Introducing Reimagining Biblical Politics

(Including a cover and a foreward)

Hey friends, I want to share some news about the Bible and politics book I’ve been working on, including the cover and release date!

The book is Reimagining Biblical Politics: What Scripture Says About Public Life and Why It Matters. Behind the title is the idea that Christians desperately need Scripture to transform the way we see and practice politics in our world. The reference to “public life” in the subtitle adds another emphasis: while we often reduce politics to national elections and partisan campaigns, at a deeper level, politics is about how God’s people arrange our life together as followers of Jesus and seek to love and serve our neighbors in public.

Even though it’s not out till June 2026, the book already has an amazing cover, thanks to the great people at Baker Academic.

Not only do I think the cover is super cool, it also lets you in on another secret. My friend Carmen Joy Imes has been kind enough to write the forward. Carmen is an incredible scholar whose work is helping the church become more and more the people God has called us to be. She’s been very kind in her engagement with my last book, Just Discipleship, and an inspiration in my own thinking, especially on the book of Exodus. So it’s just outrageously humbling and encouraging that she was willing to write the forward to this new book.

Do We Really Need Another Book About Politics? What Makes This One Different? And Where Did It Come From?

Like many Christians, I grew up trying to keep my faith separate from politics. Over the years, though, I realized that if Jesus is King over all, that means he’s Lord over our politics, as well. Living in a low-income community during politically turbulent times showed me that if the church was called to love and serve our neighbors, we’d have to think about what that meant for our politics. I became increasingly interested in political discipleship.

But I also have found myself caught up in our outrageously toxic political climate, influenced by the rising political partisanship and tribalism of our age. The sense that God calls us to live as his disciples in our political lives has often given way to very un-Christlike anger and rage at others. I’ve often wondered: what am I missing?

And so I started asking: what does Scripture actually say about politics and public life? What does the Bible actually call us to in our political discipleship?

That’s what this book is all about.

I think there are two things that make this book unique. First, I try to really capture the beautiful, strange, startling complexity of the Bible’s political teaching. In my experience, if you ask Christians what’s on their “Greatest Hits” list in relation to politics, most of us come up with a few out of context one liners (“render to Caesar;” Submit to the governing authorities”).

But the sprawling book we call the Bible contains countless stories of God’s people trying to sort out how to live out their allegiance to God as king in a wide variety of challenging political contexts. The Bible is filled with complex, powerful tools for helping us see the world politically and act faithfully within it. But too often, we rely on only a few of the most familiar passages. We’re like craftspeople trying to build a house with a single tool, swinging the same hammer again and again, rather than looking at the tool box and exploring the full range of what we’ve been equipped with.

So in this book, I introduce readers to a much broader range of biblical voices. Not just Paul’s “submit to the governing authorities” or Jesus’ “render to Caeser,” but Jeremiah’s advice for exiles to seek the flourishing of the land of their enemies, the midwives of Exodus’s wily willingness to hustle the Pharaoh, John’s stern warning to stop collaborating with political monsters, Daniel’s complex pursuit of faithful cooperation and resistance while working for ‘the man,’ Esther’s ambiguous political action when God didn’t appear to be around, the Torah and Jesus’ counter-cultural guidance for becoming outpost communites that bear witness to the reign of God, the Proverbs wisdom for pursuing political justice, the Psalms’ offer of political worship, and much, much more.

This wild, beautiful, startling, complex choir of voices is every Christian’s political inheritance. When we ignore much of Scripture’s “great cloud” of political witnesses, though, we end up with an anemic, oversimplified account of politics. And as everybody knows, trying to offer overly simple solutions to enormously complex problems often makes things worse. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail . . . with disastrous results!

But second, Christians, especially in America, are increasingly and deeply divided along partisan lines. Many of us can hardly talk to each other anymore. Americans are apparently slightly more likely to marry a person from another religion than someone from the rival political party. And when Christians try to talk politics we jump so quickly to our preferred parties or political leaders that we often jump right past a deeper engagement with Scripture.

So a second unique feature of this book: I don’t talk about contemporary American politics at all.

This is not because contemporary American politics is unimportant or Christians should be less engaged! Quite the opposite! But because many of us have such a difficult time talking about politics, and because our political imaginations have often become so partisan, impoverished, and disconnected from Scripture, we desperately need to spend some significant time lingering in the “strange world”[i] of the Bible, a world in which God’s reign definitively shapes every aspect of our public life.

The recent political witness of God’s people in the West has often been abysmal. What if our path to recovery requires us to return to the basics? What if wrestling seriously with the strange world of biblical politics can equip us for the hard work of politics in our own world, the hard work of discerning together what’s going on in our political communities and what God might be calling us to do about it? What if the Bible itself could provide politically divided Christians a shared space to re-imagine biblical politics? To discover again our shared heritage and, along the way, a renewed commitment to live out that shared heritage together, even across the deep differences that divide us? What if disciples, churches, and Christians deeply divided by partisan politics could come together to re-imagine political discipleship through a shared engagement with Scripture?

That’s the gamble of this book. But to ensure that readers realize this isn’t just Scripture study for the sake of study, each chapter also includes incredible stories of saints from church history or the global South whose political witness resonates with the Scriptural texts I’m exploring. I have loved learning more about these political saints, and am confident they can help us imagine how to begin moving from the “there and then” of the biblical world to the “here and now” of humble, faithful, courageous political discernment and action.

What’s Next?

Re-Imagining Biblical Politics is scheduled to launch sometime in June 2026. In the months ahead, I’ll be sharing more from and about the book. There will also be opportunities to engage early by joining the book’s launch team, resources on this Substack especially for preachers and teachers looking to explore the Bible’s political teaching in their preaching and teaching, and a limited run podcast that explores some of the highlights.

I’m by no means an expert on politics. But I do have the privilege of studying Scripture for a living, and Scripture has so much to say about our public witness. My deep hope is that the ideas associated with this book will help all of us re-visit Scripture together, allowing God’s Word to transform the way we see and serve in the world, for the glory of God, for the privilege of participating in God’s mission, and for the good of our hurting world.

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[i] This is an allusion to Karl Barth’s famous essay “The Strange New World Within the Bible,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (Hodder and Stoughton, 1928), 28–50.