The New Orthodoxy, Part 4: Do you support Israel? 

This is the fourth and final entry in my mini-blog series describing the parameters of what I call the “New Orthodoxy.” As with the previous posts, I’ll briefly re-summarize the opening argument. 

Recall with me, if you will, that an orthodox Christian pastor affirms the statements in the traditional creeds of the Church, while a heterodox Christian pastor (i.e., a heretic) is unable to affirm these things. But I am detecting a novel trend in the church today, where, in addition to these traditional standards, a new list of beliefs is levied against pastors (and other Christians) to determine whether they are “in” or “out.” The primary question is no longer, “Do you believe the historic teachings and creeds of the church of Christ?” Now it is, “Do you agree with these positions?” In my first post, I wrote about how adherence to certain beliefs about the Bible are privileged over the Bible itself. In the second, I addressed the question of renouncing “wokeness” as a cypher for agreement with conservative political talking points. In the third entry, I wrote about the the question of being “pro-life” as a measure of testing your allegiance to a cause. In this final post, I’ll tackle the question of support for Israel. 

Question 4: Do you support Israel? 

When I began this survey of what I have called the “New Orthodoxy,” this answer to the question of support for Israel was the first thing I wrote. When I consulted my spouse on how it was going, she told me I’d have to say a lot more. That’s how what I thought would be one longish post became four substantial ones. 

The main reason for spiralling length was simply a matter of untangling what is confused. And these four questions are places of significant confusion—confusion about what is important in the Christian life, about what counts as “primary” areas of doctrine, about how the faithful minister has to posture himself within a context that is increasingly hostile to careful, reflective Christian teaching. With respect to these matters, I have saved what may be the most confusing, hostile question for last. Nowhere in my experience are the operational metrics of the New Orthodoxy in greater display than when it comes to the question of Israel. By these “operational metrics” I mean a reactivity, a spirit that refuses to listen, a refusal to intake new information, and covering all these a habit of black-and-white thinking. For many Christians, anything less than complete, unquestioning, radical support for Israel is considered a sign of outright wickedness. 

What is more, for the past year Israel has been even more prominently featured in the endless news cycle. The terrorist attacks of October 7th, the fact that there are still hostages in Hamas custody, and the waves of protest in favour of Palestine have created—or perhaps foregrounded—many of the issues that we must deal with, and that I intend to attempt to address in this doubtless inadequate essay. 

A full and faithful answer to the question, “Do you support Israel?” requires an exploration into theology and history alike. Let’s go back to the beginning, because Christianity has a long and often uncomfortable relationship with Jews. Naturally, we Christians began as a Jewish sect, and better than two thirds of our Bible is originally the Hebrew Scriptures. Our God is the Jewish God, and our saviour, Jesus, was born a Jew and observed Jewish customs during his earthly life. Since he is the same yesterday, and today, and forever, that’s a pretty good indicator that Jesus is still Jewish. 

Quite early in Church history, however, the streams began to diverge. As the ranks of Christians began to be populated more and more by Gentile believers, there was a natural distancing from elements of this Jewish origin. Some of the earliest conflicts we know about in the Church were birthed from this relational question—how are ethnic Jews and Gentiles to get along in this new business of being the Church of Jesus Christ? On the other side, and standing against Christ as the Messiah, early Jews (and many Jews today) have trenchantly rejected the Christian claims about Jesus. This situation has led to latent hostility, and outbreaks of persecution, against Jews throughout Church history. The hostility and persecution are not things about which we Christians have any cause to be proud. 

Some early Christians, like Marcion, tried to cement the divide between Christians and Jews. He wanted to reject the Old Testament, with its God of “vengeance.” But the Church rejected his position, and declared his beliefs heresy. There could be no Christian Church that rejected its Jewish heritage. Nevertheless, as the Church’s story began to be tied to that of Rome, more and more Israel’s story began to fade into the background. It is noteworthy that by the time the creeds were finalized (around 381AD), we find in them no mention of Israel. Sure, Jesus is born of Mary according to the Scriptures (implying the Hebrew Bible), but somewhere along the way—perhaps with translating the Hebrew word “Messiah” into the Greek word “Christ”—we lost the part where he sits on David’s throne, an Israelite King. 

Marcion, being crushed as a heretic.

Despite this distancing, there have always been Christians who took this Jewish heritage seriously, and for them there were always questions about the relationship of Jewish people to God’s revelation in Christ and the resulting Christian faith. Are there still promises in Scripture that apply to the Jews? Does God still have a plan for those of Jewish heritage? Or did the Church replace Israel as God’s people? This idea, that the Church replaces Israel, is helpfully called “replacement theology.” I will deal with it more momentarily.

John Nelson Darby (1800-1882)

These questions have brewed in the background throughout Church history. But in the 19th century, a new answer emerged. This was the articulation and deployment of a new theological system called “Dispensationalism,” and its chief author was a man named John Nelson Darby. In brief, Dispensationalism is a way of interpreting theological history (a.k.a. “salvation history”), regarding what it sees as seven different periods of “dispensation” for grace. For the most part (and depending on how you define key terms like “grace”) these divisions are innocuous, and occasionally even helpful. But when it comes to the last days Dispensationalism becomes… innovative. And by “innovative” I mean it leaves behind any relationship with historic orthodoxy. 

Now is not the time to summarize everything Dispensationalism says about the end times. I will say this: it takes unprecedented literal readings of the book of Daniel, together with unprecedented literal readings of John’s Revelation, to calculate, mathematically, a series of events based on “weeks” and “years” in a biblical timeline. A lynchpin belief of this system is the Rapture, where the Church is more or less “taken out” of spacetime. (Note: I addressed the belief in the rapture and how texts are misread to support it in the first post.) What is important for this discussion about Israel is what happens next in the Dispensational system: with the removal of the Church, the salvation-history story of the Jewish people reactivates. 

With this departure of the Church and return to Jewish salvation history comes a number of attendant beliefs—the rebuilding of the temple, the return of sacrifice, and the final rise and fall of the antichrist. Big stuff. 

This is a hugely widespread, hugely popular, and deeply entrenched belief system. It provided the architecture for the runaway best-sellers, Left Behind. It terrified my wife, who at the tender age of 7 watched the film, A Thief in the Night. It provided the late Hal Lindsay with a lifetime income. It bolsters the ongoing success of the Scofield Study Bible (which I have written about here). And it is also very wrong. 

Let me see if I can sum this up: the key point of Dispensational eschatology is with this removal of the Church and the renewal of Jewish salvation history. But what this means, in effect, is that the Church was God’s “Plan B.” In other words, this means that God was unable to work things out with Israel, so instead He tried things out with us (the Church) for a time. 

If you are a careful reader of Scripture then I think alarm bells ought already to be going off. In the first place, to claim that the Church will be removed so that Israel’s salvation can be taken up again is essentially to deny that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. He is Israel’s King, sent to God’s people first, and taking up the full mantle of what it means to be God’s people in the world. To separate Christ into two parts—as if He were Christ for the Church, and Jesus for the Jews, is to commit the same errors of the German theologians who separated the “Christ of faith” from the “Christ of history” (as a way to patch their uneasiness with the miraculous—esp. the miracle of the resurrection). It is, in some respects, to continue the error of Marcion who wanted to separate the words of the Old Testament from those of the New. It puts an unholy and ultimately false dividing line between the work of God throughout history. 

No, Jesus is Israel’s messiah, and Christian teaching on this matter is abundantly, strikingly, starkly, unmistakably clear: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.” That’s Acts 4:12, and we dare not forget that the speaker is Peter, an ethnic Jew. 

What is more, the suggestion—even the hint—that Jewish sacrifice will once again be renewed with saving effect for a Jewish nation is an affront to the cross itself, voiding the work of Christ of its power. Hebrews 10 is on this matter explicit, “for it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin.” Christ is the final sacrifice. Any sacrifice made in addition to Christ is idolatry from the pit of hell. 

With these things in mind, let’s circle back to the question of “support” for Israel. One of the features of Darby’s influential system was that he predicted a return of Jews to national Israel—that is, a return of Jews to their historic landed boundaries. In his system this return was an imminent precursor to the End Times. In modern history, this has meant that, in the wake of the Holocaust and the consequent 1948 return of Jews to Israel, the Dispensational theological mind has been sent into overdrive. “This is it!” people thought; “This is what we’ve been waiting for!” The return of Israel to their land means that the arrival of the antichrist, the rapture, and the return of Jesus are really at hand. These beliefs were the source of that flurry of pseudo-theological writings about the end times that flowered in the late 20th century (Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye shine brightly). 

It was in this eschatologically charged and (frankly) distorted context, that a new set of ethical mandates began to emerge. “True” Christians supported Israel, no matter what. And not just Israel the people of God, but national Israel, the modern nation-state carved out of the territory of the former British Empire. I personally remember being coached in this rhetoric by sincere Christians growing up. “Those who support Israel are blessed,” they would say, drawing from the promise to Abraham in Genesis 12. “Those who don’t support Israel are cursed.” These statements were bolstered by the evidence that America had become prosperous, and that America had also supported Israel. The implication was that any retreat from that complete support would be detrimental to America’s blessing. For many people who believe these things, support for Israel and support for America are exactly the same thing. 

Most of the time, when asked about our support for Israel, this framework of Dispensational Theology provides the understructure that is powering the question. A bad system of theology sits at the heart of the testing question pressed to pastors and Christians today. 

The ultimate problem with the question is that it collapses three categories of people into one group. The first category is the modern nation-state of Israel, which is composed primarily of ethnic Jews, many of whom are either non-practicing or functionally atheist. The second category is the Jewish population that spans the globe, some of whom are orthodox, others “reformed,” and many others functionally non-practicing. The third category is what we might call, using the language of Scripture, “True Israel.” This is the community of God’s people, Jew and Gentile together, bound in unity by the death and resurrection of Christ, Israel’s Messiah. I must be explicit: this is not replacement theology. Replacement theology claims that the Church replaces (or supersedes) Israel in salvation history. Orthodox Christian teaching—what we might call “Biblical Theology”—holds that the Church is the new people of God, composed of Jews and Gentiles together. It is not that God had one people, the Jews, whom He replaced with saved Gentiles (and then discarded the Jews). It is that God has crafted a new people together through the life of His son, Jesus. (This is the argument of Ephesians 2.) This means that the new metric of what makes us God’s people is our attachment to the saving work of Jesus, not our ethnicity or works (this is substantially the argument of Romans). In a real way, Jesus is Israel, and all who are in Jesus are in Israel.

So, when you ask me if I support Israel, which “Israel” are you asking me if I support? Let’s be clear: I support the Israel of which Christ is Messiah and King. I support the New Israel, the New People of God, composed of Jews and Gentiles joined together by means of Christ (who broke down the dividing wall of hostility). Affirming this also means that I affirm, with the Apostle Paul, what he says in Romans 9:6, “…for they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.” What an astonishing thing for an ethnic Jew to write! But what it means—and what may be shocking to some—is that Palestinian Christians are more “True Israel” than the members of the modern Israeli nation-state. 

There are many reasons why a teaching like what I have articulated about Israel—however traditional and formally orthodox—is difficult to communicate. One reason for the difficulty is the astonishing emotional hold that Dispensationalism has on the thinking of the church—especially the American church. I can think of a few reasons why these beliefs are held on to so strongly. One reason has to do with loyalty. When a given Christian who has been formed by Dispensational theology encounters teachings that call that theology into question, what they are defending in that moment is not the teaching, per se, but the teacher who brought it to them. They have learned this theology from pastors, parents, and beloved Sunday School Teachers who believed it sincerely. Doing the important work of updating our theology to make it more orthodox can feel like calling those beloved teachers false teachers. There can even be a kind of cascade of doubt, “If they were wrong about these things, how can I trust anything they taught me?” Untangling Dispensational theology from Christianity can feel, for some, like losing their Christianity altogether. 

Alongside this sense of loyalty is a kind of loss of control. We live in complex, confusing times, and in such times Dispensational Theology promises a sense of understanding about those times. It places world events into a framework that makes them more tolerable. “I can endure these horrors because I know what’s really going on.” Losing such a theological framework means more than just replacing it with a better one—it means losing out on a kind of eschatological crutch that helps us to manage our ever-pervasive string-of-horrors newsfeeds. And yet, what it means to be a faithful Christian is, simply, to be faithful in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. And what that means is that the work of the faithful pastor is not to explain the world for our congregants through the lens of a comfortable theology, but to point them instead to the only One who does explain reality. Our focus must never be on a system of times and dates, of plug-and-play eschatology, of weekly newspaper interpretation from the pulpit, but on the real and difficult work of being sincerely Christian in an insincere world. With respect to this primary work, a focus on Israeli geopolitics is nothing more than distraction. 

Let me anticipate an objection. Am I implying that we should dismiss national Israel? I don’t think we can. And in fact, given the history of antisemitism and the Church’s participation—and even fostering—of such beliefs, do we have an obligation to support and defend our religious cousins? In this, I believe the answer is an unreserved “yes.” In the present conflict, we must acknowledge that Hamas is an organization committed to the eradication of Israel, and, ideally, of all Jews. We may watch Borat and laugh at his absurdist antisemitism, and yet the joke is a little more real than we’d like to admit. For many people, how he speaks is how they really feel about anyone who is Jewish. Added to this, there is something truly mendacious about many (not all) of the pro-Palestinian protests, and how they foster a sometimes quiet, sometimes overt, hatred of Jews. So we have an obligation to support, and an obligation to truth. But this support—however it takes shape—is most decidedly not a carte blanche approval of all the policies and procedures of the modern Israelite nation-state. As a Christian I must love the Jewish people—I owe them a debt. But loving doesn’t always mean agreeing with and supporting people in their actions. Support for “Israel” in this sense does not in any respect preclude sincere and faithful criticism of the Israeli Nation-state. This is the part where we have to speak the truth, and be willing to see and speak about those places where national Israel’s actions are hostile, if not criminal, and even reprehensible. 

I want to anticipate one final objection. Christians, especially those who have grown up in this Dispensational framework, focus on Old Testament passages that make promises to Israel about land. Am I suggesting that God isn’t going to fulfill His promises to Israel? The answer to this—as is the answer to so many of our questions in the Bible!—is found in the person of Jesus Christ. Recall that, in Jesus’s temptation from Matthew’s gospel, Satan offered him “all the kingdoms of the world.” Jesus refused to bow to Satan—he would be a king on God’s terms and not the Devil’s. But then, after his cross, death, and resurrection, Jesus’s last message to his disciples contained these words: “All authority has been given to me in heaven and in earth.” In other words, what Satan offered, Jesus has claimed. He is now king of the whole earth—not just the 90 mile stretch of land from Dan to Beersheba on the coast of the Mediterranean that we call “Israel.” To be explicit: the dominion of God’s New Israel, of Jew and Gentile together in Christ, is the entire world. And this means that in the person of Christ, the living, resurrected, reigning King, all the promises of land made to Israel from the Old Testament have been fulfilled. 

The New Orthodoxy, Part 3: Are You Pro-Life?

This is now the third entry in a mini-blog series describing the parameters of what I call the “new orthodoxy.” 

In this series I have argued that what makes a pastor an orthodox Christian pastor is that he or she affirms the statements in the traditional creeds of the Church, while a heterodox Christian pastor (i.e., a heretic) is unable to affirm these things. This is the historic position, but what I am detecting today is a novel trend in the Church, where, in addition to these traditional standards, a new list of beliefs is levied against pastors (and other Christians) to determine whether they are “in” or “out.” The primary question is no longer, “Do you believe the historic teachings and creeds of the church of Christ?” Now it is, “Do you agree with these positions?” 

In my first post, I wrote about how adherence to certain beliefs about the Bible are privileged over the Bible itself. In the second, I addressed the question of renouncing “wokeness” as a cypher for agreement with conservative political talking points. In each case, the question is a “shibboleth” (see Judges 12:1-6). In other words, it is a question which is being used as a test to evaluate your adherence to beliefs as held by the questioner.

In this third entry to my mini-series, I want to address the question of “pro-life” advocacy. But let the reader be forewarned—I will not be exploring arguments for or against abortion. In fact, what I will explore has little to do with the pro-life movement itself; rather, I am attending to how it, and movements like it, operate within the life of the church. 

Question #3: Are You Pro-Life? 

As with each of the questions I have examined, this question about pro-life allegiance is a kind of test. It isn’t really asking if you hold a position that advocates for the sanctity of human life—which is a broader, overarching theological issue (one that contains, as a component part, our beliefs about the unborn). Instead, this question is probing the degree to which you are in allegiance with a cause. And the measure of that allegiance is, in turn, telling the questioner something about your views about how the church ought to engage with civil society. In its own way, these three issues—the danger of causes in the church, the boundary between church and state, and ultimately our theology of the sanctity of life—are all at stake in this question. 

And while the question about being pro-life presents itself as upfront and straightforward, it is in reality something of a trick question. Think about it—how could you answer in the negative? “No, I’m pro-death! I hate unborn babies!” No sane, reflective, orthodox Christian person can answer in the negative. But, as is the case with every other question we’ve examined, this trickiness is an indicator that the question is after something else. The person who asks it isn’t really asking if you hold to a life-affirming platform (which might admit some theological and ethical nuance), they are asking if you are pro-life in the exact same way as they are. They are asking if you support “the cause.” 

This is why, when a person like this asks if you are “pro-life,” you have to be on guard, because what they are setting up is a kind of syllogistic stranglehold, an argumentative full-nelson. It goes like this—if you are pro-life, and if you feel about abortion the way I feel about abortion, then you will do everything you can in all your power and resources to support the pro-life cause. Agreement with the questioner means implied agreement about a whole subset of additional actions and behaviours. 

I have experienced this personally. On one occasion I was contacted by a local pro-life organizer. He wanted my church to join in his streetside, sign-holding protest for life. There were a number of reasons why it was not right for my church to participate at that time, not least of which was because we were in process of discerning how best to reach our region for the gospel, and this protest didn’t fit within our vision of that outreach. I assured him that I was pro-life, but declined to join his event. He was not pleased with me, and the reason he wasn’t pleased was because I wouldn’t agree to be pro-life in exactly the same way that he was pro-life. He could not fathom the scenario where I would claim to be pro-life but refuse to join his event, and that made him suspect that I wasn’t pro-life at all. I have found this experience to be characteristic of people who want the church to be on board with the cause about which they’re fired up. In an unhealthy way, they calculate the manpower, resources, and microphone of the church, and then want to siphon off a degree of those resources for the cause of their choice. 

Of course, the pro-life cause is not the only public cause about which ministers are “tested” for allegiance in this way. Prominent right now are the various causes in opposition to the LGBTQ movement. One flavour of opposition finds expression through the “sanctity of marriage” cause, which opposes LGB marriage unions. Another flavour addresses the “Gender ideology” cause, which specifically targets the philosophies around transgenderism. This latter cause finds its greatest expression in both opposition to biological men in women’s sports, or instructing children in so-called “Gender-affirming” ideologies. Whichever the cause du jour, when you are asked about it you are being asked less about what you think theologically and more about your allegiance to this broader set of often unspecified particulars. 

I need to address this business of cause-based Christianity, because it is a subtle, pervasive, and terribly dangerous habit in the church today. I also think that it is a problem that goes significantly unacknowledged. To put it in the briefest terms, cause-based Christianity allies itself to various causes in order to draw from them an energy and sense of focus that is easier to maintain than the difficult business of faith. To frame this from the other side, faith is hard. Discipleship is hard. Obedience is hard. Following Jesus meaningfully in our mundane lives is hard. True spiritual growth is often (almost always!) painful and unrewarding in the short term. Against this overwhelming mundanity of ordinary Christianity, the appeal of a cause—a burning issue, a sense of purpose, a sense of movement when so much of spirituality is frustratingly slow—is self-evident. And, from the perspective of pastoral ministry, active promotion of a cause has the alluring power to make the complex thing of faith simple, and a given pastor, through appeal to a cause, can drum up excitement, energy, focus, buzz, and even media attention. In this way, he trades the slow, difficult work of discipleship for the easy, alluring work of getting things done. I regard this as a particularly pernicious and dangerous trap. 

And one of the dangers, of course, is that the causes—more often than not—are good. Who in their right mind is anti-life? Who, in Christian love, hates the unborn? Shouldn’t marriage be kept sacred? Shouldn’t children be protected? But the counter-question may bring clarity—what is the chief job of a shepherd in the Kingdom of God? What is my chief purpose as a pastor in authority over a community to serve them faithfully? My chief job is always the care and shepherding of the sheep—I teach, baptize, evangelize, rebuke, and encourage with the ultimate goal of developing each of those image-bearers under my care into greater likeness with Christ. In this, every cause, no matter how good or valuable or important, is secondary to my primary mission as a disciple-maker. Every cause will have its end, but the Kingdom is forever. This, again, is the danger of our question about whether or not you are “pro-life.” The question is measuring the degree to which you allow allegiance to the cause in question to determine your preaching, teaching, and advocacy. The faithful, orthodox pastor, however, distinguishes between the gospel and a cause—however valid—that is adjacent to the gospel. My job is the spiritual formation of souls into the image of Christ, not the temporary formation of soldiers in service of a fleeting and necessarily temporary cause. I cannot replace Nietzsche’s understanding of Christianity as a “long obedience in the same direction” with a kind of “fiery activism in constantly changing directions.” 

I hope that you will not misunderstand me, and I want to stress that there will always be a need to address, and redress, cultural issues from within the church and (on occasion) from the pulpit. But this cultural mission can never be allowed to replace our primary purpose, and our primary purpose will always be the exaltation of Christ in the saving news of His Gospel. With respect to this, the church has one cause, the Kingdom, of which there are many subsidiaries. But the perennial danger of cause-based Christianity is that these subsidiaries subtly, and inevitably, replace the gospel as our focus—whether that cause is teetotalism, or anti-slavery, or a building project, or advocacy for the unborn, or support for our troops, or overturning the school-board. C. S. Lewis addresses a form of this danger in his short essay, “First and Second Things.” There he argues that when we have the right things in first place, we get second things thrown in as a bonus. But if we make the error of putting second things first, we lose out on both first and second things. An easy example to understand is the matter of prioritizing work and marriage. If I put work first, I risk losing my marriage in the process. With respect to these issues of the Gospel and a cause as a first and second thing, the danger is profound. Inevitably, the prioritization of the alluring cause-based work over our slow gospel work will mean that our outward allegiance to a cause comes to replace the work of gospel proclamation and formation. To say it again: the gospel and a cause related to the gospel—once again, however valuable that cause—are never interchangeable. 

It is worth nothing that there are causes that are prominent on the leftward side of the church spectrum as well—the cause for Palestinian rights, the cause against nuclear proliferation, the cause for antiracism (i.e., BLM), the cause for environmentalism, to name a few. Where these causes differ from their rightward-leaning parallels is that they rarely (though not always) take root in more traditional, what we might consider orthodox, churches. The reason for this unequal distribution of causes is beyond the scope of this essay, but there is one interrelationship worth highlighting. One of the characteristics of leftward-leaning churches is that they are often aligned with modern political causes (like those listed above). Another characteristic is that they often distance themselves consciously from traditional Christian orthodoxy. Whether it is the case that their focus on causes has resulted in a diminishing of discipleship-as-spiritual-formation, or whether their lack of orthodox discipleship has paved the way for causes to arise as a replacement is perhaps unimportant. What seems evident is that these churches are examples of how causes, in time, replace the slow work of discipleship. It even suggests that self-styled “conservative” churches that consciously or unconsciously ally themselves to causes are in similar danger, in time, of vacating their pews. 

There is yet another difficulty with this question about whether or not you are “pro-life,” and that it that the question itself presumes a certain kind of relationship between the church and civil society. In brief, it assumes that the church has a responsibility to “fix,” or at least call out, what it perceives as the evils of a given society. The question, then, is not asking about your theology of life so much as it is asking about your theology of activism in the Church. 

Reframing the question may help to clarify the issue: to what degree ought people outside the church be made to follow the teachings of Christianity? Immediately, it should be apparent that this is a far more tangled, difficult, and fraught question. We should also note that it is a question the Church has wrestled with since almost Day 1. To what degree do converted Gentiles need to obey the Hebraic law? What are the boundaries between allegiance to Christ and service in the secular state? What happens when the State becomes Christian but then acts in its own secular interests? At no point in Church history has there ever been, at any time, a clear answer to this dilemma. And what I want to stress about the disposition of the pro-life, cause-based movement is that they sometimes act as if the question is solved. In their logic, abortion (or transgenderism, or fighting the Dems, or voting against Their Guy) is an evil that the church should do all in its power to eradicate. To take up the primary example, while I can agree that abortion is an evil, I remain uncertain about the role that the church ought to play as a corrective schoolmarm to the world’s evils. 

Constantine had a vision of the cross which led to his conversion, creating the ultimate struggle of church and state relations.

But this is right where the cause-based psychology of well-meaning church members can become unkind, and even manipulative. It seems to me that the people who get caught up in these cause-based enterprises are also people who like things to be black and white. They don’t like grey areas. And you can spot them when they talk about social issues with the language of “things that have to be stopped no matter what.” In fact, this is a good means of detecting these cause-formed believers, because they reveal themselves especially by means of these nuclear-level, admit-no-nuanced-response arguments. Imagine that in conversation you advocate for something even remotely nuanced, like the fact that sometimes, on rare occasions, an abortion might be necessary, and the pro-life position holder may well respond to you with a nuclear-level argument, “So you support horrific procedures like dilation and extraction?” “So, you’re okay with mothers murdering their children out of the womb?” “So, you support the widescale genocide of black babies by black mothers?” To which I want to say, “I haven’t said any of those things.” But the questioner lives within an all-or-nothing framework. Either you are all in with him, or you are a liar and a cheat, and the absolute either/or of the question precludes any nuance, however carefully formulated. You are either entirely pro-life, or you are nothing at all. You are protesting on the weekends against abortion, or you are functionally pagan. You either hate all Transgender ideology (to the same degree as the questioner) or you hate children. You either agree with the presuppositions of the questioner, or you are not a true Christian at all. But this all-or-nothing test for faithfulness is its own slippery slope. If being pro-life matters more than anything else, then the “anything else” includes our commitments to the gospel itself. The absolutes inevitably create conflicting instructions within our commitments. Because the truth of the matter is that faith is hard and the world is kind of grey, and we’re all just stumbling along doing the best we can within the lights we’ve been given. Once again, the appeal of black and white thinking is that it simplifies the world, even simplifying the difficult work of faith. In this respect, the question, “Are you pro-life?” is in one crucial sense a query into how black-and-white you view the Christian faith. 

At the same time, behind these shadow theologies about cause-based Christianity and the efficacy of activism, there is a real body of critical theological reflection on issues relating to life. This body of thinking is our theology around the sanctity of life. We should be clear about something: the language of “Sanctity of life” is not contained within the creeds, and is therefore not really a question of orthodoxy or heterodoxy. It nevertheless describes an important—and I would argue under-defined—aspect of our theological witness in the world. Our theology of life is also an area where the Church and the world are at profound odds. 

In brief, the concept that life is sacred is a deeply Christian concept. It takes as its foundation point the idea that God created life, that He has especially created human life in His image, and that human life is specially valuable and demanding of respect. One of the first commandments in the Bible is that someone who defaces the image of God in his neighbour should receive the death penalty (Gen. 9:6)—in other words, what you have done to God’s image is treated as if you had done it to God Himself! Sobering stuff. A commitment to the sanctity of life, therefore, is a lot more far-reaching than just a commitment to the unborn. It is a commitment to the newly born, to the young, to the disabled, to the elderly, and to the dying. It contains within it consequential commitments to healthcare, education, and welfare. It is, above all, one of the doctrines that stands behind our commitment to the wellbeing of the poor—those who cannot make it on their own without help. If we believe that life is sacred (which, as Christians, we should) then the portfolio of our actions and beliefs extending from that belief will be strikingly broad. 

But, as I said, this idea about the sanctity of life is a place where our culture has been moving in ways quite divergent to the Christian tradition. While the world reflects a vestige of belief in life’s sanctity through its vocal profession of suicide prevention, at the same time it champions the rise of medically assisted suicide. Too depressed? End your life. Terminally ill? End your life. No prospects? End your life. The astonishing rise of acceptance for medically assisted suicide is itself indicative of a deep problem in the hearts and minds of many people—a latent belief that life isn’t all that worth living. If I don’t care about being alive, why should I care about the unborn? Why should they want to be cursed with life? 

This is not the only contradiction in the world’s approach to life’s value. It will loudly demand the defence of Palestinian children, while ignoring the millions of unborn who die almost daily. It will demand radical responsibility for sexual indiscretions (esp. towards men), while abdicating all responsibility for sexual restraint (esp. towards women with respect to abortion on demand). What motivates these contradictory positions is an idol of freedom. Anything that restrains my pursuit of happiness is an evil that must be prevented. That is why the world demands abortion on demand, marijuana on demand, suicide on demand, divorce on demand, and so forth. 

And so here is our conundrum—we have a theology of the sanctity of life that the world does not share, because our beliefs about life’s sanctity require the curtailment of some people’s personal freedom. No, you are not free to have all the sex you want; no, you are not free to ignore the poor; no, you are not free to abort an unwanted child; no, you are not free to do whatever you please. But to people formed by this attitude of hedonistic freedom, our convictions that the lives of the unborn should be protected falls on especially deaf ears, especially where people don’t think life is all that much worth living. To be blunt, our culture will never be “pro-life” while it doesn’t believe that life is valuable, and even more so when it is trenchantly anti-responsibility. 

Where does this leave us? I may believe in the sanctity of life, but I also recognize that our world does not. It follows, therefore, that one of the burdens of discipleship is to teach world-formed men and women to appreciate the life that God has given them, and to their image-bearing neighbours, and to grow in understanding the nature of responsibility in light of that knowledge. This means that our outreach to culture—if we are going to reach these world-formed men and women for the gospel—has to target these deep beliefs about freedom and responsibility before we can target their behaviours around sex and personal conduct. They have to meet God, and be convinced that His image and likeness are worth preserving. It also means that while our convictions on the sanctity of life will include advocacy for the unborn, this can only be part of the package. Because in the fullness of understanding that our neighbours are image-bearers a whole array of issues about life emerge—from pre-birth, through childhood, adolescence, middle-age, and seniority, extending to how we die. 

In the end, Christian theology has a rich, powerful, and crucial body of teaching on the sanctity of life, but questions about our pro-life allegiance collapse this manifold theology into a single issue. What we must remember is that the prevalence of causes are always symptoms of a deeper sickness, and it is that deeper sickness that the Christian pastor is summoned to address. The question we pastors must ask is this: what role will our commitment to the sanctity of life play in our active discipleship of people into the image of Christ? 

The New Orthodoxy, Part 2: Do you oppose “wokeness” in all its forms?

This is the second entry in a blog mini-series describing the parameters of what I call the “new orthodoxy.” You can read the original post here.

Before I get into the second question, I’ll briefly summarize the opening argument. What makes a pastor an orthodox Christian pastor is that he or she affirms the statements in the traditional creeds of the Church, while a heterodox Christian pastor (i.e., a heretic) is unable to affirm these things. Affirmation of these creeds is a good and reliable test for the orthodoxy of a given pastor, but what I am detecting today is a novel trend in the Church, where, in addition to these traditional standards, a new list of beliefs is levied against pastors (and other Christians) to determine whether they are “in” or “out.” The primary question is no longer, “Do you believe the historic teachings and creeds of the church of Christ?” Now it is, “Do you agree with these positions?” In my first post, I wrote about how adherence to certain beliefs about the Bible are privileged over the Bible itself. Today I’m going to address the question of “wokeness.”

Question #2: Do you oppose wokeness in all its forms? 

There are many questions we can ask pastors to query their orthodoxy, some of them extremely important and valid. One such question is something like this, “Tell us about your commitment to the authority of Scripture.” Another important question may be this one: “Tell us about your positions on marriage, gender, and sexuality.” These are both valid, important questions you may well want to ask. Unlike the above, however, the question about “wokeness” is not one you are likely to be asked directly. This is because in the  background of this question a concept of “wokeness” is doing a lot of work. I will need to attempt to articulate this background, because the operative concept of “wokeness” is providing a broad emotional subtext to the query. That subtext, in turn, is itself informing both the questions we are asked, and then frames how people respond to our answers. So you may be asked a series of questions that are each, in their way, attempting to determine whether any of your beliefs can be considered “woke.” The set of beliefs that are “woke” itself is wide-ranging, encompassing your convictions about things like racism, sexuality, economics, the “current political situation,” and environmentalism. 

I want to tip my hat at the outset and say that pastors—faithful, orthodox, Bible-believing pastors—can have lots of different convictions about matters like racism and how to address it, sexuality and how to pastor people in the midst of gender identity questions, economics and what it means to care for the poor, current politics and how best to address them from a Kingdom perspective, and the environment and what it means to be a faithful steward of God’s creation. What the “wokeness” question is asking is whether any of your beliefs on these matters are considered culturally… compromised. To put it another way, when we dig around the background of this question it appears to be asking you how politically conservative you are. 

These background motivations are critical to understand, because I need to stress that in answering queries into your “wokeness” you aren’t really answering the surface-level question; you are addressing a set of hidden presuppositions. These presuppositions encompass a shifting but deeply felt set of convictions, in which anything “woke” is leftist and bad, while anything anti-woke is conservative and good. But the definition of what makes something “woke” itself keeps shifting. In this respect, and in the minds of many conservative North Americans, the definition of “woke” is so sufficiently plastic that it ends up serving as a shorthand for “things I don’t like.” That list may include things like Gay Pride, Marxism, BLM, “Critical Race Theory,” Socialism, Climate Change, and “the Dems.” Since these things are, from this “conservative” perspective, politically and socially bad, what happens next is that the definition of “woke” bleeds out to encompass even ideas and concepts that are marginally associated with these ideas. In other words, while Christianity has real and important things to say about sexuality, economics, racism, political structures, and the environment, bringing up a nuanced discussion of these issues can result in cognitive shutdown on the part of the questioner. You have said something that sounds like it might be “woke,” therefore you are “woke,” therefore your opinion is invalid. 

This is a difficult cognitive process to untangle. If what makes something “woke” is that it identifies this subset of “things I don’t like,” then the definition of the concept shifts accordingly. “Woke” no longer denotes a set of clearly identifiable, and perhaps largely progressive, beliefs about society. Instead, “woke” describes everything I (the questioner) don’t like about society, whether progressive or not, and serves as a shorthand for “everything that isn’t politically conservative.” With these twists and turns in mind, it now appears that we are being asked a different question: Do you dislike the things that Conservative Christians are supposed to dislike? Do you hate the things I hate, and love the things I love? In the end, this question of “wokeness” is a question that is demanding is your political agreement with a congregation as a prerequisite for your accreditation as a faithful teacher/preacher/pastor. 

At this point, it is worth pausing to note that there is an actual definition of “woke” which is independent of the largely slanderous use by conservatives (i.e., “Go woke, go broke”). As with many newer slang terms, the concept of woke originated in black urban culture in discourses around race and ethnicity. A person was “woke” if he or she was alert to the ongoing realities of racism—more specifically, if the person was alert to the way that social systems, long built by privileged persons, passively bolstered white success and hindered that of black individuals (I am simplifying matters). If you were “aware” of how the system performed this privileging/hindering process, you were “woke.” If you were not aware, or denied it, you were not woke. Quite straightforward, really. 

And the truth of the matter is, there really is quite a lot of evidence to support the idea of systemic oppression. One really clear, documented, and illuminating example has to do with questions of diet and poverty. Poor people have poorer diets than wealthier people. And this poverty of diet has a direct impact on measurable metrics like educational success, job success, body composition, and generational wealth. Being poor does actually make it harder for you to get ahead in life. Having been enslaved, and then freed but legally oppressed—which is the story of many black Americans—similarly and unsurprisingly makes it difficult to get ahead in life. These are not terribly controversial points to make. 

So, while we may disagree about the particular systems that may be helping or hindering people through life, and that those systems regrettably target people based on racial particulars, to believe that there are such systems is, quite frankly, noncontroversial. Where things become controversial is in how we prescribe actions to address these problems, what policies and procedures we advocate to “fix” racism. It is the solutions that are controversial, not the evidences which describe the problem, or even its acknowledgement. 

Now, here’s where things get squirrelly. The idea that there are systems of oppression and systems of privilege is quite similar to—and potentially even drawn in an ideological line from—certain beliefs in Marxist sociology. Marx divided humanity into classes, and viewed the struggle of history as a class war towards greater freedom (the proletariat overthrowing the bourgeoisie). Marx himself is repurposing Hegel, and whether or not Marx was right in his Hegelian interpretation of the progress of history is something that is deeply debatable (I think he was wrong). But he’s not entirely wrong when he identifies classes of people, or suggests that one class (in power) seeks to preserve its power at the expense of another class (not in power). In other words, the fact that there are Marxist parallels between the ideology of wokeism and that there are flaws in Marxist eschatology is not, in itself, sufficient to reject the real ways that systems sustain models of oppression or privilege. In other words, we can agree that classes exist without demanding, as a solution, that they seize the means of production. 

But at the mention of Marxism it seems like a switch flipped in conservative minds. It was a binary, I/O switch. With the association to so-called “Marxist” ideas, all the historic, McCarthyian fear of communists hiding in the bushes seems to have resurrected, and conservative minds consequently responded to things that they consider “woke” with the ruthless hatred they had reserved for those pinko commies in the 1950s. As a result, “wokeness” is now regarded almost as a kind of disease, any symptom of which is a sign of evil to come, and any vestige of which must be mercilessly dealt with. Subsequently, any belief associated with the “liberal” agenda is labeled “woke” as well (even if it has little to do with systemic justice). It follows that anyone who espouses a belief that is even tangentially related to the so-called “liberal” agenda is showing symptoms of the disease and must be ruthlessly eliminated. A nuanced approach to questions of life? Libtard. A nuanced understanding of sexuality and gender? Libtard. Criticism of the (Republican) American President? Libtard. Concern about the Environment? Libtard. 

This is a serious problem, not only because it oversimplifies our Christian ethics, but also because there are lots of ways that Christians really ought to be at the forefront of what is, in this original sense, “woke.” We, as Christians, believe in principalities and powers that stand opposed to God’s ways in the world. Why should we be surprised that those principalities work in an oppressive way through racism? Furthermore, on each of the platform points which are labeled “woke” we have things to say. As Christians, we believe certain things about racism (that it is bad!), about sexuality (that it is God-designed and regulated by His Word), about economics (that we have an obligation to the poor), about politics (that we are citizens of the Kingdom before any earthly loyalty), and about the environment (that we are stewards of God’s creation). These are five different areas of belief, each deserving of their own complex set of theological reflections. But what has happened is that the discourse has devolved to the point where even discussing the nuanced points of these matters will get you labelled “woke.” This is an absurd oversimplification. It is in this sense that the language of “woke,” deployed derogatively by people on the political right, shuts down even what should be sincere, good-faith discourse. It is from this epistemic place that Christians can speak of a so-called “sin of empathy”—i.e., that in allowing yourself to feel compassion for the poor, oppressed, and marginalized, you are submitting to the “woke” virus and in danger of becoming “woke” yourself!

Let’s return to the question as I framed it originally—“Do you renounce “wokeness” in all its forms?” In a curious way, this question overlaps quite strikingly the previous question, about really preaching the Bible. This is because there is a latent belief that the really biblical preacher denounces as sin the things I hate from the pulpit. Like wokeness. Or the gays. Or transgenderism in schools. Or abortion. Or the Libs. What people who ask this question want—what they really seem to want—is a pulpit ministry that is liberally flavoured with largely conservative talking points. They don’t want the Bible, they want their conservative talking points fed back to them from the pulpit. They want, in a tragic, distorted way, “what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Tim 4:3). But the truth of the matter is that “owning the Libs” from the pulpit is not a fruit of the Spirit. 

It’s probably not a true story, but I like the one about the congregant who came to his pastor after a service and said, “Pastor, I wish you’d talk about sin more from the pulpit.” The pastor paused, thought for a moment, then replied, “Which of your sins did you want me to talk about?” The congregant, flustered, walked away. There is truth in the story, however. If you want to be a popular, “successful” preacher, preach against other people’s sins—the sins of those “out there,” who we can secretly hate for their sinfulness and feel good about our sanctity. If you want to get in trouble, preach about the sins of the men and women in the pews—about their greed, pride, hatred, unforgiveness, lack of mercy, and about how they ignore the justice of God. 

In my opening post, I addressed how it was that secondary or tertiary doctrines are elevated, wrongly, to places of primary priority in the church, especially with respect to the question of people who “really” preach the Bible. In this second entry, I have tried to show how there is a desire for political alignment, conformity to which is treated as a measure of genuine orthodoxy. But the bald and unavoidable truth is that our political agreement is not, and cannot be, a precondition for our Christian faith. When we do that, we privilege the kingdoms of the earth at the expense of God’s heavenly Kingdom. 

But I should stress—and this will be difficult for some of you to hear—that this political and religious overlap appears to be a uniquely American phenomenon. Let me try to explain. When my wife and I moved from the US to Canada in 2005, we experienced some pretty profound culture shock. Things in Canada looked just like they looked in America, but were subtly—and occasionally overtly!—different. Coming to terms with those differences was an important learning experience for both of us. In that long process of (largely wholesome) personal growth, one of the things we realized was that the broad overlap between conservative American politics and Evangelicalism was not replicated in Canada. Not at all! Canadian evangelicals didn’t operate based on the same presuppositions that to be Christian was to exhibit allegiance to a specific political party. Later, when we lived in Scotland for five years, we found that UK evangelicals didn’t operate that way either! In short, living outside of America for almost twenty years has shown us that being a faithful Christian is not the same thing as being an observant American Republican. It has helped us to see that any demand for a conservative orthodoxy, superadded to our convictions about Christian orthodoxy, is nothing less than a form of political idolatry. 

In the next post, I’ll address the question of support for the Pro-Life cause. 

The New Orthodoxy, Part 1: Do you really preach the Bible? 

I have encountered an unsettling trend in the Evangelical circles in which I run. This trend disturbs me, so over the course of the next few blog posts I plan to address it. 

What is the trend that I am encountering? I am witnessing situations where, in order to qualify as a “true” pastor—and sometimes even as a “true” Christians—you are expected to conform to a set of beliefs that are not, in themselves, the Gospel. These Gospel-adjacent beliefs are treated as a kind of “new orthodoxy,” and if you dare to hold a position contrary to one of them you are regarded as suspect, if not an outright heretic. But, as I hope to show, these new “points of doctrine,” are not actually a part of our central Christian witness. This means that the credibility of ministers is being evaluated on standards that are not the Gospel. 

But we’ve got to start at the beginning, and that means clarifying what we mean by saying that a Christian can and should be “orthodox.” (And, to be clear, I am not speaking about the capital “O” Eastern Orthodox Church.) Orthodox Christian beliefs are summarized best by the three primary traditional creeds of the Church (Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian). To summarize those, orthodox believers hold to the sovereignty of God the Father, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son, and the life-giving power of the Spirit. Which is to say, they affirm belief in the Trinity. Orthodox Christians also believe in the virgin birth, the resurrection of the dead, the forgiveness of sins, and in the Church catholic and universal. Added to these—and I say this acknowledging my own Protestant heritage—are beliefs about the authority of Christian Scripture, the necessity for saving faith, and the need for active growth in the Christian life. It is difficult to imagine any traditional, orthodox Christian struggling to affirm the parameters of a list like this (although they might well niggle at the particulars!). 

Jan Hus, being burnt at the stake.

So, an orthodox Christian pastor affirms these things, and a heterodox Christian pastor (i.e., a heretic) does not affirm these things. What I am encountering, however, is a novel list of beliefs by which pastors and Christians are tested. The primary question is no longer, “Do you believe the historic teachings and creeds of the church of Christ?” Now it is, “Do you agree with these positions?” If the answer is “no,” then at best your credentials as a Christian are rendered suspect. At worst, you are considered an agent of the enemy, apostate, a servant of the Evil One. 

What are these beliefs of the so-called new orthodoxy? I have encountered four that I believe figure prominently in our cultural discourse at the moment:   

1) Do you really preach the Bible? 

2) Do you oppose “wokeness” in all its forms?

3) Are you pro-life? 

4) Do you support Israel? 

Over the next four blog posts I will take time to address each of these “new orthodoxy” questions. I think we will find that in no case is the question as direct as it might appear on the surface—indeed, it is in exploring what is under the surface that we will discover something important about the motives of this “new orthodoxy.” 

Today, I’ll tackle the first question—about really preaching the Bible.

Question 1: Do you really preach the Bible? 

When someone asks if you “really” preach the Bible, that person isn’t asking if your sermons come from a place of sincere, studied, and intentional Bible-reading. They aren’t really asking if you make the Bible the foundation of your teaching life in the Church—if they were, then it would be a perfectly good question to ask any minister. And, just to set the record straight, preachers who willingly align with historic orthodoxy typically do preach from the Bible, although not always in the same exact ways. There is space for preaching to be expository, topical, narrative, and theological, while all remaining thoroughly Biblical (although I suspect that some churches make an idol of their idea of “expository”—that’s a subject for another essay).

This is why the emphasis on the word “really” is quite important. “Do you really preach the Bible?” is asking something different. The person who asks this question isn’t asking about the Bible, he or she is asking if you use the Bible in a way that conforms to their preexisting idea of theology. They aren’t asking if you preach the whole counsel of God’s Word, they are asking if you preach a theology they are familiar with. To them, “Biblical” is shorthand for “things I think about the Bible” and not the Bible itself. 

The collapse between these two concepts is a problem, and it is a problem because not all of our thoughts about the Bible are biblical. And there is a whole array of these extra-biblical thoughts which are deployed in evaluation of the Christian minister, but because of the conflation of the concepts of “biblical” and “things I think about the Bible,” the extra-biblical thoughts are elevated to a position of undue authority in the orthodox Christian tradition. To make matters even worse, almost all of these are unspoken, and you won’t know you’ve sinned until you break the rules! 

Allow me to to tease out some of these external criteria, for some people, the really Biblical preachers are KJV onlyists (i.e., that the KJV is the only legitimate Bible translation). For others, truly Biblical preachers are cessationists (i.e., believing that the miraculous work of the Spirit ended with the apostles). For still others, genuine biblical preachers preach doctrines like the rapture, and focus on the times and dates of Revelation, and draw explanatory connections between American Geopolitics and the End Times. In each case, the “biblical” preacher is someone who says the things “our theological camp” agrees with, quoting the Bible in the process. And I would be remiss if I failed to mention that many in the modern Reformed camp do exactly this thing by conflating “Reformed theology” with the gospel itself (they are by no means coterminous). In each case, these doctrines, not the Bible itself, become little shibboleths by which people can gauge the purported orthodoxy of a given pastor. 

To be gracious, I don’t think many people are aware that they have conflated the two statements, “I want a preacher who preaches the Bible,” and “I want a preacher who preaches the things I like.” But it is precisely the unexamined nature of our beliefs that allows these sentiments to coexist. More deeply still, it is very likely a problem in reading comprehension. We believe that our thoughts about the Bible are de facto Biblical because we are not very good readers of the Bible itself. 

I think I can best illustrate this with a personal story and some clear scriptural examples. The personal story is this: for three years I was a marking tutorial assistant in Seminary for our introduction to exegesis course. It was my job to grade all assignments and coach students through the process of learning how to read the Bible more effectively. It was challenging work. Repeatedly, I came up against a fascinating scenario. We would be addressing a passage of Scripture with the intention of reading it in context. But the student in question simply could not do it. He or she would jump straight past reading the text to his or her theology about the text. In other words, the student would jump clean over “reading comprehension” and begin speaking immediately about what he or she thought it meant. Here are three brief examples of how this kind of thing worked. 

Example #1) “Eat my flesh.” Consider the passage from John 6, where Jesus tells the crowds following him that they must “eat his flesh and drink his blood” (6:53ff), at which point a large group stops following him. An attentive reading of the text has to ask a lot of questions—why does Jesus say this? To whom is He speaking? What is the significance of his flesh as food? Are there any Old Testament references which make sense of this? All these questions, and more, are part of a careful reading of Scripture. But for the beginner exegesis student, the jump to theology—the jump to “Communion!”—short-circuits this necessary reading process. Is John 6 about communion? It doesn’t look like it. Passover isn’t in view in this chapter. Instead, we have the feeding of the 5000. With this in mind, Jesus’s words begin to take on a different aspect—the crowds are following him because they want a free meal. But if they’re really going to follow, they’re going to have to commit to him. “You’re here because of bread; what you don’t understand is that I am your food.” This reframing clarifies that John 6:53ff appears to be about the radical nature of commitment to Jesus. In other words, we must be so committed to him that we are like people who eat his flesh and drink his blood. And the early hearers were sufficiently put off by this that they stopped following Jesus. Are there tethers from John 6 to our theology of communion? Possibly—but we don’t start with communion theology and read John 6. Instead, we read John 6 and use that reading to inform our communion theology. And what this implies is that our practice of communion expresses something of our radical commitment to Jesus, rather than John 6 being about the practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper. In summary, whenever we start with theology and then fit the text inside it, we are not actually reading the Bible very well. 

Example #2) “By faith…” Famously, the Apostle Paul speaks about the nature of saving faith in the book of Romans. A passage like Romans 3:28 figures prominently: “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.” When students read a passage like this—especially Protestant students—their theological minds supply a variety of things. Most often, in my experience, what is supplied is some form of belief about how it is “faith alone” that saves (i.e., sola fidei). But that word “alone” isn’t in the text here, and our theology about the interrelationship between faith and works is far more complex than the simplifications of the Reformation. It is worth remembering that Luther, somewhat infamously, when translating the Bible from Greek into German, added the word “alone” to the text here, even thought it is not in the original Greek! But if you do a Bible search on the words “faith” and “alone” a curious thing happens. Only one verse comes up, and it is James 2:24, “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” I’m not going to take on the whole faith/works debate here, but the simple truth remains: so long as our theology reads the text, rather than the text—even difficult texts!—reads our theology, we are in danger of mis-reading what the text says. 

Example #3) The Rapture. Consider the well-known passage from Matthew 24:40-41, “Then there will be two men in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one will be left.” Students will read this passage and, given their theological background, immediately cry, “Rapture!” The text points to the theology, and the theology comes to read the text on our behalf. But even a cursorily attentive study of the context begins to render this suspect. Look with me at the longer passage, beginning at verse 36: 

“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. 37 For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. 38 For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, 39 and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be. 40 Then there will be two men in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. 41 Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken and one will be left.

When we read these words in their immediate context, two pretty important things emerge. The first is that Jesus is using an image of “being taken” to highlight the sudden unexpectedness of his return. In this respect, the passage isn’t about the return itself, it’s more about how we won’t be able to predict the moment of the return. The second important thing—and one that is in its own way a thing more startling—is to think about the image. In the days before Noah’s ark people are hanging about,  eating, drinking, and it is those people who are taken by the flood. Being taken, in other words, is bad. And it makes little sense, from a reading perspective, to shift to the next verse and claim that the man being taken from the field and the woman being taken from the mill are taken up with Jesus. If the governing image is the “taking” of the flood, then this passage isn’t about being raptured to Jesus, it’s about being taken away in judgment. To the degree that Matthew 24:36-41 is about a rapture, that rapture is a very bad thing. 

Now, I can hear the protestations of my rapture-defending readers, and they are shouting about 1 Thessalonians 4:17, where Paul says that we will be caught up in the air to meet Jesus. Let’s take Paul at face value (generally good practice, by the way!) and agree that at the return of Jesus all Jesus’s followers will be gathered to him. But let’s also recall Jesus’s departure from Acts 1 and the promise of his return. Here is Acts 1:9-11: 

9 And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. 10 And as they were gazing intently into the sky while He was going, behold, two men in white clothing stood beside them. 11 They also said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven.”

Jesus (somehow) disappears into the clouds, and some angels announce that he will return in the same way. Look closely, because Jesus’s return has a trajectory—he’s coming back to the earth. So now we can put 2 and 2 together and calculate a theological 4. When Jesus returns, he will return as he left—descending to the earth. When he returns, we will meet him in the air, where it looks very much like we who follow Jesus are joining in his triumphal procession back to the earth. This isn’t a rapture, it’s more like joining a parade. Once again when our theology overrides our reading comprehension, we skip the text itself in favour of the things we think about the text. 

I’ve given these three examples, but the in case of my exegesis students, there was need for a relentless, almost exhausting, nearly despair inducing repetition of the need to point that student back to the text.“Yes, I know what your theology says,” I would say. But then I would ask, again, and again, “But what does the text say?”

Again, I think there is some room for grace here. And this is because, by degrees, I think everyone does this. The Bible is a big book. There’s a lot in it. And it becomes easier to read for our shorthand of what it means than, sometimes, to read the words itself. For me, it was my university Greek professors who helped to break this habit, and to them I owe a significant debt of gratitude. When you’re learning Biblical Greek you’re learning a language that, when translated, sounds really familiar. Most students studying Biblical Greek have been reading the Bible for a long time, and the words themselves are so familiar that it is easy to take them for granted. But on our assignments, and especially on our exams, my professors would give us Greek sentences to translate that were almost but not quite, the Bible. It would look something like this: “And Jesus said to his disciples, go into all the world and preach the fish, and my daughter will be with you always.” See, you’d start reading and be all geared up to fill in the blanks with what you know to be the answer, but if you read carefully you’d be rewarded with this theological gibberish. The reason this was so good is because it forced you to actually read the words of the Bible, and not take them for granted. All that to say, I surmise that many Christians simply don’t know how to read the Bible as the Bible—they leapfrog over their reading to familiar tropes. And the unchecked result is that they don’t read the Bible; they think their theology and look for verses that fit with what they know. 

In the end, the question, “Do you really preach the Bible?” is a query into your alignment with a variety of secondary, even tertiary theological issues. And the person who asks it is, in my experience, revealing that he or she has elevated one of these secondary or tertiary issues to the level of so-called “orthodoxy.” 

The Bible says a lot of things. The faithful preacher does his level best to say those things in accordance with a careful and meditative reading of the Scriptures. But the very idea that a truly “biblical” preacher merely parrots familiar theological talking points is, to put it mildly, simplistic. Instead, the truly Biblical preacher says the things that God wants him to say—even, and perhaps especially, when his people don’t want to hear it. 

In the next post I’ll take up the second question—about wokeness. 

I Fear Greeks, or, What’s in the Horse? 


Travel with me back in time to what is one of the most famous and recognizable episodes from all of ancient literature. The scene is set outside the walls of Troy, where the Trojan citizens led by Paris and Hector hold Helen, the wife of Menelaus, against an army of Greeks. The names of the Greek soldiers loom larger than life: Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax, and Achilles. For all their gathered strength, however, they cannot break through the Poseidon-blessed walls of Troy. The war is at a stalemate. 

Crafty Odysseus, however, hatches a plan. The Trojans loves horses, worship horses, consider horses to be a sign of good luck. So the Greeks secretly build a large horse—larger, it is important to note, than the walls of the city. They then fill the belly of the horse with a group of warriors, seal it up, and feint a departure from the battlefield of Troy. To all appearances, they have left a religious gift and departed for good. 

Some Trojans are suspicious, arguing that the horse should be burnt where it stands, but communal feeling, and exhaustion from the length of the war, win out. The Trojans begin to dismantle their wall so that they can bring the horse inside, and within it the hidden Greeks. Two key voices warn against this course of action. Cassandra, daughter of the King, speaks out, but she has been cursed. Her curse is that she will always prophecy the truth, but no one will believe her. True to form, she warns against the horse, but none believe her. Then, Laocoon—a wise Trojan priest—stands and says these fateful words, recorded by Vergil in his Aeneid. I remember them well, because they are some of the few lines of Latin that I memorized and retain: “Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos, et dona ferentis.” Translation: “Whatever it is, I fear Greeks—even when they bring gifts.” 

A famous sculpture of Laocoon, being eaten by snakes with his sons for daring to oppose the Trojan Horse.

I expect you are familiar with the rest of the story. The horse enters the city, the Greeks in the field return by night, and the Greeks within the horse climb out of their hiding place to execute their vengeance on the Trojans. The rest, as they say, is history. 

Laocoon’s phrase has been rattling about in my head these past weeks as I observe these early days of Trump administration. His words have reverberated especially as I witness the celebratory—in some cases gloating—attitudes of my fellow Christians. They are thrilled to see the “end” of DEI, the scratching of the pen as it removes aspects of gender ideology from its presence in the political sphere, the sabre-rattling against neighbors to the north and south of the States, the executive actions taken to remove illegal immigrants, and the slash-and-burn approach to cutting “government waste.” The list can go on. 

I should be clear, at this point, that—with abundant provisions and caveats—I can see how some of these actions are good. NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) ought to be the premier American institute for sciences, and I can see how certain DEI policies are inimical to that excellence. I’m not a fan of gender ideology, and I believe (and am on record for having written previously) that unrestricted immigration is bad. It’s difficult to make any truly coherent argument against better efficiency and the curtailing of government spending waste. To reiterate, saying these things are good doesn’t mean I agree with how the administration is executing its platform. The results may be “good,” but the means may render them evil. 

Beneath and alongside these “goods” I think there is reason for fear. And that reason for fear is tied to Laocoon’s words that I hear ratting around in my head. Quidquid id est…whatever it is. Whatever these goods, whatever benefits we perceive in the moment, whatever agenda are at the moment aligning with the desires of a large portion of Americans, timeo Danaos. I fear these Greeks. And the reason for fear, quite specifically, may be captured by a different question: What is in the horse? 

Sure, the Trump administration is accomplishing some goals that many like, approve, and laud. But what else is going on? What’s being shipped into the heart of American geopolitics? From my perspective, different people seem to be populating the horse with different fears at the moment. I don’t think all their suppositions are of the same quality or warrant. Here are three that do concern me. 

#1) I am concerned that there are unelected billionaires in the horse. And what I mean, more specifically, is that I simply don’t believe that these unelected billionaires—Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos—have American best-interest in mind. I believe that they have their own best interest in mind. And there is evidence that the billionaire class—especially tech billionaires—believe that destabilization is a great way to make more money. Gabriel Gatehouse, in his award-winning BBC Radio-4 series, “The Coming Storm,” traces some of the intellectual currents that undergird the motives of this billionaire, tech-bro class. In particular, he points to a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, written James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Those authors speculate how to benefit—even thrive—in the coming destabilization brought about by advancing technology. While I think it would too simple to say that these billionaires are actively causing destabilization, I think it is perfectly sensible to reason that they are willing to posture themselves to benefit in the face of it. Chaos is good for business, especially when you’re protected by nine zeroes. 

#2) I am concerned that Christian Nationalism is in the horse. I suspect that a lot of the hullabaloo around Project 2025 is overblown, and I have no doubt that certain that aspects of the program are common sense. But I also know that there has been a long movement in Washington, DC to establish Christian power in Washington along the lines of a theory called “Seven Mountains Dominionism.” (I should note that Paula White, Trump’s new “faith advisor,” is a proponent of this theory.) Dominionism is a program, developed and executed by Christians, to model American government after a theocracy. It is profoundly unbiblical. Remember that Jesus says that his kingdom is “not of this world.” Attempts to make this world, by our power, the Kingdom of God and of His Christ are deeply misguided. (Does this mean that Christians shouldn’t be involved in politics? Of course it doesn’t—but we engage in politics under the full awareness that our loyalty lies to the Kingdom of Christ, and that it is His Kingdom to bring about, not ours.) 

#3) Bear with me for a moment, because this will take some explanation, but I am concerned that there are dwarfs in the horse. At the close of C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, a group of dwarfs turn against the true king of Narnia, and against an invading army, in favour of being for themselves alone. Their rallying cry is, “The dwarfs are for the dwarfs!” Captured by Narnia’s enemies, they are hurled in the dark of night into a stable where they are expected to meet their death. Later, some of the Narnian children and the true king are also hurled into the stable where, to there surprise, they find themselves in a wide green country. This is because, by Aslan’s magic, the stable door into which they were thrown had become the very means of their escape from harm. The children rejoice, but are soon troubled to find a circle of dwarfs huddled together. The children try to reach out to the dwarfs, who simply will not see the reality of Aslan’s country. They are convinced that they remain in a dark and dirty stable, that the good food offered to them is merely mud pies and cow pats, that bright and refreshing wine is really dingy water from a trough. “The dwarfs are for the dwarfs” has been their rallying cry, and now their minds are crippled so that they cannot see beyond their self-serving choice. 

The Greek army inside the horse and outside the walls—in our world—seems to me a great deal like these dwarfs. It is a body of people who won’t hear any arguments against what they have decided to believe. Any evidences presented to them that are contrary to what they believe are deliberately misinterpreted. Their rallying cry is that they are “For America!” For their America, that is—for themselves. 

In some respects the dwarfish problem is a problem of misinformation. I’ve been reading Jaques Ellul’s book Propaganda, which is incredibly good, incredibly prescient, and incredibly discouraging all at the same time. He addresses the ways that governments have to distribute information in order to maintain popular support and power, even to facilitate the outward veil of legitimacy. One of his arguments—and this is one I believe is highly accurate—is that while some information consumption permits us to become more human, other kinds—the kinds produced by propaganda—want us to be a mass that supports other people’s thinking. This kind of information is profoundly dehumanizing, reducing us to this mass, a body of unthinking reactives who will respond in predictable ways to the information we receive. In a sense, for Ellul, the end of critical thinking is the end of something important to what it means to be human. In this respect, I perceive a sea of disinformation at play within this present administration (for the record, there is disinformation on the left, as well). But what I see also is a body of people, my Christian brothers and sisters, who trenchantly refuse to admit that this disinformation is at play on their side too. That’s why I say that I fear that the horse contains this dwarfish spirit, built upon a trenchant refusal to admit that any other reality is at play.  

So, I am concerned about what is in the horse—unelected billionaires, Christian nationalism, and a spirit of dwarfish pride. But I am also concerned about another aspect of the Trojan story. To get the horse within the gates they had to dismantle the gates. (NB: this is a disputed aspect of the ancient story, but it works well for my illustration.) I see Trump’s use of power as a kind of removal of the gates of protection for American democracy. Just the other day, Trump on his “Truth Social” platform oddly and troublingly referenced something said by Napoleon, “You cannot break a law when defending your country.” What an odd thing to say…

Allow me a moment to be more specific. Trump’s governance-by-executive order is a dangerous precedent. It allots far too much power to the Executive branch of the government. (I should be a fair critic and mention that this use/abuse of power is a precedent set, to my understanding, by Obama, who liberally deployed Executive orders to bypass unfavourable Republican congresses. This is a situation where it really is Obama’s fault.) The right order for American government is that Congress passes a bill that the President then signs into law. Instead, we have a president who is legislating by executive order. This is a smelly action, setting smelly precedents. The move to bypass legal precedent—and the rhetoric to defend it (that it is necessary to “save” our democracy)—is, to put it mildly, disturbing. This is an administration that appears to be actively undermining democracy in the process of advancing its agenda—an agenda which may well contain various unsavoury agents within the horse. What I am saying is that the mode of operation for this administration may be tearing down the walls of checks and balances put in place to protect American democracy. 

Trump’s disregard for the rule of law is in itself precedent setting. Subsequent administrations, perhaps even hostile to Christianity, may use these means to punish, limit, and even oppress the very people who are championing it at the moment. I think this is immensely dangerous. 

So, I suppose an ironic congratulations is in order for my Christian friends on the right. You have gotten what you wanted. I am concerned that you are about to get a lot more of what you don’t want.