Pete Wehner on Pete Hegseth, Iran, and Dangerous Biblical Interpretation
Good Faith
Good Faith
4.8 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are Violent Bible Passages Being Used to Justify War?
Pete Wehner, former White House official and writer for The Atlantic, joins Curtis Chang to examine how violent Old Testament "holy war" texts are being invoked in today's political and cultural debates, including by Pete Hegseth and voices tied to the Trump administration. Pete and Curtis explore the war in Iran, Bible interpretation, the character of God, and why Christians must read troubling Bible passages through the lens of Jesus and the cross before making life-and-death moral judgments.
02:37 - Holy War Texts and Public Policy
03:37 - Pete Hegseth and the Invocation of Holy War
08:32 - The Real-World Consequences of Misreading Scripture
17:21 - Wrestling with Disturbing Texts
22:28 - The Necessity of Disturbance and Christocentric Reading
31:07 - What Is the Historical Role of Allegorical Interpretation?
35:17 - Jewish and Rabbinic Traditions of Wrestling with Text
37:21 - Tim Keller: Christ's Character as Interpretive Key
42:58 - The Importance of Literary Reasoning
46:37 - Literal but Time-Specific Commands
52:15 - A Warning Against Overconfidence
54:04 - Debating for Truth, Not Victory
56:09 - The Real-World and Personal Stakes of Biblical Interpretation
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Mentioned In This Episode:
- Pete Wehner's article Pete Hegseth's Moral Unseriousness
- Understanding Pete Hegseth's connection to Douglas Wilson: What is CREC and how does it shape Pete Hegseth's religious rhetoric?
- President George W. Bush's National Cathedral Speech
- What is the Christian Reconstructionist Movement?
- What is Just War Theory?
- Gregory A. Boyd's The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Vol. 1 & 2
- Gregory A Boyd's Cross Vision: How the Crucifixion of Jesus Makes Sense of Old Testament Violence
- Tremper Longman's The Old Testament as Literature: Foundations for Christian Interpretation
- More about C.S. Lewis & Owen Barfield
More from Pete Wehner:
- Pete Wehner's articles at The Atlantic
- Pete Wehner's opinion pieces at The New York Times
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Transcript
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| 0:46.5 | When people read some of these really striking and disturbing passages in the Hebrew scripture, |
| 0:53.5 | and people's moral intuition says is this cannot be true. |
| 0:57.4 | God is doing what you and I and every morally saying person knows is a wrong and even a wicked act. |
| 1:05.5 | And that's what the text seems to say. |
| 1:07.8 | And then if you have a certain interpretive approach of the Bible, you say, well, |
| 1:12.3 | I think this is really and truly what the Bible says. And the Bible is God's work. It's |
| 1:17.9 | inerrant without flaw. It has to be true. So then you're in a position which you say, |
| 1:23.9 | how do I swear those things? My moral intuition is screaming at me and saying, |
| 1:27.6 | this cannot be true. |
| 1:29.3 | And the other part of you is saying, |
| 1:32.1 | but it has to be true because this is what the Bible teaches. |
| 1:35.2 | And the question is, what do you do with it? Welcome to the Good Faith podcast, where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world. |
| 1:59.9 | I'm your host Curtis Chang. |
| 2:01.9 | This podcast is produced by a nonpartisan 501c3 organization. |
| 2:07.7 | How do you read the Bible? |
... |
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