#282 | Exploring God’s Sabbath: A Deep Dive into Creation with James W. Skillen

Today's episode is brought to you by the Martinez family. May the Lord bless you and give you favor in your latest ventures.

The meaning of history is not the American story. The meaning of history marching on is not the story of enlightenment intellectual progress. It's not the progress of economic growth.

Those are factors in, and we've absolutized them, but none of them can serve as a true God. So Christians ought to say, look, we live in the Christian story. We, we need to see ourselves totally within that story.

But that story doesn't work as a whole if it only functions one day a week.

Welcome to Ministry Deep Dive. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host.

You know, today I interact with a lot of ministry leaders, and the one thing that I find that's a constant, they're exhausted. Churches are anxious. The world feels fractured, accelerated and out of control. It just won't slow down.

Many of us are asking not just what should we do next? But what kind of world is God actually leading us toward? Today's conversation is about that deeper question.

Today on Ministry Deep Dive, I get to welcome Jim Skillin as we're talking about his book, God's Sabbath with Creation. Now, this is a book that is going to, in many ways, blow your mind because it's going to take you into some of the deeper parts of the scripture.

I don't even say deeper parts. It's going to shine light on scriptures that you've probably not thought about.

It's going to connect them for you in a way that's going to make you go, wow, that was great. And it's going to encourage you where you're at. It's going to help you do your ministry even better.

But before I jump into that, as we talk to Jim, and again, for those that don't know who Jim is, he is a political thinker and author of the book God's Sabbath with Creation, as we're talking about today.

And he started the center for Public justice and in Washington, D.C. and so he is my guest today, and I am so overjoyed to have him on Ministry Deep Dive. Jim, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

Thank you. I'm honored to be here and delighted and looking forward to the conversation with you.

Well, let's have some fun. But before we do it, you know what's coming. It's the fast five. Are you ready?

I don't know, but go ahead.

Okay, here we go. If you could travel anywhere in the world tomorrow, no obligations, no conferences, no responsibilities back at home, or no Lectures.

Where would you go and why?

Oh, that's a good one. Because I've been in many different places. I was born in Colorado. One place I'd go is back to see the mountains and the mountaintops.

But I have a lot of connections with Europe. I've recently done a book with a fellow in Ukraine on citizenship from a Christian point of view. He translated it all into Ukrainian.

I would love to go there and meet him and the people that he's been working with. So something like that. Nice.

All right, how about this one? You've done a lot. I mean, I barely even touched the surface of all of the different things you've done in your life. And I want to ask you this.

If your life were a movie, what would the title be and who would you have play you?

Oh, my. Trying to understand what's going on. Jim in search of answers.

Jim on a canoe that he's not sure he can paddle, but he's, by golly, going to keep on going up that creek.

That's a long title of a movie.

You might need to act in it because you're bald and you got a bit of a beard. You can do it, I think.

Or so that is a first for me. I've never had anyone tell me that I should act in their movie. I am tremendously honored. But it will get zero stars in the box office.

I'm the one that would star in it. All right, number three. What is one everyday pleasure you enjoy that people would not expect from a theologian or public thinker?

Well, I like to read, and those are internal things. I watch a lot of news, especially these days. But the pleasure thing, and I find enjoyment in that. I like to play golf.

I'm not a great golfer, but if I can get out when the weather suits, all those kind of things, I very much enjoy that. I think the biggest thing now happening with us, we're living near where our daughter and family settled and they have two boys.

And I'm telling you, those boys were learning the art of grandfathering and grandparenting, grandmothering, and they're both into music. They're really, really good. So we're going to all kinds of things. It's just fun. I love going to orchestra concerts. So, yeah, it's a lot.

But it all is wonderful and it sounds very relaxing and a very full life. That's a great joy. All right, here's number four.

What's something you're current, currently curious about that has nothing to do with theology, politics or ministry?

I would come Back to the grandparenting and being with friends.

I mean we have very close friends in the Chicago area and now in Florida, but they're moving and to be with them, play golf with my brother in law, to be attentive to these grandsons who are in middle school, high school, having them over for dinner or the whole family over for dinner on Sundays, being in, in their life, which I mean, my son in law teaches English at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. So there's academic discussion, but that's not most of what we do at dinner time.

So it's family, it's friendships, it's connections, it's staying close to the earth. I enjoy eating good meals. My wife's so wonderful chef. So I mean, you know, I could go on, but we got to get to question five, right?

Yeah, the question five. But those are the simple pleasures that just mean everything.

Number five, what's one piece of advice you'd give your younger self before he took life so seriously?

Well, you know, there's been, there was a great transition in my life in the sense that up until I went to college and my wife and I met when we were 15 years old in high school. So we will be celebrating our 60th anniversary of this June. But I was serious about sports and music. I was not thinking seriously.

I got good grades, but it was just to do it. I was not thinking about anything special. I wanted to be a doctor. So I started out pre med in college.

But what happened was through some reading and other things, I already had a change of heart as a Christian, but I had a change of mind, a change of worldview. It's like I shifted from the kind of evangelicalism that is man centered, that is this is all about God saving us to a God centered world.

This is all about God, we as the stewards of creation. Now that was such a delight in the discovery that that was fun. I mean it was not, I was not planning to be a scholar.

I wasn't thinking about, oh now I was a philosophy major. But I wasn't trying to be a philosopher. I just enjoyed wanting to discuss the most important things in life.

So it just carried on and everything from then I just keep on exploring. And as soon as you get this, all of creation is God's and we are participant in that story of what God is unveiling. Well then there's nothing.

I mean music, family, friends, golf, whatever, politics, it all has to fit into that somewhere. So looking for all of the things, the talents that God has given humans, the Institutional structures of reality, everything.

I mean, I've just, I'm a, I'm a kid in a candy store still at 81.

Well, you know, it's interesting. I find that the more that you grow in wisdom and knowledge, the more you just realize there's so much you don't know.

Exactly.

And it's a lifelong journey.

I mean, I think many of us don't realize that you talk about this even in your book, when you're talking about wisdom and growing in wisdom, that it is a lifelong process. And that's why we talk about who are you becoming in the process. It's not just this getting people saved into heaven. It's so much bigger than that.

I mean, it's not less than that, but it's certainly much bigger than that. It's being with God and having commune with God.

But we've so reduced the gospel into this kind of transactional, otherworldly understanding where we talk about the forgiveness of sins. And again, Christ did die for our sins. We know that, but it's so much bigger. And this which leads me to your book, God's Sabbath with Creation.

You told me in the kind of pre show walkthrough that this has been a lifelong process to write this book. Like you said, you start in a seminary and then you wrote it a few years ago. And I mean, it's a 50 year process.

But what was it that you said, okay, now is the time for me to write this book?

Well, let me put it this way. When I was in college there, there were three major things that occupied me. One was baseball. I was a pitcher in a baseball team in the spring.

The other one was trying to figure out how my wife and I could communicate enough because we were really serious. But she was home at other college. And the third thing was asking the question, what is it? I'm a Christian.

What does it mean for me to be a Christian in all of life?

The reason I asked that is that the context at the college I went to, Wheaton College, was in very many ways still a sacred secular kind of atmosphere.

Not in the sense that the world was treated as nothing or just apart from God, but in the sense that full time service, full time Christian service meant pastoring, going to missionary or an evangelist. And the question was, well, that's not what most of us do most of the time. We sleep eight hours if you're good.

If we, you know, we eat and drink and have family and friendships and responsibilities. What has all that got to do with Christ's Kingdom. If Christ is Lord of all, what does it mean? So that was the exploration.

I was a philosophy major, but I was trying to answer those questions, not trying to figure out how to be a philosopher. So it was pursuing that.

When I went to seminary, it was not with a call, a sense of a call to ministry in the sense that pastors go, but it was to get a better understanding of what a Christian doing philosophy should be doing. It was still occupied like that. I was still more or less oblivious to the larger world. I was in college and seminary from 62 to 69.

Now, that suggests that I lived through the 60s, right? Well, I'll tell you, I knew things were happening, Civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, but I didn't know anything about them.

I wasn't paying attention.

But what got me through some biblical studies and that was with Richard Gaffin, who was a great New Testament scholar at Westminster Theological Seminary. He did some great biblical study. And it was in his developing of biblical theology that I was beginning to ask.

I was thinking of it as theology, but I was beginning to see it from the point of view that I've been struggling with about what does this have to do with a biblical worldview. And the more I went, the more I got to see. And then this is one of the things I have at the beginning of the book.

And this is something that grew in almost all that Christians have done, not just since the Reformation, but from the beginning of the church. But then it kept getting more and more focused this way. And. And most all the creeds are about sin and salvation. It's the salvation story.

But in fact, if you look at the beginning of John's Gospel, the beginning of Colossians, verse from verse 15 on, and the first words of sentences of Hebrews, the way the incarnate one is introduced is not as a Savior. He's introduced as the one in and through whom all things were created and all things hang together.

The beginning of God's story to unveil himself is through the Son, to create and hold things together. The story then is about God unveiling himself and the meaning of creation. That's what the biblical story is.

It's because human sin that the question of how can God fulfill his story when he's given us stewardly responsibility over the earth? How can that be? And then that's where the judgment redemption story comes in. And we have to think of it as a judgment.

I mean, that which is sinful cannot stand. It will not be. By the end, all tears, all Crying, all sinfulness is going to be judged, finished and gone.

But we are now living in the story of how are we to live in God's world with every vocation that we have and therefore to understand who is Christ the Savior? Well, he's the Son in and through whom all things were created. Who are we? We're not first of all sinners in need of salvation.

We're created in the image of God to be God's stewards over the earth who are messing things up by our sin. So the question of why judgment and salvation is needed is to fulfill God's creation.

We even can say by looking at the Scripture, Christ came to reconcile all things to the Father. Reconciliation means turning, getting rid of sin, turning us back from one path of darkness to the part of light.

But when you pick out the sin salvation story, then what we have today, by and large, I would say in America, and this is a great deal of telling another story. It's a story of humans, through their great mind and autonomy, recreating the world to suit themselves. That's not a story we should be living in.

We are in the middle of it. Because one false lesson, one false path that we've been encouraged to lead on leads us away from the biblical story.

We ought to be located the biblical story. But that means that when you talk about who is this person, who are these persons God came to save, created an image of God with all their vocations.

We should not be thinking of humans needing salvation as a soulish thing, as simply a faith thing, as simply a religious thing, meaning. There's a lot of other stuff that's not relevant. And I hear Christians to this day.

It's the Christian things, it's reading the Bible story, coming to church, all of which are important as the Christian thing, and then telling people about Jesus from time to time. Well, what's the responsibility of a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a farmer, parents? That's what we do full time. That's what occupies our lives now.

How can you say that all of that is just beside the point or here today to God? No, when we finally get to go to heaven. So what I really got into with that was what is the meaning of creation?

And that's when it began to dawn on me that the creation story is not just the story of what God created. It's the story of God creating and positioning himself relative to creation, as the Sabbath giver, the one who rested.

And as Hebrews says later, there remains a rest for the people of God. Don't harden your hearts, as Israel did in the day of the desert. There's a remains Sabbath for the people of God. We will enter God's Sabbath.

So we need to think of the creation as all seven. It's a seven day story. After all, in the scripture, it's not a six day story, it's a seven day story.

And therefore we need to see that in many respects what the Sabbath of God means and what it identifies is what we tend to call heaven. That is, I would call it the fulfillment of creation. It's resurrection.

It's going to be a whole new mode without sin, sitting with God forever, walking, talking, doing everything that we are given to do. But we're going to be renewed people on earth.

He's coming back to earth and in this world, renewed in all kinds of ways that will be unrecognizable, most of which will be recognizable. Because we can't end up being not human, not souls without bodies. And it's not that God takes us out of this world and puts us in a new world.

That's what people often think of heaven, new heaven and new earth. It's more the meaning of renewed heaven, renewed earth.

But when it's fulfilled, creation's fulfilled, then we will be enjoying God's Sabbath and the fulfillment of all things, the revelation of the glory of God and the fulfillment of all human vocations. Christ came to be one with us, not just to bear sin and die. He came to fulfill what he all hangs together in the first place.

So he takes our place as the human who had responsibility to be good steward of the earth and begins to turn us around by his grace into the prospect of doing that again, turning, repenting and doing it right. So that gets to the heart of your missiology approach. What we are doing is letting people see we need to live in tune with the coming fulfillment.

But that means with all our vocations. But that never, hardly ever comes up in sermons, in Bible studies, in talking about Christian strength. It's religion and life.

It's religion and that's not it. Our whole of life is one thing served before God and nothing exists outside that.

What's been really fascinating about what you just said, and it's a description.

I remember talking with Mark Noll about this very thing as we were talking about how certain theological expressions or gospel expressions took root in America over time. And some of those had more of an escapist theology or some have called a two chapter gospel.

You know, set up creation, fall, redemption, restoration of all things. It's just fall redemption. And in doing so, they've reduced or cut off these other parts. And as time has gone on, it's become even further reduced.

Part of it is, is, you know, kind of neoliberal capitalism is pulling people along. And churches then started doing that much more attractional piece.

Well then they, they, in order to keep people kind of in the seats, they reduce it even further where it becomes this justification only the event of salvation, rather than the understanding of the greater process of sanctification and then glorification and how it all fits together.

And so part of what we're trying to do is stretch that back out is say, hey, it's not that it's just like you've got this part, but you're missing the whole part of it.

And that's one of the reasons I think that so many people have started, stopped going to church is because many churches are just doing that get to heaven piece. And people are like, I've heard this episode. You know, I've played this, I've done this script over and over and over again.

I need, I don't know how it's applying to my life and I don't know like what the purpose of my life is. Because in that kind of two chapter gospel idea is that you find that then like your job is basically your vocation is instrumentalized.

It's only good insofar as you make money and give to missions or you evangelize. It has no bearing on the cultivating or flourishing of society.

And you're right, that sacred secular split that has been brought in has been disastrous. And so we're trying to bring that back together.

Is that really what you're helping us do is bring these disparate or seemingly culturally or historically in the last couple of generations that split, and you're saying, no, no, no, that's an illegitimate split. Let's bring this back together and just see the full context of the story.

And when we do, we're going to find that who we are as humans and who God calls us to be as followers of Jesus is fully shown within the word of God. And now we're to just embrace that. But I need you to see what this looks like because the lenses that you're approaching it with are incomplete.

Would that be a legitimate way of going about it and explaining it?

Yes, yes. And I think it's right there in the text. But we don't look for it, don't see it, because we're busy finding other uses for the Bible.

But when you see the very beginning of creation and humans are created in the image of God and called to develop the earth, govern it and nurture it. I mean, there are different words in Genesis 1 and 2, but that's the business.

That's the service to God that we're to render, even as all the rest of creation is our hospitality context. And it's all about the revelation of God. And it concludes with, and God saw that everything was good.

But then look at Psalm 8, which repeats and appeals to that in wonder. We look out at the universe, how great it is, Lord in all of this. How can you even consider us piddling little creatures?

But then he goes on to say, you've crowned us with glory and honor as these creatures. The glory and honor doesn't begin with Christ saving sinners to give them glory and honor.

It's God who is the all glorious, all honorable one, taking the image of God, creating them to be so much like God, let's put it this way, so much like God that the Son of God could become human and not quit being God. Now when you take that and you say we are crowned with glory and honor, what do you mean? My soul? My life at church? No, we as whole creatures.

So the basic thing I would urge just following up with what you're saying is don't ever talk about Christ's redemption of humans without asking, who are humans? It's left unsung said, it's left unsaid in that mode.

So pretty soon as religious life gets focused on church life, and I mean that in the sense of worship and evangelism, Bible studies and the rest of it, when that gets to be the focus of Christianity, then all the things we really spend most of our time doing is not seen as something related to God in, in that fashion. It's seen as. In fact, I think for most people, they think all of this, I heard it just the other day, all of this is going to be left behind.

I heard this in a sermon last Sunday. All of this is going to go anyway. And what's done for Christ will last. Well, what's done for Christ is assumed to be this religious thing.

Well, it can't be left behind because what we're being restored to and put in new bodies, what we should be doing is lifting up our gifts of thanksgiving to God. What we should bring into the tabernacle, into the church building, in the church service every time are our gifts.

And the gifts are the remembrances of all of us. They're the gifts of Remembering and renewing.

Discussing what we've been doing as a doctor, with patients, a teacher, with students, a philosopher, cutting through confusions, the engineer. These are capabilities that God gave humans. And to develop the earth, to enlarge the human population is what just.

So there's a mess that God has to clean up? No, it's the revelation that begins of God's Sabbath. So it seemed to me the more we looked at it.

And since all of this is revelatory, I mean, when you ask about what, how is God defined? How do we talk about God?

You either get the negative theology, which is, we can't comprehend him, he's beyond all knowledge, or you get the Greek kind of thinking, he's with these all things and bodies and accidents and substances and stuff. Just read the Bible.

God reveals himself as the father of a family, as the husband of a wife, as a tiller of the land, as the teacher of students, the rabbi as the judge in a court, as the lawgiver. He's doing this thing. We reveal that in part.

And therefore I would say what we do in this sense of renewing life, getting a new life in Christ, turning away from the bad things.

What it should be turning to is this opening of our eyes and our lives to the fact that this way of living is to recognize that when we do things aright, when we truly love our children, our spouse, our friend, we are doing something that's revelatory of God in anticipation of the fulfillment of that in the great bridal feast, in the great banquet feast, with all our brothers and sisters, in the times of our learning from Jesus, whom we'll never quit learning enough from, who is our rabbi. I mean, the fulfillment is the fulfillment of what we are doing now.

So I would say every marriage that's done lovingly, with repentance and continued love, and so on and so forth, every marriage that's an anticipation, a revelatory anticipation of the great wedding.

And we ought to see every wonderful dinner, every once in a while gathering as the anticipation of the banquet feast, because it's revelatory of that. And if we don't do that, if we don't look at the creation and one another as revelatory creatures, then we don't understand.

Likewise, it means we weaken the meaning of understanding sin. Sin is not loving your wife and your children, right?

Disparaging the creation, ruining it ecologically, just treating it as something that just is our dominion has nothing to do with God. No. We're stewards of the one who owns it. You aren't taking care of these creatures.

Spouses, children, friends, colleagues in the work, at the hospital.

If we aren't taking that seriously and looking at every beautiful flower and saying it's beyond belief that God can do all of these things, what a beautiful revelation. If we aren't doing that, then we don't understand the significance of sin.

Sin is not loving your spouse or your children, manipulating and doing work just to make money.

Shortcuts in doctrine, law, doing law without asking about how unjust is some of the law that I'm now trying to enforce, without examining what's the right way to do these things. And therefore, I mean, it's all there. Paul concludes a couple of his epistles by saying, learn to distinguish the good from the evil.

And I think the peace in Hebrews, you're still too immature. He says, you just need milk, but you need to become capable of eating meat. And what's the meat of maturity?

By these are my words, by perpetual learning, practicing, you learn to distinguish what is, what is wrong. Now, that is taken for many people as well. I just better not cuss or I better not run around with. With somebody who's not my wife.

Blah, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't mean just that. It means, how are you doing your doctoring? How are you doing your lawyering?

And how much of what you're doing is simply perpetuating the American way of life instead of the Christian way of life.

You know, Jim, it's interesting you bring this up because it's not just in. I know you're talking about in the context of doctoring and lawyering or gardening or whatever it is that you're doing as a vocation.

But being a pastor, I actually see that within pastoral ministry. And what. That's what bothers me. And one of the reasons why we created mystical holism.

And I told you at the beginning, we know, we answer seven questions. What is the gospel? How is God's kingdom unfolding? What story am I a part of? Who am I doing this with?

What are we doing where?

How is our culture distorting the answers to these things? And then who are we becoming in the process? And so when I, when I look at churches and I see churches that burn out their pastors left and right.

Well, that or pastors just running themselves ragged. It's like, well, you're actually violating the very thing that you're trying to get people to do.

You're to show what living under the reign of Christ looks like in all of its. Its entirety.

Which means Even in your rest, in your leisure, in your parenting, in your family and your digital world and interactions, all of those things. But I'm amazed.

And how many Christians just compartmentalize and they just look at this ministry piece and they separate it and it's caused all this kinds of disaster and hypocrisy across the board. Now, I'm not saying this would fix everything, but it would fix some things, don't you think?

Well, it should lead us to. For example, if the meaning of the Christian life is living, becoming part of the community, the body of Christ.

Yep.

It should make us want to be drawn close together and working closely with fellow believers to nurture one another so one another we can learn. Hey, so you're. You're working at the hospital. Oh, you're working as an engineer. Tell me about it.

I mean, I need to know how you are living so I can know more about who I'm part of. So it's. In that sense, it's vocational. But the way I also see it is everything we do, every responsibility, is a vocation. That is response.

God calls us and commissions us, we have to respond. There's no way you can escape it. God has made us. He's called, he's given mandate. How do you respond?

Well, every response we give to God having to do with how we develop the creation, the earth, how we develop our human relationships, and all the things that go together with what it means to be human. Eating, drinking, celebrating, resting, all of that is part of what it means to be human. Okay.

How do we respond to God with these offerings, these gifts of mercy, these talents that he's given? If I live only. I mean, let's put it this way.

I think for many, many Christians, they are closer in relationship to their colleagues where they work or their friends across the fence or into some vocation that they like than they are to members of the church they're in, depending on the size of the church, because you get to know them as church people. I remember it took me.

It was only maybe 15 years ago we lived in Annapolis in the Washington area, when I was working with the center for Public Justice. We lived there for 30 years. And we drove to a church in Washington, took about 40 minutes. And at home it was, hey, time to go to church.

Come on, get your clothes and time to go to church. And then we're going to church. And it dawned on me 15 years ago, that's a stupid thing to say.

We ought to say, hey, the body of Christ is gathering for worship. We're not going to church. We are the church. We are the people of God.

And unfortunately, even the word church has now, in modern lingo, become one among many institutions. Well, the body of Christ is not an institution among others.

It's the whole body being renewed so that right now we are the body gathering for worship on Monday. We're the body going in different directions with our families and our vocations.

But where we work, in the neighborhood where we can find fellow believers that we can nurture one another with that we can encourage one another and ask, say, hey, what's the biggest issue or problem you see in your work or in this vocation? Or in this vocation, whether it's family life or whatever? Let's talk about it.

Have you thought of talking, finding some other Christian engineers or whatever that you can talk about, why are we doing it this way when it seems to cause these problems, etc. Etc. But this is also then where judgment comes in that we want to talk about.

Christ is the one who loves us for who, as we are, loves us for who we are. He's come as the one who gives grace and saves people.

There's hardly a reference to judgment, but at the heart of Christ coming, Jesus being incarnate, is being sacrificed for the sins of the world. That's judgment.

But it also means that we who are still living here in the day when the judgment and fulfillment are yet completed, then the meaning of judgment keeps coming. And most of it is not God just throwing spears down.

It's just bumping our head against the walls of creation that we ignore and paying little attention to what's going on.

We're stumbling over the sins of our parents and our fathers and gathering them up ourselves, creating this sacred secular duality which messes up the whole meaning of creation, sin and salvation so apart in that sense, what is needed by reading the Scriptures to see what it's talking about with regard to the whole meaning of Adam and Eve, the meaning of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the meaning of Israel, which was supposed to be the people of God as a light to the world, and they're sinners too, and then we face it today. You may not want to get into, but one of the great crises about America that we're in the middle of relates to this.

Because I think while by and large we who think of ourselves as Christian with these Christian ministries and believe in Jesus Christ don't understand the whole of what Christ is. And that's gotten, you know, fit into this churchy life.

But why do Many Christians are now so preoccupied with saving America or getting it back to some stage when they think it was whole and healthy. Well, because the myth, the founding myth of America was not just about the structure of government.

It was about God having chosen America as a new Israel, as the people of God. This was the language of many sermons in the time leading up to the revolution.

It was a secularization of the Puritan idea that they were going to have a New England which was going to be pure and all the rest of it.

But that language was taken over by the country at the founding, the white Anglo, Saxon part of the country, taken over by them in a way that led us to see America as God's chosen people for this earth.

So you basically have two salvation stories, and there's the salvation of Christ saving souls for eternity, and God choosing America to save the world for democracy, prosperity, individual freedom and so forth. Now that latter so, so called Christian nationalism is actually a blasphemy. It's a false God.

Because the God who everybody wants blessed for America is America's God. We created it by secularizing the myth, the myth, secularizing of the true Christianity. And most of that draws primarily on the Exodus story.

It draws on all kinds of themes like that, but it doesn't draw on the whole Bible. But likewise, many, many Christians who think the two stories fit hand in glove.

I mean, that's what I see in much of the more radical right, because Christ is the Lord of my salvation, life for eternity. But America, I mean, the world will die if it's not on top. See, because God made us to be the saviors of this world, the representation.

And you can see that when that myth starts to break down, When it comes to an end, because it can't be. And the glorification of a nation, not just this one, others do it similarly.

But we have this particular mythology when that begins to break down, partly because many people don't see it makes any sense anymore. They're not Christians. Many Christians are the ones that help to create that story.

When that happens and it starts to break down, you can get what we're now experiencing.

The breakdown, the financialization, the economization, the glorification of certain sports and heroes, the glorification of money, the glorification of power. They're all elements of this thing.

But if you have to hang on to something for the meaning of life in this world, then for many, even though the religious part, the Christianity part is long forgotten, we still have this sense of God has to, we have to save the world for the sake of the world. And it has nothing to do with Christ. Even for these people that want to connect Christ with the nationalism.

We've done a few episodes on Christian nationalism. I had Paul Miller on who wrote the book the Religion of American Greatness. I mean, we love our country, but let's tell the story accurately.

And basically it's understanding that. And James Davison Hunter said this when he came on. It's the only country that was birthed during the Enlightenment.

And our founding fathers, they had at least a Judeo Christian worldview, although many weren't.

Many were.

But they created a cultural reservoir with a view of God that was opaque enough that anyone else could put into that cultural reservoir what they. They, you know, or read into it what they thought or who they thought God was.

And that worked for a period of time as long as those people continue to fill that cultural reservoir and in some ways perpetuate that same myth that was there. But it was a certain kind of faith. It was a Judeo Christian faith for sure.

But, you know, as multiculturalism come in, or someone has challenged the reservoir, which he mentions native, indigenous peoples, he mentions African Americans and slavery. He mentions even Mormons. They challenge that.

And so as we're looking at this and we're saying, okay, we see this nationalism rise and many Christians, well meaning, don't necessarily understand all the ramifications of it, but we have to show them.

That, wait a minute.

You know, you can love your country, but let's not syncretize this. Let's understand that these two are really separate. And God's called us to build his church, not called to build America.

Now, while we look for just governments, we do these other things, kind of the faithful presence idea in these different spheres. We're called to do that and engage the world in that regard.

This is where I think your work becomes so helpful, because even then you're showing, okay, we are to exhibit a better humanity and we are to be participants within the political sphere. But we have to make sure that we don't excuse the means.

I mean, we look at the message, but sometimes we are willing to adopt unjust means to communicate that message and then baptize power and force in order to communicate something that's to be shown by love. Isn't that right?

Yeah. Two things just in quick response. One is, I do not think that Judeo Christian religiosity was at the heart of the beginning.

I think you can say Judeo Christian ethics, morality was kind of saturated.

But the religion, when you begin to identify, as was happening before the revolution and continued on, begin to identify the nation as covenanted with God, when in fact we are the ones that created the covenant. Even coming over these pilgrims coming over in the famous letter or charge covenant drawn up by.

Yeah, that founding father, whose name I've forgotten. When that was drawn up, it was not an interpretation of God's covenant with human beings and then fulfilled in Christ through Israel and Christ.

It was a covenant they made with God for the colony which was going to be the new colony. So I think the secularization began even at that point of us creating the covenant or making covenant with God. That's one thing.

But then getting to what you're saying that I agree with you see, what we ought to see as Christians, we ought to see that our civic responsibilities for a just polity is a vocation. It's one of our humble vocations. It's one that we have as Christians to serve.

So we shouldn't be seeing the nation as some kind of super all embracing religious meaning in which our churches, we want freedom of religion. Our families and others are kind of parts of that nation. They aren't parts of the nation. They have their own integrity. Families are families.

They're not business enterprises.

Right.

Business enterprises are not universities. Universities. There's a dozen, thousands, hundreds of vocations that we have that are many of them institutionalized or organized.

The political order should not be seen as any more than one of those, though its character has to do with a public legal embrace of all the people.

But that's only to say the embrace of all the people in the territory is an embrace in a public, legal way, not in a familial way, not in an educational way, not in a business way. So even there, the idea that the primary thing government should be doing is fostering economic growth misunderstands.

From my point of view, government ought to be there doing justice to all, including these different vocations. We have to make sure that some don't get stamped on or environmentally destroyed by others.

So it calls for a different kind of politics, a different understanding of the meaning of government and citizenship in their relationship.

And unfortunately, I know you don't want to go on with this, but unfortunately, what it means is the source of it is that our conception of government, that's something different than this view of the nation the conception of government is that government was created by human beings. This is John Locke, in order to protect their life, liberties and properties. So the government is a function of the freedom, autonomy of individuals.

There is no polity in that vision. We in America do not have a vision of a national political community that we are citizens under government about.

We have a view of a nation which is this myth thing and it embraces.

And its signs are individual freedom, freedom of states from the federal government, freedom of the political order from foreign enemies or enemies within, which is not the military's responsibility. But there's a different way.

But what's going to have to happen, and I don't see it coming, Therefore, there will be growing difficulties for the country without having a sense that we have a political order in which, when we are in the civic arena, we put our civic hats on, which is different than putting our business hat on and lobbying government to do good for business. It's not putting our family hat on and lobbying the government to do good. Something for families.

Government has responsibility to see that those things are protected, arrested when crime is being committed, et cetera. But it's a vocation, and we should. In this sense, we need to lower this puffy idealism and raise respect and honor of the task of government.

Romans 13 is a vocation that God ordained to encourage the good, punish the evildoer.

Right?

But that's a vocation for humans. It's not something that takes precedent over all the other responsibilities God has given us.

This is where I find that some other thinkers have written that we treat our politics religiously and our religion politically. And I think what we have to rediscover. And this is what James Davison Hunter was talking about when he was on.

He basically said, you know, in many spheres, Christians have been excluded. So that's why Christians feel like the only place that they can exhibit any means of influence is through the political sphere.

And it's caused them to treat. Again, you get two different extremes, right?

You get the people who don't do anything and those who try to get politics to do everything that it needs to do. So then how do we help our people to be able to have a right view or a healthy theological view of participating within this process?

Well, that's where the understanding. I mean, some history has to be there, and it should be there even in our.

I mean, it should be there wherever Christians are gathered and being educated at home and elsewhere. But the history that is behind what you're doing is that although no church was Ever established.

What really functioned as the glue of the community were the schools of the 19th century. They were WASP structured, white, Anglo Saxon, Protestant, Duffy's Readers, McDuffie's Readers. And reading the Bible is important for the schools.

Many of the founders had a deep concern that if there's no established church, how are people going to get their ethics while the schools are going to do that and the schools are there to teach them to become good Americans. That's what it was for.

They weren't claiming to be doing church stuff, but it meant that the more and more that that ruled in the 19th century, the more without knowing it, we could see that religion and politics were connected all along because America, Americanism is a political religion. Now.

By the time you get to the end of the 19th, early 20th century, you have the churches going liberal theologically and becoming more powerful and important in shaping policy. The policies of fdr, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But going back to the social gospel of the liberal churches was itself seen America.

I mean, the Christian Century magazine began at the early part of the 20th century because this was going to be the Christian century.

The idea of even Woodrow Wilson and the country finally deciding to vote to get into World War I newspapers, Atlantic magazine, they were comparing the importance of are American soldiers going to fight to defend freedom, democracy, et cetera. They compared it with Christ going to the cross and there has to be death in order that resurrection life can come again.

And the resurrection was the renewal of political life. I mean, it's saturated. People just don't know it. It's saturated. The language of the this is public. This wasn't hidden.

So what happened was when liberal churches went liberal, the fundamentalists, evangelicals were put outside. They lost control of the churches, meaning they were not dominant in the churches, and they lost the influence in political life.

So it was not surprising that when evangelical fundamentalist churches began to grow again, when the mainline churches were declining in population and influence that some like a Jerry Falwell would begin to see, look, we really are a majority here, this moral silent majority. We really are. And what we need to do is to recover America.

Now, he was very clear in the beginning of his work to say we're not trying to establish a church. In other words, recovering America. You did establish a church. What we need to do is to recover the moral foundations of America.

So that's where Mormons and others, some Jews were drawn into it. And he named it the Moral Majority.

So in that sense, this drive to need to have influence in the, in the government is not for the sake of a public polity. It's for the sake of the nation having a better morality, which is. Wants to be recovered.

And then so family issues and others became kind of the calling cards for that.

But it's in that sense that this connection between Americanism and Christianity, Christianity now very much narrowed, very much apart from biblical meaning, I would say, sees itself as naked unless it has that glove to put on. America has to be there to guarantee religious freedom. No, the early Christians did not have a government to support them to be Christian.

The persecuted Christians throughout the world don't need the government to protect them. The government should be doing justice, which would indeed protect people in their freedom to practice their faiths, but that's a different matter.

So I think it's clear that what's happening now is that since the moral majority types or Christian nationalist types of religious right, I mean, many who call themselves Christian nationalists have no claim to Christianity even. They're just people that want to be part of this whole thing.

And just like many of the founders and others who were not, were not Christian, they were deists or something else. But heck, if you can all have a God for America, that's great in my mind. So some of that's what's going on.

And all the more we need to say, look, we are not living. The meaning of history is not the American story. The meaning of history marching on is not the story of enlightenment or intellectual progress.

It's not the progress of economic growth. Those are factors in and we've absolutized them. But none of them can serve as a true God.

So Christians ought to say, look, we live in the Christian story. We need to see ourselves totally within that story. But that story doesn't work as a whole if it only functions one day a week.

The way it has to work is you have to see all of our creaturely life, everything in God's creation as unfolding revelation of God building a community in which all will be gathered together as the saints, as the children, as the wife of God, et cetera. That's what it's headed for. Now, where in that does government fit? Well, it can fit. And then that's a whole other story.

It can fit as a proper task of humans to protect the innocent from violence, to see that there's an ordered. It's not just that to encourage the good, which means recognizing that things like families and schools and churches are not parts of government.

They have their own identity which needs to be recognized by public law and protected There's a place to have a legitimate government and to develop a Christian view of it, which is what I spent most of my life doing. So that's one thing.

But then the other thing is we can't just say, well, how do we grasp government if we don't get back to the whole meaning of the thing? Because it's going to have to do with what do you see as your business practice, your family practice, your friendship practice.

And among all it has to be seen as that which anticipates is revelatory in a way that anticipates the fulfillment of the revelation.

Otherwise, even if you want to say, I'm trying to be a Christian in my vocation, well, for most of them means organizing a Bible study at work or having a prayer group at work, well, that's not a bad thing to do. But what about the meaning of the work? What is about the meaning of the family?

Just having devotions at night, that doesn't make it a Christian family. How do you live your married life? I think we're so individualistic that I think wives pray, lord, make me a better wife.

Husbands pray, lord, make me a better husband. But they ought to be praying together, Lord, make us a better marriage. It ought to be a communal prayer. I'm just picking that out of the hat.

You could do that with many, many things, but the question at the bottom of it is why did God create us to be eating, sleeping, resting and developing our talents to the glory of God? We develop our talents for the glory of ourselves. And once that's done, there's no synthesis that's adequate with Christianity. With that.

These are so many good thoughts, Jim, that you've given us just. And I know we've only skimmed the surface of really not just your book, but your life's work. You've really touched on so many different things.

For pastors and ministry leaders that are not familiar with your work and they want to delve into it, I mean, or even encouragement thought like, first of all, where would you tell them to begin in learning more about what you've done and what God has used you to do? And then secondly, what would be an encouragement and one last water bottle that you could help lead for our audience today?

Well, I think the fundamental thing is to go looking in the scripture, read them. You're a serious Christian. You read the Bible, read the Bible from the beginning and look for all of the creaturely ways God has made us.

And he images. In other words, cut through or broaden the context of the meaning of the sin salvation story. Ask the question whenever you're reading.

Who is this savior of humans? He's the one in and through whom all things are created. Who? Who are these sinful humans?

They are created in the image of God to do all the things they were given in the beginning.

So from then on, you can't cut off the realities of the gardening, shepherding sheep, the marriage, and developing a family life, which means more and more kinds of talents. It means the development of things. Look in the scripture at that. Just keep reading to see what kind of people did God want Israel to be?

Well, everything he gave them to do and to be, including all of the laws which are the laws for prosperity and for happiness in serving God. All of that is revelatory of what the people of God should be in anticipation of the fulfillment of all things.

And if you just take it, if you just read the Bible looking for salvation, what you'll end up with is seeing Israel as just the first part of a salvation story. God saved Israel and he took them out of the land. No, he brought them forth to be renewed people.

And if you look at all the laws in Deuteronomy and elsewhere, it had to do with food. It had to do with taking your crap outside the gate.

It had to do with everything that's done among human beings, including Sabbath rest and raising children. So read it as looking at how does this illumine creation? How does it illumine the meaning of who we are as the image of God?

Then you'll begin to understand how serious our sin is, how serious our sin is that we could never recover. But then the incarnation becomes that affirmation of the meaning of creatureliness. Because it's humans that were given responsibility for the earth.

God doesn't come in and take it away from them. He comes and makes himself one with them and brings us back to the meaning of humanity forever and ever. Amen and Amen and Amen.

Where would you recommend someone wants to learn more about you and your work? Where would you recommend begin?

Well, in a pastoral realm. I know pastors are all busy and too many of them get burned out, but those of you who want to. I mean, I don't have a shortcut, unfortunately.

This book that you've just mentioned, God's Sabbath with Creation, is kind of my telling the story of creation, fall, redemption, and the meaning of many important focal points in the scripture.

As the guide to where we go, I don't have a. I'm working on a little thing trying to get something that will be more of a summary, but I'm not satisfied so far. But that's that.

If you want to understand what I've been doing in philosophy and politics, I have different lines of there, but in the political thing, the last more comprehensive thing, but it's a smaller book, is my book on the good of politics. Biblical, historical and contemporary introduction.

And so the first part is really about the biblical story to get at the root of the meaning of political life and political responsibility. The central part goes from Constantine and Augustine through the Middle Ages.

It's not a history of all that, but looking focally at how the meaning of Christianity was interpreted and followed, leading to the Reformation and beyond.

So that's that and that's a shorter book and would give you some introduction in the first part on the biblical part to what we're doing, if one wanted to brief one who was interested.

I am now working on a book that I hope will come out, will be finished enough to come out and will adequately take into account this whole American plight that we're in. Because I've worked on that in many ways.

And it's where development of some of the things I said about the civil religion that comes about of Americanism, the civil rights, Christian nationalism and as well as what we have is a rather low view of government. Government is created to serve the nation.

And I think what we're seeing now is that too many people have become convinced that government is not serving what we want. So destroy it, undermine it. And that's the heart of Trumpism, I would say. It's destruction of what exists. It's very, very dangerous.

And so anyway, I'm trying to get at that, going back to these roots, because the roots of political life and the way Christianity is integrated with go back, some of it's in the Middle Ages, some of it's with the, the rise of the state, the formation of the modern state, which is, you know, 16th, 15th, 14th, 15th, 16th centuries and then into the Reformation. And unfortunately, apart from some of the good stuff Calvin did, the Reformation was basically an argument about salvation with the Catholics.

It was focused on soteriology. And most of the Reformed confessions are soteriologically serial logical.

So in many ways, though Calvin and some others, Calvin was not a, was a trained attorney, trained law, not a pastor. So he, he had that kind of view. But anyway, it's just to say that there's a lot of roots to it.

And I, I think since people look entirely at the surface now, the media looks at the surface. What happened yesterday? What's the crisis today? Who might get elected and who's bad and who's good?

Most of the underground of that volcano, people do not understand or pay attention to. I'm trying to get at that. So if you have me on maybe next year, this time or in the.

Fall, we'll have the book.

Maybe I can tell you about that.

Well, I look forward to doing that. Jim, I want to thank you for being a guest on Ministry Deep Dive. I mean, we've dove deep today. We've covered not only your book.

We moved into the political realm, trying to help pastors and ministry leaders understand this concept of Sabbath and really the entirety of our humanity. How do we follow Jesus's or see Jesus's lordship in all of our life, and what does that mean for each one of us?

For those pastors and ministry leaders out there, I would encourage you to just go on to Amazon, just put in James W. Skillen and you'll get this book. Many others will come up as, as he mentioned, the good of politics. Jim, I do want to thank you for coming on Ministry Deep Dive. Thanks again.

It's been a joy for me. Travis, thank you very much for having me.