A Roman denarius is small and silver and warm from someone's pocket, and stamped on it is the face of Tiberius with an inscription calling him the son of the divine Augustus and the greatest high priest of the world. In Mark's Gospel, religious leaders and political operatives who ordinarily can't stand each other come together for one afternoon with a single goal: to destroy a carpenter's son with a question about taxes. Say yes and you've sold out your people to the occupying army. Say no, and there's a Roman soldier close enough to hear you. And Jesus says, bring me a coin, whose image is this?

In this episode, Graham explores church and state, political loyalty, and how Christians can be good citizens without handing their souls to a party, a president, or a flag, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the biblical argument from Israel demanding a king in 1 Samuel and the limits Deuteronomy placed on royal power, to Daniel serving an empire while refusing to bow and Jeremiah telling exiles to seek the good of Babylon, to Romans 13 and Revelation 13 sitting side by side with the state as God's servant and the state as a beast, to Jesus standing before Pilate and telling a governor where his authority came from. He engages with voices like Augustine, Thomas Helwys, Abraham Kuyper, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther King Jr., alongside the research of Lilliana Mason on political identity, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry on Christian nationalism, and Robert Putnam on the hollowing out of civic life. He draws examples from Rome and Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa and the black church in the United States, Leipzig in 1989 and Manila in 1986, and from Nigeria, India, China, Brazil, Britain, and Australia today. And he asks what Caesar can rightly claim from us, where those claims stop, and what it costs a church when politics stops being a subject and starts being a religion.

Book recommendations: "A Public Faith" by Miroslav Volf, "Resident Aliens" by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, "Mission Between the Times" by C. René Padilla, and "Kingdom or Empire?" by Graham Joseph Hill.

See my Substack: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

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