An Unpersuasive Plea for Christians to Swing Left

Phil Christman’s apology for progressive politics ignores points of natural affinity with conservatives.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Eerdmans

One of the less interesting but increasingly common attacks one hears in Christian institutions is that some person or group is trying to “smuggle” liberalism or leftism into the church. Those targeted this way might claim to be bona fide evangelicals who believe the Bible. But critics suspect they’re merely mouthing the right words so they can sneak their Trojan horse of radical Marxism inside the gates of your church.

No one can make this accusation against Phil Christman’s new book Why Christians Should Be Leftists. It says right in the title that he’s not advocating a third way or just trying to make conservative Christians better listeners. Christman, an English professor who has worked extensively in the prison system, genuinely wants Christians to be political leftists.

I am, in some ways, part of the target audience for this book. At the very least, I am deeply sympathetic to what Christman wants: I have a half-finished document from 2019 sitting in my drafts folder entitled “Why Christian Conservatives Should Be Leftists and Leftists Should Be Conservative Christians.” Which makes it all the more disappointing to find that Christman hasn’t given the average right-leaning Christian any especially compelling arguments for swinging left.

Why Christians Should Be Leftists begins with Christman’s own story of coming to reject many of the political assumptions of his evangelical youth. He describes a transformative encounter with the Sermon on the Mount that forced him to acknowledge the value of each person created in God’s image. This realization, in turn, forced him to reconsider any economic or political arrangement that would exploit a person’s labor or judge that person by his or her earning potential.

Christman’s account of this moral awakening, along with later chapters expounding on the political implications of Jesus’ teachings, are the most compelling parts of the book. His convictions in this vein are worth celebrating and emulating—all people, even our most-hated political enemies, deserve a legal and social order that honors their inherent worth as human beings. However, it feels as if these later portions should have come earlier, helping to establish common ground with readers by describing the biblical basis for the author’s political principles. Instead, he jumps right into the more contentious bits.

Part of the problem with those contentious bits is that Christman doesn’t explicitly define the entire program he wants readers to subscribe to—or even prioritize. The closest he gets to defining the “leftism” he advocates comes in the second chapter, when he enumerates a set of specific practices and principles. As he argues, Christianity entails

massive redistribution of wealth (either through alms or taxes), the right of marginalized communities and exploited nations to self-defense, a much-lessened emphasis on punishment-for-its-own-sake and on revenge and a much greater emphasis on harm reduction in our systems of punishment, an abhorrence of war, and an avoidance of the hoarding of wealth and power.

Much of the book focuses on his first and last point, about the concentration of wealth and power in society and the ways it ought to be redistributed. There are some compelling arguments here—namely, that the wealthy and powerful will always be tempted to exploit the weak and poor to acquire more wealth and power. Christman rightly observes that there are no abstract and scientific laws of economics that somehow supersede our moral obligations to one another. The temptation to treat people like machines has existed for a very long time, and every political system requires strong restraints against exploiting people like property.

Beyond this, though, Why Christians Should Be Leftists never distinguishes between primary, secondary, and tertiary issues. The author knows quite well that conservative Christians will be squeamish about certain cultural issues, but the book heavily implies that a good leftist will adopt the standard liberal or left-wing perspective on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender identity.

Abortion, for example, gets only one long footnote, despite the role of pro-life convictions in keeping Christians aligned with the Republican Party. To many Christians, abortion is the ultimate legally sanctioned instance of treating people like property. Christman claims that “bans don’t work” (although evidence exists that they can, including recent research from scholars at Johns Hopkins University, who concluded that a Texas ban increased the number of births in the state). Even setting that debate aside, pro-life Christians generally retain a strong moral notion that governments looking out for people created in God’s image should extend that same solicitude to unborn children.

Christman argues that the best way to reduce abortions is “a very strong social safety net for new parents.” This is neither a new argument nor one that yields a settled consensus. It fits naturally, though, alongside a broader argument that building a more generous welfare state promotes the formation of strong families.

Numerous conservatives, however marginal they might be within current power structures, have advanced such arguments. Yet Christman doesn’t acknowledge any of this. Where do the Christian democratic parties of Europe, which have linked cultural conservatism and aggressive welfare policies for decades, fit into the picture? The book doesn’t say.

Similarly, there are many topics of public debate where the leftist concern for poor people being exploited points toward natural alliances with conservatives. The lure of legal euthanasia in Canada pressures the poorest citizens to end their lives. Unrestricted gambling is immiserating vulnerable families. Universally accessible porn is inculcating vicious misogyny against women and girls.

On such matters, any leftist should be able to tell a conservative neighbor, “Hey! We’re on the same side, and we want the government to intervene.” Christman misses an opportunity by ignoring these possibilities. (He also includes a handful of whoppers, like his claim that “the infant mortality rate for Black children in the United States is at positively premodern levels.” In fact, the infant mortality rate for Black Americans is about 10.8 per 1,000 live births, twice the rate for white children but still consistent with trends across America back in the mid-1980s.)

Ultimately, though, the biggest flaw with Why Christians Should Be Leftists is that it will do little to change minds among most right-leaning Christians.

I won’t fault the book for not being a dense work of political theology, although omitting John Calvin’s statement from his commentary on Psalm 82—that political rulers “are appointed to be the guardians of the poor”—feels like another missed opportunity. But other gaps are less defensible. One critical issue—the distinction between private charity and government aid that historic Christian leftists like Dorothy Day would have vigorously emphasized—receives just one footnote. Another—immigration—barely registers on the book’s discussion of global justice. The uncomfortable political reality is that unlimited immigration will undermine even the most robust welfare system. Many countries with generous social safety nets have found themselves reckoning with this tension in recent years.

Over the past few decades, extreme poverty and child mortality have decreased dramatically across the world even while wealth and power have remained concentrated in the hands of a few. This suggests that free markets can accomplish a great deal of good, even without countervailing government policies designed to reduce income inequality. But Christman betrays little awareness of these patterns. In general, he simply makes little effort to argue from biblical principles to concrete policies or even the general direction of leftism.

As a result, I struggle to think of any non-leftist Christian who would benefit from reading this book. Christman excels when thinking theologically about what it means for human beings to be created and loved by God. But then he simply assumes that readers, having contemplated these truths, will embrace leftist politics as a matter of course.

There are many Christians, like me, who wouldn’t mind paying higher taxes to help fund a more vigorous welfare state, even as we maintain strong convictions about abortion, marriage, and euthanasia. Unfortunately, we are still waiting for a book that might convince our left-skeptical friends to join us.

Matthew Loftus lives with his family in Kenya, where he teaches and practices family medicine at a mission hospital. His book Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press.

- More from Matthew Loftus

News

Judge Blocks Texas’ Campus Speech Cutoff After Student Ministry Lawsuit

Phoebe S. Gibson

District court: “The First Amendment does not have a bedtime of 10:00 p.m.”

The University of Texas at Dallas in Richardson, Texas.

Mak Studio / Getty Images

Key Updates

September 16, 2025

Texas Student Ministry Sues over Law Cutting Off Free Speech at 10 p.m.

A federal judge has halted enforcement of a new Texas law that restricts when students can engage in “expressive conduct” on university grounds.

Weeks after a campus ministry at the University of Texas Dallas and other student groups in the University of Texas system sued over the law, claiming it violated free speech, district judge David Alan Ezra issued a preliminary injunction.

The law didn’t allow students to take part in First Amendment–protected speech or activities between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. and barred guest speakers, amplified sound, and drum-playing leading up to finals week. Leaders with the Fellowship of Christian University Students worried about implications for evangelism, evening worship, and other activities.

Ezra wrote in the court order on Tuesday,

The First Amendment does not have a bedtime of 10:00 p.m. The burden is on the government to prove that its actions are narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling governmental interest. It has not done so.

September 16, 2025

New restrictions on campus speech in Texas have spurred a lawsuit from a coalition of student groups, including a Dallas ministry concerned about the impact on Bible studies, worship nights, and evangelism on campus.

The Campus Protection Act bans First Amendment–protected speech or expressive conduct between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. and prohibits using amplified sound, playing drums, or inviting guest speakers during the last two weeks of the semester.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, Texas lawmakers will meet to reexamine free speech protections at universities, including the implications of the new law, which passed last session and went into effect September 1.

Although legislators drafted the law in response to last year’s pro-Palestine protests as a means of “ensuring safety, order, and respect,” per the bill’s sponsor, it simultaneously impacts outreach by organizations such as the Fellowship of Christian University Students (FOCUS).

“It does matter that we as a ministry can meet students where they’re at when they need it,” said Juke Matthews, a FOCUS council chair at The University of Texas at Dallas. Someone could be going “through it at 10 p.m. at night, and as somebody who wants to look like Jesus, I want to be able to meet them or talk to them at that time and help them walk through things.”

State officials announced Friday that they formed two legislative committees in honor of Kirk, who was killed at a college event in Utah last week. According to the officials, the committees will also monitor “the climate of discourse and freedom of speech on campus” in light of the recently enacted Campus Protection Act and make recommendations for future policy decisions.

On September 3, FOCUS—alongside The Retrograde student newspaper, Young Americans for Liberty, the Texas Society of Unconventional Drummers, and Strings Attached—filed suit against The University of Texas system, which encompasses nine university campuses across the state, including in Arlington, Austin, Dallas, El Paso, San Antonio, and Tyler.

The student groups are represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan free speech advocacy group.

“Early morning prayer meetings on campus, for example, are now prohibited by law,” the lawsuit contends. “Students best beware of donning a political t-shirt during the wrong hours. And they must think twice before inviting a pre-graduation speaker, holding a campus open-mic night to unwind before finals, or even discussing the wrong topic—or discussing almost anything—in their dorms after dark.”

The Campus Protection Act walks back previous legislation that strengthened free speech on public college campuses in Texas and “casts a long censorial shadow,” according to the complaint. FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh argues that administrators can prevent disruptive conduct without issuing such broad restrictions.

The university system declined to comment to local media, citing pending litigation, and has not responded to an updated request for comment.

The act’s rollout this month corresponds with heightened scrutiny around free expression in state schools, with a Texas A&M professor fired over gender-identity lessons in a literature course, a Texas Tech University student arrested at a campus vigil for Kirk, and officials poised to discipline dozens of teachers and professors over social media responses around the conservative figure.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Yale Law School professor Keith E. Whittington referred to “the assassination that broke campus free speech” and wrote that the outcry over Kirk’s death “kicked into overdrive the interest of colleges in punishing members of the campus community for politically inflammatory speech.”

J-Stop Media

UT-Dallas student Juke Matthews (second from right) leads the university’s chapter of FOCUS.

At UT Dallas, a campus lecture hall turns into a sanctuary of sorts each Friday during the semester for FOCUS’s large group gathering called The Grove. With string lights, a curated worship playlist, live music, and Bible teaching delivered by a campus pastor, The Grove is where FOCUS invites students to learn about God and connect with one another.

The gathering concludes around 9 p.m., but Matthews said it’s not uncommon for cries of “encore” to ring out after the music ends or for fellowship to linger on into the night.

Whether they head to the Taco Bell Cantina on campus to grab a late-night snack or stay after the worship service to talk, students can’t count on campus ministry outreach ending at a time the law demands.

Much of evangelism is relational, “and that’s often how we see Jesus go about it,” said Matthews, a senior.

“He’s building friendships with people and getting to know them, meeting them where they’re at. In the same way, we try to meet people on campus and get to know them, share our stories with one another, and invite them into our ministry to experience community. Not having that time period where we can have those expressive activities, I think it is just going to be very harmful to that,” he said.

A few of the late-night chats Matthews has been a part of stemmed from the sermons preached at The Grove, often “to address what someone’s feeling then and there.” In his experience, these conversations can take anywhere from an hour to two—or on rare occasions they go as late as 2 a.m.

FOCUS leaders also worry the law could stymie the ministry of its campus pastors. As it stands, the Campus Protection Act limits expressive activity to students and employees only, reversing a previous version of the law that protected First Amendment rights of “any person” in the common outdoor areas of public Texas universities.

Campus pastors—employed by FOCUS, not the university—facilitate and support ministry events, from teaching at The Grove each week to helping student leaders plan small group Bible studies and even leading Bible studies themselves.

As the semester winds down, the support of campus pastors is more important than ever as students prepare for exams and “have less time to give to the ministry,” Matthews said. Large group meetings, study nights, and worship nights “would be just be out of the question those last two weeks,” he added.

While meeting off campus is an option, it can be logistically challenging since many students live on campus and some don’t drive or have vehicles.

“Throughout the Bible, we see a lot of people who are in much more dangerous and hard areas to evangelize. God still wants to do that effort. Regardless of what happens with this law, I do trust that God will be with us as a ministry and the other ministries at UTD,” Matthews said. “But I also think it’s important that we as an organization step up and try to fight for our rights.”

- More from Phoebe S. Gibson

Church Life

‘Make the Truth Interesting to Hear, Even Enjoyable’

Interview by Divya Chirayath

Robert Clements doesn’t shy away from his Christian faith in his newspaper column. Yet Indian readers keep coming back for more.

Image courtesy of Bob Clements

In the past 30 years, Robert Clements’ daily column, Bob’s Banter, has appeared in more than 60 newspapers and magazines, most of them in India but also in countries like the UK, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates. His articles, which are translated into Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi, reach an estimated 6 million people.

In a country where only 2 percent of the population is Christian, Clements sees his work as a calling, as he uses his writing both to point people to God and to call out injustices against Christians in India. Using satire and humor to engage readers, Clements comments on everything from politics to relationships to faith.

Today, the 70-year-old Indian writer isn’t slowing down as he continues Bob’s Banter, teaches writing, gives motivational speeches, and writes books and musicals. Three of his books will be published soon.

Christianity Today spoke to Clements, who lives in Mumbai with his wife, about what it means to be a Christian writer in India, what his message is for aspiring writers, and how the everyday momentsinspire his columns. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you get into writing?

I’ve always been passionate about words. I wrote my first little novel when I was 12, and around that time I had the thrill of being published. Through my college years, I supported myself by writing and selling nearly 80 radio plays.

Later I started a successful business in civil contracting. It was good work, but writing never left me. With the encouragement of my wife, Lata—who is a doctor—I eventually stepped away from the business and moved into full-time writing more than 30 years ago.

The skills I had honed in business—persistence, negotiation, and learning not to take no for an answer—helped me navigate the publishing world and approach editors. My first column found a home in The Times of India, and from there, the journey gathered momentum. Looking back, I see now that this was more than just a career shift; it was a calling. God had given me a gift with words, and he opened doors for me to use them—not just to make a living but to speak truth, bring hope, and point people to him.

You grew up in a Christian home. At what point did your faith become real to you?

It happened not in a church pew but while facing the hard realities of business. After completing my master’s in English, I boarded a train from Chennai to Mumbai with only 500 rupees [$6 USD] in my pocket. I was young, ambitious, and determined to make a mark. But Mumbai, with its relentless pace and cutthroat competition, quickly stripped me of illusions. There were days when I wasn’t sure how I’d pay rent or even afford the next meal.

It was in those moments of uncertainty that I found God—not as a distant idea but as a living presence. In the loneliness of a rented room, in the worry of unpaid bills, I discovered a God who cared about me personally, who provided in ways I couldn’t explain, and who became more real than the challenges I faced.

My wife also had a childlike faith. Together we learned to bring everything—finances, decisions, family, work—before him in prayer. Time after time, we saw him answer in ways that left us humbled.

But Christianity is more than answered prayers—it is salvation itself. The simple but life-changing truth is that because Jesus died for my sins, I now have fellowship with God. I am his child, and he guides me. That is the message I carry in my writing and speaking: It isn’t complicated. It isn’t about rituals. It’s about accepting what Christ has already done and living in the reality of his presence.

What was your column, Bob’s Banter, like when you started it 1993?

Because of my initial experience writing plays, most of my earlier writing took on a conversational tone. To keep readers engaged, the columns consisted of banter between two characters. The name Bob’s Banter stuck, although my writing today includes spiritual or motivational articles as well as political satire. I try to see whether I can take the serious issues of politics, society, and faith and write about them with a smile. For instance, recently I read a newspaper headline about how Indians are treating AI chatbots as their personal doctor and turned it into a piece about how Indian politicians similarly prescribe ill-informed remedies for people’s problems.

To my joy, readers embraced it. Some said they laughed, then cried; others said they were offended but still couldn’t stop reading. That, I thought, was the perfect mix.

You’ve written more than 7,000 pieces over your writing career. How do you come up with fresh ideas for your columns and articles?

Everywhere. Imagination is a gift God has blessed me with, and it allows me to see columns in the most ordinary of moments. One day it may be a crying baby reaching out for a ball—that became one of my recent columns. Another day, it may be a politician stretching the truth. Sometimes the spark is a line from Scripture; other times it’s a conversation with my wife over morning coffee.

I often tell people that life writes my columns for me—I simply put them on paper. The world is full of stories waiting to be told, lessons waiting to be drawn out. A writer’s task is to notice them, to listen carefully to both the world and to God’s gentle whispers within it.

In the classes I teach for aspiring writers, I call this the “looking out of the window” technique. You look out of a window, take in whatever you see—whether it’s a tree, a bird, or a passing stranger—and train yourself to imagine a story around it. Over time, that practice sharpens not just creativity but also attentiveness to life itself.

One of my favorite examples came from watching a stray dog sleeping outside my gate. As I watched it, I began to reflect on loyalty, belonging, and the way society treats its weakest. By the time I finished writing the article, it had turned into a full-fledged column on compassion, which struck a chord with readers across the country.

And often humor sneaks in too. I’ve found that satire disarms people—it makes them laugh even as it makes them think. A baby grasping for a ball can become a lesson on perseverance; a politician’s “elastic truths” can become a joke that leaves readers both chuckling and pondering. That’s the joy of writing for me: to take the everyday and show that hidden inside is a story, sometimes serious, sometimes funny, but always pointing to something larger than itself.

How did you find your voice as a writer? Do you have any advice for aspiring writers on finding their voice?

My voice as a writer has evolved over the years. Initially I leaned heavily on satire—it was sharp, funny, and often biting. But with time I realized that writing is not only about pointing out what’s wrong but also about showing a way forward.

When I began writing with solutions in mind, my style became gentler, more persuasive. Satire still plays a central role in my columns, yet truth has been my guiding principle, and that conviction has kept me steady even when writing in difficult contexts.

For example, I’ve had a Sunday column running for more than 15 years in a newspaper based in Nagpur, the headquarters of India’s Hindu-nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. Many of those columns contain strong pro-Christian views. At times I’ve received hateful comments, but more often I get notes of appreciation. The fact that they’ve continued running my writing all these years tells me that truth, when expressed fairly, can find its way into even the hardest places.

My advice to aspiring writers is simple: Writing is a gift from God. With that gift comes a choice. Do you want to be popular, or do you want to be respected for telling the truth? If you choose truth, then learn to wield it with precision. Don’t bludgeon your opponents—cut carefully, like a surgeon, so that your words heal even as they correct. Be fair. Develop arguments that can win people over, not just rally those who already agree with you. And always write in a way that even those who don’t enjoy reading will still find themselves drawn in.

How do you incorporate your Christian faith into your writing?

I don’t force Scripture into my writing; I let it seep in. My faith is not a separate compartment of my life. It’s the lens through which I see everything: politics, society, family, even cricket. If God is central to my life, then naturally he will appear in my words.

It’s a little like seasoning food—you don’t always see the salt, but you taste it. In the same way, I believe Scripture should be used gently in writing. Don’t throw the Bible at readers, but weave it in so that they glimpse truth for themselves. That’s when it becomes an invitation rather than an argument.

I also believe Christians in India need to be intentional about mixing with people of other faiths. Too often we live in a “ghetto”—we know how to speak to our own, and then we use the same language when addressing others. But that isn’t the way it works. To communicate effectively, we must meet people where they are, respect their perspective, and share our experiences honestly.

At the same time, we should never be ashamed of speaking about our faith. In today’s India, where Christians face suspicion and attacks, it is important to explain to our fellow citizens that their fears are unfounded—that someone becoming a Christian does not mean they have changed their loyalty to another country. We remain fully Indian even as we worship differently.

What are the biggest hurdles you’ve faced as a Christian writer in India?

In India, writing openly about faith can invite ridicule, suspicion, or even censorship. There’s also the temptation to dilute your convictions, to make your words more “acceptable.” For me, the way through has been to write on different topics and in varying styles each day. I don’t aim for a knockout blow by quoting long passages of Scripture. Instead, I slip in a slice of truth—just enough for readers to taste it, recognize it, and perhaps hunger for more.

Ironically, some of the hardest hurdles I’ve faced have not come from editors of other faiths but from Christian editors themselves. I remember clearly two incidents—one in a major newspaper, another in a magazine—where my column was removed. Not debated, not questioned, but simply taken out. Why? I believe it was because those editors were embarrassed by their own faith. That was painful but also revealing.

But here’s the wonder of it: When that editor pulled my column, I submitted my writing to a bigger newspaper, and my writing reached an even greater audience. God was at work behind the scenes, opening bigger doors than I could have imagined. What looked like rejection became redirection. And that’s been the story of my journey as a Christian writer—hurdles are real, but they are never final. They are simply the backdrop against which God shows his hand more clearly.

What advice would you give an up-and-coming Christian writer, especially in India?

Be wise. Don’t assume that the words you use from the pulpit or to a Christian gathering will work the same way outside that space. Context matters. Don’t put down another religion. Instead, let your writing be so fair, truthful, bold, and courageous that people will want to know more about you—and ultimately about the God you believe in.

It’s a slow process, but in a land where truth is often wanting, your voice will eventually be heard. Practice not only through writing but also through speaking. When you learn to communicate effectively to an audience who may not share your faith, those same skills will make your writing more persuasive. Look at everyday situations and problems, and offer solutions grounded in biblical truth—but do it in a way that is not preachy. Make the truth interesting to hear, even enjoyable. Humor, when used well, can be a powerful bridge.

Discipline matters too. Write daily. Read widely. Observe keenly. And never underestimate the power of prayer—pray before you send your article to a publisher, asking that your words be used for God’s purpose. Don’t chase trends; chase truth. Don’t write to please; write to pierce.

And remember this: Writing is not about showing off your vocabulary. It’s about showing up with honesty. In a country like India, where truth is often muffled, your words can become a megaphone for justice, compassion, and hope. Use it well.

- More from Divya Chirayath

Theology

The Way We Debate Atonement Is a Mess

Brad East

Contributor

A case study in how Christians talk about theology, featuring a recent dustup over penal substitutionary atonement.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

This is an article about penal substitutionary atonement, or PSA. I’d like to attempt the herculean feat of discussing PSA without slander, rancor, or resort to a straw man. I leave it to you, dear reader, to judge whether I succeed.

Speaking of impossible tasks, I’m also going to avoid adjudicating the merits and demerits of PSA itself. I’ll discuss arguments for and against it, but I’m not going to tell you where you should land. Rather, I’m mostly going to talk about how we talk about PSA. Scholars call this “second-order discourse.” Normies call it “meta.” Either way, my concern is not the doctrine per se, but rather the way Christians discuss it with one another—or perhaps I should say, the ways we fail to do so.

With me so far? Good. Let’s get started.

Last month, there was a dustup online about a recent book that purports to be the final nail in the coffin of PSA. I have nothing to say about that book, because I haven’t read it. For my purposes, its publication was only the latest in a long line of confrontations between two groups.

One consists of those who believe that PSA is, at a minimum, a crucial component of the Christian gospel. For some of them, in fact, PSA is the heart of the gospel itself.

Let’s call folks in this first group pro-PSA. Typically, though not always, they are Reformed Protestants and evangelicals, a recognizable mix of academic, pastoral, and lay writers, speakers, and ordinary believers who care deeply about the integrity of Christian faith, doctrine, and preaching.

The second group I’ll call anti-PSA. Adherents in this case are united less by what they share than by what they reject. They include non-Reformed evangelicals, exvangelicals, mainline Protestants, biblical scholars, and members of high-liturgical traditions like Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism.

Like their backgrounds, the reasons for this second group’s opposition to PSA are diverse. Some believe that it is unbiblical; others that it is a historical novelty; others still that it is specific to Calvinism, a departure from patristic and medieval doctrine, or just bad theology. Above all, they share the conviction—sometimes intellectual, just as often emotional, a visceral gut feeling—that PSA is bad for people to believe.

Why might it be bad to believe? There are two main answers, one vertical and one horizontal. On the vertical side, some say PSA proposes a distorted picture of God. The argument is that the doctrine presents God as a vindictive and bloodthirsty monarch who cannot forgive—whose anger cannot be mollified—until retributive violence is enacted. Such a deity, in effect, hates us until his wrath is satisfied (and maybe still hates us then), the blood sacrifice of an innocent victim converting his wrath into love.

When anti-PSA rhetoric is turned up to 11, people designate this “divine child abuse.” In this telling, the Father must vent his anger upon his own Son, raining down unspeakable cosmic punishment until every last drop of blood is paid for sin. Only then do grace and mercy become available to the guilty.

On the horizontal side, some say PSA is bad because it distorts human relationships. Whether in the family, the city, or the church, justice becomes retributive and punitive all the way down. Transgressors get what’s coming to them, justice is indistinguishable from vengeance, and the forces of law and order imitate Almighty God by forswearing mercy and executing punishment to the last farthing. Parental and church discipline become unsparing. Guilt, shame, and public punishment are integrated within and inseparable from every level of society, informing responses to everything from childish errors to grave evils.

Now, before we ask what the pro-PSA have to say for themselves, it’s worth pausing to make two observations. First, whatever the merits of the anti-PSA case, it is very rarely marked by making a steel man of the opposing position—or even truly engaging it. That is to say, anti-PSA advocates often are not talking to their pro-PSA brothers and sisters in Christ. They are talking about and at them. Too often what they are pointing to, mocking, and shouting at is a straw man.

In short, sophisticated theological supporters of PSA are highly unlikely to agree with an anti-PSA summary of their views (high school encounters with Jonathan Edwards notwithstanding). In any debate, Christians talking past one another like this is a problem.

Second, much is made in anti-PSA arguments of the doctrine’s perceived impact. Often—not always—the reasons proposed for rejecting it are consequentialist, which means they are not so much about whether it is true or rooted in biblical teaching as whether its purported downstream effects are desirable.

This is always the weakest way to argue over Christian doctrine. Why? Because the truths of the gospel can always be abused. As the ancient maxim has it, abusus non tollit usum: Abuse does not invalidate proper use. The fact, for example, that some pastors use the faith to benefit themselves financially does not render the faith false; it just means that anything, no matter how good, can be twisted to evil ends.

We should not doubt that PSA may be and sometimes has been put to bad ends, leading to misshapen views of God or shame-filled faith. Yet this does not and cannot obviate the experience of those for whom PSA has produced just the opposite. Nor can we decide the matter by simply weighing positive and negative experiences against each other. That’s just not how Christian theology works. The matter is the thing itself, and the question is whether it’s true. That question, in turn, is answered by turning to Holy Scripture.

So consider now what the pro-PSA would say in reply to their opponents—not the straw man but the genuine article.

First, the Son who suffers divine wrath is himself God in the flesh. There is no division or separation between Father and Son, for together with the Spirit they are one God: one nature, one essence, one will. It is, according to PSA, the one will of the one triune God for the eternal Son of the heavenly Father to assume human nature in order to suffer the justice due sinners, that they might receive his perfect righteousness as a pure, unmerited gift.

Second, the mission of the incarnate Son is not a last-ditch effort to divert the unloving rage of a God who otherwise eternally wishes to smite us. The Father sends the Son in the power of the Spirit precisely in order to save us—and to save us, in Paul’s words, “while we were yet sinners” and “enemies” of God (Rom. 5:8, 10, RSV throughout). Which is to say, to save us when we did not deserve it. The Son does not transform the Father’s disposition from malice to mercy. Jesus’ very presence among us is a revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’s united, sovereign, and invincible mercy toward sinners from everlasting to everlasting.

Third, PSA is a particular combination of elements in the biblical witness that no one can deny. These elements include justice, wrath, transgression, guilt, debt, punishment, and exchange. At their best, advocates of PSA believe the doctrine integrates these biblical elements into a single vision of God’s saving work in Christ that complements, rather than excludes, other orthodox descriptions of the atonement. PSA thus seeks to comprehend God’s multiple roles in relation to us: not only father, brother, and friend but also creator, king, and judge.

The upshot: As lawbreakers, fallen humanity merits punishment in the divine law court. This punishment is God’s own wrath against sin, which is the failure to render God the obedience and worship he is due as Creator. But precisely because he loves us and “desires all people to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4, ESV), God provides what he demands before we could even think to ask for it. In a word, he provides himself.

The Lord puts himself in our stead, living the fully human life we failed to live. What is due us he takes upon himself: wrath, curse, punishment, and death. What is due him he gives to us: life, freedom, sonship, and righteousness. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).

This is the “substitution” in PSA, or what Martin Luther liked to call “this fortunate exchange” whereby Christ “took upon Himself our sinful person and granted us His innocent and victorious Person.” Before Luther a similar understanding was proposed by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in the late 11th century, who used the language of “satisfaction” to describe what Christ, as the God-man, does in our place, for our sake. He assumed all that we are in order to give us all that he is. In doing so he satisfied the perfect justice of God once for all—a marvelous substitution and unspeakable gift.

Now, having done my best to represent PSA according to its best lights, it seems only fair to do the same for its critics—to continue on in order to model the mode of theological debate I’m aiming to promote. Because while my sketch of anti-PSA objections above is accurate, it remains incomplete. Let me bolster the case with additional criticisms without letting go of the commitment to fraternal charity.

First, consider the difference between the subtleties of academic theology and the practicalities of the pulpit. Far too often the way pastors preach and speak about PSA resembles the straw man I outlined earlier. God sounds vindictive; Father and Son appear opposed; wrath overshadows love; mercy seems secondary rather than primary. PSA may not be wrong, but some pro-PSA pastors are on the hook for sloppy preaching.

Second, anti-PSA Christians are right to object to the way some in the pro-PSA camp treat the doctrine as synonymous with the gospel. This is both unhelpful and outlandish. At its worst, it calls into question the very salvation of any believer who doubts or even downplays PSA.

It also brings us to the third and most significant observation, which is that PSA really is a historical and doctrinal innovation. By “innovation” I do not mean that it has no precedent in Christian history before the Reformation, nor do I mean that its newness means it’s wrong. What I mean is that any honest study of church history must admit that the particular formulation of penal substitutionary atonement that came to birth with Luther and Calvin is genuinely new. So is the doctrinal centrality accorded it by the traditions these Reformers founded.

The theological mainstream of patristic and medieval writing on the atonement differs from PSA in important respects. It is an uncodified mix of (1) Christus Victor, whereby Christ destroys death by his own perfectly faithful death and resurrection from the grave; (2) a miraculous exchange of natures, so that the sheer fact of the Incarnation heals our sin-sick selves through the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus; and (3) deification or theosis, which proclaims that God became human that we might become divine.

To be sure, there are bits and pieces of language and concepts in these older works that resemble or intersect with PSA. But these are largely the flotsam and jetsam of other, far more popular and influential theological formulations of the atonement. Moreover, pro-PSA folks tend to oversell the obviousness of doctrine, claiming it to be Paul’s own direct teaching, the “clear” message of the New Testament.

Neither of these claims is necessary for PSA to be true, any more than the apostles had to recite the Nicene Creed for it to be faithful to their teaching. The formulation and articulation of doctrine takes time, and there is no reason to suppose the atonement is simpler to understand than the Trinity, which likewise took centuries to develop into the form we now take for granted.

The Bible speaks in many ways about God’s saving work in Christ, and PSA is one fitting, venerable, and spiritually powerful way of putting the scriptural pieces together. It is, in other words, a perfectly reasonable proposal for how to understand biblical teaching—even if one isn’t persuaded by it. After all, Luther and Calvin were razor-sharp exegetes. Perhaps they saw, for almost the first time, something no one else before them had quite seen. “When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus taught, “he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13).

At the same time, the fact that for centuries almost no Christians taught what we now recognize as PSA makes it implausible that this is the one clear atonement teaching of the New Testament. And this brings me back to my larger interest in talking about how we talk about PSA.

Theology is an ongoing conversation about how best to speak the gospel. It is, therefore, a perpetual debate until the Lord’s return. The problem is not disagreement. The problem is Christian critics and advocates talking past each other. The problem, in a word, is rhetorical points counting more than fairness, clarity, or mutual respect between groups of fellow believers.

When we debate theology, we are speaking of and with sisters and brothers who understand and explain our common Lord’s life, death, and resurrection in modestly different ways than we do. We can differ with respect. Even better, we can differ with mutual understanding. When we argue, we can do it as disciples of Christ—even if we walk away agreeing to disagree.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

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Books

Review

Jesus Uses Money to Diagnose Our Spiritual Bankruptcy

Michael J. Rhodes

A new book immerses us in the strange, subversive logic of his financial parables.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Baker Academic

When students in my Old Testament courses contrast the allegedly messy world of the first testament with the allegedly simple, straightforward teachings of Jesus, I know for sure they haven’t read the New Testament lately. When we read the Gospels, not least Jesus’ parables, we discover him saying all sorts of bizarre, borderline offensive things.

Keith Bodner is here to help relieve our confusion. His new book, Exploring the Financial Parables of Jesus: The Economy of Grace and the Generosity of God, gives a tour of God’s “economy of grace” by focusing on “parables with a financial edge.” Indeed, Bodner suggests these parables provide “an excellent point of entry into the larger biblical story.”

Along the way, as Bodner invites us to learn from the parables, he also offers guidance on immersing ourselves in them as readers. The book thus inspires readers to engage a genre of biblical literature Bodner playfully dubs the “TikTok of the New Testament,” while equipping them with tools to engage it well.

Exploring the Financial Parables of Jesus is both extremely accessible and delightful to read. Bodner, a religious studies professor at Crandall University in New Brunswick, Canada, displays a winning passion for good illustrations.

At various points, he likens the plot twists in parables to the endings of M. Night Shyamalan films, reframes the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1–13) as the story of “an Oil Baron and an Embezzler,” and describes the Pharisee’s proud prayer—“God, I thank you that I am not like other people” (18:11)—as an instance of “virtue signaling.” Employing both wit and remarkable clarity, Bodner achieves his goal of writing a book that will captivate readers interested in the Bible but unfamiliar with the prevailing jargon in academic biblical studies.

At the same time, his simple presentations offer a sophisticated literary approach to the parables. Bodner slows us down, allowing us to feel the power of a story as it unfolds and consider the questions it raises along the way. For instance, Bodner’s interpretation of the parable of the vineyard workers (Matt. 20:1–16) pauses to ask why the owner keeps coming to the market where the unhired workers are throughout the day. Surely he doesn’t really need more workers once the evening rolls around. As the end of the parable confirms, the owner’s actions flow from his lavish generosity rather than any economic calculus.

Bodner’s story-sensitive approach also involves reading these parables alongside one another and with close attention to their immediate context. Doing so reveals hidden depths. Consider, for instance, the way Bodner reads the praying tax collector (Luke 18:9–14) alongside the story of the Prodigal Son. His reflections on the prodigal’s painful journey back to the father become a window for imagining what it costs a despised tax collector to take his own journey to the temple. Perhaps that journey to the temple, too, is a journey of repentance.

In addition, Bodner points out that the picture of a tax collector pleading for mercy in the temple raises questions about what happens next. “Should such a figure decide to start following Jesus,” he writes, “an immediate shift in priorities would need to take place. … At the end of the parable, the unlikely figure goes home justified but nonetheless has more work to do” on the road to “becoming a shareholder in the kingdom of God (or using the imagery in Luke 9:23, a “cross carrier).”

Such attention to the story allows the parables to become genuinely subversive. “Perhaps,” Bodner notes, “we’re all spiritually bankrupt, and, like the tax collector, we’ve sold out to the empire in various ways.” That means there’s more work for us to do as well.

The most surprising—and, for someone in my line of work, delightful—aspect of the book was how often Bodner pointed out rich allusions to the Old Testament in the parables. Reading the parable of the unjust steward alongside the story of the wicked King Ahab’s (faithful) steward Obadiah helps us see how both stories nudge us to costly acts of creative discipleship in response to God’s reign. And we learn something about the Bible’s expansive conception of neighbor relations, says Bodner, when we read the Good Samaritan parable as a “deliberate echo” of 2 Chronicles 28, another story about unexpected kindness extended across unlikely boundaries.

In line with his book’s subtitle, Bodner regularly reminds us that all these parables invite us to enter God’s “economy of grace.” His study attends to patterns of these parables “immersing” us in the “experience of forgiveness.” That is one of the primary gifts of the book; Bodner demonstrates that parables drawn from economic life invite us to reflect more deeply on God’s economy of salvation.

But I confess that, at times, I thought the economic and material aspects of that economy of grace deserved more emphasis.

For instance, when Bodner analyzes the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12:13–21), he suggests that Jesus’ words about being “rich toward God” refer to building up “relational capital.” That’s not all wrong, but I worry that readers prone to overspiritualizing Jesus’ teachings may miss his relentless emphasis on economic practices within the life of discipleship. When Jesus presents the kind of wealth many modern readers take for granted as a danger to genuine faithfulness, we shouldn’t downplay the plain meaning of his warnings.

To take another example: While Bodner’s treatment of the parable of the unjust steward is outstanding, I wish he had given more attention to Jesus’ admonition to “use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings” (16:9) That line seems to suggest something beyond an invitation, in Bodner’s words, to “live with wisdom and operate according to the economy of grace.” Perhaps Jesus is calling us, more specifically, to invest money in building a new kind of community.

This is not to say that Bodner ignores the financial implications of parable-shaped discipleship. Far from it! He acknowledges, for instance, that the Samaritan’s costly care for the injured man is a “tangible sign of the economy of grace,” because he undertakes it “with no chance of any return.” But again, I thought such themes merited more attention, given the emphasis on economic ethics in the Gospels.

In a similar vein, I suspect Bodner could have strengthened the book with more sustained reflection on the economic world of Jesus and his audience. In my experience, many Americans read the Gospels from a largely middle-class perspective. A great many people in Jesus’ day were barely scraping by, if not already slowly dying due to desperate poverty. By reminding readers of that background fact, Bodner might add more depth to his discussion of economic themes.

Consider, for instance, the way predatory debt wreaked havoc in the lives of Jesus’ listeners. Highlighting this dynamic would only enhance Bodner’s treatment of the parables about debt forgiveness. It might also underscore the connection between forgiveness of sins and the countercultural call upon disciples to give freely, without expectation of return.

At the same time, that background might also require further discussion of how Jesus’ audience would hear stories about, for instance, the “master” in the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30). Bodner’s depiction of that master is fairly rosy; others have suggested that, to Jesus’ average listener, he would have sounded like the consummate exploiter. Even if Bodner disagrees with that line of thought, acknowledging the underlying complexity would strengthen his argument.

Nevertheless, part of the power of the book lies in the simple way it welcomes readers into the strange, subversive world of Jesus’ parables, and Bodner makes no claim to offer a comprehensive treatment of the parables he tackles. Exploring the Financial Parables of Jesus offers preachers, teachers, small-group leaders, and everyday Bible readers an outstanding window into this world, and the hope of being transformed by their journeys there. May the Lord use Bodner’s book to welcome all who read it into the everlasting riches of God’s glorious “economy of grace.”

Michael J. Rhodes is a lecturer in Old Testament at Carey Baptist College in New Zealand. He is the author of Just Discipleship: Biblical Justice in an Unjust World.

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News

Excerpt

From Dialogue to Devastating Murder

Russell Moore and Mike Cosper discuss Charlie Kirk’s alternative to civil war.

Mourners gather outside the Turning Point USA headquarters in Phoenix.

Eric Thayer / Getty Images

Here are edited excerpts of a conversation between Russell Moore and Mike Cosper on CT’s The Bulletin podcast.

Mike Cosper: Look, his murder has really bothered me. If you’re a dad—I don’t care how you feel about Charlie Kirk—look back on the days of your life, the days of your marriage, when your kids were little. There’s something so beautiful in those years, and they not only robbed that from him; they robbed that from his kids. They robbed that from those kids’ grandparents, from his wife. I’m gutted by this regardless of how I feel about Kirk’s politics. This is gutting.

Looking at Kirk’s videos that his most ardent fans liked the most—the ones that have the most views, the most likes—it’s not necessarily the “Charlie Kirk Destroys Progressive” or “Charlie Kirk Destroys Trans Activist” or anything like that. A lot of those videos are Charlie responding to people and preaching the gospel. He articulates a very straightforward and compelling understanding of the gospel.

Another video I watched was one where a college student comes to him and says, “One of my parents is very liberal. One of my parents is very MAGA. I don’t find myself agreeing with either one of them. How am I supposed to navigate this?” He basically says, “Love your parents. Show up. Stop talking about politics. Don’t let politics drive a wedge between you and your parents.”

I found that admirable when I immersed myself in it. I could delineate plenty of differences in political rhetoric and ideology between myself and Kirk. I just don’t feel this is the day for that. It’s worthy to celebrate the ways where we were arguing for the same things and advocating for the same things, whether it was the importance of marriage, the importance of gender, the importance of the gospel.

I’m emotionally moved by this because, on the left and right, Kirk’s death is already being leveraged for political ends in ways that are incredibly gross.

Russell Moore: What makes that all the more striking are places where there’s an exception to that. Last night I was watching a couple of very young, very progressive mirror images of Charlie Kirk—Dean Withers and Parkergetajob. These people are doing similar things to what Kirk was doing. Both had debated Charlie Kirk quite a bit, and both were openly weeping in a way that was genuine.

What I heard in that was what we’ve been talking about here. This is a human being, and there is a sense of shock and outrage at what could happen to a human being’s life. And fear for the country when you have a situation that seems to be unraveling and people start to see murder as a response to political rhetoric.

That entire world is built on “Here’s a video of me humiliating someone”: Fill in the blank, so-and-so gets “owned.” It’s easy to start to see people as YouTube avatars.

Both of these young guys were shaken by the fact that this isn’t a game: There’s a human being here. Even as angry and upset as I am, it was a little glimmer of hope that people can see sometimes what really matters and what doesn’t.

Mike Cosper: One thing I genuinely respected and admired about Kirk—and on lots of things he and I differed—was his willingness to sit across the table on a small scale, on a large scale, on camera, in real life and everything else. He was willing to engage people who thought his ideas were retrograde and evil.

There’s this wonderful clip of an encounter where he shows up at a college campus and puts up a sign that says something like “Tell me where I’m wrong” or “Debate me.” The mother of a student comes to the table and basically says, “What are you doing? What is this?”

He explains, “Look, I do this for a couple of reasons. One is that I think there’s a lot of people who think like I do, and they’re afraid to share their ideas because they get shouted down when they do. I also do this because if we can’t maintain the capacity to talk to one another, the only alternative is civil war and violence. And so I think it’s an important exercise for us and for civility to just show up and say, ‘Let’s have a conversation. Let’s build a relationship.’”

Kirk did that as imperfectly as any human being would do in terms of showing civility to the people he debated, but it was a value he articulated and aspired to. More often than not, he’s showing respect to the people he’s arguing with.

Russell Moore: One thing that fuels political violence is the sense that—once and for all—“I’m definitively going to deal with my opponents.” Then they’re gone, and we move on. That is not only immoral and satanic but an insane and irrational way of thinking.

We have to pay attention to what Jesus said to Peter: Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. What he means by that is that these cycles of revenge just continue to feed off of each other unless the revenge cycle is broken.

What ends up happening is not only the harming of whoever one’s enemies are but the harming of oneself, because it’s the deadening of a soul to the point of thinking, The way I’m going to respond is murder. That is itself a kind of self-harm.

We must have a sense of the value and dignity of human life apart and beyond from somebody’s gifts and somebody’s set of beliefs—and that there is a different way to be from retaliation and revenge: the Sermon on the Mount. Those ways of shaping our consciences are going to be necessary.

Mike Cosper: Modernity, especially since the French Revolution, has had this idea that violence was somehow going to purge society of its evils and heal it, that it would come out the other side because we killed all the right people.

Whether the purges in the French Revolution or the Bolsheviks, the starvation of the kulaks, or the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate Jews from Europe, there was this belief that efforts would bring us much closer to utopia.

Obviously this is a sin. Every human being is made in the image of God, and every murder is asin against the image of God. But the other reality that history should show us in all this is that all those attempts at violence, all those violent revolutions, resulted in more violence.

Russell Moore: Usually we’re talking into our own ecosystems. We’re trying to get the cheers of whoever we’re already with, rather than thinking we could persuade someone. A few figures tried to persuade. Charlie Kirk was one of them.

The Bulletin closing: Our hearts are heavy today for the family of Charlie Kirk. We mourn his death. We grieve for his wife, Erika, and their two precious little children. It is our prayer here that this deep loss will become a catalyst for new and lasting change in our country’s political life for the common good.

Listen to the full episode, which released Friday, September 12.

Church Life

Come to Office Hours, Be Humble, and Go to Church

Alan Noble

Contributor

As a professor, I know you’re under pressure. Let me share what I’ve learned in 20 years in the classroom.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

College comes with many pressures: pressure to perform. Pressure to fit in. Pressure to find your people, to graduate on time, to choose the right major and career (and sometimes spouse).

But beneath all these pressures is what I believe to be the purpose of higher education: to grow in wisdom, knowledge, and skills so you can glorify God, love your neighbor, and delight in God’s creation. That purpose is hard to remember with these pressures tugging at your sleeve—telling you to worry about grades or about why someone hasn’t texted you back already—and your task as a student is to discipline yourself to remember it anyway. Set aside your distractions and focus on the calling God has laid before you today.

So how do you develop this discipline? What can you do practically as you go or go back to college this fall? My experience teaching college students for 20 years has taught me the key is humility.

All wisdom begins with humility. We see this in Scripture: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10), and fearing God requires a posture of humility. Learning wisdom—or knowledge, skills, or anything else—requires it too. You must open yourself up, become vulnerable to the opportunity to grow. This means admitting ignorance, admitting that when you enter a classroom, however confident you are in the subject, you have something to learn.

Allow your professors to guide your journey toward wisdom in their subjects. Trust them in humility. Trust that their years of study and discipline have made them experts in their fields. It’s not that they aren’t human and capable of mistakes. They are. But trust that they have something precious to share with you.

When students become prideful, they become unteachable. There is no wisdom a teacher can impart to a prideful student, because a prideful student sits cross-armed and confident. A wall has gone up.

I understand that sometimes students have to take classes they believe they should be able to skip. This is frustrating, but each class is nevertheless an opportunity to grow in wisdom—even if that growth is less in factual knowledge than in attention, patience, and humility. I can tell you from experience that these virtues will serve you well in life and are in short supply in the contemporary world.

I also understand that some students are skeptical of trusting professors because there are so many stories of professors who take advantage of their positions to promote ideological views irrelevant to their subjects. I understand this concern: I once had a professor at a secular university who taught grammar by criticizing President George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and creation science. But despite his ideological bent, I did learn grammar from him—and discerningly ignored the ideology.

All this talk about students being humble may sound a bit patronizing. What about professors? Is it only students who have to be humble?

You’ll be glad to know that we professors require humility just as much as students do. We need it if we’re to continue to grow in wisdom and be effective teachers. In humility, we professors must open ourselves up to the advice and admonition of our colleagues, our administrators, and other scholars in our fields. And in humility, we must read books that challenge us and our assumptions. Everyone who wants to grow in wisdom remains humble. Any professor who is not humble inevitably becomes a fool.

But what about those pesky pressures? Let’s say you get to college with your heart set on walking into class with humility and an openness to learn for the glory of God. Won’t you still be distracted by grades and that person who left your text message on “read” for an hour?

Maybe, but not necessarily. If you truly understand education as pursuit of wisdom, you’ll be better able to accept poor grades or high grades for what they are—and move on.

Grades aren’t measures of your personhood. They don’t prove you are a failure (or a success). They may show you need to study more for a particular class. And if so, fine. You can accept that with humility. Or if you receive high grades, also fine. In humility, you can accept them without inflating your pride.

Other pressures can’t be so directly addressed by humility (though even there I think a humble heart is part of the solution). Pressures to fit in, find the right career path, and snag a spouse can be overwhelming.

My advice is this: Wherever you are and whatever kind of school you attend, find a local congregation and get plugged in—immediately. I know it can be difficult being the one young adult in a room full of parents or older adults. I know it can be hard to coordinate rides on Sunday morning. But you must do it.

Take the initiative. Show up on Sundays. Join a small group or a college ministry. Find some kind of Christian support.

The college years can be very challenging for young people. This is a period of enormous change, of scrutinizing your childhood, of making major decisions with long-term ramifications—all while you are taking tests. You need a Christian community to ground you. And I suppose that does take a lot of humility to accept and practice. It certainly takes vulnerability and courage.

If you are attending a Christian college or university, then I highly recommend using your professors’ office hours (in addition to your church or ministry community) whenever you have questions about faith, life, and challenges in class.

Giving you this support is exactly why your professors are there. Indeed, one of the great benefits of teaching at a Christian liberal arts university is that I have time to meet with students and mentor them. I always try to approach these meetings with humility myself, knowing it is an honor to have someone come seeking counsel. Your visits are never an imposition.

And even if you don’t attend a Christian school, having the humility and courage to visit your professor during office hours will only benefit you. Being willing to raise questions about a course and its material is a strong indicator of academic success.

In this school year—and the next, and all your years after graduation too—the decision to pursue wisdom, knowledge, and skill is up to you. We like to hedge and say some people are just born intelligent, but Proverbs makes clear that wisdom is open to anyone who truly desires it. Whatever our innate abilities, we can all seek a posture of humility before God.

The pressures won’t go away. Various distractions will continue to come. But your duty is to glorify God, love your neighbor, and delight in God’s creation by submitting yourself to the work of questing for wisdom, knowledge, and skill. With a community of believers to support you, professors to encourage you, and a God who loves you and wants you to know him, you can learn well.

O. Alan Noble is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and author of four books: To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, On Getting Out of Bed, You Are Not Your Own, and Disruptive Witness.

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News

Brazilian Evangelicals Call for Reconciliation After Bolsonaro Convicted of Coup Plot

Franco Iacomini

The former president received a 27-year prison sentence for orchestrating an uprising to take over the government after his defeat.

Supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro participate in a protest in his support on August 3, 2025.

Anadolu / Contributor / Getty

On Friday, the Brazilian supreme court sentenced former president Jair Bolsonaro to more than 27 years in prison for plotting an attempted coup after losing the 2022 election. The landmark ruling marks the first time the country has tried and convicted a person for trying to overthrow an elected government.

For days ahead of the verdict, Bolsonaro’s evangelical supporters took to the streets in demonstrations and held vigil praying outside of the politician’s condo in Brasília.

The court found Bolsonaro guilty of leading a group of high-ranking officials involved in a January 8, 2028 uprising and plotting the assassinations of his political opponents. Calling the election rigged and declaring incoming president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva illegitimate, protestors occupied and vandalized congressional headquarters, the supreme court building, and Planalto Palace, which contains the president’s offices.

Bolsonaro denies the charges, claiming that he was not even in Brazil on January 8—he boarded a Brazilian Air Force plane bound for Orlando, Florida, on December 30, 2022, two days before the handover, and remained there until March 30, 2023. He told the court that those who took to the streets calling for a military coup were crazy.

Evangelicals participated in the riots, with at least four pastors among the 1,400 people arrested, and they continued to back him as he and others faced charges for their involvement.

Pastor Silas Malafaia, leader of Vitória em Cristo, part of the Brazilian Assemblies of God, organized street demonstrations and advocated for amnesty for all arrested protesters. Last month, he was targeted by police and charged with obstruction of justice.

Malafaia, in turn, has called for the arrest of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is in charge of the Supreme Court’s investigation of Bolsonaro.

“This almost indiscriminate support that evangelicals gave to Bolsonarism is one of the clearest fingerprints of the coup movement,” said political scientist Carla Ribeiro Sales, who belongs to a Baptist church in Recife. “I confess that I am ashamed—not of the gospel, but of this mess we have gotten ourselves into.”

Clashes over Bolsonaro have polarized Brazilian churches, echoing America’s splits around President Donald Trump.

“It’s terrible to see people hurt, families divided, churches sick because of this polarization,” said Cynthia Muniz, pastor of Igreja Anglicana Porto in São Paulo. “There were entire families who left churches because they thought their leader should take a stand in favor of one candidate or another.”

Brazil elected Bolsonaro in 2019, backed by 69 percent of the country’s evangelical minority, but that support slipped. He lost reelection in 2022 by a margin of 2.1 million voters, or 1.8 percent of the electorate.

“Bolsonaro certainly would have no relevance at all if it weren’t for evangelicals,” said theologian Jacira Monteiro.

Some evangelical leaders hope the former president’s conviction might spur a reckoning among evangelicals. Theologian Valdir Steuernagel points to the challenge for the church to recover the ministry of reconciliation, as described in 2 Corinthians 5.

“We have been so captured by political polarization that we have lost the ability to listen to the Scriptures, which call us to encounter, not to distance ourselves,” he told CT. “Our calling is to reconcile.”

It won’t be an easy task. Some Brazilian evangelicals remain loyal to Bolsonaro and have joined public demonstrations, such as the demonstration held on September 7th (Brazil’s Independence Day) in São Paulo. The protesters called for amnesty for all those accused of a coup d’état, including Bolsonaro.

One of the most strident spokespersons is Malafaia. “The constitution, the laws, and the justice system were thrown into the trash by those who should be the greatest example of upholding the law: the Supreme Court,” he said in a video released after the conviction.

Ed René Kivitz, pastor at Igreja Batista da Água Branca in São Paulo, said that churches have three challenges: to defend democracy and the secular state, to promote peace and reconciliation among all people, and to multiply signs of justice and solidarity.

“We need to prevent the hijacking of the thinking of evangelical communities by political ideologies, whether on the right or the left,” he said.

Bolsonaro’s trial, though criticized by the former president’s supporters, has been seen as exemplary in its aim to curb anti-democratic initiatives in Western nations.

“Our concern as pastors is not to allow this to happen again,” said Muniz, who also emphasizes the superiority of biblical ethics over ideologies and the polarization that arises from them.

She uses Jesus’ words to Pontius Pilate in John 18:36 as a reference for addressing political polarization: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

For Muniz, the kingdom has a real impact on the world, bringing justice, goodness, and hope. “God cannot be reduced or co-opted by political parties or figures,” she said.

The former president remains under house arrest, now convicted of coup d’état, violent abolition of the rule of law, armed criminal organization, aggravated damage to public property, and deterioration of a listed building.

He and his former aides may be in prison soon—Brazilian law allows them to stay free while they appeal the sentence. The supreme court is expected to rule on all appeals by the end of the year.

- More from Franco Iacomini

Pastors

How Should Pastors Respond to Charlie Kirk’s Assassination?

Seth Troutt

After the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, how do pastors lead well in a fractured, reactive age? Here are five pastoral questions for this moment.

TWP / Getty

I was waiting for my lunch appointment to arrive when I saw the video on X. In my gut, I knew Charlie Kirk was going to die. The brutality—and grim clarity—of the clip made my heart drop. My first thought: His wife. His Kids.

My second thought: My congregation.

What do they need? How many will be heartbroken? How many will be haunted by the clips that are circulating? How many have no idea who he was? How many loved him? How many didn’t like him? What should our pastors and staff do? How should we prepare them?

Then my heart returned to the cold facts: Charlie Kirk—husband, father, friend, conservative activist, and brother in Christ—had been assassinated.

For many, myself included, he was a bold witness—unashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ and willing to champion countercultural truths, whether by advocating for the unborn or upholding a Christian vision of marriage and sexuality. To others, his brash style and controversial remarks made him hard to hear. Some saw a prophetic voice; others saw a provocateur. Some saw a man growing in grace and maturity; others saw a culture warrior who played too close to the edge.

As pastors, we carry the weight of shepherding people who often see these things very differently. Some in our churches admired Kirk’s courage. Others were concerned by his tone. Most feel confused, grieved, or simply weary by the continued fracturing of our world. But no matter how we perceived him, we now face a discipleship question: How do we shepherd our people faithfully in the wake of such a moment?

In the second century, when reflecting on the unjust and unprovoked killing of Christians, Tertullian wrote, “[Christians] are not a new philosophy but a divine revelation. That’s why you can’t just exterminate us; the more you kill the more we are. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” What do we do with that seed when it falls not in the arena, but in the age of algorithms, outrage, and moral confusion? What are we called to plant, and what fruit do we hope to see?

Consider these five questions that may help us as pastors—first to reflect personally, and then to shepherd our congregations in how we respond to this tragic act of evil.

Who gets to narrate the world?

God rules the whole universe; his perspective on history is ultimate, final, and perfect.

Robert Webber’s book Who Get’s to Narrate the World? argues that the Christian story is true—not just as a personal opinion among many, but a divine revelation that sits over and against the postmodern assumption that all worldviews are equally plausible. This basic evangelical perspective also reminds us that there is no such thing as secular neutrality.

People who do not know, love, and follow Jesus cannot fully account for what was done to Kirk. If you let “the fool says in his heart, “There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1) describe and narrate to you what is unfolding, you will lose touch with reality, because they are already out of touch with it. To follow Jesus is live soberly within the grain of the Creator’s story. As in The Chronicles of Narnia, the narrative offered by the White Witch cannot make sense of the fact that Aslan is on the move. We will be discipled by someone’s story; the secular humanist account of the world is not just different, it is insufficient—and wrong.

I’ll offer one simple example out of the many that have emerged in the hours after Kirk’s murder. Before he was even officially pronounced dead, an MSNBC commentator said, “You can’t have awful thoughts and say awful things and not expect awful actions.” We don’t know exactly which of Kirk’s comments he was referencing. But many evangelical Christians hear those words as an attack on their own basic Christian beliefs—a biblical view of marriage, saying abortion is murder, believing that a woman is an adult human female, and confessing that salvation is found only in Jesus Christ.

Why label basic evangelical beliefs as “awful”? Perhaps to shame believers into silence. To suggest that speaking biblical truth incites violence is to place the blame in the wrong place. Awe-filled reverence for the Lord of all is not awful. What is awful is the judgment of God against those who set themselves against him.

Whom shall I send?

The primary way we honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy is to be like him—to walk unashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to say what we believe, to speak plainly, and to do so even in environments hostile to the authority of God.

Too often, many of us are content to delegate evangelism to evangelists, preaching to preachers, and truth-speaking to pundits while comfortably sitting in the shadows of those who risk their reputations and relationships. We may not be policymakers in the Capitol or elders in our congregations, but we are nonetheless the missionary people of God, the light to the nations, and the image bearers of God who bear incredible responsibility.

In Isaiah 6, the question God asks the prophet should ring in our ears, not just the ears of prophets and public figures: “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

And our right response ought to echo Isaiah’s, “Here Am I, Send me!”

We are sent ones, every one of us sent to our neighborhoods, institutions, families, and friends to announce the good news of the reign of God in history through the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are ambassadors—God making his appeal through us—who do our best to defend the young and vulnerable from sub-Christian, murderous, and oppressive ideologies.

Is Jesus Lord of all?

You do not have to agree with every detail of how Charlie Kirk attempted to integrate his faith with his politics, but you must agree that one’s faith cannot be separated from one’s politics. There are many Christians who didn’t like what Kirk was doing. Brash. Not winsome enough. Argumentative. Too political. Some who critique Kirk may do so out of genuine concern for over his tone or method. Others, however, are tempted to retreat into a private faith that never risks public witness.

But the call of Christ presses us to move beyond either silence or cynicism—to bring our whole selves, including our convictions, into the open. If you want hits, you must swing at pitches. And when you swing, you’ll sometimes miss. But some Christians swing at nothing—content to sit in the dugout, then stand at a distance and criticize those who are in the game.

Notice how one of his political (not personal) opponents, Ezra Klein at The New York Times, described him after his passing:

“Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion…Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics.”

May we conduct ourselves in such a manner that even our opponents see our integrity, consistency, and our commitment to right means—not just right ends.

If Jesus is Lord of all, then it follows that his instruction and social teaching are good for all. We must “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile” (Jer. 29:7), and the ground and standard of that peace and prosperity is God’s word.

Submission to and respect for the Ten Commandments would have helped here: “You shall not murder” is a command we can no longer take for granted (Exodus 20:13). A recent report from Network Contagion Research Institute found that 55% of “left of center” people think assassinating Donald Trump would be “somewhat justified.” Include all the surveys respondents, regardless of political leaning, and it is still at 38%. The brokenness we’re witnessing is not random. It reveals how sick we are as a nation.

Will I love my enemies?

Can I bless those who persecute me? Will I not revile when reviled? Will I turn the other cheek? Will I love my enemies? If I can’t, then I’m living in contradiction to God’s law.

Ephesians 6:12 a verse Christians are too slow to believe: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” The image bearers on “the other side” of the aisle or the issue at hand are not the enemy. They may be held captive by human tradition and demonic influence, but they are not our ultimate enemies. If we cannot walk in step with the fruit of the Spirit, we too have been taken captive by the spirit of the age.

The collective rage at the killing of Charlie Kirk is understandable. But often, that rage shields something deeper: our grief. The world is not as it should be. People are not as they should be. The government is not as it should be. The government, the media, and even we—Christ followers—are not as we should be.

The suffering and decay we see around us are the fruit of sin and demonic power in a broken and fallen world. Our capacity to push back on the darkness is frustratingly limited. We pray, preach, disciple, advocate, and labor toward the things of God. Yet the myth of progress—that modern belief that humanity is steadily improving and can save itself—is shattered time and time again.

In that place of discouragement, the temptation to act sinfully in response to sin is real—to match outrage for outrage, or to harden into cynicism. But we’re called to react; we’re called to endure. We’re called to cling to holiness—not through gritted teeth, but by staying rooted in Christ, walking by the Spirit, and obeying God’s Word, even when it costs us. Not because it’s easy, but because that’s what faithfulness looks like in the dark.

What should I do next?

Yesterday, and today, I felt shepherded by Charlie Kirk’s own words:

“When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it’s important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends.”

That’s not just personal advice. It’s pastoral guidance. And it’s needed now more than ever.

In these reactionary times, we must be the ones who remain rooted. Grounded. Present. We must immerse ourselves in the visible people of God. Cling to God in Christ. And then lead others to do the same.

Do today what Charlie Kirk cannot: Hug your spouse, hold your kids, invest in your local church, and call a friend who is struggling.

And do today what Charlie Kirk is doing now: Praise the risen Lord, pray to the Father, and immerse yourself in the life of the Spirit.

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

May his death not make us shrink back in fear, but stand up in faith. Preach clearly. Shepherd faithfully. And lead your people to live holy lives in the midst of a crooked generation—the kind of lives that bear fruit from the seeds he planted.

Seth Troutt is the teaching pastor at Ironwood Church in Arizona. His doctoral studies focused on Gen Z, digitization, and bodily self-concept. He writes about emotions, gender, parenting, and the intersection of theology and culture. Seth and his wife, Taylor, have two young children.

- More from Seth Troutt

Ideas

Charlie Kirk Is Not a Scapegoat

Stefani McDade

Contributor

When we instrumentalize violence, we side with the accuser rather than with Christ.

Rebecca Noble / Stringer / Getty

French Catholic sociologist René Girard argued that ever since the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, violence has been robbed of its sacred legitimacy and ancient power—but you wouldn’t know that by scanning some corners of the internet today.

Over the past few days, a slew of violent events has erupted in our nation, including the senseless stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte, another school shooting in Colorado, and Wednesday’s brutal assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk. News of Kirk’s death exploded not only due to his celebrity-like status but also because it appeared to be a clear act of political violence, which experts have long warned would result from the increasing polarization on both sides of the political divide.

For instance, a 2023 study found that 40 percent of both Biden and Trump supporters “at least somewhat believed the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals.”

But what should be equally concerning to us is how our nation responds to violent incidents like these. Most Americans are in shock, grieving, and rightly concerned for the future of our nation. Yet there are outliers on both ends of the ideological spectrum who seem inclined to assign a deeper meaning to Kirk’s murder—one that instrumentalizes it to galvanize further support for their respective camps and causes.

On the far left, some talk as if Kirk deserved what happened to him for his past comments on subjects like race, sexuality, guns, and even empathy, which critics have deemed deeply dehumanizing. Kirk is someone who died on the hill he chose and whose death can thus be weaponized against his own rhetoric and ideology. By contrast, some on the far right speak of Kirk’s death as advancing a holy cause in enemy territory. Kirk is a slain saint and hero whose murder is a rallying cry and call to arms for conservatives and Christians like him. In short, in a mutual display of selective outrage and empathy, the far left blames Kirk’s death on the right and the far right blames his death on the left.

Ironically, these impulses draw from the same source and therefore cause the same effect by casting Kirk as a scapegoat. In each case, Kirk’s murder is assigned a kind of sacred significance that unites each faction around their respective ideologies—in such a way that his death becomes ammunition for further partisan violence.

Societies use scapegoats to avoid their deeper problems, which, Girard says, stem from “mimetic contagion”—an escalating rivalry that spreads as people imitate one another’s desires. Instead of embracing true concern for victims “from the standpoint of the Christian faith,” which leads “the way into God’s new community of love and nonviolence,” Girard observed that pagan forms of “victimism” use victims to “gain political or economic or spiritual power.”

More to the point, by resorting to scapegoating, we wind up affirming that violence actually works as it is intended—a reality that Girard says stopped being true the moment Jesus gained victory over the power of death.

According to Girard’s anthropology, Jesus was the scapegoat to end all scapegoats—an innocent victim whom the political and religious establishment of the first century viewed as the culprit of their communal crisis, leading them to believe that killing him would restore the status quo. Yet because Jesus embodied true innocence—the only perfectly innocent person to walk this earth—he exposed the scapegoating mechanism for what it was, thereby defeating the devil and defanging death.

In Girard’s thinking, “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) disarmed violence itself, uncovering a hidden mystery which “none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8).

Ever since Jesus, violence lost the cohesive force it once exerted to unite communities around the deaths of their victims and thus relieve their tensions. Now, any positive effects that result from acts of violence—like the national unity after 9/11—will always be temporary and ultimately self-defeating. This also explains why, according to Girard, violence has grown increasingly chaotic in its nature, decentralized in its manifestation, and ineffectual in its aims.

In short, to instrumentalize Kirk’s murder, whether by painting him as a martyr or a miscreant, sanctions his status as a scapegoat and so affirms the essential function of violence—which in turn denies the reality that Jesus conquered death’s demonic power.

The scapegoating mechanism, which is at work in all forms of brutality, plays right into the hands of the enemy of both God and humanity. That is because, Girard argued, it is the primary operating system of Satan himself. As the accuser, Satan supplies the core impulse behind scapegoating, which is assigning blame. Thus, whenever we blame each other for the violence of our times, we end up aligning ourselves with the accuser (Rev. 12:10).

Christians across the political spectrum should be disturbed by the increasing violence that seems to be taking over our country. Yet as followers of Jesus, we also have a unique opportunity to direct our anger in the right direction—for only then can ours be a righteous rage. When we target and attack one another as the enemy, it distracts us from our real enemies: sin, death, and the devil.

In Scripture, Satan is called “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44) and the one who “holds the power of death” (Heb. 2:14). While Jesus broke the power of death by defeating the devil, the reality of death still exists and is thus “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor. 15:26).

Too often, Christians aren’t mad enough at death, as my colleague Kate Shellnutt has pointed out. Perhaps that’s because we’re far too busy getting mad at one another. We forget the words of the apostle Paul, who writes that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).

As Christians, we are uniquely poised to combat the lie that violence still has its uses in our world. In fact, the more inevitable and inescapable violence seems to become in our culture, French theologian Jacques Ellul argued, the more important it is for Christ’s followers to prove otherwise: “The role of the Christian in society … is to shatter fatalities and necessities. And he cannot fulfill this role by using violent means.”

Not only is violence unnecessary, but it is also counterproductive—it creates a literal death loop that does nothing more than reinforce itself. This is why Girard said that the kingdom of darkness is a house divided against itself, for eradicating violence with violence is like Satan casting out Satan (Matt. 12:25).

Instead, the Good News of the gospel is that Jesus now holds power over death, binding the work of the enemy and causing Satan to fall like lightning (Luke 10:18, John 12:31). As Christians, we have access to that same supernatural power through Christ’s sacrifice—who conquered not by being death’s instrument but by being its willing recipient for the sake of the world. That is, we overcome Satan’s schemes “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of [our] testimony” (Rev. 12:11).

As citizens of Christ’s now-and-coming kingdom, we must refuse to sacralize murder and thus return to death its scepter. Now is the time for every Christian, regardless of our political affiliation, to beat our swords into plowshares and do the hard work of uprooting the false necessity of violence in our nation. We must demonstrate that the new operating principle of Christ’s kingdom is a divine love that is even stronger than death (Song 8:6).

Christ’s “resurrection is the guarantee that God can cure every wrong and every hurt,” writes Catholic priest Jacques Philippe. “Love, and only love, can overcome evil by good and draw good out of evil.”

Now is the time to prove to the world that death has, in fact, lost its sting—and that only the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ prevails against the violent forces of hell.

Stefani McDade is the theology editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Stefani McDade

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