Pastor Politics
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Hebrews 11 and the Proof Text Problem

Chris Oswald · October 26, 2026

The question

I have heard Hebrews 11 used to discourage political activism. I have heard it used against Kuyperianism, against postmillennialism, and against nearly everything Moscow-adjacent. The argument usually leans on two phrases: the saints “acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (11:13), and “here we have no lasting city” (13:14). If we are pilgrims, the reasoning goes, we should travel light and leave the governing to others.

Is that a proper use of these texts?

To be sure, the book is full of heavy texts and they are a little like the grain barges on the Missouri River of my youth. Those barges carried enormous loads, but they had to be piloted skillfully or anchored properly. A big barge that broke loose did real damage downstream.

Context is the anchor

D. A. Carson is fond of an old saying: a text without a context is a pretext for a proof text. Context is what keeps the barge tied to the bank. Cut the line, and the same heavy text that should steady the church starts drifting into whatever argument is nearest.

It takes about two seconds to see that Hebrews 11 is not directly about politics. It is about faith that endures, written to believers tempted to go back to something else.

It takes about thirty seconds more to notice who is on the roll. Many of them were wealthy. Many of them held some kind of governing role.

The roll of Hebrews 11

  • Noah (v. 7). The head of the human order after the flood, to whom God gave the mandate of capital justice (Gen 9:5–6).
  • Abraham (vv. 8–19). “Very rich in livestock, in silver, and in gold” (Gen 13:2). He led 318 trained men against four kings (Gen 14:14–16), swore a treaty with Abimelech (Gen 21:22–32), and was called “a prince of God” by the Hittites (Gen 23:6).
  • Isaac (v. 20). He “became very wealthy” (Gen 26:13) and made a covenant with Abimelech and his army commander (Gen 26:26–31).
  • Jacob (v. 21). He grew rich in flocks and servants (Gen 30:43) and blessed Pharaoh (Gen 47:7).
  • Joseph (v. 22). Second only to Pharaoh, set over all the land of Egypt (Gen 41:40–43).
  • Moses (vv. 23–29). Raised in Pharaoh’s house and “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22). He led Israel and gave its law.
  • Rahab (v. 31). Her act of faith was a political one: she sheltered the spies of an invading nation and changed sides (Josh 2).
  • Gideon (v. 32). He judged and delivered Israel, and declined the crown when it was offered (Judg 8:22–23).
  • Barak (v. 32). He commanded Israel’s army under Deborah (Judg 4).
  • Samson (v. 32). He judged Israel twenty years (Judg 16:31).
  • Jephthah (v. 32). The elders of Gilead made him “head and leader over them” (Judg 11:11).
  • David (v. 32). King of Israel.
  • Samuel (v. 32). He judged Israel all his life on a yearly circuit (1 Sam 7:15–17) and anointed two kings.
  • Those who “stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire” (vv. 33–34). Daniel and his three friends, all senior officials in Babylon (Dan 2:48–49; 6:1–3).

Verse 33 sums up the group: through faith they “conquered kingdoms, enforced justice.” Abel, Enoch and Sarah are the main exceptions.

The same pattern in church history

That is, frankly, consistent with church history.

  • Ambrose of Milan (d. 397). He was the Roman governor at Milan when the city acclaimed him bishop in 374. Later he barred Emperor Theodosius from communion until he repented of the massacre at Thessalonica.
  • Alfred the Great (d. 899). King of Wessex, who opened his law code with the Ten Commandments and selections from the law of Moses.
  • Martin Luther (d. 1546). He appealed to the German nobility to reform the church (1520), answered the emperor at the Diet of Worms (1521), and wrote on the limits of civil authority (1523).
  • John Calvin (d. 1564). Trained in law at Orléans and Bourges. He drafted Geneva’s church ordinances and helped draft its civil edicts.
  • Samuel Rutherford (d. 1661). He wrote Lex, Rex (1644) on the limits of royal power and served as a Scottish commissioner to the Westminster Assembly.
  • John Owen (d. 1683). Chaplain to Cromwell, preacher to Parliament the day after Charles I’s execution, and vice-chancellor of Oxford. He also wrote the major Puritan commentary on Hebrews, which we will come back to.
  • John Witherspoon (d. 1794). Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey. He sat in the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence.
  • John Newton (d. 1807). Former slave-ship captain turned Anglican pastor. He gave evidence to Parliament against the slave trade, and he urged the young Wilberforce to stay in politics rather than leave it for the ministry.
  • William Wilberforce (d. 1833). Member of Parliament for 45 years. He led the campaign that ended the British slave trade in 1807.
  • Lord Shaftesbury (d. 1885). Evangelical member of Parliament and peer who drove the factory reforms that limited child labor and working hours.
  • Charles Spurgeon (d. 1892). He denounced American slavery from the pulpit and in print, and in 1860 Southern towns burned his sermons. He addressed voters for the Liberals in 1880, campaigned for disestablishment, and broke with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule in 1886. Yet he warned that a pulpit turned political loses its strength.
  • Abraham Kuyper (d. 1920). Pastor and theologian who founded the Free University of Amsterdam and served as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905.

A note before the question

Before going on to the question at hand, both lists make one thing plain. Involvement in the political realm does not ipso facto make a believer “less effective for the gospel.” Hebrews itself counts just rule among the works of faith (11:33).

A light pole on a straight road

Any use of Hebrews 11 to encourage political quietism simply fails the context test. That part is not complicated.

What is harder to explain is who sometimes fails it. Men who are normally sober-minded with God’s word have occasionally veered into misusing this text.

Picture a driver with a long and well-earned reputation for Hank Hill driving, his hands planted firmly at 10 and 2. One bright and clear afternoon he hits a light pole on a straight road. Leaving everybody to wonder what happened.

That is my question here. I have seen men with a firm and well-deserved reputation for careful handling of Scripture grab this passage and wave it around as a “stop being so political, guys” banner. And I can't help but wonder what is going on.

Back to the text

What is the occasion of the book of Hebrews? What is the pervasive theme, the context to which this mighty barge in chapter 11 ought to be anchored?

I would put it this way. Hebrews is a sermon sent as a letter, urging beleaguered new-covenant believers to hold fast to the gospel rather than drift back into shadowy realm of a covenant God has formally set aside. The primary rhetorical approach in the sermon involves utilizing Old Testament imagery that highlights God's progressive purposes and the cost of doubting his great and precious promises.

The evidence runs through the whole book. The readers have already suffered public reproach and the plundering of their property (10:32–34). Every major section argues that Christ is better: better than the angels, Moses, Aaron, the first covenant and its sacrifices. And the warning passages all press the same point: do not drift, do not harden, do not shrink back (2:1–4; 3:7–4:13; 6:4–8; 10:26–39; 12:25–29). John Owen located their temptation precisely: it came from “the Judaical church-state and Mosaical ordinances of worship.”

Owen’s introduction to the letter goes further. In his essay on its time and occasion, he places it a few years before Rome destroyed Jerusalem. Judea was coming apart, its governors “rather mighty robbers amongst them than rulers.” The believing Hebrews still kept the whole Mosaic worship of temple and synagogue.

They had been warned to flee Jerusalem before the end came. What grieved them most, Owen says, was not the loss of their possessions but giving up the worship they loved. Some chose to stay and perish with their unbelieving countrymen rather than leave it.

So, in Owen’s reading, Hebrews strikes “at the very root” of their danger. It shows them the nature, use, end and expiration of the Mosaic ordinances. The city they were tempted to cling to was the old-covenant city, and it was about to fall.

A worked example: tasting the fruit

I believe the key to most of the hard texts in Hebrews is its use of Old Testament language and imagery. Take the “tasting” of Hebrews 6. Those who fall away have “tasted the heavenly gift,” shared in the Holy Spirit, and “tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come” (6:4–5). I would locate that tasting in the story of the twelve spies.

The author has already built two chapters on that story. Hebrews 3–4 turns on Psalm 95 and the generation “whose bodies fell in the wilderness” because they would not enter (3:17–19). At Kadesh, the spies were sent “in the season of the first ripe grapes” (Num 13:20). The Hebrew word there is the word for firstfruits. They carried back a cluster from Eshcol, with pomegranates and figs, and said, “This is its fruit” (13:23–27). They tasted the land and refused to enter it.

The next morning they changed their minds: “We have sinned,” they said, and tried to go up. It was too late, and they were routed (14:39–45). That is the shape of Hebrews 6:6, where it is “impossible to restore them again to repentance.” Two verses later the author is still talking about land: ground that drinks the rain and bears either crops or thorns (6:7–8).

So my argument is this. The Spirit is the firstfruits of the eternal inheritance (Rom 8:23; Eph 1:13–14), and “the powers of the age to come” are a foretaste of that age. To taste and turn back is to repeat Kadesh: to hold the fruit of the promised land in your hands and still refuse to go in.

Owen does not make the spies connection, but he supports the substance. Tasting, he says, means making a trial of something without eating and digesting it. The heavenly gift is the Holy Spirit in the gospel. The powers of the age to come belong to the days of the Messiah. And his verdict on such people could be a caption for Numbers 14: they “had a mind to leave the finest wheat for their old acorns.”

Agree or not, it is anchored

You may not agree with that reading. Fair enough. But notice what kind of disagreement it would be. It is an argument about which Old Testament story the author has in mind, conducted inside the book’s own imagery and its own argument.

That is the point. Whatever its weaknesses, the spies reading is far better footed than any suggestion that Hebrews 11 is about politics.

The crescendo

When it is anchored properly to its context, Hebrews 11 is the crescendo of the same pattern the whole epistle has been sounding. Christ is better. Do not go back. Faith endures what it cannot yet see.

Chapter 11 gives that pattern faces. The patriarchs “would have had opportunity to return” to the country they left, and they did not (11:15). That is the readers’ temptation exactly, and the saints of chapter 11 are the ones who refused it.

Owen reads it the same way, and he connects the pieces in three links.

  1. The old-covenant city they were tempted to keep. On 13:13, Owen says “the camp,” and later Jerusalem, was the seat of Israel’s whole political and religious life. Going “outside the camp” means leaving that old-covenant order for Christ.
  2. The promise that was not Canaan. On 11:13, Owen denies that the unreceived promise was the land. Samuel and David held Canaan at its height and still “did not receive what was promised” (11:39). The promise was Christ himself, with all the privileges of the new covenant.
  3. The city still to come. The “better country” is the heavenly city God has prepared (11:16). Believers have already come to it by faith (12:22), and they will one day see it.

Two more of Owen’s comments close the door on quietism. On 13:14 he refuses to say believers belong to no earthly city at all; Paul, after all, was “a citizen of no mean city.” What Christians lack is a city that serves as the seat of worship, as Jerusalem did. And on 11:33 he reads “enforced justice” as righteousness in rule and government, a fruit of faith in rulers and judges. The want of faith, he says, is the cause of all the injustice and oppression in the world.

Owen wrote those lines after the Restoration, as a dissenter shut out of public life. He had been Cromwell’s chaplain and Oxford’s vice-chancellor. He knew both conditions, and he did not read Hebrews 11 as a call to leave the field.

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