How Should Christians View Authority? | Jonathan Leeman

All right, welcome to another episode of the Room for Nuance podcast.

I'm Sean.

But seriously, two hours?

Two hours. I'm Sean DeMars and we're gonna go two hours, maybe longer. And Jonathan Lehman is our guest for this show. Brother, before you tell us about yourself and why we should listen to anything you have to say, you're gonna lead us in prayer.

Are you being Mark in this? Are you being the one who interrupts with sarcasm? Open us in prayer.

Let's do it. Father God, thank you for my good friend, Sean. Thank you for the salvation that we share in Christ and the gospel partnership we pursue together in different ways in different states. God, you are so good to use folk like us.

We pray that you would use even this conversation now for your glory, for the church's good. In Christ's name, amen.

Amen.

All right, brother, tell us who you are and why we should listen to you.

Jonathan Lehman, editorial director, Nine Marks. Married to Shannon, father of four daughters, three of whom are teenagers. Written a book on authority, which is what I think we're gonna talk about now.

Also an elder at Chevrolet Baptist Church.

Yeah, that's right. And you have a whole bunch of degrees, right?

Undergraduate in political science and English.

Celsius or Fahrenheit?

Yeah.

Sorry, go ahead, man.

Is it gonna stay that good?

Oh yeah, that's good.

A master's degree in political theory. Another master's or an MDiv from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and then a PhD in theology slash political theology.

Okay.

You have more degrees than hairs on your head. That's crazy. Jonathan, how do we know each other?

But not as many as you have pounds on the scale, right?

Amen?

Good try, man. That was a good try, dude. All right, yeah. What did I ask you just now? How do we know each other?

Well, you remember

I want you to tell the story of us.

You were a member of Capitol Baptist for a number of years and I first met you For one year. Yeah, okay, that long. You made a multi-year impression on me though. And then you came back as an intern.

Yeah, and I was

Is there more you're fishing for there?

No, that was good. Yeah, it was really good. Man, I just want you to give the answer you feel is most appropriate. Now, I really enjoyed my time as an intern because I tried to, as much as I could, saddle up next to you.

I learned a lot from Mark. He's a fantastic role model, following him as he follows Christ. But there's a sense in which I felt like I could, in many ways, not just learn more from you, I don't even know if more is the right word, but I felt like I could learn from you in a different way.

I remember one time talking to Mark, asking him if he had ever struggled with depression. And he said, I think I was really sad for like a week once in college.

Well, what I was gonna say is, you and I have the ability to relate together as ordinary mortals.

Yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah. But I also, from the very beginning, brother, I appreciated you as a thinker and a writer and a communicator. And I think you do something very well. And I didn't bring you on here just to flatter you.

I'm not flattering you. I think you're pretty exceptional in your ability to be like a really good down-to-earth pastor that people can relate to, while also being very intellectual, also being able to be very firm and convictional in your faith, while at the same time being irenic and friendly, even towards people who are out-and-out enemies of the gospel.

And I just watched you and I said, whatever ministry I have, I want it to have that kind of flavor, right? Because we know that different ministers and their ministries have, like MacArthur has a flavor, right?

Mark has a flavor. John Piper has a flavor. And I'm not saying I want to be 100 Jonathan Lehman, but observing you there pastorally and working for Nine Marks, I said, at least in part, I want to be able to role model my ministry after what I've seen in you, man.

I appreciate it.

Yeah.

But if your ministry had a flavor of ice cream, what flavor would it be?

Best question of the interview. We don't even have to do the rest. I can tell you this is going to be the best.

What's the ice cream?

It would be Ben and Jerry's, Americone Dream.

Americone Dream?

Americone Dream.

I don't know what that is.

It's Stephen Colbert. Listen, everything about it, part of me repulses that, right? Like Ben and Jerry's, the woke stuff, right? But listen, the beauty, the elegance is in the simplicity. Vanilla ice cream.

Okay.

Salted caramel.

Are people still listening?

Chocolate covered ice cream cones.

Oh, all right.

Yeah, I like it.

Right, just three.

That's good.

Yeah, simple ingredients.

Okay, me too. I'll say the same.

And I think that really is a perfect transition into authority.

Yeah, segue.

Don't you think?

Yeah, that's right.

From ice cream to authority. Would you say that this new book on authority, what's the subtitle again, by the way?

You're being mean now.

I want to know what the subtitle is.

The title is authority.

Okay.

The subtitle is several phrases that me and Crossway kind of bandied about trying to figure out what order they go in and what to say. Something like how godly rule protects the vulnerable.

Wow.

Builds community or something and makes society flourish or something.

And that's really good. So if you're looking for Jonathan's new book, type the word authority in Google and just pray that it comes up. You've written, basically your whole career has been writing on authority.

You're kind of the polity guy, which I appreciate. But isn't polity really just a fancy word for how authority flows down through institutions?

Yeah, polity, which refers to a form of government or governmental structures, is very much all about authority. And in many ways, my previous books, both about the church as well as about church and state, types of things all pertain or draw on this idea of authority.

So this most recent book I've done is sort of saying, okay, we're not just gonna talk about church or state, we're gonna talk about the thing itself. We're gonna talk about authority. So yeah, and it's out of my own experiences of being under good authorities.

You mentioned Mark a moment ago. I was under his authority. And in some ways still am at Capital Nine Marks. But I've had good parents, a wonderful father.

Your dad was a pastor or a music minister?

Minister of music, that's right. Wonderful mother, wonderful godly grandparents. I've had good teachers, I've had good pastors, I've had good bosses along the way. So reflecting on what they did in my life, reflecting on some of my pastoral experiences with bad authorities.

My own experience with a bad authority. I once had a terrible boss when I was in journalism. I had a terrible boss. And certainly reflecting on what scripture has to say about the topic of authority. So all of that fed into this book.

So this is like the piece de resistance. This is like, would you say this is the, what all of your career thus far has been?

Fascinating and sort of, in many ways, yeah.

That's what I said in French just now. Piece de resistance. Okay, do you see the inflection I hit on? Why now? Why this book now? So that's a good sound. Use your words, Jonathan.

Several reasons. One, because all the stuff has been in my head. The things I want to say in this book have been in my head and I've been speaking them and teaching them in different contexts. People would ask me to come and speak on this topic and I'd write stuff down and it would show up there and so forth.

And flecks of it had shown up in this article or that article or this chapter or that chapter of a book. So it was all sort of there in my head. And also I think this particular moment, it is a live and hot topic, right?

Especially coming out of the Me Too movement, looking at the Church Too movement, looking at all the charges being made about abuse of church leaders, scandals of this or that celebrity pastor, growing conversations about complementarianism and whether or not it just leads to abuse or not.

Society at large has always been skeptical of, since the fall in some ways we could say we've been skeptical of authority. In the West, since the Enlightenment. But I think in the last five to 10 years especially, there's been that growing skepticism towards authority in the church.

So when I began in the quote unquote ministry in 2004, five, six, authority was kind of popular. Complementarianism was kind of popular.

Yeah, making a comeback.

It was having a little comeback, that's right. Whereas in the mid-teens, various things going on in society at large, you don't need to go through all of them, suspicions were coming up in the church as well.

Resistance to authority.

You have all kinds of authority, right? Scientific authority, governmental authority, parental authority.

All of those things, very much questioned, but also certainly pastor and church authority. So both because all this stuff had been in my head and then also because Christians increasingly are questioning this topic.

I thought it was a good time to write about it. One last thing I would say is, there are a number of books that have come out in the last five years on authority, but they're all critical of it. About abusive pastors.

Yeah.

I'm not gonna name them here.

I will.

But all of them were aiming their guns at authority for many good reasons.

Sure.

In the same way, I wanna aim my guns at bad authority, but I also wanna talk, in some ways it's easy to talk about bad authority.

Okay.

The harder thing to do is to talk about good authority and help people understand it and train them in it. And I think there's a place for Christians to do both. We gotta talk about bad authority. Don't take your eye off of that.

The fall happened. But we also gotta talk about good authority because authority in creation is good and authority in redemption is good. So keep one eye on that as well. So what I try to do is write a book that does both.

Bad authority is bad and good authority is good and you gotta hold them together.

Do you think there's more bad authority in the church today than there is good?

I don't have surveys. I don't have statistics. I only have personal anecdotes. My personal experience, my personal experience is that most pastors is, meeting you and I were just in with some other guys, most pastors are good guys.

Most pastors I think are being faithful. But all it takes is a few bad apples to give a reputation to the whole barrel of being rotten.

Right?

And so you have 20 good churches in a town and that one church or those two churches explode with the abusive or disqualified pastor and that shows up in the newspaper and suddenly all 20 churches come under suspicion.

And I do think there's some of that. Now that's not me wanting to downplay the badness of bad pastors. We don't need to talk about that. But no, I think my anecdotal sense, and maybe you've had a different, if you're listening, maybe you've had a different experience than mine.

If you have, I'm sorry, I'd wanna hear about that. But in my own experience, most pastors are good guys.

Yeah, I think I would agree, brother. Jonathan, we're going to do something a little different for this interview, for the rest of the interview. I'm gonna let you interview me on your book. You ask me questions about authority, I'll give you the answers.

What's the subtitle?

I don't know. No, all right. So here's the way I'm, listen, your book, the problem with this interview is I just, your book's not out yet. By the time this publishes, it'll probably be out.

September 12th, 2023, Lord willing.

Lord willing, published by Crossway. Get your copies on Amazon. Get your copies on ninemarks .org.

That too.

Yeah, it was so good. You know how sometimes you read a book and you just end up like highlighting everything on the page? I think when I got through with your book, the word count for stuff I wanted to talk about was like 6 ,000 words.

So that's way too much. So I'm gonna just walk through some of the things that I found to be incredibly useful or insightful, or maybe even ask you some questions, and then just let you kind of riff on it.

You're the authority guy. You're the subject matter expert. So let's just dive right in. So you start by telling us that this book is not just for pastors. Everyone has authority, right? So here's a quote from you.

You have authority. Everyone does. Even if you're a 13 year old, you have rule over your bedroom or the thoughts inside your head. You have dominion over something, some plot of dirt, like Adam and Eve in the garden.

I thought that was really insightful, really useful. Because as I was trying to think through, how does this apply to every single person that I shepherd in the local church? It applies all the way down even to the children.

That's right.

How is it that children have authority?

Well, it's hardwired into, let me use a fancy word. It's hardwired in human ontology. When God created us in his image, he created us, this is an ontological claim.

The essence of the thing.

Yeah, that's right. The essence of what the human thing is is an authority bearer. That's what it means to be created in God's image. What does an image do? An image noun, images, verb, something, right?

So God, the creator, is also God, the ruler. So if I'm gonna mirror image God and what he is like, that means I image him as I rule. And so sure enough, Genesis 1, 28, God creates him in their image and says, rule, subdue, have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the animals, every creeping thing.

Which is to say, authority goes right to the heart of human existence. You, your wife, your two daughters, were created to rule, right? And as children, we practice at that rule in small ways. Right, when you say to your daughter, clean up your room, you're training her in exercising dominion over that little bit of space that she caused, her little garden, her little plot, right?

And as she proves faithful and responsible in that, you entrust her with more authority and more opportunity to rule over even a bigger territory, right? Oh, here's some money, you can go do this this weekend.

Here's the car.

Exactly, that's right. And so what are we all doing as human beings? We're growing up into the rule that God intends for us in creation. Now, of course, we abuse that and bring the fall, but that's

Which we're gonna get to in a second.

But we'll get to that.

You said the goal of the book is to help every husband, parent, pastor, policeman, politician, officer, and employer. Now, you left out a lot, or is that just meant to be a sample?

Yeah, that's right.

Okay, employer, understand this good and dangerous gift of authority, and then equip you to handle it with care. So it seems like, you don't use this metaphor, but this is what comes to mind, like a chef handling a really sharp knife, right?

Like to be a good cook in the kitchen, you have to use this really dangerous instrument. And actually, if it's dull, it can be more dangerous. It's a good instrument, but it's really dangerous. And you're trying to help people learn how to use it well.

Yeah, another image that comes to mind is dynamite. I mean, dynamite's used to blow up rocks and lay train tracks, right? Which is a wonderful, good thing, but dynamite's also used to blow things up that shouldn't be blown up, right?

So, and that's why I call authority a good and dangerous gift. Or here's another example, human agency, choice. Human choice, human agency is a gift God has given us, which we can use for good to bless others, or we can use for harm to hurt others.

And something else I say in the book is that our authority and our choices are almost basically one and the same thing. Your ability to choose is to say, you have authority over some place that you've been given dominion.

And in that way, Adam's bite of the apple and Pharaoh's bloodshed are the same thing, albeit one quantitatively far worse.

Yes.

And so when we say people have abused the choice that God has given me, little kids say to you, why does God let bad things happen? And you say something, oh, well, you know, people have been given choice by God and we've abused it.

Well, another way to say the same thing is to say, well, we were given authority and we abused it. Yeah.

You speak of our struggle to use authority well like this. Our profoundly pharisaical post-Christian world, which has abandoned all ideas of original sin, teaches us to think like this, which is to misuse authority.

It classifies everyone as an abuser or non-abuser, oppressor or non-oppressor. Those are the only moral categories it has left. Human beings generally have a problem with authority. Our Western problem is that we don't know what to do with it.

We hate it, but we cannot live without it. I pushed two quotes together there, but both running in the same vein. I thought that was really insightful.

I'm making a bleak reference there to things like critical race theory and so forth. I'm making a bleak reference to, let me just say critical theory in general.

Proper, and then.

I'm making reference to the categories, the moral categories that people these days, particularly on the progressive side, often use, which is they can't escape morality in general.

Yeah, even if you topple the oppressive regime, you're just gonna replace it with a new oppressive regime.

That's exactly what happens. That's exactly what happens.

But maybe this time, if we do it.

I know, they use their authority poorly, their power poorly, so give it to me,.

Because we'll be.

No, no, that's exactly what happens. And finally, it's scripture, and specifically a Lord of redemption who gives us a way out of that. For fallen creatures, we will all use our authority and power wrongly.

And so that's the very beginning of the book. I try to open up by saying, look, if you think I can just give you five tips on how to do it. Well, no, you're mistaken.

Not the right book.

No, finally, you need to be redeemed. You need to be converted. You need to understand that you are an abuser of authority and that it's only through repentance and faith and trusting in the Lordship of Christ for salvation that you will learn to use authority, even as the son of man came not to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.

On that note, I heard something you just said now, you said just now reminded me of something you said in the talk you gave to the pastors. You wanna tell us that we all misuse authority from time to time.

Maybe even abuse authority. Are we all abusers?

Yeah, I mean, I wanna be very careful about that. On the one hand, I wanna preserve a category of abuse. That is to say, let me define that as authority misused. I wanna preserve a category of abuse and oppression.

The Bible uses the word oppression, for instance. Very, very common in the prophets, for instance. As something that is terrible and exceptional, kinda, and that requires the special attention of parents and politicians and pastors, right?

We need to set our sights against that. So I wanna preserve that as its own thing. At the same time, I also want to say the seeds of that are in all of us and the potential, and even in some ways, the smaller forms of that are in all of us.

In the same way that Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, says, look, if you've even lusted, you've committed adultery. If you've even hated, you've committed a murder. I think I wanna have that same, I don't wanna say lust and adultery or hate and murder are the same thing, but in some ways, they're connected.

That's what I'm trying to say.

That may be the most helpful way I've ever heard anyone talk about that. If I don't get anything else from this interview, I'm taking that one with me.

So I mean, can I expand on that?

No, just let's move on.

Very briefly, what that means is, I don't want you sitting around like some sort of Pharisee and saying, I've never murdered, I've never been unfaithful to my wife, I've never abused authority. It's like, really?

You've lusted, you've hated, and you know what? The way you interacted with your kids just now, the way you interacted with your church members just now, it's created the same fabric. And I want you to stop being self-righteous and pharisaical and before you take the speck out of my eye, look at the plank in your own.

That's where we all need to begin this conversation.

Yeah, it's tricky because on the one hand, you do wanna acknowledge that, especially when you say like the way you talk to your kids, I hear that and I go, ooh, got me, right? Like the potential's there for me.

I know I could be abusive if it wasn't for the Lord's grace. On the other hand, we wanna preserve this category like something needs to be done about you, right? Your life in ministry is typified by this pattern.

Just like you might say ethnic hostility lives in all of us. Nevertheless, there's a big difference between someone who could have certain unconscious biases racially versus someone's life who's typified by racial animosity.

No, that's right, that's exactly right. I think when I sat down to write, I read a number of books first, right? As I said, there have been a number of books in the last five years that talk about the abuse of authority.

And many of those books say good, helpful things. I don't wanna just decry them all, but all of them basically point to this problem out there of abuse. They're looking outward and there's a place for that.

But when I began to write this book, I just thought that just seems like, that's a posture I can't adopt. I can't just adopt the posture of say, you bad abusers of authority out there if I really know my own heart.

And I think any sinner would need to approach it finally in the same way. Again, not to say there's not a place for books that just talk about this particular file in the file drawer of sins called abuse.

There's a place for that. Let's open that file, let's look at it. Yes. But I needed to do it a little differently.

Well, you even, you think about Israel, right? And the way that the Lord talks to them, they were oppressed, they were enslaved, they suffered. And then as soon as he redeems them, he's like, and you make sure that you uphold standards of justice in your own court.

You don't privilege the poor and the poor, right? Like, because what Pharaoh did to you lives in you as well.

Exactly. And as they quickly proved.

Yeah, it didn't take too long. All right, so you talk about, there are a couple of things that I, you know, listen, you read a book that's 285 pages, you're not gonna walk away with all of it, right? Hopefully you're just, it's doing a lot of shaping and contouring and it's leaving its impression whether you realize it or not.

But some concepts you are like, I got that and I'm gonna use that often. One of them was the way you talk about our orientation to authority. You say we all have three orientations. We, there's an authority above me, there's an authority beside me and an authority beneath me.

Did I say that right? If I exercise authority, I have to do it under the authority of God. But I also, as a pastor, do it with the people.

With my fellow elders.

Yeah, can you just riff on that?

Well, I think if you were to ask me to summarize in two points, what are the two most important things to take away? Well, one of those two would be all authority you exercise is under the authority of others.

All good, all good human authority is always under the authority of someone else.

Always, without exception.

Without exception.

President.

He's under the, well, in the US constitutional system, he's under the authority of the constitution, certainly in the people and their vote and other branches of government.

The Supreme Court.

Under the authority of the constitution.

Okay.

I'm running out of things to say now.

Even a king, you would say, finally is under the authority of God.

A despot?

Under the authority of God. You know, Romans 13, what does it say?

I don't know, you tell me.

You have no authority except what he's given.

That's right.

There is no authority except what God has established. And I think to be in authority, as one philosopher put it, is to be under authority. Even Jesus Christ himself, the incarnate son of God, says, I don't speak anything or do anything that the Father's not given me to speak or to do.

And even there, what you have is Christ demonstrating all authority in heaven on earth by submitting himself perfectly to the Father's authority in heaven, right? And how does that work? Well, to step in and to image God, we need to mimic God, image God perfectly by obeying his law.

And as I obey his law, I do what he does. I demonstrate justice, righteousness, love, goodness, as God does. And insofar as I do that, I am ruling under God, but I am also ruling with God because I'm doing what he does.

I'm mimicking him, right? And so there's a sense in which authority and submission are kind of two sides of a coin, very much. To be in submission is to participate in that authority and vice versa. And so you think of Israel and what God says to Israel and its kings, it says, read the book of the law all the days of your life so that you would not rise up above your brothers, is Deuteronomy 17.

Even write a copy of it yourself.

Write a copy, exactly, so you're doing it and you're under it. So again, if you get nothing out of the book, what would be the two most urgent things I'd want you to take away? One of it, one of them is to be in authority, is to be under authority.

And so if you're a pastor, a father, a husband, a workplace manager, I want that reflected. That should show itself in your life in various ways, various concrete ways you demonstrate that.

Yeah, that's good, brother. Is authority avoidable? Like, is anarchy a real thing? Can we ever truly just throw off the chains of authority?

I don't think so, no. Animals can, I suppose. But to be created in God's image.

Yeah, and then they're probably bound by their own impulses.

They're bound by their natures, but I don't know that there's any exercise of authority between animals, maybe with, you know, like a

Like a ape or

Lions in a pride or something. But no, to be in God's image means it's inevitable. It's hardwired, as I said, I went back to the, I used that word ontology. The essence of what it means to be human is to be made to rule.

And so wherever there's a vacuum of authority, people will step in. Someone else will step in and fill it. So anarchy is going to be brief and temporary until a more powerful despot steps in. It is inevitable.

In your book, you talk about how even people who don't like authority, they end up turning to some form of authority to get rid of the authority that I think has gone bad or corrupt.

Well, what do you do when you see child abuse? You call CPS, right? What did the minorities do in the South when their city, local, state governments were corrupt and abusive and racist? Well, they contacted federal authorities, which is to say the solution to bad authority is never no authority, it's always good authority.

That's what we all have a hope for. That's what we all have a longing for. We have a hope and a longing for good parents, good pastors, good coaches, good teachers, good policemen, good governors, right?

And when we see that, do we not rejoice? Do we love it?

Yeah.

Because good authority is life-giving. It creates it, authors. And it's a joy to behold.

You want to read the second Samuel scripture?

Yeah, sure. Sean and I have heard many times the pastor we both shared allude to this text, and it's something I allude to multiple times in the book. In 2 Samuel 23, verse one sets it up as these are the last words of David.

Which is significant.

Yeah.

The last thing the king of Israel has to say to his people before he goes to be with authority.

And David knows a little something about authority.

A little bit.

Well used, poorly used. He says in verse 3b, when one rules justly over men, ruling in the fear of God, he dawns on them like the morning light, like the sun shining forth on a cloud this morning, like rain that makes grass sprout from the earth.

So just think about that. Okay, so you got this guy ruling justly. What does that mean? Well, it means ruling in the fear of God. Okay, what does that look like? Well, it's like morning light, sun shining, grass, I'm sorry, rain coming.

And what does all that do? It makes grass sprout from the earth. Which is to say, good authority is like the sun and the rain giving life, growing grass, creating vibrant colors, empowering, life-giving, beautiful.

And authority in creation and authority in redemption are like that.

Which we're gonna get to, we're gonna go through, yeah, your system there, because it's really helpful. It's pretty amazing if you haven't, so I grew up with a father who was absent, I never met a mom who was horrendously abusive.

And then most

When did your book come out?

Mid-March, thanks, that worked out just like we planned it.