Writing is the easiest thing to summarise, because I hope this summer will see me complete the draft for a new book on happiness, provisionally entitled Enjoy and published by Crossway. I have always loved teaching on joy, and in this book I am looking at the subject using six questions: why we can be joyful, what happiness is, who we are, when happiness comes, where it lives, and how we can pursue it. After finishing that, my next project might well be a popular commentary on Deuteronomy (in the same series as my 1 Corinthians For You), but we shall have to see. I’ve also got a book proposal on 1968 percolating, but that really is gazing into the crystal ball.

As for reading, I expect I will spend at least half the year in Christopher Ash’s Psalms: A Christ-Centred Commentary, which I have just begun, taking a Psalm a day in my devotional times. Other devotional reads I can see coming are Brevard Childs on Isaiah, the second half of Michael Morales’s new Numbers commentary, and Simon Gathercole’s The Pre-existent Son. (Gathercole is a brilliant scholar whose books have wonderfully devotional application, so I’m really looking forward to this one.) I don’t plan my history or fiction reads that far ahead, but three books I have bought and can’t wait to get into are Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost, Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendour: Vienna 1888-1889 and Tania Brannigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution.

My schedule for preaching and teaching is clearer. As a local church we will be doing a series called Technology: What We Make of the World, then a series on the cross from Romans, and then an expository series from Daniel after Easter. The THINK conference will be on Isaiah in July (I can’t wait), so the major prophets will be quite a theme this year. I’m also really looking forward to speaking at The Gospel Coalition’s conference in Indianapolis in April - I’ve been given Ephesians 4:1-16, which is pretty great! - and visiting my friend Simon Murphy and Redemption Hill Church in Singapore for a week in February, to speak on all sorts of different things. The second half of the year will be quieter on the travel front, but the Newfrontiers Global conference in October is always a highlight, and I’m also hoping to be at Christ Central’s Devoted event at the end of August.

Of course, many of the most exciting and uplifting things that happen in a year are unplanned (as indeed are the challenges and tragedies). So this is certainly not a summary of the year to come, or a prediction of what the most important things in 2025 will be. But for those who are interested it will give you an idea of what I’m hoping to get up to. Happy New Year.

If pushed for an answer I would probably settle on South Africa, specifically the Cape. The combination of beautiful beaches, soaring mountains, rolling vineyards, extraordinary flora and sun, sun, sun, make the Cape hard to beat. That South Africa is ‘a world in one country’ is a cliched advertising line, but it is true that it is a place into which so many of the world’s beauties have been squeezed in concentrated form. I have been travelling to South Africa more or less regularly for the past 36 years and I love it. The beauty astonishes me.

Yet part of what makes this beauty stand out in such sharp resolution is the profound brokenness that runs alongside and through it. This is made stark when flying into Cape Town: there is Table Mountain in all its majesty, the incredible Cape Peninsula stretching out to form the meeting point of Indian and Atlantic oceans, and the promise of so much that is glorious. But there too, right by the road that leads from the airport into the city, are mile upon mile of shacks, constructed from pieces of corrugated iron and bits of plastic. The poverty, levels of unemployment, and harshness of conditions are staggering.

In this beauty and brokenness South Africa offers a microcosm of the world, and of the human condition. There is so much that is beautiful. And there is so much that is broken. This is the case in the particularity of our own lives as well as at a global scale. Just today I have been a recipient of beauty: good food on my plate, the wind stirring up the waves at the beach, my wife. There has been brokenness too: the trail of litter along the street from the takeaway stores, neglected gardens, ugly things I can detect in my own heart.

Different lives have different measures of beauty and brokenness poured into them: some people live in Constantia while others live in Khayelitsha. But beauty and brokenness are the warp and weft of every life. No situation is so broken that a glimpse of beauty, like a blade of grass pushing through tarmac, can’t be seen. And even the most beautiful life will be shadowed by what is broken. This is the human condition.

It is into this condition that the message of Christmas speaks. The coming of the Messiah carries with it the promise of beauty even in the midst of brokenness. The nativity story shows us this contrast. We see the brokenness in a pregnant young woman being unable to find a place to rest and the horror of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents. We see the beauty in the gifts of the magi, in the angels, and in the face of the baby.

For so many that is as far as the Christmas story goes. We must go further. We need to see how our desire for beauty and lament for the broken can only be answered by that baby. Erik Varden writes that, ‘Our most intimate desires carry messages from afar. They make us homesick for a land we have not yet discovered.’ Even the most beautiful things this world can offer don’t answer the longing of our hearts. We remain homesick still.

The only sure answer to that homesickness is found in the manger. ‘The gospel does not obliterate our longing. It validates it, assuring us that what we long for is real and substantial…. ‘the One the nations wait for’.’ He is the One who brings a promise of all brokenness healed and unimaginable beauty experienced. He is the One who promises to fulfil our longings. It is only in Him that we can find our way home.

Merry Christmas!

Knock yourself out.

History and Philosophy Books (To Make You Think)
Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist. Another man whose life spans and parallels the twentieth century, and provides striking insights into it.
Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution. The moral and cultural implosion of Mao’s China, narrated with remarkable clarity and power.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things II. Every bit as good as volume one, which was my book of the year in 2023.
Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Book of the Year
Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World. Any guesses as to the book project I’m thinking about?

Exciting and Absorbing Books (To Read at Night or on Holiday)
Katherine Rundell, Rooftoppers. I think this book might have been meant for children, but it’s wonderful. What a writer.
Rory Carroll, Killing Thatcher. A taut and gripping account of the IRA plot to kill Margaret Thatcher and the manhunt that followed.
Tracy Sierra, Night Watching. “There was someone in the house”: the tension starts in the opening sentence and does not relent until the final page.
Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am. Ten short stories based on the ten times Maggie O’Farrell nearly died. Thoroughly absorbing.
Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz. A clever detective story set in a fascinating alternative history of midcentury America.

Christian Books (To Help You Live Well)
Kevin DeYoung, Impossible Christianity. Why the Christian life can be lived faithfully and wisely despite all appearances, actually.
Christopher Wright, Hearing the Message of Ecclesiastes. A penetrating study of one of Scripture’s most thought-provoking and challenging books.
Rachel Gilson, Parenting Without Panic. How to raise loving and brave children in a world where LGBTQ+ questions press upon us from all sides.
Gavin Ortlund, What It Means To Be Protestant. A wonderful defence of Protestant thought and practice in dialogue with Orthodox and Catholic positions.
Kevin Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics. KJV brings his A-game to an often convoluted subject and brings his customary clarity with him.

Christian Books (To Fuel Your Joy)
Jeremy Writebol, Pastor: Jesus is Enough. A warm and uplifting exposition of the seven letters in Revelation, aimed at pastors but relevant for everyone.
John Oswalt, Isaiah 40-66. Magnificent insights on one of Scripture’s greatest books (and the topic for next year’s THINK conference!)
Julian Hardyman, Jesus, Lover Of My Soul. A beautiful exposition of the Song of Songs that is nearly as passionate and unashamed as the original.
Sam Allberry, One With My Lord. Probably the best (and simplest) book I have ever read on union with Christ. Rachel and I fought over it on holiday.
Michael Morales, Numbers 1-19. A marvellous and substantial commentary on a book that lots of us struggle to understand, let alone revel in.

Happy Advent!

A big part of that answer includes the Psalter, the prayers of God’s people. In the case of poems like Ps. 23, Christian appropriation is fairly straightforward. But what of the so-called imprecatory Psalms, where the Psalmists invoke curses and judgment on their enemies? For example, consider the final six verses of Ps. 139:

[19] Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!
O men of blood, depart from me!
[20] They speak against you with malicious intent;
your enemies take your name in vain.
[21] Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
[22] I hate them with complete hatred;
I count them my enemies.
[23] Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
[24] And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting! (ESV)

May Christians pray such passages today? Could you, in the scenario above, use such a Psalm to vent your rage at the injustice of evil? We commonly read or hear that Christians should not. For example, Bruce Waltke argues that the imprecatory Psalms are “inappropriate for the church” because “ultimate justice occurs in the eschaton” and we should be more focused on forgiving than condemning.¹ This approach has become attractive to modern evangelicals, finding endorsements in popular-level works such as Ian Vaillancourt’s recent Treasuring the Psalms—overall, an excellent resource. The problem is that Waltke’s view has hermeneutical, historical, and theological problems. And the stakes are not small: while in the West, the Christian response to persecution is often a theoretical exercise, in other parts of the world it is viscerally practical.

In what follows, I would like to give some historical and theological context to imprecations and malediction as a form of speech, address some hermeneutical inconsistencies applied to these texts, and then make the case for Christian appropriation of these Psalms. The persecuted church needs all the help she can get in the face of violent evil, and the imprecatory Psalms are a gift to her from our Heavenly Father.

Putting Imprecations in Context

The imprecatory Psalms (those that invoke curses, calamity, or judgment) are often directly or indirectly tied to what may be called the “retribution principle”: those who are righteous should flourish, and those who are wicked should suffer, both in proportion to their virtue or vice.² Thus, the imprecations are, in one sense, prayers for the enforcement of the retribution principle: may the wicked get their just desserts. This was, however, not a distinctively Israelite impulse—the principle can be found throughout the literature of the Ancient Near East (ANE) and within the Mesopotamian religions, in particular. However, non-Israelite religious systems did not depend on the justice of the gods (for the gods could be wicked) but on mutual incentives: gods and people needed one another.³ Life outcomes were determined by one’s pleasing or offending of the gods, knowingly or not.⁴ In contrast, the Israelites believed God to be utterly just and without wants. It is his holiness, rather than his neediness, that informs the Biblical idea of retribution.

In another sense, imprecations are curses. Curses of many kinds can be found throughout ANE literature, nearly always invoking deities: “execration texts” that name specific enemies to be destroyed, treaty texts that specify punishments of disobedient vassals, and so on.⁵ However, where ANE curses (and blessings) were often understood to be magical formulas, Israelite versions of both were better understood as prayers to God in which the power resides in him and not the words themselves.⁶

We moderns are quite unaccustomed to imprecations and curses, though in that sense we are certainly a minority across human history. It has been observed that “malediction [the use of curses] was a speech-form in the ancient world . . . and a widespread phenomenon.”⁷ We can go further and suggest that malediction has likely been a part of social discourse universally until the modern world. As it existed throughout the ANE, so it also exists within the Hebrew OT and the Greek NT, which will be seen below. From councils of the early church, which addressed heretics with the biblical term anathema, to the fiery polemics of the Reformation, church history has been no stranger to curses. Modern aversion to this form of speech may have more to do with what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery” than with Christian piety.

A Biblical Theology of Imprecations

Of the sixty laments in the Psalter, nearly all mention an enemy.⁸ Not only that, but a rich vocabulary—94 different words!—is used to describe them. “In fact, hatred, enmity, violence, retaliation, and even revenge are not sub-motifs in the psalter: they are substantive parts of it.”⁹ Though the Psalter is generally considered a book of praises, the enemies in the life of God’s people take an outsized role. The Psalmists do not merely lament over bad things; they cry out against bad people. Justice must be served.

An attentive Bible reader will readily note that justice is hardly a peripheral idea within the OT writings; justice and righteousness were central to the Israelite religion.¹⁰ Furthermore, they serve as the basis for scriptural judgment and imprecations: justice must be served because God is just. He is also coherent and unchanging—his attributes are not at odds with one another or expressions of various moods. In Jer. 9:24, God says, “I am Yahweh, showing steadfast love, justice and righteousness on the earth.” This view of God is at the heart of Ps. 139 and all other prayers like it: for the wicked to receive less than they deserve would compound the injustice and call into question the goodness, righteousness, and even love of God.

Outside of the Psalms and wisdom literature, imprecations are found in three OT contexts: sanctions for covenantal disobedience, prophetic judgments, and oath-taking.¹¹ The Mosaic law used curses as a warning against disobedience, which are detailed in Lev. 26 and Deut. 28-32. Doug Stuart identifies twenty-seven types of curses found in those passages that will come upon the Israelites if they violate the covenant but consolidates them with six terms: “defeat, disease, desolation, deprivation, deportation, and death.”¹² Throughout the Torah, those things and people that are meant to be “devoted to destruction” (e.g., the Canaanites in Deut. 20:16ff.) are often translated by the Septuagint as anathema, “cursed things.” This informs the context of Paul’s NT use of the word, to which we will return.

In the prophets, imprecations may be made against the nations, the wicked, and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, but it is always on account of disobedience before God, not because of personal injury experienced by the prophet. In the case of Israel and Judah, the breaking of the covenant is generally the basis for the curse. For example, Jeremiah 11:3 says, “You shall say to them, Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel: Cursed be the man who does not hear the words of this covenant.” But even Gentile nations are guilty of disobeying God. Jeremiah 10:25 contains an imprecation on nations that do not know God because they have oppressed God’s people. Isaiah 13-23 includes a series of oracles against the nations, which is justified in 24:5: “The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.” Therefore, Israel may enjoy a special status within its covenant with God, but all of creation bears the responsibility of obedience to God, even if some are unaware of their obligation.

But what about the NT? It is not as different a picture as some might assume. Jesus himself issues a curse on a fig tree in Mk. 11:12-14 and Mt. 21:18-22. I share the view of many others that the fig tree represents Jerusalem and the religious establishment, which suggests that the curse is not merely for the tree. Fruitlessness and spiritual barrenness are the result of covenantal disobedience and thus become the subject of Christ’s malediction: “And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness’” (Matt. 7:23).

Twice, the apostle Paul issues curses. In 1 Cor. 16:22, he writes, “If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed.” And in Gal. 1:8-9 he states twice that anyone who preaches a different gospel, even an angel (!), is accursed. Both passages use the word anathema. As the Septuagint used this word to discourage disobedience, so Paul uses it in the same way. In 1 Cor. 16, he discourages the ultimate disobedience within the Christian community, that is, a failure to love the Lord.¹³ In Gal. 1, he is discouraging false teaching, which is a failure to love the brethren. Thus, malediction, in the form of imprecations and curses, is used to serve the NT church.

Perhaps OT imprecations find their greatest NT parallel in Rev. 6:10, where the martyrs in heaven pray to God, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” Two things are to be noted here. First, vengeance is assumed to be good. (This accords with Rom. 12:19 and Heb. 10:30, both of which present a positive view of God’s vengeance.) Second is that the martyrs do not merely desire vengeance but are actively interceding with God about it. Thus, Scripture demonstrates that God’s people make imprecatory prayers on earth and in heaven.

This is not to say there is only continuity between the Testaments regarding imprecations, curses, and vengeance. For example, hatred (of which we read in Ps. 139) is more nuanced in the NT perspective than the OT. But here, again, the discontinuity is not as great as some would assume. The prohibition of hatred seems to stem from Matt. 5:43-44, where Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Interpretive challenges abound here (to say nothing of those presented by the entire Sermon on the Mount). Namely, the referent of this antithesis is only partially found in the OT scripture—there is no text commanding the hatred of enemies. More to the point is the semantic challenge: what is meant by love and hate (Greek: miseō)? Some lexicons unhelpfully suggest that miseō always refers to the interior, emotional posture of the believer.¹⁴ It is more likely, however, that Jesus is speaking here of actions (which accords with the themes throughout the rest of the Sermon). Luke 6:27 bears this out, where Jesus says, “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.” In this context, the opposite of hate is a love that does good rather than a love that feels good.

A further demonstration of Jesus’ figurative use of hate is in Luke 14:26, where Jesus says anyone who follows him must first hate his family and even his own life. Clearly, the hyperbolic use of hatred in this case is meant to establish the priorities of allegiances within the life of the believer. The use of miseō in Rev. 2:6 is also relevant, where the church is commended for sharing God’s hatred of the works of the Nicolaitans.¹⁵

Thus, when reading passages like Ps. 139, Christians should not be too quick to assume that the NT prohibits hatred in every sense. Though Christians are given a new vernacular and a new way of relating to enemies in the teaching and example of Christ, they may surely join the martyrs in heaven who pray for vengeance against their enemies, and they may feel the disgust of God toward wickedness and sin. Let us return, now, to the hermeneutical problems that have plagued Christian interpretation of these Psalms.

Hermeneutical Issues

The reticence to use the imprecatory Psalms today stems from at least two problems in modern evangelical interpretation. First, there is an emphasis on the royal or kingly nature of these Psalms that is rightly stated but perhaps over-applied. For example, because most of the imprecatory Psalms were written (or associated with) King David, the enemies in view are not merely personal enemies; they are the nation’s adversaries. In a theocracy, that makes them the de facto enemies of God.¹⁶ We must, so we are told, hear them how ancient Israelites would have heard them. In the conclusion of his chapter on the royal orientation of the Psalms, Bruce Waltke states: “It is the king who is in view throughout the Psalter. It is abundantly evident that the subject of the Psalms is not the common man.”¹⁷ Fair enough, but how would the common man have heard them? What would he have done with them? Would a family in the temple, singing the songs of their king, not be shaped by these Psalms? Indeed, would King David have been unaware that, in teaching the people to sing about his own enemies, he was also instructing them in how to sing of theirs? Furthermore, how far do we extend this kind of reasoning? Should Christians apply a different hermeneutic to the application of first 18 verses of Psalm 139 (some of the most beautiful poetry in the Psalter) than the final six? Is Psalm 23 a reflection of how God cares for the king alone? Surely not! Overapplying the royal aspect of the Psalms, even Christologically, ultimately leads to a neutering of the Psalter for the believer: everything they express is reserved for the king (or Christ), and nothing is available for the church.

This touches on the second problem with the modern interpretation of the imprecatory Psalms: an inconsistent application of the NT to the OT interpretation. Waltke believes the imprecatory Psalms are inappropriate for the church (see above), and notes that “the saint’s struggle is against spiritual powers of darkness. He conquers by turning the other cheek and praying for the forgiveness of enemies.”¹⁸ But what keeps us from applying this kind of logic to other types of Psalms, such as the laments? For we are also told in the NT that our afflictions are “light and momentary” (2 Cor 4:17); Jesus told us when persecuted that we should “rejoice and be glad” (Matt. 5:12); Peter tells us that suffering is not something to be concerned about, but to “rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ’s sufferings” (1 Peter 4:12-14); Paul and James both command the church to rejoice in suffering (Rom. 5:3, Jam. 1:2). We could go on. It seems that the NT is applied inconsistently to the expression of emotion in the OT and in the Psalms in particular. For example, Vaillancourt endorses Waltke’s view of the imprecatory Psalms but critiques the lack of lament in the church, arguing that “to sing and pray our tears is an essential part of Christian life.”¹⁹ Why should we so heavily “re-format” our anger while baptizing our grief? Can we not sing and pray the full range of our emotions in the New Covenant?

The Case for Christian Imprecations

It is my view that Christians not only can but should pray and/or sing the imprecatory Psalms, especially since there is no clear NT teaching they shouldn’t (I will address Rom. 12:14 below). However, the teaching of the NT regarding anger and vengeance (and grief as well) is nuanced. Therefore, three things are necessary for the church to use these Psalms.

First, Christians need a more honest vocabulary for anger and hatred. If Jesus can stretch the semantic range of miseō (hate) to describe the distance between allegiance to God and allegiance to family (even hyperbolically), certainly we can stretch our English equivalents to describe our feelings about those who harm us or are opposed to Christ. The reality is that Christians will feel the full range of human emotion and must be able to express it. If they are only told that it is wrong to hate, then they will carry on having intense, negative feelings but will likely minimize or deny them out of a misplaced sense of piety. As noted above, the commands in the Sermon on the Mount do not address the emotions but the acts of the will. If we cannot distinguish them, it will be impossible to pray the imprecatory Psalms without feeling like we are guilty of sin. (It is for this reason that perhaps the Hebrew word śānē, translated above as “hate” in Ps. 139:21, would be better rendered as “resent” so that Christians can more easily connect with the emotion being described and acknowledge it.)

Second, the imprecatory Psalms demand an appropriate context. A clear distinction is necessary for those inside and outside the church, particularly as it relates to enemies. 1 John, in particular, warns of hating brothers and sisters in Christ. This does not mean that we cannot express emotions when betrayed by fellow Christians, but we must be careful not to treat (or speak of) wayward family members as we do enemies of Christ. Not all suffering is of the same kind, and it is more pastorally appropriate to encourage resilience in the face of most day-to-day troubles. Such woes must not be grouped with the existential and profound agony of Christians who suffer distress at the hands of their enemies because of faith in Christ. So, to restate, it is not my view that the imprecatory Psalms cannot be sung by Christians today, but I also do not think they must be sung by every Christian on their own behalf. If Calvin was right that the Psalms are “An Anatomy of all Parts of the Soul,” then let us, as wise physicians, prescribe and use them as the soul requires.

Third, we are in need of a fuller, more biblical, and more comprehensive theology of forgiveness. To argue that Christians should want forgiveness for their enemies rather than judgment overlooks the role of judgment in the act of forgiveness. In forgiving, God does not ignore or minimize sin but pours out his wrath in judgment on the crucifixion of Jesus. This tendency to pit judgment and vengeance against forgiveness fails to account for the fact that salvation is accomplished through judgment, not in lieu of it. All sin will be judged—either at the cross of Christ or the second coming of Christ. Paul is clear about this. He says, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20a). In Rom. 6:4, he says that to be a Christian is to be “buried with [Jesus] by baptism into death.” If forgiveness of sin is not thoroughly expressed in the language of judgment and the language of the cross, then the imprecatory Psalms will seem strange indeed.

How, then, can Christians pray these Psalms today? After all, aren’t we told to bless and not curse? Yes, but the context of Rom. 12:14-21 is the relationship between the believer and his enemy. Pagans cursed their enemies directly, but in the Bible, imprecations are always addressed in prayer to God.²⁰ There is a big difference! (And an often-overlooked fact is that the motive Paul gives for doing good deeds to our enemies is that it will “pour burning coals” on their heads—something Paul assumes his readers would like to do.) All of that said, I agree that some “New Covenant” re-formatting is appropriate when praying the imprecatory Psalms—though I think that this is necessary for the entire Psalter, not just those Psalms that offend modern sensibilities. (For example, the laments should not be sung without some consideration of the NT perspective on hope and suffering. I agree with Vaillancourt that the church should learn to pray its tears, but I also agree with Paul that we do “not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess 4:13).) With that in mind, I believe that Christians can sing a re-formatted version Psalm 139:19 by using the NT expression of justice, judgment, and vengeance in this way:

“Lord, destroy the enemies of your church, either in your wrath
or in the waters of baptism.”

Like the saints of Revelation 6, Christians today are free to desire and invite the vengeance of God. Contrary to popular opinion, Rom. 12:19 does not prohibit Christians from desiring vengeance—it commands them to leave it to the wrath of God. The imprecatory prayer I have suggested, then, asks the Lord to do what he has promised to do, and no Christian should feel embarrassed to ask for that! Thus, a persecuted Christian can know that if his enemy is forgiven in Christ, that means his enemy has first had to repent, that he has had to die to himself, and that on the cross of Christ, God poured out the full measure of his wrath. This is why baptism is better than condemnation. In the latter, the enemy is merely vanquished, but in baptism, our enemy is not only destroyed—a friend and brother (or sister) is born.

The gospel is not contrary to malediction, judgment, or any of the imprecatory Psalms. Rather, it gives them their best possible expression, as it does for the rest of the Old Testament. Let us use them, then, as we use the rest of the Psalms: for the glory of Christ and the good of the church.

————
Bryan Hart lives in Morehead City, North Carolina with his wife Kimberlee and five children. He serves as a pastor at One Harbor Church.

Larry Siedentop’s definition of secularism gets to the heart of current tensions surrounding issues of conscience and personal liberty. Secularism can be criticised as ‘mere consumerism, materialism and amorality’, but Siedentop (anticipating similar arguments made by Holland, Trueman, Wilson, et al) argues that secularism properly defined owes its origins to Christian expectations of personal liberty – that our understanding of the ‘individual’ is inseparable from the Christian message:

Paul’s conception of the Christ introduces the individual, by giving conscience a universal dimension. Was Paul the greatest revolutionary in human history?

But what of when individual liberty and conscience collide with that of another? Whose conscience should be given priority?

In my home town our council has established a public spaces protection order (PSPO) around the abortion clinic. This order expressly forbids prayer within the exclusion zone; and from the end of this month a new law will enforce a similar 150 metre buffer zone around all abortion clinics in England and Wales.

This week Adam Smith-Connor was handed a two-year conditional discharge and ordered to pay more than £9,000 costs for praying outside our local abortion clinic. According to the Bournemouth Echo Smith-Connor, “emailed the council before each visit, informing he would be silently praying for his son who was aborted 22 years ago and for the end of abortion in the UK and across the world.”

Arguably, Smith-Connor was looking to be made a martyr. Before his arrest he was clearly given time and opportunity to walk away. Or he could have simply denied he was praying. But that someone should be arrested, receive a criminal record and have to pay a significant fine (the council had initially asked for costs of £93,441 to be awarded) for silently praying is troubling. As professor of law Andrew Tettenborn observes,

This episode should worry all of us, pro-life or pro-choice, if we believe in the idea of liberty. The by-law Smith-Connor was convicted under (not strictly a by-law, but it has a similar effect) effectively bans the expression of moral opinions that are entirely lawful and quite widely-held from within a sizeable chunk of suburban Bournemouth.

Smith-Connor was following the secular principle, he was acting as “a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions.” He was placing “a premium on conscience rather than the ‘blind’ following of rules.” Within British cultural and legal tradition this would be considered entirely unexceptional and Smith-Connor’s arrest and conviction feels more akin to the actions of a totalitarian state than a democratic one.

The paradox of secularism though is the way in which it, “joins rights with duties to others.” Did Smith-Connor, in the exercise of his rights, fail in his duties to others? The PSPO was introduced to protect the rights of women attending the clinic – including the right to not feel threatened or harassed as they enter it. Whose rights should triumph here?

This is where the PSPO, and the forthcoming buffer zones, feel a blunt instrument. Had Smith-Connor been acting in a way that was clearly intimidatory he could have been moved on but it is hard to see how to stand silently praying constitutes a threat to anyone.

Last year our church undertook to prayer walk every street in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole. This meant that at some point one of our church members infringed the PSPO, even as they were praying for the blessing and wellbeing of our town. Personal, private prayer: in a culture of death this is now an illegal act.

Not being allowed to pray in a small area around abortion clinics might not feel a vast infringement of individual rights: Smith-Connor could have stood further away and prayed without interruption. Yet his arrest is part of a general slide from policing actions to policing words to policing thought itself. This is a retreat from the secular ideal. As Andrew Tettenborn says, it should worry us all.

Enough
Something you can never be. No, not ever. But Christ is enough, and in Him each of us can find all we need.

Mindfulness
The conscious awareness of our sin and lostness outside the grace and forgiveness of the Saviour. This leads to living in step with the Holy Spirit and experiencing peace and joy.

Wellbeing
The position of being found in Christ. In Him we are brought into the shalom of God and can say, with genuine sincerity, ‘it is well with my soul.’

Safeguarding
The eternal security of those found in Christ. He knows who are His and will never let them go – nothing can separate them from His love, not death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present or future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation.

Woke
Awakened to the reality of personal sin and need of a Saviour. This is why it is said, ‘Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’

Triggering
What happens when a fellow believer is offended because of a weaker conscience. The mature believer is free to adapt their behaviour in order to not offend against conscience in this way.

Intersectionality
The place where my sin and God’s grace cross, at the Cross. The Cross is the intersection where God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Inclusion
What happens when someone puts their faith in God and discovers that Christ is their peace, the dividing wall of hostility has been removed, and they – along with all believers – have access to the Father by one Spirit.

Systemic
Sin.

Diversity
The people of God, a numberless multitude, from every nation, tribe, people and language, who will stand before His throne and give Him praise.

Safe space
The blessing into which the forgiven enter, knowing God is their hiding place, who protects them from trouble and surrounds them with songs of deliverance.

Yet for readers and preachers, it does present challenges. How does the entire book hold together, not just as a series of edited highlights (e.g. chapters 6, 40 and 53), but as a unified whole? What do we do with the numerous oracles of judgment and their very obscure imagery? Why are there so many cryptically-named children in the book, and what is their significance? How can we read chapters 1-39 in such a way as to “behold the King in his beauty” (33:17)? Why do the New Testament writers quote Isaiah in ways that seem so different from his original meaning? (Here’s to you, Ahaz!) What historical backstory makes best sense of each section? How do you preach from a book this long? How do you even read it devotionally without getting lost in the eighth century weeds?

These are just some of the questions we will be considering at our upcoming THINK conference, from 1-3 July 2025. We will spend three days together in Isaiah’s magnificent scroll, hosted and taught by Andrew Wilson (King’s Church, London) and including plenary sessions, breakout discussions, meals together, rich times of corporate worship, and time for Q&A.

The cost of THINK 2025 is £150 per person, which includes tea, coffee, and meals together at lunchtime and in the evenings but does not include breakfast or overnight accommodation in London. We will begin at 3:30pm on the Tuesday, and finish with lunch on the Thursday, at King’s Church London King’s Church London, 21 Meadowcourt Road, London, SE3 9DU.

Come. Take time. Be refreshed. Think. You can book in here.

Last week, that young woman was at the Norfolk Showground with teenage children of her own, speaking in a seminar stream as Newday turned twenty. It was a very different experience. The weather was glorious - warm in the day, cool in the evening - and nobody was evacuated or wrapped in foil. The number of people on site was more than three times as large as in 2004, with just under 10,000 in attendance. At the risk of reducing young people to statistics, there were 553 first time responses to the gospel and 534 healing testimony cards filled out, to say nothing of the thousands who encountered God in fresh ways. The majority of the main stage speakers and worship leaders last week were young teens themselves when Newday started; at least three of them would not even have become Christians yet. Most of the leaders of the 2004 event were still there in 2024, but in supporting roles: co-oordinating prayer meetings, typing out programmes, meeting with trustees, praying for healing, or simply encouraging youth workers. The crowd of people listening to that young woman’s seminar was vastly more diverse than the foil-clad group in Nottinghamshire two decades earlier. Shivering in that leisure centre, she would not have imagined that Newday would still exist twenty years later, let alone be thriving like this. I only know that because two weeks later I married her.

The fact that Newday is the same age as my marriage shapes the way I think about it. I track its progress over time. I see it maturing as an institution, like marriages do, as it learns more and more what it is uniquely called to do, and what it must (sadly) lay down in order to do it as well as possible. I notice the obvious changes in size, activity, diversity, accessibility and leadership, but I also notice the way in which they reflect what Newday always hoped to be. A twentieth anniversary is a good time to observe the differences between who you were and who you are, but it is also a time to celebrate the continuities, and the way in which God has changed you in order to keep his purpose for you the same. So the song lists and musicians have changed, but in order to preserve the exuberance and encounter we have always hoped for. The preachers, topics and seminar titles have changed, but so as to maintain the combination of biblical fidelity, prophetic clarity and evangelistic urgency we started with. We no longer bus young people into football stadiums, but more people respond to the gospel now than they ever did. And so on.

Two things struck me particularly. One is the model of team leadership that has always been a feature, but seems to have become heightened over time. I saw at least eight different people lead out in corporate worship, three men and five women, even though there were only two bands on the stage all week. The only people who preached more than once were the people who did the morning sessions, and neither of us were involved in leading the event. If you asked a group of teenagers which individual was in charge, you would have got several different answers, and none of them would have been right. As one speaker put it on the Wednesday night, there has never been a Mr or Mrs Newday.

The other is something that has never changed, and I hope it never does: the kindness, humility and diligence of the serving teams. It still astonishes me that there are people who take a week off work to come to a campsite in Norfolk to look after my children, and that they are ceaselessly enthusiastic and thoughtful as they go about it. People go out of their way to be helpful as they set up and pack down venues, empty bins, cook meals, fix things, steward venues, oversee safeguarding, care for people with disabilities and run sporting activities, even though they are tired, sweaty and (obviously) unpaid. As ever, it is the cleaning team that amazes me the most. At one point I encountered two individuals - one a hugely talented gospel singer, and the other a pastor with thirty years experience - clothed in luminous jackets and rubber gloves, with huge grins on their faces, telling me about what they had witnessed as they cleaned the toilet blocks that morning. I was as captivated by their joy as I was horrified by their anecdote, and I know similar things could be said of many, many others.

I have no idea how many people have served in such ways over the last twenty years. Someone must have set up the venue for my first seminar. Someone must have given my soon-to-be wife a sheet of foil in that leisure centre. Someone was on the doors when my son made his first response to Jesus, and someone else was on the front gate that day when my daughter lay down in the driveway and refused to move, and someone else had to deal with the pastoral fallout of that public mistake I made. I don’t know any of their names. And despite my desire to honour a great many individuals over the last twenty years, I haven’t used any names in this article, except one. His is the only Name that matters.

‘If three people love each other and agree to enter into a committed, sexual relationship with each other, what’s wrong with that?’

Responses vary, but laughter is probably the most common response. Some laugh because it’s something they think is so unlikely it’s comical. Others laugh because they feel a bit nervous, unsure of how to answer.

But it’s a question I think we Christians – and certainly Christian leaders – need to start thinking about, because it’s a question that will be coming up a lot more in real life in the coming years.

The rise of polyamory

The relationship envisaged in the question is an example of polyamory – a romantic and sexual relationship between three or more people with the consent of all involved. It would also be an example of consensual non-monogamy ­– a broader category encompassing any sexual relationship where those involved agree the relationship is not exclusive.

Polyamory and consensual non-monogamy will almost certainly be the next step in western society’s journey away from traditional, Judeo-Christian-rooted sexual and relationship ethics. While perhaps still a fringe practice at the moment, acceptance and practice of polyamory and consensual non-monogamy are on the rise.

The last few years have seen an increasing number of polyamorous and consensually non-monogamous relationships being portrayed in popular media. Shows such as the BBC’s Wanderlust and Trigonometry and Channel 4’s The Couple Next Door centre on such relationships, and popular shows like Netflix’s Sex Education and Australian soap Neighbours have featured polyamorous characters or relationships. This year there has been a significant increase in media coverage of the topic (see Polyamory in the News). And this month saw ‘Week of Visibility for Consensual Non-Monogamy’.

This all matters and is likely to have a considerable impact. Ask that discussion question – ‘What’s wrong with a three-person sexual relationship?’ – of most people in the modern west today, and they might first respond with an instinctive distaste for the idea, but push them on why and they are unlikely to be able to defend their position. For those familiar with Jonathan Haidt’s work, this is people’s elephant’s (their intuitions) reacting and then their rider (reason) becoming a PR person trying, but struggling, to defend the elephant’s direction of travel.

Most secular people won’t have any convincing arguments against polyamory (even though there actually are some – monogamy is good for both society and individuals, especially women and children.¹) And because they don’t have good arguments, the visibility of seemingly healthy and harmless polyamory that brings happiness to those involved will begin to change people’s perspectives. To think in Haidt’s terms, the visibility of polyamory will appeal to the moral intuitions most prominent for many modern westerners (care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating) and that will change the direction of people’s intuitions – their elephants. This is why it seems pretty certain that polyamory and consensual non-monogamy will grow in acceptance and practice, possibly quite quickly.²

Now is the time

That means now is the time that Christians need to be thinking about polyamory. If we’re honest, many of us might find we’re currently quite like our secular neighbours: We instinctively sense that polyamory and consensual non-monogamy are wrong. We can probably take the extra step of saying ‘Because the Bible says so’. (Although could we then defend that claim well? And what do we do with the practice of polygamy in the Old Testament?). But many are likely to get stuck at that point.

Because of this, many Christians will be susceptible to being swayed to acceptance (just as we’ve seen with same-sex sexuality), and many will be ill-prepared to communicate God’s good plan to the world around us.

The Christian opposition to same-sex marriages is currently often one of the biggest barriers to people considering the Christian faith. In a decade or so, our opposition to polyamory could be another big barrier. Will we be ready to help clear that barrier so people can consider the claims of Jesus?

I think this is an important moment for Christians. I also think it’s a moment of opportunity. We have the chance to get ahead of the curve, to work out what we believe and why now, before we’re having to explain and defend that. We have the chance to learn from some of the mistakes in our past handling of sexual ethics (for example, in the same-sex sexuality conversation), so we can do better at loving people in this conversation. And we have the chance to prepare to engage well on this topic, not just playing catchup and trying to defend Christian teaching, but showing people how God’s plan for sexuality and relationships is good for all of us and how it is in the gospel and God’s way of living that we can find the best answer to the desires often driving the practice of polyamory.

‘What’s the problem with polyamory?’ At the moment, our problem may be that we don’t really know. Now is the time to ask that question for ourselves, because soon enough, we’ll have other people asking it of us.

To help jumpstart the Christian conversation on polyamory and consensual non-monogamy, I’ve written a short booklet titled Three or More: Reflections on Polyamory and Consensual Non-monogamy (Grove, 2024). In the booklet, I talk about how society has got to this point, how we can engage well with biblical teaching and with arguments in favour of polyamory, and I give some pointers to start our thinking about a Christian response. Get your copy now.

Apart from the big issues of economics, foreign policy, climate change and so on, issues on which faithful Christians can legitimately disagree, what of some of the social issues? Thinking from the perspective of a Christian pastor who seeks to be biblically faithful and maintain theological orthodoxy here are some things we are now likely to face:

Issues around sexuality
Keir Starmer has already made it plain that when there is a conflict between Christian orthodoxy and the LGBT agenda he will support the latter.

The introduction of a ban on so called ‘conversion therapy’ is now as good as inevitable. This is likely to put many of us in a very difficult position. It may well be that praying with someone about their sexuality becomes illegal. It may well be that preaching a biblical sexual ethic becomes illegal. We saw sabre rattling about this just before election day when a report into former MP Miriam Cates highlighted the fact that she belonged to a church that expected gay people to, “eventually understand the need to be transformed to live in accordance with biblical revelation and orthodox church teachings.” It may be that such an understanding is criminalised.

We will need to act with the innocence of doves and the wisdom of serpents. We will also need the courage of our convictions as for some of us there will be a price to pay.

Churches should also be preparing financially for the possibility of charitable status being removed. In the decision to apply VAT to independent schools Labour has demonstrated it is not afraid to penalise charitable bodies of which it disapproves. It is certainly possible that adherence to the current sexual orthodoxy will become a requirement for churches if they are to receive the financial benefits of charitable status. Many of our churches rely on Gift Aid to meet budget. We should probably start planning for when this ceases to be the case.

Euthanasia
Whoever had won the election it was likely that moves to legalise ‘assisted suicide’ would again have been brought before parliament. But a massive Labour majority (supported by the LibDems and Greens) means this is now more likely, and more likely to succeed where previously it had been rejected. The pastoral implications of this are significant.

As we have seen from countries like Belgium and Canada where euthanasia has already been legalised, there is always ‘mission creep’. Not only those with terminal illnesses, suffering unbearable pain, choose euthanasia, but those with mental health issues, including young people, and older people who feel a burden on their families. Palliative care tends to be undermined.

As pastors we will have to think about how to counsel those who are considering euthanasia, how to counsel the families of those who have chosen this course, and how to advise medics in our congregation who will be expected to cooperate with the process – especially in a context where exemptions on the grounds of conscience are being increasingly squeezed. And we will need to think about how we approach the funerals of those who have chosen euthanasia.

Hopefully some things will be better under the new government, others may be more challenging. Either way, the Church is called to be a faithful witness to the good news of Jesus Christ, who is eternal king over all. But we will need to do some planning.

Beginning of life issues
I’ve been writing about the problems with IVF on Think for years but it still doesn’t seem to be an issue that enough pastors have grappled with. A developing complexity is that of polygenic screening. Increasingly, parents – at least those who can afford it – will be able to screen their embryos for a wide range of ‘defects’; and, increasingly, to select for desired traits.

This should be ethically concerning on multiple levels. Firstly, it will make all conceptions IVF ones, as the screening can only happen with lab-generated embryos. Secondly, it will produce many more ‘spare’ embryos which then have to be discarded. Thirdly, it will reinforce and encourage the notion of childrearing as being a consumer choice rather than divine gift.

What does your church teach about the conceiving and raising of children? Would you know how to respond if a church member was considering polygenic screening and came to talk it over with you?

End of life issues
For a very long time it has felt that the legalisation of some form of euthanasia is inevitable. Mercifully parliament has consistently voted against it, but prospects of a Labour super-majority make a change more likely. I’m not going to rehearse the rights and wrongs of ‘assisted dying’ here (suffice it to say, the wrongs far outweigh the rights, as the evidence from Canada, Belgium, etc., makes increasingly clear), but want to urge consideration of a pastoral corollary: if euthanasia is legalised, what happens when we are asked to conduct the funeral?

Any suicide is always a deeply sad and regrettable event. Taking the funeral of a suicide is always pastorally fraught, but how will we respond if members of our congregations opt for medical suicide? The fact that such deaths will be more obviously planned than ‘regular’ suicides means we should be able to do some ahead of the event pastoral planning too. Personally, I think I would have to refuse to take the funeral of someone who had opted for euthanasia, certainly for church members. Or, I would take it only on the understanding that I would declare their decision to have been wrong.

Either way it’s difficult. What would you do?

All of life issues
Genetic screening will increasingly not only be an issue at the conception of life but throughout it. For many people getting a genetic test will seem a no-brainer: it is free on the NHS and seems to promise all kinds of information that could be beneficial to health. The offering of these tests will become increasingly routine and to refuse them will put you in the same moral camp as those who refused covid vaccines.

There are many concerns about this though. An individual might have legitimate concerns about the amount of information, and control, having this kind of data could give actors who don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. (This is especially the case given the NHS’s notorious propensity to IT failures and data leaks, never mind malicious hacking operations.) It might push up your insurance premiums. But from a pastoral perspective I anticipate one of the biggest issues being an increase in anxiety.

Genetic testing is meant to, at least in part, stem anxiety by providing information. I fear the reality will be rather different. Most people are very poor at interpreting data and statistics. If a genetic test revealed that an individual is ten percent more likely than the average to develop a particular cancer what is the likelihood that that individual will experience far more stress from worrying about this possibility than they are to actually experience it?

My strong hunch is that more widespread genetic testing will create more anxiety, more neuroticism, and hence more pastoral work.

The double-edge of technology
Genetic testing is an example of a technology that can have clear benefits but which we might discover causes more harm than good. Technology is often like that. Technology, specifically digital technology, is the driver of so much disorder and sin.

Digital technology opens the door to worlds that in some cases weren’t even previously imagined, as well as those that were imagined but impossible. We all know the reality that the action of going into a newsagent and purchasing a magazine off the top shelf created a far higher barrier to accessing porn than does the instant access provided online. We also know that this is fuelling ever more extreme and depraved examples of porn, and that in turn affects expectations and behaviours. The dating apps create opportunities, some good, many bad, that wouldn’t have existed without technology. And so on and on.

These technological trends will only accelerate. Are we thinking about these issues, and are we teaching into them? Digital technology offers so many wonderful benefits and blessings yet at the same time many of us are like toddlers who have been handed a chainsaw. If we are going to make disciples then discipling people in how to handle technology in a God-honouring way is going to be essential.

If you are a pastor you may well think that trying to finish off your message for Sunday, let along working out which way to vote, leaves you with no time to consider ethical issues like these. But you should do. The issues are unavoidable.

That may be why I found Alastair Roberts’s recent article on it so interesting. His response is very different from mine, and much more interesting. The Negative World, he argues, is basically the Internet - and it is negative for everybody, not just Christians. Take your time:

There is one huge missing piece in Renn’s account, its absence both glaring and baffling. While he rightly mentions the importance of digitization, which concentrates great power in a few online companies, he simply does not adequately wrestle with the impact of the Internet. Without considering the Internet, I do not believe that much of what Renn terms ‘negative world’ will truly make sense. Indeed, key inflection points in the wider adoption of the Internet coincide with some of the shifts that Renn identifies: global Internet use took off in the mid-90s and it was in the mid-2010s that the age of the mobile Internet arrived and social media reached its dominance.

The shifts to neutral and negative world are certainly not monocausal, but I believe that the Internet is by far the more powerfully explanatory factor. The following is a rough sketch of some of the relevant ways in which I believe that its impact has played out:

The early Internet radically changed the form of public discourse. Whereas broader cultural discourse had formerly been the preserve of a few, a realm protected by gatekeepers within elite institutions, publishing, media, and politics, the Internet started to open the conversation up further. As a growing realm of discourse, the Internet reduced the control of legacy media, the political and party establishments, academic institutions, and other such agencies, and the power of old liberal elites at their heart.

Within the former cultural ecology, liberal elites were less threatened by hostile and unwelcome voices, which could more safely be siloed outside of mainstream discursive contexts or policed within them. The obscurity that people could enjoy outside of such mainstream discursive contexts was also a source of safety for them. To become a public voice, you would need to pass through credentialing and other gate-keeping institutions and agencies and demonstrate some degree of loyalty to the norms of the liberal establishment that they constituted. In many ways, this allowed for a more generous Overton Window. Liberalism’s confident culture of good faith and respectful disagreement was easier to maintain in a context where participation in public discourse was more reserved to those who had undergone extensive formation in its institutions, belonged to its elites, and honoured its norms, while more fringe or plebian voices lacked the same access to publicity and could safely be ignored.

While people might have strong differences, they shared institutions and a broader liberal culture in common and were less likely to be seeking to destroy each other or burn it all down. In such a setting, despite political, religious, and ideological differences in society, there were still effective consensus-forming mechanisms and institutions, elite control over the dominant means of publication, and a confidence in a culture of persuasion.

Legacy media, with its gatekeeping and credentialing, could restrict participation in the public to persons with formation in liberal discursive values, but the Internet changed this. Whereas positions might formerly have been represented in public by more erudite and polished advocates, the Internet opened realms of conversation in which differences could be discussed by the average Joe. Now people could talk more directly with people of different viewpoints.

The earlier Internet was dominated by more intellectual, creative, and technologically literate males, who developed their own fora and typically male-coded cultures of argument. The liberal dream of a culture of persuasion began to sour in this context, however, especially as less intellectual persons started to go online ... People who had hoped for thoughtful and friendly debate encountered flamers, trolls, and fools. Instead of interacting with thoughtful exponents of different positions, you might unwittingly find yourself arguing with some anonymous obnoxious fourteen-year-old. Some of us might have been that fourteen-year-old.

The world prior to the Internet was one in which people of different contexts were far less visible to each other. People could live within their own bubbles, with much less exposure to people and ideas outside of them. The Internet, however, started to pierce a lot of these bubbles, enabling people to look beyond their social worlds and to be formed in ideas and values and engage with people from outside of them. This weakened the power of those worlds to maintain internal norms and consensus; it also made it easier for dissidents to arrange movements within and against them. It also started to make formerly obscure bubbles easier for outsiders to look into. Among other things, these shifts increased the felt need for apologetics, for both outsiders and insiders. It also intensified the perceived threat that different bubbles could pose to each other.

It was in such a context that a strong atheist movement started to emerge. More young people from Christian contexts were rejecting the bubbles in which they had grown up. And, especially following 9/11, more secular atheists were starting to look at the religious worlds of many of their compatriots as a threat. The belligerent New Atheist movement was a product of the earlier Internet culture, strongly male-coded and debate-driven. Alexander suggests that a loss of confidence in the power of persuasion led people to look for a ‘hamartiology’, an account of sin. The New Atheists came to believe that religion was at the root of people’s blindness and resistance to reality. They were strongly committed to the hard sciences and to a world of facts and reality. While very aggressive, they still tended to uphold liberal values of open discourse: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

It seems to me that the rapid passing of New Atheism as a movement might be a difficult thing to explain within Renn’s three world framework. In the early 2010s, atheism discourse was everywhere online and then suddenly the movement failed and many of its leaders fell into disfavour. What happened? Alexander suggests that the New Atheist movement ‘seamlessly merged into the modern social justice movement’, the hamartiology of the latter replacing that of the former. I think that Alexander is right that New Atheism largely shifted into social justice. However, I do not think that he adequately accounts for the mechanisms by which this happened: I think that the evolution of the Internet provides a far better explanation.

The key shifts occurred around the time that Renn locates the movement into negative world. The earlier Internet had chiefly been a realm of words and ideas. Although there were intense circles of feminine-coded online activity, more masculine forms and cultures of discourse generally tended to be more defining of the Internet as it related to the ‘public’ realm (the ‘there are no girls on the Internet’ meme belongs to this era). The rise of social media radically changed the culture of the Internet. While the former Internet had been more anonymous and detached from offline identities and relationships, in the new social media age everyone was increasingly putting themselves online. Whereas the Internet had been a weird place with lots of anonymous strangers onto which you could go, now your real-life identity and relationships were online. It was no longer a Wild West into which you could wander or a secret friend to whom you could confide, but a virtual village in which you resided.

The earlier Internet was also decentralized and unmapped, filled with obscure corners where you could find groups of strangers who shared some interest. Or you could set up your own online homestead with a blog, perhaps joining some friendly circle of fellow bloggers. The social media Internet completely changed this. In place of subscribing to RSS feeds, on the social Internet things were disseminated socially. ‘Virality’, ‘memes’, social media ‘mobs’, and other such concepts tried to wrestle with the novel results and forms of the emerging dynamics of the social Internet, where ideas spread along more tribal, reactive, and emotional trajectories.

The social Internet made formerly obscure parts of the Internet visible to each other, collapsing formerly detached spaces into vast common planes of discourse, within which we were all potentially visible to everyone. In the social media Internet—which would be intensified by the mobile Internet—the distinctions between public and private, and those between political and personal started to fail.

Before the advent of the social Internet, there were also strong feminine-coded worlds online. In particular, the worlds of fandom and fan fiction. The Internet gave a powerful voice to fan communities, who obsessively talked about, speculated concerning, created artwork relating to, and spun off their own fantasies from their favourite properties. Especially for young women, such contexts were realms within which they could theorize their identities, relationships, and worlds. The intimacy of the things that a young woman could confide of herself in such realms also gave them a social intensity and fierce protectiveness and sensitivity. Katherine Dee (Default Friend) has argued that it is impossible to understand the cultural shift to so-called ‘wokeness’, or what Wesley Yang has called the ‘successor ideology’, without appreciating the role that Tumblr in particular played. Tumblr was a step away from the more obscure worlds of earlier fandoms into a more visible and open world.

I think Dee, perhaps the most perceptive commentator on such Internet subcultures, rightly appreciates the importance of Tumblr. However, it seems to me that the mainstreaming of Tumblr culture required larger social media such as Facebook and Twitter, which brought masculine and feminine forms of the Internet into more direct contact and collision with each other and led to the dynamics of the latter prevailing over the former.

The immense popular user base of Facebook and the widespread use of Twitter among the commentariat, academics, and other public figures gave them immense power to shift the tone of the broader cultural conversation as platforms. And their social character meant that there was a concern for personal identity, relationships, and communal dynamics within them that one would not encounter to the same degree in former public realms. The intense self-reflexivity and theorization of identity and society encouraged by Tumblr and other such contexts could break out into the broader culture because Facebook and Twitter created flattened contexts of discourse, disrupting the oppositions between public and private and political and personal that would formerly have limited the spread of its discourses.

As social media increasingly swallowed public discourse, it led to a growing preoccupation with the fragilized and bespoke identities of those who came of age online. Whereas the old context of liberal discourse was gatekept and bounded, distinguished from more social spaces, and operating according to more masculine-coded norms, the new discourse, occurring in social places, became preoccupied with feminine-coded sensitivities about identities, victimhood, and etiquette. The structurally egalitarian character of the new social media also made it very easy for authorities to be challenged and unsettled through group pressure. It made it a lot easier for marginal groups to organize across contexts, to make themselves visible to themselves and others, and to exert pressure upon majorities. The intense fandom culture also encouraged the rise of a fixation upon media representation of various groups and identities in various properties and powerful lobbies to press for them.

Without the advent of social media, the shift to social justice and its more feminine-coded politics would probably not have occurred in the same way. In the New Atheist movement this shift initially played out in controversies such as that surrounding ‘Elevatorgate’ and in a migration of focus from discourse focused upon scientific and philosophical realities to its own internal dynamics and to issues of ‘social justice’: feminism, antiracism and racial justice, and the various concerns of the LGBTQ+ movement. The concerns of this politics were concerns that were more natural to an age dominated by Spectacle, where appearance and representation have increasingly taken the place of ‘everything that was directly lived’, and the personal and political are elided.

In this context, the old confident liberalism has failed. The once bounded public square is bounded no longer. The participants in society’s discourses—at all levels—increasingly appear as victims and vulnerable persons requiring protection. A public square to which people are more directly exposed and in which they can more directly operate (perhaps to be followed by its evaporation) has set the stage for the passing of a culture of robust exchange of differing viewpoints, confident in a common reality.

Much of the old liberal establishment has withered and lost its former confidence. The legacy media has shrunk and its authority diminished. Academics are more precarious in their employment and more conformist; there has been a rapid diminishment of political diversity in academia. Academic institutions are increasingly driven by the interests of administration and business. The old realms of the public square have been weakened and what has taken their place operates very differently, a small number of corporations exerting considerable power over it. More restrictive managerial oversight of societies without consensus reality but with repeated alienating and polarizing interactions is taking the place of the more open liberal societies of the past. Power has shifted to large corporate agencies, untrustworthy custodians of liberal values. The Overton Window is no longer the more expansive one of the old liberalism, but one that serves the interests of a new managerial elite, brokers of a social order for their dependent and biddable clients, whose constant petitioning of them in the hyper-politicized symbolic causes of their personal lives is rather less threatening than traditional politics might be. In many respects, it could be regarded as a depoliticization of people, so that the market can proceed unobstructed: ‘neoliberalism is social justice’.

In the deluge of data characteristic of the Internet Age, the fact has died and, in its place, we have multiple competing narratives, with little allegiance to a grounding reality. The politics of such an age of spectacle and social media will tend to be ‘scissor’-politics, repeated narrative-driven polarization (Floyd, COVID, and Gaza are examples of such stories). In such a context, disdain, anger, resentment, and cruelty will tend to proliferate. Its reactivity will also encourage competing extremisms. Trump was a symptom and accelerant of such politics, among other things designed to attack the dignity that liberals might see in the office of the presidency.

There is a great deal more that could be said about the impact of the Internet. However, I want to consider how it might relate to Renn’s negative world thesis. The development I have described weakened an old liberalism, reordered societal discourse, transformed the public square, elevated more feminine-coded values, fragilized communities and identities by making them more porous and exposed, thrust more of societal life into a collective Spectacle, and strengthened managerialist neoliberalism. It was not targeted against Christianity, though.

In many respects, we all live in a negative world now. The loss of consensus reality, the failure of effective consensus-forming institutions, the extreme polarization of our politics, and the fragilization of our communities and identities leave everyone feeling exposed and vulnerable in new ways. No one thinks that they are winning. In other respects, the development has fallen especially hard upon particular groups. In America the place that Jews once enjoyed in the old liberal establishment, for instance, is rapidly shrinking and rising open antisemitism and less certain government policies concerning the state of Israel are signs of a loss of their cultural power.

In such a context, it is easy for people to confuse some of the ways that the emerging order seems to threaten their groups with some ‘negative world’ hostility to the Christian faith. Responding to such a sense, it is easy for identitarian victimhood politics to elide Christian identity with fragilized cultural identities—with ‘white masculinity’, for instance—and to pursue sectarian politics in Christ’s name. As such politics impact the Church, they will tend to be both highly divisive, resistant to the Church’s concrete catholicity, and to compromise the moral integrity of the Church and the primacy of its bonds for the sake of effective political coalitions. Accentuating political tribalism offers a sort of security for anxious Christians, but at the cost of Christian faithfulness in preserving the peaceful bond of the Spirit in the Church.

A key reservation I have about Renn’s thesis is that it might lead us to focus our attention upon ourselves and upon American society’s reduced hospitality to Christians and their faith. This is not without importance, but, in many respects what we are experiencing may be a particularly pronounced form of a more general societal malaise, much of it brought about or accelerated by the Internet. Recognizing this might equip us to think better about the manner of our response. For instance, we might think more carefully about how to guard our own lives, contexts, communities, and organizations from some of the more damaging dynamics of the Internet. We might also consider how the Church might function as an Ark for others, protecting them from the collapse of the former order and the threats of its successor.

In that previous essay I raised questions as to the extent that our spiritual experiences are conditioned by the culture in which we live. To what extent were the phenomena of 1994 a reflection of wider cultural currents of the time? Ten years on from those questions and observations I can both still detect traces of what happened in 1994 in the ‘ministry shape’ of churches with which I am involved; and if anything I am more convinced of the influence of the wider culture in our spiritual experience.

Way back, in December 1993, I read Arnold Dallimore’s George Whitefield. This two volume biography of the great 18th century evangelist was very shaping in my life and ministry but it has only been recently, more than thirty years later, that I have picked it up and read it through again. It was only a few months after first reading it that the Toronto blessing swept through our churches and we were laughing, weeping, and falling over. I’m not sure to what extent I connected the dots with Dallimore’s descriptions of phenomena accompanying revival in the 18th century but it is fascinating to read his account and make those connections now.

Wesley, and others, seem to have encouraged the same kind of external manifestations that we saw in 1994 – viewing them as evidence of God’s working. On the other hand, Whitefield, and others, discouraged them – viewing them as a fleshly distraction from the true work of God that risked bringing the revival into disrepute.

A standout moment in Whitefield’s ministry was the revival at Cambulsang, Glasgow, in 1741-2. This provides an interesting mirror against which to hold the events of 1994. As John Arnott wrote at the time of the Toronto blessing, “The fruit produced in a person’s life is the…way to evaluate a spiritual experience.” What was the fruit of Cambulsang? And what the fruit of 1994?

At Cambulsang, and nearby Kilsyth, were two faithful but uninspiring ministers, William McCulloch and James Robe. These men had laboured in the gospel for years but with little result. They were known for being dull communicators but in 1741 something changed. A fresh anointing fell upon these two men and a new spiritual hunger came upon their congregations. Central to this awakening was a conviction of sin. Robe reports, “bitter cries, groans, and the voice of their weeping.”

Whitefield appeared on the scene in July 1742, preached three times in the space of ten hours and reported, “For about an hour and a half there was such weeping, so many falling into deep distress, and expressing it in various ways…Their cries and agonies were exceedingly affecting.”

The following Sunday came the famous Cambulsang communion service. Services were conducted over the whole weekend, culminating on the Monday, with constant preaching by a relay of ministers, and communion served on the Sunday. All this took place outdoors. Those wanting to take part in the communion were personally examined by a minister and if their ‘conversion and manner of life’ was deemed sufficiently genuine they were issued with a small metal token that gave access to the communion table.

A month later Whitefield returned for another communion service. Thirty thousand were in attendance but only about three thousand were admitted to the table: “Worship began at 8.30 on the Sunday morning, and the last table was being served at sunset.”

Dallimore states that there were two kinds of ‘emotional phenomena’ displayed during these services, “the outcrying and trembling among the unconverted and the ecstatic rejoicing among believers.” Not everyone was so affected though (Robe thought it to be one in five of the congregation) and Dallimore concludes,

The bodily distresses were not encouraged, but when they occurred they were considered of value only inasmuch as they arose from a sorrow for sin so intense they could not be restrained.

And what of the fruit? An accounting of the revival, written in 1871 relates,

This work… embraced all classes, all ages, and all moral conditions. Cursing, swearing and drunkenness were given up by those who had come under its power. It kindled remorse for acts of injustice. It won forgiveness from the vengeful… It bound pastors and people together with a stronger bond of sympathy. It raised an altar in the household… It made men students of the Word of God and brought them in thought and purpose and effort into communion with their Father in heaven.

True, there was chaff among the wheat, but the watchfulness of the ministers detected it, and quickly drove it away.

And for long years afterwards, humble men and women who dated their conversion from the work at Cambuslang, walked among their neighbours with an unspotted Christian name, and then died peacefully in the arms of One whom they had learned in the revival days to call Lord and Saviour.

What happened in Cambulsang in 1742 was of a different order to what we experienced in 1994. To be fair, this is why we described what was happening as a blessing rather than as a revival, but it does seem that we placed far too much emphasis on the phenomena. Rather than one in five displaying strong emotional phenomena we looked for everyone to do so. This made it difficult for the few who did not – I remember some individuals becoming very disillusioned because they were untouched amongst a sea of flailing and falling bodies.

With hindsight, my perspective is that the focus on phenomena was a mistake: there was a great deal of chaff among the wheat. And, as I remember it, conviction of sin was almost entirely absent. There wasn’t any great turning of the unconverted to God.

I concluded my 2014 essay with an observation about how culture affects our spiritual responses and then a question,

An obvious question that arises for us out of this observation is at what point our cultural envelope becomes a hindrance to actively receiving the Spirit. Arguably some cultures are more open than others – would a 1970’s style charismatic renewal have been possible in the more straitlaced 1950’s? At the least, we should be alert to the importance of ‘discerning the times’ and aware of the impact of the wider culture upon us. Over the past few years there has been a lot of conversation about the church ‘impacting the culture’. It seems to me that the impact is rather more likely to be the other way around, and most of the time we do not even realise it. That is how culture works, even when we think of ourselves as charismatic.

Over the past ten years there have been some cultural shifts that wash into our expectations and practices in the church. The therapeutic worldview has become increasingly dominant. Technology has more and more impact in peoples lives. There has been a growing suspicion of leadership. To what extent do these cultural realities affect and condition any move of God among us? In our current climate of individualism and leadership suspicion it is very hard to imagine a context in which ninety percent of a congregation would tolerate being kept from taking communion, or in which pastors would have the courage necessary to enforce it!

Thirty years on there are things I am grateful for that came out of our experiences then, as well as things I would do differently now. But oh for a move of God that cuts through all our cultural realities and causes trembling among the unconverted and ecstatic rejoicing among believers.

Many of us will have reflected on the goodness of our bodies; that as the creation of a good creator they can speak to us both about how we should live (ethics) and who we are (identity). And that they are core to what it means to be human, not secondary or irrelevant.

Recently I’ve been struck by this again in the creation accounts. Obviously I’ve been aware before that in Genesis 1 God declares all creation good and then very good after the creation of humans. That would include human bodies and so our bodies are clearly good. But I’d never before noticed quite how strongly the creation accounts of Genesis stress the centrality of our bodies. Both of them seem to imply that bodies are central to what it means to be human.

In Genesis 1, the first thing we are told about humans is that we are created in the image of God. The second is that we are created male and female (Genesis 1:27). What does it mean to be male or female? They are terms that speak of bodily forms – the way our bodies are structured to play one of two roles in reproduction. This is why the statement that we are created male and female is immediately followed by the command to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’ (Genesis 1:28). Male and female mean nothing apart from bodies.

This means the second thing we are told about humans in Scripture – and so presumably a fairly important thing – is that we are embodied. Bodies, according to Genesis 1, are central to what it means to be human. They are central to who we are.

In Genesis 2, it is striking that God first creates Adam’s body and then breathes life into him (Genesis 2:7). There is no Adam before the first body is created. The first human is not a disembodied being for whom a body is created, as if the body is just a container to hold our true self or a tool through which we can interact with the physical world. The body comes first. It is central to what it means to be human.

Aware of this, I’ve been trying to be more careful of the language I use about our bodies and their relationship with our true self. We often use language that implies our bodies are separate to who we really are: ‘Your body is a gift from God’, implying that the core you exists separately to, or even prior to, your body such that that this you can receive a gift from God.

On one level this is obviously overthinking things (I’m good at that!). I don’t think this statement, or others like it, is completely inaccurate or inappropriate.¹ It’s a statement trying to communicate things that are true and important. But in a contemporary context – both cultural and Christian – where the body is so often devalued and seen as separate to our true self, there may be value in thinking very carefully about the language we use.

So what can we say? I’m increasingly talking about us being created as bodies rather than being given a body as a gift, and as being bodies rather than having them (‘You don’t have a body. You are a body.’)

I can already hear the responses. Has Andrew become a monist, believing we’re are only bodies and nothing else? No. I am a convicted dichotomist – we have a body and a soul/spirit (two words for the same thing; see Isaiah 26:9; Luke 1:46-47). I think that’s pretty clear in Scripture (e.g. Ecclesiastes 12:7; Matthew 10:28). But those two parts are meant to be united. So while an ontological dichotomist (there are two parts to our being), I am a functional monist (those two parts are designed to work together as one).

That the union and interworking of body and soul is God’s good intention can be seen from the problem of death. The problem of death isn’t that it’s the end of existence – because it isn’t. The problem with death is that it’s the (temporary) end of embodied existence. At death, body and soul are torn apart awaiting reunion at the resurrection (Genesis 35:18; Acts 7:59; 2 Corinthians 5:8).

Do the sorts of phrases I’m proposing run the risk of suggesting that our bodies are prior to our souls? Maybe. And that’s something I probably wouldn’t want to affirm. (I don’t think the creation of Adam in Genesis 2 can be used here as he could easily be an exceptional case!) But aware of the complexities of communication and the reality that we often have to make do with phrases that have some weaknesses, I think the statement ‘You are a body’ leans to the side indicated by Scripture. Our bodies are central, perhaps even primary, in who we are.

In a time when both secular culture and popular Christian thinking have a tendency to undervalue the body and to overvalue the internal or non-physical (whether that’s called ‘true self’ or ‘soul’), I think it’s better to use the imperfect language that might help us to correct our imbalance. I’m trying it out at least.

Your body matters. And so does the language you use about your and other bodies.

That’s quite a bold statement and a bit of a curveball for most of us. Art is a strange thing. Most people have an intuition that it is somehow important but almost nobody can articulate why! In fact, it’s quite hard to even define what art is. So, for most of us, art is regarded as rather peripheral and extravagant. The cherry, or at the most the icing, but certainly not the cake!

So, why would a sensible fellow like Tim Keller make such an outrageous claim? Why would the church need art to reach the world?

I run a network of artists called Sputnik Faith & Arts and we split our time between two pursuits. Some of our efforts are directed towards encouraging Christians who make art to keep going, to get better at it, to engage with audiences outside the church, and to keep following Jesus while they do it. The rest of the time, we find ways to explain to Christians who aren’t artists why we think Tim Keller hit the nail on the head.

The problem is that art is so integral to human experience that we miss it. Imagine trying to explain the importance of water to a fish. It’s a bit like that. Secular anthropologists would mark the emergence of homo sapiens by the appearance of cave paintings. The Genesis creation story presents the first reported speech of a human being as a song, or at least a poem (Genesis 2:23). From the very beginning, we have created art. It’s fundamental to who we are.

And we are surrounded by art. The pictures on your wall. The chair you sit on. The wallpaper on your walls. The architecture of your house. The design of your shoes. All produced by artists of one sort or another. And this is to say nothing of the digital worlds we inhabit.

To imagine a world without art is to imagine a world without people. In the world. In the church. Anywhere.

But how does art help us, as Christians, to reach the world with the gospel? We could ‘use’ art to package our message more attractively? To pull on the heartstrings? To get in under the radar? Well, we could. And sometimes we do. But this is, at best, the tip of the iceberg.

Art keeps us human. It keeps us asking questions. It stops us drifting into tribalism and robotic pragmatism. It recognises the complexities of life and of God and of church and refuses to flatten the vibrant world that God has created. It reminds us of the abundant life that Jesus promised us, a life of love and generosity not of cold tradition and dogma. It keeps us human and allows us to connect with other humans as image bearers of our artistic God, resonating with other image bearers so as to lead them to find their rest in Him.

I think that’s what Tim Keller meant. And, yes, it’s all a bit vague and mind boggling. It certainly also needs some unpacking.

To that end, I’d like to introduce you to a resource that will hopefully help you to wrestle with this difficult but crucial topic. We’ve put together a course to explore how, as Christians, we might engage with the arts more constructively and support the artists in our communities and beyond. It’s called ‘Releasing Artists to Renew Culture’ and it’s been released through the Broadcast church planting network. It consists of 8 short videos that are accompanied by discussion questions and relevant artworks and Scriptures to help you think it all through.

If you’re an artist, it’s for you.

If you ‘don’t have an artistic bone in your body’, it’s for you too.

If you’re a church leader who is lacking creative contributions to your exoskeleton, it’s especially for you.

Engaging with the arts may not be at the top of your to do list. ‘Reaching the world’ may well be. Tim Keller thought the two things were more connected than we often think so why not watch the first video and see what you think?

——-
Jonny Mellor is an elder at Churchcentral, Birmingham and also helps run Sputnik, a network of Christian artists. Sputnik works with artists and churches, and aims to rebuild the often damaged bridges that exist between them. To find out more, try: https://sputnikfaith.art

Introduction

How should pastors respond to Christian Nationalism (CN)? This is a difficult question for two reasons. First, the term “Christian Nationalism” is not clearly defined and has a wide spectrum of applications, even within the US. Second, despite having no consistent definition, CN has rapidly become a lightning rod of attention in news, media, and evangelical circles. The volume is up, but the clarity is down.

The goal of this paper is twofold. First, I survey several theories of CN currently in use: three negative criticisms and three positive defenses. As we will see, what one side condemns is not exactly what the other embraces. Second, I identify three critical issues that are being conflated (or ignored) within the CN rhetoric: the undefined political theology that characterizes much of current evangelical thought, the rise of political disengagement, and the influence of theological positions regarding eschatology and the Kingdom of God. Under the auspices of “responding to CN,” pastors are liable to make some significant missteps if these issues are not first recognized and faced on their own merits. Having clarified them, leaders will be in a better position to wrestle with the various strands of CN.

Note: this paper addresses Christian Nationalism in America and from an American perspective. I cannot speak to the applicability of these insights to the rest of the world.

Theories of Christian Nationalism

CN, as a term, can be traced back to at least the Christian Nationalist Party of the 1940s. However, it reflects an ideology that runs back further, perhaps to the Spanish-American war.  According to Matthew McCollough, it was in that war that “messianic interventionism,” what he sees as a key ingredient to the development of CN and something beyond even the Manifest Destiny of the 19th century, was first embraced as “both Christian duty and providential destiny.” 

The contemporary usage of CN terminology, however, has developed especially within the last ten years. Below I provide a brief survey of several definitions of CN, with the intention of demonstrating just how wide of a spectrum exists within the semantic domain of the term. I have categorized each presentation of CN as either “Negative” (critical of CN) or “Positive” (defensive of CN), and provided my own analysis of each.

Negative Theories

Perry and Whitehead write in their book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States: “Simply put, Christian nationalism is a cultural framework—a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems—that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.”  They understand it as the syncretism of religion with political conservatism, nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the divine sanction of military action. The result is a framework “that blurs distinctions between Christian identity and American identity.”  Three arguments are key to their thesis:

1. The polarization of American discourse is largely a result of CN. (For example, CN—and not “conservative Christianity”—explains the large numbers of conservative Christians who supported Donald Trump despite his moral failures.)
2. CN may be related to theological beliefs, political sympathies, views on race and gender, and so on—but it is not synonymous or reducible to any of those things. It is a distinct phenomenon that must be understood on its own terms.
3. CN does not equal Christianity or evangelicalism, and the former often influences Christian behavior in ways that are opposite to the latter’s legitimate practice.

In Chapter 1, Perry and Whitehead identify four categories of relationship to CN: Rejectors, Resistors, Accommodators, and Ambassadors. (Interestingly, though CN’s Accommodators and Ambassadors are primarily political conservatives, not all of them are. CN is anchored on the right, but it spans the political spectrum.) Chapters 2 through 4 evaluate CN perspectives on power, boundaries, and order.

Analysis: I find Perry and Whitehead’s definition of CN a helpful and, sadly, accurate description of much of what I have personally witnessed in the conservative South since 2016. In many respects, I share their alarm of the idolatrous relationship many Americans have with our nation. Of particular concern is their research which demonstrates the “take America back for God” rhetoric is actually not about pursuing Christian or religious purposes, but is about the retention of political power. We cannot ignore how many Americans see God as a means to partisan, political ends.

That said, I have three criticisms of their book. First, I think at times they clumsily place too much conservative political action under the umbrella of CN. For example, they identify support of the wall on the Mexican border as “xenophobic.” This is a sweeping generalization of motive that dismisses the complexities and severity of the immigration crisis. Second, though CN is partially responsible for the polarization of American discourse, their volume leaves readers with the impression that it is mainly or even entirely responsible. This fails to account for the corrosive and divisive effect that the ideologies of the political left have had on American society, as well. Third, it seems they think that Christians are only to live out their faith as individuals; any attempt by Christians to pursue wider cultural or community change is liable to be charged as CN. In the conclusion to chapter 2, they write: “Christian nationalism mobilizes Americans to take positions on issues and rally behind candidates that will defend their cultural preferences, preserve their political influence, and maintain the “proper” social order.”  Are Christians not to have positions on issues, choose candidates, or have cultural preferences? Does not every American have a vision of some kind of social order? It would seem that Perry and Whitehead are insisting on Christian political disengagement and that anything else amounts to CN. This is a key problem in the discussion about CN, and I address it below.

Dan Partland & Rob Reiner have produced a documentary called God and Country which warns about the rise of Christian Nationalism. Framed from a leftist position, they have similar concerns to Perry and Whitehead and interview the likes of Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Phil Vischer, Russell Moore and David French, all of whom have been vocal in their own streams about the dangers of Christian nationalism. In the film, David French defines CN as:

“A deeply felt emotional connection between the fate of the nation and the fate of the church. So when someone says, “America is in danger,” at the heart level people are also thinking the church is in danger, my faith is in danger, my religious liberties —it’s all a package.”

Phil Vischer says,

“At a very basic level, it’s the belief that America has a very special, God-ordained role in human history. But, here’s the big issue, and it’s a big issue for America: if I have decided that America is irreplaceable in God’s story, has a role to play that only America can play in God’s story, and democracy gets in the way, then democracy has to go.”

Indeed, pointing to the violence of January 6, 2021, the documentary presents CN as comparable to Nazism and a threat to both pluralism and democracy itself. In a podcast interview with Mike Cosper of Christianity Today, Partland and Reiner argue that CN is a movement that is essentially utilitarian, “a political movement that uses an issue, whatever the issue is, to get what you want, and you’re willing to do anything for it. You’ll do it at the point of a gun.”

Analysis: Like Partland and Reiner, I remain horrified at what happened on January 6 and the Christian trappings used in its justification. Many of the clips of “America-first” sermons throughout the documentary are cringe-inducing examples of what Perry and Whitehead have described. (Andrew Whitehead is interviewed in the film.) However, while I also support a broadly pluralistic society (since the gospel fares well in a free market), pluralism is not a transcendental good, which Partland and Reiner seem to think it is. In fact, there is some irony that the documentary presents democracy and pluralism as practically sacred—revealing another kind of syncretism. Furthermore, in the podcast, Reiner goes so far as to say that the teachings of Jesus are essentially identical to what is found in the rest of the world’s religions. They may understand something of CN, but they clearly misunderstand Christianity. I found Trevin Wax’s comments at TGC particularly helpful:

“In the end, these filmmakers are right to spot the danger in a political movement that harnesses and instrumentalizes the Christian faith toward some other end. Unfortunately, they can’t see they’re doing the same thing. They want to harness and instrumentalize the parts of Christianity that resonate with them as a way of bettering society according to their core, left-wing values.”

The fact is, criticisms of CN are not launched from nowhere—it is significant that many come from the political/cultural left, and are therefore fraught with their own biases and blindspots—and in this case, even a profound misunderstanding of what Christianity is.

Heidi Przybyla, an investigative journalist for Politico, has significantly broadened the scope of CN. In an interview on MSNBC, she claimed that anyone who thinks that human rights come from God (rather than the government) is a Christian nationalist—effectively indicting a significant percentage, if not the majority, of Americans in US history. In an article she co-wrote for Politico, warning about Trump’s desire to “infuse” CN into his second term, she criticized how Christians are using natural law: “Natural law is the belief that there are universal rules derived from God that can’t be superseded by government or judges. While it is a core pillar of Catholicism, in recent decades it’s been used to oppose abortion, LGBTQ+ rights and contraception.”

Analysis: The Declaration of Independence unambiguously asserts: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Such ignorance of history and civics, by an investigative journalist no less, should be of concern to all Americans. But the impact on Christianity is significant: now even basic Christian teaching and the application of natural law to long-standing ethical concerns are being labeled as Christian Nationalism. (This also calls into question the viability of the CN terminology, since it now appears that it can mean anything to anyone.)

Positive Theories

Patrick Schreiner wrote an essay for TGC titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Christian Nationalism.” Under the section titled ‘The Good: The Influence of Christianity in American Civil Life,’ Schreiner writes, “For some, Christian Nationalism simply means that Christianity has influenced and should continue to influence the nation.” Though he admits that CN rarely refers to this limited sense, he says of it:

“In the best sense, this form of Christian Nationalism doesn’t attempt to dominate the political process or to make the nation completely Christian but seeks instead to bring change by persuasion. Rather than trying to overthrow the government, adherents advocate their cause by supporting laws, electing candidates, podcasting, writing, and developing think tanks. They won’t force their opinions, but they also won’t back down from arguing for them.”

Analysis: Schreiner’s article is more focused on the Bad and the Ugly of CN, but I include his brief remarks on the Good because they reflect the fluidity of CN’s usage and also demonstrate the tension that exists in competing definitions. What is being described here is a fairly traditional take on Christian civic engagement. Schreiner intends it to be a positive, restrained sense of CN, but what he is describing could be included within the pejorative use of the term by those who see any Christian activism as problematic.

Andrew Torba and Andrew Isker co-wrote Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations. It is a biblical defense of CN, which they define as follows:

Christian Nationalism is loving your neighbor. Who is our neighbor? Our fellow citizens and especially our brothers and sisters in Christ. Loving them means protecting them from foreign interests, alien worldviews, and hostile invaders. Christian Nationalism means placing the interests of your neighbor and your home above the interests of foreigners in foreign nations. This doesn’t mean we neglect foreign nations or do not extend love to them, but rather that we place the interests and worldview of our home above foreign ones. 1 Timothy 5:8 tells us that “if anyone does not provide for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.” Nationalism is about taking care of our neighbors, our families and fellow citizens, lest we deny the faith and be worse than an unbeliever.

Torba and Isker insist they are not guilty of the charges that Perry and Whitehead make of CN. They disavow idolatry of the nation; they state that CN is not limited to any race, nation or culture; they do not believe America is chosen by God as a new Promised Land; and they say that CN is not a “marriage of the gospel with patriotism.”  Nor do they wish to overthrow the government. Rather, “after we have attained enough Christians in our nation, we are obliged to peacefully order our state governments in such a way as to help Christianity grow and flourish in our states without restrictions.”  They also understand the US to be a Union of states, and that the states are actually countries, many of which were founded with state religions. It is not their aim to recreate a 17th-century situation but rather to build a CN movement that is more ecumenical. 

“No longer do Christian Nationalists in America seek to establish official state churches or religions, but rather we seek to reestablish states that recognize Jesus Christ as King, the general Christian faith as the foundation of state government, and state laws that reflect (in every way possible and reasonable) Christian morality and charity.”

The rest of the book goes on to make their case. They insist that America is a Christian nation; they criticize the individualistic piety of low-Church evangelicalism which, they say, downplays the understanding of Christ’s Kingdom and political engagement; they heavily criticize dispensationalism and make the case for an alternative eschatology; they rage against critical race theory, cultural marxism, wokeness, luke-warm Christianity, and more. The book ends with a history of the founding of the American colonies in a defense of seeing the origin of the country as “Christian Nationalist.”

Analysis: I suspect most readers of this paper will be put off by the tone of this book and some of its specific arguments. However, I also suspect that most evangelicals would agree with more of it than they might anticipate (even if reluctantly). Hence Peter Leithart’s assessment that the book is “flawed but generally sound.” My biggest point of disagreement is with the eschatological argument. Though they don’t name their views, their presentation is strongly of the postmillennial flavor (more on this below), and much of their thesis depends on this position. I am not a postmillennial, and so I do not share their conclusions. With Leithart, I also found their distinction between Christianity and Judaism to be too severe.  Given their frustration about how much CN has been mischaracterized in the press, I was disappointed at the lack of graciousness with opposing Christian views and the mischaracterization of some of them, especially in Chapter 6. Though unpersuaded to join their project, I don’t think Torba and Isker are proposing anything particularly controversial given their postmillennialism, and certainly not something that threatens democracy or the witness of the Church.

Stephen Wolfe is the author of the incendiary The Case for Christian Nationalism. (Both his book and Torba/Isker’s came out in 2022.) One of the first to embrace the term, Wolfe offers a positive case for it from a far-right, Reformed perspective. He defines CN as,

“A totality of national action, consisting of civil laws and social customs, conducted by a Christian nation as a Christian nation, in order to procure for itself both earthly and heavenly good in Christ.”

He sees CN as a sub-genus of nationalism and assumes that groups/nations should and will work together for their own common good. He also distinguishes his book as a work of political theory, not political theology. Thus, he assumes a Reformed theological tradition and spends little time in the biblical texts. Wolfe’s arguments are robust and are centered on the nature of man (he engages in theological anthropology and how that shapes social and political life), the nature of civil government (which he argues should enforce both Tables of the 10 Commandments ), and the nature of the magistrate (which he calls The Christian Prince). Furthermore, Wolfe makes a defense of cultural Christianity, he includes a chapter on revolution and one on liberty of conscience, and he offers his analysis of Protestant experience in early America. Many of Wolfe’s conclusions will likely be rejected outright by evangelical readers (e.g. the civil magistrate should have the authority to punish blasphemy and heresy), but it is worth pointing out that his views are rooted in a coherent, historical tradition.

Analysis: Both Neil Shenvi and Kevin DeYoung have written substantial reviews of Wolfe’s book. Given the sophistication of Wolfe’s arguments, I feel somewhat unqualified to write my own and instead will draw on Shenvi and DeYoung’s insights. Both helpfully point out that Wolfe’s book has many strengths that its critics often overlook and, importantly, Wolfe’s presentation of CN is not of the popular variety described by Perry and Whitehead. (For example, of flags in the church building, Wolfe writes, “I’m ambivalent about national flags located inside or outside churches, but national flags should not be displayed in a sanctuary and especially not within sight during worship. The worshipper should see pulpit, table, and font.” )

However, Wolfe’s use of the concepts of “nation” and “ethnicity” are both confusing and problematic. For example, he argues that ethnicity is “your people” and that an ethnic group can be multi-racial. But he goes on to say, “People of different ethnic groups can exercise respect for difference, conduct some routine business with each other, join in inter-ethnic alliances for mutual good, and exercise common humanity (e.g., the good Samaritan), but they cannot have a life together that goes beyond mutual alliance”  [emphasis mine]. Wolfe’s project has been plagued with accusations of kinism, which he exacerbated with some foolish tweets on inter-racial marriage (which he later retracted). But even if we set the tweets aside, Shenvi persuasively shows that Wolfe’s formulation of nations and ethnicities seems to create division, not unity within the church. Indeed, Wolfe says we should become more like non-Westerners: “more exclusive and ethnic-focused.”  This seems to fly in the face of Ephesians 2 and a basic understanding of the gospel’s horizontal, reconciling effects.

Furthermore, in the twitter-sphere, CN has been occasionally connected to ugly forms of physiognomy. In his epilogue, Wolfe contributes to this impression when he writes:

“Christian nationalism should have a strong and austere aesthetic. I was dismayed when I saw the attendees of a recent PCA General Assembly—men in wrinkled, short-sleeve, golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats. We have to do better. Pursue your potential. Lift weights, eat right, and lose the dad bod. We don’t all have to become bodybuilders, but we ought to be men of power and endurance. We cannot achieve our goals with such a flabby aesthetic vision and under the control of modern nutrition. Sneering at this aesthetic vision, which I fully expect to happen, is pure cope. Grace does not destroy T-levels; grace does not perfect testosterone into estrogen. If our opponents want to be fat, have low testosterone, and chug vegetable oil, let them. It won’t be us.”

DeYoung notes that the epilogue, different in tone than the rest of the book, reads like a rant. In paragraphs like the one mentioned above, the gloves seem to come off, and Wolfe’s proposal of CN feels less “magisterially Protestant” and more like an angry, personal vendetta. Much more can be said about Wolfe’s proposal, but ultimately, I join Shenvi and DeYoung in rejecting it.

Synthesizing the Theories

Though more could be said, this should suffice as a survey of some current CN theories. What should become clear is that, though there are definite sides to the debate, they are not exactly lined up directly across from one another. What Perry and Whitehead describe is not what either Torba/Isker or Wolfe embrace. We might label the former “pop-CN” and the latter “classical-CN.” Perhaps these terms are unhelpful—I wish only to distinguish them so that each may be properly evaluated on their own merits. It is my view that the former, where it legitimately exists, is unequivocally syncretistic and idolatrous and therefore should be condemned. (For a more balanced assessment of this kind of CN within the broader ideology of nationalism, and an explanation for why conservative Protestants are uniquely vulnerable to it, I recommend Political Visions and Illusions: A Survey and Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies by David T. Koyzis, in particular Chapter 4, titled “Nationalism: The Jealous God of Nation.” )  Classical-CN, however, must be considered more carefully, for reasons that will be seen below.

Before taking sides in these arguments, three issues must be untangled from the CN discourse to avoid superficial criticisms of CN and misguided uses of the terminology. They are undefined political theology, inconsistent political disengagement, and failures to recognize the theological issues at play, in particular eschatology and the Kingdom of God.

Undefined Political Theology

The first issue that must be separated from CN is the field of political theology. Many Christians are using CN terminology to attack political theologies they fail to understand and/or wrongly assume to be novel ideas rather than historic ones.

Political theology can be understood as “efforts to probe the implications of the church’s beliefs, practices and Scriptures for political, social and/or economic realities.”  Scripture has much to say on how Christians should submit to their governments, but it has virtually nothing to say about how Christians should (or should not) wield power on behalf of the state in a constitutional republic—or a monarchy or any form of government, for that matter. Christian governance was simply not a reality of the NT age. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that Christians have found very different solutions to civic governance throughout the centuries. Since the days of Constantine, there have been nearly endless attempts to properly configure the “church” and the “state” in relationship with one another. Though space prohibits a thorough summary of these ideas, the Reformation yielded significant developments that still heavily influence political theologies today:

● Martin Luther was the father of the “two kingdoms” concept. He believed that God ordained two kingdoms, one sacred (the church) and one secular (the state), each with its own functions. However, only the state has been granted the right to wield the sword.
● John Calvin agreed with Luther that there were two, distinct realms, but believed they should work much closer together, as evidenced in his Protestant city of Geneva. In his three-fold use of the law, the second use is the restraint of society. Thus the state, though incapable of creating inner transformation in the life of the believer, is responsible for enforcing the laws of God.
● The Anabaptists believed that neither the church as an organization nor Christians as individuals should have anything to do with the state apparatus. In their view, military, political, and civic service are all off-limits for Christians.

Since the Reformation, there have been many more proposals, often related to increasingly sophisticated questions about how the church is to relate to culture and society more broadly. H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, though now quite dated, summarized approaches to Christian cultural engagement as follows: Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture. Though this grid has been re-assessed and critiqued many times over, it helpfully illustrates the plurality of ways Christians have understood the relationship between the church and the culture around us.

Fundamentally, most Christians in US history have believed that politics and the mechanism of the state are appropriate means by which Christians may engage with culture and public life. This has been true of both the Christian Right and the Christian Left. Those who are against Christian political activity of any kind are in the definite minority, and this conviction is still largely connected to the Anabaptist movement and voices like John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas.

Unless one is prepared to take the Anabaptist position, the ethical questions related to cultural change, political engagement, and the public sphere are profoundly complicated. What should the relationship of the church and state be? Can Christians utilize the state’s power without being corrupted by it or perpetuating injustice? To what extent should Christians leverage their faith in the public sphere in a pluralistic society? As James Woods has asked, “Is there a Christian case for commitment to the nation?” And as Peter Leithart has asked, “What do we mean by nation?” What is the difference between nationalism and patriotism? And so on. As evangelicals, we have not all wrestled with these questions or attempted to place them in a coherent system. And as we have seen from Perry and Whitehead, the expectation is increasingly that we keep our faith private. (And as Shenvi and DeYoung acknowledge, Wolfe’s proposal, for all its weaknesses, is one of the few that is tied to a historical tradition.) The point is this: any attempt to provide answers to the above questions (which I think we should attempt), or to actually do political theology, is likely to receive the charge of Christian Nationalism from someone.

In Part 5 of Center Church, Tim Keller maps his four, broad models of cultural transformation (Two Kingdoms, Relevance, Counterculturalist and Transformationist) onto a helpful diagram which I have pasted below.  In Chapter 18, titled “Cultural Engagement Through Blended Insights,” Keller dismisses the idea that a “perfect union” of all models is possible; at the end of the day, we need to pin our colors to a mast. But he gives very helpful guidance on how to synthesize convictions, seasons, giftings, and calling as we each develop our own views of how Christ relates to culture, which will then inform how we approach governance and politics.

Finally, the argument I am making here is not for one particular type of political theology. Rather, I am recommending that pastors attempt to formulate their own convictions in this regard. As it stands, “Christian Nationalism” has become an easy pejorative with which to accuse anyone to one’s political right. By developing coherent cultural and political theologies, we can be more judicious in our use of this term and our analysis of those who arrive at different conclusions.

The Rise of Political Disengagement

The rise of political disengagement, or political passivity, has been another key influence on the trajectory of CN conversations. Several likely causes are at play.

Perhaps in response to a perceived union of theological and political conservatism, many evangelicals are increasingly suspicious of political and cultural power. Michael Horton’s 2008 Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church was a classic expression of this unease. His book opens with a reference to a sermon from Presbyterian minister Donald Grey Barnhouse, in which he imagined Satan taking control of cities:

“All of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday…where Christ is not preached.”

What is being described here is “cultural Christianity,” a concept that evangelicals often use negatively in reference to the hypocritical expression of faith.  In some cases, evangelicals have been so concerned with this hypocrisy, that they have even celebrated the end of Christian influence. For example, in 2015 Russell Moore wrote that the days of Bible-belt Christianity were essentially coming to an end, adding, “good riddance to them.” In his view, even things like “traditional family values” become suspect when practiced at large but without a primary motivation of obedience to Christ. This apprehension about cultural Christianity has surely contributed to the evangelical retreat from the public square.

A second cause of evangelical disengagement has been the out-sized influence of James Hunter Davison’s 2010 book To Change the World. Hunter identifies three “paradigms of cultural engagement” that are specific to contemporary, North American Christianity: ‘Defensive Against’ (typical of the fundamentalist conservatism of the Religious Right), ‘Relevance To’ (typical of the liberal mainline Religious Left, progressive evangelicals, the “seeker-sensitive” movement, and the “emerging church” movement), and ‘Purity From’ (typical of neo-Anabaptists, some evangelical conservatives, most Pentecostals and the “new monasticism”).  Following this analysis, Hunter provides his own proposal called ‘Faithful Presence.’ He sees the future of Christian power as “postpolitical” and writes: “It may be that the healthiest course of action for Christians, on this count, is to be silent for a season and learn how to enact their faith in public through acts of shalom rather than to try again to represent it publicly through law, policy, and political mobilization.”  Although Hunter’s ‘Faithful Presence’ has been criticized as “too passive and concessionary,”  his analysis of the other three paradigms has been highly acclaimed, and his work was a major influence on Tim Keller. Through Keller’s ministry, Hunter’s “postpolitical approach” has shaped large swaths of evangelicalism. And despite his claims in the book that ‘Faithful Presence’ does not mean civic privatism, it’s hard to see how it would lead to anything else.

In the wake of these developments and the decline of Christian influence in the West, a question has crystallized: Should Christians use the civic sphere to actively promote a Christian lifestyle amongst people who are not all genuinely Christian? More and more, it seems that pastors and Christian leaders are answering that question in the negative, even when speaking of majority-Christian contexts.  Such an instinct, however, reflects a kind of neo-Anabaptism that is being selectively and inconsistently applied.

For example, I think nearly all Christians would say that the abolitionist movement was an unqualified good—regardless of whether slavery was abolished in obedience to Christ or not. Similarly, we recognize that pornography is destructive to communities and we believe that people will flourish more without it—regardless of whether the refusal of porn is made in God’s honor. And of course, we want both Christians and non-Christians to stop getting abortions, regardless of motive. Yet all of these are rooted in Christian beliefs and are therefore part of what might be called a Christian lifestyle. Without a coherent framework that accounts for how we want laws, culture, and society to be formed, convictions such as these can begin to feel arbitrary. Some political/societal action is celebrated, but other political/societal action is decried as Christian Nationalism. It’s all very ad hoc.

In a recent TGC video on Christian Nationalism (on the whole, an illuminating discussion), one of the exchanges well illustrates the problem I am describing. Bob Thune asks his fellow panelists about how our convictions on God, Christ, and the scriptures should inform our public policy. Andy Davis replies by contrasting how Christ’s Kingdom advances by martyrdom, whereas the kingdoms of the world advance with the sword. Here’s how the dialogue plays out:

Andy: “We seek to persuade. We seek to exemplify godliness. We seek to pray for people and be willing to lay down our lives. The government uses the sword, it’s what it’s designed to do. I’m uncomfortable with the marrying of those two.”

Bob: “But that doesn’t help me much if I’m a Christian who’s running for office or who’s on the school board or who’s on the city council. That’s where the question gets interesting to me: there’s a lot of people in our churches who can keep those two worlds separate, but there’s many who can’t . . . Taking that a step further, Andy, what would you say to someone who does have a responsibility to instantiate public policy in some way?”

Andy: [After a brief anecdote]... “That’s the challenge.”

Unfortunately, Andy is either unwilling or unable to elaborate. And yet, later in the video, he goes on to argue that competence in governance is vital. This dialogue highlights the problem facing evangelical leaders. Our initial responses to the complexities of the public sphere are often avoidant, pietistic, and quasi-Anabaptistic. And yet, contra Anabaptism, we do want at least some Christians to become competent public servants. Our selectively applied political disengagement is sending a confusing set of mixed messages and has created an ethical vacuum that the ambiguous term “Christian Nationalism” is now filling.

Theological Issues

The third area of interest that bears on the CN conversation is explicitly theological: eschatology and the Kingdom of God. We will consider them in turn.

Eschatology

In Reformed Theology, Michael Allen writes:

The real issue involved in the relationship of Christianity and culture, therefore, is the way in which eschatology and salvation relate. How does the redemption brought by Christ play itself out over the course of the plan of God? In what time and at what pace will these things happen?

What Christians believe about the end, and in particular the millennium, will strongly influence what they believe about Christians’ responsibility to change (or not change) culture in the present. In fact, it may be the most important theological belief that shapes one’s positions on political theology and CN.

Postmillennialism, in particular, teaches that Christians are to work for the transformation of society prior to Christ’s return and is generally connected to the Christian theonomy movement. Of the different views of the millennium, it is the most optimistic about cultural engagement, and therefore the most likely to align with proposals like Torba/Isker’s and Stephen Wolfe’s. (Anecdotally, most of the CN advocates I follow on Twitter are postmillennial.) In contrast, premillennialism, and in some cases amillennialism, tend to be more pessimistic about the present age and therefore less optimistic about the change that is possible. In the debates over CN, both pre-mill and post-mill adherents have pointed to these eschatological differences, though they present the issues differently.

Whereas postmillennialism may find a kindred spirit in Stephen Wolfe’s proposal, pop-dispensationalism is often connected to “pop-CN.” Daniel Hummell, author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, observes that “under-theologized, pop-dispensationalism” has spread while “scholarly dispensationalism” has been in rapid decline. Under the influence of figures like John Hagee and Paula White, Christian political activism in the US has been “Pentecostalized.” However, that new activism is not classically dispensational, but heavily modified. It still maintains strong support for Israel, but does so without explicitly theological or properly eschatological underpinnings. It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully explore the evolution of dispensationalism in the US. The point I wish to make here is that the Wolfe/Torba flavor of CN is far more connected to the eschatology of Reformed postmillennialism than dispensationalism, despite appearances to the contrary, while “pop-CN” is loosely connected to a kind of pop-dispensationalism widely prevalent in the US.

The Kingdom of God

Tim Keller observes: “It is evident that one of the main reasons for many of the divergent approaches to cultural engagement—among many aspects of ministry today—is differing views of the nature of the kingdom.”  These differing views are partially a result of exegetical disagreement: what did Jesus mean when he spoke of the Kingdom of God?

RT France believes that the Greek word basileia should be translated as “reign,” “rule,” or “sovereignty” because the modern meaning of “kingdom” unhelpfully suggests a specific place or people group under the control of a king, such as The United Kingdom. It is worth quoting him here at length:

“The kingdom of God” is not making a statement about a “thing” called “the kingdom,” but about God, that he is king. Thus, “the kingdom of God has come near” means “God is taking over as king,” and to “enter the kingdom of God” is to come under his rule, to accept him as king . . . The classical debate among modern theologians as to whether the kingdom of God should be understood as already “realized” in Jesus’ ministry (Dodd) or still wholly future (Schweitzer) can thus be seen as a false trail. It is based on the wrong assumption that “the kingdom of God” denoted a particular time or state of affairs within history. Instead, the term is a dynamic expression for any and every situation in which God is king, his authority exercised, and his will done . . . As long as God continues to allow his world to resist his rule, so long will there be tension and paradox built into the language of the “kingdom of God.”

Based on these insights, a natural question arises: what, then, is the difference between the kingdom and the church? This is perhaps the most difficult of the many challenging questions related to the Kingdom of God. I will present two views.

Geerhardus Vos, in his book, The Teaching of Jesus Concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church, writes of the invisible church:

From what has been said it appears that every view which would keep the kingdom and the church separate as two entirely distinct spheres is not in harmony with the trend of our Lord’s teaching. The church is a form which the kingdom assumes in result of the new stage upon which the Messiahship of Jesus enters with his death and resurrection. So far as extent of membership is concerned, Jesus plainly leads us to identify the invisible church and the kingdom. It is impossible to be in the one without being in the other.

This is not to say no distinctions can be made between the invisible church and the kingdom (indeed, several can ), but Vos insists that the line that marks the boundary of both is regeneration, which corresponds to France’s understanding of the kingdom God.

Of the visible church, we can affirm that it is an expression or manifestation of the invisible kingdom, but it does not constitute the entire thing.  Vos says that whenever any sphere of life (art, science, etc) “comes under the controlling influence of the principle of the divine supremacy and glory, and this outwardly reveals itself, there we can truly say that the kingdom of God has become manifest.”  This means that both the institutional (visible) church and the individual Christian contribute to expressions of the Kingdom.

However, he asserts that Christ never intended that all spheres of life should be subject to the visible church: the church should not control the state. But what if those who control the state are regenerate? Vos continues:

“While it is proper to separate between the visible church and such things as the Christian state, Christian art, Christian science, etc., these things, if they truly belong to the kingdom of God, grow up out of the regenerated life of the invisible church.”

George Ladd presents an alternative view. In A Theology of the New Testament, he writes:

“The Kingdom is primarily the dynamic reign or kingly rule of God, and, derivatively, the sphere in which the rule is experienced. In biblical idiom, the Kingdom is not identified with its subjects. They are the people of God’s rule who enter it, live under it, and are governed by it. The church is the community of the Kingdom but never the Kingdom itself. Jesus’ disciples belong to the Kingdom as the Kingdom belongs to them; but they are not the Kingdom. The Kingdom is the rule of God; the church is a society of women and men.”

He goes on to argue that not only is the church not the Kingdom, the Kingdom creates the church, the church witnesses to the Kingdom, the church is the instrument of the Kingdom, and that the church is the custodian of the Kingdom.

Taking a comprehensive view of the Kingdom, it would seem that it should include more than regenerated souls, unless we are to believe that the non-human part of creation is excluded. If only for this reason, I tend to side with Ladd.

But both theologians make important contributions here. We can agree with Ladd that the church and kingdom are not the same. Confusing them increases the probability that expressions of the kingdom (like Christians in positions of governance) automatically fall within the domain of the church. This is a slippery slope to a conflation of the church and state. But as Ladd acknowledges, neither the Kingdom nor the church can exist without the other.  Since the church is the instrument and custodian of the kingdom, the church and the church alone manifests the Kingdom. Thus, Vos’s point is still critical, that both the institutional church and the individual Christian participate in bringing the Kingdom to bear on the world. Keller makes this observation of Vos’s perspective:

“There is a tendency to see the kingdom as either strictly spiritual and operating within the church or mainly social and operating in the liberation movements out in the world. Vos’s biblical balance will enable us to avoid imbalances in the cultural engagement and missional church debates in particular.”

How we understand the Kingdom will surely influence how we seek to advance it in the public square. In theory, a country led entirely by Christians in accordance with Christian principles would be, in some sense, an expression of the Kingdom. (Thus, the question of whether a nation can be “Christian” is, ultimately, semantic.) I suspect this is something all Christians desire. What it should be called and how it should be pursued are the questions with which we’re grappling.

A final thought on eschatology and the Kingdom of God: as we have already said, “classical CN” is primarily linked to postmillennialism. However, that belief is inextricably linked to a very specific understanding of the Kingdom: “In postmillennial thought, the kingdom of God is viewed as a present reality, here and now, rather than a future, heavenly realm . . . Its growth will be extensive (it will spread throughout the entire world) and intensive (it will become dominant.)”  Much of what Torba and Isker, in particular, argue is based on a theological conviction that the gospel will triumph in this age because the Kingdom is slowly and steadily advancing. Though their views are couched in the language of “Christian Nationalism,” they are mainly advancing the logical conclusions of their theological beliefs.

Conclusion: Toward a More Robust Assessment of Political and Civic Engagement
As I said above, the Christian Nationalism that Perry and Whitehead defined (what I have called “pop-CN”) is deeply problematic. Idolatry is perhaps the gravest sin of the Bible, the “fundamental crime against Yahweh.”  Should God and/or the gospel become means to ends other than God’s own glory, then we know that idolatry of some kind is afoot. We are right to call such things demonic and judge them accordingly.

But I am also suspicious that everywhere the term CN is used, such syncretism has actually occurred. (We may reject the arguments for what I have called “classical CN”—but that does make it synonymous with the popular variant.) I am also nervous that evangelicals are being bullied out of the public square with injudicious accusations of Christian Nationalism. And I am concerned with our inability to articulate coherent strategies of cultural and political engagement.

My recommendation is that evangelical pastors and leaders, especially in the US, should develop their own views on political theology at a principled and foundational level rather than starting with the downstream issues. The rise of the conservative far-right (e.g., Stephen Wolfe) has been possible largely because of the evangelical retreat in these matters.

As a starting point, Brad East has provided a framework that is perhaps more helpful than either Niebuhr’s or Hunter’s for cultural engagement. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, East suggests four ways to interact with culture and points out that they are not mutually exclusive—sometimes we may need to use more than one at the same time. He identifies them as Resistance, Repentance, Reception, and Reform; for fuller descriptions of what he means by these terms, his essay is worth reading in its entirety. However, even the application of these concepts must be founded in some kind of political theology—and indeed it will be, whether that political theology be thoughtfully crafted or ignorantly assumed piecemeal.

It is likely that, within our movement, there is a wide spectrum of ideas and convictions about how Christians should participate in the public sphere and in culture change. Let’s work to determine our own views on these matters and give one another the best possible hearing. Let’s remember that some of our questions are ancient (e.g. the nature of the millennium) while some are quite recent in world history (e.g. how Christians should participate in democratic and constitutional republics).  And let’s also be cautious that we don’t use the term Christian Nationalism as a cheap insult for political views with which we disagree, or perhaps simply don’t understand. On this subject, in particular, we could use less heat and more light.

1) Epistemological failure: the recognition that there are now no objective, knowable truths; that all claims to authoritative knowledge are without foundation; that ‘reason’ as an autonomous capacity independent of presuppositions or free from any vested interests is a fiction.
2) Ethical incoherence: the recognition that we are at ‘the end of the moral interpretation of the world’; that there are no absolute moral or ethical values, but rather that right and wrong, good and evil are, in the end, nothing more than vague constructs tied to social circumstances and emotional states.
3) Existential despair, which denies any intrinsic meaning or ultimate value or purpose to individual or social life.
4) Political annihilation, which manifests itself in a will to obliterate all that obstructs the will to power, a will to bring enemies to nothing, to destroy completely.

Put like this, Hunter adds, there are very few genuine nihilists. So why is nihilism so pervasive in Western culture, and specifically in American political culture? The answer will be familiar to readers of Hunter’s To Change the World: “culture has a life of its own more or less independent of people’s intentions or will, and it is most powerful when the meanings or rules by which people live are taken for granted ... For my purposes, passive nihilism is the net effect of large, institutional dynamics intrinsic to the modern world - its technology, its bureaucracy, its markets, its pluralism, its entertainment - unfolding in the public sphere.”

What Hunter calls “nihilism without nihilists” is exacerbated by the conditions of late modernity: “the profound confusion that derives from the sense of multiple realities and multiple ways of knowing, the relativization of value through pluralism and choice, the absence of authority and with it the sense of meaninglessness in life and history, the diminution of the moral worth of all human beings (though some more than others) through their instrumentalization, and the absence of clear, coherent and common purposes to which individual and collective life might be directed.”

- “a means to power and influence in a world that has rendered average citizens powerless of the conditions of their existence,
- an assertion of distinctiveness in a world that tends to flatten or level all meaningful differences,
- the possibility for meaningful belief and purpose in a world that denies ultimate meaning and renders most beliefs a matter of mere taste,
- an anchor of certainty in a world of contingency,
- a way of belonging in a world that atomizes our existence even as it weakens the ties of local and organic community,
- a heartfelt plea for recognition and the dignity it confers in a world that cares very little for the individual personally and cares for you publicly only insofar as you perform the role that you play, and
- the hope of living a meaningful and significant life, a life that matters, in a world that makes most of us feel our lives are insignificant and inconsequential.

In sum, identity groups are compensatory networks that emerge in response to the dehumanisation endemic to the modern and late modern world.”

All the other sessions are available here.

A big theme I’ve been thinking about has been the greatness and otherness of God. It’s so easy for us to slip into thinking that God is basically just a better version of us. We forget that he is a fundamentally different kind of being; he’s not just a better version of us, but the most perfect version there could be of anything. He’s the creator of all and all else is the created. He’s the infinite, limitless one; we the finite, limited ones.

You might think that focusing on God’s greatness, his otherness and how different he is from us would make him seem more distant and inaccessible. And yet that hasn’t been my experience. It has been recognising and acknowledging God’s greatness and difference that has drawn me closer to him in recent months.

Focussing afresh on who God is, has reminded me of the depths of the wonder of the gospel. The fact it is the limitless creator who has reconciled us to himself through the sending of his Son and his Spirit makes the gospel even more incredible. Far from making God seem distant and inaccessible, recognising God’s greatness emphasises the wonder of the relationship we can now enjoy with him. The greatness of God doesn’t undermine the gospel, it underlines the gospel.

The greatness of God is also an encouragement and comfort. As we face challenges in life, knowing that the God who loves us and has adopted us as his own is a God who is without limits makes a huge difference. Nothing it outside of his control, nothing is too difficult for him, nothing is going to distract him or incapacitate him. He is the God who is in control of all things and yet is controlled by nothing. There is great comfort in recognising the greatness of God.

But my renewed appreciation of who God really is has also made me realise how often the greatness of God is missing. The focus of so many contemporary worship songs is on the impact of the gospel on us – that we are forgiven, free and loved. The same is probably true of much of our teaching. These are wonderful truths and things that we should celebrate and allow to fuel our heartfelt worship, thanksgiving and obedience. But they can also encourage us to look at ourselves. They draw our focus inward rather than upward, to ourselves rather than to God.

On the flip side, how often do we sing of who God is, of his otherness, and of how the gospel not only brings us many blessings but reveals to us the greatness of God? How often is the greatness of God, his total perfection and otherness the focus of our teaching? I suspect many of us who consider these questions will find there’s often an imbalance when we gather as God’s people.

Looking back now, I feel like I’ve been suffering from spiritual anaemia without even realising it. Sometimes it’s only when things begin to become more balanced that we realise how unbalanced they’ve been up until then.

Could such spiritual anaemia be a broader problem? Maybe. We may have lost the greatness of God. But the good news is that the God who is without limit does not change. His greatness hasn’t diminished even if we have failed to behold it. He there’s, the infinite, unchanging, uncreated creator. He’s waiting for us to rediscover who he really is, and as we do, we might just find that as our perception of God gets bigger, our relationship with him gets deeper.

I’d quite appreciate an apology from those who were critical about posts on this blog about the response to covid. The passage of time has demonstrated that, if anything, those posts were too equivocal and cautious. Pastor Sceptic was right. Not getting an apology won’t do me any harm though. It’s not damaging to me. But what of those things that are damaging? What should apology look like then?

One such example of damage is Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. In Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations now!, Michael Banner has written a compelling case for genuine apology to be made. When the idea of reparations for slavery is suggested (as it increasingly is) a number of typical objections arise, as expressed by fellow Cambridge academic Robert Tombs:

Precisely what damage today is to be repaired? Who are the victims now? Who alive in the 2020s is responsible for events in the 1720s? How can the monetary cost of remote harms be reasonably calculated? Would resentment be caused by the imposition of reparations? How damaging might that be to present society and to the relationship between payers and receivers? Could resources be better used to relieve urgent 21st-century needs, rather than to pay the distant heirs of long-dead victims?

These might seem insurmountable arguments but Banner deftly exposes their weaknesses and false presuppositions, as well as providing practical solutions. Previously I would have made similar arguments to Tombs but found myself being persuaded by the force of Banner’s reasoning.

Banner sees a biblical case for reparations in the example of Zacchaeus who paid back four-fold those he had wronged. This is an interesting case as at no point in the narrative does Zacchaeus articulate an apology: it is his actions that speak louder than words and Jesus commends him for it. Banner describes this as an example of ‘moral repair’ – it is an action that makes amends for past wrongs – and says that the UK should engage in similar action with the Caribbean nations.

Of course, in the case of Zacchaeus it his personal sin of which he repents and for which he makes restitution. How might this work in the case of the UK and Caribbean? I, personally, haven’t enslaved anyone and the UK as a whole has been opposed to slavery for the past two centuries. So in what way could or should we make apology for something not personally connected to us? Is this actually a mistaken view of the nature and purpose of repentance?

In response, Banner shows how the shame of slavery is ‘mine’ because Britain is ‘mine’.

To take pride in something is to suppose that, on account of it, I gain prestige, worth, and standing; conversely to feel shame regarding something is, in certain cases at least, to think that it somehow detracts from that prestige or standing. And these negative appraisals, like the positive ones, are appraisals of the self, so just as there needs to be some connection between me and the something of which I am proud, so too here. You probably couldn’t make much sense of my saying I feel ashamed of, let’s say, Russian atrocities in the Ukraine, since these are not ‘mine’ in any way you (or I) could fathom.

That, to me, seems to be a key ‘aha!’ insight. Contemporary Britons are not responsible for slavery, but its reality is part of our national story: it is ours. It is something of which we can rightly feel ashamed just as we can rightly feel pride in the abolitionists who fought against it. This means we can own the sins of our fathers while not being personally guilty of them. Banner illustrates this with the example of a stolen bike. Were I to discover that a bike I possessed in good faith had been stolen I wouldn’t be considered guilty for its theft. But I would have a responsibility to return it.

In the case of the Caribbean nations, clearly there was great harm done: the horrors of the middle-passage, the unspeakable nature of slavery on the plantations, and the extreme injustices that followed emancipation. Banner argues that these harms are evident, the consequences ongoing, and that we have a responsibility to make reparation. That reparation should include genuine apology – an owning of our fathers’ sins – and it should include financial restitution. Banner suggests linking this to the £20 million that was paid to slave owners as compensation when slavery was abolished. An equivalent sum (which he calculates at being somewhere between £105–£250 billion in today’s money) would be meaningful, and costly, but measured against total GDP (Banner says this is ‘about £20,000 billion’; the actual figure is £2.274 trillion - one less ‘0’ makes a significant difference!) not ruinous.

Banner recognises that at present making such reparations falls into the ‘ain’t never going to happen’ category, but is hopeful that might change. Afterall, there was a time when the abolition of slavery was in that same category.

Initially sceptical, I found myself increasingly persuaded of the rightness of the cause Banner espouses, and of the solutions he offers. (I have to declare an interest here as twenty years ago Michael was course tutor for my MA and very influential in shaping my thinking. Without him I might never have grappled with Augustine and Nietzsche, Vitoria and Marx. This predisposes me to find him convincing.) Some of my scepticism returned, however, towards the end of the book when he explains the actions of two institutions of which he is a member: Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Church of England. Both of these institutions have embarked upon a process of exploration of their historic involvement in slavery, a recognition and ‘owning’ of it, and an attempt to make reparation, including significant financial investment.

Yet this is the point at which the idea of reparations can start to feel somewhat odd – that institutions as liberal and egalitarian as Trinity and the CofE, whatever the actions of their forebears, should feel it necessary to apologise in the way they are doesn’t quite connect.

We also get into the complexities of how to assess those ancient sins in contemporary terms. For example, the Commissioners of the Church of England have committed £100 million in reparations, potentially rising to £1 billion, reflecting the funds they possess originating in the ‘Queen Anne’s Bounty’. This was a fund generated by the South Sea Company, which was active in the slave trade between 1714-1739.

Three hundred years on, though, it isn’t that easy to demonstrate the financial connection and the whole basis of the Commissioners sums has been called into question. As Robert Tombs summarises it, there is evidence that, ‘the Church Commissioners, with loud fanfare, have earmarked an enormous sum in reparations for a sin that was never committed out of profits that were never made.’

Calculating the extent to which the British economy profited overall from slavery is complicated and prone to very different interpretations. And the reality is that each one of us is most probably, somewhere in our family tree, both descended from slaves and slavers, those who opposed slavery and those who profited from it.

Against those realities the case for reparations can start to founder, yet that does not detract from the fact that very real harm was very evidently done to the people who were the victims of slavery. Perhaps, then, we should quibble less about the details and admit our responsibility. Perhaps it is time to say, with much more sincerity, meaning and empathy, I am sorry.

You take the use of particular elements far too seriously. What would you do, for example, in the case of a person with gluten intolerance?

There are occasions when it is perfectly appropriate to make exceptions. The problem comes when people use such valid exceptions to undermine or negate the rule. For example, the fact that some people might be physically incapable of kneeling does not excuse the rest of us from doing so.

What about people with allergies to wine or former alcoholics?

In the case of allergies to wine, it is worth pointing out that the allergy is generally to something other than the alcohol. In such instances I would suggest that it is probably best to serve an alcoholic, rather than a non-alcoholic, substitute. In the case of recovering alcoholics, much depends on the particular case. The vast majority of arguments against the use of wine in communion on account of alcoholism are utterly without foundation. Most former alcoholics can drink wine in communion without any problem. Even if a church chooses to provide a non-alcoholic substitute they should do so for that individual alone. Everyone else should be served alcoholic wine.

Those with scruples about the use of wine should not be catered for. If they won’t accept wine, then they will just have to go without. People with unscriptural scruples should not be encouraged in their errors. Unless there are strong individual reasons why a substitute is necessary, no choice should be offered. Those who unbiblical scruples should certainly not be permitted to hold the rest of the church hostage to their uninformed consciences. Besides, it really is not for the servant to decide what is served at his Master’s table.

The Scriptures are quite undogmatic about the type of bread that we use for the celebration of the Eucharist; doesn’t this suggest that we shouldn’t be that dogmatic about the use of wine?

The Scripture may be undogmatic about the type of bread that is used (although some would dispute that claim), but it makes clear that it must be bread. Likewise, we have considerable freedom in our choice of wine. We can celebrate according to the biblical pattern using red or white wine, sweet or dry wine, regular or fortified wine. It really is up to us. However, we are taught by Scripture to use wine, rather than anything else.

White wine?!

Why not? In a number of traditions, white wine has often been used for the celebration of the Eucharist. This is certainly not a novel or entirely unusual practice. The symbolism of the element does not rest primarily on the colour of the wine that is used. Many believe that the whole symbolism of the wine rests upon its being dark or reddish in colour, making it look like blood. On this basis they can justify replacing the wine with other dark or reddish liquids. I have attended churches where Ribena has been used in the celebration of the Supper. However, in Scripture the significance of the use of wine rests on details such as its being the fruit of the vine and being alcoholic.

Red wine is probably slightly to be preferred over white wine on account of its colour. However, this detail really is an adiaphoron. One benefit of using white wine would be that it would have the effect of shocking us out of unhelpful ways of viewing the sacrament. It is not there to be looked at, but to be drunk. The wine is not there to be a mere ‘picture’ of Christ’s blood, but to be received by faith as the gift of Christ’s blood itself.

Christ may have employed wine in His institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. However, He also almost certainly used unleavened bread. Why make an issue about wine and not about the use of unleavened bread?

First, the type of leaven used in the ancient world was different from our yeast. Unless we use sourdough, our bread is technically unleavened.

Second, the Eucharist is not merely the fulfilment of the Passover ceremony, nor, in the NT, is it merely based on the Last Supper. Oscar Cullmann has argued, for example, that the Eucharist was seen by many within the earliest Church as some sort of continuation of the post-resurrection meals and was not merely based on the Last Supper.

Third, the use of leavened or unleavened bread has been a matter of heated debate in the past in Church history, principally between the Eastern and Western Church in the eleventh century. The Eastern Church used leavened bread, while the Western Church tended to use unleavened.

Fourth, leaven is not neutral in symbolism. The Scripture speaks of purging out old leaven to celebrate the feast, drawing on the pattern of the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Exodus 12:15-20; cf. 1 Corinthians 5:6-8). On account of this and the negative symbolic sense that leaven tends to have within the NT (Matthew 16:6, 11-12; Luke 12:1; Galatians 5:9), many have insisted that the Supper must be celebrated without it.

However, leaven is not purely a symbol of evil. At the Feast of Pentecost new leaven was used (Leviticus 23:17). Old leaven is cut off; new leaven is introduced. Jesus uses leaven as a positive image in one of His parables of the kingdom (Luke 13:20-21). Leaven symbolizes the hidden spread of the kingdom of God and its message. At Pentecost the new leaven of the Spirit was introduced. We are to cut off the old leaven of malice and wickedness and introduce the new leaven of the Spirit. The use of leavened bread highlights one dimension of biblical imagery, the use of unleavened another. There may be good reasons for using leavened bread on one occasion and using unleavened on another.

The use of leaven is an adiaphoron for good theological reasons. Such reasons are not present in the case of wine.

Your argument from scriptural symbolism notwithstanding, the Scriptures that God has given us nowhere explicitly teach that alcoholic wine must be used. In light of this, how can you say that the use of grape juice — which is clearly the ‘fruit of the vine’ — is against God’s instructions?

God has not just given us the Scriptures; He has also given us intelligence. God does not insult the intelligence that He has given to us by spelling out explicitly that which is clear to any careful reader.

As James Jordan has remarked, a good servant is attentive to the slightest gesture of his master. Only a bad servant needs to have explicit commands in order to do his master’s bidding. Only an evil servant seeks loopholes in the explicit commands of his master in order to avoid doing that which he knows deep down is his master’s will. If we truly are good servants we will immediately pick up on the fact that God wants alcoholic wine on his table and will act accordingly.

Should a common cup be used? Should individual cups be avoided?

I don’t think that the Scripture presents us with as clear an argument for the use of a common cup as many believe. I suggest that this is another adiaphoron. I am not even sure that there was a common cup at the Last Supper. There were a series of cups of wine drunk as part of the Passover celebration and it is possible that, rather than passing one cup around, the ‘cup’ referred to the particular serving of wine that they were about to drink as part of the celebration. The ‘cup’ would perhaps function like the way that a toast does in our celebrations. Each individual would have an individual cup. Passing around individual cups and drinking at the same time might therefore be closer to the original celebration.

What do you think about the practice of intinction?

The biblical pattern for the Eucharistic rite is really quite simple. Intinction is a practice that breaks with this biblical pattern. Intinction is also more unhygienic than the use of the common cup, a practice that many express health concerns about. The fact that high church Christians often follow this practice means nothing. High church Christians frequently get liturgy wrong and are not the pattern that we should be following.

What size should portions be?

Again this is an adiaphoron. However, I think that portions should ideally be a lot more substantial than they are in most churches. We are eating a meal. A larger hunk, rather than a miniscule morsel of bread would be nice. Also a larger glass of wine would help us to recognize that the Eucharist is not primarily about ideas, but about joy and celebration in the kingdom of God.

In your post you claimed that wine is a drink that is dangerous and that it takes maturity to partake in such a celebratory meal. How does this impact the arguments for paedocommunion?

Wine is dangerous and must be handled with maturity. This is a significant dimension of the symbolism. The Table of the Lord is a place of wisdom and not the table of fools (Proverbs 9:1-6). Young children are trained in wisdom by being taught to treat wine appropriately at the table of wisdom. The supervision of older and wiser persons ensures that young children do not learn to drink as fools drink. The wisdom and maturity that the table speaks of is not an individualistic matter, but something that is true of the congregation as a whole.

I am currently in a church that only serves grape juice. I am deeply troubled by this practice. What should I do?

Important as these things are, we need to beware of causing unnecessary division over them. God is gracious and does not judge us as harshly as we tend to judge each other. I can understand why this would be a difficult and sensitive issue for a pastor of a church to work through or a member of a church to live with. Even if you want to reform the church’s practice, you don’t want the sort of reform that tarries for no one. Reform needs to be taken slowly, in order to avoid unnecessarily alienating people. Reform is important and, if we are obedient we should be working towards it. However, there is a sort of unloving and impatient reform that actually causes great damage, despite its noble intentions. God gives us time to grow out of old practices and does not force us to change completely overnight (witness the significant overlap of the old and new covenants, for instance).

There are occasions when a strong line needs to be taken. Those who want the church to capitulate to their unscriptural scruples should not be pandered to. Although we must be patient and gracious in reform, we must also be persistent. We may reach a point where some people must be resisted, even if this results in their leaving for another church.

The reform that I primarily have in mind here is a gradually phasing out of the use of grape juice. In a church that resists the use of wine altogether, the issue may need to be addressed more forcefully. It is one thing to resist the use of wine for yourself. It is quite another to resist its being served to others.

The common practice of celebrating the Supper with grape juice or some other form of substitute for alcoholic wine is, to my mind, a serious departure from the biblical pattern. In the old covenant there were many different rites, each with detailed instructions. God expected His people to be faithful to His command and celebrate these rites precisely as commanded. Any departure from the instituted pattern was regarded as a very serious error.

It seems to me that many evangelicals have relegated this precise God, who expects to be obeyed in the details, to the OT when it comes to the practice of the Lord’s Supper. Even some conservative churches, who loudly proclaim their adherence to the ‘regulative principle’, tamper with the menu of the Eucharist. God has only given us a few simple new covenant rites and yet many churches seem determined to play fast and loose with His instructions.

What shocks me is that fundamentalist Christians are generally the worst offenders on this point. Fundamentalists, who are the most adept at ramming the Bible down people’s throats, are often the ones who treat the Bible with least concern when it runs counter to their prejudices. People who will loudly denounce anyone who holds to anything other than full submersion as the proper mode of Baptism will happily celebrate communion with Ribena. Whilst there are occasions when compromise might be appropriate (legitimate compromise does not, I believe, stretch to Ribena), in the vast majority of cases it is merely an unbiblical intolerance of alcohol that causes people to compromise. They nullify the Word of God by their tradition.

What’s the Supper all about?

At this stage some people might argue that I am missing the whole point. To insist on the use of alcoholic wine is to misunderstand the purpose of the Supper. The Supper is essentially about knowing communion in our individual hearts with God, as we meditate on what Jesus did at the cross. The outward elements of bread and wine are little more than pictures that help to draw our attention to the body and blood of Christ.

What such people forget is that the Supper is an inescapably physical ritual and cannot be reduced to a mere linguistic or mental reality. Without the elements there is no Supper. Without the physical act of eating and drinking of the elements in the assembly of God’s people there is no Supper. The danger inherent in many lowgrade forms of eucharistic theology is to reduce everything to the sursum corda. However, Jesus instructed us to ‘do this’, not ‘theologize about this’, ‘look at this’ or even ‘meditate on this’. That which He instructed us to ‘do’ was to eat bread and drink wine. The physical elements and the physical act of eating and drinking are absolutely essential. The Supper is primarily a public event and not merely a time of private communion with Jesus.

We should also recognize that, as many leading liturgical and biblical scholars have observed, the ‘remembrance’ that we are called to is not primarily the private and subjective bringing to mind of a past event, but a public memorializing (much as the Passover functioned in Israel). We should also avoid over-psychologizing the call for self-examination and discernment of the body.

A related, but more important, objection is that the Supper is inescapably public and ecclesial. The Supper is about communion, and not just communion with Jesus in the privacy of the human heart. The Supper constitutes the Church as one body. ‘Private communion’, quite apart from being somewhat oxymoronic, is patently unbiblical. The fact that it is, to all intents and purposes, practiced in many churches where people partake as if the Supper is just a ‘me and Jesus’ meal is extremely worrying and shows how far the eucharistic doctrine of many evangelicals has departed from the biblical pattern.

The Supper is only the Supper when it is performed by the Church of Jesus Christ. The Bible does not teach a merely functional ecclesiology, but presents us with a visible Church outside of whose walls there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. In 1 Corinthians 11 it is interesting to observe the manner in which Paul speaks of the ‘body’ of Christ. One verse He speaks of the sacramental body of Christ (the bread as Christ’s body); shortly after he speaks of Christ’s historical body (the body crucified for us); later he speaks of the ecclesial body (the body as the Church). Only by maintaining the close relationship between the three aspects of the body of Christ can we protect the Supper from the Scylla of becoming a mere mnemonic device (as it has become in a lowgrade evangelical form) and the Charybdis of becoming an extrinsic miracle (as in some extreme forms of transubstantiation).

The Supper is a memorializing meal that is celebrated by the assembled church and not a mere picture for individuals to meditate on. Consequently, the physical elements that constitute this meal are very important.

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

By arguing for the validity of grape juice in the Supper, evangelicals have greatly reduced the significance of the Lord’s Supper. The Supper celebrated without wine is a radically distorted Supper, a Supper that is at risk of being entirely eviscerated. In many churches today, the Supper has become a time for people to put on funereal countenances and engage in sombre introspection, whilst meditating on how unworthy they are and how much it cost Jesus to pay the price for their sins. Whilst elements of the Supper instituted by our Lord are undoubtedly retained, the true character of the Supper is badly obscured.

Part of the problem is found in the fact that evangelicals often fail to appreciate that the theological meaning of the Supper is embedded in the concrete practice of it.

There is a world of difference between grape juice and wine. If you were arranging an important party and instructed a friend to go and buy some of the finest wine for your celebration, you would be appalled if he returned with cartons of grape juice instead. The character of a celebration can be considerably altered by the type of food and drink that is served.

I am a firm believer in the statement lex orandi, lex credendi. The manner in which we worship has a powerful effect upon our beliefs. If we consistently worship God falsely, we will be moulding our minds to believe in a false God. Arguably nothing is more urgently required in the Church today than a reformation of worship.

Many evangelicals today find it hard to believe in a God who would command His people to celebrate with wine and strong drink in His presence. They find it hard to believe in the God of Scripture (Deuteronomy 14:26). In place of this God they have created a god in their own image—an irascible and judgmental party pooper. This god would have us engage in morbid introspection and look melancholy at His table. This god is reluctant to have us too relaxed in His presence; we might forget that we are unworthy and sinful worms.

The problem is that for all too many evangelicals the Supper is not a joyful feast of memorial of Christ’s great victory over the powers in the assembly of the Church; rather, it is a time for dour individuals to contemplate their personal relationship with Jesus. It can look more like a funeral than a feast.

Stripping away the Symbolism

The phrase ‘fruit of the vine’ should not be read in isolation from the rest of Scripture. Christ’s institution of the Supper takes place against the backdrop of the Passover, OT prophecies of an eschatological feast, tithe feasts, drink offerings, sacrificial meals, images like that of Lady Wisdom’s feast (Proverbs 9:1-6) and an OT network of symbolism in which wine—the sabbath drink—plays a significant role as a symbol of judgment and blessing.

Wine is the drink that brings gladness (Psalm 104:15), wine is the drink of kings (Nehemiah 2:1), wine is forbidden to the priests because their work is not yet done (Leviticus 10:9); wine is also the drink of victors (Genesis 14:18). Wine is something that matures and is produced by man in time. It does not occur naturally.

The choice of wine was not primarily motivated by its colour, but by its place within a network of symbolism (although wine was certainly associated with blood in the OT). Besides, if we are going to rule out anything except the explicit command of Christ in the institution of the Supper we could just as easily celebrate communion with white wine (indeed, the blinkered literalist could celebrate with tomato juice; tomatoes are the fruit of a vine) as the colour is never expressly stipulated. Of course, whilst white wine or some other alcoholic drink would preserve far more of the meaning of the Supper than red grape juice, there are clear reasons to prefer red wine.

Most evangelicals presume that the alcoholic nature of wine is not an important part of the symbolism of the Lord’s Supper. I disagree. The symbolism attached with wine throughout Scripture plays much on its alcoholic quality. Wine is seen as that which distinguishes between fools and wise. Wine is dangerous and demands wisdom, power and maturity to control it properly. Cups of wine are symbols of judgment for this reason and kings are often associated with wine (we see a few cupbearers to kings in the biblical narrative).

Priests were forbidden to drink wine as their work was not yet done. I doubt if they would have been forbidden to drink grape juice. Jesus refused sour wine on the cross, as he had promised that He would not drink of the fruit of the vine until He had finished His priestly work and entered into His kingdom (Matthew 26:29). Grape juice damages this element of the biblical symbolism.

Wine emboldens and this imagery of wine emboldening for battle is used of both God and man in Scripture (Psalm 78:65; Zechariah 9:15). Wine is that which makes hearts glad, leads people to sing and loosens inhibitions. Grape juice does not have quite the same effect, at least in my experience. Wine is the sabbatical drink, the drink of feasting which men take to relax (e.g. Deuteronomy 14:26). It is therefore fitting that wine is associated with the Spirit in certain places in Scripture. Grape juice empties much of this imagery also.

The Bible is full of feasts of wine. Take Esther, for example. Or the eschatological feast in Isaiah 25:6. Or the marriage suppers. Or the victory feasts. Or the tithe feasts. Are we willing to sacrifice all of this biblical imagery associated with the Lord’s Supper on the altar of modern evangelical prejudices concerning alcoholic drink? We cannot exclude alcohol from the Lord’s Supper without losing much of the theological import of the celebration. Having grape juice at the Lord’s Supper is like having a vegetarian substitute at Passover.

New Testament Teaching

In addition to the OT background, I believe that there are certain other things that can be demonstrated from NT teaching. The Lord’s Supper should be more of a joyous feast than a sombre occasion. It is a foretaste of the great Marriage Supper of the Lamb and should, to some degree or other, be celebrated in a manner that brings this truth out. I believe that it is one of those occasions when we are called by God to ‘rejoice’ (like in Deuteronomy 14:26). We should encourage joy.

A further thing that we should encourage is fellowship. The Lord’s Supper is about communion—not just with God but with one another. If we go through the Lord’s Supper with grave faces and fail to fellowship with others, I believe that our celebration is woefully lacking. We are corporately memorializing the great victory of the Son of God over Satan, in which event the community of the Church sees its foundation; how can we not rejoice?

Few will deny that Christ used wine when He instituted the Supper. However, many argue that the wine of those times was considerably weaker, perhaps so diluted as to barely have any alcoholic content at all. Scholars have produced detailed word studies, trying to argue that the references to wine in the old and new testaments can include grape juice.

The persuasive power of such studies lies purely in the mind of those who want to rationalize their unbiblical practices with regard to the Lord’s Supper. It is patently clear in Scripture that wine is alcoholic and the alcoholic quality of wine is central to both its positive and negative uses. Those who focus exclusively on lexical studies often (willfully) lose sight of the fact that wine is given significance by its place within a system of symbolism; extract wine from this setting and its significance diminishes considerably.

I have yet to see someone explain how grape juice ‘makes the heart glad’ in the same way as wine does. Feasts are practically universally celebrated in scripture with some form of alcoholic drink. The fact that drunkenness is reported to have taken place at a number of biblical feasts suggests that, even if their wine was heavily diluted, they were drinking more than mere thimblefuls of it.

We should also remember that God did authorize the use of strong drink alongside wine in the tithe feasts (Deuteronomy 14:26); there is nothing wrong in principle with the use of stronger alcohol in communion.

The Tradition of the Church

Just about every aspect of the Lord’s Supper has been controverted at one point or another. There have been differences within the church on whether the wine should be mixed with water or not, or whether the issue was indifferent. There were differences between the azymites and the prozymites with regard to the kind of bread to be used. There have been differences over the legitimacy of intinction. The list could go on.

Nevertheless, with regard to the use of wine in communion, there has been a clear consensus throughout the church for well over 1800 years. The impetus towards change on this matter did not arise from some new biblical insight, but from cultural prejudices.

Other arguments

Some Christians bring up such passages as Romans 14 as reason for abstaining from wine in communion. There are weaker brothers and sisters who might be caused to stumble if wine were used in communion.

If anyone has a problem with strong alcohol in communion, it can be diluted. Besides, no one drinks enough communion wine to even get tipsy, let alone completely drunk. If a person in a congregation has a problem with the use of alcoholic wine I would suggest that it would be better for them to abstain, rather than change the biblical institution ...

The reference to wine in Romans 14:21 should be read in context. It is paralleled to v.17 and some have taken it as hypothetical. I do not. The instruction takes place within a particular cultural context in which Jews fasted on particular days and those who did not fast and abstain from wine on those days of fasting (cf. Luke 5:33f., 7:33-34) would possibly cause others to stumble in the young church in Rome. That fast days are prominent in Paul’s mind is clear from Romans 14:5-6. The idea that Paul is thinking of relativizing Christ’s institution for the Lord’s Supper is out of the question. We fast in order to prepare for feasts. The friends of the bridegroom cannot fast when the bridegroom is with them. Joyful celebrations of the Supper, using alcoholic wine, reinforce the truth of the Bridegroom’s presence on such occasions ...

Towards Reform

Many will argue that my position is simply impracticable. Members of churches will not accept a Lord’s Supper without a non-alcoholic option. To be absolutely frank, I don’t see that this should be a real issue. The real question is whether God accepts alcohol-free celebrations of the Supper.

I sympathize with the situation faced by leaders of churches who have large numbers of militant teetotalers in their congregations. However, I believe that such people need to be opposed. God does not want us to tinker with His instructions for the sacraments. We should be far more concerned with what God thinks than with what congregations think.

Change on such matters will undoubtedly be painful, but I do not think that we can see it as optional. If churches are more concerned with keeping congregations happy concrete steps will never be taken towards reformation on such controversial issues. Church leaders need to be prepared to bite the bullet on this matter.

The way that we worship has a powerful effect upon the way that we think about God. If we move away from the biblical form of worship we will move away from the biblical picture of God and of where we stand in relationship to Him. Checking downgrades in worship is, in my opinion, far, far more important than many evangelical and Reformed Christians are accustomed to think. The use of non-alcoholic substitutes for wine in the Eucharist represents just such a downgrade.

If there is one thing that Church history has taught us, it is that old habits of worship die very hard. Calvin pointed out about 450 years ago that the Lord’s Supper should be celebrated weekly if we are to follow a more biblical pattern. Countless other theologians have said the same things since. Nevertheless, there is such a powerful inertia in churches that few pastors feel like pushing towards change on these issues. I believe that the leadership of churches needs to be far more proactive in the reformation of worship if we are to get anywhere.

‘If only I was tall and slim with shampoo-advert hair,’ I thought, ‘then I’d be able to find a husband.’ Or maybe it was that I needed to pray more or be more generous or less selfish or…whatever it was.

I recognised this (eventually) as vending-machine Christianity – ‘If I just put the right things in and press the buttons in the right order, God will dispense what I want.’ It wasn’t until this week’s sermon at church, though, that I realised it could go by another name: guilt.

We’re just embarking on a new sermon series on unanswered prayer, based around Pete Grieg’s book God on Mute, and our guest speaker sought to help us reflect on disappointments in prayer in a healthy way.

Guilt wasn’t a word I had come across in this context before, but it made so much sense. Obviously we know that when a tragedy happens it is common for people to think ‘If only I had been there, this might not have happened,’ and to experience guilt in that way. Or, sadly, there can be the ‘Job’s comforters’ who assume guilt on the part of the person they are praying for, insisting that their illness must be due to some unconfessed sin in their lives. But this was not talking about those things. It was focussing on unanswered prayer in any context – in contexts like mine.

It is part of our fallen human condition, the speaker pointed out, that we want someone to blame when things don’t go the way we want. (That statement deserves significant reflection in itself, doesn’t it? It is so obviously true of the world we live in, and has been true ever since Adam claimed, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit…”, but I’d never really considered before that it was a consequence of the fall. But I digress…)

Unanswered – or perhaps we should say ‘ungranted’ – prayer is not immune from this impulse. If God doesn’t give us what we want, someone must be to blame.

Perhaps the most honest and clear-sighted people are those who hold God himself to blame. The Marthas and Marys who say, “If you had been here, this wouldn’t have happened” (John 11). They know God has the power to do anything, and that all outcomes are entirely in his hands, so if he hasn’t healed our relative, or got us the job we wanted, or provided us with a spouse, the fault is entirely with him. We can express this desperate disappointment without compromising our honour and respect for God, as Martha and Mary demonstrate, or we can allow it to eat away at the bedrock of our faith in him, and eventually fall away. Either response, however, recognises God’s sovereignty in the situation.

But then there are those who take the blame on ourselves. We feel guilty that we didn’t do more – that we didn’t pray persistently enough, or work hard enough, or diet well enough. We believe, deep down, that the situation is our fault.

In other words, we think we have – and we want to have – control over the situation, and by extension, the world. We think, in fact, that we are God.

If we feel any sense of guilt over an ungranted prayer, we are saying that the outcome was down to us and not down to God after all. Our prayers weren’t so much requests as commands, and if the robot didn’t process them how we intended, it must have been a programming error on our part. So we punch the buttons harder, or go away and try to fix the things we can control, to see if that makes it work.

The solution, as always, is humility and repentance.

We need to remember that God is God, and can answer our prayers however he likes. We must recognise that he knows best, and his plans are perfect – always and in everything. As a good Father, he will sometimes say no, even to things that seem good to us, and we have to trust him in that.

The final point of the sermon was also very helpful: “It’s not about you.”

That is so hard for us to grasp, as everything else in our world trains us to believe that we are the centre of our own universe, the star of our show. But we’re not. It’s not about you. God’s ways are for your good, but they are not for you. They are for him. For his glory. For his kingdom.

So how can you escape from the feeling of guilt over your ungranted prayers?

• Repent: ask God to forgive you for forgetting that he is God and you are not.
• Rejoice: choose to find your joy and delight in the Lord, and not the gifts you wish he would give you. Praise him until you feel like it.
• Re-focus: look to the needs of others. Love your neighbour.

As you reorient your gaze from yourself to your heavenly Father and his other children, you will find your ungranted prayer shrinking back to its proper perspective. That doesn’t mean pretending not to mourn your lack or loss, or putting a brave face on things. It simply means holding those things in their rightful place, and living without the burden of trying to be God.

 
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*Status update: I am no longer contentedly single, but now contentedly married. See this post for the story. For more on how to learn contentment when living with ungranted prayers, check out my book If Only (written as Jennie Pollock). The sermon recording is available on the TVBF website now.

Second, here’s Freddie deBoer:

If we’re dividing the hours of the day and our mindshare between more and more relationships relative to the past, we’re almost certainly investing less in each individual relationship. Digital substitutions for real-world social engagement reduce the drive to be social but don’t satisfy emotional needs ... I think this created a really powerful trap: this form of interaction superficially satisfied the drive to connect with other people, but that connection was shallow, immaterial, unsatisfying. The human impulse to see other people was dulled without accessing the reinvigorating power of actual human connection.

And third, here’s Jonathan Haidt in his brilliant new book The Anxious Generation:

When everything moved onto smartphones in the early 2010s, both girls and boys experienced a gigantic increase in the number of their social ties and in the time required to service these ties (such as reading and commenting on the posts of acquaintances or maintaining dozens of Snapchat “streaks” with people who are not your closest friends). This explosive growth necessarily caused a decline in the number and depth of close friendships ... This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become.

In order to understand the full significance of the position of deaconess in the early Christian community, one must understand how it relates to the positions of deacon and elder. First, the deaconess was a female deacon. As the Didascalia Apostolorum states, the deaconess, like the deacon, is chosen to work under the bishop as a helper. They are both servants of the community and serve as extensions of the bishop, acting under his direction ...

Like the deacon, the deaconess held a recognised position within the Christian community. Like the deacon, she was not one of the heads of the community but served as an extension of the bishop and elders ... In short, the deaconess can properly be seen as the female position corresponding to both that of elder and deacon. She performed services that both elders and deacons performed. Although the deaconess never bore the authority or independent responsibility of an elder unless caring for an all-female group, she was in certain respects the female elder of the community.

The history and development of the position of deaconess (and widow) in the earl Christian community is complex and uncertain. However, a few key facts stand out clearly. There was a recognised position of leadership for women in the early Christian community, stemming probably from New Testament times, but certainly from within a century afterwards. The deaconess may have performed somewhat different functions at different times and places, but with the widow she performed an important role of leadership in the community, especially among the women, and held an honoured place. The early church did not have an all-male leadership, as has been common in much of the Western church in more recent times.

- Stephen Clark, Man and Woman in Christ, 120-122

Here’s what he means by that: “How does this biblical text—its world of assumptions, attitudes, and application—cut against the grain of what passes for “common sense” in our world? Where’s the encounter or confrontation of this text with worldly ways of thinking and living? Where’s the sharp point of contradiction? Find the edge. The world says one thing; the Bible says another. Don’t stop planning your sermon until the edge is clear.”

Trevin gives an illuminating example of a sermon (of his) on the Lord’s Prayer that lacked the edge. Its early draft was fine; it was true, clear, well-structured and theologically sound. But it wasn’t very interesting. It didn’t say anything that most of the listeners didn’t already know, and nor did it say it in a way that they would find fresh, let alone electrifying. So he rewrote it, looking for the edge. He began with the question: “How does this line cut against the common sense of the world or the current practice of the church?” For example:

- How does praying to our Father expose our overly individualistic understandings of the Christian faith?
- How does the picture of him being in heaven reveal popular misunderstandings of heaven and earth and how they relate?
- What does it mean to pray for God’s name to be hallowed in a world where most people believe the purpose of life is to see one’s own name magnified?
- How does praying for daily bread stand out in a world that prizes independence and self-reliance?

Tim Keller was an expert at this. As Trevin points out, Keller identified five major narratives in our culture that the Scriptures regularly challenge, and regularly incorporated them into his own preaching: (1) rationality, (2) history, (3) society, (4) morality, and (5) identity. But this did not make him—and it should not make us—preachers who rail against the culture while leaving our own idols untouched. Rather, it made him—and it should make us—preachers who allow Scripture to challenge the falsehoods, assumptions and ideologies that percolate throughout our culture, including within our churches, workplaces and homes.

It’s a great piece. Read the whole thing here.

Bach is my thing, but quite apart from the glorious music, sitting in a concert hall with 1,500 other people hearing a 150-strong choir (the excellent Bournemouth Symphony Chorus) belt out these words was certainly a thing:

Praise and thanks let us sing to Christ the King.
Death’s domain for us was broken,
When Hell’s gates He did destroy.

Glorious things shall now be spoken
Here on earth, in hymns of joy.
Then fling wide the gates for the King ever glorious.
The lion of Judah has risen victorious!

The strife is o’er, the battle done;
Now is the Victor’s triumph won;
O let the song of praise be sung.
Alleluya!

Death’s mightiest powers have done their worst,
And Jesus hath his foes dispersed;
Let shouts of praise and joy out-burst.
Alleluya!

Yes! Alleluya! Welcome to the wonder of Easter weekend.

Like the words of Genesis 2:24, these words have a future-oriented character. The incisive formulation of Genesis 3:16 seems to concern the whole complex of the facts that in some way came to light already in the original experience of shame, but were later to become clear in the whole inner experience of “historical” man. The history of human consciousness and human hearts was to confirm repeatedly the words contained in Genesis 3:16. The words spoken at the beginning seem to refer to a particular “reduction” of woman in comparison with man. But there is no reason why one should understand this reduction as social inequality. Rather, the expression, “Your desire shall be for your husband, but he will dominate you,” immediately indicates another form of inequality that woman was to feel as a lack of full unity precisely in the vast context of union with man to which both were called according to Genesis 2:24.

The words of God-Yahweh “Your desire shall be for your husband, but he will dominate you” do not speak only about the moment of union between man and woman, when both unite so as to become one flesh (see Gen 2:24), but they refer to the wide context of relations of conjugal union as a whole, including indirect relations. For the first time the man is here defined as “husband.” In the whole context of the Yahwist narrative, the words of Genesis 3:16 signify above all a breach, a fundamental loss of the primeval community-communion of persons. This communion had been intended to make man and woman mutually happy through the search of a simple and pure union in humanity, through a reciprocal offering of themselves, that is, through the experience of the gift of the person expressed with soul and body, with masculinity and femininity —“flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23) —and finally through the subordination of such a union to the blessing of fruitfulness with “procreation.”

It seems thus that in the words addressed by God-Yahweh to the woman, there is a deeper echo of the shame that both began to experience after the breaking of the original covenant with God. Here we find, moreover, a fuller motivation for such shame. In a manner that is very discreet but nevertheless decipherable and expressive enough, Genesis 3:16 attests how that original beatifying conjugal union of persons was to be deformed in man’s heart by concupiscence. These words are directly addressed to the woman, but they refer to the man, or rather to both together.

…Genesis 3:7 [shows] that in the new situation, after the breaking of the original covenant with God, man and woman did not find themselves united with each other, but rather more divided or even set against each other because of their masculinity and femininity. By highlighting the instinctive impulse that had made them cover their bodies, the biblical account describes at the same time the situation in which man as male or female—before then it was rather male and female—senses himself more estranged from the body as from the source of original union in humanity (“Flesh from my flesh”), and more set against the other precisely on the basis of the body and of sex. This antithesis neither destroys nor excludes the conjugal union willed by the Creator (see Gen 2:24), nor its procreative effects; but it confers on the realization of this union another direction that was to be the one proper to the man of concupiscence. This is precisely what Genesis 3:16 speaks about.

The woman, whose “desire shall be for her husband” (Gen 3:16), and the man, whose response to this desire, as we read, is to “dominate [her],” form without any doubt the same human couple, the same marriage as in Genesis 2:24, even the same community of persons, but nevertheless they are now something different. They are no longer only called to union and unity, but are also threatened by the insatiability of that union and unity, which does not cease to attract man and woman precisely because they are persons, called from eternity to exist “in communion.” In the light of the biblical account, sexual shame has its deep meaning, which is connected precisely with the failure to satisfy the aspiration to realize in the “conjugal union of the body” (see Gen 2:24) the reciprocal communion of persons.

All of this seems to confirm under various aspects that, at the root of the shame in which “historical” man has become a participant, there lies the threefold concupiscence about which 1 John 2:16 speaks: not only the concupiscence of the flesh, but also “the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life.” Does not the expression about “domination” (“he will dominate you”, about which we read in Genesis 3:16, indicate that third form of concupiscence? Does not domination “over” the other—of man over woman—essentially change the structure of communion in interpersonal relations? Does it not transpose into the dimension of this structure something that makes an object out of a human being, an object in some sense concupiscible for the eyes?

These are the questions that spring from reflection about the words of God-Yahweh according to Genesis 3:16. Spoken on the threshold, as it were, of human history after original sin, these words reveal to us not only the external situation of man and woman, but allow us also to penetrate into the interior of the deep mysteries of their hearts.

With unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record. Why?
How did the first generation to raise kids without spanking produce the first generation to declare they never wanted kids of their own? How did kids raised so gently come to believe that they had experienced debilitating childhood trauma? How did kids who received far more psychotherapy than any previous generation plunge into a bottomless well of despair?

It’s an important question and the answer Shrier gives is the title of her book: bad therapy. Her argument (and be prepared, it’s a polemic) is that we have been suckered by a therapeutic worldview: that all our therapeutic parenting, therapy, counselling, and drugs have made things worse, not better. But because we are so enthralled to the worldview our response is to try and solve the problem by adding ever more therapeutic parenting, therapy, counselling, and drugs.

The issues Shrier is grappling with are relevant for us all, not least Christian parents and those in pastoral ministry. The greatest danger that I perceive in the therapeutic worldview is its tendency to drive us towards narcissism. We are too easily too consumed with the self, something the Bible warns us against explicitly (2 Tim 3:1-5).

This curving in on the self is dangerous spiritually, as it turns us away from God. It is also dangerous personally, as the evidence clearly suggests that the more time we spend thinking about ourselves the less happy we become. And it is dangerous to community as, by definition, it prevents us from thinking about the wellbeing of others. Shrier illustrates this last point:

About a year ago, I was on a flight, seated behind an American family of four – two parents and two little girls. Mid-air, the girl who was about eight let out a protracted scream so shrill, my eardrums felt like they’d been pierced by a sharp object.
Her father, red-headed and bearded, a gentle giant, attempted to calm her down. He asked her what was wrong. He inquired about the reason for her anger toward her younger sister. He told the younger one not to pinch or whatever she had done. He urged them to reconcile.
He never once mentioned the other passengers on the plane. He didn’t tell either of those girls that when they cried out, they might be disturbing ninety other people. He never mentioned that we were all sharing this space in the air, and we all had a job to do: be good neighbors for the length of the trip. He never troubled his daughters with thoughts of us.

If you are committed to the therapeutic model of parenting you might find this illustration offensive. It’s a very practical one though, and it applies in churches every Sunday, when an entire congregation have their attention torn from worship and the Word by the child whose parent has failed to teach them to be a good neighbour. (A recent post on the TGC site helpfully explored the pros and cons of gentle parenting.)

A plane, or a congregation, being disturbed by an unboundaried child is one thing; more disturbing is the damage being done to an entire generation by bad therapy. Our relentless expectation is that our children should always be happy, yet all we do to try and achieve this can perversely have the opposite effect:

According to the best research, we have it all backward. If we wanted our kids to be happy, the last thing we would do is to communicate that happiness is the goal. The more vigorously you hunt happiness, the more likely you are to be disappointed. This is true irrespective of the objective conditions of your life.

As Christians we know that true happiness comes when we forget ourselves, not focus on ourselves. It is in the moment of absorbed focus on something outside ourselves – something bigger and better than us – that we feel most complete. This is why it is as we give ourselves in worship to God that we find our greatest joy and integrity. It is when we really ‘lose ourselves’ in wonder at the Saviour and what he has done that we truly find ourselves (Matt 16:25).

The therapeutic worldview takes a different approach from this self-forgetfulness. It calls us to constantly monitor ourselves, to be permanently alert to our feelings and state of happiness, but this tends to make us more anxious and depressed! As one professor of psychiatry told Shrier:

If you track a person’s emotions over the course of a day or even a week happiness is actually a very rare emotion, statistically speaking. Of our sixty-thousand wakeful seconds each day, only a tiny percentage are spent in a state we would call “happy.” Most of the time we are simply “okay” or “fine,” trying to ignore some minor discomfort: feeling a little tired, run down, upset, stressed out, irritated, allergic, or in pain. Regularly prompting someone to reflect on their current state will—if they are being honest—elicit a raft of negative responses.

These negative responses are made worse when we insist that everyone talk about them the whole time. Rather than letting it all hang out, not talking about it might help more. Some repression might actually be better for us.

“Really good trauma-informed work does not mean that you get people to talk about it,” physician and mental health specialist Richard Byng told me. “Quite the opposite.”
Byng helps ex-convicts in Plymouth, England, habituate to life on the outside. Many of these former prisoners endured unspeakable abuse as children and young adults. And yet, Byng says, the solution for them often includes not talking about their traumas.
One of the most significant failings of psychotherapy, Byng says, is its refusal to acknowledge that not everyone is helped by talking about their problems. Many patients, he says, are harmed by it.

Rather than go with the therapeutic flow Shrier urges parents to be parents. Her recommendations for how to do so: Parents are the true experts on their kids, and are in it for the long haul – rather than contracting parenting out to ‘experts’ who have a vested interest in keeping the therapy wheel spinning. Put boundaries in place around behaviour – be authoritative. Don’t allow kids to have smart phones, ‘knowing full well that they are linked to a rise in depression, anxiety, and self-harm’. Allow kids more autonomy – don’t track and monitor and supervise them the whole time: let them create their own play. Don’t put them on medication. Don’t go diagnosis hunting.

The challenge here is that even if you agree with Shrier’s conclusions, it is almost impossible for our solitary actions to make much difference. When the whole world is therapeutically shaped (count up how many times you’ve heard the phrase ‘mental health’ today) taking away your daughter’s iPhone isn’t going to remove her from all the other therapeutic influences that surround her. It’s the water in which we swim.

I’ve been on both sides of this. A couple of my own kids have had extensive therapy for significant mental health issues. I’ve also seen the reality of bad therapy and the harm that has done to people. It’s complicated, but surely, in our churches we have the opportunity to do things differently – and better. It’s not going to be easy but it has to be possible for a Christian community to come to unified resolution about how to handle these things, together.

That would mean things like an agreed level of boundary setting for children (and that parents will be shepherds rather than sheepdogs). It would mean agreed habits around the use of phones (perhaps an annual youth camp at which they are banned – and times when the adults leave them behind too. Who really needs a phone with them in a church service?). It would mean allowing pastors to pastor, and not be relegated to a position of less qualified therapist. It would mean agreeing that the gospel is where we find a better hope and salvation.

Our world has come to believe that ‘therapeutic’ always equals ‘good’ but there is plenty of evidence pointing the other way. If it doesn’t help the kids grow up, then therapy is bad.

Rosaria Butterfield’s latest, Five Lies of our Anti-Christian Age, is a no holds barred evisceration of five contemporary assumptions: Homosexuality is normal; Being a spiritual person is kinder than being a biblical Christian; Feminism is good for the world and the church; Transgenderism is normal; Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back.

Butterfield doesn’t start gently and I imagine many will stumble before making it through the introduction. It is worth persisting though. Her arguments should be engaged with. At every point she is erudite, biblically focussed, and the narrative is cast against the background of what she once was: a feminist lesbian professor of English, who ‘helped create this world’.

The closing anecdote gives a flavour of what Butterfield is doing in this book: seeking to be uncompromising, accepting while not approving, sympathetic rather than empathetic, hospitable, biblical, and faithful. In this story she manages to combine clever apologetics, Kuyperian sphere sovereignty, and tight biblical application. It is worth reproducing in full:

Here at the Butterfields’, the gospel still comes with a house key. Let me give you a recent example.

One Lord’s Day morning, early, during the height of the Covid frenzy in 2021 and directly after vaccine mandates were leveled, I was heading out the side door with my two dogs in tow, Bella the Shih Tzu (50 percent dog, 50 percent stuffed animal), and Sully the goofy three-legged dog (75 percent dog, 25 percent plucky comic relief). My older neighbors Bill and Jason were waiting for me at the end of the driveway, with their elegant poodle Trixie.

Bill jumped right in: “I want to know why you Christians don’t believe in the vaccine! Don’t you believe in loving your neighbor?”

Bill and Jason have been in a homosexual relationship for thirty years. As Bill was talking, Jason was holding his cigarette at the left corner of his mouth so that he had two free hands to adjust Trixie’s halter. After the halter met his approval, he allowed Trixie and Sully their special quality personal-sniffing time.

“Bill, I have a question for you,” I countered.

“Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s during our other pandemic, how come gay men rejected wearing condoms? Didn’t you love your neighbor? Or even your sex partners?”

Jason’s mouth opened like a fish on a line and his cigarette fell to the ground.

It was early, around 6 a.m., and maybe they weren’t expecting the word condom to come out of the pastor’s wife’s mouth. Or sex partners. Or both. Who knows?

Bill exhaled deeply. “I never made the connection. Jay, she’s right. Remember [AIDS activist] Larry Kramer supported condoms but most of us thought he was selling out.” Jason recovered and said, “And Kramer was right. So many more of us would have lived.” He choked a little, cleared his throat, and said, “All the funerals. All the young men in the prime of life. That could have been us, Bill—” his voice trailed off. In hoarse whispers he blurted: “It should have been us.”

We walked in respectful silence until we turned the corner, each lamenting in our own life the toll taken by AIDS.

“Do you want to know why some Christians reject the vaccine and why some gay men rejected condoms? Do you want my opinion?” I offered softly, breaking the silence.
My neighbors nodded.

“Because everyone wants freedom to exercise their conscience. For Christians, that freedom comes from the Bible—”

Jason rebuked me, “Oh, sure, like the Bible has anything to say about vaccines! Or freedom!”

“The Bible has everything to say about freedom as well as making health choices, because the Bible has everything to say about spheres of authority”

“Huh? The Bible?” offered Bill.

“Absolutely. The Bible offers spheres of authority: the family, the church, and the civil government. Health decisions are under the jurisdiction of family. The government has the right to issue taxes but can’t tell the church how to serve the Lord’s Supper. And the church has the authority and responsibility to proclaim the gospel to all the nations, warning people about sin, calling them to repentance, and sharing the good news about eternal salvation through Christ, who covers the sin of his people with his atoning blood. You might miss the whole discussion about spheres of authority if you fail to read the Old Testament, but I believe that the whole Bible is true. The church can’t be the government and the government can’t be the family and—”

“Preach it, sister,” said Jason, a retired public-school teacher. His last years of teaching made him feel more like a social worker than a math specialist. He hated that. Jason loved his job when he could actually teach math and loathed his job when all he could do was plug holes of family neglect.

We were heading back into our neighborhood, and my house was right around the next corner.

“So, gentlemen, you answered your own question. Getting the vaccine or not getting the vaccine, wearing a mask or not wearing a mask - it’s a personal choice, not a sin and not a grace. Some Christians reject the vaccine because they are exercising their biblical authority over their health care over their bodies. Everyone wants freedom, and Christians find their freedom in the Bible. When gay men rejected condoms, that was an exercise in freedom. The question is this: Where does our freedom come from – our personal feelings or something greater? Which freedom is safe, and which is not?”

We stopped at my driveway. Sully and Trixie gave each other one last sniff. We all looked in each other’s eyes with love and care.

“I never know what is going to come out of your mouth,” Bill said.

I decided that morning to take Bill’s comment as a compliment.

“I want to talk more about this,” offered Jason.

“Maybe tonight’s dog walk, we can pick up where we left off?” he asked.

“It’s a plan,” I said.

I hope that story encourages you to read the rest of the book, but don’t say I didn’t warn you: there will be things you don’t like.

Butterfield is a theological conservative, an Orthodox Presbyterian. She believes in male leadership in the church and home; she believes husbands are to lead and wives are to be domestically focussed (a home schooler all the way): ‘husbands lead, protect, and provide, and wives submit, nurture, and keep the home’. She is unapologetic in her takedown of the likes of Preston Sprinkle and Wesley Hill and what she sees as their selling out to the lies of our age. Butterfield is uncompromising. Issues like attending a gay wedding, what pronouns to use, or whether ‘gay Christian’ is a legitimate identity receive short shrift.

But press on…

It’s worth engaging with Butterfield’s distinctions between acceptance and approval, sympathy and empathy. (‘Empathy is dangerous because if the highest form of love is standing in someone else’s shoes, no one is left standing in a place of objective truth. If someone is drowning in a river, jumping in with him may break up his loneliness, but having two drowned people produces an even greater problem.’)

Her claim that, ‘The sin of transgenderism is actually the sin of envy’ is an angle I hadn’t previously considered, and worth considering.

And her own story is remarkable, a truly unlikely conversion.

You might not like it, but you should read it.

The answer is not straightforward.

In her book, The Toxic War on Masculinity, Nancy Pearcey describes two contrasting pieces of evidence on this subject from a US context. On the one hand, she shows that,

Compared to secular men, devout Christian family men who attend church regularly are more loving husbands and more engaged fathers. They have the lowest rates of divorce. And astonishingly, they have the lowest rates of domestic violence of any major group in America. (p.15)

In other words, on average, devout Christian men are better husbands than secular men. She then goes on to show an astonishing contrast:

Surprisingly, research has found that nominal Christian men have the highest rates of divorce and domestic violence – even higher than secular men. (p.15)

Here, ‘nominal’ means a person who identifies as Christian because of their background, but rarely goes to church. The research about such men is tragic and woeful:

They spend less time with their children, either in discipline or in shared activities. Their wives report significantly lower levels of happiness. And their marriages are far less stable. (p.37)

If devout men make the best husbands, then nominal Christian men make the worst. How can we explain that? 

When a man is truly surrendered to Jesus, then he understands his role as head of the home in a radically Christ-centred way. Having authority is in itself neither a good nor bad thing, neither safe nor dangerous in itself. The issue is what you do with that authority. And when a godly man understands his position of responsibility, and then interprets that authority by looking at the example of Jesus, then he seeks to follow that example in the power of the Spirit by laying down his life for his wife and children.

But when a man cherry-picks his theology by embracing male headship, but denying the demands of Christ to die to himself and live a life of surrender, then he becomes dangerous. He’s like a toddler playing with a weapon: He has power but no clue how to use it. In his selfishness and self-centred desires, he ends up abusing his authority and harming those nearest to him. He becomes a brute and a bully, grunting about his God-given rights and privileges, wielding his superior strength and stature to harmful ends, and wreaking destruction in his wake. He reads his Bible ‘through a grid of male superiority and entitlement’ and then manipulates its teaching ‘to justify [his] abusive behaviour’ (p.37).

And this is, in the microcosm of the family, the story of the world. It’s the story of divine power, might, and authority invested in humanity as the pinnacle of creation. Then of that power wielded to the oppression of one another and of the earth itself. But finally, it’s the story of that calling to rule being redeemed in Christ Jesus, the selfless husband of his people, and gracious Lord of his creation. Maranatha! Our Lord, come!

This post first appeared at Grace London.

This reality received further confirmation last week with the government decision that those who lose a baby through miscarriage before 24 weeks can now receive a baby loss certificate. ‘Campaigners said they were “thrilled” that millions of families would finally get the formal acknowledgement that their baby existed.’ Baby.

We are confused about babies though. A recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics makes the case that being pregnant should be viewed in terms of disease. In such a framework language shifts substantially from ‘baby’ to, ‘Like a disease, pregnancy is caused by a pathogen, an external organism invading the host’s body.’

The goal of this is to reframe how pregnant women are regarded and the services they can access:

Pathologising pregnancy could, in fact, lead to better treatment for women. If pregnancy is construed as a disease and access to contraception and abortion as preventive medicine, it puts the provision of these interventions on a different footing. This is not about ‘family planning’ or reproductive autonomy, but about medical need.

This is revealing. We know that babies are babies. We know that they are human. To abort them is at best distasteful, and by all logic a form of murder. Everyone knows that; but in our cultural moment a woman’s reproductive autonomy is considered more significant than that reality. How differently we might feel though if rather than ‘baby’ we think ‘pathogen’.

It’s a clever play, and entirely in-line with other deconstructive linguistic moves: pregnant people; chest-feeding; people who menstruate. Or, as the Bible has it, ‘putting darkness for light and bitter for sweet’ (Is. 5:20).

It won’t wash. Those ‘millions of families’ haven’t been delivered from a pathogen; they know that they have lost a baby.

Keep pointing out the inconsistencies.

Some examples are very practical:

Some reflect mistakes I’ve certainly committed or witnessed:

Some are helpful correctives to what can be unnecessary habits:

Some are more profound:

It’s a different way of thinking about preaching and I found it helpful. Whether you’ve preached thousands of times or are just getting going there will be images here that will challenge and help you. I recommend it!

1) When Moses intervened between two Hebrews fighting one another (2:13), the question in Exodus 2:14, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us?” is reminiscent of the question Joseph’s brothers asked when he recounted his dream in Genesis 37:8, “Are you indeed to reign over us? Or are you indeed to rule over us?”
2) In the same way that the dreams indicated that Joseph’s brothers would bow down to him, the facts that Moses’s mother “saw that he was good” (Exod 2:1), and that he was raised in the pharaoh’s household, point to the conclusion that Moses would be used by the Lord to deliver God’s people.
3) Having been sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers (Gen 37:18–28), Joseph was eventually exalted in the pharaoh’s household and given the daughter of a foreign priest as a wife. Similarly, having been raised in the pharaoh’s household, Moses was rejected by his Hebrew kinsmen (Exod 2:15) and fled to Midian, where he was given the daughter of a foreign priest as a wife.
4) Joseph’s foreign wife bore him sons, to whom he gave meaningful names (41:40–52). Moses’s foreign wife bore him a son, to whom he gave a meaningful name (2:16–22).
5) In the same way that Joseph “was shepherding the flock” (Gen 37:2), Moses “was shepherding the flock” (Exod 3:1).

Matt Anderson, Alastair Roberts and I discuss on Mere Fidelity:

When we gather as churches for a celebration of the gospel, or when we sit together for prayer, or when we pore over the scriptures in a group, we are, in those moments, touching something much deeper than we realise. We are engaged in something more eternal than our marriages since at these moments we’ve stepped out of the rehearsal room and onto the stage.

You see, the thing is – here’s the thing – our fraternity (being brothers and sisters) lasts into eternity; our marriages won’t. To look at our churches you wouldn’t know it, but it’s true. I’ll be a husband to Amy until I die, but I’ll be her brother forever. (To be clear for a moment, Marriage will last into eternity but our marriages won’t. Christ will be married to his bride, the Church, forever.)

Our marriages are meant to be signposts. They’re physical displays of a higher reality, and ‘good’ marriages are judged as such based on how well they reflect the Ultimate Reality to which they point. It’s important that we help people do marriage well since marriages are windows into the gospel, but once the marriage of Christ and the Church takes place, all husbands and wives will retire their roles and take off the ‘costume’ of marriage, but remain as members of the Church, Christ’s bride.

When Jesus was confronted by the scribes with a trick and a trap, he challenged his interrogators, the Bible experts of his day, by exposing how little they understood their Bibles…

‘Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven”’ (Matthew 22:29).

The scribes’ question assumes the continuation of human marriage, and it’s a question that reveals how little they’ve reflected on God’s eternal plan. They haven’t meditated long enough on the deeper storylines of Scripture: on Yahweh’s love for his people and on the meaning of marriage. It’s classic ‘You’ve missed the woods for the trees!’

In heaven, your spouse won’t be your spouse, but they will be your brother or your sister, and so for that matter will the person you sit next to during the sermon, or knock arms with in worship, or do rota swaps with. Taking it further still, that person you’re married to, or that child you’re raising to adulthood, or parent for whom you’re arranging social care, they may be your spouse/child/aging parent now, but they’ll primarily be your brother or sister for eternity.

True as all this may be (and I think it is), you often wouldn’t know it if you looked at our churches or scanned our leadership team photos or listened to our sermons or saw how often we platform married people over unmarried ones. How many times have I seen a husband and wife duo host a church gathering or heard of a pastor’s wife running the women’s ministry? How often do we overlook unmarried people or insist on a married woman leading a ministry with her husband? Of course, none of those things are necessarily problems by themselves, but it’s their ubiquity and the unspoken assumptions that are the problem.

So, what should we do about it? Here are seven suggestions for how and why we might rethink some common church practices.

1. Mind your language. Our words make worlds since they create the cultures we inhabit. I hear often from our platforms ‘This is my wife…’ or ‘Let me introduce my friend…’ and whilst not being a problem by itself, I noticed a difference by contrast whilst attending a conference in the Middle East. It struck me how often those from the Middle East welcomed one another with ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ and how often the preachers addressed the room as ‘brothers and sisters’. This elevates our fraternal relationships and emphasises our family connection. As a related point, I can see how this kind of language also changes the nature of our interactions online. Addressing someone as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ (on Twitter/X, say) ensures I write to them respectfully and with honour. The language of siblings is also a valuable safeguard in the prevention of unbiblical hierarchies. (Jesus’ prohibition against calling one another ‘rabbi’ may be instructive here.)
2. Purity is promoted. As men and women, we are all too easily drawn toward trading insults and objectifying one another which leads to suspicion and mistrust. How often do women feel themselves treated like radioactive material, too dangerous to get close to? How often have men felt depressed by wandering thoughts they wish they could control but can’t? Cultures that have been mindful of the dangers that sexual attraction creates respond by erecting fences of separation that keep unmarried adults away from each other. But Scripture’s answer is different: ‘Treat younger women as sisters in absolute purity’ (1 Timothy 5:2). Emphasising our fraternity brings with it a code of conduct that’s based on honour and trust, but that also has clear barriers that mustn’t be violated. It allows for affection for sure, but it also allows for conflict (what siblings do you know who don’t fight?), reconciliation, and partnership. A consequence of this, of course, is that women will be safer in churches. In general, men feel a duty of protection for the women in their lives which means that not only would they resist objectifying their sisters, they are also more inclined to act with their safety and protection in mind. Note, however, that we are ‘brothers and sisters’ not ‘fathers and daughters’. This is an important distinction to bear in mind to avoid unhealthy paternalism.
3. Seating plans matter. We’re creatures of habit and are also drawn toward comfort. In a crowded room with unfamiliar people, we’re anxious and seek reassurance. Often the easiest way to do this is to sit with the people we know best of all: our nuclear family. But by placing a biblical emphasis on the church as family we find a seat of reassurance and safety next to almost any brother and sister we know. This goes beyond simply ‘including’ unmarried people and gets to the heart of who we actually are. In our houses we ‘have a go’ at family, but on Sundays we practise the real thing, the eternal family. Sit with your spouse on Sundays if you want, but you don’t need to. The same goes for training our children in worship. Imagine a community who understood that on Sundays it’s the job of the whole to help out. When a family arrives for worship, they should be able to sigh with relief because the church will ‘take it from here’. An older brother will encourage your son to sit with them in worship or a younger sibling will follow your toddler around the hall for a while.
4. Singleness is stupid. The word, not the experience. No one is called to singleness. Chastity perhaps, celibacy even, but not singleness. We are not singles and couples, we are family members and we must preserve ways of interaction that emphasise our relationships rather than treating us as atomised individuals bouncing around from one experience of connection to another. Think about the events you run and who they’re for. I used to love putting on men’s events: ‘Hog & Grog’, ‘Beer & Deer’; you name it (and I love naming things!), we ran it as a church! But the trouble I’ve come to see with some gendered events like these is that they define us in terms that aren’t embedded in our relationships. Dads’ nights or mums’ events or sisterhoods and bands of brothers help much more with this.
5. Visibility and partnership problems. No doubt we’re all aware of the positive impact that representation has. Who we put on our platforms highlights what we believe, and what gets ‘celebrated’ in this manner is often the thing that gets replicated in the church. This is as true with our relationship status as it is with our cultural and social demographic. Do unmarried people get much public honour in your church? I don’t mean do you clap them or embarrass them publicly with gifts or compliments, but are they on platforms (where they are literally elevated)? When partnership in ministry is required are spouses preferred to unmarried people for the sake of convenience and neatness? What about your website? Do you profile the man but picture his wife as proof of, what, his fidelity?! Celebrate brothers and sisters not only husbands and wives.
6. Care for and train co-workers as well as elders. In a society like ours many people are bemused or offended by the New Testament’s male-only eldership structure and have concluded that we need to move beyond how the early Church (and the Church through history) structured themselves to a structure that better communicates our anthropology. Partly this is due to our overuse of unbiblical terms like ‘senior leader’ and partly it’s due to practices that have under-utilised (and at times even devalued) the gifts God has given to some of our brothers and sisters who aren’t elders; gifts that are essential for the family’s health. Notice also how little we know of or even hear of elders in the New Testament: in fact, we don’t know any elders (besides the apostle John) by name. Instead, we read about many people (men and women) whom Paul describes as ‘co-workers’. Elevated among and by the early Church (and naming someone publicly does elevate them) are servants: people known not for their office of ministry but for their service in the church. This naming/honouring is perhaps also them applying Jesus’s declaration: the servant shall be the greatest (Matthew 23:11). Our practice is different to the New Testament’s. We elevate and name elders as leaders (a term that doesn’t imply relationship), often at the expense of terms more embedded in social networks. The ‘co’ of ‘co-workers’ makes relationship essential. As much as we equate elders with fathers, the term traditionally speaks of a position of hierarchy and authority more than an individual enmeshed in social ties. It’s important that we care for elders (a whole other article), since elders carry burdens and take hits for the church, but so do workers, grafters, and servants. Emphasising our fraternal bonds also unlocks for us the importance of providing proper profile, pastoral support and power to non-elders, people who may not be our pastors, but who are our siblings. And let’s notice that ‘pastors’ also will cease but siblings won’t.
7. Family loyalty matters. I’m aware of how quickly things can turn ‘heavy’ when a leader uses the church ‘family’ language to manipulate people into allegiance and loyalty, but don’t miss why that abuse is possible. It’s possible because most people are loyal people and, even in a digitised and fragmented society like ours, we still recognise the claim that family has on us. By stressing the family (or even ‘extended family’) component of church life we help people feel rooted and at home, which actually serves to stabilise identity anxiety. Of course, it’s not enough to use words like ‘family’; we have to breakdown what that means for people, and with multiple cultures and expectations around what family should be, it’s going to require us to be patient and adaptable.

In light of all this I want to appeal to you brothers and sisters, in view of the manifold wisdom of God on display in the Church – a wisdom displayed in the uniting of Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female – to not be conformed to the pattern of this age that couples-up, idolises sex, and retreats into domestic huddles. Rather let your churches be transformed by allowing the eschaton to renew your life and leadership, and in so doing let us all prove the good, acceptable and perfect will of God. Viva la resistance!

Amen

Jez Field is an elder at Life Church Seaford and host of the New Ground Life and Leadership podcast.