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Jesus for President Politics for Ordinary Radicals

We in the church are schizophrenic: we want to be good Christians, but deep down we trust that only the power of the state and its militaries and markets can really make a difference in the world. And so we're hardly able to distinguish between what's American and what's Christian. As a result, power corrupts the church and its goals and practices. When Jesus said, "You cannot serve two masters," he meant that in serving one, you destroy your relationship to the other. Or as our brother and fellow activist Tony Campolo puts it, "Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream." As Jesus warned, what good is it to gain the whole world if we lose our soul?

So what we need is an exploration of the Bible's political imagination, a renovated Christian politics, a new set of hopes, goals, and practices. We believe the growing number of Christians who are transcending the rhetoric of lifeless presidential debates is a sign of this renovation. Amid all the buzz, we are ready to turn off our TVs, pick up our Bibles, and reimagine the world.

Over the last several years, the Christian relation to the state has become more dubious. The most prevalent example is the Christian language coming from the State Department of the United States. Professing Christians have been at the helm of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, implicitly or explicitly referencing faith in God as part of their leadership. Patriotic pastors insist that America is a Christian nation without questioning the places in distant and recent history where America has not looked like Christ. Rather than placing our hope in a transnational church that embodies God's kingdom, we assume America is God's hope for the world, even when it doesn't look like Christ. Dozens of soldiers who have contacted us confess a paralyzing identity crisis as they feel the collision of their allegiances. At the same time, many Christians are questioning whether God is blessing these wars and whether it's enough for our money to say "In God We Trust" while the daily reality of the global economy seems out of sync with God's concern for the poor.

We hope this book will broaden the definition of political. As you'll find in the following pages, political doesn't refer merely to legislation, parties, and governments. So while we will insist that the Christian faith be political, we also want to redefine what political means or looks like. We hope to redefine it simply as how we relate to the world.

This book doesn't presume to blaze new trails of scholarship. Also, readers hoping to find an exhaustive political account of every book in the Bible will feel we paint with too broad a brush. Rather, as we seek to understand Jesus, we'll attempt to distill the work of scholars and ordinary saints into an accessible read (while having a little fun along the way). The scholars we will cite have busied themselves for generations with finding the truest theological and historical nuances about Jesus. We are grateful for their work and hope to anchor it in poetry, real life, and images in a way that invites us into the story of the most creative king who ever lived.

We begin in the Hebrew Scriptures, since this is where Jesus' story begins. While we may be tempted to jump to the good news and just write about Jesus, we must hear the Story from which he came and anchor his language, politics, and actions in that world. Just as America's narrative did not begin with America and will not end with America, Jesus' story did not begin in Matthew, nor does it end in Revelation.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne Chris Haw Copyright © 2008 by The Simple Way. Excerpted by permission.
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