pass. I'm not going to. I think the way he did this was absolutely ridiculous. I mean, he's equating Trump to Esther. Such a time as this raised up to battle the Iranians who want to kill all the Jews, just like the Persians wanted to kill all the Jews back in Esther's day. Again, this sort of surface level equation of what's happening there. And if you don't know and you don't look, you're not going to be able to tell that He's missing layers and layers and layers of details here. So I would argue number one, the Persians were not really the ones who are trying to kill all the Jews. Haman was an Agite, a Gagite, and that is part of the traditional enemies of Israel. It goes all the way back. You can find an a gag in numbers. You can find an agag in for Samuel. This was the the Amalakite sort of lineage. And now you have this one Amalakite who is Haman, who is trying to destroy the Jews in Persia. And this is very much an inner court conflict within Persia that ultimately doesn't work. But it's not the Persians who are trying to do this. And I think the the equation of the Persians with the Iranians historically completely impossible. The Persians were probably Zoroastrian, you know, until like the nineteen seventies, when you finally have an Islamic state set up, it's like twenty five hundred years away from Esther. These are not the same people. This is not the same mentality, this was not the same religion. It wasn't even that. It's not even close to the same thing, not even close. But if you can put those sort of non detail oriented little pieces together and then go, oh, look, Trump is Esther. He's been raised up for a time such as this. It's just a manipulation of the scriptures and a misuse of prayer to argue this type of surface level connections in a way that legitimizes the war. It's crazy. I don't really mind saying that. It's nuts. He does effectively the exact same thing that PAULA white Kin does equating Jesus and Trump. He does the exact same thing equating Esther and Trump, and he should not get a pass just because he doesn't use Jesus.

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Speaker 2: That's right. A prominent passage in the Old Testament that we quote a lot, or I hear quoted a lot that I'm not sure that we really get the narrative thrust of it is the claim that solved the king that precedes David was was more or less the fulfillment of the people's desire to of a king.

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Speaker 1: Like the nations yep.

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Speaker 2: As a biblical theological claim. What I often hear more popularly from the pulpit is that the fact that they wanted a king was a problem. That's not precisely true, right. The issue was specifically like the nations. Right, So the raising up of David, at least the early David and the late David. The middle David had some trouble with this wasn't like the nations. He represented the shepherd's mentality. He represented a sort of demeanor that was supposed to be ministerial of some sort, right ministerial, where the nations around him were to receive what he said or to the way that he was, and to be drawn to worship of Yahweh. This wasn't a statement of subjugation. This wasn't a statement of conquering imperial right. And when we get to Solomon, right, the early Solomon, you see the fruits of this, and that's when the Queen of Sheba comes to him. In other words, you're seeing these good relations with those who are out and through that you see a drawing of people to the God of Israel. By the time you get to the New Testament, the ways that you can describe the thought processes, the political thought processes of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, in their own kinds of ways, is a king like the nations. And it's that which Jesus is pushing against, right, Because what Jesus is saying again is that you have this reality that Paul, for instance, bears out in the Book of Ephesians with his near far language. The old Testman talks about near and far as opposed to in the right ordering, as opposed to this nation against other nations.

00:25:40
Speaker 1: Right.

00:25:41
Speaker 2: So when you get to Paul, he reveals, guess what, the distance between near and far was always meant to be bridged. But that's not a political statement again in the sense that we think of it, right, It's meant to be a theological statement about the ordering of creation into its highest point of flourishing.

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Speaker 1: Right.

00:25:59
Speaker 2: It's the freedom of creation within that. And the payoff of this is supposed to be that you have these peoples that might otherwise have been considered far, the gentiles, but they are to be brought near in a way in which they're not second class citizens. Right, the way that Franklin Graham orders his particular rendering a vester to return to that point, sets up opposition, It sets up a king like the nations. He even describes this as a parallel to the point of not just for the good of America, but to save Israel, where Israel is not a political entity, not a covenantal identity, which is completely removed from the ordering of Israel as an entity that's covenantal. It's meant to draw people to the beauty and flourishing reality of God, of their covenant God.

00:26:50
Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 2: You see this also in the antagonistic sorts of claims in the middle of prayer. Ostensibly prayer, Franklin Graham says, refers to these Islamic lunatics.

00:27:02
Speaker 1: Right.

00:27:03
Speaker 2: Again, that's oppositional in a way, that's just. It's asking for trouble, it's asking for conflict in a way that's It doesn't at all speak to the beauty of the God that you're wishing to proclaim. It doesn't speak at all to the ability to draw people who are far near. It speaks of keeping those who are far, not just far, but now in an antagonistic relationship, and to do so ostensibly in the name of Jesus. As you pointed out, he doesn't say Jesus. But that's clearly the implication, right, Yeah, in so far as Esther is this in the Persian Empire, Israel is this vis a vis the Iranian people, and on this Easter Sunday. It's a representation now the fullness of what God meant and intended to do through this man in a time like this, which is again in a biblical phrase, for such time as this.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and you don't get the impression as he's praying. So there are precatory psalms where you would find this sort of same antagonistic language as the Islamic lunatics. Right, you could see in precatory psalms utilizing that sort of language. But in the imprecatory psalms, what you normally sense is that there's this lament about a lack of justice and a desire for God to write the world. What you don't see is this idea that we are looking for justice, we're looking for God to write the world, and oh look, here happens to be a world leader who God is placed right before us in order to write the world and the way that we think it should be righted. That in it of itself is also problematic. It's the Islamic lunatics are being framed as the problem, the only problem for justice. Let's put it like that, the only problem for justice. I wouldn't deny that I have a problem with the way of the Islamic regimes talk about other peoples as well, But I don't think what you see in his discourse his prayer is an elevation above that, an elevation that recognizes, to your point, you know, the king like the nations. Part of what I see when I read that statement in First Samuel is Saul is a king who fears the people. If you read through for Samuel and you watch where Saul fails, he fears because the people are running away, and so he takes action to do an inappropriate sacrifice to keep the people near him. He operates early on on threats because the people won't come to him. He threatens them basically and says, if you don't come fight, I'm coming after you. Next. David and Goliath narrative, which we often frame is this contrast between David and Goliath, But really what we see there is Saul is afraid because he knows he doesn't have the physical strength to beat Goliath. And so he cowers in the back with his men. Saul's always afraid of what he sees before him. David, the difference is he fears the Lord. He's constantly doing things that demonstrate that he is more attuned to what the Lord is doing supposed to what Saul is doing. Now he does that imperfectly. I have read the David and Abashivan narrative. I'm not ignoring that. But the point is that even as we move into the New Testament, to your point and you say, well, what is Jesus really embodying here? He's not embodying a political revolution, because political revolutions won't work. The way of the world is obedience to the will of the Father. That's what he's showing us. It's faithfulness. It's not alignment with a political entity. It's continually being faithful to the Lord, living obediently, even when living obediently doesn't solve the world's problems. It is our strategy, and that's it. And I think that gets lost in all of these prayers at that the prayers that we're going to talk about. At least, I actually think Bishop Baron gave the best prayer at that meeting. But I will say paul O White Kine, Franklin Graham, and then the other person we haven't talked about yet, Robert Jeffers. They just really feel like what they're promoting is sort of a triumphalism that the Kingdom of God can be made manifest in some way, shape or form through military action in the United States or through the United States leadership in some way. And I'm just not sold. In fact, I would say I'm more than not sold. I would absolutely disagree that that is the way of things. I think God uses our nations. I think God is God has a plan for the United States. But when I say that, I have no idea what that plan is. And we live with that mystery, right, Like, it's not that the United States has some special covenantal relationship with God that I'm not aware of. We're a nation. God uses nations and stop.

00:32:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I want to hone in on that God has a plan discourse. Yeah, to be clear. In the Book of a bac Tobacua comes forward, he calls out to God. He says, Lord, help the wealthy, the powerful amongst my people, referring to Biblical Israel are trampling upon the outcasts, the poor, the underprivileged, do something about it. God's responses, don't worry, Babylon's coming in and they're going to take care of them. Yes, a backup is beside himself.

00:33:06
Speaker 1: He says, what wait, no, what, Yeah.

00:33:08
Speaker 2: Babylon's worse.

00:33:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, I take it back.

00:33:12
Speaker 2: No, don't worry, they'll get their own too, right, And historically them getting their own ends up being the Greeks. The point being in that moment that to to well, to the point of a plan that God might have, what it is that God does in and through, maybe with often in spite of the United States, is more akin to don't worry. The Babylonians are coming in. Don't worry, they'll get their own too right. But the way that the US has often established itself, and this is maybe a topic of its own, is this sort of city on a hill mentality. You hear this on both sides of the letter Ledger by the way. You hear this if you go to Fox News, you hear this, if you go to CNN. The city on the hill is sort of dying. The criticism is less less often about invoking that and more often what someone means by it. But The problem theologically is to invoke it at all in that sort of way. Right, It's a declaration that exists within the Sermon on the Mount to refer to what Israel was supposed to be as a covenant reality, not as a political, national imperial entity.

00:34:26
Speaker 1: Yep.

00:34:27
Speaker 2: And the degree to which that can still be possible, in Jesus' words, is the degree to which in that Sermon on the Mount, he's he's upending the order in which, again the Pharisees and Sadducees have in their own ways seen their allegiance with Rome as either a fulfillment or a or an entity to be used to reach a fulfillment that still looks like a king. Like the Nations, the US is not a covenant identity. It's not the replacement of Israel. And what's what's particularly troubling is that, unfortunately, there is a history and the US beginning with the Mayflower Compact. Right. If you read it, it is all right, it's an explicit declaration of what the people saw, that their reality being entering into this world, where they saw this land that we think of as America today as a land flowing with milk and honey. The new Israel. They saw themselves therefore as the new Israel, and this particular mode of Israel as a king like the nations, and they saw the people that were in it as the Canaanites. They set themselves already up in a position as readers of the text that were in direct opposition to the message Jesus giving, which was to speak on behalf of the elevation of all creation, not the elevation of some at the expense of the rest of creation.

00:35:48
Speaker 1: Right. It's when I studied some of that, and I haven't done the full historical research to nail down this claim, but what I saw is the use of the Exodus narrative in early American literature has so many resonances with what we find in liberation theology. It's really not even funny. It's always a political liberation of freedom from tyranny so that we can live on our own terms. And when you read the Biblical Exodus, when you actually read the account in Exodus, Exodus fourteen and fifteen, the israel Lites escape Exodus fifteen is the Song of Sea. Exodus twenty, they're getting the Ten commandments. God is essentially saying I'm the one who redeemed you out of Egypt. You're not living life on your terms, You're living them on mine. Here are the constraints, here's the law. This is what you now get to do. And it wasn't a constricting sort of law there. It was an appropriate constraint given so that the israel could really enjoy their freedom and remain in a position in the presence of God and God going with them, God being with them, God being together in them, being together with God. That was supposed to be the animating principle, the animating idea, right that we keep Israel safe and allow them to go into the land. They're going with God. God's going into the land. You can come with him. Here's how you live in the presence of God. Here's how you walk with him. Like, that's what those laws were meant to do. But when that exodus narrative is activated, particularly, I would say, specifically in early America, what we find is, no, we just want freedom from the tyranny of Europe right or of Great Britain specifically, and we want to be able to live life on our own terms. Now, was that life on their own terms? Was that structured with some sense of miracle. Was it influenced by some Christian teachings and those kinds of ideas. Probably that's not Christianity. And so it doesn't matter how close you get, if you're not living under the lordship of Jesus Christ, you're not there yet, right. So, I think that overall, what we're seeing in these prayers, what we're seeing in some of the history is a slippage. It's this notion that we can take a lot of the good Bible teachings, like we can lucky dip into scripture and we can say, oh, I like this nugget, I like that nugget, I really enjoy this part. Some of the other ones I'm going to do without. And I don't really need Jesus to do any of this, and so I'll just keep these portions. I think what I see in these in these at this prayer lunch, and what I see a lot when people were talking about advocating for Christian nationalism and those kind of things, is that Jesus tends to get parked somewhere else. And what they're really talking about is something akin to the Judeo Christian ethic that is then situated under an American civil religion, and now we need a new Messiah, a new king, a new leader who can usher in this moment of enhanced morality. None of that is a Christian story, None of it is a true exodus, because we don't end up getting freed from anything like what we get freed from in Christ. We don't get freed from sin. We just move from one dominion of sin to another. And what Christ brings us is that freedom from sin, as Paul talks about, like Romans six. So there's just so much I think that we see in these in this luncheon that is so deeply problematic. And the last person, which we haven't really talked much about yet, is Robert Jeffers. I dealt with I dealt with his July fourth sermon a couple of years ago in my book Serpents and Doves Shameless Plug. But he argued there and at the end of his sermon he quotes Psalm thirty three twelve. You know, blessed is the nation who's God is the Lord. And that's actually in his sermon. He only quotes that portion. There's actually a second part of Psalm thirty three twelve. He only quotes a not b and b really specifies this as the covenant people of Israel, but when he quotes it, he's talking about America. That mentality I think carries through in this prayer that he gives and the remarks that he makes at this luncheon. He uses this language of divine authorization, and what he means by that is not that ever leader everywhere is appointed by God and so we should give them some due respect. What he seems to mean by that is you have been uniquely chosen by God for a task that will advance His kingdom in a very particular way that Christians should all get behind. I don't know how else it put that, but when I listen to Jeffri's talk, that's really what I think he's saying. So I don't know if you have thoughts on that one, Ashish, but I'll stop talking and let you respond.

00:41:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do. And it connects to what you begin your comments on with the liberating impulse. My emphasis might be a little bit different than yours, but I think there's some parallel elements that lead into what I see as similarly troubles and troublesome remarks from Jeffers that the liberating impulse that you're talking about. Of course, there are a variety of liberation theologies, yeah, right, and they're doing different things in different places, but also sometimes coming from different traditions and so different tools at play. But the impulse that concerns you, I think is a fair one that if a liberation theology is merely an inversion of a political spectrum, yes, then what we've created is a ripe new opportunity for abuse.

00:42:27
Speaker 1: Agreed. That's exactly and.

00:42:29
Speaker 2: Unfortunately the rhetoric in a lot of cases, and you this might be controversial in your part, but I know where you're coming from. What these mayflower folks you call them liberators in some sense, or liberation theologis of some kind in some sense, they were, right, Yeah, and that's precisely the impulse they had in mind. Alternatively, of course, Jesus is the liberator. But what's distinct about his liberation is that, yes, he's calling us to a reality that now receives its life from the fullness of God's very presence and being, giving life to all that there is. But what's distinct about that that's not you know, of course, one difference is there's God versus not God but it's more than that. The God who liberates is setting up a reality in which the pattern that he gives to creation, yeah, God's very self, from father giving of son to son, giving what the son has been given by the Father to his disciples to then give on to those that they take the good news to. Is this consistent pattern that begins at the top of the giving of oneself. And this is the pattern that makes makes liberation truly life giving and free for all, right. And it's the irony of that freedom comes not in the freedom from, as Bart would say, but in the freedom for, as he argues, to give ourselves to another. And ultimately that giving ourselves to another is to give it all to the God, who doesn't keep for God's self, but gives it all right back to the giving of God's very self. It's an eternal cycle. And that freedom is not a freedom just for a few. It's not a freedom of some at the expense of the many, which is what every version of this freedom from, this liberating experience that doesn't have its ultimate understanding in the self giving of the Father, in the Son for everyone, right. And that kind of liberating just sets up, ironically a king like the nation. But the kind of liberating that God gives us is a kind that is for the other. Now, when you get to Jeffers, this distinction is precisely what's on display for him the presence of Donald Trump, beginning all the way back in twenty sixteen, when he seems to indicate God in some way told him Trump would be next president, which I guess he was. So I suppose whether or not God told him.

00:45:05
Speaker 1: He was at least right.

00:45:08
Speaker 2: Right was always for the purpose of being able to and in his own words, right was always for the purpose of enacting what amounts to a power over, And that power over is never self giving, it's always extracting. Right, And so whatever liberation Jeffers thought that he and his people received in that moment came at the expense of the fullness of life, not just of other people. But I would argue in a conversation that would take us further, and we don't have time for a subjugation of the very earth itself. Right, it can. It accelerated patterns of loss of fertility for crops. It accelerated patterns of removing stuff from the earth without filling it with anything else, creating an unstabable, unstable crust of the earth. It continued projects that removed habitat from the other creatures of God, the other animals that belong to land, animals that belong to Day six of creation. Right, that's obviously a larger creation. But these are all markers. Right when you look at the end of the Bible and you look at Ezekiel, the end of Ezekiel where it's where it's alluding to this same end, it's this garden imagery in which all the creatures of the earth are receiving their full and are able to receive their full not at the expense of another creature. Right, And any version of this liberating impulse that just merely changes who's at the center but continues to extract is not ultimately liberating. It it's downcasting of another group of people's And that could go either way in the political spectrum. By the way, it just so happens to be one way the moment in under the Jeffer's vision. But that shows to me a radical lack of understanding on his part of what Easter is and what it is Jesus doing and the fullness that that's meant to bring to a liberation of the entire earth.

00:47:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I think his references to Trump ushering in a spiritual revival, and I'm not exactly sure that was exactly the way he put it, but there is a spurring on of a spiritual revival that is done in the context of this presidency that wasn't done in previous ones. Is basically the implication I think he's playing in and leading into the dynamic. You're suggesting that, in part oddly, the spiritual revival is available because Christians are getting what they want. And this spiritual revival doesn't, in my mind, necessarily equate to Christians deepening their commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. It may very well just be a function of Christianity being more comfortable now and so I can more conveniently participate as a Christian in various realms. And I'm not sure that that. I know, I wouldn't call that revival, but I'm not sure that's not what I see happening. This merger between the politics and the religion, which again I've addressed in numerous other episodes. People can go and listen to those if they want, but I think this unholy merger between the politics and the religion. And what I mean by that is that I kind of introduce this, but there's this idea that what's the sacred order that we sit underneath. I think what each of these people conveyed that we've talked about, they conveyed that the sacred order is America, and that the social order then is downstream from America. That there's a vision of America that they have that is the sacred order, and it is why they can identify Donald Trump in the way that they have. What I think we're arguing is just to put in these terms that the Kingdom of God is the sacred order, and that everything underneath that sits underneath that sacred order should be conforming to the authority of Christ and seeking to be refined to his image. I read Romans thirteen correctly. Everything sits under the authority of God, and that means that a politician doesn't get to determine what is good in the sense that they get to make it up wholesale themselves. They should be recognizing what is good and doing thusly, and the Church should be speaking in to the political realm saying, by the way, you missed it this time. This isn't justice, this isn't goodness, this isn't beauty, this isn't whatever. We need to have a prophetic voice in that, not a legitimizing voice. It's not that we are constantly attacking the people who are in charge of us. That's not what I'm saying. We can give people their due right. When they do justice, we should affirm that. When they do goodness, we should affirm that. But my perspective is we should always be pointing beyond this justice that you're enacting. This is gesturing forward to the judgment of God that is coming. And so even though you're serving justice in the moment, you need to be serving Christ. Like We've got to get to that point where the church understands that these political leaders are gesturing toward God's judgment when they do it right, but that they still need to know Christ in order to escape God's judgment at the end. And I think that somewhere along the line we've just forgotten that part of it. We've gotten consumed with being comfortable having religious freedom, having all the rights that we have, and those are fantastic things. I don't I'm not wishing them away but I also know that if my faith depends on not being persecuted, I'm going to be in trouble one of these days. And so I think that that sort of summarizes my discomfort with what I heard from these three individuals. For the most part. I'll let you go ahead, Ashiesh.

00:51:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, I second what you're saying. I suppose if we're talking in terms of summaries very much related to yours, my discomfort is the collect apps of the faith into national identity. One way people talk about that you alluded to is nationalism, in other words, civil religion. My fear is, and I'm drawing off one of our former colleagues herea Mike McDuffie, is that it's it's actually a description of America as a religion. And I'm still wrestling with understanding that. But increasingly as I listened to these people, it really did seem that there was a lack of a gap between their understanding of this nation and their understanding of their faith, such that there's a loss of the distinctiveness of Jesus. There's a loss of the meaningfulness of the biblical covenant with biblical Israel. Right not to be confused with the modern nation state of Israel, and the meaningfulness of Jesus is coming out of that, so that we can't see in the way that these folks talked about, these supposed faith leaders. We can't see or a man a way of understanding the goodness of the work of Jesus and the work of renewal that we see in the first fruits, we see in the very work of Jesus as separated in any sort of way from where this country goes. Yeah, right, And I find that problematic, not least because regardless of who's in control this world, this country has never represented the thriving and the fulfillment and the liberation really of everyone in this country, never mind outside of this country. Correct, It's always existed within the kind of reality that you see, even if the politics are different at the top, the kind of reality you see in the emperor or the imperial dynasties of the past. Yeah, And that's always the blessing of a few at the expense of the many, and that blessing of the few is a short lived thing, right, Yeah, And that concerns me when we now reduce what Jesus is doing to this we make Jesus a partisan entity. We make Jesus a political entity that sets one nation up against the other when the work that Jesus came to do radically challenges all of it. Right, So when we think of the work of the providential ministry of God, we begin to see God as a puppeteer and raised up America to do X, Y, and Z. When I think the better way to look at it is, these things exist because the world exists in a place civilianation from it's thriving, which is with the Tree of Life as it represents God's fulfilling presence in the center of it.

00:54:47
Speaker 1: Right.

00:54:49
Speaker 2: But the existence of the world in this kind of a way doesn't mean God is powerless within it. God can nudge, God can pull, God can move, God can push. And that's what we mean by the providence of God, that nothing is outside the scope of God working. But that's not the same thing as saying the set of affairs politically that's at play are God's entities. That's right, and the collapse of those realities really troubles me. And the fact that Christians are happy to embrace that troubles me.

00:55:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too, I think just to end this episode were coming up on time, but I would just say we didn't get to it. But I do have a piece that will be published on christianity dot com that discusses some of these prayers, and I would just commend Bishop Baron's prayer is one of these bright spots. So if you've listened this long, you shouldn't leave with the impression that what we're saying is Christians should never pray at the White House. It's not at all what we're saying. What we're saying is that Christian prayer at the White House, Christian participation in politics needs to be situated under the authority of Christ and needs to form to the sort of patterns that we see in Jesus and throughout the scriptures. And I thought, as I listened to each one each person pray, there were a couple of bright spots. But Bishop Baron, I thought, did a wonderful job of number one, recognizing that it's almost Easter. I thought that was nice, really focusing it on Jesus, but then also praying for the President and praying in a way that echoed very much the Sermon on the Mountain. He talked about weakness or meekness and humility. He talked about wisdom. You know, he encouraged God to instill in Donald Trump these characteristics, and so I think that there are appropriate ways for us to pray for our president. So this isn't about hey, don't pray for your political leaders. This isn't about hey, never participate in politics or never show up at the White House. That's not it. But we have to recognize that our God sits above all of this and that we his name, and in doing so, we have a role and responsibility of representing him well. And I don't think that the first three folks did that. I thought Bishop Baron did a wonderful job of it. So we can leave it there and really appreciate you having this conversation. I learned a lot. I think your comments were really helpful, and so thanks for being here, and thanks everybody else for listening. We'll catch 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 dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.