“Confusing our judgments with God’s turns our judgments into idols, which in turn divides the church and leads to injustices inside and outside the church.” (10) “It’s my sense that one of Satan’s greatest victories in contemporary America has been to divide majority and minority Christians along partisan lines.” (8)

There are other reasons I recommend this book, but here are eighteen of my favorite quotes to give you a snapshot of the book. And as Christians, we should be careful not to let secondary issues divide us when the gospel unites us. We can disagree without being against one another. We shouldn’t avoid tough topics, but we must begin with the Bible as our guide and engage in conversations marked by grace. Conversation and dialogue where we genuinely listen to others and open our views up to critique is desperately needed in the world and church today. We must go back to the Bible as our authority and guide.īut the second “how to” Leeman’s book exemplifies and encourages is a gracious, respectful dialogue with people we don’t see eye-to-eye with. They then take already existing thoughts and filters as their authority into the biblical text and quickly interpret a verse or construct their ethics without doing the work of study and reflection. Too many “Christians” get their views from the news, social media, brief discussions, a headline, or a 500-word blog. Bible verses aren’t ripped out of context to support existing ideologies or opinions, but Leeman models the needed approach of going back to the Bible, studying and interpreting it with depth, and building our views up from that floor.

The book begins with and draws from Scripture. With 2020 promising to be a heated and divisive year in our country, this book will be a timely read. The book not only helps us root our thinking about politics in the Bible (the what of the book), but I recommend the book because it also teaches us how to engage tough topics as Christians. The book focuses on faith and politics, though in the conversations many other significant hot-button issues get brought up. I recently read and recommended How the Nations Rage: Rethinking Faith and Politics in a Divided Age by Jonathan Leeman, not only for what it says but how it says it.

Political Church by Jonathan Leeman