On A New Christian Authoritarianism? (Pastors Talk, Ep. 239)
What is Christian authoritarianism and how should Christians respond to modern politics? On this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman discuss Leeman’s journal, A New Christian Authoritarianism. They talk about the history of the relationship between church and state and continue by discussing modern culture’s view of morals and virtue. In this conversation, they address what the Bible says about how much authority the church should give the government what the mission of the church is.
- The History of Church and State Relations
- Has Culture Become Morally Dissolute?
- How Much Authority Should Christians Give the State?
- Is Political Theology a Mission of the Church Issue?
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
Hi, this is Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
And this is Mark Dever.
Jonathan Leeman:
And welcome to this episode of 9Marks Pastors Talk. Again, it’s us.
Mark Dever:
Again?
Jonathan Leeman:
Actually, I think this might be the last of the season. Is this the last of the season? Yeah, this is the last one of the season. We’ll take a break for the summer and just going to have to find other things to listen to. 9Marks exists to help pastors build healthy churches, learn more at 9Marks.org.
Mark Dever:
And yet these days you come out just for summer reading with a journal that is 300 pages long when you print it out.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think it’s 375. That’s correct. Our longest ever by far because it’s such a hard topic.
Mark Dever:
It’s using words that a lot of pastors aren’t that familiar with, or at least not to be used by pastors, words like nationalism and magisterial. So some of us may have gotten up early recently to watch the coronation of King Charles III. And there we saw something that was, without doubt, nationalistic and certainly by many of the accouterments, you know, where it was in an Abbey, the Bible being there and being referred to as the greatest treasure on this earth and lots of scripture read, it seemed to be a kind of Christian nationalism.
Jonathan Leeman:
It was, I didn’t watch it. So I can’t, I saw the…
Mark Dever:
My description just now was excellent.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. I saw news footage after the fact. I didn’t see it. So I don’t know that I can comment on specific things as such. What do you, what did you think?
The History of Church and State Relations
Mark Dever:
I thought it was a point that seemed like Charles was being made an elder at Capitol Hill Baptist church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Like what happened when he was…
Mark Dever:
When they were referred to reformed Protestantism as a positive thing. He was called the defender of the faith. And I think some of the vows he took may have literally been some of the same vows that our elders take.
But when we’ve studied the Reformation, we’ll know the Church of England is the established church in England, that it’s a Protestant church historically.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, it’s not just the established church. It’s the fact that Henry was made supreme over it all through the act of supremacy, putting the church’s authority under the king’s authority in a way that effectively made the state part church.
What Are Magisterial Reformers?
Mark Dever:
Well, across the Reformation, when we read it in seminary, a lot of us who are pastors, we’ve read books on the Reformation and they’re called magisterial reformers. What are magisterial reformers?
Jonathan Leeman:
That slice, that lane of the Protestant tradition in which the magistrate was understood to be Christianized. So it’s a Christian magistrate and in which the church was established. Contrary to your more dissenting Protestant lanes, Baptists, Anabaptists.
Mark Dever:
Who by our very nature, we couldn’t take control of the state because we were few in number or there’s something in our theology of the church that…
Jonathan Leeman:
Both-and.
Mark Dever:
Okay. I understand the few in number part. What is your or my understanding of the church would forbid us from being able to control a state the way, say the Congregationalists could control Massachusetts or, you know, the Anglicans, Virginia, and their colonies?
Jonathan Leeman:
When you move from a paedobaptist to a Baptist, believers Baptist, conception of the church and what constitutes the church and where Jesus names belong, you necessarily cut a kind of tie that now I’m not saying all paedobaptists have to go in a magisterial direction. They don’t. But they have a magisterial…
Mark Dever:
This means using the offices of the state to protect or forward the church, right?
Jonathan Leeman:
Right teaching, right doctrine in the church, and in also not just that, but also a shared membership between state, nation, and church. Okay. So with paedobaptism, and I think I learned this well from you, Mark.
You’re the one long time ago that helped me see this more clearly. In a paedobaptist conceptuality, I have available to me if I want it, again, I don’t have to, if I want it, the ability to baptize every new citizen into the church because of their own profession of faith…
Mark Dever:
Presumably, the parents are part of that church.
Jonathan Leeman:
As such, I can have Anglican England and Roman Catholic Spain. Christian Europe.
Mark Dever:
Reformed Geneva.
Jonathan Leeman:
Exactly. In a way, a Baptist view of regenerate church membership just doesn’t allow that. The people of God are no longer overlapping with the people of a nation in the way they were in Israel.
In Israel, the nation and the people of God were overlapping and they were intended to be overlapping with the new covenant. That’s no longer possible. The people of God overlap with the nation, but with those who are united to Christ by faith.
Mark Dever:
So these days, if you look at the United States. And not in, you know, 1950, but in 2023, not only is not everyone a church member, though I think our rates of church membership are still high compared to many places in the world.
Jonathan Leeman:
And historically,
Mark Dever:
Yeah, even our own history. But certainly, not everyone is a member of a church. Certainly, not everyone is a member of a Bible-believing church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right.
Mark Dever:
And yet as Christians, we want the state to act consistently with those values that we uphold that we think are good and right. I remember David Wells in his series of books, I think in the one called Losing Our Virtue, Wells saying something about when you no longer have agreement on character, then all that’s left is power.
And to me, that sounds like the state. So in America, it does seem like there is less agreement on what good character is now than there was even when I began pastoring this church in 1994. So when that agreement on character has receded…
Jonathan Leeman:
Character, let’s say virtue.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Yeah. Good character, good virtue, that which is good on the good. When that agreement has receded, is David right? Is all that’s left then sort of naked power?
Has Culture Become Morally Dissolute?
Jonathan Leeman:
I think that is the common response to it. That’s the worldly response, not worldly in a negative sense, but I think it’s human to say when my society is becoming morally dissolute in some form or fashion, which is to say there’s no agreement on what virtue is, pick up the sword, right?
That’s a natural instinct. We as Christians would say there’s a place to pick up the sword, yes, in order to protect the second table sorts of virtues or convictions, but we would not pick up the sword for the sake of the first table.
When I was saying on the first table, just to be clear in case you made the first four commandments. The first four commandments are about vertically and then the second table horizontally, directly five to ten.
Mark Dever:
So when I’m preaching or you’re preaching at Chevrolet, do you want to apply the sermon and call for the opposition to slavery or a certain definition of marriage?
Jonathan Leeman:
Yes and yes, based on the second table, horizontal, neighbor-to-neighbor loves, not a first table. Now, many of our friends are going to quickly respond by saying, look and listen, the love of neighbor depends upon the love of God. I agree.
The second table depends on the first table. Again, I agree. Theologically, that’s true. That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that God has authorized people to enforce in some form or fashion, light or heavy, first table matters.
But that’s the conversation that’s going on right now. A lot of people are saying, our Theonomist friends, our Christian Magisterial friends, Christian Nationalist friends are saying, look, you cannot protect neighbor-to-neighbor loves and obligations apart from first table vertical enforcements. Therefore, we need to do something about the first table things.
And others of us are responding. Those of us more than a traditional Baptist tradition are saying, no, we’re not authorized to do that.
Mark Dever:
Wouldn’t Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic agree with that concern?
Jonathan Leeman:
Which is the first, not the Baptist way, but the other way using the power of the state.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yes. And they do. Yeah. And historic, well, historically Catholics certainly have the Vatican to find ways to avoid that. And Greek Orthodoxy or Russian Orthodoxy right now seems to be in some respects.
Are There Increasing Rates of Division in the Evangelical Church?
Mark Dever:
Certainly has historically. So why do you think in our churches, in our evangelical churches, we are finding the members of our churches more divided on these kinds of issues than we have in the past?
That is the issue of what do we use the state’s authority for and what do we not. Because don’t you think when you first joined Capitol Hill Baptist Church in the nineties, don’t you think we would have had a lot more of agreement on that than we have now as a church or you all have it shiverly?
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. In 1938 William Butler Yates wrote a poem called Politics and he begins with this epigram in which he says that the meaning of life is being determined politically or that life’s meaning is determined in political terms and why what’s going on.
Well, think about 1938. He’s looking rightward and he sees fascism. He looks leftward and he sees communism and he sees threats from both sides and all of life. And when I say all of life, I don’t mean just what we typically give to politics.
I’m talking about romance and religion and all of this is politicized. And what’s going on? We have dramatic moral division and religious division going on in Europe at that point. And so everything becomes political.
I think something similar is going on right now. Why do we have more arguments about these things right now? I think increasingly as America feels more divided morally and religiously, that means we have very different and competing conceptions of justice.
What is just? You know, so an LGBT crowd is going to say one thing and Christians are going to say another thing. Well, those are dramatically opposed views of justice. And therefore, yeah, every, every, the stakes feel higher on everything.
Mark Dever:
And if pastors are not speaking to that, we’re retreating from a position we should publicly hold.
Common Political Theology Conversations
Jonathan Leeman:
Are you talking, you’re retreating from specific things like LGBT or do you like same-sex marriage? Or do you mean these larger political theology conversations?
Mark Dever:
Both. Both or either.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, what’s tough I think right now is a lot of pastors are feeling the need to sort of bone up on their political theology to know what exactly the state can and can’t do. Right?
And in the same way, you have a doctrine of God, you have a doctrine of salvation and you have a doctrine of the church. How much time have you spent thinking about your doctrine of the state? It feels peripheral to us.
Mark Dever:
It’s not always obvious to people that that’s a part of piety.
Jonathan Leeman:
Part of piety or part of what a pastor’s job is to know and understand. But in a moment in which suddenly we’ve all felt an existential threat to our children. Like if you tell your children this at the public school, you know, you risk, you know, the state slapping your hand and, and, and, and people are saying, the state doesn’t have to tell your, the parents of the children want to go through a transition of some sort.
Suddenly it was like, well, I feel a kind of existential threat against my life. Christians, I think feel this way. Therefore we need to pick up the sword and the church needs to pick up the sword and some are Christianized by the state in some form or fashion based on the threats that we’re feeling.
And, that raises the mission of the church conversations. What is the mission of the church is the mission of the church in some form or fashion to pick up the sword?
How Much Authority Should Christians Give the State?
Mark Dever:
When, when you say, and I think in one article in this issue, you may say this, that theology is inherently political. Do you mean it’s inherently like democratic theology or Republican theology?
Jonathan Leeman:
Certainly not. I mean that when a Christian says Jesus is Lord, even as an Old Testament Jew would have said, Yahweh is King. That is the first and most profound political statement we can make that God is God over all things and Lord over all things.
Well, my view of the state and what the state is responsible for doing, my view of politics, and that domain is necessarily under the lordship of Christ. So when Jesus says all authority in heaven on earth has been given to me, he means Caesar too, right? He means the U.S. Congress too.
He has authority over that. And so in times when you’re sitting and living comfortably in a Christian-ish society in which your Christian-ish morality defines what most people believe, there’s no need to think about theories of government.
When all of that is suddenly threatened, wait a second, what does Jesus give Caesar authority to? What does render to Caesar what is Caesar and to God what is God’s? What exactly does belong to Caesar here?
Okay, he’s to prosecute right and wrong, reward the good, punish the bad. What good and bads are we talking about? All goods and all bads are a subset of goods and bads, and if a subset, what goods and bads exactly do we mean?
First table stuff, second table stuff? So suddenly in a moment of being, or feeling existential threat from society at large, from, you know, corporate America to the U.S. military and what it requires of its officers, pastors, I think, more than ever are feeling this need to have a political theology conversation, which is what we’re trying to do in this journal.
Mark Dever:
So if you want more like this, there are over 370 pages coming at you in the current 9Marks journal that’s been released. And in that, you’ll find a great little article by Taylor Hartley called A Guide Through This Issue in which he walks through trying to show us the sort of collections of issues that are addressed in these four articles or these three articles or these seven articles. So it’s a great way to start out. It’s your tour bus around the city.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s right.
Mark Dever:
Then you decide where you want to spend more time.
Jonathan Leeman:
Now, Mark, I know you’re trying to get out of answering questions in this. I can see that.
Mark Dever:
Hey, we’re just about to come to your awesome editorial, man. We’ve got less than seven minutes left in the conversation.
Jonathan Leeman:
Why did you insist it was your idea to do this journal? Why? You put it in your own words.
Mark Dever:
Because it was clear to me a number of years ago that what had been an old 1970s, eighties, nineties conversation about Greg Bonson, RJ Rushdooney, and was kind of limited to Presbyterian circles. And even then just a certain part of Presbyterianism was coming back and the situations, the weather was just right for it to come back even among other Presbyterians and among Anglicans and even Baptists types like us, because the societal agreed upon the bank of virtues had gotten so low that it was clear that, ah, there’s going to be more thinking done as people realize that the liberal, not liberals, liberal in the classic sense of, uh, determined by free consensus that the liberal agreement on what is good and bad has been reduced even further than we’ve so often had it in our society.
We see that by the Defensive Marriage Act passed by Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly in the 1990s. And then 20 years later, that all being reversed in a Supreme Court decision that was, I think more popular than unpopular.
So you just see, the sea change that’s happened in the last few decades. And what that means is that all of us, including pastors like me who have not majored in what you would call political theology are now enacting certain kinds of political theology and are having to listen to arguments about political theology in a way we hadn’t before.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right.
Mark Dever:
Which brings me to, should people bother reading your editorial to this issue? Cause Taylor’s article where he talks about what articles are doing what, does what you’re opening editorial often does.
So what did you sneak in since you gave Taylor that in your editorial? What are you sneaking in there? What are you basically saying? And should the pastors listen to this, read that when they first go to this massive journal?
Jonathan Leeman:
I say it’s a mission of the church issue.
Mark Dever:
Okay. I want to explain that just briefly.
Jonathan Leeman:
So when people feel political or economic threats, I was talking before about existential threats, if they can find a verse in the Bible that sort of makes that seem like a credible threat, the temptation is going to be, let’s make that part of the mission of the church. So does the Bible address poverty?
Yes. Do I, am I feeling the threat of poverty? Yes. Well, let’s say the mission of the church is to address poverty. Does the Bible care about the decline of the morality of a nation?
Yes. Do I see the nation declining morally? Yes. Well, let’s just say the mission of the church is to address the decline of morality in a nation. Family problems.
Mark Dever:
Which would include the decline of morality in our congregation.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, no, I’m thinking about, yes, it would include that, but I’m thinking about it largely in the nation.
Mark Dever:
But we don’t normally as pastors just do op-ed pieces for sermons. We’re expounding scripture and we’re looking particularly at the members of our congregation.
Jonathan Leeman:
You know, that’s right. But you know what’s funny? I remember walking into a church in Dallas a number of years ago, a big church, a well-known church. And the whole sermon was about haranguing how bad outsiders are and how bad the country was.
And so it, no, it wasn’t just about the congregation. It was about how bad things are and you guys on the inside, you’re the good guys and they’re all the bad side, bad guys.
Now everything that preacher might’ve been saying in some sense is true, but it was clear where his emphasis was. He was there for do culture war, not to build up the culture of the congregation for the sake of going out and making disciples.
Mark Dever:
But now, it seems like in this journal, you’re calling pastors to get involved in the culture war a little bit more.
Is Political Theology a Mission of the Church Issue?
Jonathan Leeman:
What I’m, we’re calling them to do in this journal is to understand the beginning of a political theology is actually a view of the church, right? The church is the church and that has implications for what the state can and can’t do.
So if you came to me and you said, Jonathan, I think the mission of the church is to dig wells and water wells in Africa. I said, well, no, it’s not good. Christians can do that. That’s fine.
But that’s not the church’s job as such. And so likewise, if you came to me and say it’s to Christianize the nation, I would say, well, no, that’s actually not his job as such. And insofar as more and more people are saying things like that, it’s time for us to write a mission of the church journal and call it a Theonomy Christian Nationalism journal.
Mark Dever:
It sounds a little bit like the thing you said at the beginning about the priority of loving your daughters more than loving the other children in the neighborhood. So it sounds like you’re saying as pastors, we do have a role in helping to think biblically about the orders of our lives, the orders of our griefs.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yes.
Mark Dever:
You know, what is it that pulls on our hearts, and what should pull more and what should pull less?
Jonathan Leeman:
And how much? Yeah. And Paul also put, which we can speak…
Mark Dever:
We can speak to that from scripture.
Jonathan Leeman:
I would also say politics is part of discipleship, right? Teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded. So this Jesus…
Mark Dever:
But the disciples were not deciding what Herod or Pilate would do.
Jonathan Leeman:
No, they weren’t, but they did have certain obligations to Herod and Pilate, which, you know, are laid out in First Peter 2 and Romans 13 and First Timothy 2, and so forth. So in so far as these matters are mentioned in scripture, we need to be discipling our congregation to think politically, which requires the pastor to have some view of the state and what it is called to do and not called to do.
And therefore how you will disciple your congregations in these ways. But that doesn’t finally come to something you said earlier, Mark, down to party politics and programs as such.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. What does this mean as far as what pastors can do to read more? This is obviously a vast topic, and so you’ve produced a vast journal, but are there other authors like Augustine?
Resources For Church Authoritarianism
Do we need to go read City of God or who would be some good folks for pastors to read to get a good background? I mentioned David Wells. I mean, what name is an accessible title or two? I mean, there’s your book on politics from several years ago.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. How the Nations Rage.
Mark Dever:
I love the way you got that title in there.
Jonathan Leeman:
Uh, did you see that was sneaky, I mean, sure? If you want to do historical pieces, yeah. Augustine. Especially, especially chapter 19 of The City of God, just go there. You don’t need to read the whole thing. It’s mammoth. Read Chapter 19.
Mark Dever:
You even have a, don’t you, a little one in the church questions booklets,
Jonathan Leeman:
How to love church members who disagree politically. [Correction: How Can I Love Church Members with Different Politics?]
Mark Dever:
Yeah. And there’s, isn’t there another one on politics?
Jonathan Leeman:
No, that’s the only one. Okay. I think it’s fascinating to go back and read, you know, not having my, 16-year-old daughter read John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Letter Concerning Toleration. There’s some good stuff in there.
Mark Dever:
There are so many people listening right now who wish they were one of your daughters.
Jonathan Leeman:
Martin Luther’s Christian freedom. What’s it called? Help me out. Is it called Christian Freedom?
Mark Dever:
Oh yes. Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s, that’s an excellent little treatise in terms of maybe name a few other historical ones that I said, hey, this is worthwhile. In terms of contemporary authors, I really like David Koyzis’s book, Visions and Illusions.
Mark Dever:
What spells that last name?
Jonathan Leeman:
K O Y Z I S. Koyzis.
Mark Dever:
Of course.
Jonathan Leeman:
And Visions and Illusions about the idolatries of the various ideologies that characterize that day, our day. I think David VanDrunen’s After Christendom is really good.
Mark Dever:
And would you be rightly characterized as a kind of two-kingdom theologian?
Jonathan Leeman:
I characterize myself as a Two Age theologian. If you want to, if you want to, if you want to Google Jonathan Leeman’s Two Ages, an article on the Gospel Coalition will pop up in which I distinguish the two ages from a two kingdoms perspective, not measuring like areas of our life, like the political area of my life versus the religious area of my life.
I don’t do that inside, inner man, outer man, two kingdoms tends to work in that way. I divided the temporal sphere versus the eternal sphere.
Mark Dever:
We’re over time. If somebody were going to read one article other than the two I’ve mentioned by Taylor and by you in this vast journal, this like a Canadian-sized journal…What province would you send them to? Where should they go?
Jonathan Leeman:
That was a pro-Canada statement, I take it.
Mark Dever:
Subtly, yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
If you want a map of the playing field and what’s going on and you have a little bit of time, read my A New Christian Authoritarianism, which is the lead article, which kind of explains the lay of the land and what’s going on in this conversation in depth. No, it’s a longer piece.
It’s a much longer piece. If you’re curious about post-millennialism in a way that we haven’t talked about, the way that plays all into this, David Schrock’s piece is excellent. If you want a good biblical theology of the whole conversation, another excellent piece is the one…
Mark Dever:
Now we’ll take a moment to think and consider.
Jonathan Leeman:
Josh Greever’s piece. He’s up at Bethlehem College and Seminary, G R E E V E R. It’s an excellent treatment of how we deal with Old Testament Israel and how it applies to the church or not to the church.
Mark Dever:
Would that be a good thing to read for a pastor who’s thinking about what should I do in my sermons with application?
Jonathan Leeman:
It’s not going to answer those questions. It’s going to give you the theological structure to answer those questions.
Mark Dever:
Okay.
Jonathan Leeman:
Two more, just a short concise for the pastor piece is very helpful. Jeremy Walker’s, What Is a Greater Grief, a Compromised Church or a Compromised Nation? Mark, what’s the answer?
Jonathan Leeman:
I assume he’s going to say a compromised church.
Mark Dever:
Yes. Cause that’s the hope of everyone in the nation.
Jonathan Leeman:
And that’s, that’s the Baptist in you speaking.
Mark Dever:
I would say it’s the New Testament in my speaking.
Jonathan Leeman:
And Jamie Southcombe’s God is (Not) an Englishman is also a short concise. Get your bearings pastor
Mark Dever:
Short and concise like this podcast coming in at just under 30 minutes. Jonathan, thank you for your time. We commend reading for you in the new journal that’s just come out.
Jonathan Leeman:
A New Christian Authoritarianism?
Mark Dever:
So why didn’t you say A New New Christian Fascism? I mean, authoritarianism is a pretty negative word.
Jonathan Leeman:
What I mean by that is it’s not liberal as in okay, okay, so it’s not Lockeian, Jeffersonian, Madisonian.
Mark Dever:
You realize everybody who reads the journal is not necessarily a political theologian or political theorist.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, I wanted to provoke them a little bit with that title.
Mark Dever:
Thanks, Jonathan.
Jonathan Leeman:
Thanks, man.
Mark Dever:
As always.
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