Jonathan Leeman

Religion and politics are the world’s two biggest Rorschach tests. When engaging in either, we tend to see what we bring to the test. Fusing the two into one giant test pushes the limits of the human ability to comprehend each other. Wire it into a participatory democracy and supercharge it with social media, and you get the incoherent buzz that is early 21st-century America. Jonathan Leeman attempts to tune out the static and offer a healthy frequency for Christians.

Leeman tries to build show more on timeless Christian principles, but he’s naturally informed by his time, place, and sect: the latter days of the first Trump administration, Washington D.C., and conservative Southern Baptist flavored with Reformed theology. I don’t mean that as a criticism. For one thing, I’m just as conditioned as he is by time, place, and sect. For another, it’s hard to criticize Leeman because he’s such a humble guy. No doubt, this is partly pragmatic. When your church is a blend of racial and party affiliations in the most political city of the most powerful hegemony on Earth, humility is the only rational stance. But I think chalking this up only to pragmatism is unfair. Leeman has arrived at some hardwon conclusions, especially on race relations in America, both through the beautiful grind of ministry and from his theology of politics.

My reaction to Leeman’s conclusions is divided. Perhaps most importantly, we would converge on a similar praxis. Starting from a polemic against the idea of the public square as neutral, he builds a case for Christian participation in that square within my own eschatological framework: that the church exists as an embassy of a coming kingdom rather than a Committee of Building the Kingdom Now. Pastors are not policy wonks, and need to stay in their lane (which, according to Leeman’s Twitter bio, is one of the things he tries to do). That lane, though, does include matters of morality and justice. The trick is discerning between a handful of “straight line” issues where a church can bind the conscience of its members on the basis of the Bible, and a bewildering vastness of “jagged line” issues where wisdom has a weightier role and Christians need to leave room for each other to differ, learn, and love.

All of that resonates with me. I appreciate Leeman’s analogy of the church as an embassy. Embassies represent a foreign sovereign, demonstrate that sovereign’s values and authority, and bear their first and highest allegiance to that sovereign while conducting themselves with respect toward their hosts. Embassies should not be cauldrons of revolution, dens of manipulators, or engines of domination. This aligns with my own conception of the church, and Leeman and I would each prioritize evangelism over lobbying, and downgrade party politics in favor of personal sanctification. Sometimes issues are clear enough that a church has the right and responsibility to say something and even to bind the conscience of its members; but those instances are rarer than you’d think. Mostly, we have more important things to do. We are the light of the world, and we can’t afford to be playing around in the dark.

My other reaction is to swerve a bit from Leeman’s theory. He stakes out space for Christians in the public square with the common evangelical argument that everyone is religious, everyone has gods. Mine might be a traditional personal deity, and yours might be human freedom expressed as the sexual revolution, but each of us worships something. It isn’t fair for you to say that your god gets to occupy the public square but mine can’t just because you dispute his existence. Democracy means that everyone (regardless of which gods they worship) gets to debate, persuade, and vote; that someone’s moral compass will provide the foundation of law; and that Christians have just as much right as any other “worshiper” to give it the ol’ college try.

I get the attraction of this, but I think it contains a poison pill. For one thing, I consider it a rhetorical trick. A religion and a secular ideology do similar things in terms of imposing epistemological, moral, and ethical constraints on their devotees; but doing similar things doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. Out of friendship, I might prioritize your needs very highly and treat you with kindness, deference, and love. The fact that I do the same things for my wife doesn’t mean you and I are married. Friendship and marriage do similar things, but they’re not the same thing. Likewise, a secular ideology is not a religion. It lacks key elements such as the supernatural, the revelatory, the spiritually immanent. One of these things is not like the other, and I’m not willing to play semantic games just to get a foot in the door.

More importantly, though, this argument drags God down to the level of an abstract ideology. Karl Barth had the right idea when he opened his “Church Dogmatics” by positing God as the only explainer of himself, not just another subject for human investigation. Leveling the playing field by equating Christianity with secular ideologies reverses Barth’s polarity: now “God” is just another abstraction elbowing all the other abstract “gods” for a place at the table. Convincing my neighbor that Christianity and the sexual revolution are both religions doesn’t make evangelism easier; it just drags God down to the level of the sexual revolution where he can be tamed, dissected, and rejected.

I think the idea that “everything is gods” is flawed, perhaps fatally. If God is equal to every other abstract ideology, then why shouldn’t I abandon separation of church and state and try to ram my “God-eology” into law? If we reduce God to an idea so the big boys will let us play with them, then I see no reason to limit myself from imposing my idea on everyone in the same way that everyone else tries to impose their ideas on me. Leeman opposes the confusion of church and state, but his pathway to political participation has no guardrails to prevent it. Without those guardrails, there’s nothing standing between the gospel and, say, the poisonous fungal growth creeping out of Moscow, Idaho.

I’d rather stick to Leeman’s image of the embassy, and clearly represent God as one who stands apart and above. As individual citizens, we may develop theories or participate in activities that we think are most supportive of a free and healthy society. For those of us who are religious, this will certainly be informed by our faith to a greater or lesser degree. But all of that is secondary, and I’m not going to waste time trying to figure out how to enshrine God into law. He’ll take care of that himself on the Last Day. So rather than try to jury rig society along the lines of my “God-eology,” I’m going to do the church’s business: call people to a better and a higher life with the King of Kings and the Prince of Peace.

I don’t pretend that managing this balance is easy, that answers are always clear, or that democracy itself doesn’t present challenges the apostles never dreamed of. I also won’t pretend that Leeman would not also elevate a gospel mission above politics, because he does, with great clarity and humility. I would simply encourage the Christian, as Leeman himself does, to think of the public square less as a place to dominate with your cramped political theology and more as a place to shine for our most glorious God. show less

The author states that, “The primary goal of this book is not to help Christians make an impact in the public square. It is not to help the world be something. It is to help Christians and Churches be something” (p. 33).* Rather than pushing a partisan agenda, Leeman warns us to “…be leery of being too captivated by any political worldview. Your tight-gripped principles should come from Scripture, not ideology” (p. 157). He reminds Christians that our primary identity is who we are show more in Christ according to the glorious Gospel of grace, lived out in fellowship with the local church. One of his goals “…is to encourage us all to stop letting our political parties set our political agenda. Even more, we should not conflate our parties with our faith. Parties are good servants, but bad masters; useful instruments, but awful identities” (pp. 116-117).

He deals very practically with how Christians should approach and advocate for issues that are important to them – both issues that directly relate to clear biblical principles and ones about which individual Bible-believing Christians might disagree because they are based on logical arguments, inferences, pragmatic concerns, etc. rather than a single principle. An important part of this is the discussion on how we treat those with whom we disagree. For example: “If you participate in social media, does your tone edify or convey care? Or does it lambaste and belittle? How will it affect your evangelism? Our arguments should seek to persuade rather than to score points” (p. 165).

I have another whole page of quotes that jumped out at me as I read this. However, rather than include them all, I will settle for urging you to read this book for yourself. As with any political or theological book, you probably won’t agree with everything in it (e.g. I thought he put a little more weight on Genesis 9:5-6 than it could legitimately bear), but it provides a much-needed biblical perspective on government and our participation in it. If you claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ, be guided by God’s Word, not a party platform or the combative, contemptuous attitude that prevails in today’s politics. show less

Summary: Explores the nature of the church, arguing that it is a political institution that serves as an embassy of the kingdom of God, with implications for both its internal life and its engagement with the nations and governments of the world.

It seems that the relationship of church and state, which we often frame as spiritual versus political, and organic versus institutional, is a perennial discussion. In this work, Jonathan Leeman does a fine-grained analysis of both the biblical show more material concerning covenant-redemptive history and studies of the new institutionalism and turns much of the traditional schools of thought on their heads, arguing that both church and state are political and institutional, that our separations of spiritual and political realms don't wash, and that our liberal idea of religious freedom ends in the destruction of religious freedom. He argues that both church and state function under the rule of God, albeit under different covenants and functioning in different "ages." He contends that there is no neutral public square but that it is a battleground of the gods and that the state, ordained by God, either acting in accord with God or self-justifying.

Intrigued? I found myself growing more and more intrigued as I followed his carefully reasoned argument to its conclusion and thesis about the nature of the church. Leeman writes in his Introduction:

"Yet the primary claim of this book is that the local church is just such a political assembly. Indeed, the church is a kind of embassy, only it represents a kingdom of even greater political consequence to the nations and their governors. And this embassy represents a kingdom not from across geographic space but from across eschatological time.

"In other words, this book is concerned with the biblical and theological question of what constitutes a local church. The answer, it will argue, is that Jesus grants Christians the authority to establish local churches as visible embassies of his end-time rule through the “keys of the kingdom” described in the Gospel of Matthew. By virtue of both the keys and a traditional Protestant conception of justification by faith alone, the local church exists as a political assembly that publicly represents King Jesus, displays the justice and righteousness of the triune God, and pronounces Jesus’ claim upon the nations and their governments."

Leeman begins by calling into question our conceptions of politics and institutions arguing for a broader conception of politics that includes the church, and that an institutional understanding of the church's life is warranted in scripture. A political institution is "a community of people united by a common governing authority," and he applies this both to church and state.

His next four chapters explore a politics of creation, fall, the new covenant, and the kingdom. He argues that the state operates under the Noahic covenant and has delegated authority to maintain the social order in the present age while refraining from enforcing belief, or impinging upon religious liberty, rooting religious liberty in an absolute standard, rather than in the conflicted conscience of liberal democracy. The church, foreshadowed by Israel, operates under the new covenant as ambassadors of the coming age, ordering its own belief and practice through the "power of the keys" while announcing the coming rule of Christ and its character to the nations.

A particularly striking conclusion is that it is the local church that is the focus of this work, and the only meaningful place, in Leeman's argument, that functions as a kingdom embassy. Furthermore, he argues that the "power of the keys," that is, the power both to admit people into membership and instruct them in truth, and to remove those who, by their lives, repudiate Christ's rule, resides not in a single person or in a hierarchical structure, but in the congregation as a whole. This certainly is consistent with a "priesthood of all believers" theology, but I am troubled with what seems an inevitable consequence of his conclusion, the highly Balkanized kingdom of schismatic Protestantism. Are local congregations the only institutional manifestation of the kingdom?

His development of the idea of church as institution also bears on his discussion of justification and a difference with N.T. Wright. He would contend that covenant inclusion is not the definition of justification which he would maintain is being "declared righteous, but rather the institutional context of justification. This is one example of the careful analysis one will find in this work, in contrast with what Leeman believes is often fuzzy thinking. One also sees this in his critique of "advancing the kingdom" through social transformation without conversion. For Leeman, this begins with defining terms carefully, and distinguishing from notions that accrue more to liberal, Western ideologies than biblical theology.

This is a short review of a very long book. It is not possible here to "show all the work" in Leeman's argument. His premises about politics and institutions and his covenant theology are key to that argument. It is particularly helpful in its conclusion that the church's witness is a political act, in the ways it defines what both church and state do under a sovereign God. His discussion of the politics of forgiveness versus self-justification was another highlight for me in bringing to bear the distinctiveness of the Christian message as it bears on both church and public life.

In a time where political engagement tends consist of knee-jerk reactions to hot-button issues, slogans and soundbites, and efforts to return America to some kind of mythical Christian age, Leeman challenges us to the hard thinking about what our proper role is in our churches, and a framework for how Christians involved with the state might act. Whether you agree with all of his conclusions, the process he uses to reach them will challenge your own thinking and assumptions. show less

Overall, an informing read. I think it was a good articulation of the Congregationalist perspective of church governance. My particular faith tradition has always had an unhealthy mix of Presbyterian and Congregationalist polity. Unlike most staff I have worked with, I lean towards the Congregationalist approach.

There are aspects of his argument that are unwarranted or drawn out for no lingering purpose. That can be really frustrating when an author abandons succinctness out of fear of not show more covering a particular argument someone might throw up. However, I get it. show less