[00:00:03] Voiceover: Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the status quo. Expand your imagination and tackle controversy head on. Let’s stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It’s time for the Libertarian Christian podcast.
[00:00:22] Doug Stuart: Welcome to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty network. And with me, I have another host at one of the other podcasts on the Christians for Liberty Network. His name is Alex Bernardo. He’s the host of the Protestant Libertarian Podcast, and he lives in rural Kentucky, where he enjoys reading, theology, podcasting and cajoling Cody Cook for living in Ohio. And he likes writing. Yeah, he likes writing. Uh, which is why he’s on to tell us about this project that he’s been working on. And I think it would be of great interest to libertarian Christians. Alex, thanks for joining me again. This is like, I don’t know, your fifth appearance. 10th appearance, something like that.
[00:00:58] Alex Bernardo: It’s always good to be back here, Doug. I really appreciate it and I appreciate that you mentioned my hatred for Ohio at the very top of the episode.
[00:01:06] Doug Stuart: You know, I, uh, you know, we’d like to diss on Ohio. I recently had occasion to drive through Ohio and then also on through Indiana and Michigan and Wisconsin, and Ohio was not the worst state. Yeah. So there’s that.
[00:01:18] Alex Bernardo: And I’m going to be real honest with everyone that’s listening here. I grew up in Northern Kentucky, so right across the river from Cincinnati. I think that everyone can agree that Cincinnati, for the most part, is pretty terrible city. And for most of my childhood, I associated the entire state of Ohio with the city of Cincinnati. Ohio is actually beautiful, and there’s a lot of really cool places in Ohio. I love that state a lot. I just hate Cincinnati so much. Uh, and that’s really where all of this, this, um, you know, this kind of anger and aggression towards Ohio comes from.
[00:01:43] Doug Stuart: I see, I see. So is that why you have to write, like, a 130 000 word book, which is what you sent me?
[00:01:50] Alex Bernardo: Yes. Uh, yeah. Pretty much. And we’re, you know, we’re about, uh, I would say it’s probably about two thirds of the way to the end. So it’s going to be.
[00:01:56] Doug Stuart: Yeah. No. That’s good. That’s good. No. I like to hear it because I know, obviously, I know the topic that you’re writing about. I want to talk to you about that today. Um, you and I tend to have a lot of similar thoughts on things, although you have, you know, you’ve stayed up more currently with some of the more recent scholarly works and books and things. Um, so you have fewer kids than I do, so maybe that accounts for it, I don’t know. Uh, but, uh, anyway, tell us about this project you’re working on. Like, kind of what prompted you to want to write about this? Uh, and what is the what is your book gonna be about?
[00:02:28] Alex Bernardo: Yeah. So I really appreciate that. And also, you are completely correct. Having one kid is the reason why I can write this book at this stage of my life. Uh, definitely gives you a lot of free time to pursue these kind of interests that, uh, my friends that don’t have only one kid, uh, they just don’t have the same amount of time to afford. But anyways, the book is called. The tentative title of the book is “Politics, Economics, and New Testament Interpretation”, and it really is a summation of a lot of the issues that I’ve been thinking about over, really over the last 20 years, even before I was really interested in politics. And it’s been 5 or 6 years since I really started diving into economics and political philosophy. And I’ve realized that a lot of the language and the categories that we use in the modern world to think about political and economic, um, political and economic structures and political and economic concepts are not they don’t have any sort of solid foundation that people very loosely use words that are associated with political and economic, um, subjects all the time without ever attempting to define them. And this is something that for a very long time, I’ve identified in New Testament scholarship, even before I was, I was like, self-consciously political.
[00:03:38] Alex Bernardo: I realized that there were, in many cases, disjunctions between the claims that certain New Testament scholars were making about what the writers of the Bible were saying, and then their modern application to the realm of politics and economics, and that I think that by trying to ground some of these concepts and definitions that are stable and applicable and more constant than the way that New Testament scholars have generally approached these issues. It actually sheds more light on how we can better interpret the New Testament in its own historical context. And I think, more importantly for modern Christians, draw draw on principles from those texts that we can use to kind of navigate our own political and economic landscape today. So this book is an attempt to try to deal with those those problems. How do we deal with the complete subjectivity of language with respect to economic and political concepts? And once we have a grounded understanding of politics and economics, how does that how does that allow us then to go and interpret the Bible in its historical context and come up with conclusions that might be a little bit more satisfactorily aligned with the intentions of the original author than what New Testament scholarship has produced up to this point.
[00:04:43] Doug Stuart: So give us a sense of what you mean when you say New Testament scholarship, because I know you probably have a whole bunch of authors in your head, and I don’t know what people listening are going to think of. Um, but some people might be listening and think, well, none of the New Testament scholars that I read are really in contradiction, because a lot of them are just all about helping us understand when when Galatians was written and, you know, more spiritual and non-economic and nonpolitical things. And so I roughly know the authors that you’re referring to, but I think they’re really, really helpful to kind of discuss that because this, this sort of, um, sphere of I don’t know what the word is, this grouping of authors that that are New Testament scholars tend to sort of dip into the economic realm, which is sort of out of their lane in a way. Right. Yeah. And so why is it? Who are these people? And we can talk about them by name or maybe not, but like, what kind of scholar are they? And then why is it that they seem to want to dip out of their lane a bit?
[00:05:39] Alex Bernardo: Sure. And I do think just to just to make it really clear to the audience before we get into some of the specific authors in this camp, there is in in academia, there is a distinction between biblical Scholarship and theology. And I want to make sure that our audience understands that, because it’s very important that when I talk about New Testament scholarship in particular, I’m talking about people that are essentially historians who focus on the biblical writings. And so my book is going to focus like my specialty is not the Old Testament. So my book is focusing on on New Testament interpretation. So these are scholars who have and obviously you can’t you cannot draw, especially in Christian circles, a hard wall between theology and history. It’s just not possible. But these are scholars that are self-consciously operating within the categories of historiography, like they’re trying to come to. They’re trying to construct historically plausible historical scenarios within which we can interpret the New Testament. That’s kind of the goal of New Testament scholarship. And it’s been very popular for at least the last 25 years in New Testament scholarship to see the claims that are being made by New Testament authors as being in conflict with Roman imperialism. This is called this the anti-imperial reading of Paul in evangelical circles. Probably the most famous name associated with that is N.T.
[00:06:54] Alex Bernardo: Wright. But then you also have people like Scott McKnight and Mike bird who have written extensively on that as well. And then in and I know some of these scholars would consider themselves to be Christians as well. But you have people that aren’t within the evangelical world like Richard Horsley and Neal Elliott. Very recently I’ve had James Crossley on my show before, and Robert Miles have written a book that analyzes Jesus through the lens of Marxism. And so these are these are scholars that are, um, that are interested in the historical interpretation of the New Testament, but are also interested in the way that it intersects with modern political concepts. Now, it’s pretty obvious when you read them that a lot of the literature that they’re engaging with in terms of their reading of economics in particular, is, is like secondary literature that’s written by people that have a self-conscious, um, that have a self-conscious perspective on certain economic and political issues. And so I can use. Some of this is you can tell just by reading through the bibliography at the back of these books. They’re not reading like the political philosophers themselves. They might be familiar with Karl Marx or, um, or maybe they’ve read like Keynes or like Adam Smith or something like that, but they’re not steeped in, um, in economic thought and political philosophy.
[00:08:07] Alex Bernardo: And yet they’re drawing these kind of very broad economic and political conclusions from the text and aren’t necessarily justified by the way that political theorists and economists understand these very same concepts. And so by doing that, they wind up bringing all of these imprecise categories to the text with them as they’re interpreting the New Testament and then drawing monitoring conclusions that I think are at odds with what the writers of the Bible are attempting to communicate. And so much of that is that they just aren’t like they’re very interested in politics and economics. And a lot of this is probably the like the academic incentive of I work in a university. Universities are inherently political, and we’re supposed to stimulate students to think about these kind of grand political and economic issues. But these New Testament scholars might not have there, might not be familiar with kind of hard political and economic philosophy, and they certainly aren’t familiar with, like, the Austrian tradition of economics. Right. Like, like, like they’re not reading anything that’s outside of the mainstream. And you can kind of see that reflected in the areas in their literature where even if they’ve done very strong historical scholarship, it just doesn’t quite translate to the modern world and the way that they think it ought to.
[00:09:10] Doug Stuart: Yeah, they might get to Hayek because he was pretty popular.
[00:09:13] Alex Bernardo: Yes, yes.
[00:09:14] Doug Stuart: And was kind of opposite Keynes. And so they’re like, all right, well, we’ll read we’ll read his nemesis.
[00:09:18] Alex Bernardo: Yeah. Well, and even then I’m glad you brought that up, because I’m reading a book right now and I might have the author on my show. So I’m not going to name any names, but it’s very clear that his analysis of Hayek doesn’t come from his own personal reading of Hayek. It has to have come from like like an activist anti Hayek book, which again, you can’t be an expert in everything. And so I get it. If you’re a scholar and you are already committed to a particular political perspective, then you’re probably going to read someone who’s done an analysis of the people that you don’t agree with. But it’s like it’s very clear in his presentation of Hayek in his book that he’s not read Hayek because he attributes to hike certain ideas that in Hayek’s work he specifically refutes, uh, like one of them is scientism. He’s like, yeah, well, Hayek is basically just working within, you know, scientistic categories. When Hayek himself, like, wrote an entire book against using scientism in economic reasoning. Right. And so but you get a lot of that New Testament scholarship, too, where it’s just like, okay, I can tell that they’re interested in these issues. Yeah. But I don’t think they’ve ever really tried to drill down to, um, how how they work at the core in the same way that kind of like the libertarian tradition does, where unique political philosophy and economic philosophy, because we’re concerned about fundamental principles in a way that, um, other like economic and political traditions just aren’t. Um, and I think that that really has hindered New Testament scholarship in a lot of ways.
[00:10:35] Doug Stuart: How much do you think, though, does this? Is it how much do you think this is explained by the, I guess, the general sense that you’d have scholars who are like, okay, I’m not going to go become an economist. I’m not going to go spend, you know, years of my life kind of learning the Austrian tradition versus the Chicago school versus the Keynesians and all of that. Right. And so I’m just going to kind of read some literature of people that I trust, and they shrug and they’re like, oh, well, there’s a handful of positions here. I’m just going to pick one. And maybe they use a little bit of thought process. I’m not going to say they’re just thoughtless about it. They pick one and then they just kind of go with it. And what ends up happening is you have this sort of like, you know, lightly Marxist readings of New Testament texts, because the economic analysis sounds a little bit more like something, you know, the, the, the railing against the rich of Jesus did and the railing against the rich that Marx did. Oh, well, those sound very similar. And, you know, acts four, they held all things in common. And it’s like, oh, well, okay, those kind of match up. And there’s not a thorough thinking through like, well, that was then, this is now. What are the economic implications? What are the differences in those in those settings?
[00:11:45] Alex Bernardo: Yeah. No, I mean, I pretty much agree with everything that you said there. And I do think that to your to your point that a lot of scholars tend to it’s just a part of the academic institution. The academic institution is inherently left wing because a lot of it is funded by or at least subsidized by the taxpayers. And like the Pell Grants that students get to go to college are also subsidized and backstopped by the government. So there is like an inherent there’s an inherent like sort of left wing bias within academia. And I think that a lot of scholars that have no specialty in economics or political thought will just kind of imbibe that as a part of being an and I’m sure that there are all kinds of social and I know that there are social pressures and the institutions because I’ve heard people like I’ve had people tell me that work in these institutions, that they’re libertarians, but it’s kind of hard to talk about it in certain, like academic contexts. Yeah. And then the other thing too, with this is that, yes, if you’re a New Testament scholar, there is you have to be you have to be extremely immersed in the literature, and you have to know several different languages, and you have to be up to date on all the current scholarship, and you have to know a little about history and philosophy and, um, and anthropology.
[00:12:52] Alex Bernardo: And so there are all of these things that you have to study when you’re in New Testament scholarship, that it makes sense that you wouldn’t be able to devote an extensive amount of time to researching complex political and economic ideas, because that’s just not something that is inherently like, necessary. If you’re just going to do the work of being an historical scholarship or a historical scholar. Now, I do think that if you’re going to explicitly comment on how biblical texts that deal with what we would consider to be political and economic issues, um, impact the way that Christians ought to think about politics and economics in the modern world. Then you have to do better than what I just read what somebody said about this in a book a long time ago, and this was my position. Um, but I am sympathetic towards the fact that a lot of scholars don’t have the time to do that, and maybe don’t think that it is as important as we would. We would as we know that it is.
[00:13:41] Doug Stuart: What do you think of the what do you think of the critique that economics as a, as a field of study is just and particular free market economics is a sort of business, corporate, business interests way of interpreting economic like analyzing the economy in order to sort of justify the kinds of things that Marx would say economic class warfare does. Like I’ve heard that before, where it’s kind of like, oh, well, economics, that’s just another field. And that’s just, you know, that’s just, you know, bootlicking to the, the bourgeois or the capitalists and so forth.
[00:14:15] Alex Bernardo: Yeah. I mean, I just, I think that that’s just a wrong way to approach economics. I mean, it is certainly true that there are like in every academic discipline there, like in every academic discipline, there are activists within economics. And I would say maybe the majority of of economics professors in the country are probably activists for some sort of political program. But at its heart, economics is and this is what Mises and the entire Austrian school is built upon. Economics is just the analysis of human behavior. At the end of the day, it’s about how human beings act and about how organizations and institutions kind of spontaneously generate from human action. That’s at least the starting point for our particular tradition and economics. And so, um, for me, you know, these questions about scarcity and choice and supply and demand, these are just intrinsic to the human experience. There’s something that we can’t avoid, and we should try to have an understanding of how these dynamics work and about how they impact the lives of regular people. And to that extent, that really is just a study of economics.
[00:15:14] Alex Bernardo: It’s just about how people navigate the reality of scarcity and make choices given that we’re constrained. And so I think that, yeah, there are certainly like if you read, if you pick up a if you pick up an introductory textbook to economics, and you look at all the charts and graphs and the math and everything like that, and there yes, it can seem very technical, and I could see how somebody who is kind of reflexively against, you know, what they consider to be capitalism would say, well, this is just a way of kind of masking the the evil excesses of free markets. I could understand how someone could draw that conclusion, but there’s a lot more to the economics discipline than that. Um, and so I think that by assigning to the discipline of economics a sort of kind of abstract and almost irrelevancy that we don’t give to other disciplines, you wind up actually missing out on, on a way of looking at the world that helps us to analyze, like the basic, the basic, the basic reasons why people make the choices that they make.
[00:16:14] Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah. No, that’s really well said. I think that’s that’s good. You know, it’s funny, we’ve gotten to maybe the second point in my outline for talking to you about this. This is like how this goes. Right? I want to talk a little bit about modern categories. And like first century economic realities. I think we kind of touched on it a little bit that that you have this like, um, the word socialist or capitalist or even libertarian. I mean, you and I both have articles of very similar names that Jesus wasn’t a libertarian. Um, and we don’t like calling Jesus libertarian, even though we would say he would probably endorse what we what we’re doing here. Um, well, what do what do modern Christians not realize about the way in which both New Testament scholarship and just even pastors in general, in readers of the text, tend to do with our modern categories when we’re looking at what we know as an ancient text.
[00:17:03] Alex Bernardo: Yeah. Well, I think that the the biggest problem in that regard is that we don’t have clear, stable definitions of either capitalism or socialism, and we don’t really have clear, uh, and we don’t really have clear conceptions of how political power works. Right. So even if you.
[00:17:20] Doug Stuart: And they didn’t have any of those things in the New Testament.
[00:17:22] Alex Bernardo: Yeah, right. Well, that’s exactly right. Because all of the modern isms, whether it’s libertarianism, progressivism, uh, you know, capitalism, socialism, conservatism, all of these are responses to political and economic ideas that were generated in the wake of the enlightenment. And, you know, for whatever the enlightenment, it’s a it’s a very diverse. And we can’t even really call it an event in history. It’s a very diverse period of time where the human mind in the Western world shifted in terms of the categories that it used to analyze the world around it, and they just didn’t think in the same way that post-enlightenment thinkers do in the first century. And so it’s it’s we’re already running the risk when we import these modern categories into antiquity and assume that they had to have taken a stake in these debates that weren’t even really possible. And then beyond that, um, we also don’t have a clearly defined or articulated definition of any of these modern concepts either. So not only do like, not only do we fail to realize that the ancients don’t think like us, but we don’t even know what we think about capitalism and socialism for the most part. You know, like you, I guarantee you, if you walked into, like, you know, a local county affiliate for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. And you ask all the Republicans what define capitalism and socialism? And you ask all of the Democrats will define capitalism and socialism. It would basically be that whichever one they didn’t like was bad, and whichever one they did like was good. And that’s the definition that they have for those terms, right? Like there’s no substance to them. And I think that that is really, really harmed our ability to think clearly about what the writers of the Bible were saying. It’s just that we just don’t we don’t have any way of grounding our modern concepts and anything objective or tangible. And so of course, we’re not going to be able to do it when we’re interpreting texts that are 2000 years old.
[00:19:07] Doug Stuart: Right. Okay. All right. So let’s talk about another thing then. Um, the word politics. You and I both know that the word politics is not a dirty word. We also know that the New Testament is very political. Uh, but you and I catch a lot of flack when we say that among our friends. So what is is politics part of the New Testament? In what ways?
[00:19:26] Alex Bernardo: Well, I mean, yeah, and a lot of that does depend on how you define politics. And I really do think that the.
[00:19:32] Doug Stuart: Definitions.
[00:19:32] Alex Bernardo: Again. Right. Because really this all just is kind of a problem of language. Like I think that, um, well, yes, even in the very narrow modern American sense of the term, when people hear the word politics, they think about the political process, right? So they think about governments, they think about elections, they think about that in a very narrowly conceived term. And of course, if you look at the New Testament, then absolutely. I mean, I just got done writing, uh, like yesterday, my chat or two days ago, my chapter on acts and the entire book of acts is about the early Jesus followers being engaged with the, you know, quote unquote, political authorities of their day. So, yes, the early Christian movement is very political, and they’re also making very concrete claims about Jesus as Messiah that they don’t think is a metaphor, like when they call like, and this is universal. All 27 works in the New Testament when they call Jesus the Christ the Messiah, they sincerely believe that he is the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Son of David who is reigning over all of creation right now in a real way, like it’s not just a dead metaphor for them. And so, yeah, of course, like the New Testament is very political in that narrow sense. But I think that a more helpful definition of politics in the wider modern sense is simply how human beings relate to each other.
[00:20:43] Alex Bernardo: It’s about how we, um, whether whether it’s organization from the top down that’s imposed upon us by a state or by a government, or whether it’s organization from the bottom up where people come together and build communities and, and create businesses and do things like that. Well, that’s that’s politics. And I think the broader sense of the word and really the Greek word politeia is a lot more, uh, it’s a lot more closely related to that wider conception of politics than just focusing on governmental structures and the political process, although that would be a part of human relationships as well. Um, and so I think that we have to be kind of aware that, that when we talk about politics, that it’s got to be bigger than just, um, you know, who’s running for election and what laws are they going to pass if they win? Um, it has to do with how human beings relate to one another in general, as. But we cannot But we also cannot forget that it does have to do with power and authority. And so, you know, quote unquote, social management and things like that. So, um, again, it’s just it’s just trying to trying to step back and think about, well, what do we mean when we say political? We also have this problem in the modern world where the thinkers of the enlightenment, at least rhetorically, it never worked in practice.
[00:21:47] Alex Bernardo: But the thinkers of the enlightenment, this is very famous. Um, they divided up the world into separate spheres of religion, politics and society. So from the enlightenment on, and a lot of this had to do with the fact that the that many enlightenment thinkers wanted to undermine the power of the institutional churches of late medieval Europe, which I’m kind of sympathetic with that in a lot of ways. Um, but in doing so, they, they, they put these very firm boundaries between politics, religion and society. And so those of us that are born in the wake of the enlightenment just kind of assume that those are separate spheres of life, whereas in antiquity they just they just didn’t do that. There is no boundaries between those three things. They all kind of happily blend together. And so one of the reasons why the Romans were nervous about Christianity is that they didn’t worship Roman gods. And the thought back then was that, well, if you don’t worship the gods, then the gods are going to be unhappy with Rome and they’re going to bring wrath upon our civilization. And so, like, these Christians are putting our entire empire in danger by not worshiping our gods. And that’s just a great. And we don’t think that way in the modern world. But they certainly did back then. And we have to account for that.
[00:22:50] Doug Stuart: Yeah, yeah. If the gospel weren’t political, then Rome wouldn’t have seen it as a threat. They would have just shrugged. They would have just shrugged and said, okay, just don’t be menacing. Yeah, yeah. No, I yeah, of course I agree with you on this because you and I have talked about this a lot.
[00:23:03] Alex Bernardo: Yeah, we read a lot of same authors.
[00:23:05] Doug Stuart: We read a lot of the same authors. I think there’s this, um, there’s this view that the either the gospel or the scripture or Jesus wasn’t political. And a lot of times we think about that as just narrowly the electoral politics that we talked about. In other words, Jesus doesn’t tell you how to vote. Jesus doesn’t tell you, you know how how to think about every single policy prescription that’s out there. And that’s true. I mean, I think you and I do agree with that in that sense. But to understand that is it politeia is is a way for us to think about. It’s important. And God cares about how we treat each other and how we relate with one another, which brings up questions of power, authority, violence, and the limits of all of those things. And so that is where that’s where you and I come down as libertarians, uh, as where other people come down is, you know, whatever social Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, whatever, whatever they end up, uh, you know, we think that we’re, you know, more consistent. Um, they think they’re consistent. Um, we’re here to tell them they’re wrong. Of course. That’s why that’s why our shows exist. Right, Alex?
[00:24:09] Alex Bernardo: Yes.
[00:24:09] Doug Stuart: It is. Um, so I think it’s I think it’s super important that we we understand the political nature of the gospel, the political nature of, um, of the New Testament, especially, but even even the entire scriptures. But that is not to say that it is only political, or that it is primarily political, or that it’s first and foremost political. That may be the sort of historical on the ground, uh, setting. Um, but there’s also a sense in which we know that it’s also more universal than that.
[00:24:39] Alex Bernardo: Yeah. No, absolutely. And that was kind of goes back to what I was saying just a minute ago, is that in antiquity, they blended all of these ideas together. And so there is no distinction. And that’s why when it’s been very unfortunate in the history of Western Christianity, that we severed the messianic identity of Jesus from its Davidic origins. Like the entire point, you can read this like it’s like just read Isaiah or Jeremiah 30 through 33 or Ezekiel 34 through 37. I mean, these passages, uh, you know, Zechariah nine there over and over again, Micah four. And I gotta stop because there’s so many, uh, there are so many passages in the prophets that foretell the coming of a future Davidic king who will rule over all creation. Psalm two, second Samuel seven, Psalm 70. You can go through all the passages in the Old Testament. They believe that this was going to happen. And so when the writers of the New Testament call Jesus Messiah and say that he’s the Son of David, they’re not they’re not changing the fundamental structure of those messianic promises, like they really do believe that he is king over all creation. And it’s unfortunate that in the third and fourth centuries, and I’m not saying that it’s wrong, like these were good conversations to have, but I think that questions about the ontology of Jesus, about whether or not he was in substance with God, kind of overtook these messianic categories. And the Western Church is more or less just completely lost that. And that’s the reason why a lot of modern Christians read the New Testament and think that when it’s like that, when the writers of the New Testament talk about Jesus as king, that it’s more of a metaphor, like he’s king of our hearts or he’s king of the church, or he might be, you know, the king of my life, but he’s not king of the world. And any sort of tangible, objective sense.
[00:26:12] Doug Stuart: Or king just goes along with Savior and Lord.
[00:26:14] Alex Bernardo: Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. Well, and again, there’s kind of like this, um, and I know that this, this, um, this is, this is hard for a lot of people to to grapple with, especially people that have grown up in churches. But we’re like, we put the ontology of Jesus before we put his messianic identity. And I don’t think that we should play those two things off of one another like I, you know, I’m I think that, uh, the Trinity is certainly one way of looking at God that I don’t disagree with like that. That is a model for understanding the relationship between the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit that is bred within the realm of Greco-Roman philosophy. But I think that if you’re going to make a statement about the nature of the father, the son, and the spirit within the framework of Greco-Roman philosophy, you would have to get something like the Trinity. So I don’t disagree with that. I do believe that Jesus is God. Absolutely. But he’s not just that. Like there’s more to his identity than that. And we kind of want to downplay all of those other aspects and just emphasize his divine status when in reality, like his divine status is, is inextricably connected to his messianic status as well, the one reaffirms the other.
[00:27:14] Alex Bernardo: And so you can’t really fully have, um, a developed, fleshed out Trinitarian theology. Unless you also understand that Jesus is the real Davidic Messiah. And we can’t we can’t pull what. And this is, again, kind of putting these modernist categories back on these ancient texts. We can’t pull Jesus’s political identity away from his religious one, because in the ancient world, there was no distinction between those two things. And unfortunately, in the modern world, we want to keep those two apart. And we actually kind of want to privilege the theological identity over the political one. But the writers of the New Testament just don’t do that. Like it’s just not it’s not biblical to do. I understand why people read it that way, because we’re trained to read it that way to a certain extent. And I’m very sympathetic towards people that have a hard time kind of seeing that in the text. But once you once you kind of tear down all of those modern impositions that we place on biblical hermeneutics, then it’s really easy to see where the writers of the Bible are going. And it’s a direction that, like, not a lot of modern Christians are willing to take, because it does have massive implications for how we live our lives as Christians.
[00:28:10] Doug Stuart: Well, there’s also the explanation that sometimes there’s like apologetic explanations for these things where like there’s a certain era of time where we have to defend the divinity of Christ. And so that becomes what the church talks about and or what church traditions talk about. And we inherit that. And so now there’s, you know, you know, that people use the metaphor of a pendulum swing, right? And so, you know, the church was heavy on, you know, the divinity of Christ. And you and I inherited that with a lot of scholars, you know, as we were growing up. And now we’re thinking, okay, you know, all that you just said is like, okay, well, there’s more to it than that. And so there’s a rebalancing to some extent. And, um, I think that’s sort of okay in one sense. Um, because that’s just the way that’s partly the way theology is done. And sometimes things get a little out of whack. But yeah.
[00:28:55] Alex Bernardo: Yeah. Well, I’m going to say something too, that I might have said on my podcast once or twice and people will probably, like initially label me as a heretic. So just hang on and hear everything out that I have to say about this. But there was a period of time about, I don’t know, 10 or 12 years ago when I was really steeped in reading a lot of literature about messianism in Second Temple Judaism. And I flirted with the idea. I never, never totally came to this conclusion. But I flirted with the idea that even if Jesus wasn’t ontologically God, he could still 100% be the crucified and resurrected Davidic Messiah who reigned over all creation. That Jesus’s ontology wasn’t necessarily connected to his Davidic identity. And so I will say that as a part of my theological development at that time, I kind of privileged his messianic identity over his divine identity. But then as I read more and more scholarship on that, the the very tight connection, especially in Paul, between Jesus’s Davidic status and his like and his his relationship with God the Father, it helped me to better understand just how significant that messianism was. That yeah, he absolutely is the son of David. And yes, the church has marginalized that. But understanding that he has that relationship with the father. Um, that that historic Christianity has assigned to him only makes that that messianic identity even stronger. And so I’ve come completely around to the conclusion. It’s like, oh yeah, like if you want to believe that Jesus is Messiah, like in a real sense, you kind of have to believe that he’s God too. Um, but if you want to believe that Jesus is God, then you also have to believe that he’s the Messiah. Like, you can’t get you can’t get, you know, around the other direction without going through his messianic identity as well. Yeah. So you have to have both of those things in order to fully understand who he is and what it means for us as Christians today.
[00:30:40] Doug Stuart: Yeah. No, I mean, I think your story, um, Mr. Heretic. Yeah, is.
[00:30:45] Alex Bernardo: It’s.
[00:30:45] Doug Stuart: Not.
[00:30:45] Alex Bernardo: The.
[00:30:45] Doug Stuart: First.
[00:30:46] Alex Bernardo: Heretic, you know.
[00:30:47] Doug Stuart: No. It’s fine. Um, everyone’s a heretic to someone else’s theology anyway. So. Yeah, I don’t know. Um, but, uh, I think the experience that you have is, is very similar to something I probably around the same time you were doing, you were flirting with. This is like the idea of borrowing an idea without actually sort of adopting it and sort of just like letting it wrestle around in your mind and be like, okay, I want to try to walk out this theology and I’m going to read the Bible as if this theology, this particular point is true, whether it be what you were just talking about, whether it be something like, I don’t know, universalism or anything like that, and you just kind of, you know, work that out. It doesn’t mean you’re going to adopt it, and it doesn’t even mean that you think it’s right. But you have to find a way to be like, well, does this help me read the text better? Does this actually help me, uh, know Jesus better? Does it help me love others better? Is it the right way of treating the text, or does it twist the text? You know, all those different questions. And sometimes when you step aside and you, you take a an angle on things and you look at it from a different angle, you wake up to realities that are that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
[00:31:49] Doug Stuart: And sometimes you realize, okay, this is just wrong and terrible and or or not quite right. And so you kind of tweak it. And I think there’s, there’s a maturity in the ability to basically don the glasses of some other way of looking at the text in order to understand it better. And so I think a lot of Christians would do better to sort of like, all right, I’m going to understand this from a different perspective and try to gain a sense of what is the text saying from this perspective. And maybe it’s not true, but I can learn more about how others think about it, let alone the of course, you coming to the conclusion that okay, these flirting with that was okay to do. Uh, those people are wrong, but it gave you a better sense of tying those two things together. Together, which, you know, if you hadn’t, quote unquote flirted with that idea, uh, you may not have come to the wrong conclusion that those are just inextricably linked.
[00:32:43] Alex Bernardo: Yeah, I agree, and I mean, I know that you I mean, you studied this in college, too, so I know that you understand this dynamic. But I remember going to, um, because, like, with my own back story, when I was, when I was 15, I, that’s when I really started taking my I was, I grew up and was raised. I mean, I was raised in the church. My parents weren’t super serious about it, but like, they made sure that we went, um, and a couple of years before I started getting serious about it, my mom had an experience and she. But. So anyways, I was 15 when I really started reading the Bible for the first time and I was like, totally sold. You know, I was in a Lutheran church at the time, and the thing that I learned is that if you want to be a real Christian, you read the Bible, because that’s what Martin Luther did, you know, which I think is I think is a true statement. Like, I love I love that the impact that Martin Luther had on my life. But like in the because part. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don’t like Martin Luther’s position on Jews. I think that that was wrong. No, I think he’s wrong about a lot of other things. But I do love I love that Martin Luther gave the Bible kind of the primacy of authority in the church. I think that that was incredibly helpful.
[00:33:38] Doug Stuart: And I there’s that different angle, again, that I just talked about. Right.
[00:33:41] Alex Bernardo: Like, yeah. And so so.
[00:33:43] Doug Stuart: We.
[00:33:43] Alex Bernardo: Need to drink from that. Well and that’s for me like um, so I read the Bible just I just like throughout my time in high school, I just read the New Testament, like cover to cover. I would I would start with Matthew, read through revelation, and I just read it over and over again. And I just remember being so confused by everything that I read in there, and it seemed like there were all these contradictions, and I didn’t really know what was going on. And then trying to square it with like some of the theological teaching that I had at church, I was like, well, I know that you’re saying this, but like, there are these passages here that don’t seem to line up with that. And then I remember going to college and starting and I started studying this historically. And I realized that, like my framing for a lot of these questions was wrong. And so it wasn’t that like my it wasn’t that my, um, it wasn’t that my reading of the Bible was worthless. It was just that I had a ton of assumptions about what the Bible was supposed to do, and about what the Bible was supposed to tell me that weren’t actually true. Like the Bible was designed to do something different than what I thought that it was. And by studying it in a historical context, that really helped me to reshape the way that I thought about, like what the Bible does and how it impacts my life. And so I want other people to be able to experience it in the same way that I did as well.
[00:34:46] Alex Bernardo: And I’m also kind of like, um, on my show, I’m like, I don’t I don’t take I don’t take hard stances on a lot of theological issues. Number one, because theology isn’t my specialty. I read maybe, maybe two works of systematic theology a year at most. Like, I’m just I’m not a systems guy. I would rather start with the biblical texts themselves and the awareness that these were produced by certain people at particular places in history, and that they had to have had an intelligible meaning to their original audience. This doesn’t mean that God did not inspire the text, because he absolutely did, but he inspired it through culturally embedded people, and it was originally designed to address the needs of the audience, which was also culturally embedded, and that lived in a culture that had a lot of different values and thoughts than my own. And so I’ve always found it really helpful to try to suspend if I really believe the Bible’s authoritative, which I do like. I believe that the Bible has primacy of place above all theological systems, above all denominations, above all traditions. Like this is what Martin Luther got right. It’s that the Bible and the Bible alone should be the final source of authority for all Christian doctrine and teaching. So if I believe that the Bible is the ultimate authority, well, then I start with that. And I have a willingness to have my ideas and belief beliefs changed by the text. And I just try to figure out, well, how, how might these texts have worked historically, and how does that bear on my theology? And as I get older, I guess I’ve become increasingly frustrated with a lot of like, there are so many like dichotomies and trichotomies and theology.
[00:36:09] Alex Bernardo: You know, it’s like you either are a dispensationalist or you believe in covenant theology. You either believe in free will or you believe in determinism. And I think that when you look at it from the standpoint of the writers of the Bible and try to understand it in their historical context, a lot of those questions become a lot more complicated than that. And those either or neither side really capture kind of the dynamics of what these writers of the Bible are attempting to communicate. And so I’m just and again, this kind of goes back to what you were saying before is like, I’m now as I’m older, um, I’m a lot more orthodox, but I’m also I’m also a lot more open to like, wrestling with these ideas because I realize that they are way more complicated than many Christians give them credit for. And I don’t want to, uh, I don’t want to be guilty of, like, taking a really hard stance on a position and, like, making public statements about it and then having to come back later and say, well, you know, I kept on studying the Bible, and I realized that I was like, I was wrong and I’m an idiot for being such a jerk about it. You know.
[00:37:04] Doug Stuart: You could be. Yeah. You’re not being an idiot for being for being wrong. You’re being an idiot for being a jerk about it. Yeah, yeah, but I guess, you know, you know, your disposition in mind too, is is to be such that when when we want to articulate what we believe, it’s somewhat provisional in the sense of, well, I’m pretty sure this is the way it works, or I’m pretty sure that this is the best interpretation of this, you know, event in Scripture or whatever it might be, um, or this articulation of theology. But, you know, we also shrug and say, well, we could be wrong. And, you know, I think a little humility goes a long way. Um, I want to get to some specific, uh, scriptural passages here. I know your book covers the Luke-acts narrative. Um, if how does how does Luke and deal with the in the book of Luke and the Book of Acts? What do we need to know about that approach, that narrative as it relates to Empire?
[00:37:50] Alex Bernardo: Okay. Yeah. So that’s that’s a great question. I do want to say, just because I’m shamelessly promoting my book right now, that this like I will cover every work in the New Testament in this book, which is one of the reasons why it’s taken me a little bit of time to write. Like, I want to make sure that all of the passages that people wrestle with when it comes to political and economic concepts. I’m going to address all of them at some point in the book. So I did finish my chapter on ACS, and I did, I think, for, yeah, I did four chapters on the gospel. So there’s a lot of material in there. Um, with Luke ACS in particular, man, there’s so there’s so many interesting there’s so many interesting ways in which Luke deals with the kind of the political and economic dynamics of his day. It’s almost hard to be really general about it, but I think that what’s what’s particularly interesting about Luke ACS is that and it doesn’t appear to me that Luke was aware when he wrote his gospel that he was going to be writing acts as kind of a sequel, but he is definitely aware when he wrote acts that he wrote Luke’s right, like, like like in any. And what I mean by that is a terrible way of putting it.
[00:38:50] Doug Stuart: He starts it off that way.
[00:38:51] Alex Bernardo: He does. Right? Yeah. And so what I mean by that is like he’s self-consciously emulating the themes that he, he kind of develops in Luke throughout the book of acts. Right. So there is kind of this narrative flow there. And at the very beginning of Luke, he’s different from Mark and Matthew, whereas Mark and Matthew, Mark one one and Matthew one one start out with statements that are unambiguously about Jesus’s messianic identity. Matthew develops it just a little bit more than Mark does, but with Luke, he has kind of this address to his, uh, his audience, Theophilus. And then he actually goes into the story about the birth of John the Baptist. But Luke spends his infancy narratives kind of developing, um, this narrative about how Jesus is the Davidic Messiah and he’s come to rescue Israel, but he’s going to wind up ruling over all the nations. So you wind up getting the exact same messianic content that you get in Mark and Matthew and Luke, only in more developed form. And I also believe, too, that Luke is using both Matthew and Mark as a source. Right. The episode that I have coming out tomorrow, which will be August 26th, um, you know, as people are hearing this, I know later the episode I have coming out tomorrow is all about how the gospel writers using one another as a source, develop these messianic ideas. And then at the very beginning of Luke chapter two, you have Joseph and Mary being forced to go to Bethlehem by Caesar Augustus in faraway Rome.
[00:40:03] Alex Bernardo: But then at the very end of acts, you have Paul preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God in Rome unhindered. Now he’s in a jail cell. But but Luke makes it a point to say that Paul can more or less talk to whoever he wants to in Rome, showing that this message of the kingdom of God has made it all the way from this backwater in Judea, where Jesus was born, to the heart of the Roman Empire. And so there’s this big logic throughout the work of Luke and acts where, you know, Luke kind of telescopes in on Jerusalem, and then Jesus finally dies and is raised from the dead. And then right at the very beginning of acts in Acts one eight, Jesus says, I’m going to give you the Holy Spirit, and you’re going to be my witness in Judea and Samaria and Galilee, and to the ends of the earth. Like in other words, you’re going to take this message of the kingdom to the ends of the world. And then what happens right after that? And this is what a lot of Christians miss. But it’s very, very important for understanding New Testament Christology. Jesus is taken up to the right hand of the father and sits as the ascended Lord over all of creation. And in Peter’s first major speech in acts chapter two. The climax of Peter’s speech is when he says that Jesus was raised from the dead and now sits as king, currently ruling over all creation from heaven.
[00:41:08] Alex Bernardo: And that’s the political logic of of Luke, which is also there in acts like all of these, all like everything that acts is moving to is kind of working, or everything that Luke was moving towards is working itself out in acts. And so every time you see someone in acts like Peter or Paul interacting with one of the political authorities, Luke wants you to understand that this is within the context of Jesus already being king over all creation. He’s unambiguous about that. But the way that Luke, but the way that Luke portrays Peter and Paul and other early Christians interacting with the Roman authorities is, is unique because, uh, like Paul in particular, seems to get along really well with the political authorities. Now, he doesn’t compromise his message. Like time after time, Paul wants to say to everyone that he can that Jesus is the Messiah and that there’s going to be a judgment day and Jesus will come back, and that everyone needs to get ready. But he also doesn’t allow himself to succumb to the temptation of revolution. Like Peter and Paul are not really interested in changing political systems per se. They believe that it’s the power of the spirit that’s going to transform the world, and they just have to get the message out there. As long as people are hearing it and the spirit has the space to do the work, then that’s what really changes the world.
[00:42:16] Alex Bernardo: And all of this is only possible because God has installed Jesus as king over creation, and he’s ruling currently throughout Luke-acts. So in that sense, like Luke and acts is is they are very political texts because they’re all predicated on the assumption that Jesus is this Davidic Messiah, and you just simply can’t escape that in, in any of the text, in acts. And when you look at it from that perspective, it’s so brilliant. I think the thing that’s so frustrating to me about the way that New Testament scholars have approached acts, and a lot of the sources that I use kind of do this, too, is that they acknowledge this and they see this, and they don’t draw the obvious conclusion that for modern Christians, if we want to take a principle away from the book of Acts, it’s that whatever you think about your party affiliation or anything like Jesus has to come first and there’s nothing that comes before that. That loyalty to Jesus like that is the number one and everything else. If there is even a second place, it’s a very distant second. Um, and I think that that’s the message that comes out of that. And a lot of people have forgotten it because, again, we tend to read passages like that and we wonder more about, like these weird, like theological, not weird, but these theological issues that aren’t necessarily tied into the main themes that Luke wants to portray.
[00:43:27] Doug Stuart: Got it.
[00:43:27] Alex Bernardo: Yeah. Was that good? I know that.
[00:43:29] Doug Stuart: Yeah. That was that was that was like this nice rush of like, here’s a theme. Like, we all understand when I say we all I mean, it’s it’s understandable for a lot of listeners, for a lot of people to think, okay, Luke and acts, that’s, that’s a large portion of events in the New Testament, of course, because acts is really all the history beyond the Gospels that we have, and it kind of frames the approach that you’re taking. And that’s why I picked Luke acts as sort of the narrative for you to kind of discuss here. Um, it also influences, of course, things like Romans 13 first Peter two. I’m sure you’re going to deal with all those in your book without maybe without going into those in depth. Do you want to tease a little bit else? What? Sorry, do you want to tease what else is in your book that people might be, you know, sort of piqued, especially libertarians, because I know we all want to hear what Romans 13 means to every other Christian, Christian, libertarian, Christian. So let’s wrap up with that. I just want to give you an opportunity to sort of share, like, what else do you want to share about your book? I realize we’re months, possibly a year away from this really being out and basically in the hands of people. But, um, it’s important for them to know, like I’ve seen I haven’t read it all, but I’ve seen it and it’s pretty large. And I know you’re covering a lot of material, so tell us more.
[00:44:41] Alex Bernardo: Yeah, I mean, I like my, my goal is to have the manuscript done by March of 2026. Uh, it’s a pretty ambitious goal. I think I can do it, but it’s going to require a lot of work. We’ll see if that happens. That’s that’s the goal. Um, but with the book, like I said, I want to. So the first, the first six chapters of the book are just pure methodology. So I talk like I give a concrete definition for capitalism and socialism. Um, I give a more concrete understanding of the political spectrum. It’s really a spectrum between like liberty and authority, between violence and nonviolence. And then I also go into, like some of the methodological issues of how we interpret the Bible. Um, and then I give like a brief synopsis of Greco-Roman history, uh, and then kind of political and economic thought, because I think it’s really important to ground our interpretation in the New Testament, in the world of the Roman Empire. And in order that we have to we have to have a little bit of history. And then I also give a review of Jewish history leading up to the first century as well, just so we can kind of contextualize those two worlds of the earliest Christians lived in. So the methodology frames the rest of the book, and then I just go through all of the works of the New Testament and draw out major themes and address major passages in light of these kind of historical considerations, and also in light of the concretized definitions of political and economic concepts that I’ve developed in the earlier part of the work.
[00:45:58] Alex Bernardo: So it’s just designed to say like, okay, like if we if we look at, um, if we come up with a like, like an inflexible definition of these terms, how does this work within these passages in the New Testament that are often, um, that are often seen as dealing with political and economic issues? Now, for the Gospels, I deal with like like with the with the narratives in the New Testament. So with the Gospels and Acts, I deal with some major themes. I deal with Christology, I deal with eschatology. These are all issues that impact the way that they thought about Jesus’s messianic identity and the way that it shaped world history. And once you look at how these themes are developed throughout these, these works, then it becomes very easy to see how they do take Jesus’s messianic identity seriously in a way that Christian history has kind of tended to marginalize or ignore. And then we also look at, you know, certain economic texts. The parable of the rich young ruler is a great example of this. The widow and the mites is a good example of this. Um, in acts I look at the Jerusalem church in Acts two and acts chapter four, and we look at that through the framework of wider Christian teaching, how they understood political and economic dynamics in the first century. And then can these do these correspond to any of our grounded modern definitions for politics and economics and just kind of work through them that way? And there are so many passages.
[00:47:10] Alex Bernardo: Now, like I said, I’m setting up my, uh, my, my chapters on Paul because I think I’m going to have to have five chapters, all in all, to deal with him. Um, but I’m going to have an introductory chapter where I deal with his main themes. We look at like, all right, so what does the gospel mean for Paul? What is it about the identity of the church that is characteristic that maybe Western Christians have forgotten? And then what is it about Pauline ethics that we have to take for granted? And so when you look at, like, the cumulative evidence that Paul’s gospel is centered upon Jesus as the Messiah, that his ecclesiology is, that he believes that all those that have faith in the Davidic Messiah are a part of Israel, and that, like we’re the real people as opposed to everyone else. He takes that Jew and Gentile divide and applies it to the church and not the church. And then if you look at his ethic of Cruciform that Christians are supposed to emulate the cross and live a nonviolent life. Well, then, when you read all of Paul’s letters and you come across these economic and, uh, or these texts that appear to speak to political and economic issues, well, then you have a framework for thinking about those things within Paul’s larger thought. And that just helps contextualize a lot of these. And what’s crazy is that there are so many passages in, uh, in like first and second Corinthians, for instance, that are just totally left out of these Christian political and economic debates that need to be reincorporated.
[00:48:16] Alex Bernardo: And I think that by, you know, having that more expanded definition of politics that helps us to see where Paul sits with these, and then I’m going to go through the rest of the passages in the New Testament, um, like, you know, James, Hebrews, all the Catholic epistles, written revelation and just work through how these would have been understood historically, and then how these bear on the way that Christians ought to today try to apply these categories. So it’s it’s going to be a really for someone that’s totally unfamiliar with this. It’s going to be a great book to read from start to finish. For people that are already a part of these debates, it might be more of a resource that, you know, you can kind of pick certain passages here and there and certain sections here and there. I just want to be able to give people a guide for understanding how this could work. Um, if we were to start with the assumption that the Bible was historical text and then have some sort of hermeneutical controls to deal with that and then work through the interpretation that way, that’s the whole goal of the book. It’s going to wind up being probably 450 to 500 pages long when it’s all said and done, but this might be the only time in my life I ever write a book. And so if I’m going to do it, I want to do it right.
[00:49:18] Doug Stuart: Well, I wish you all the best. And, uh, if there’s anything we can do to help you get the word out there, I mean, we’re starting with this conversation, and, uh, so that would. That would be really great. Um, Alex, thank you so much for joining me here. Uh, I know we’ll talk about this, uh, whenever your book is published in the future, and we’ll we’ll talk more concretely about it since, uh, since, you know, I love talking to you. And this is kind of a topic of interest for for the two of us. So, uh, thanks for coming on to talk about these topics.
[00:49:44] Alex Bernardo: Oh, man. Doug, always great talking to you. You. Thanks for having me.
[00:49:46] Doug Stuart: Yep.
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