Given the impacts of lockdown it is extraordinary that it has been so effectively erased from the national narrative. There are no headlines on the BBC website commemorating the date and analysing the consequences of the decision. There is endless comment and speculation about the measures Rachel Reeves may or may not introduce in the forthcoming budget, but barely a nod to how our current financial predicament is linked to lockdown. The amnesia is really quite weird.

November the fifth has long been a date to remember. Sadly, now rather overtaken by the nonsense of Halloween, November fifth is a key date in our national history. Even if people are shaky on the details, Guy Fawkes and the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament are part of our story.

Stories matter. They locate us in space and time, giving a sense of identity and defining culture. (Which is why the flags have the significance they do.)

The people of God have stories that help locate who we are, where we have come from, and what our mission is. If we are to know these things we need to know the stories. Amnesia about scripture and church history leaves us scrabbling to understand who we are and what our purpose is.

In his excellent book on the role of the Holy Spirit in the ministry of Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Philip Eveson highlights the significance ‘the doctor’ placed on knowing our story. For instance, the 1859 revival loomed large in Lloyd-Jones’ thinking and was seen by him as,

Similar to the supernatural activity of God at the river Jordan, when Israel crossed over dry-shod into the land of Canaan. Telling future generations of what happened in Church History was like answering the question ‘What mean these stones?’, stones which God had commanded to be taken from the middle of Jordan and set up in Gilgal (Josh. 4:21-24). He taught his congregation the importance of monuments and reminders of the great things God has done and that Christians are called to consider historical facts, ‘significant and miraculous facts.’

We see another example of this intentional memory in the longest prayer in the Bible, that of Nehemiah 9. In this prayer the Levites bring to memory the ‘stones’ of God’s acting among them: His work as creator, the covenant with Abraham, the story of the Exodus, the conquest of the land, and God’s constant forgiving of His peoples frequent rebellion. It is these memorial stones that provide a sense of identity, the certainty of hope, and the scope of mission for God’s people. These stones are our story too. We need to know the Bible story. We need to know church history. We need memorial stones to help guide our steps into the future. We should not forget.

Six days after Guy Fawkes Day comes Armistice Day: Lest we forget. The slogan stands as a warning – forgetfulness is not simply failing to remember; it is losing a part of who we are. Forgetting lockdown makes it harder to understand our current social woes and more likely we will repeat the mistakes of 2020. Forgetting Guy Fawkes separates us from our national identity and culture. Forgetting the memorial stones of scripture’s story and church history leaves us blowing in the wind of every kind of teaching and deceitful scheming.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November.

“Remember me, O my God, concerning this, and do not wipe out my good deeds which I have done for the house of my God and for his service.” (13:14)

“Remember this also in my favour, O my God, and spare me according to the greatness of your steadfast love.” (13:22)

“Remember them, O my God, because they have desecrated the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites.” (13:29)

“Remember me, O my God, for good.” (13:31)

Does this indicate a spiritual decline in Nehemiah’s life? Has success gone to his head? Have the numerous confrontations with recalcitrant Israelites - some of which, famously, involving beating people and pulling out their hair (13:25) - fostered a degree of self-righteousness in this great leader?

D. A. Carson wonders about this in God’s Word, Our Story: Learning From the Book of Nehemiah. Here are his reasons, and even if he turns out to be wrong, his punchline is well worth heeding:

Why doesn’t this book end up with: “Remember, O Lord, so to work within us by your power according to your covenantal mercies, that we will again revere your name”? Why do we get this repeated refrain in this chapter: “Remember me, Lord, because I’ve done quite a lot of work. I’ve done a pretty good job. I mean, they failed, Remember them, too, for the bad things they’ve done. But remember me for the good things I’ve done”? In other words, this feels like a kind of spiritual declension, a slightly disappointing focus on self, with overtones of self-exoneration.

That might be too harsh. Doubtless God will pronounce his own verdict on the last day; he will sort this one out ...

There are some people who are used by God to bring along the church of the living God in some wonderfully powerful ways for a period of time, but who end up, late in life, destroying what they build. This may happen for a lot of reasons. Some people get cranky. They discover at 75 that they cannot do what they did at 45, and they resent the younger folk who are following them. Wittingly or otherwise, they begin to destroy what they built.

It’s a wise challenge.

Coming to terms with the significance of world events is almost impossible in real time. We’re limited by our emotions, our hopes and fears, our awareness of what’s taking place, the outsize narrative-shaping influence of those in power, and our ignorance of the future consequences—and those limitations mean that it can take years for a considered judgment to be possible. That’s why people love to quote the former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who was asked in 1972 about the effects of the uprising in France four years earlier and replied, “Too early to say.” Quite right. Cold takes are better than hot takes.

So it’s fascinating that the last 12 months have seen the release of two books that, in different ways, try to make sense of the social and cultural upheavals in Western democracies that peaked in the summer of 2020. (The terminology we use for these upheavals is highly contested: depending on who we are and whether we approve of them, we might talk about the rise of social justice, antiracism, identity politics, cancel culture, racial reckoning, intersectionality, the Great Awokening, or something else.)

Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse is a historical and journalistic account of what happened, telling the story of 2008 to 2024 with a focus on the response to George Floyd’s death in 2020. Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite takes a sociological and theoretical approach, defending its provocative thesis using established categories from economics, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy.

There are obvious similarities between the two books. Both are serious-looking hardbacks from prestigious presses (Knopf and Princeton). Both are well-produced, carefully researched, and blurbed by the kinds of people you’d expect: David Brooks, Jonathan Haidt, Tyler Cowen, Yuval Levin. Both are brightly and engagingly written, with an audience of thoughtful nonspecialists in mind. Both criticize many of the developments they describe but are eager to understand rather than merely denounce them. Both, significantly, are written by men of color in their early 40s who are fiercely critical of the populist right and cannot be dismissed as part of a racial backlash. And both are excellent: thoughtful, readable, provocative, and illuminating.

Summer of Our Discontent

Summer of Our Discontent begins on May 25, 2020, with Floyd’s murder. The event is horribly familiar: a white policeman kneeling on the neck of a black man for nine and a half minutes until he asphyxiates, captured on camera and instantly broadcast for the world to see. But Williams frames it in an unfamiliar and important way. “George Floyd was a poor man. That was the most salient fact about his life” (xiv). “George Floyd was not simply or even necessarily killed on account of race . . . his death was very much a function of his being impoverished. He died over a counterfeit banknote the vast majority of black people would never come to possess” (77).

Indeed, Williams argues, it can be helpful to distinguish between two Floyds: the complex real one and the simplified totemic one. “On the one hand, there was the son and the brother, certainly down on his luck that long weekend, unemployed and carrying methamphetamines and fentanyl in his system . . . dozing in a parked car, having passed a counterfeit banknote moments earlier” (4). “On the other hand, there is the immortalized George Floyd, whose death exists in footage, on wretched loop in our brains . . . the idea, simmering for years without reaching a rolling boil, of intransigent black pain and suffocating white supremacy” (5).

Within minutes of his tragic death, the former was almost entirely swallowed by the latter. Within hours, it was being felt and understood in explicitly Christlike ways:

Had Floyd not, in some viscerally apparent way, borne the awful weight of his society’s racial sins on his very own neck and shoulders? And had that weight—all of ours massed and taken together—not in turn crushed him? A man died for us on that squalid pavement, not asking why his father had forsaken him but, shatteringly, calling for his deceased mother. The lethargic executioner . . . had washed his hands of the matter—had buried them deep inside his pockets. (7)

The following days and weeks saw thousands of protests and millions of people come together in what were probably the largest protests against racism in human history. This raises the obvious historical question: Why?

Williams answers by telling the story of the West from 2008 onward, highlighting four key ingredients.

The first was the global financial crash, which caused large numbers of white millennials—already progressive on sexual ethics and wrestling with colonial guilt about the 9/11 wars—to rethink the merits of global capitalism and consider social democratic or Marxist alternatives.

The second was Barack Obama’s presidency, the start of which was hailed at the time in The New York Times as a “national catharsis” and even the end of the American Civil War, but which could never have fulfilled these colossal post-racial expectations, especially when confronted with regular video footage of young black men being killed by law enforcement.

The third was the way in which Donald Trump’s first term radicalized both the right and the left, from the racist march on Charlottesville to the Jussie Smollett debacle, causing both sides to reject basic liberal norms and ushering in a state of exception.

And the fourth ingredient was COVID-19, which—besides fueling fear, enforcing isolation, increasing inequality, and driving people online—created a new menu of issues for people to disagree about: lockdowns, masks, vaccines, lab leaks, and whether or not it was justified to violate social distancing restrictions in the name of antiracist protest.

Few public figures emerge from Williams’s story with much credit. He’s unsparing in his criticism of Trump, as you might expect, for his general mendacity and ignorance in public office through to his specific suggestions of treating COVID-19 with light-based remedies or injecting disinfectants into people.

But in many ways, he’s even more excoriating about the progressive left’s response to that summer’s events. “In the space of two weeks and without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street” (78), he explains. We’re still paying the price for that intellectual incoherence today.

Williams devotes particular attention to the “cult of antiracism” that flourished in 2020—from the conceptual work of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones to the practical outcomes of institutional repentance in Princeton, policing cuts in Minneapolis, forced resignations at The New York Times, and performative antiracism in Portland—culminating in what CNN notoriously called the “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” in Kenosha after the shooting of Jacob Blake in August.

The book then brings us into the present day, with chapters on the worldwide exporting of American antiracism through social media, “cancel culture,” the spectacle of January 6, and the events in Israel and Gaza since October 2023. Williams has no difficulty in showing that our responses to each of them are colored, often profoundly and sometimes literally, by the summer of 2020.

There’s a lot to like about Summer of Our Discontent. Williams is a good storyteller. His narrative blends familiar set-pieces with unfamiliar details; his prose is fluent and occasionally sparkling; and there’s enough humor to compensate for the relentless grimness of the central arc and the unpleasant memories it’ll evoke for most readers.

The main piece that’s missing, however, is hope: hope that this uncomfortable story means something beyond a collective plague on all our houses, hope that things either have improved or are just about to, hope that we’ve learned anything at all from what happened. (In fairness, this tone is what we’d expect from a book with “discontent” in the title and “demise” in the subtitle.)

Some readers will find it therapeutic to relive that summer in the hands of a confident narrator, safe in the knowledge that we’re all still here five years later. I certainly did. Others, though, will crave positivity: signs of change, a way through, a promising case study, an audacious proposal of some sort. They may need to look elsewhere.

We Have Never Been Woke

There’s no shortage of audacity in We Have Never Been Woke. In the face of a consensus that the Western world went through a Great Awokening in the 2010s and early 2020s, whether people celebrate or lament it, Musa al-Gharbi calmly but firmly replies, No, we didn’t.

Some of us pretended to go through a process of awakening or sincerely believed we had. Others fiercely criticized or ridiculed the awakening and all who sailed in her. But in reality, the so-called Great Awokening never took place:

The problem, in short, is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that we’ve never been woke. . . . Symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce and mystify inequalities—often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion. And our sincere commitment to social justice lends an unearned and unfortunate sense of morality to these endeavours. (20)

To make this case, al-Gharbi introduces a few pieces of sociological jargon, the most important of which is Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of “symbolic capital.” We all have resources available to us (or not) on the basis of prestige, recognition, honor, and status within a social hierarchy. This symbolic capital may come from our position, credibility, experience, or trust within a particular organization; it may come from academic credentials, the books we’ve read, the degree we hold, the institution we studied at, or the expertise we claim; or it may be cultural in nature, deriving from our speech, clothing, manners, tastes, opinions, terminology, and so forth.

This is vital to understand because “wokeness has become a key source of cultural capital among contemporary elites” (26). One of the main ways in which cultural elites signal their high status, and identify the status of others, is through the positions they hold on issues of race, sexuality, gender, disability, and identity, and the language they use to express them.

Progressive views on issues like these signal high status in polite society, particularly if they’re expressed with the right terminology. But they usually make little practical difference to those they purport to represent and frequently function in self-serving and status-reinforcing ways. “As a result of these tendencies, symbolic capitalists and the institutions they dominate may seem much more woke than they actually are” (36).

Examples of this disparity between appearance and reality abound. Sexually, people who claim to believe that “trans women are women” don’t act that way when it comes to their dating and marriage decisions. Economically, while the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 sounded like a grassroots protest against inequality, it was overwhelmingly driven by well-paid graduates in symbolic economy hubs who were generally globalization’s winners, not losers. Racially, those who gain the most from the recent surge in corporate and academic DEI programs aren’t poorer employees or students but the professionals who hold the “social justice sinecures” that teach them (107–110).

Environmentally, the most progressive urban areas in America see less new housing, more aggressive policing, and greater inequality than elsewhere. Romantically, the people who most disparage “traditional families” are among the most likely to have come from such families themselves and to form such families of their own. Financially, affluent progressives give less of their income away to charity than rural, suburban, and religiously motivated conservatives, and their charitable giving is less likely to go to poorer communities.

Everywhere you look, symbolic capitalists are claiming to speak for the poor and marginalized while actually reaping most of the benefits themselves. Consequently, “nonelites would be well advised to ignore what symbolic capitalists say and look at what we do instead” (170).

Having said that, We Have Never Been Woke isn’t a tirade against progressivism. There’s plenty of posturing and hypocrisy to be exposed, not least in the chapter on totemic capitalism and competitive victimhood. But al-Gharbi doesn’t descend into partisan ranting, preferring to explain rather than to harangue.

He’s clear, for example, that he’s a symbolic capitalist himself, and recognizes that the anti-woke are just as prone to flexing and symbolic posturing as the woke. He considers the similarities between the four periods of “awokening” in the last hundred years—in the 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s, and the 2010s—and highlights several parallels, which demonstrate that the last decade or so isn’t as unprecedented as we think.

Most importantly, he takes performative wokeness seriously as a sociological phenomenon and seeks to account for it. After introducing the phenomenon of “elite overproduction” (99–103), whereby we educate more graduates than we have jobs for and this causes resentment, he moves on to analyze the emergence of the “creative class” (134–46), and continues right through to the development of “luxury beliefs” (which signal status to the rich but ultimately hurt the poor) and “moral licensing” (in which we hold certain positions to insure us against accusations of racism), tying them together coherently (270–95).

His tone is nuanced throughout, and his argument is supported by empirical research and quantitative data rather than anecdotes, undergirded by a hundred pages of references.

Yet his argument is so clear that this doesn’t involve excessive throat-clearing or punch-pulling. Here’s an excellent example on critical race theory:

Let’s be frank here: the ideas and frameworks associated with what opponents label “CRT” are demonstrably not the language of the disadvantaged and the dispossessed. These aren’t the discourses of the ghetto, the trailer park, the hollowed-out suburb, the postindustrial town, or the global slum. Instead, they’re ideas embraced primarily by highly educated and relatively well-off whites, reflecting an unholy mélange of the therapeutic language of psychology and medicine, the interventionism of journalists and activists, the tedious technicality of law and bureaucracy, and the pseudo-radical Gnosticism of the modern humanities. It is symbolic capitalist discourse, through and through. (274)

This combination of serious research, lucid prose, and tight argumentation characterizes the whole book and makes it a joy to read.

Implications

Neither Williams nor al-Gharbi offers solutions as such. Their purpose is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But of the two, al-Gharbi comes closer to pointing a way forward, or offering what I referred to previously as hope.

Some of this comes from the books’ respective endings. Where the afterword in Summer of Our Discontent considers the October 7 Hamas attacks and their aftermath, which creates the impression of a permanent doom-loop, the conclusion of We Have Never Been Woke suggests a number of avenues for further study that hint at future possibilities. Some of this difference derives from the time frame. Williams is telling a 15-year story, whereas al-Gharbi is describing a 100-year cycle of which the most recent iteration is just one example. That gives both writer and reader much-needed perspective on a turbulent decade.

And some, it seems to me, comes from the implied anthropology. Summer of Our Discontent describes events that happened to us, on our behalf, in which we as readers were observers at best. We’re watching things unfold passively, with minimal agency of our own; our primary role in remembering is to shake our heads in disbelief at what happened in the corridors of power in Washington, Minneapolis, or The New York Times.

The central figure of We Have Never Been Woke, by contrast, is us. We’re al-Gharbi’s symbolic capitalists, or we wouldn’t be reading a book like this—and a moment’s thought will reveal that we’re characterized by many of the same hypocrisies, status games, and moral inconsistencies. And because both writer and reader are in the same predicament, we can internalize and reflect on al-Gharbi’s implied challenge: Where have we become performative in our activism and self-serving in our moral logic? How, if at all, are we expressing our stated ideals in genuine relationships with those in need around us? Who are they? Are we being careful not to perform our acts of righteousness before men? Or have we received our reward in full?

With five years of hindsight, there’s clearly a widespread sense that the social upheavals that peaked in 2020 went too far. The years since the pandemic have seen a significant pendulum swing in the opposite direction on issues ranging from woke capitalism and cancel culture to unconscious bias training and trans rights. The mood in politics and on social media has shifted substantially in many Western nations.

But there’s another sense in which they didn’t go far enough. Many racial injustices were left largely unaddressed by the mass outpouring of performative wokeness. Many of the changes that did result were cosmetic and served only to enhance the position of more affluent, educated, and privileged groups within society. Many of our poorer and less advantaged citizens are still waiting for a genuine awakening to come. Many of our churches are just as segregated as they were in 2019.

Neither of these books will solve those problems on its own. But both of them, and al-Gharbi’s in particular, have the capacity to challenge and inform us by reframing the narrative of that turbulent year—as long as we read them with a spirit of humility (“Is it I, Lord?”) rather than smugness (“I thank you, Lord, that I am not like that symbolic capitalist over there”). Vibes have shifted many times before. They will again. And thoughtful cold takes on the last one can help us wisely respond to the next one.

This article originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition.

I got up one Saturday morning when I was in the tenth grade. I sharpened my No. 2 pencils and walked down to the high school for the PSAT - the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, which determines National Merit Scholarships. Taking the first section, as the administrator repeatedly called out the time, I was right on schedule. When we had one minute left, I was answering the last question of that section, number 70. But as I looked down, ready to fill in my circle for that question, I saw that it was already filled in on my Scantron sheet.

I started going back over the filled-in circles in a panic. Where had I skipped? As the administrator called ‘Time!’, I found out that I had skipped the answer line of the third question. So I grabbed my sharp pencils and walked home without even bothering to take the other two parts of the test ...

We can be really smart. We can know lots of stuff. We can know all the right answers. But they will all be in the wrong place if the fear of God is not in the first place. It is foundational.

Here are five passages that stood out to me:

Married and single Christians have a different speciality focus. The married Christian specialises in pointing us towards the gloriously intimate relationship which the church will enjoy with Christ forever. The unmarried Christian specialises in pointing us towards the gloriously intimate relationships we will enjoy with one another within the church forever. We are complementary—rather than competing—co-specialists in eternity. (22)

When we carefully analyse the original text of [Matthew 19:1-12] we arrive at an unexpected, but I think inevitable, conclusion. The self-made eunuch is not a metaphor for the disciple who chooses never to marry for the sake of the kingdom, but for the divorced disciple who chooses not to remarry because of their obedience to the kingdom. (82)

In my early thirties, I twice signed up for online dating. Both times, I selected a dating platform that was geared towards Christians … However, both times, I only lasted a few weeks before I realised I needed to delete my profile and sign out. Why? Because I had found myself compulsively logging in to check if I had any new matches … Online dating made it much, much harder for me to see my singleness as anything other than something to escape from. (96)

Yes, the Reformers rightly sought to correct corrupted institutional celibacy and rediscover marriage as a good part of this creation. But in trying to make more of “mundane” marriage and less of “heroic” celibacy, the Reformers ended up making far too much of sex. They overcorrected. And we have inherited that legacy. (123)

In [1 Corinthians 7:9], Paul is not raising a theoretical situation that may or may not be relevant. No. He is specifically addressing certain individuals, namely unmarried Corinthian Christians who are actively committing sexual immorality … Paul is not saying that if an unmarried Christian doesn’t think they are cut out for long-term singleness, they are under a moral responsibility to get married. Rather, he is actively calling out unmarried Christians who are not currently exercising self-control … In its context, the verse is saying that it’s good to remain unmarried unless you are enjoying the “perks” of marriage without the actual being married part. It is better to choose marriage than to choose to remain tangled up in sexual sin. (145)

It’s a great book.

In our culture, jealousy is almost always portrayed as a bad thing. “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy,” says Iago to Othello in Shakespeare’s play. “It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.” Or think of the chorus of Mr. Brightside by The Killers, with its wails against “jealousy, turning saints into the sea, swimming through sick lullabies, choking on your alibis.” Many even use the word—wrongly, I think—to describe the seething resentment that rival siblings might feel over each other’s toys.

In this context, proclaiming God’s jealousy can feel like an embarrassing reminder of the overweening pettiness of Bronze Age religion. A jealous God? How primitive! This awkwardness leaves noticeable gaps in our worship services and our private spiritual lives. When was the last time you sang a song praising God for being jealous? When did you last hear a sermon on the subject? When did you last mention it in prayer?

Yet God’s jealousy is integral to the way Scripture describes him. It appears in the Ten Commandments: “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God” (Ex. 20:5). It is revealed as part of God’s name: “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (34:14). It is repeated several times in Deuteronomy, and it undergirds the theology of Ezekiel, Nahum, and Zechariah in particular. There is no getting away from it.

Here is the problem. In modern English, most people do not distinguish between jealousy and envy. The two words sound identical. Yet in reality they are near opposites. Envy is a fierce desire for something that rightly belongs to someone else. In Scripture, we see it exposed as a disorder-sowing (James 3:16), bone-rotting (Prov. 14:30), Christ-killing (Matt. 27:18) work of the flesh. Jealousy, by contrast, is a fierce desire for something that rightly belongs to you. Envy is when you want to sleep with someone else’s husband or wife. Jealousy is when you don’t want anyone else to sleep with yours.

When we grasp that, we can see why a perfectly faithful lover would feel jealous when jilted by a loved one. In fact, no other response would be fitting. If I did not feel jealous about someone else having an affair with my wife or taking my children from me, I would only be showing how little I loved them.

The point is much sharper when we consider things from God’s perspective. Having taken the Israelites out of Egypt and carried them through the wilderness, how could he greet his people building idols and worshiping foreign gods with anything but fierce jealousy? That is how lovers react when they are betrayed—and the greater the love, the greater the betrayal and the greater the jealousy.

This is personal for Moses in Deuteronomy 4. He has experienced the consequences of God’s jealousy for Israel: “The Lord was angry with me because of you, and he solemnly swore that I would not cross the Jordan. … I will die in this land” (vv. 21–22). But he is not bitter. Rather, he urges the people to learn from his experience. “Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you; do not make for yourselves an idol” (v. 23), because “the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (v. 24).

Happily, Moses’s sermon does not end there. Granted, it immediately mentions the possibility—later a reality—that Israel may provoke God’s jealousy by falling into idolatry after settling in the land (v. 25) and face destruction and exile as a result (vv. 26–27). But then comes hope. If, after all this has happened, Israel comes to its senses in the pigsty of exile and seeks the Lord, then “you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul” (v. 29).

This is a prophecy, not a mere possibility (v. 30). Because, besides being a jealous God, “the Lord your God is a merciful God” (v. 31). His jealousy brings judgment, but his mercy brings restoration. His jealousy will take his people into exile, and his mercy will bring them back again. And ultimately, the consuming fire of God’s jealousy and the overflowing waters of his mercy will meet at the cross.

This article originally appeared at Christianity Today

So it is not surprising that an awful lot of books have been written on the subject. There are books on happy habits, brains, diets and chemicals; books on happy families, philosophies and religions; books on the science of happiness, the sociology of happiness, the theology of happiness and the history of happiness; books on how you can be happy if you really want to be, and books on how you will actually be happier if you stop trying to be. In such a flooded landscape of ideas, anyone releasing a new book on the subject - which I will be next year, with the title Happiness: What It Is, Where To Find It, And How To Make It Last Forever - had better explain themselves.

The book is an attempt to bring together three types of writing on happiness. All three types have influenced me in important ways, but they are almost always kept separate from one another. The first type is biblical and pastoral, in which the case is made from Scripture that God is happy and wants us to find our highest joy in him. The second type is theological and philosophical, and mounts an argument for considering happiness as the result of living a virtuous, loving and good life, in dialogue with Christian theologians and ancient and modern philosophers. The third type is psychological and sociological, full of studies and charts and all kinds of practical recommendations on how to live a happier life. The second and especially the third types often have bright yellow covers. The first type never does. 

Some writers combine two of these three genres. C. S. Lewis, who wrote about joy in most of his books, bridges the first and the second. Jonathan Haidt is an influential example of someone who blends the second and the third. But I am seeking to integrate all three. I am convinced we can learn from pastors, theologians, philosophers and psychologists on the subject of joy—and that some of our greatest thinkers, from Paul to Augustine to Pascal to Lewis, were comfortable wearing any of these various hats if the situation required it. I have also found it both intriguing and encouraging to discover how often the best thinkers in each category are saying very similar things.

Structurally, the book is organized around six questions: why, what, who, when, where and how. I start by considering why enjoyment is possible, rooted in what Scripture says about the character and purposes of God (chapter one). Then I explore what happiness actually is, and how the wide range of words we use for it overlap and differ from one another (chapter two), before looking at who we are, and how our bodies, souls, natures, minds, emotions and brains collaborate—or not—in our desire to rejoice (chapter three). In the next two chapters I think about the when and the where of enjoyment, drawing from Ecclesiastes and the Psalms in particular to reflect on how happiness relates first to time (chapter four), and then to space (chapter five). I finish in chapter six with the very practical question that most people are asking: how we can actually rejoice in the Lord, live the good life, and experience joy.

It will be out next summer, published by Crossway. Enjoy.

About the only conservative character portrayed sympathetically in the show is Ainsley Hayes, a young Republican lawyer (and she only appears in twelve of the 154 episodes). Here she is debating her boss over that touchstone of left-right disagreement: gun control.

Sam Seaborn: It’s not about personal freedom, and it certainly has nothing to do with public safety. It’s just that some people like guns.

Ainsley Hayes: Yes, they do. But you know what’s more insidious than that? Your gun control position doesn’t have anything to do with public safety, and it’s certainly not about personal freedom. It’s about you don’t like people who do like guns. You don’t like the people. Think about that, the next time you make a joke about the South.

You don’t like the people. How often is that the underlying reason for the political (or theological) positions we hold?

Last week Andrew posed the question, “What does the flag say?” Another way to phrase that question is, “Do you like the people who fly those flags?” And that feels the deeper question as it gets closer to the root of our responses to the flags. If I don’t like a particular flag being flown what about the person who put it up – how do I feel about them?

A friend who ministers in an area of Birmingham close to the origin point of the campaign to fly the St George’s flag, raises helpful points around this. His perspective: that as well as affirming the concerns and fears many may have at the flags going up, we also need to do better at affirming the legitimate concerns and fears of those putting them up. This probably isn’t easy to do for those of us who live in areas where there are few flags flying. The reality is that we don’t often have to mingle with those in areas where flags are abundant. And we probably don’t often have to deal with the issues these people are concerned about.

Here are the concerns my friend observes in his community – some of which are specifically related to Birmingham:

Freedom of speech/expression, arrests for online comments, grooming gangs, unlawfulness, radical Islam/Islamists, desire for sharia law, potential islamophobia laws, the currently predicted demographic flip, illegal and mass immigration, rising living costs, bankruptcy of the council, lack of bin collection, LGBTQ+ agenda/ideology, and the difference between how the council seems to have reacted to the raising of Palestinian and English/British flags.

Any of these issues can make for uncomfortable conversations – the kinds of discussions that polite middle-class society would rather avoid. It is far easier to dismiss the people who have these concerns as racist, or irredeemably right-wing, or ‘deplorables’.

Which brings us back to Ainsley Hayes’ argument with Sam Seaborn: not liking guns is one thing, but not liking the people who like them is quite another. So, do you like the people? If we don’t, it might not be the flags that are the real issue.

Photo by balesstudio on Unsplash
   

In March 2022, Ukrainian flags appeared all over my neighbourhood. Some of them may have been raised by Ukrainian refugees arriving in the area, as many did in the opening months of the war. But most were raised by British people wanting to express solidarity with Ukraine. They were unfurled on flagpoles, hung out of windows and on lamp posts, and stuck in car windows. The ambiguity was minimal. The flags said “We stand with Ukraine,” and “Putin must be stopped,” and “Bullies cannot annex other people’s countries,” and “Ukrainian refugees welcome here.” During the England-Ukraine match at Wembley Stadium in early 2023, they even said, “We don’t really mind if we lose this one, because we stand with you (and will probably qualify anyway).”

Three years later I was in Birmingham, driving down a long street in which every single lamppost was flying a Palestinian flag. What did those flags say? A range of things, I imagine. For many they were exact equivalents of the Ukrainian flag: “We stand with Gaza.” “Palestinians welcome here.” “We grieve the deaths of innocent children.” But reading the posters and graffiti in the area alongside the flags, it was clear that for some people—and it is hard to say how many—they said more than that, from “Stop the genocide” to “Britain should not support Zionism” or even “Israel should not exist.” Flags speak, but they speak ambiguously. Needless to say, the message that a Jewish person would hear on driving down that street is different to the message that I heard, which may well be different again from the message that many of the residents intended.

Two months after that, I went for lunch with my wife in a local café that was festooned with Pride flags. I don’t mean that there was one in the window, or a notice about Pride month; I mean that there was rainbow bunting across the entrance, a large rainbow flag on the way in, and rainbow coloured streamers on every table. What did those flags say? To the proprietor, they may well have said no more than “LGBTQ people welcome here,” or “Pride month gives us a chance to make this place more colourful.” But they communicated more than that to me. They also said, “We support unlimited sexual freedom,” and “Bigots (including evangelical pastors like you) are not welcome here,” and “If you believe in traditional marriage, you might want to have lunch somewhere else.” And it said those things to me whether the proprietor—or interior decorator—intended anything of the sort.

So what does a St George’s Cross say? It depends. During the World Cup there is no ambiguity: it means, “I am cheering for England rather than Germany / Argentina / Brazil.” During a coronation or royal jubilee it means, “I love my country and am grateful to live here” (and possibly also “I am hazy on the difference between England and Britain”). But what about when it appears on flagpoles and bridges all over the country one August, as if from nowhere? Does it mean something different if it appears at the same time as a major protest against migrant hotels? Or when hung alongside banners saying “Stop the boats”? Or when waved on a march at which Tommy Robinson is speaking? Would my decision to hang a St George’s Cross in my front window today say something different to my neighbours than it would have during the last World Cup? Even if my convictions are exactly the same now as they were then?

Of course it would. Flags speak. And they do so in a context that is much broader than the intention of the person who flies them. I cannot possibly know the motivations of all the people who have flown St George’s Crosses in the last few weeks—I suspect they range from the respectfully patriotic (“I love living in England”) to the politically pointed (“uncontrolled migration is a major problem”) to the downright racist (“reclaim England for white people”)—or the proportion of people characterised by each. But to many in this country, especially people of colour, they will be heard to carry an insidious message of chauvinism and white supremacy, even if the person flying it has no such agenda. And I think that is worth considering carefully.

I love England. People who know me at all will have heard me go on about it: castles and pubs, cricket and football, Sussex and London and Yorkshire, rhododendrons and village greens, the industrial revolution and the Royal Navy and the West End and the final scene of Dunkirk. But at this point in time, that flag means more than that to a lot of people, and not in a good way. Many of my brothers and sisters respond to it with apprehension, or fear, and I can see why. It’s worth thinking about.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady.

And here is Musa al-Gharbi riffing on Orwell in his excellent We Have Never Been Woke:

The behaviours of those who profess that ‘trans women are women’ suggest strongly that most do not literally believe that trans women are the same as cisgender women. Proponents who are romantically interested in women typically do not treat these two populations equally as women with respect to their own dating and marriage decisions - not even remotely. Yet these same people, who overwhelmingly fail to behave as though trans and cisgender are equivalent or indistinguishable (that is, who implicitly disagree with the idea that ‘trans women are women’), may nevertheless pillory others who explicitly disagree with the proposition that there is no meaningful difference.

It is the longest and fullest Gospel we have. The two most celebrated of Jesus’s parables are found here and nowhere else. Luke fills his nativity, crucifixion and resurrection accounts with details that are unique to him—Mary and Elizabeth, Pilate and Herod, the road to Emmaus—and his interest in prayer, women, the poor and the Gentiles give even the most familiar passages a distinctive angle. It is theologically rich, narratively compelling, rhetorically masterful and evangelically joyful, as well as being filled with interesting questions and challenging stories.

So from 7th to 9th July 2026, we are going to devote some time to reading, understanding and rejoicing in it. We are delighted to be joined by Dr Peter Williams, the Principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, as our guest speaker. Peter is both a brilliant biblical scholar and a sparkling and engaging communicator, and I can honestly think of nobody in the world I would rather have teaching on the Gospel of Luke. He is also the author of The Surprising Genius of Jesus (2023), a superb study of the teaching of Jesus in particular, and the outstanding Can We Trust the Gospels? (2018), which has been translated into fourteen languages.

The conference will comprise plenary sessions, breakout discussions, meals together, rich times of corporate worship, and time for Q&A. Practically speaking, we will be hosting it at King’s Church London, SE3 9DU, starting at 3.30pm on Tuesday 7th and finishing at lunchtime on Thursday 9th; the cost for the event is £170, which includes lunch and dinner on both days.

What’s not to like? One of the greatest books ever written, taught by a world-class scholar and surrounded by brothers and sisters who want to know, apply and delight in God’s word. So come. Take time. Be refreshed. Think.

You can book in here.

Christianity in China grew under the Jesuits and then again in the 19th and 20th centuries when missionaries from Europe, the United States and elsewhere began to travel there to spread the gospel. Fortunes changed, however, with the Chinese Revolution in 1949. For China’s early Communist leaders, Christianity was associated with the ravages of European imperialism and was seen as a clear ideological competitor. Its transnational connections, from the Vatican — where a number of modern popes have condemned Communism — across to America’s West Coast meant that it might readily become a tool of foreign subversion.

Rather than seek to ban Christianity outright, the strategy from the Fifties onwards has been to build ideologically safe, state-sponsored Christian organisations. Protestant Christians were shepherded into a state-sponsored “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (TSPM) — the three selves being self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. Catholics were asked to join a Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). In both cases, links with foreign organisations were banned in favour of a state-directed fusion of Christian with Communist and patriotic ideals. Most foreign missionaries operating in China at the time of the Revolution were thrown out ...

Given these unpromising beginnings for Christianity under Communism, China-watchers were astounded by its rapid growth across the final three decades of the 20th century. In 1949, Protestant Christians accounted for less than 0.2% of the Chinese population — a million people at most. By the mid-Nineties, that figure had risen to 14 million. And that was only registered Protestants. Underground “house churches” were doing spectacular business, raising the overall number of Protestants to somewhere between 60 million and 90 million people. Breathless commentators began to predict big things for Christianity in China. Some claimed that by 2050, Christians might even be in the majority.

That now seems unlikely — and for two reasons.

First, Xi Jinping is a keen student of why the Soviet Union collapsed and some scholars in China regard religion as a factor. It served, they say, as a “sacred banner” under which anti-government elements could unite. It’s no surprise, then, that during Xi’s term in office the regulation of religion in China has tightened. Patriotic religious associations are now overseen by the United Front Work Department, which in turn reports directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. New measures, in 2018, on “Internet Religious Information Services” linked religion to national security and required churches to apply for licenses before sharing religious content online, from live-streaming to micro-blogging. Most registered churches in China are thought to be under some form of electronic surveillance.

Christian organisations have meanwhile been required to re-evaluate their teachings in light of Xi’s push for “Sinicisation”: a fusion of traditional Chinese values and ideas with the CCP’s vision for China’s future. Christmas hasn’t been cancelled, but local governments increasingly seek to steer local businesses away from erecting Christmas displays or selling Christmas-themed commodities.

A second reason why this might not, after all, be a “Christian century” in China is that statistics suggest a slowing-down of the growth rate of Chinese Christianity since the 2000s. Some urban churches are growing, but at the expense of rural Christianity: a consequence of large-scale urban migration in China. Once a rich, inter-generational weave of miracle healings, exorcisms and Spirit-infused worship, many village churches are now said to resemble old people’s homes, that are more sober, full of people in search of meaning through a combination of community and a rational, textual faith.

The reality for Chinese Christianity is that over the next few decades, almost anything might happen. Even if Christian numbers begin to decline, match or run ahead of an overall fall in the country’s population, the lesson from countries like South Korea is that the cultural influence of Christianity can end up mattering more than raw numbers. “Sinicisation” may backfire on the CCP if potent combinations emerge of Christianity and Chinese philosophy: Jesus, Confucius and Mencius forming an ethical dream-team, focused on love, self-sacrifice and prophetic critique of spiritually empty, narrowly growth-focused governance — of the sort with which the CCP’s critics within China charge it. At the same time, those same two traditions, Christian and Confucian, provide the basis for regarding government as God-given and thus profoundly legitimate.

Western culture may play its own modest role in what comes next, serving as it does as a vehicle for Christian values. Christian creations, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Passion of the Christ, are the focus of discussion, where internet restrictions allow or where the use of a VPN permits. China is even home to a number of high-profile “cultural Christian” intellectuals like Liu Xiaofeng, who are capable of taking varying degrees of critical distance from the CCP.

Meanwhile, academics and journalists who study underground Christianity in China — with heavy use of pseudonyms for the people they interview and even the cities where they conduct their research — reveal grassroots churches in rude health. Branches of McDonalds have been used for sessions of the Timothy Training Course, a grassroots discipleship and leadership programme. A different lesson from the course is taught at each plastic table-top, and when the police arrive to round everyone up, they cheerfully sign pledges not to do it again — or, at least, in that particular branch of McDonalds.

The bigger picture is of a country that has upended many of the predictions confidently made about it by Western commentators. It was once expected that market forces would drive political liberalisation in China. Perhaps Xi Jinping enjoys a quiet chuckle about that one, now and again. In a similar way, secularisation theorists once claimed that modernity brings a two-fold decline: first, in the social significance of religion, and then later in its salience for the individual. This hasn’t been borne out in South Korea or in China, where Christianity has grown in tandem with the economy and with urbanisation. Xi no doubt finds this departure from expectations rather less amusing. The battle for China’s soul goes on.

Whatever the causes, it is complicated, and can be a difficult subject to address. As Kathleen Stock observes,

Talking honestly about the explosion of mental health conditions is intimidating, not least because of the numbers of outraged people steaming in to protest about imagined accusations of hypochondria or malingering. Yet, the observation that psychological conditions can ripple across populations like wind through wheat, being especially susceptible to social influences, is compatible with debilitating dysfunction and awful suffering happening at the individual level. There’s no split between “real” mental health disorders and culturally porous ones. The latter — which includes the vast majority of them — are as real as any other. And the suffering they bring feels the same from the inside, no matter what the source.

The suffering is real but the paradox has often been pointed out: objectively we live safer, healthier, wealthier lives than has been the case for the vast majority of people throughout the long history of the human race. Yet we are in the grip of unprecedented emotional anguish. What explains this?

While much attention has been paid recently to the role of the smart phone, there are, surely, larger considerations in play. The past two centuries of industrialisation have witnessed us engaging in a mass experiment in reorganising human patterns of living. It is not impossible that these changes have had a profound psychological impact, which could help explain the current surge in mental health issues. If we are living in ways that humanity has not yet had time to adapt to it would be unsurprising if our mental health were negatively impacted.

Here are four key transitions in the shift from traditional to technological society which I think help explain our emotional discombobulation.

Too much of our own faces
Two hundred years ago no one really knew what they looked like. It is only 190 years since silvered glass mirrors were invented. Prior to that mirrors were rare, and imperfect. Most people would have gone through life without ever seeing an accurate image of their own face. Today, mirrors are ubiquitous. The old saying that you are never more than six feet from a rat is less true than that we are now never more than six feet from a mirror.

This constant referencing of our own faces has only been accelerated, first by the invention of the camera, and then by the reversible camera on our phones and the cameras on our computers. Whether taking selfies or participating in online meetings, we look at ourselves constantly.

Unlike anyone born before 1850 the face we are most familiar with is our own. What has this done to us?

Too much, too fast
It was not until the 1830s that steam locomotives were capable of travelling faster than the horse. Prior to that no one had travelled faster than horse-pace. Life was slow. Now life is fast – both in terms of the actual speed at which trains, planes and automobiles enable us to move, and even more, at the rate that information is expanding.

Technology writer Kevin Kelly says that information is expanding at the rate of a nuclear explosion. That’s too much, too fast.

The diminishment of male-female distinction
The move from traditional to technological patterns of living has permitted (and at times forced) a reduction in the distinctions between men and women. Despite the ‘patriarchy paradox’ which sees the sexes grouping around stereotypically defined work preferences in societies with high levels of sexual equality (engineering in Sweden being dominated by men, nursing by women), there no longer exist defined areas of male and female occupation. In a technological society everyone is just a cog in the machine. Ability is considered more significant than given social position rooted in gender. 

Alongside this we see the shrinking of the domestic sphere. The economy no longer centres around the household but is outsourced to the state, business and industry. In economies centred around the household men and women have clear social position and roles. There is a division of labour, grounded in sex, which is not the case in technological societies.

This is also witnessed in the feminization of education. In traditional societies women are primarily involved in the raising and training of girls, men in the raising and training of boys. In modern technological societies education is largely performed by women – certainly in primary education where it is not unusual for a boy to progress though several years of schooling with no male teaching.

The diminishment of physical labour
In traditional societies most people are engaged in physical labour. Technological society ‘saves’ us from that. While this makes life easier it does not necessarily make us happier. We might be safer and healthier than our labouring forebears but we are all too familiar with the dangers of sedentary living. So we engage in what are essentially pointless physical activities – lifting weights in a gym is all very well but it doesn’t accomplish anything in the way that lifting stones to build a wall would. Going for a run is all very well but participants simply end up where they started with nothing to actually show for it. Or, most pointless of all, running on a treadmill.

In technological societies we use our heads rather than our bodies, but our bodies are still with us. If our bodies are unhappy then our heads tend to be as well.

Almost all human history and experience has been in a world where we didn’t know our own faces, things moved slowly, men and women had clear social roles and most people were involved in hours of physical daily labour. All that has changed, very quickly. Is it any wonder there is so much emotional whiplash?

Unless we choose to go the route of the Amish (a choice that is in reality an impossibility for most of us) how are we to live so as to minimise the whiplash of these changes? As in all things, the gospel shows us a way.

Focus on another face
God has given us the light of the knowledge of His glory displayed in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). Whether we seek enlightenment (the Jewish worldview), knowledge (the Greek worldview) or glory (the Roman worldview), the fulfilment of our search can only be met in Christ. We need to spend less time looking at our own faces and more time searching after His. Only in turning out from ourselves and towards Him can we find what the human heart most longs for. Truly, our souls are restless until they find their rest in Him. Our restless, self-focused, age finds its antidote in the face of Christ.

Move at the pace of family
In our accelerating world having children slows us down. As anyone who has ever wrestled a toddler into a car seat or needed to get a teenager out of the door knows, being in a family means slowing down. This can cause great frustration. It is probably part of the reason why so many are remaining childless. But it is good for us. God created us as social beings, not cogs in a machine. If you go for a walk with grannie, you are going to have to slow down.

We are made for family and Christians are adopted into the Lord’s. This is meant to be worked out in full participation in a local church and that means not going at our own pace, or the pace of the world. In the church everyone needs to move together, from little babies to wizened old saints. Very often that means going slower.

Celebrate God-given distinctives
In technological, meretricious, societies it is skill that determines our position, at least in theory. We all know that ‘who you know’ still counts for a lot, and there are reasons that candidates in the current contest to be deputy leader of the Labour Party have to be female. But we have come a very long way from the sexual division of labour evident in traditional societies.

Throughout scripture the principle of male headship, in the church and in the home, is demonstrated, taught and expected. This creates tensions in the church in a technological society and is why such a significant portion of the church has abandoned this aspect of the Bible’s teaching. (Although saying that reveals something of a blind spot towards Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic church.)

As Stephen Clark observes in his definitive Man and Woman In Christ,

A pressure is exerted against all social roles in technological society, with the result that many traditional social roles begin to look more like functional roles. The father-son relationship is one example. Another example can be found in the role of the Christian pastor. One reason that modern Christians have a difficulty in understanding the meaning of “elder” or “pastor” in the New Testament is their tendency to see the position as a set of functions to be performed in a social institution rather than as a role of leadership and care in a communal relationship.

When a role is about function, it doesn’t matter whether the person doing it is male or female - but that isn’t actually how God created us, and it is not how human society has ever operated until just yesterday.

We need to learn to think in biblical, social categories, more than in technological, functional, ones. That is hard to do. That the Lord may have created men for certain roles and women for others outrages the modern mind but ignoring that reality is not a recipe for long term human flourishing.

Be body conscious
Every follower of Jesus is included in His body, and that body is meant to work (1 Corinthians 12:12-31). Our physical bodies are included in this as through them we are
to know and glorify God.

As we read scripture we see a great deal of bodily exertion in God’s service and worship. There is dancing, bowing, kneeling and the raising of hands. There is training like an athlete or boxer. There is walking incredible distances in pursuit of the mission. There is washing of others’ feet. There is feeding of the hungry and care of the sick. 

We need to use our bodies. Works of service, prayer walking, getting out into nature and using it as fuel for worship – all these and other activities are ways in which we can find a greater connection and integrity between the spiritual and physical. Appropriate bodily exertions is a means of pulling our emotions into line.

It is through the ageless gospel and in the eternal church that we can find the tools and context to withstand the emotional whiplash created by the technological society. It is by obedience to Jesus that we can be helped through our suffering.

Then, a few weeks ago, I had to preach on it. I came to God’s righteousness having just spent a lot of time in Isaiah 40-66 (for the THINK conference), and Deuteronomy (for a book on it), both of which shaped the way I approached the subject. So what does it mean to speak of God’s righteousness, or to say that God is righteous? Here’s what I said.

Imagine a Venn diagram with three major circles, arranged in a triangle so that all three overlap in the middle. The word righteousness is in the centre, where three other Bible words overlap together: uprightness, justice, and salvation. Each of those three words are frequently paired with righteousness in the Old Testament, as if their meanings “rhyme” with it.

Start with uprightness. “Shout for joy in the LORD, O you righteous! Praise befits the upright” (Ps 33:1). So righteousness overlaps closely with the idea that God is upright, and so should his people be. Righteousness in this sense is to be correctly positioned relative to reality. It involves being right as opposed to wrong - theologians would call it conformity to an external norm - but it also means standing straight rather than wonky. If you have an upright glass, that means a glass that doesn’t spill. If you have an upright building, that means a building that doesn’t subside, give way, or crumble. The righteous, the upright, are those who stand properly and correctly in proportion to reality, and they don’t crumble, and they don’t give way. They are in the right. That’s one element.

Another word that overlaps with righteousness in the Bible is justice. We would probably naturally realize that justice and righteousness are paired together: “Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son!” (Ps 72:1). In Scripture, the concept of justice has to do with giving people their due: giving people that which they are entitled to, and making judgments on the basis of the merits of their case, not on our prejudices, preferences or incentives. If you are just in the Bible, it means you’re not judging for a bribe, or because you don’t like the person, or because you’ve pre-decided the outcome, but because they merit or warrant this particular judgment. That closely overlaps with the biblical category of righteousness too.

The third category that overlaps with righteousness, especially in Isaiah, is salvation: “He has clothed me with garments of salvation; he has covered me with the robe of righteousness” (Is 61:10). This is the most surprising of the three. You don’t normally think of righteousness in terms of rescue. So why is the righteousness of God connected with his salvation of his people? Because God has made a covenant with his people, in which he has promised to deliver them. Which means that for God to be righteous means for him to follow through on his promises to save, in faithfulness to his covenant. God’s righteousness means that he must save his people because he said he would. If he didn’t, he would break his covenant and dishonour his name.

When you get those three ideas together - uprightness, justice and salvation - and they all overlap in the middle of the Venn diagram, that’s what righteousness is. To say that God is righteous is to say that he is upright and correct in all of his ways, just and impartial in all of his judgments, and committed to save his people in accordance with the covenant he’s made with them. That’s what we mean when we say God is righteous.

When I was a child faith matters were all wrapped up in one huge bundle with all of equal value. I learned, “Christians don’t smoke and drink” and “Christians believe in the virgin birth and resurrection” and “Christians go to Sunday school and Sunday evening service.” I was too young to make any distinction between smoking, the resurrection and Sunday school attendance—they all were in the “Christian bundle” and of equal value for judging who was a Christian or not.  I assumed people who drank beer or denied the resurrection or didn’t have a Sunday evening service weren’t Christians—at least not “real” Christians (later termed “born again Christians”). As a child I made no distinction between levels of faith and practice and simply lumped them all together in one huge bundle. It is simply how a child views things ... You may also remember that as a child you simply lumped all these things together into one big bundle with church doctrine and everything else and you held them all with equal value as I did.

Then I discovered some things are written in pencil.

My first hint of this came in the sixth grade.  I had won a mural contest and gotten a pile of tickets for Kennywood Park.  This was before all-day-one-price entry fees so a pile of tickets meant I could ride all day at our school’s annual Spring outing. I gave the tickets back.  I knew Christians didn’t attend a carn-evil or cir-cuss or amusement parks (which were “just a carnival in a permanent location”). I quietly told my teacher after class, “Christians don’t go to amusement parks” and he reluctantly took the tickets back. (I discovered 30 years later that mister Krome, a Presbyterian, had called my parents that evening to ask, ‘What sort of strange religion is this?”)  Not going to Grandview schools’ annual outing wasn’t all that bad—I got the day off to play at home. Yet on that morning in May, 1957 my father woke me early to announce “we’re taking a trip.”  And we did—driving almost 100 miles to….(you guessed it) an amusement park (at first I thought my dad had backslidden). He announced I could ride all day and he’d foot the bill.  Late that afternoon he took me to an old stump that was designed as a sort of bench and we sat together—just the two of us.  He said something pretty much exactly like the following (a son can’t forget his father’s words like this):

“Keith, I brought you here to teach you a lesson. There are two fences in life: God’s fence and the church’s fence.  The church’s fence is always smaller than God’s fence.  God doesn’t care if you go to amusement parks or not, but a lot of church folk do and they think it is wrong.  That’s why we drove this far—so we won’t be seen by the people in the church who would spiritually stumble by it.  But there are a lot of Christians who do go to amusement parks, and there are even Christians in other countries who drink a bit.  As you grow older you might push against the church’s fence.  You might even break down the fence other Christians put around you—even the fence your mother and I have built. But be careful as you do this that you do not run so fast and far from being fenced in that you smash through God’s fence—for His fence is at the very edge of a precipice.  And that’s why I brought you here today—to teach you this important lesson-remember it as you grow as a teenager.”

This is how I learned that some things are written in pencil.  Going to an amusement park wasn’t as important as the virgin birth in the bag of beliefs.  It was a pencil-belief (actually a pencil-practice).  It was one generation’s attempt to resist worldliness and they wrote it down.  But they wrote it with pencil and I had an eraser.  Indeed every generation has its own eraser and can erase their parent’s pencil work.  Did I abandon the faith when I went to an amusement park or started going bowling? No.  I simply erased some of the previous generations’ pencil work.  I learned that all the stuff I had in one belief bag really had a second category—some things are written in pencil and can be erased without damaging my soul.

In college I discovered some things are written in ink.

By my college days I was erasing lots of stuff.  I attended several movies (they would be “G” movies if they had ratings back then) and I went bowling with reckless abandon.  While I never danced, I do admit that I went on a lot of hayrides that essentially accomplished the same purpose.  I wore shorts in the summer and even went once to a beach during college where the girls wore “yellow polka-dot bikinis.” I tried a pipe and took communion in a Lutheran church where I got a taste of alcohol. In fact, one other time, when I attended a bar mitzvah I swiped a whole bottle of wine and drank it all one evening to see what would happen. (Nothing much).  Yet other than this experimentation I kept a lot of my parent’s pencil work in college.

It was a college where I found that some things are written in ink. In high school I had worked with lifestyle matters that were mostly pencil written.  In college I encountered doctrinal things that were written in ink.  In a student Bible study I became convinced that my denomination was completely wrong on doctrine.  My denomination was Arminian-Wesleyan and after a freshman year of Bible study I concluded they were completely wrong.  I became a Calvinist.  I discovered that doctrinal matters aren’t written in pencil—they use ink for doctrine.  I was disheartened that my professors and my denomination refused to capitulate to my faultless logic. The Bible was so clear and my denomination so deluded and I tried to set them straight.  I once gave my whole spring break over to trying to convert my mother to Calvinism, but she stubbornly refused to fall before the scythe of my superior intellect.  I could not imagine how any honest reader of Scripture would refuse to believe in eternal security.  I could accept that there were folk with such small minds they could not fathom the notion of predestination, but eternal security—well any honest person must accept this obvious teaching of Scripture!

I became a Calvinist evangelist.  Actually there was a Calvinist trinity at my college:  Moses Yang, my upper class mentor, Ray Berrian and I together dazzled the dimwitted Arminians with our brilliance and slew them by the thousands.  Well at least we slew a dozen.  By the end of that year we had about twelve Calvinist converts who met secretly as if we were in the catacombs   (All this eventually brought to me the distinction of being the only student ever to be grounded to the campus for a full month due “questionable theology”—a badge I wore with great pride!)  I had bumped into an ink-written doctrine.  Inked doctrines are not as easily erased as behavioral pencil writing.  Indeed ink writing cannot be erased at all but must be blotted out and we much write something else beside it.  So, I used Calvin’s darker ink to blot out Arminian theology and I wrote down in large ink letters all five points of Calvin as my doctrine. I was a theological rebel in The Wesleyan Church and I intended to correct the denomination’s dimwitted doctrine. If I failed I would simply leave the denomination and join one with the right and true doctrine—a doctrine like mine.

At seminary I discovered some things are written in blood.

Then I went to Princeton Seminary.  I met professors and students there that rattled the bones of my belief system all the way down to my toes. I went to Bible classes and heard that the Bible wasn’t a single unified book written in seamless continuity but had various points of view.  I heard political, theological and biblical teachings that made “bobbed hair” and movies vanish from my mind.  One precious doctrine and interpretation after another vanished when placed under the microscope of the original language or the original meaning of Scripture.  Even my sturdy Calvinism was shaken so much that that the issues had changed from believing eternal security or not to believing in the resurrection or not.  Was Jesus truly divine?  Did he actually rise from the dead? Was he born of a virgin?  Is there a coming judgment?  Is there a heaven to gain?  These are the questions that occupied my mind.

This is how I found the creeds. Really.  I did not even know they existed until I was in seminary. I suppose I had heard of them but I had never heard them.  They were never said in my church—they were “too high church.”  I never even encountered them in college—we had revival meetings and testimonies in college.  The first time I met the creeds was when several faithful professors at Princeton tossed them my way as a rope to a drowning student.  I had erased most of the pencil work I was raised with.  I had inked out much of my denomination’s doctrine.  And now I was faced with reading people who didn’t even believe the core issues of the Christian faith.  What could I believe?  I took hold of the creeds—the Nicene but especially the Apostle’s creed—and hung on.  Credo. I believe.  The creed for me was not pencil work of earlier generations—their preferences, or lifestyle convictions.  Neither were the creeds written in ink—merely the doctrinal positions of one particular denomination. The creeds were written in blood—they are life and death issues for the Christian church.  I would not die for the doctrine of eternal security or entire sanctification.  Hold a knife to my throat and demand I say, “I could backslide” or “I’m eternally secure” and you’ll get whatever answer you want to save my life.  Hold that same knife to my throat and demand I say, “Christ was not divine” and I will refuse.  At Princeton, under the mentorship of several godly professors I melted down to the core—to the Apostle’s creed.  Everything else burned away like wood, hay and stubble.  All I had left were 18 phrases ...

I know the difference between what is written in pencil, written in ink and written in blood. You can be a Christian in my book if we disagree on the pencil and ink stuff.  But neither you nor I can say we are Christians if we reject those things written in blood.  Examine the blood-writ truths if you must, I did. But do so very carefully for you are dealing with the essence of what makes a Christian a Christian. And remember that picture of the knife at your throat.  For some Christians today that is not an imaginary exercise.

My first prediction was that it was as good as inevitable that a ban on so-called conversion therapy would be implemented. On this I was wrong. One of the perhaps unforeseen developments of the past year has been the rapid swing away from the relentless transgender trajectory we had been on. Yes, there are still examples of the grip the ‘T’ has got on our institutions (such as the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan by five armed police officers for comments he had made on Twitter/X). But generally the tide has begun to turn the other way: the Supreme Court judgement on the priority of biological sex, police forces being told they are not to participate in Pride marches, the number of institutions bailing out of association with Stonewall, and the resulting reduction in funds for June’s Pride events. Against this backdrop it appears the Prime Minister doesn’t really want to cause himself more trouble by pushing ahead with the conversion therapy ban. For that we should be grateful.

My second prediction was, sadly, more on the money, with parliament approving assisted-suicide even more rapidly than I had feared would be the case. That this happened in the same week that MPs voted to decriminalise abortion up to the point of birth was, to say the least, a reality check – or, as Danny Kruger MP expressed it, a grave sin.

Assuming assisted-dying passes the remaining legislative hurdles (not necessarily a foregone conclusion) pastors will have to reckon with how they respond. It’s likely to get messy and be painful.

Another pastoral reality already confronting us is the state of the UK economy. Our national debt is almost equal to our national GDP and we are in the death spiral of having to borrow more billions simply to finance our debt repayments. This is not only a political and economic issue but ultimately one of social justice. We are becoming like the people who complain to Nehemiah, “We have had to borrow money to pay the king’s tax on our fields and vineyards” (Neh. 5:4). Debt as crushing as this reduces all room for manoeuvre. A supermajority should mean the government being able to enact radical reforms to change the situation but the opposite actually seems to be the case as rebellious MPs further limit room for government action. 

Of course, there are different political perspectives on what the solution to this might be, but pastorally it means shepherding people who are themselves feeling increasingly financially pressured, which quickly leads to anxiety. It is also complicated navigating a landscape in which a significant proportion of the population are at the same time to the left of Keir Starmer economically but to the right of Nigel Farage socially. All this has very real consequences for how we in the church talk about and seek to serve the poor and the alien.

A year in, what further predictions for future pastoral issues in a country governed by a supermajority? I’m not sure I’m brave enough to make them – other than that it is likely things will continue to be turbulent, and that there will not be a supermajority after the next general election. Through it all our hope and confidence need to be in the supremacy of Christ and the certainty of His plan.

When we first started this blog in 2010, I wrote a lot. Three times a week was quite normal, and although that is not quite at Tim Challies’s level of content creation, it was something I found both enjoyable and (to the extent that I can tell) fruitful. My children were up very early in the morning, and I would often use that time to write about whatever theological, pastoral or missional issues took my fancy, and post them before anyone else woke up.

That continued until around 2016, when my output here dropped off a cliff because of three things which happened at the same time. One is that I took a new role as Teaching Pastor at King’s Church London, and the combination of the new role, and representing Newfrontiers more, made it feel more high stakes (and often less wise) to sound off all the time about whatever I was thinking. Another is that I started trying to read a hundred books a year, much of which happened in the early morning slot that I would otherwise have used for blogging. And the third is that I finished my PhD, which meant I was able to start writing books again (hooray), but this in turn meant that I had very limited creative capacity for shorter, often spontaneous comments on immediate issues here (boo); it also removed me from the academic environment that had sparked a lot of my posts on New Testament studies and such. So besides updates on what I was reading, announcements of the THINK conference, and the occasional longer article, I pretty much stopped posting anything.

Two of those three things are still true. I am still at King’s London, and I am still writing books. But I am still hopeful that I will be able to re-engage here a bit, not least because I have now finished drafting my next two books: one on happiness, and one on Deuteronomy (of which more in due course). I am also excited about launching next year’s THINK conference, and talking about what I’m reading again, and writing about some issues I haven’t given time to for a while. And as I say, when the blog disappeared for the summer, I missed it.

All of which is to say that you may be hearing more from me in 2026-27. We shall see.

The latter was due to some rights issues with images we had used carelessly - mea culpa. After receiving a couple of hefty fines we had to take some drastic action. Sadly, part of this action is that most of Andrew’s posts have been extinguished, while I have had a wonderful volunteer (thank you Kira!) going through all my old posts and resolving the rights issues.

On the former, Andrew more often now posts on platforms such as The Gospel Coalition and I have been occupied with other things. However, we feel it would be a shame to kill Think off entirely, so intend to pop up here occasionally. I am amazed when visiting churches in other parts of the country, or the other side of the world, how often someone introduces themselves and says they have enjoyed and been helped by this blog over the years. If that is you, thank you!

There may be life in the old blog yet.

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!

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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!

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.