Basic Information:
Author: Kaitlyn Schiess
Edition: ePub on Libby from Los Angeles Public Library
Publisher: IVP
ISBN: B085FT1LGJ
Start Date: December 25, 2026
Read Date: January 29, 2026
207 pages
Genre: Christianity, Book Group
Language Warning: None
Rated Overall: 4 out of 5
Religion: Christianity,
Religious Quality: 5 out of 5
Christianity-Teaching Quality: 4 out of 5
Synopsis:
Recommendation: Sherri
Date Became Aware of Book: Fall, 2025
Why do I want to read this book: Sherri listens to the Holy Post in which Schiess is on a lot. Also saw her in person in November 2024
What do I think I will get out of it? Not sure
Thoughts:
Written in 2020. I wonder how she would update it for today?
There seems to be a bit of snobbishness to Schiess. In chapter 5 it almost seems like studying and reading Scripture should be left to those who have been trained to do so.
Foreword by Michael Wear
Who is Michael Wear?.
He begins by saying no one gets into politics to serve. Politics is about winning—winning for the right reasons and the right causes is about the best we can imagine.
He notes this book is written to the church as a gift not a condemnation. It is in response to how should a Christian and the Church be involved in our society today? Politics, of course, is not often safe.
Wear says that politics deals with a whole boatload of societal concerns: harms and forces, systemic structures, who shares in benefits and those who do not, and conflict. It takes courage to call for things which are outside of our societal norms and even more for those outside of our tribe’s expectations. I believe the real prophetic call is the one issued in this book: the call to attend to the kind of people we are as we participate in politics.
He points out that not only is Jesus’ sayings remarkable, so were his words put into action, such as loving your neighbors.
1. Apolitical or Unexamined: What Spiritual Formation Has to Do with Politics
[The church] cannot have an inner life without having at the same time a life which expresses itself outwardly as well. She cannot hear her Lord and not hear the groaning of the Creation. Karl Barth. Each chapter starts off with a quote. This one encapsulates much of my thinking. We study God’s Word to become more like Him and His Son who showed us what it is to live as God’s person on earth, caring for the world which God loves. Our faith starts with us, but it needs to go outwards.
She was involved in debate which made her understand things about being a conservative and being a liberal. I could see how reactive each side was, how much it defined itself by opposition to the other, and how powerfully it compelled the loyalty of its particular communities. I have wondered about how Christian it is to be too entrenched in either side of that coin. There seems to be too much of a dichotomy which neither seems to operate how Jesus would have done things. Jesus seemed to deal more individually than in groups-even though at times he did deal in groups.
Schiess thinks that much of our Christian oriented politics is not dealing with right or wrong, or what God wants us to do, rather as Weyrich says that what changed their mind wasn’t abortion or school prayer, but tax-exempt status for segregated schools. There seemed to be an alliance based upon economic matters, communism and a smattering of social issues. the alliance would change them as much as they wanted to change the country. This alliance seemed to be also in reaction to a change in morals as well as a change in how power was held.
Too Political
Political is practically a dirty word. It’s constantly pitted against the gospel, as if anything political stands in opposition to mere faithful living. Here is where Schiess and I agree. She will go on and define the word politics. There are several meanings of politics or political. We usually mean partisan politics, but it really is how society interacts with each other on a wide variety of platforms, not just at the party level. She points out that Evangelical groups have tied political positions to a particular party instead of just letting a position speak for itself. …perhaps the problem with too closely aligning our faith and a particular strain of conservative politics isn’t that the movement was “too political,” but that it was actually insufficiently political.
And that tying it to a party which seems to be more favorable to one's position is a natural thing, after all political parties have power. And power is how we get things done. And yet from church history we know what happens when Christians gain power, it does not bring about heaven, rather it corrupts us.
We tend to support people and parties which will get things done, even if they are of a corrupt nature. We try to whitewash that corruptness. We allow means which we would never want to be allowed to take to accomplish an end rather than holding firm.
Brains and Bodies
There is a sense that Christian leaders want to explain positions for hot-button items. Schiess’ position is that we need overall teaching to understand both the context of who we are and all we relate to these pressing issues. This is not just a new set of teachings, but understanding of our heritage and the fundamentals of faith.
She then summarizes James K.A. Smith’s teachings: “liturgies” that form us—the embodied habits, practices, and corporate pedagogies that we repeatedly participate in. Instead of thinking of humans as primarily thinking beings, he has argued (as Augustine and others before him) that we are primarily loving beings, motivated and driven by the things we have learned to love. I will have to understand what liturgy is. I have a much more narrow understanding. If Smith’s teaching is right, then teaching is not only about knowing and understanding doctrine, but also learning how to love through those doctrines.
I use that phrase, “spiritual formation in a political direction,” in two ways: the ways we are spiritually formed by the political forces around us, and the ways our intentional spiritual formation practices form us in political ways. I need to understand this statement to understand the book. Seems like she is using the word direction like a physicist would use the term vector. What I am understanding her to say is that spiritual teachings are not just encapsulated in us, rather it extends us and forms how we interact in society.
Missing Furniture
The premise of this section: we are formed in ways that help us navigate the world, before thinking even enters the picture. Which the question then is, what forms us and what are the outlines of how we view the world around us?
Not Apolitical, Just Unexamined
No matter how seemingly inconsequential, we have practices that slowly shape us in profound ways. These practices have the potential to counter the political and cultural forces vying for our loyalty, but they also have the potential to reinforce them.
Schiess equates spiritual formation with liturgies. Keep this in mind because she uses both. Does she use them in the same way? Another one of her premises is: nothing truly formative can impact us in ways that aren’t spiritual.
Definition: political. This word primarily indicates government functions—elections, legislation, court decisions, and so on. But delineating what pertains to the government and what doesn’t is a messy business. I think she at least starts a bit narrow on this. Does not government also talk about how we interact with each other? What would we consider the norms and allowable in our society? In a couple of paragraphs she expands on the need to consider a wider array of consequences than just elections and legislation. Our lived theology has political consequences. She takes Isaiah 1:10-17 to show how wide a net God thinks politics is.
A Return to Analog
Outside of political concerns, a lot of young people are starting to find comfort in ancient things, even if “ancient” only means thirty years old. She wrote this in 2020 so she is saying as far back as 1990? I must possess the wisdom of the ages then!
The analog in this section refers to anything physical. She notes that this should resonate with Christians as our whole religion is based upon that God honors bodies-He sent His Son in a body to be with us. CS Lewis says that having bodies is the oldest joke. She says that this is what is driving youth to want to understand where our religion comes from and why they are trying to connect with the older part of our religion. The only thing that can truly counter the strength of powerfully formative forces around us is rediscovering rather ancient ideas about spiritual formation.
She notes something which I noted 50 years ago when I went to a Pentecostal church-they had their own set service, even their own set time of spontaneity.
Many church leaders know that their congregations are being strongly formed by political forces outside of their reach, but they don’t know what to do. Schiess wants to provide guidance by saying: the way forward requires looking back.
The Right Question
She starts this section off with a question of, are we all reading the same Bible-my summary of her intent. Why do we think/believe/support the things we do when we have every biblical basis not to? Earlier she talked about the lens we approach life with. I would suggest it is the lens we approach Scripture which determines how we read and what we understand of the Bible.
She notes that the answer is in spiritual formation. We approach our times with God to determine: Am I a better person? Do I feel closer to God? A better question is this: What am I being formed to love?
She really approaches her time with How does this practice form me in ways that have consequences for how I treat my neighbor, sometimes through my political participation. She ends this chapter stating it is not a question of Biblical illiteracy, rather The real question is, What is forming us?
2. The Liturgy of Politics: Loves and Loyalties
Our views on poverty itself, not just economic philosophies or political strategies for addressing it, seemed to have been shaped primarily by our political convictions.
The Pull of Politics
The line between our political beliefs, our moral beliefs, and our theological beliefs is blurry, if not entirely invented. … none of our beliefs in these categories are ever content to stay in the boxes we’ve prescribed for them. They’ll wander, bleed over, and most importantly, they will seek supremacy. Her point is awareness-what am I formed by and how does it affect my beliefs?
we tend to view the world as bifurcated along particular lines: civil and religious, moral and political, earthly and eternal. Her example is that we may feel that there is an obligation to feed and care for the poor, but also that the poor also are responsible for their own predicament. This a lot of times leads into inaction on caring.
We need to unlearn our bent toward a private religion and a public politics—and see our participation in political life as a reflection of our very public faith. When I read that I think about a chart which Dr Fiala had in his Fall 2025 class titled Religion, Nationalism,
and The Constitution. In our society we tend to allow pluralism and it is a secular society. But there is a paradox there. How does a religious person interact in that kind of society? Can they allow their religious views to shape how the person leads? If not, does that not stifle their religion?
Our Political Loves
Schiess points out that we are a whole-not just a spiritual and non-spiritual being. Anything which happens to us, anything which we indulge in affects our entire beginning.
Smith talks about thin and thick rituals-things you do which are easily stopped and those which would take down our whole being because of the truth behind them.
Stories and emotional content stay with us longer than facts and rational thought.
There is a tendency to choose where we get our information from by the beliefs we hold and how close the source matches our beliefs. We might think that we make political decisions based on propositional information, but we are overwhelmingly motivated by our loves and our loyalties
Framework of Loyalty
Our political participation usually operates on the level of our loves. We are pulled toward a particular set of goods. There is also a second pull: participation such a strong formative effect in our lives: the framework of loyalty.
How do we work through things? One key way we do this is by sorting people into categories—“my people” and “other people” being the most foundational distinction. I have found this true. If there is something which I hear which does not fit the framework I think in, I try to find the source of the information. The first filter I use is not so much, is it true or not, but is it come from someplace which I can agree with? PBS vs Fox lets say. This helps me know what to spend time with. On the other hand, I am not as open minded as what I think I am.
We also live as active participants in that community when we challenge accepted norms that don’t find their basis in Scripture. But as Schiess points out, do I hold the beliefs I have to the light of Scripture? Or do I let my “tribe’s” values take precedence? Misplaced loyalties are powerful and dangerous forces precisely because they play on our desire to join a community and submit to its authority. Our political ads tends to be oriented towards a community to show the politician is one of us. We need to look at all of these ads critically not in light of are they our community, but do they uphold what the Scriptures say.
The Language of Fear
Describing competitive debating: It was fast-paced, technical, and always ended in nuclear war. She describes that whatever the topic, one of the side effects was always nuclear war as a possibility. If loyalty is the primary framework of political participation, fear is the primary language. It is easier to descend into fear than to be raised up by describing the good life. Fear is also fundamentally antisocial. Our fear causes us to protect ourselves above the common good of a community. As a Christian, do we descend into fear? How large is our protection of other people besides our selves. Does it include family? Friends? Those we are in fellowship with? Our neighbors? Our community? …
In politics, fear is easier to communicate and to associate fearing the other side. She gave an example of what Republicans do. Then said On the other side, and broadly speaking, Democrats use fear on other issues, such as the effects of global climate change and the medical costs of changing healthcare policy.
Idolatry
the prophets who so consistently communicate this judgment don’t describe her idolatry as merely misplaced valuing of some good thing (the way we often use the term), but as capitulation to a different story and set of values. Schiess is concerned about the current use of idolatry as anything which we desire from chocolate chip to football.
In politics, it is easy to substitute a group’s values for our own. Or even that group’s values for our Christian values, if there are enough similarities. Idols are not merely things that we love more than we should: they are able to control us and motivate our actions. This is what makes political involvement both so enticing as well as a threat to our Christianity. idolatry implicates the entire community
The fact that fear is a strong motivator does not mean that these are not real issues with serious effects that should concern us, but it does mean that we have to understand the deep effect it can have on us psychologically and spiritually.
The prophets repeatedly proclaim God’s judgment on Israel for two sins: idolatry and social injustice. This is about community and about the individual. Gary’s note: aaI am tempted to look at this more as an individual statement. But the prophets implicated the community.
The Tension of Formative Spaces
Schiess makes the point that all of God’s creation is good, even those which things which shape human societies. But like most things on this earth, it can be twisted. This twistedness is not a reason why we should ignore politics. we will fall into another pitfall: shirking the responsibility God gave humanity to steward his creation and the command God gave the church to live for the sake of the world. … Our response to these liturgies should not be avoidance or total rejection but careful engagement and productive criticism
3. Of This World: The Gospels of Prosperity, Patriotism, Security, and Supremacy
We all live in light of some gospel or other—the good news that while we suffer from a fundamental problem with the world salvation is possible if we submit to a new ruler of our lives and become part of a new people. Thee are different tones to the gospel-some overlapping and some separate from mainstream. Also our culture gives us different views of the gospel. She will now go through some of the more popular American gospels.
The Prosperity Gospel
… many of us who would turn up our noses at the prosperity gospel in these more garish manifestations might be discomforted to discover just how much of this message we’ve likely accepted. Schiess indicates that the fallacy which most Christians fall into is, if they are good, then nothing bad will happen to them. You can reject the explicit form of the prosperity gospel and still believe on some level that God rewards good behavior in the form of healthy bodies and hefty bank accounts. … Many American Christians have unwittingly accepted the belief that we are in control of our lives, particularly our financial futures.
This is where Schiess’ saying that stories and emotions are more powerful to us than logic or propositional truth. Jesus knew this as he told us stories-parables of truth. Advertisers know this as well, giving us visual reinforcement.
One issue is that we have a tendency to say those who have wealth must be good people while those who are poor are not doing things right.
Patriotic Gospel
Schiess notes she was the daughter of a military family. She heard a priest once talk about that service does not conflict with Christian values. even I can recognize places where my service to my country and my service to God conflicted. This is the world we live in: where there are conflicts between those that rule and He who rules the world. As people under authority, it is hard to serve both your country and God in some places. I suspect that this is true in most countries, it just may be that some countries are a little more in line with God’s values than other places. No country is 100% in line.
The patriotic gospel requires uncritical allegiance to one’s country. It sounds like there is almost a sense of entitlement if we say we are God’s country. Eventually one becomes saved through service to the country. The patriotic gospel thrives on a captivating narrative about a superior nation, her special people, and her mission in the world.
There are some rituals which we follow which have the same sense of ingrainedness in us as religious rituals. Such as the hand over the heart and the singing of the national anthem. There are national holidays: 4th of July, Flag Day, and President’s days for example.
If we really believed the notion of a special manifestation of divine benevolence to America, we would end with a twisted view of God.-Mark Noll, One Nation Under God? Christian Faith and Political Action in America
Even if the Founding Fathers had a Christian vision for the nation, and there is a great deal of debate if they were Christian and if they envisioned a Christian nation, our history is not always as good as we would like it to be. Such as the genocide of the American Indian and the slavery of Blacks.
Christians should be the kind of people who can love their nation for its good gifts given by God and also critically engage with its sinful legacy.
The Security Gospel
We live in a dangerous world. But so have people from the very beginning. If the literal Bible story of creation is to be believe\d, The murder rate of males was around 33% back in Cain and Abel’s days. There are places in the Bibnle where His people are saved: Daniel in the lion’s dean and Peter in prison, for instance. In the Christian version of the security gospel, God always provides physical security. But we know that the word always is not true. A couple of chapters later in Acts from Peter being released, James is killed and Stephen is stoned. Paul even describes suffering and insecurity as a normal experience for believers that God can use for their ultimate good (2 Timothy 3:12; 1 Peter 4:12-19; Philippians 1:29.
The question is where do we get our security and what has God promised us? Seems like the Biblical figures do not rely on physical, or even mental, security. Rather where their home is with God. Schiess says that when we prioritize our personal security, then the needs of others are shut out. National security is not a kingdom value, but hospitality is. (Audrey Assad in an article in Aleteia called Audrey Assad: American daughter of a refugee.
National security is rooted in both the feeling of wanting to personally feel secure as well as the Patriotic Gospel talked about before. But I find this somewhat unconvincing from a person, such as myself, who has not experienced life in insecurity for our nation. There are several aspects to national security. Does being the strongest nation matter? Does keeping our borders free from all comers matter? War on Drugs was based in a desire for security that prioritized law and order over restoring and building up communities.
Legal scholar Lucia Zedner argues that our desire for security often paradoxically requires a constant reminder of danger. Fear is a powerful motivator. It also blinds us to the security we already have. I think that is what we are currently seeing in 2025 and 2026 with how immigration is being dealt with.
Allan A. Boesak said When we go before Him, God will ask, "Where are your wounds?" And we will say, "I have no wounds." And God will ask, "Was there nothing worth fighting for? Apparently he uses this quote as it is all over the Internet from him speaking.
The Gospel of White Supremacy
This one is going to be the most controversial. Maybe because of how she names it. She notes correctly that whites have had a place in society whee they can get things without thinking about color. While Blacks and Browns have had to prove that they can do something-we just read a book in my Book Group called Be Free or Die. The Black during the Civil War stole a steamer out of Charleston, SC. The South was surprised that a Black could do it. What surprised me was the that people in the North had the same thought. I would guess that many people would also have that same thinking today. The question is, do I?
Schiess points out that the sins of our ancestors affect us. Isn’t that true of how minorities have been treated in the past? We do not have to harbor consciously racist thoughts in order to be impacted by the legacy of our country and religious communities.
Over time, [Beverly Daniel] Tatum says, white people passively absorb racial messages of superiority—messages that can go unchallenged for an entire lifetime.
Schiess references Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. It is pointed out that it is our ignorance of our own attitude is what perpetuates this. We as Americans rely on individualism rather than community. This leads us to think each person has the same chance rather than looking at overall prejudices.
Political Gospels
4. For the Life of the World: Spiritual Formation and Public Life
What is our salvation for? That is a basic question of Christianity. For some the answer is to get to heaven; for others it is living on earth in a community. For me it is the entrance to the struggle to be in communion with God. That includes the forgiveness of my wrong doing as well as learning to be more like Him in my living.
Schiess’ thought: What if God’s redemptive plan is the reconciliation of the whole world, and our personal salvation is one part of a larger sweep of redemption? And if that’s all true, what would our salvation look like?
For the Life of the World
Schiess says that the personal disciplines have never been about us. If not first about us, then we are like a messenger who runs before receiving a message. I think it is better to say, our disciplines do not stop with us but are meant to show God’s love for all we come in contact with.
In a world focused on perfecting our outward appearances and public personas, a Christian call to cultivating godly character and spiritual growth is necessary and countercultural.
She notes that even Israel was meant to be a light to the world. If this was true of Israel, then it should be even more true of those of us who are called by His name. The laws which Israel was to live by were not only internal, but external-a way of shining light. it introduces us to a community whose life together witnessed to God’s redemptive plan—both to those inside the community and those outside of it. Early Christians not only said that Jesus was the light, they became the light and introduced how to live to the Gentiles Pliny the Younger in a 112AD letter to . Emperor Trajan said there was a “political club” that took care of the sick, organized community events, buried the impoverished dead, and supported widows and orphans. There were wide ranging effects on Roman culture and the Gentiles noted it. The church could not create this ethic by detailing a set of doctrines that required this behavior. Neither was this community formed by practicing inward-focused spiritual disciplines.
A Political World
Why does it take Christians being involved in politics to work out salvation? politics color all aspects of our collective life. Disengaging from politics is impossible, and the effort to do so is an abdication of our responsibility as image bearers. To me she seems to be using the word politics rather loosely. Sometimes she means what I would call partisan politics as politics-she uses the word statescraft- and sometimes it is more society interactions which have political ramifications. I think here she is commingling these meanings.
After this commingling the meanings, she defines what she is talking about: It signifies the means by which we shape our common life together. She goes on and says this shaping is rooted in the creation story and how we are created in the image of God. Politics reflects our good creational order in the same way—humans take the raw materials God has blessed his creation with—such as intelligence, land, and human relationships—and they creatively cultivate those things.
She notes that to Israel, the Sabbath is not only a time of rest and recouping yourself, but it also had economic and social implications. Such as the body was more important than gain. In the same ways, the other laws which ancient Israel lived by had a broader impact than just personal. God cares about the ordinary and procedural ways that we organize our communities.
She concludes that being involved with politics is an expression of being part of creation. Also that it is part of God’s plan of redeeming this world as described in Revelations. While the church is our foundational human community and authority on earth, the new heaven and new earth don’t have a place of worship because God dwells with his people. What I see in Revelations is that we are restored to worship.
There is a train of thought that we are citizens of heaven, so our work is not for this world. Then why are we in this world?
Jesus is the example we need to look for. He brought the message that the kingdom of God is here. So should we and we should live like it is here. The point is not that the kingdom is purely spiritual, but that it extends to the entire world. During Jesus’ trial and in other places, Jesus acknowledges that governments have authority-but the authority has been given to them from God.
Instead of viewing the particular institution of human government as God imposing an inherently evil system on his people, our political participation should be viewed as one of many ways we practice the creativity and stewardship we were created for. I am thinking this is not a complete answer. A government can be evil, such as Nazi Germany. It is then incumbent for the Christian to figure out a way of degrading that government. To me that is part of working towards the kingdom.
Political Responsibility
What does Christian political responsibility look like in our fallen world. She breaks it into three questions:
1. What requirements are given to the noncovenantal nations we live in? This comes from Christians or other religious people, trying to impose their set of norms onto other people-typically, non-believers. There is clearly a difference throughout Scripture between the expectations God has for those he has made specific covenants with and those he has not. Schiess notes that the prophets go after those who are in Israel when they do not live up to what they have been commanded. But the other nations are given a pass on that, rather they are expected to live up to a general code which all people know about. She derives this from Noah. The question for Americans is, are we assuming that we are God’s chosen nation? Or a nation with a lot of Christians in it? This covenant is made with “all life on the earth” (9:17) and requires that human life be honored and protected, because all human beings are made in the image of God. … Psalm 82 gives a beautiful and succinct picture of how God deals with the whole world.
2. How does this responsibility interact with our mission to share the gospel?
Schiess notes that our calling to be Christians in this world goes beyond the Great Commission. the gospel comes with an ethical imperative to love our neighbor, and Scripture is clear that loving our neighbor means opposing social and political barriers to their flourishing.
3. Can we do anything worthwhile in a fallen world?
Schiess takes a semi-strawman showing that not investing in the world around us does not fit into the gospel. It is also a very narrow way of thinking. Such as would we say there is nothing to do with abortion like maybe we would say racism or poverty? She introduced me to the term border-stalkers. These are people who use the church to sustain themselves, but then go out and invest in their neighborhood. I think she uses the term neighborhood in a broad sense, not just where their house is. Rather in the groups they associate with. The term comes from Makoto Fujimura
Cultural Estuaries for a Political World
Makoto Fujimura also uses the term Cultural Estuaries-where salt and fresh water meet. Or in our case, where we as Christians and the world mix.
5. A Story to Live Into: Scripture and Political Formation
Interesting quote by Stanley Hauerwas at the start of this chapter. In essence, it says that individual Christians should not read the Bible and that interpretation should be left in the hands of the professionals. One piece of light is that he notes we American Christians tend to read Scripture through the eyes of democratic people rather than as a community. Of course, if you follow this through, why am I reading this book then? Shouldn’t I be only listening to those who can interpret this book for me?
many of the barriers to our political formation lie in our inability to recognize our own hermeneutical tendencies, biases, and perspectives. And then the following is especially true I think: One of the most important things we can do for our political formation is to learn to recognize the ways we’ve been conditioned to read Scripture.
Lesson Learned
She starts off by saying she missed how much the prophets had to say about social injustice. Rather than saying laypeople should not study the Bible, I am thinking we need to be open to what God is saying in the Bible rather than our own narrow ways of thinking. She says that next: just how much of our reading of Scripture is constrained by the political and social influences in our lives.
You cannot read the prophets honestly and walk away thinking God cares more about your personal relationship with him than he does the way you treat other people. … Jeremiah is a remarkably relevant book for the American church today, but more than anything else, our little small group’s study of the prophet taught me about how easily we can ignore these messages and themes when we aren’t conscious and critical of our own blinders. And yet here, Schiess is indicating we should be reading and understanding the Bible.
Getting Good Posture
Wants us to develop good habits when we read the Bible and look at the text and minimize our filters
The Necessity of Community
All Christians who take the Word of God seriously, mistake that they can read Scripture without training. we have missed a central implication of our own depravity and put far too much stock in our own ability to understand and apply Scripture by ourselves. I think she misses a point. While there is considerable depth to Scripture and God is even much deeper than the written Word, He also makes Himself known. As our pastor used to say, “Listen closely as this is how God speaks to us most directly.” I would agree, I need to come to His Word with an open and receptive heart, ready to change.
She does make the point that Scripture is not an instruction manual. She notes that the Church used to read Scripture together for instruction and discussion, to understand it and what God is saying to us. Her point is that The community of God has always been shaped—morally, spiritually, and politically—by gathering together. She notes that when read together, it is harder to ignore what the needs of our brothers and sisters are. But what she only hints at is that our congregations are more heterogeneous than homogeneous. We go to churches which looks like ourselves. What we fail to recognize is that our churches are often the result of fragmentation, not at all the solution.
There is a hunger to be rooted, something which goes beyond ourselves. That is where things like a liturgy comes in which may have been used for centuries, connecting us with Christians past and in different cultures. Karl Barth described the work of dogmatics as starting with “the question of how the Church talked about God yesterday” and asking how it should be done tomorrow.”
Practices for Good Posture
Reading the Whole Story. She advocates using a lectionary- book or listing that contains a collection of scripture readings appointed for Christian or Jewish worship on a given day or occasion. This is to counteract the tendency to pick favorite verses or a limited view of scripture. This would be true both for personal and corporate use. We would be confronted with whatever Scripture is saying, not just our own preferences.
Practice lament. What troubles me? Does what troubles me align with Scripture or does it align with my political concerns. In a world full of real dangers, differences, and conflict, the answer to prejudice and injustice is neither to elevate nor ignore these dynamics. Scriptural lament has the unique ability to connect to the universal human experience of insecurity and fear without legitimizing the bigotry it can turn into. How do we respond to news: with fear or sorrow and petitioning God?
Submitting to moral authority. Does Scripture convict me? Discomfort me? We often relate to Scripture as merely an authority over our brains—thus a source of the right theology—and not as a powerful and living source of authority over our communal moral decisions . What voice does my church have in my life? Is it something which when I disagree I can leave? Probably not. We have been going to First Pres for 40 years. Either the church is empowered for the sake of creating national citizens or it is relegated to the realm of private belief and experience.
Receiving instead of using. Schiess notes this comes from CS.Lewis An Experiment in Criticism. She says that We are in continual dependence upon God to reveal himself in his Word Rather than it being a tool or something which we are handed.
It’s Not About You
The settings which we see Scripture is of a different time, culture and location than what we live in. We should be careful how we apply it. We are the “ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8), not the main characters in the story. We are the foreigner talked about.Much of the Bible is about communities not individuals.Think about the letters of Paul are mostly written to communities than individual. ALmost all of the Old Testament is community oriented.
How Matters as Much as What
Talks about her revelation how Scripture should be looked at. She was look at Ephesians 2 as a purely spiritual reality. When in reality it calls for physical reconciliation between opposing people-Jews and Gentiles. In America it might be between whites and African-Americans or Latinos or other groups. One of the most political acts we can do is to push back against the homogeneity of privileged perspectives and seek to learn from the kind of voices the Bible is full of—the marginalized, vulnerable, or oppressed. While I agree with her, I wonder if you could also argue that she is now looking at Scripture through a different set of lenses, maybe only a bit clearer, but differently, giving a different view of Scripture.
A Last Example
In this section, she uses a collection of sermons by Mark Noll, Fast Day Sermons: or, The Pulpit on the State of the Country, preached in the 1861 about abolitionism-both sides sounding rather Biblical. Conclusion: Reading Scripture with the recognition of our own biases, humble engagement with the global and historic church, and special attention to marginalized voices will transform us and our churches
6. Ekklēsia: The Church as a Training Ground for Political Engagement
In this chapter, Schiess discusses the need for churches not to be politcal, but also to be politcal. She also reveals her disdain for the current conservative evangelical bent to current Christian political involvement. It's hard to imagine how any church—a group of people who gather because of their identity as an outpost of a coming kingdom and their commission to serve the true king—could truly avoid getting political. There is the general feeling that politics is both tainted and taints those who get involved. So how can Christians participate in politics without being stained? How do we participate in politics without being malformed by it? We need to counteract one powerful source of formation with something stronger. Her thinking? Far too many conversations about Christian political engagement miss the heart of the question, which is also the heart of the Christian life: the church
Strangers and Sojourners
What is the “church”? Is the question she starts off. Simple answer: community of God. Not just a group of like-minded Christians who enjoy each other, but people whom the Holy SPirit has brought together. Bonhoeffer points out it is the Spirit bringing people together is what makes the church. Also called “communion of saints” and “ strangers and sojourners, “
Schiess’ definition is: it is a political institution eschatologically oriented toward the redemption of all things and a social witness to that reality. That definition may be more than my brain can handle.
Political-the process of making decisions for a group, country, or society, involving how power is used, resources are shared, and rules are made, often through debate, negotiation, and competition for leadership to manage public life and solve common problems.institution-a society or organization founded for a religious, educational, social, or similar purpose.eschatologically-a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind; a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankindI suspect that Schiess is falling victim of what she accuses others of: seeing things through a particular lens, rather than looking at Scripture and those who have come before us. My definition would be something simpler: Christians grouped either together in a location and time, or spread worldwide and across time which are working to to be the people of God, to fulfill the works of Jesus.
When the church becomes accidental to Christianity, the weekly gathering becomes merely a social opportunity to confirm our prior personal experience with God.
Schiess notes that there is a tendency to be on auto-pilot through much of the service and only tune in during the sermon.
The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.” Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. Dillard captures that the church should be a dangerous place.
The Ekklēsia
A quote from Mark Seifrid which he states that the church used a political term to describe itself: an ekklēsia, a public assembly, rather than as a ‘religious gathering’ (‘synagogue’). It is pointed out there were also words for private associations as well. We read a book, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, which talked about how the Roman and Greek world had mutual aide societies-the church was not one of these, they helped anybody.
Schiess noted: Christians make political decisions based on what will protect them and their interests. But the church is commissioned to seek the flourishing of our communities, not special privileges for ourselves.
She talks about how the church refuses to abduct from the political world. I am a bit surprised that she does not reference Richard Neibuhr’s book Christ and Culture. In the book Neibuhr goes through the different stances the church/Christians have taken in relating to our world. That is right up what she is talking about here.
The church is neither the state-that is set to govern. There has been a time when the church tried to do that and was corrupted. Also the church is not set up to enforce morals on those outside of the church. Also the church is not something you are born into like you are to a country. But having said that, God is sovereign over all and rules all. It is good to remember, we are not God.
church and state are limited in their authority, but that doesn’t mean that either are politically or spiritually neutral. The state doesn’t have jurisdiction over worship and theological convictions, but its actions are theologically significant; likewise, the church doesn’t have jurisdiction over legislative matters, its actions are politically significant.
A Moral Training Ground
Why is it consequential that we act corporately? we aren’t a loose collection of individual believers with individual callings. The church service is the training ground for our life outside of the assembly. Our corporate worship trains us in a story and then sends us with that story into our various manifestations of worship. We learn what to love and what not to. We are able to rehearse what it means to be Christian.
Jonathan Edwards: True religion, in a great measure, consists in holy affections. I thought I recognized this. It is from A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Mars Hill AUdio did a piece on this.
Schiess says that There is no real divide between worship and ethics, liturgy and politics. She notes that this is essentially what Israel did and was condemned by the prophets-detaching politics from their religion.
Sacraments
The sacraments are a place to start looking at what practices forms us within the church. While how they are to be performed is a different subject, how they bond us to the faith is what she is looking at.
Baptism: the naturalization. The entrance into the Church. All enter the Church through this no matter race, gender, or economic status. All who go through this are family. Unity is conferred in baptism in the way a legal status is conferred upon a new citizen. She notes that it does not abolish our differences, but our new identity supersedes the differences. She notes that this says we pledge ourselves to a radical who the authorities killed.
The Eucharist. Another place where all are equal. Paul talks about how the Corinthians used it to denote status and he condemned it. The divisions in our churches extend beyond specific congregations; they are manifested in the reality that most of our churches are filled with people who look just like us. In a country with a deep and long history of racial injustice. She notes Acts 2:42, 43 as a sign how the early church met. The Lord’s Supper both shows equality with other believers-this should not be in name only, but we need to work towards that. But also a dependency on Jesus. Do we?
One thing Schiess points out that we do not turn away our family, even if we are in danger. If we take communion, we are saying we are all in this together. Our failures are both impetus to reform and reminder of our finitude
The Body and Bodies
Schiess notes that there is certain similarities between the two Sacraments: they are both physical and require us to accept certain political attributes. Both sacraments require our bodies—hands that guide another’s body into water, hands that break bread, teeth that chew, throats that swallow. I am not sure I would agree with the political part. But there are things which underly the sacraments. The physicalness of both is important as we are not people yearning to break free of our bodies rather we are people yearning to be whole. our God incarnated among us not just to identify with our physical bodies but to bodily inhabit the good creation that had been corrupted and to call us to a coming kingdom that would take one shape among many as a new heaven and new earth we inhabit with resurrected bodies like Christ’s own.
Political Training Ground
Schiess says that the church, the assembly, is the primary place of training. When we primarily think of our faith as a personal relationship with Jesus, we will view church like any other social group—another opportunity to meet people with common interests. … Jesus wasn’t making converts—individuals who would pledge their individual support of him as a religious leader—but citizens of a new kingdom
7. The Rhythm of Our Lives: Time, Music, Confession
We are all working together to follow a rhythm. Schiess uses this statement as what we should be doing. Isn’t that the point of fellowship? maybe of the whole book?
We as Christians should work together-that is what the church is built for. These practices are politically significant in their own unique ways that we’ll soon discuss, but they all share this important element with the sacraments: they form our loves and loyalties to our rightful king and the inbreaking of his kingdom. The rhythms we learn in church is what we will take out into the world.
global and the local are refracted in such a way that one becomes more united to the universal the more one is tied to the life of a particular local community. William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination something to reflect upon
Time and Our Collective Memory
Talks about how the church calendar provides a powerful reinforcer of our rituals which strengthen our faith. It helps to create an identity.
Christians have a different set of responsibilities—to a people that does not follow the same categorizations that create nations and interest groups alike.
Many preachers make God’s sovereignty a central part of their message without giving that sovereignty the shape and meaning it deserves. Schiess notes that when Israel came into the Promise Land, not only the doctrine/Law was taught but so was the story of Israel. when you love a story so much that you aren’t content to just heard it told and retold, you want to inhabit it, taking the pieces and reimagining them in your own context
Advent
We are in the unique position of living in between two Advents, celebrating the incarnation and yet longing for the second coming. Focus is on coming of the light to drive away darkness. This posture of waiting and hastening (2 Peter 3:12) is a necessary stalwart against both political idolatry and political apathy. Advent is to say that he is coming, make way for the King. We are to prepare the way.
All Saints’ Day
This is the day which we remember those who have gone before us. A reminder that the church is not just here and now, but stretches forward and backwards in time and across all lands.
As G. K. Chesterton is remembered saying: “If you want to know the size of the church, you have to count the tombstones.” This is probably not a quote, but a summary of his thoughts.
The she reminds us that our faith is more attuned to suffering than conquest
The Church Calendar as Rhythm
She points out that our worship does not draw a straight line to a particular political position, rather we are drawn to a world in need of repair.
Rhythm-Making Practices
Keeping the practices allows you to know when you fall out of step and how to get back into step. Some practices are:
Music. Music has a way of becoming part of us. It is important to pay attention to what we sign and how we sign it.Also important to understand what we are singing and how it relates to our larger world. Many of the songs sung in evangelical churches focus on individual salvation rather than cosmic redemption.
The way we respond to wars, natural disasters, and terrorism is indicative of where our loves and loyalties lie: where we seek hope, who we protect and who we vilify, and the avenues we use for expressing our fear and pain. Did the songs our churches use after 9/11 say we rely on Him or did they talk about revenge or fear? The songs we sing become the language we use.
Buildings and programs. How we use our churches reflect what we think the mission of a church is. Are they predominately used on Sunday morning or are they more open to community use when the church is not in session?
Confession. This does not seem to be a normal practice in the groups I have been part of. The church is a community that knows how costly forgiveness is and confesses to believe in the great depth of depravity in the world. Sounds like grand words, But is it practiced? Do I practice it? She quotes Jennifer M McBride that confession is the best witness we have to the world. Schiess notes that we tend to be the moral judge of society rather than the being the ones who show our guilt. When we confess together, as a community, we are reminded that none of our sin is truly personal or individual.
Preaching. Preaching gives words and thoughts to the actions and bodily postures we practice, it explains the rituals we participate in, and it illuminates the story of the church calendar. Preaching will tell the story of the Kingdom, it will also confront us with where we need to work to have the Kingdom of God among us now. One of the greatest roles of the preacher is to help the congregation situate themselves in the text> Preaching should show us the place which we are in this world and also show us where we should be. Do we unknowingly oppress someone? Do we take advantage of things where we have no right? it does need to be courageous enough to resist the temptation to shy away from the political implications of the text.
Not Like It’s Supposed to
In this section she tackles why do only some Christians grow and thrive in fellowships which are more liturgical oriented? Her thinking is that these acts are not perfectly performed-at least that is the jest of what I get. I would suspect we are all made differently and have different early formations which mold us to being more receptive for some things than other.one important response to our current political moment is to conceive of these practices for what they truly are: political acts done in a political community for the sake of a political world.
She talks about just because you have a crowd, does not mean you are creating a communal space. [It] may require the “feel” of a crowd of people but does not require that we have any relationship with those other people. As a result, we feel alone in the crowd, not part of a community.
Another response is does our practices perpetuate injustice, even if we are striving for solutions? She is not advocating making the central point of our time together being political, rather our focus needs to be on God, not us.
Some times rituals can become routine. Her solution is to make the familiar unfamiliar. Like using a different version of the Bible. Perhaps one way of refreshing our understanding of these practices is to make the familiar strange again so that they can become familiar in a new way.
All of the practices are to lead us to Go and recognizing, He is the one in control.
8. Bent on the Coming Kingdom of God: Spiritual Disciplines and Political Formation
Schiess starts with a quote from Phileena Heuertz who said that through activism, we are confronting the toxicity which is part of the world. It is through contemplation which we confront the wrongness in ourselves. I think that is a good thing to remember-we need both. Also that it not we need to complete one before doing the other.
She seems to indicate that we go after spiritual disciplines for the wrong reasons-not personal betterment rather than getting to be closer to God. She says We want to know the trick to being a better Christian, to finding inner peace, to getting rid of our pesky temptations and sin patterns, and the spiritual disciplines come along and seem to promise a formula for achieving results. She relates spiritual disciplines as more of a community formation than individual. That is probably too narrow of what she is saying. Later on she notes that the betterment of ourselves should also feed into making the community more in tune with changing their connections with the area around them.
Then quotes Fredrick Buchner as saying: carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and it beckons us. Quoted from Longing for Home: Reflictions at Midlife
She says we should think about disciplines differently than just personal betterment.
Prayer
She notes that prayer is foundational to all spiritual disciplines. This is where we have communication with the living God. It is this listening and talking which we understand our role in this world. Confession -this is one of the very many things I need to work on and just plainly do.
One trap which we can fall into is asking for things which we want. The example Schiess uses is female slave owners asking for obedient slaves. As broken, fallen creatures we will not only ask for things that go against the character of God, we will often practice the discipline of prayer in a way that forms us to believe God is on “our side”. That does raise the question, do I use God as my personal piggy bank or do I understand how he wants to change me? if we’re going to pray for God to protect and provide for the foreigner, the widow, and the vulnerable, we should also be willing to be the answer to our own prayers.
Prayer reminds us that we rely on God to do the work, even if we are doing the work God has called us to. Also that we should not give up and keep persustant in our prayers and reliance.
The Lord’s Prayer
Our prayers are not about us, they are not for us to gain favor with people, they must be consistent with our lived actions (the opposite of hypocrisy), and they must be made in humility
The Lord’s Prayer is immediately and undeniably communal. She notes that The Lord’s Prayer is inherently communal. We start off with “Our Father” not “My Father”. We are to approach God with the prayers of the community not only personal prayers.
Also we pray for the Kingdom to come and ask that it be done on earth.
The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t just remind us of our posture and our reality, it obligates us.
Sabbath
Schiess sense of “fun” is probably a bit different than most peoples. For relaxation she read a 500 page book on the crucifixion.
Her version of the Sabbath is that she is able to delight in the work done, she was able to honor other’s work, and that nobody had to work for them. Heer statement is not that a Sabbath is an absence from doing work or the world, nor is it a respite from overwork. Rather, Celebrating sabbath is about delighting in creation and resting in our dependence upon the Creator. The Sabbath is working hard at our calling and then able to sit back and enjoy what has been accomplished. It is also a time to enjoy your community. She wants to create times of intential rhythms of justice. Not sure how she gets that from the Sabbath. I would say that the Sabbath is to create an intentialional rhythm where we can mimic our Creator in how he sat back and enjoyed his day.
She then goes into the year of Jubeliee. She is not going that every 50 years, we take a year off, rather that there is a rhythm which we have for delight and joy.
Fasting
She notes the basic concept of fasting is to do without food for a specific period of time. Not the doing without TV or sugar or something else. The concept is to refocus and use that time and resources to focus on God. fasting has been intended to form the people of God into instruments of his work of justice in the world.
One thing to note: fasting is not a way to make our wrongs right. Nor is it a way to undo our wrong or do penance for it. We need to correct our ways.
From Arisides, if anyone among them comes into want while they themselves have nothing to spare, they fast for two or three days for him. In this way they can supply any poor man with the food he needs. From Apology in the Early Christians in their Own Words.
But fasting should raise questions of where we get our food, at what human and ecological cost.
Feasting
Feasting is not done alone or in competition with others, rather it is a uniting of delight and joy. the crucial element of Christian feasting: it was not given for the sake of another. I think Shiess is noting that it is intrinsically hedonistic. Remember your Lewis in Screwtape complaining that the Father is a hedonist. By the way, she does not use those words-they are mine. I think this is the extension of what she is going with her argument. I also think it is true.
the spiritual discipline of feasting is not complete without constantly asking, “Who are we missing. She is taking the parable where Jesus said the king said to gather people from the roadside. I think she is saying feasting/festival is to be inclusive rather than excluding everybody but our friends. Schiess notes that all at the feast would be considered full members of the feast.
The rhythms of fasting and feasting are supposed to regulate these impulses(hoarding)—teaching us to sacrifice for the sake of others and give away our abundance to others. Feasting is a time of sharing so that all equally enjoy.
Hospitality
Christian hospitality is inviting in strangers and foreigners for shelter and nourishment. practicing hospitality only directed toward friends and family misses a central part of the practice. … Christian writers claimed that hospitality was itself evidence of the truthfulness of the gospel
Mistakes there were, there are, there will be. . . . The biggest mistake, sometimes, is to play things very safe in this life and end up being moral failures. She considers this the greatest example of what this book is about: our actions should be ordinary impulses and biases that we inherit and absorb in small, everyday actions. See Matt 25
Hospitality addressed of social or economic inequality.
A Reminder
Spiritual practices are spiriual not through our hard work rather because the Spirit works in us.
9. A Confessing City: Reading Politics with Augustine
We cannot respond to the political disarray of our churches with didactic political education. Then how? That is the question of this chapter, which she will lesd us through Augustine’s response. She notes there is no one response, but it will be through the life and practices of the church, mixed with the church’s understanding of God’s ways and our understanding of it.
Augustine and Politics
Shw talks about Augustine’s thoughts concerning earthly governments. That unless a government was totally believing and following, there would be corruption. She says the earthly city is not secular governments rather the community of unbelievers, demons and Satan. While the city of God is of believers and angels who are dedicated to loving God.
While politically pessimistic, he was engaged politically. Which is a question for today’s believers-to understand that earthly politics will not match heavenly ways and will be engaged in our world’s activities?
Confessions and City of God
Schiess interpretes the two books as a while rather than two separate works with different themes. She says that they face the issues Christians face: placing no hope in the political system for transformation even while faithfully seeking political.
She says the connection is clear-I have read both and wonder about the connection she is making.
Principles for Positive Political Action
they are descriptions of deficient educations and blueprints for reeducation. One addresses the deficiency of individual and the other community education. They are, in different ways, catechetical texts—educating Christians about spirituality, philosophy, politics, and social life. She gives us three principles:
Critique of perfection.
He lived just after Constantine's conversion. The coming kingdom was expected and they were living in what was described as the “in-between time.” These two accounts describe an individual and the church battling sin during this time. Augustine refuses to ascribe perfection as either the reality or the goal. He experienced both failure and success. In Augustine’s own life, experiences with God are not definite events significant in themselves but are narrated as one moment in the larger story of a life, events that only gain their full meaning in the context of a larger narrative. How we fit these into our story is more important than the actual even according to Schiess. Augustine does not determine the significance of an event based on its immediate success or failure but maintains that its significance is only found in eternity.
Actions—political and otherwise—can take on significance based not on their own success but on the extent to which they align with the political community of the city of God. This means that we are free from the “here and now” of any political action. What you do is more important than the outcome.
Reading history—or not. Schiess notes that both autobiography and history is unreliable. The reason is not because they are written by humans, rather, we are always in the middle of the journey, disoriented because we cannot have a God-level perspective on our own experience. Being in the middle of the journey, you do not know the ending of the journey because it is not completed. Therefore we should always be mindful that those who are telling us where we are going, do not know the end of the journey-that is unless they are being a prophet of God (this is my statement not hers). Only Scripture is accurate from the heaven side of history.
She notes that Augustine in The City of God ascribes human actions to the earthly city, but not as much to the deeper meanings in the heavenly one. He does not ascribe cosmic significance to Rome being sacked, just that there was sin to be paid. Maybe out modern day preachers should take this as a caution when they ascribe things like AIDS and the Pandemic to end times or something beyond personal sin.Throughout Augustine’s historical description of the two cities, there is remarkably little attempt to ascribe theological significance to specific events.
She chides statements like “this is the most important election of our lifetime.” Or ascribing that political figures are like certain Biblical figures sent by God to save us.
Is there hope to have anything known about how we should work politically? Her thought is that we can only evaluate the loves and trajectories of commmunities and institutions and make faithful decisions. But what does that mean? What does it look like?
The book points out this frees us to work not from a particular positions, but to work within the structures of politics. Augustine’s view on history allowed him to celebrate the work of Christian leaders when it aligned with the city of God and criticize when it did not. Augustine praises a particular leader not so much being in perfect union with particular positions, rather for his character.
Not sure what to do with this after Schiess seems to discard human history. But she does say history is not meaningless, but more that we are inadequate to discern how God is working in our history. She seems to be saying that Christians do have the ability to read on a limited scale the signs of our times, just not the arc in totality. The closest we can get to “reading” history is recognizing these partial indications, events we only recognize by knowing how Scripture describes God’s redemptive purposes.
Confession as political action. Confession holds the place between lament and hope. There is longing for things to be made right. There is also a recognition, should we say gladness, when there is something spotted even in Rome that God is working and that there is some goodness going on?
Confession includes acknowledging the sin, but also praise. She says we need to be educated in our longing for what God wants, not just information. I am guessing information about our sin or a set of facts. Political confession she defines as not only saying what our wrong doings are, but showing the gospel working in our past and present. Confessions is not just talking about his worldly success, but also what his success looks like in his dissatisfaction with his success. His meticulous dismantling of the stories Romans told themselves about their history and values did not serve merely to condemn their wrong. (That is in the City of God).
Remember this as we are about to celebrate our 250 years as a nation. There is a lot to be proud of, but we should not forget the things which we are trying to do better at. I am thinking that there is a move to remove all vestigates of the colpability of how slavery also shaped the nation. How our leaders also enslaved people.
The beauty of political confession—of telling the truth about ourselves and our histories in light of Scripture—is that it reveals artificial stories for what they are and creates space for truer ones.
Political Imagination
Both knowing our stories as a people and knowing we do not know the totality of the arc of our journey should give us pause before pronouncements of how things are. Confession leads to political action.
10. Creation Redeemed: Eschatology and Political Formation
This last chapter has to do with last times thinking. She is not wild about books which hint or predict what will happen when Jesus returns or even the conditions proceeding this occurrence. This is because there is an emphasis that all is lost and why try to bring God’s goodness to a world which is doomed?
She notes that the church always has had the last times in its vision of the future. The evangelical emphasis has it being a reason not to be involved. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the church “witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end. From his book Creation and the Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1-3. Schiess asks, what are the current consequences of a material, redeemed vision of the end?
Why Eschatology Matters
The question Schiess raises in this section is, What will our work be used for, if at all? How we view the end times and its coming shapes our understanding of world events and history. our general vision of the end of the story shapes our judgment of political goodness and our willingness to engage in political action.
“It’s All Gonna Burn”
She brings a thought which NT Wright presents that forces such as what drove Wilberforce and the abolitionists was given up by evangelicals when they stopped believing in the full powers of the resurrection and the bringing old a real heaven instead of some pie in the sky type of experience-my words not Schiess’.
If all of our works are just going to burn, why do them? But what if it is not like that and is more like the days of Noah where there is salvation for the human race? Schiess notes that God made an everlasting covenant with mankind through Noah. If the world is going to burn and is not worth saving, then did God lie about establishing an everlasting covenant?
Talks about a movie called Mother! By director Darren Aronoksky. Schiess talks about the allusions which this book makes to the Fall and the patience of God. Also talks about another movie called Noah.. Schiess notes that the premise of this later movie is closer to the God will start over espoused by evangelicals.
Creation Redeemed
She starts this chapter out by saying we do not trust God’s vision of redemption. We look for escape from both our responsibilities as well as not being in tune with God;’s plan. The whole of Scripture witnesses to this coming restoration, redemption, and transformation of this same material earth we live on today. Her point is that we are not here to hide from our community.
She says that we are not looking to be liberated from materialism, but from decay. Early Christians were expectant of God working in their lives and community. Christians living with a lot of privilege and wealth are much more likely to picture a spiritual future instead of a rectifying of the wrongs they’ve experienced on earth
A Return to the Beginning
When God created the world, what was the reason? Is He going back on what he wanted to do? Did He decide it suddenly was no good?
Schiess says that God created humans to work in a garden, to rule/oversee this world. She takes it that rule is not domination, but to govern. She says that the implications is that the garden-this world-was not a furnished product rather something to continue to mold and shape. She says for us to look at the story The Man Who Planted Trees as an example. It talks about the kind of labor that only hope can inspire.
A New Jerusalem
Looks at Rev 20 and 21. Quotes Richard Mouw who thinks that this new Jerusalem is more like our cultural patterns. The implication is that if this is true, then we would do well to understand and work through how to live today. Awaiting the redemption of the world also means teaching our hearts and minds to resist the way the world values human work and training ourselves to see things through the lens of the coming redemption.
Schiess says that being a citizen of heaven, as Paul calls us in Phil 3:20, is more akin to living in a place and bringing heaven to that place. It is not to return to heaven. She quotes Karl Barth: The Word became flesh (John 1:14) and not the other way around.
Political Eschatology
Last times Scriptures fill us with apprehension and prevent us from some basic understanding. This is what Schiess would like to talk a bit more about. Revelation is a book for the church—for the seven churches listed in chapters two and three but also for the universal church. Schiess says that we are invited to look beyond the powers and realities of this world and see what God is doing behind all of the actions.
The word we translate revelation in the title and throughout the book is the Greek word apokálupsis, which literally means “uncovering,” “disclosure,” and “revelation.” To understand what is being done with these passages, Schiess uses what Flannery O’Connor says: you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.(Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose). When there is shared values and knowledge, plain speaking is sufficient. But when you need to awaken to a different reality, you need to shock into awareness.
A Resisting Community
She makes two statements in the opening paragraph. 1) The early church was a resistance movement because of their refusal to worship the emperor. 2) The early Christians would have made a connection between Revelations and Daniel. On the second one, I wonder how much of the early church was Jewish and how much was Gentile. Would the Gentiles have made that connection?
Revelation is fundamentally about political resistance against the dominating systems of empire. She says that question the boundaries which the world sets. Christians see another world beyond the one we are in. Consequently, we are to resist when there is abuse of things of power such as money, military and authority. She says we as American Christians need to recognize this abuse and stand up to it.
Participation in the economic system required idolatry—a sacrifice the church could not make. This ties in with Rev 2&3 where the basic indictments against the church is idolatry and complacency. Both are because the churches there wanted to fit in.
Redeeming Power
Jesus as the slaughtered lamb appears twenty-eight times in Revelation. The slaughtered lamb being the victorious king is a different picture of a victor. We think of power; the image is of humbleness. (Rev 5:9-10) The powers of earth are defeated through self-sacrifice and suffering.
Forming Our Eschatological Orientation
Refurbishing the church is the theme of Revelation, a gift to free it of a world surrounded by exploitation, idolatry-political specificially and abuse of power. Schiess is not giving concrete instruction about what needs to be done. But she wants to give thoughts on some general directions or nudges as she calls it.
listening to marginalized communities. She notes that Revelation will be most powerfully felt in these communities. Read MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail for instance.
Rejecting the material/spiritual dualism at every turn. She quotes N T. Wright: The belief that heaven and earth could and sometimes did overlap and interlock is built into the very structure of ancient Israelite life, thought, and particularly worship. (Article in Revelation and the Politics of Apocalyptic Interpretation called Revelation and Christian Hope.) She hits that the spiritual and material are not two separate items rather there is integration. While Heaven is our home, we are ambassadors in this world.
diacritical community. Not only do we criticize the wrongs we see around us, but we also present alternatives. Christians/the Church play a crucial part in both earthly governments which is authorized by God, but also as a conscience and moral standard. We are to be a witness to what God wants in our world. No government governs purely within the standard God has set.
The way Christians change the world in Revelation is by worshiping God and trusting in his power and bearing witness to the kingdom.
Epilogue: Shalom
Schiess sums up her thinking in this chapter. She says that we will be formed in either ways of our environment or in the ways of the Kingdom of God. Jesus’ life was the embodied, holistic representation of that kingdom for us, constantly pointing his followers toward the healing, justice, and wholeness that characterizes it—shalom. … In reality, shalom means something more like “wholeness,” “intactness,” or as I like to define it, “the way things are supposed to be.” Shalom is a deeper word than just being without conflict.
Jeremiah is an example where he is said to be advocating evil for the city by having people leave Jerusalem while they can. People who are prosecuting him think they are working for the good of the City, the shalom. It is Jeremiah who is really advocating for the shalom.
She says that the Church has a lot to learn from Jeremiah. Jeremiah was advocating that people accept the consequences of the corruption of the city. She says that is something we can learn. … there are things that need to die:
Our attachment to a political party that knows it is the beneficiary of a lopsided bargain
Deep-seated racism and misogyny that we like to imagine is behind us.
Institutional structures that protect the powerful instead of the most vulnerable.
Our impulse to fortify our own kingdoms.
We are living in a tumultuous time, and it can be hard to see how this chaos could be used for good. No one wants destruction. Let’s not cling to broken buildings and rotting kingdoms when the promise of redemption then is the promise of redemption now: he is building something better
Evaluation:
Notes from my book group:
Define three words: What is liturgy and what is politics? How do they correspond to Schiess’ definition? As long as we are defining words, what is spiritual formation?
Why the title of The Liturgy of Politics? What is she trying to convey to us?
In what different ways is the word politics used in this book? Was it confusing?
A basic question which is asked in chapter Four which affects how you view both this book and your relationship to our world is: I what is my salvation for?
What assumptions does Schiess have throughout the book?
Michael Wear starts his introduction rather darkly indicating that nobody gets into politics to serve, but to win. What does he mean by this? Do you think this is true? Is his view of politics different from Schiess’?
Schiess indicates that liberals and conservatives are more defined by opposing each other’s positions. How does Schiess say we should be looking at our charged social atmosphere today? Does aligning yourself with a particular political movement change you? Your outlook? Should you be aligned with a political group?
She refers back to the old things to get us rooted. Who does she mean? How will the old things help to guide and root us?
The first chapter ends with the question of, What is forming us? How would you answer that question? What should be forming us? Does our church do a good job of preparing us to be both good citizens and good Christians?
In what ways are views inherited? The inheritance can be from family, church, or other environments? She points out that we also tend to think in terms of bifurcation-heaven and earth, religious and political, … Do you find that this part of your thinking? How does this affect your view the needs of where we live?
Disscuss the implications of Schiess’ statement: need to unlearn our bent toward a private religion and a public politics—and see our participation in political life as a reflection of our very public faith. We live in a society which values the freedom of having your opinions. How can a public person’s religious values and beliefs be part of the way government works without restricting other people’s religious values and beliefs? How should a private person express their views and beliefs?
We might think that we make political decisions based on propositional information, but we are overwhelmingly motivated by our loves and our loyalties. Is this a true statement in general? Is this true in your life? Is being motivated by your love and loyalties a bad thing? How much of what you take in depends on the source of the information? Do you evaluate the information based upon the source vs the possible trueness of the information?
Schiess notes that a Quiet Time can lead to being in-grown. Is Schiess against having a Quiet Time? What is her thinking about the purpose of time alone with God? What place does your Quiet Time have in your life and how has it led you to doing the things God wants you to do?
Do you agree that personal disciplines were never about you? Why does she say that?
If Jesus is our example, then what does that say about our relationship to the place and time you live in?
Schiess says that Christians have political responsibilities. How do you answer her three questions in that area:
1. What requirements are given to the noncovenantal nations we live in?
2. How does this responsibility interact with our mission to share the gospel?
3. Can we do anything worthwhile in a fallen world?
She uses a couple of terms from Makoto Fujimura: border-stalkers and Cultural Estuaries. What is being described by these terms. Do you think this is an good way to discuss areas where kingdoms of this world and God intersect?
Chapter five starts off with a quote from Stanley Hauerwas which leads us to say that Biblical interpretation should be left in the hands of the professionals. What would be gained by doing this? What would be lost? Do you think that is how God intended the Bible to be used? What do you think the proper interaction between individual Bible readings and religious professional interpretations should be?
A point Schiess makes is that One of the most important things we can do for our political formation is to learn to recognize the ways we’ve been conditioned to read Scripture. How can a person identify this bias in themselves? Is that a thing to avoid? How can you avoid personal bias? What is personal bias?
What are good Bible reading habits?
What part does community have in understanding what the Bible has to say to us?
What does she mean when she says: the problem with too closely aligning our faith and a particular strain of conservative politics isn’t that the movement was “too political,” but that it was actually insufficiently political?
What are the consequences of Christians aligning themselves with a particular political party? Do you see this as a problem with the party which you are aligned with?
Schiess notes it is power which gets things done. A utilitarian approach says that is how things get accomplished in this culture. What should the Christian’s relationship to power be? Can a Christian hold power without bending their values?
At the end of the second chapter, Schiess notes abouthow fear and idolatry’s place is in our culture. Where do you see these facits at work and how are they used to manipulate us? Why does she say we over use the term idolatry?
Chapter Three deals with what Schiess says are false gospels. Are their commonalities between false gospels? Did you have a problem with any of them being identified as a false gospel?
It is noted that the Christian life is countercultural. What is countercultural about your life? What is countercultural about the Christian life or what would be countercultural about Jesus life being lived today?
Schiess uses“spiritual formation in a political direction,” in two ways: the ways we are spiritually formed by the political forces around us, and the ways our intentional spiritual formation practices form us in political ways. Talk about the distinction between the two ways and the impact they can have on our lives. What forces do you see that form us? How has the teachings of the church directed your thinking in how you interact with society?
Spiritual formation seems to be used interchangeably with liturgies. Are they the same? How are they different? The only thing that can truly counter the strength of powerfully formative forces around us is rediscovering rather ancient ideas about spiritual formation. What ideas is she talking about? How can these ancient ideas form stability in our culture?
political: This word primarily indicates government functions—elections, legislation, court decisions, and so on. But delineating what pertains to the government and what doesn’t is a messy business. Does government imply how we interact with each other? What would we consider the norms and allowable in our society? She goes on and says that Our lived theology has political consequences. In what ways does she mean this?
Schiess explores should Christians read the Bible. What are her conclusions? How does she say it should be done? Who should do it and in what context? Do you agree?
Since the book was written in 2020, how do you think she would update it today?
By reading this book, what in your life have you had to re-examine?
How do you want your life to change because you read this book?
New Words:
- spiritual formation-Spiritual formation . . . is the ongoing process of the triune God transforming the believer’s life and character toward the life and character of Jesus Christ—accomplished by the ministry of the Spirit in the context of biblical community
- liturgies-a form or formulary according to which public religious worship, especially Christian worship, is conducted.
- teleology-the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world. the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise.
- salvific-leading to salvation.
- The Eucharist-the Christian service, ceremony, or sacrament commemorating the Last Supper, in which bread and wine are consecrated and consumed.
- vacuous-having or showing a lack of thought or intelligence; mindless.
- Reclaiming Hope by Michael Wear
- The Revenge of Analog by David Sax
- Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology by ames K. A. Smith
- Hope in Troubled Times: A New Vision for Confronting Global Crises by Bob Goudzwaard, Mark Vander Vennen, and David Van Heemst
- Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
- Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics
- Chris Lehmann, author of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream
- Michelle Alexander writes about these inequalities in her groundbreaking work, The New Jim Crow
- In Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing, Andy Crouch
- Jemar Tisby outlines in his historical survey of racism in the American church, The Color of Compromise
- Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity, Brian Bantum
- Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon
- Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear, Matthew Kaemingk
- An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis
- Fast Day Sermons: or, The Pulpit on the State of the Country by Mark Noll
- R. Alan Streett, author of Caesar and the Sacrament
- Robert Webber, in his fantastic introduction to the church calendar, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality Through the Christian Year
- Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, Fleming Rutledge
- Repentance as Political Witness,” Jennifer M. McBride
- Danger of Christian Practice, Lauren Winner
- The Dangers of Christian Practice, Lauren Winner
- Fleming Rutledge’s five-hundred-page The Crucifixion
- A Liturgy for Feasting with Friends
- City of God
- Hal Lindsey’s 1970 The Late Great Planet Earth
- Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright
- The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
- Letter from Birmingham Jail”;
- William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land; and
- Allan Boesak, Comfort and Protest: The Apocalypse of John from a South African Perspective
- Douglas Kaine McKlevey, “A Liturgy for Feasting with Friends,” Rabbit Room, November 24, 2016, https://rabbitroom.com/2016/11/a-liturgy-for-feasting-with-friends
- William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist
Good Quotes:
- First Line: I’ve spent my entire life in evangelical spaces: I grew up in a variety of evangelical churches as a nomadic military kid, attended a prominent evangelical university, and chose an evangelical seminary.
- Last Line: Let’s not cling to broken buildings and rotting kingdoms when the promise of redemption then is the promise of redemption now: he is building something better
- Foreword by Michael Wear
- 1. Apolitical or Unexamined: What Spiritual Formation Has to Do with Politics
- 2. The Liturgy of Politics: Loves and Loyalties
- 3. Of This World: The Gospels of Prosperity, Patriotism, Security, and Supremacy
- 4. For the Life of the World: Spiritual Formation and Public Life
- 5. A Story to Live Into: Scripture and Political Formation
- 6. Ekklēsia: The Church as a Training Ground for Political Engagement
- 7. The Rhythm of Our Lives: Time, Music, Confession
- 8. Bent on the Coming Kingdom of God: Spiritual Disciplines and Political Formation
- 9. A Confessing City: Reading Politics with Augustine
- 10. Creation Redeemed: Eschatology and Political Formation
- Epilogue: Shalom
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
References:
Publisher's Web Site for Book
Author's Web Site
Wikipedia-Book
Wikipedia-Author
Amazon-Book
Amazon-Author
Barnes and Noble
GoodReads-Book
GoodReads-Author
New York Times Review
NPR Review
Lit Lovers
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