In this thought-provoking episode, host Jean Geran sits down with guest Gar Anderson to explore the concept of Christian citizenship through the lens of the early church. Drawing from Gar’s recent lecture in Oshkosh, the conversation delves into how early Christians—most of whom lacked formal citizenship—navigated life under the Roman Empire. Rather than seeking political power, they transformed society through radical love, community care, and allegiance to Christ.

Gar and Jean discuss:

• The historical context of citizenship in the Roman Empire
• The difference between patriotism and indifference in Christian political engagement
• Jesus’ teaching on rendering to Caesar and God
• Lessons from Paul’s use of Roman citizenship to expose injustice
• Practical examples of loving one’s neighbor in everyday life

📚 Recommended Resources

Books Mentioned:

• Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Robert Wilken (Oxford University Press, 1984)
• The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark (HarperOne, 1996)
• Destroyer of the Gods by Larry Hurtado (Baylor University Press, 2016)
• Strange Religion by Nijay Gupta (Brazos Press, 2023)
• The Patient Ferment of the Early Church by Alan Kreider (Baker Academic, 2016)

Ancient Text Highlighted:

• Letter to Diognetus (c. 125–150 AD) — A second-century Christian apology describing the distinctiveness of Christian life and allegiance. Link = https://storage2.snappages.site/6X3R8B/assets/files/The-Epistle-to-Diognetus.pdf

Other Podcast Episodes Mentioned

·     Christian Citizenship in a Pluralistic World | Chris Seiple (August 4, 2025) https://player.captivate.fm/episode/1fedbb2c-6c00-47d3-bc40-a1cc9a367d84/

·     Faith, Citizenship, and Dissent: Lessons from 18th–19th Century Britain | Michael Rutz (August 18, 2025) https://player.captivate.fm/episode/8fa1fc18-402f-4271-afc8-9e4bf9a73c13/

🔗 Watch & Subscribe

🎧 Subscribe to The UpWords Podcast on your favorite podcast app to stay updated.

problem is when we get out ahead and we say, want to change the world. And if we start grasping on, again, pragmatic and utilitarian measures for trying to change the world, taking it into our own hands rather than converting ourselves and our communities to Christ and his ways, then you might even bear a certain amount of influence, but what have you changed? Probably what you've changed is yourself and not for the good. You've become corrupted rather than subversive.

Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we discuss the intersection of Christian faith in the academy, church, and marketplace. My name is Jean Guerin, and today I have a conversation with my colleague, Gar Anderson, distinguished fellow in biblical studies for the Lumen Center and distinguished professor at Nishoda House Seminary. This conversation is part of our Upwards Podcast series on Christian citizenship, and we'll be expanding on a talk Gar gave at a community lecture in Oshkosh recently.

We discuss how the early church would have thought about the concept of citizenship, which most of them actually lacked, and more broadly how they lived in relation to each other and the Roman Empire. Though they lacked political power or agency to effect change, the love and care that the early church exhibited toward one another and the vulnerable in their society set them apart. They ended up changing the world by not trying to change the world, just by loving their neighbors as themselves.

So Gar, welcome to the podcast. It's gonna be really fun. So we are new colleagues, sort of. are a old friends, new colleagues. You are now a fellow at the Luhman Center and in, what's the exact? Physical studies, great. And we just did a really fun event together up in Oshkosh and we have

Thanks, this is gonna be fun.

biblical studies.

been building on the topic of Christian citizenship, which is what we addressed up there. And you're the third in a series of the podcast, too. So thank you for joining us.

It's an honor for me and thank you for all the legwork and everything you're doing to make this happen Including the event in Oshkosh. It was just really a lot of fun

Yeah, great, great. Well, and so we'll go back and maybe set the context for your talk that you gave in Oshkosh. your role was to kind of take a little bit of a historical perspective, but share lessons from scripture and from the early church on Christian citizenship and what it may have meant to them or may not have meant to them.

Right, right, so I think the title of the two talks that Mick and I gave was What Can History Teach Us? About Christian Citizenship. And so for that reason, but also on purpose, I wanted to say let's not do a quick dive in and try to proof-text some Bible verses that tell us how to behave with respect to the state. There's a place for talking about those things and those important passages.

But I think what ends up happening is if you do sort of the shortcut into the Bible that way, you end up missing the larger panoramic view and you especially miss the differences in context, historical context between the ancient world and the experience of early Christians and our place and world and our experience. for all of the overlap that there may be and all the lessons we could probably draw.

profound differences. So instead of sort of saying, let's do what the Bible says about, my thought was let's take a step back and think about the history of the earliest Christians, their context, and how did that affect the way that they thought about their relationship to governing authorities and so forth. So that was sort of, as you know, that was the approach we took.

Great, so why don't you share a little bit of that context of the Yearly Church.

Well, you know, there's certain things that are kind of obvious that we all know. But of course, you know, we live in a participatory democracy. We're not going to get into the technical political science here about whether we're a public or a democracy. You're all those kind of questions. But we do get to vote. And we have a, although we do feel that we don't have a whole lot of agency, we have an incredible amount of agency compared to anything that they would have had.

in the ancient world, we can organize, we have mass media, all of that. Well, didn't even, the majority of Christians in the first century, first of all, were slaves. And even the freedmen and freeborn people, a small minority of them were even citizens. And even if you were a citizen, that didn't mean you voted. So, I mean, just think about those layers of difference.

And then of course for Christians because you had recently adopted this new way of life and this new allegiance to Jesus Christ, a Jew from the eastern part of the empire, nobody who was politically crucified, very strange. And so the earliest Christians were called the superstitio.

It was this new religion, we get our word superstition from that. And the ancient Roman world loved religion, just not new ones. It was very pluralistic. And the joke said by some ancients is there were more gods in the Roman Empire than there were people. So it was very pluralistic, but a lot of suspicion attached to belonging to, say, a new religion.

Right?

It was seen as maybe upsetting the social fabric. Made people worry. And maybe even for good reason. Because above all, the Pox Romana greatly loved stability. Everybody in their place, everybody knows their place, you stay in your place, you do what's expected of you and so forth. And Christians started experiencing a certain amount of cultural emancipation. They had these kind of softer,

disability.

less intimidated relationship to governing and other authorities and know, and a stern allegiance to the crucified criminal raised to be Lord of the universe. Think about that, that's crazy. Like a very different context.

And well, and even Jesus, he came to overthrow, right? And in ways, in a certain way, he kind of did, right? And I mean, think the stability of the Roman Empire was actually, it wasn't all bad, right? They did provide a lot of stability and mostly good, and it was really quite world-changing at its time in that way. then this, so talk a little bit about how the Christians and this new religion,

in a certain way.

might have been a threat to that empire.

Right, right. So you have in the very first Christians language that they're using to refer to Jesus Christ that is also used, maybe previously used, to refer to the emperor and other governing authorities. So Caesar is kourios, is Lord. So Jesus is Lord, the Christians are saying that.

Wow.

So how does that change allegiances and people's sense of responsibility and that sort of thing. So that's kind of a starting point. And then Christians would say, because they learned it from Jesus, they would say things about their social place and identity that was confounding. For starters, that they belonged to a kingdom and it was the kingdom of God. And of his.

also probably sounded pretty crazy, especially outside.

It's the end and sounded dangerous, Also dangerous. So it would be one thing, right, for a Jew to say, I belong to the kingdom of God. That's another way of referring to your own people, to the nation state of Israel, restored to its glory, right? Kingdom of God, no problem, sort of. Now you Gentiles and people of a variety of ethnicities saying, we are subject to the kingdom of God.

It's gonna really be a different take on things. And our Lord, our Kurios, actually turns out not to be ultimately Caesar, a resurrected Lord of the universe. And so you can just see the destabilization that could come as a result of that. And then at the level of sort of social relationships and organization, some of the tried and true and well-known

hierarchies and assumptions about who's in, who's out, what everybody's place is, well they're breaking down in certain ways. Of course, early Christians are often faulted with not eliminating slavery, right? And of course they didn't. And one has to imagine that they probably couldn't imagine it. Anymore than you or I think about, let's not have employment or jobs anymore.

it.

I'm not equating the two. I'm saying but it's a social structure that we consider just a given. But at the same time, the way that masters related to slaves, related to masters, the fact that they were worshiping together in the same social spaces, and now as brothers and sisters in an all but literal sense, in a very real way, well that's kind of messing with the way that we think the world ought to be.

And same would be true for the new place that women are enjoying in the Christian assemblies and rich and poor and so on and so forth. So the stable world where everybody has a place, they know their place, they're defined by geography, gender, and genealogy. Now they're not defined that way.

I think in the talk you gave an interesting and I don't quite remember it. So maybe you can reproduce it a little discussion of the coin and Caesar and give to Caesar what is Caesar and maybe move into use that to kind of move into how they did see the Roman Empire, you know how this new community of believers interacted or how they themselves saw it

Right, so you remember that one of the kind of two points that I was making during the talk, one was that the least intuitive way of thinking about a relationship to the nation, the nation state, the empire, so forth, the least intuitive way to think about that for Christians would have been what we would call patriotism. Right. And that is not a condemnation on patriotism. Yes. Patriotism, I think, comes from a good place.

I think it.

Kind of like a stability, you know?

Anyway, go ahead. I think patriotism arguably comes from a good place. It also can quickly go to a bad place. And I would say it's fundamentally rooted in our general sense of love of neighbor. And it's a way of expressing that on more than individual terms. Like we want the well-being of the whole. And then it can go from there to something not so much a love of neighbor and not so wholesome. So if the least intuitive

way to think about the relationship to the Roman Empire and the governing authorities was patriotism. I suggested that the actual view was a kind of indifference. And what I mean by that is not that they didn't care what the government and governing authorities were doing. They had to care because it had direct implications for them. But indifference in the sense that their hopes weren't set upon it.

hope for a better life, a better world, for their faithfulness to God was not leveraged on or strictly connected to their influence with the governing authorities, because they just didn't have it. So okay, so that was a long lead up to the question that you had, which is I think Jesus was actually teaching this in that episode. We all know it happens in the final days in the Gospels and the

when Jesus is in the temple courts, and he's got people coming in asking questions, by what authority you do these things, who gave you that authority, who do you think you are? And one of the questions was, because it was a burning question, should we be paying this tax to our Roman overlords? And that's a gotcha kind of question, darn if you do, darn if you don't, there's no good answer, except for the one Jesus gave, which is a great answer. He says, well, let's have a look at that coin.

And then he says, well, whose image is on that coin? And the answer is, well, of course, it's Caesar's image. Right. So look, he's bearing the image. So render to Caesar what's Caesar's. But he didn't stop there. He's not just enforcing for the IRS that we should pay our taxes, which we should. What he's saying is, then he goes on to say, but render to God what is God's.

So what he's saying there is you also bear an image. That goes all the way back to Genesis. It's renewed in Jesus Christ. You bear the image of God. You belong to God. So if I could be a little crass about it, Caesar can have his dang money, but you belong to God. So in a way there, that's not about separation of church and state in the way that we think about it. Spiritual domain, governmental domain.

It's really about primary loyalties. And Caesar can have his money. You owe him taxes, that's fine, but also who cares? So part of the way that obedience of Christians is structured in the ancient world is obedience comes not from loyalty, not from a strong loyalty, but from a strong indifference. Of course I can't obey, because he doesn't matter.

It didn't matter in an ultimate sense. Obviously he matters as a human being, he bears God's image, so on and so forth. But in an ultimate sense, it doesn't matter. That's why in one Peter, he'll say, honor the emperor, fear God. Don't fear the emperor. He's merely a human, and that whole apparatus of the Roman Empire and the governing authority, so just human apparatus.

Interesting.

they don't deserve your fear and loyalty in the way that God does. And once you're liberated that way, now you're prepared to be a Christian citizen. But if you attach a kind of ultimacy or a pragmatic or utilitarian ultimacy to what the government should do and what it can do and how it will solve problems, then you become the sort of subject

that God doesn't mean us to be, he means us to be free subjects. We obey in our freedom. Anyway, that's maybe a lot more than what you were.

That was exactly what I was hoping you would recreate. You did it very well. I think related to that, partly the indifference. I know one theme that you did hit on in kind of comparing the ancient or the early church to our environment now in the context-wise is the lack of power that the early church had. So yes, they were indifferent. They were obedient. But they were

you know, ultimate loyalty to the Lord because we in the image of God belong to the Lord. And I loved that. But then as in that role, not because of that, well, maybe because of that, but they already lacked power before they even came to faith. And then they came to faith and actually had access to another kind of power, right? When it comes to power, how did they see that?

Yeah, that's a nice way to put that.

Yeah, well, so this is really important. Now, one of things I want to say is I don't think we need to romanticize the early Christians. Right. Nor do we have to give them over much credit for not doing what they didn't have the capacity to do. this is born of necessity and of circumstance. Right. But I guess the point that I was trying to make in that talk, as you may remember, was

there was a silver lining to their powerlessness. And I think the silver lining to their powerlessness was not being in a position to exercise a whole lot of agency if at all in the ways of the world and structuring human society and influencing government and so forth. They did not get distracted. And instead they poured all of their energy into the

intra-intercommunal character and ethos of themselves. In other words, before they even could think about Christianizing the world, especially through governmental agency, they had to become Christians themselves. And so one of the things, if I may speak about our contemporaries, one of our challenges is we actually do have a lot of agency.

And whether you're on the political, so-called left or right, it doesn't really matter. We are bombarded with appeals to get organized and to get our people in the right places, to get our policies through, again, whether you're on the left or on the right. And what it has the temptation there is we place a lot of focus on the agency and power that we can have and that we can exercise.

say as a voting block or whatever, and very little agency, or very little attention on ourselves. And what kind of people are we?

How do we live? How do we relate to each other?

And so what we're doing, right, exactly. So in a way, we're trying to, you see this attempt by Christians, again on all political sides, of trying to Christianize the world but not ourselves. So if you pass all of these, you think are the will of God type laws, but you yourself and your community is not transformed and isn't bearing the image of Christ to the world.

That's a way to put it.

Well, what good is it? And people see it through it, right? And people smarter than us, if I might say so, will exploit it. And they'll say, you know what you need to do to get these Christians on your side? Talk about this, talk about this, talk about this. And they won't even pay attention to all these other things. Because these are their hot button issues on the left or on the right. And you can get them. And then you actually become a tool, a utility for forces that

second.

really have nothing to do with Jesus and in certain ways are anti-Christ. So that's the, I think really the big danger there. So what the earliest Christians then, again this is not a strategy, it's not like they sat around and said, okay so we're not gonna get the vote out, how are we gonna change the world? The way they were gonna change the world was not by trying to change the world, but by letting the Spirit of God be at work.

in them and by having a really close sense of discipleship and following of Jesus and his teachings and his ways. And being an incredibly distinctive community that would be repellent in one sense and dangerous in another sense and highly attractive. And it's repellent and dangerous and attractive all the time. And that's because they weren't trying to change the world through the utilitarian political.

at the same time.

means they didn't have a chance.

Well, let's go back because I think it is human nature and desire and we'll get to our own responsibility a little bit later. But it wasn't just the early church, was the disciples who also, like they wanted Jesus to exercise power in a very different way than he did. In a group that we have up in a separate group in Oshkosh, have pastor who was participating, did a great summary of the Gospel of Mark and described how, it was really helpful to me, I had never thought about it.

how Jesus showed how he was the son of God and had all the power he needed and exercised it to heal and to, you all these other things in the early part of that gospel. And then the later part, was all about the disciples wanting him to do more at the empire level, shall we say, or the kingdom level or exercise more political power. Exactly.

restore the fortunes which the prophet said was gonna happen

Right, and they weren't thinking this up, Yeah, I mean it makes sense that you would even think that. But instead he did quite the opposite, which was relinquish all the power. He actually became a servant, and they still didn't get it, and it's still hard for us to get it now. And maybe that's the thing that we struggle with, even in our own time. But talk a little bit about the disciples and what they might have been thinking.

Right, so you'll even remember, right, when we, the first question in the Book of Acts is, is it now that you're gonna restore Israel? And as I just alluded that they had reasons for asking this question, because the prophets did speak, especially the post-exilic prophets spoke about God restoring the fortunes of Israel.

And they were oppressed. They weren't oppressed people at the time. Exactly.

So it was not a bad question that they're asking, it's a natural question and it actually came from reading their Bibles. And sometimes the early followers of Jesus or the Jews at the time of Jesus, the Christians can be a little harsh with them, but it's usually because they knew the Old Testament and we don't. They're asking the right questions or the normal questions. But yeah, it says you say that the Book of Acts then goes on.

to show God rebuilding David's fallen tents, Acts 15. But the way it looks is totally different. The way it looks is that now coming to Jerusalem, but especially going out from Judea into all the world is an in gathering of God's people who are now by choice subjecting themselves to a new way of life, to a new ethos, and ultimately to a new Lord.

and

And living completely differently as a result of that.

That's right, and in the process, without trying to change the world in one sense at all, the Book of Acts says they turned it upside down. So here we are in Acts chapter, I hope it's 19, I'm gonna say 19, yeah it's 19, we're in Ephesus, and the Christian influence was such, you remember Demetrius to Silversmith, it was all bent out of shape because,

These Christians are ruining their economy, but not because they organized to ruin his business. But they were anti-adolatress. And so this is very upsetting. They're changing the world without trying to change the world. What they're trying to do is to be faithful to what God has revealed of himself through Jesus Christ. It's subversive. That's right. I'm glad that word came up though here.

and it's subversive.

In the

because there's a lot of subversiveness in the early Christian practices.

It's not even intentional subversion, but yeah.

It turns out to be subversive. I mean, all you have to do is to say, as again in 1 Peter he says, honor the emperor, love the brothers, the brotherhood, fellow Christians, not just the men, love the brotherhood, and fear God. So if you do the honoring, the loving, and the fearing, it's actually a recipe for subversion.

and transformation.

And transformation, right. And transformation precedes subversion. The problem is when we get out ahead and we say we want to change the world, and if we start grasping on, again, pragmatic and utilitarian measures for trying to change the world, taking it into our own hands rather than converting ourselves and our communities to Christ and his ways, then you might even bear a certain amount of influence, but what have you changed?

Probably what you've changed is yourself and not for the good. You've become corrupted rather than subversive. And I acknowledge this, is, you know, yeah. So if you don't mind, I think I might have mentioned this in the talk, I can't remember, but when I was a younger Christian, and I still hear it to this day, there was a lot of talk about

and idolatrous.

Be the salt of the earth, be the light of the world. Which I'm, amen. But I wanna change one of the words, because it's the wrong word. Jesus never said be the salt of the earth. He never said be the light of the world. He said you are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. And then he adds some warnings about how that could go bad. Which it can go bad.

Now you say, okay, maybe making a little too much out of grammar, which is my job. Is that New Testament profession?

dislike grammar. I still like you, but I dislike you. But anyway.

Well, okay, so it's an indicative, not an imperative, just to make things worse. But the point is, it's an indicative, you are the salt of the earth, that follows immediately on the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. Blessed are the peacemakers. So it's those people, that's the you.

Blessed are you when men speak evil of you. That you is the you who are the salt of the earth. Now, one of the things we know about salt in the ancient world is it was impure. So what we called salt had N-A-C-L, salt, but it was intermixed with lime and other minerals and so forth. So you could literally have a pile of salt sitting there.

and under the right humid or rain conditions and so forth, the salt dissolves and the minerals don't. You could have a pile of white stuff that you're still calling salt, because that's what you see it as, that has no saltiness. That's what happens when Christians try to take these matters into their own hands and be the salt of the earth, a pile of white stuff with no active ingredient.

And we only become pure through the power of Holy Spirit. That's right. By Jesus working through us, right?

That's right, by keeping the focus on what it needs to be. So I'm not, by the way, then, saying just because early Christians, we don't have much track record of them being politically involved. I'm not arguing against political involvement, nor trying to exercise political influence. But it's about putting first things first.

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Well, and I think some of the more profound ways that people who don't know as much about the early church like me, but the stories you get and the things that I think strike us, they actually ended up having influence on the empire and the local authorities for sure, by doing things like rescuing babies that are abandoned on the outskirts of cities.

I've worked in that area so that image has always stood out to me. I'm like, okay, want to, yeah, that's what I want to be. I want to be like the elderly church in how they cared for the most vulnerable, how they loved each other and their neighbors outside of the fold even, right? But by doing that, they both drew people or became attractive as a community of love to other people.

And but also there that threat was there that subversion was there just in that act of love. And I think that is coming from a career where I tried to use the levers of power to to help people or help children even write and protect children. I have a growing appreciation. I'm still glad we did that. You know my colleagues working on on human rights and what have you. But more and more it's like what is even more profound. It's that.

That's right.

viewing that act of love.

And I don't think we, you and now I'm getting way out of my depth. So I'm not a political scientist for sure. So that's okay. But what I want to say is that's not a choice between either or. Right. Right. Because I think we would agree that there can be policies that are profoundly transformative for an actually embody loving neighbor.

But we're talking about citizenship.

Yes. The problem is if you put all the eggs in theoretically loving your neighbor versus actually exercising a concrete lived out love neighbor. That's where I think we missed the boat. I think it was John Stott if I remember. This one really always stuck with me. He said, you know, we make a lot out of the parable of the good Samaritan. We have the Samaritan who comes and cares for the immediate

physical needs of this man, robbed and beaten and left for half dead. Takes care of him. It's a beautiful exercise of mercy. We should all do the same. But he makes the point, what if people are getting beaten and robbed on a daily basis between Jericho and Jerusalem? Then.

Especially Samaritan people.

Yeah, right. Or whoever. Right. Yeah. So what if that's happening on a daily basis? What would love of neighbor look like then? Well, it would still look like people finding them and spontaneously caring for them for sure. Yes. But you probably would also want to do something to safeguard people. Right. Protect them. Yes. And that would be like a structural change. Right. Right. So that's the kind of thing. That's what you did. Right. And that was an exercise of love of neighbor at a sort of different.

level and a really important level. But if you became, like some of the great thinkers and romantics of our time who loved humanity and hated people, or didn't care about people, I think that's a Peanuts cartoon too. I love humanity, it's the people I can't see. So if you end up doing that and just becoming like a theoretical observer of

the second great commandment that's not okay

Well, it makes me think also, I've learned from other colleagues of ours in biblical studies that a lot of the kind of formation language in scripture, believe Galatians was one, but it's actually plural. You know, it's not just about working out our own individual salvation, it's actually about working out our corporates. And of course, God interacts with Israel in that way.

very little to hear about as a people and and it's how you treat the alien or the widow or the orphan as a people and that is a structural question that's just just a care for the widows you know right it's actually figuring out how to how do we do this structurally

are we doing? No, that's really well said. And again, I think we're bumping into a lot of these things where people have made dichotomies that don't help us. The intentions that aren't, they're not there unless we make them. So are we about individual mercy and rectitude? Yeah. But does that mean we're not about the corporate? No, that too.

Yeah. And tension.

And where Christianity in some sense breaks down is when you choose one of those poles and don't care for the other. And they're not poles, they're like integrated. So I would say a person who is actively loving their neighbor in direct and personal concrete ways probably is in a better position to think about policy things and structural.

what would really help.

that would really help. And if you're not actually boots on the ground, dirty hands, involved in that, maybe your policy things would be a little naive. Or could even do harm, and of course that happens a lot.

and off the mark. Or even do harm.

Well, so along the lines of actually kind of using maybe in a more utilitarian sense for good citizenship, maybe let's talk, are there some lessons for how Did reference his Roman citizenship and used it in other ways to accomplish God's purposes that we might draw from? I don't know. I just thought of this, so I don't know if it's an off the mark question.

Well, and you'll remember that Mick made some really interesting appeals to that in his talk. so I can't give his talk like he could. No. But one of the things. So Paul used power. Yes. And what I mean by power, had a certain. It was a citizen, which was rare. Yes. And that he used that to expose injustice. Yeah.

Nor do you have to. There's another podcast you can listen to.

He was a citizen.

And of course in his case it was injustice directed at him. But it was the right thing to do. It not just a matter of pragmatic self-protection, but actually laying bare something that just wasn't right. And in this case it involved him. And that was good. Now what Mick told us is that that really captured the imagination of 18th and 19th folk who said what Paul did for himself.

we need to use that example to expose injustice as it's exercised toward others. We need to use the power that we have and the positions of authority that we have for the good of others, especially for those that don't have it in the same way. So I think, yes, I think there is something to be said for that. Making Paul kind of a model Christian citizen is a little awkward in that he was a rare Christian citizen. So it wasn't like other

that word coming up very often and with any other.

And citizenship was a privilege that didn't even maybe mean the same thing that we mean by it. But yes, there is definitely something to learn there for sure.

Right. So kind of building on his approach to citizenship, what you talking about earlier, that there's both the individual level and the corporate, more corporate level of exercising influence. What are some thoughts on what is our appropriate posture toward our own citizenship, which is very different than the early churches? Right. You know, I talked to previous podcast Chris Seipel about

there's a responsibility that comes with the citizenship and the agency that we do have. So what are your thoughts on what that means right now?

Yep, well, so much that could be said, but I would just start with what the early church knew as their reality through no credit of their own, but just really through their impoverished and powerlessness. I think we need to seek and recover that lesson for ourselves. So to make the formation of distinctive

Christian communities that actually detach ourselves from political alliances as a first order good. The first thing we need to do is to detach. That's sort of again what I mean by indifference. There's no ultimacy there. I can't imagine a political party in our day that's going to align with Jesus and the values of the kingdom of God.

There's gonna be, you'll see a little hint over here, a little hint over here. You'll see all kinds of people not caring about really important things. So I have to de-align from that if I'm going to be faithful to Christ. Because what will happen is if we make that alliance strong and sort of irrevocable, then what happens is the influence doesn't run from Christians to the civic sphere. The ways of the world.

corrupt us personally and they really change and subvert the church. So our subversive prophetic role in the world is actually subverted and the power that we're rightfully to exercise, which is just being God's people in God's world. The power we're supposed to exercise is actually removed and we become a pawn. We become a pawn of other forces. Again, on the left or the right.

It doesn't matter, they'll use us if we make ourselves available. They will use us. So I think that's the first thing that we need to do is put less trust and align ourselves less, maybe not at all. Then we have to vote. We still have responsibility. But we will do that advisedly as real citizens of the kingdom of God, with our citizenship in heaven.

responsibility.

We'll have realistic hopes and expectations for what governing authorities can do and so forth. But our hope will be in Christ and in his body here now on earth in the work that the church has to do. So I think the first job is to give up idolatry, turn ourselves back to Christ, and let him be Lord. And so that's I think the first job.

Now, from that position then, then we can start thinking about how do I act responsibly as such. And I don't think that we will find it easy to align ourselves with something politically because that will always make us a tool, a tool of another agenda that's not Christ's agenda.

But maybe if I take us back to a comment we just heard, part of a conversation we just had by, so detaching and then living and loving our neighbors and the vulnerable in our communities, engaging in another friend, I'm thinking of a conversation with another friend. I'm very invested in my school, my local school, in my family, in my kids, forming, helping them be formed, grow.

into spiritual maturity, very invested in my local school. So, you know, a micro level kind of love your neighbor and engagement, but profound. It's profound. And then she made the comment, like, you know, but maybe I do need to take that next step and become civically responsible and engaged and bring that voice of knowing the needs, kind of like Paul pointing out injustices that are seen, needs that are seen.

at that micro level or relational level and then speak that into a local city council meeting. Or you know, like that's kind of the next step in, or as another guest on the podcast said, you know, do a community project together that benefits the broader community. And then you're acting out your love of neighbor even with others who may not share your faith. But you know, just to, and I'm almost,

Trying to encourage myself, right? Like that is actually where the rubber hits the road. And if we can focus on that, it doesn't mean we don't care about the broader structures, because we do. But if we're focused on that, we're going to actually know more. And then I also believe God will place things in our sight. Like actually, I want you to go speak for these people into this civic environment or to this governing body or what have

is.

that will come from this, an interior sense of it, it's an integrity. That's right. I mean, maybe the point where I think we're both making is Christians are called to exercise their agency where they have the most of it. And not only that, but start there, and especially there. I just read something last night that I thought was provocative and convicting in the best possible way. The author said, you know, if a Christian

and he's speaking about the fast growth of earliest Christianity, said, if a Christian had children who also converted to the Christian faith and kept the faith, not that easy to do, by the way, as we know. But if they did that, and during their lifetime, they influenced one other adult by their way of life to become curious about Christianity and find the Christ, the

church, Christianity would take over very quickly. That's it. Yeah, that's it. Like one person and your own family. That's exercising the agency where you have it. I thought that was pretty cool, because I've been raised to be an evangelist. I take opportunity where I can, hope. But it isn't actually that I need to convert dozens or scores of people, though.

That's all it takes.

God would open those doors, of course I wanna walk through them. just that kind of faithfulness. So my worry is the amount of emotional energy and literal time that many of us are spending wringing our hands about what's happening up there or over there, whether it's our state capital or Washington DC or whatever, versus what we could just do. This has not made us better.

And it's not expanded our influence.

So actually, maybe why don't we use one of the most popular examples you shared at the talk about loving your neighbor as sort of a kind of just an illustration of exactly what we were just talking about.

Yeah. Well, I think I know what you're asking. Yeah. Well, the story I told and I'll tell it again now was I was in campus ministry for 18 years. Had a great experience and my experience included everything from sort of private, more elite schools, University of Wisconsin, big public schools and commuter colleges and technical colleges.

Modern day Good Samaritans.

And one of things that you have more often in commuter schools and technical colleges is first generation college students. And then you'll also have a somewhat older, on average, older population. And often these are people that have the first phase of their adult life didn't go all that well. And they're putting their life back together.

I had a student that was in a Bible study with me and he had been drug addicted and was recovering. He had found the Lord and his life was transformed. But he still bore the scars. And a lot of struggles. But he was a testimony of God's grace and just a wonderful guy. We were having a Bible study on the Good Samaritan. And we came to the end of it and I was in my

highly idealistic on the one hand and really thinking about big questions of justice and so on and so forth. And I came to the end of the study and I said, well, you know, what do you all think about how we should apply this today? And you know, I'm looking for these kind of theoretically high-end answers. I want people to talk about social justice and economic justice and racial reconciliation.

all this sort of thing. you know, nobody really does. And then this guy, he looks a little sheepish and he says, don't know if this is really what you're looking for. But he said, ever since I read this, he said, I just try to leave everywhere I go a half hour earlier than I need to. And I put my toolbox in the back of my pickup. And the point being, I said,

Okay, that's kind of literal.

Very concrete example.

And he said, yeah, if you have the time, if you've given yourself the time and you're looking for people that need help, he you'll be surprised how many you find. Cut right to the heart. It's like I want something theoretical and you're just talking about how to love my neighbor in really concrete ways. So there's worse things than literal Bible interpretation.

There we go.

And that went well, of course, that was 40 years ago. Yeah.

I think it stuck with some of our guests.

Okay. Yeah. God bless him. Kurt. Yeah. Pray for Kurt. All right. Kurt.

And also, I think you had some suggestions of other resources for our listeners. Be helpful in the early church.

I'll them in the notes.

a few updated editions. And it's a gem of a book. And anything Robert Wilkin wrote was, should read. So that's one that I would think about. There've been kind of a spate of recent books talking about what made Christianity different than its surrounding culture. And why, given that it was so different and also costly, why did it attract people? Yeah. Right, so I think.

Persecuted probably. Costs were high.

It probably, yeah. I mean, it costs were high and it still, it grew so fast. So a lot of people know Rodney Stark. Rodney Stark has written a couple of fascinating books. There you go, yeah. About why did early Christianity grow and what accounts for that and there's one sort of big one and then a sort of popularization of that one. That's very worth looking at. A book that I read just recently,

a of them, Larry Hurtado has a book called Destroyer of the Gods and How Did Christianity Flourish Against All Odds. There's a great little book by Nijay Gupta called Strange Religion and it talks about Christianity as a religion over against the religions of the Greco-Roman world. But if I had to pick one, if you wanna read just one and it's a bigger one, it's called Patient Ferment, Patient Ferment.

by Alan Kreider. And it's about 10 years old now, but it's very compelling, very interesting book. And I have to tell you a true story, this is a confession. After I gave that talk in Oshkosh, one of our very well-read participants came up to me and said, I could see that Alan Kreider had a really big influence on you.

And I said, tell me more about Alan Trider, because I don't know who that is. And then he told me about the book. And now you do, though. I got it immediately, and I have loved it. OK, great. unknown to me, we were pushing on many of the same themes. Yeah, great. And it's just a really fine book. You'll find it, people will find it inspiring.

Great. And then you also ended your talk up there with a letter written back in the book. So maybe just describe that a little bit and then we'll put it in the notes as well.

8.

can read it on their own. Well, one of the things that early Christian literary culture was trying to do was to try to give an explanation of who these Christians were and why, though under great suspicion, what they were doing was somehow good. And trying to explain Christianity to people, somewhat the intellectual stuff, but especially the lifestyle stuff. So we have a genre that comes up in the second century, it's called the apologies.

Apologia in Greek. An apology in this case is not saying I'm sorry, it's defending or explaining. That's what we mean by apology. And so one of the earliest Christian apologies is called a letter to Diagnetus. And we don't know who Diagnetus is, we don't know who wrote this letter, we have some guesses about when and it might have been somewhere between 125 and 150.

And I hope you'll take the time everybody to just read an excerpt that we used in our talk. Essentially what he talks about is how Christians were normies. Like they didn't have a special language, they didn't wear different clothes, they didn't eat different foods. They were just like everybody else. Except in all the ways that matter. How they lived. How they loved one another, how they looked out for the poor and needy.

especially above all, their ultimate allegiance was to Christ. And only secondarily to the world about. That's what set them apart. And it's a beautiful little excerpt, I think you agree. If it had been written 50 years earlier, it should have been in the New Testament. But it wasn't in the Apostles and so forth. But anyway, I hope everybody takes a read.

And that's what set them up.

No, it's a wonderful letter. Well, thank you, Gar. This has been fun. A lot of fun for me, And I really enjoyed the conversation. Me, too. And thank you again.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for tuning into the Upwards Podcast. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. For more information about the S.L. Brown Foundation and Upper House, please visit slbf.org. Go in peace to be a light on our campuses, in our churches, and in our businesses so that all may flourish.