Don’t Blame Bible Prophecy for a War with Iran

Columnist

We’re living in the last days. But Jesus never said we’d know exactly when the end would come.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe he re.

After Israel’s recent bombing of Iran, a friend told me about a preacher who asserted that Russia might be the Gog and Magog of the Book of Ezekiel, that Iran might be one of the hostile nations pictured by the prophets, and that all of this just might be pointing toward the imminence of the literal apocalypse.

“Are we going to do this again?” my friend said.

By “this,” he meant the tying of prophecy charts to contemporary geopolitical events in ways that leave audiences hyped up or terrified and then exhausted and even cynical.

Prophecy chart fevers usually skip a generation. One cohort might grow up hearing, as clear as the words on the page, that the Bible teaches no more than 40 years will pass between the founding of the nation of Israel and the Second Coming—but it’s harder to do that after 1988 comes and goes.

A generation accustomed to hearing that the Soviet Union is almost definitely Gog and Magog will be less open to the same sort of confidence when they are told that Iraq is a new Babylon, that Saddam Hussein is a new Nebuchadnezzar, and that, therefore, the Rapture is right around the corner.

The prophecy charts always come back, though, and eventually they gain an audience. Why? With human nature as complicated as it is, one shouldn’t be surprised that there are more cynical reasons and less cynical reasons.

The apostle Paul warned of the time when “people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Tim. 4:4, ESV throughout).

At times, the Bible speaks about those “itching ears” as wanting heresy or the justification of sin. At other times, the problem is not the outright contradiction of the Bible but foolish controversies, genealogies, and dissensions (Titus 3:9), or the pull to “quarrel about words, which does no good” (2 Tim. 2:14).

Itching ears don’t imply a group of people who necessarily want something evil, but it does point to those who want something interesting. To have the code that unlocks what’s really going on, to know that one is part of the terminal generation left standing at the end of everything—that can be exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time, like a horror movie or a roller coaster.

Walker Percy wrote that modern people tend to secretly love catastrophes because a hurricane or an earthquake or a war makes a person feel suddenly alive. He argued that what kills us is not danger but a sense of meaninglessness, of everydayness. The sense that everything is falling apart can jolt us out of that kind of deadness.

The protagonist Will Barrett in Percy’s novel The Last Gentleman reflects on how happy his father was when he remembered Pearl Harbor. It was not that his father was a sadist or a masochist. But when he thought about Pearl Harbor, he would suddenly have purpose and life. “War is better than Monday morning,” Will concludes.

Words like “I know what’s happening is the worst thing that leads to the best thing” will gain a much readier audience than “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:20–21).

Add to that the phenomenon that the monk Thomas Merton once referred to as “mental snake-handling.” Merton asked why small, isolated, persisting congregations of people take up rattlesnakes in a service. It’s because, he argued, surviving the snakes is proof, right now, that one is in God’s favor. Judgment Day is now, it is visible and palpable.

People often look for such a jolt—in metaphorical and not often literal terms—when their lives are bored, over-routinized, or otherwise lacking in purpose or meaning.

“In Christian terms, the mental snake-handling is an attempt to evade judgment when our conscience obscurely tells us that we are under judgment,” Merton wrote. “It represents recourse to a daring and ritual act, a magic gesture that is visible and recognized by others, which proves to us that we are right, that the image is right, that our rightness cannot be contested, and whoever contests it is a minion of the devil.”

The life of faith is difficult. One must walk forward, following a voice one cannot hear audibly, into a future one cannot control. One must entrust one’s life to the mercy of God, demonstrated in a crucifixion and resurrection and ascension that others witnessed firsthand but which we have heard about and found true. A certainty about where events we care about fit into the ultimate plan, and a certainty that we are on the right side of it all, can make that faith feel almost like sight. At least for a little while.

Add to that a scary situation seemingly outside of our control. What should we do about Iran? I don’t know. The possibility of a regional war with a potentially nuclear Iran is enough to set our nerves on edge.

We can debate about what the United States should have done or should do going forward, though easy solutions are impossible and every possibility seems perilous. Given how easily and quickly hostilities can accelerate, it’s not irrational to worry about a potential World War III.

Not many people want another war, and not many people want a nuclear Iran. How to achieve both objectives is fraught with peril and will require wisdom and prudence, much more than we seem to have in this trivial and trivializing time.

That means that we have no easy answers. That’s disconcerting, and it lays on all of us a heavy responsibility to make decisions that will be good and just—whether history continues another trillion years or wraps up tomorrow.

Will Iran tip us into World War III? I don’t know. Or bigger yet, could this be the moment when we see, as Jesus promised, his coming in the eastern skies? I don’t know that either.

We want to see signs that we can track, to hear approaching hoofbeats by which we can know that the final judgment is upon us. Jesus, however, told us that what would shock us about his return is not the drama leading up to it but its ordinariness. People will be marrying and having children and working jobs, he said (Matt. 24:36–44).

That ordinariness leads people to conclude, the apostle Peter warned, that everything would continue as it always has. They will ask, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Pet. 3:4).

That sense of illusory ease and even boredom is actually heightened over time by promise after promise that this time—I just know it—we are finally at the brink.

The inner core of Jesus’ disciples wanted what we want: the definitive prophecy chart that could be timestamped by events. But Jesus wouldn’t give it. And he told them not to trust anybody who said they could (Mark 13:21–23).

“When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed,” Jesus said. “This must take place, but the end is not yet” (v. 7). The time between his ascension and his second advent, Jesus said, would be rumbling with birth pains, but none of us have a sonogram to tell us when or where.

Are we in the last days? Yes. Everything from the empty tomb onward are the last days (Heb. 1:2). Could Jesus return at any moment? Absolutely. But can we track that coming based on the bombing schedules of Israel or Iran? No.

We should act, at every moment, whether in peace or in war, as though it might be a millisecond to Judgment Day. But we do not know when that is.

Instead, we have the word of Jesus that the kingdom is advancing, invisibly like fermenting yeast or germinating seed. We have the word of Jesus that he will not leave us as orphans; he will come to us (John 14:18).

That’s all the prophecy chart we need.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Ideas

Not Just Any Hope Will Do

Christine Jeske

Biblical hope is not selfish, aggressive, or complacent. It’s not naive or scared of suffering. It rests on the foundation of Jesus Christ.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unplash, WikiMedia Commons

I remember the day my hope failed.

The seminary where I taught in South Africa had run out of money. Facing impending closure, faculty and students packed into a classroom to pray. These people had saved and sacrificed for years to arrive here from across the continent. Some had survived war, famine, drought, or dictatorship. As I listened to their voices crying to the Lord, suddenly I ran out of words. I realized, These people have a way of hoping that I have never learned.

Since then, I’ve come to think about hope in terms of quality more than quantity. That’s not because the numbers look great here in the American church: According to a recent Pew Research Center study, less than half of religiously affiliated US adults (47 percent) felt hopeful in their past week. That’s 12 percentage points higher than atheists, but it’s still a lot of hopelessness.

Yet a more troubling picture emerges if you look at the type of hope we do have. One anthropologist, Omri Elisha, who studied suburban Christians in Tennessee, concluded that Christians tend to talk about hope as a “motivational linchpin” for evangelical outreach and service. When the Christians he studied tried to put that hope into action, then, they became mired in “compassion fatigue.” They were immersed in admonitions to have more hope, but their way of hoping wasn’t working.

What we need is not just more hope but the right kind of hope.

Hope is a way of orienting oneself toward an unknown future that anticipates good. But that definition leaves room for a lot of variety. Hope is a multidimensional thing; it cannot be quantified on a simple scale from less to more. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of hoping in hard times, we need to pay attention to which narratives of hope we’re following.

As an anthropologist, I study those narratives, which we absorb from our surrounding cultural settings to make sense of the world. We take in stories and assumptions about how to avoid the bad, attain the good, and get from the one to the other. In other words, we’re immersed in cultural narratives telling us how to hope.

Sometimes we hope because we trust in progress, powerful leaders, or our own prowess. Sometimes we hope for the comfort of cozy houses and lucrative jobs. If we’re honest, many of our ways of hoping have little to do with the hope that has propelled the church to follow Jesus through the ages (Rom. 8:24–25). We need less of the shallow maxims embroidered on decorative pillows and shouted in political rallies. How instead do we find a thick, stubborn, real hope that can sing the blues and walk a tightrope?

Take, for example, the hope that King Ahab exemplified in 1 Kings 22. Ahab was a terrible king by any standard. In one of his many misdeeds, he decided to conquer neighboring Ramoth Gilead and found 400 prophets to tell him exactly what he wanted to hear: Have hope, because everything is going to be fine.

But one prophet, a man named Micaiah, was bold enough to tell Ahab that his hopes were delusional. Ahab pouted about Micaiah like a grumpy toddler. “There is still one man through whom we can inquire of the Lord,” Ahab said, “but I hate him because he never says anything good about me, but always bad” (v. 8). When Micaiah broke the news that Ahab’s imperial ambitions would fail, Ahab threatened to put Micaiah in prison then went to war anyway. Because he was scared, Ahab disguised himself as an ordinary citizen. Nevertheless, a stray arrow struck him through a crack in his armor, and he died a disgraceful death.

You have probably seen people clinging to Ahab’s kind of delusional hope. He cared only for outcomes that would be favorable for himself, surrounding himself with counselors willing to whitewash realities he didn’t like. He expected troubles to resolve easily: just a little battle, like a half-hour sitcom. He clung to power and longed for a mythical past when he had even more power. He was terrified of real danger but also terrified of having his sin exposed. He hoped for a future of more control, more power, more of himself.

Delusional hope is not always so selfishly aggressive. It can also produce dangerous passivity, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned half a century ago. When Birmingham officials imprisoned King for leading civil rights demonstrations, white clergy wrote an open letter counseling King to delusional passivity: “We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized, but we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.”

In his now-famous response, King taught a different way of hoping. “Maybe I was too optimistic,” he reflected. “Maybe I expected too much. I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.”

King rejected naive optimism. In its place, he taught a weather-beaten Christian hope: “We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of people willing to be co-workers with God.”

King wasn’t merely disappointed that people failed to advocate for justice. He was disappointed in their dangerous kind of hope, the notion that justice would simply appear out nowhere, following neither action nor repentance. Delusional hope of this kind is an alluring lie. It tells us we need not bother becoming coworkers with God.

Biblical hope is never delusional. It is not naively optimistic or afraid of suffering. In fact, it grows perseverance out of suffering (Rom. 5:3–5). It rests on the foundation of Jesus Christ, who interrupts our broken world with grace (1 Pet. 1:13) and is characterized by selfless action and discipline (1 Pet. 1:13). As theologian Miroslav Volf put it, abiding Christian hope “is not based on accurate extrapolation about future from the character of the present.” Unlike shallow optimism, it never depends upon good omens but trusts in God and his goodness even, Volf says, “against reasonable expectation.”

For the past four years, I’ve been interviewing Christians about the ways they hope in relation to racism. I’ve noticed that Christians who are committed to pursuing kingdom justice for the long haul have generally scoured away optimistic, power-loving, Ahab-style ways of hoping. They live in a deeper and more biblical hope that rests on grace, grows out of suffering, aims for shalom, and calls for action.

You can assess the shape of your own hope using prompts I’ve used in interviews. Try filling in the blanks in this sentence: “I used to hope ____, but now I hope _____.” Try filling in what you hope for, and then also answer a second time with adverbs. Perhaps you have hoped eagerly, naïvely, or blindly. Then ask yourself these questions: Why do you hope? What is the goal of your hope? And how does your hope shape your life? What concrete difference does it make?

When I asked these questions of Christians who had worked for decades to bring about justice in difficult circumstances, they told me of a profound hope that combined both lament and joy. “I find no hope in [denying] what really is happening,” one woman told me. “My hope is not shiny or happy at all. It’s totally bruised and bloodied, and it’s scraping by my fingernails. On [some] days you may not be able to see it. But there’s maybe a scrap of it hanging on and pressing on.”

These days, when I encounter disappointments, I’m not just trying to scrounge up scraps of a tired old hope. I’m looking to my brothers and sisters in Christ across the globe and across the centuries, learning how to dig my fingernails into a rugged hope founded firmly on Christ, who died and rose again.

Christine Jeske is associate professor of anthropology at Wheaton College and the author of four books, including the forthcoming Racial Justice for the Long Haul: How White Christian Advocates Persevere (and Why). She previously worked for a decade in Nicaragua, China, and South Africa.

- More from Christine Jeske

Theology

Jews Do Await a Messiah

Marvin Olasky

Since Talmud study is not enough, hopes for a breakthrough remain.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

(For previous articles in this series, see here and here.)

In antisemistic environments, Talmud study helped keep Judaism alive. Boys and men, especially the smartest, established a virtual reality. Talmud exegesis became a form of mental ski jumping that trained the mind to stay focused and the body to be poised yet relaxed, regardless of the buffeting winds. But did it offer hope?

The Talmud still trains intellects. In theory, it builds a wall far from the border of improper conduct so no one will wander into sin. Yet anyone observing human nature sees that all sin and fall short of the glory of God. At one point the apostle Paul cried, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me fromthis body of death?” (Rom. 7:24, ESV). When that realization hits, what then?

Up to the destruction of the temple in AD 70, Israelites transferred the sin to an innocent animal, a scapegoat, and slaughtered the beast in the temple as payment for transgression. But the sacrifices stopped when the temple was destroyed. Even with all the precautions the Talmudists took, it was still likely that everyone at some time would break God’s law. How, then, could people be saved?

Christians have an answer to that problem: Christ’s sacrifice is the good-for-all-time safety net that animal sacrifices once were. The Talmud offers the alternative answer of setting up barriers so far away from the real barriers that humans could ensure they usually wouldn’t break the commands. But some rabbis suggested a third alternative: Yes, humans will inevitably mess up, but repentance, prayer, and changed behavior can make up for that. A finalist for Jewish GOAT (greatest of all time) said so.

In Judaism, Abraham, Moses, and David are prime GOAT contenders. The MVP of the past 2,000 years is probably Maimonides (1135–1204). He developed a list of 13 principles of faith that he said are the minimal requirements for Jewish belief. Over the centuries they gained wide acceptance, similar in some ways to the Nicene Creed in Christianity, the Five Pillars of Islam, or the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism.

The principles include these: God exists. He is one and unique. He has no body. He is eternal. Prayer should be direct and directed to God alone. God gave Moses the written Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and the oral Torah (the Talmud). God knows the thoughts and deeds of every person. God will reward the good and punish the wicked. The messiah will come. The dead will be resurrected.

Back up for a minute. Maimonides’s 12th principle is “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of mashiach, and though he may tarry, still I await him every day.” Mashiach, commonly translated as “messiah”? Yes. Many Jews, like Christians, await the coming of a messiah. The difference is in not just the number of visits but the concept itself. The mashiach (pronounced ma-SHEE-ak) is not a divine savior and does not sacrifice himself to pay for the sins of others.

So what is he? Judaism has no set doctrine of this, and messianic anticipation, while certainly present, is not at the center of modern Jewish life. Jewish and Christian categories do not translate easily—or at all—into each other. Typically, though, Jews picture the mashiach as a great leader who is also learned and wise.

Many leading rabbis believe the time of the mashiach’s return depends on the conduct of mankind. Some say he will come when things are getting worse (to save the day), and some when things are getting better (as a reward). He could be from the living or, according to views in the Talmud, possibly even from the dead—maybe David or Daniel. Orthodox Jews believe the prophet Elijah, taken to heaven alive, will return to announce the mashiach’s imminent appearance.

When the mashiach comes, Jews will return to Israel, wickedness will decrease, Jerusalem will be rebuilt, religious courts of justice will be reestablished, and a descendant of King David will be enthroned. Jerusalem will be a focus for international monotheistic reverence. All nations will be at peace with one another. Temple worship will be restored with new thanksgiving sacrifices but without sin offerings, which will not be needed because sin will have vanished. Elijah will answer all questions about doctrine and will show who has the right ancestry to be the high priest in resumed temple worship.

Maimonides wrote that in this messianic age men will be neither immortal nor transported to paradise. Instead, Jews will live in Israel under a great king known throughout the world, with nations living in peace. Although some will still be rich and others poor, wars will no longer rage, and people will be able to study philosophy and God’s laws. The mashiach eventually will die, but his son will succeed him as Israel’s king.

When? Speculation abounds. Over the centuries some said the mashiach would come if Israel repented for even a single day or observed even one or two Sabbaths properly. Others said he would come when a generation lost hope. In recent years Zionists have thought the creation of Israel as an independent country showed the importance of human effort. A better life in America made both repentance and hopelessness less likely for a time. Many examine current events.

Overall, Jewish and Christian theologies share some Scriptures but are radically different. Jews do not regard Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah, and Christians agree that Christ is not the mashiach of Talmudic study. He rode on a donkey, not a stallion. Jews are right to long for an era of God-fearing world peace. Christians see God through Christ’s sacrifice bringing about that—and more—at a future date.

- More from Marvin Olasky

Books

Review

Christian Discipleship Is Rooted in Truth, but Pulled by Beauty

Ashley Hales

Two recent books illuminate the importance of a robust theological imagination.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Pexels, Wikimedia Commons

Every few weeks, it seems, we hear statistics about an American epidemic of loneliness, the purposelessness of young men, an increase in anxiety and depression in younger generations, and growing political tribalism. But we haven’t identified reliable pathways through the morass.

Meanwhile, our church cultures are not immune to these larger challenges. Although the number of those leaving the church may be stabilizing, Pew reports the “stickiness” of religion is declining. What can account for a disconnect between the gospel the church proclaims and the lives we often lead? What has captured our imaginations?

It’s possible for Christians to hold broadly similar doctrines while differing dramatically in how those doctrines shape their lives and outlooks. Accordingly, Christian leaders who care about discipleship in 21st-century American evangelical churches should be asking not only what we believe but how.

I’ve come to believe that much of our discipleship gap results not from an informational deficit but from an imaginative one. Although we need deep familiarity with theological truths, we first need to form a more robust Christian imagination so we can incorporate these truths into a coherent way of life. This has less to do with knowing facts, important as they are, than with learning to think, dream, and love more Christianly.

Two recent books on beauty and the imagination are helpful starting points. In Judith Wolfe’s The Theological Imagination, based on her lectures at Cambridge University, she describes the imagination as a faculty with which we make sense of the world.

This isn’t a matter of fanciful storytelling but something we use to give narrative shape to the sensory data all around us. When we read someone’s facial expression, experience a work of art, or even tell our life stories, we take differing data points and make them into a coherent whole. That person is unhappy. That artwork is meant to evoke feelings of anger. This spiritual experience is where it all changed for me.

In other words, our imaginations run like operating systems in the background, working below the level of conscious thought. This helps explain why Christians who read the same books, hear the same sermons, and profess the same beliefs might end up following divergent paths, both personally and socially. Given substantially similar rational inputs, our imaginations will make meaning in unpredictable ways that escape our notice.

What does it look like to understand this process theologically? Wolfe reminds us that cultivating a theological imagination isn’t like putting on a new set of glasses. It doesn’t mean superimposing a new worldview atop the existing one, like “a pattern to which to adjust our perceptions.” Instead, a theological imagination incorporates sense data in light of the Christian story and necessitates a particular posture of faith. Christianity, she writes, “makes sense of the world by enabling us to hold open horizons that we always rush to foreclose, and to sustain uncertainty in the light of a divine promise.” To behave and believe Christianly, we need a certain imaginative flexibility, one that can embrace the already-and-not-yet grammar of the gospel.

Yet as Wolfe notes, “Realiz[ing] this capacity requires a deep faith in a God whom we cannot grasp and take full hold of.” A theological imagination looks very much like Hebrews 11, which credited saints like Abraham with faithfulness even as their future was obscure: “For [Abraham] was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10, ESV). A theological imagination, then, is both humble and confident, as its chief mover is not the individual but God.

A second recent book, Matthew Z. Capps’s Drawn by Beauty: Awe and Wonder in the Christian Life, focuses less on imaginative formation. Instead, it reads more like an eager churchman reminding us of a rich heritage of beauty we’ve neglected. Although I gathered a full reading list from Capps’s footnotes, I often wished he would do less compiling and more synthesizing. He quotes a wide range of sources, including the church fathers, Reformed writers like Jonathan Edwards and James K. A. Smith, and Baptist leaders like Albert Mohler and Wayne Grudem. But he doesn’t always go deep in analyzing their thoughts or extending the conversations their works have launched.

Drawn by Beauty: Awe and Wonder in the Christian Life (Christ in Everything)

Matthew Z. Capps (Author), Benjamin T. Quinn (Editor)

192 pages

$22.99

Given the diverse perspectives held by the figures Capps cites, it’s unclear whether his argument comes from a particular theological angle. If recovering beauty is indeed a worthy pursuit of many evangelical traditions, perhaps this conglomeration of thinkers through the ages works. But for me as a reader, putting them all together without referencing their very different starting points seems shortsighted. After all, theological and church traditions represent more than scattered positions along a spectrum of Christian thought. On a deeper level, they give us ways of thinking about (or constructing and imagining) the world and what is possible.

If a theological imagination can help us construct reality along the lines of the Christian story and in the manner of Jesus, then each book has a fundamental question to answer: To what end does beauty or a theological imagination point? What is its ultimate goal?

In his 2013 book Imagining the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith gives his own answer, rooted in the weekly Christian liturgy. Each Sunday—as we participate in a call to worship, praise God in song, confess our faith and our sin together, hear the Word preached, and take the Lord’s Supper—we are not simply going through motions but enacting the drama of the gospel; we are inhabiting a Christian imagination. We are enfolded into the Christian story. It becomes ours. We are being built together like “living stones” into the house of God, the body of Christ (1 Pet. 2:5). Wolfe, too, looks to Christian worship as the experience that most profoundly forms a theological imagination.

Capps does gesture to requisite moral action as the outcome of beauty, but he ultimately ends his book by calling readers to experience and appreciate art. These are worthy pursuits, as they point to what Makoto Fujimura, in Art + Faith, calls “the ‘heavenly breaking in’ to the broken earth.” But is artistic appreciation the end goal of beauty? Capps encourages readers to consent to beauty’s pull, and he notes that it participates in the perfect beauty of the triune God. Ultimately, however, the book seems to suggest an individualized response—both to God’s beautiful life and to beautiful experiences and works of art here on earth.

This misses the telos of beauty, which (like any good earthly gift) must always find its resting place with God—in part now and in full on the canvas of eternity. Beauty must also create something. Martin Luther King Jr. had one name for that something—the “beloved community”—while David Brooks, in a recent address, spoke of the “creative minority.” According to Brooks, these communal manifestations of beauty can change culture when they “find a beautiful way to live” and “the rest of us copy.” Beauty needn’t be housed simply in a lovely face; it can live in a community that instantiates goodness and truth.

Although Capps discusses that beauty isn’t meant to be enjoyed in isolation, affirming that the triune God is both community and the source of all beauty, functionally his book ends with an individualized benediction: Go and appreciate art.

While neither book aims to help us practically construct a more Christlike imagination, they both leave us with markers. Capps is at his best when he applies insights on beauty to questions of spiritual formation. Wolfe—through her examples from theater, fiction, and visual art—concludes with an extended quote from C. S. Lewis’s character Reepicheep, the stalwart mouse who appears in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “When I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.” These are words we feel.

Reading Reepicheep’s words made me tear up and pass the book to my husband, for we have many memories of reading Lewis to our children when they were small. Reepicheep’s trust in Aslan’s country, his insistence upon remaining faithful even if he doesn’t reach the Promised Land, is deeply moving. And like words that are not only beautiful but also good and true, Reepicheep’s demand to be shared.

In this moment of cultural upheaval, we would do well to heed scholars like Wolfe and thoughtful pastors like Capps as they recover beauty’s necessity for lives and communities of deep, transformative faith. Beauty, as lived out, is evangelistic. It adorns truth and goodness as their attractive pull. As beauty leads the way, as it becomes the texture of a community, a person may begin to desire the Christian story before he or she acknowledges its truth claims. Beauty pulls.

As Wolfe acknowledges, a theological imagination does construct “theories and images to guide us.” Even so, she observes, “they are light, tentative, humble, because when we construct theologically, we are not building towers; we are building boats. And we trust the sea.”

Ashley Hales is editorial director for print at Christianity Today.

- More from Ashley Hales

News

Pro-Life Advocates Want FDA to Re-Review Abortion Drug

Adam MacInnis

Study of insurance data raises questions about safety.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The father of the abortion pill has died, but questions over the safety of his creation live on.

Étienne-Émile Baulieu, the scientist who developed RU-486, which also known as mifepristone, died at home in Paris at 98 on May 30, 2025. The same month, a conservative, faith-based think tank in Washington, DC, released a study claiming the drug is more than 22 times more dangerous than previously reported.

Mifepristone, which is taken along with misoprostol, was used to terminate more than 600,000 pregnancies in the 12 months after the Supreme Court ruled that states could regulate or ban clinics that perform surgical abortions. Today, more than 60 percent of abortions in America are medication abortions.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the abortion pill in 2000 and says it is safe for women to use up to 10 weeks into pregnancy. As with any medicine, some people suffer side effects. But according to the FDA, fewer than 0.5 percent of women suffer serious adverse effects from mifepristone.

The Ethics and Public Policy Center, led by conservative Catholic commentator Ryan T. Anderson, announced it did a much larger study and came to a very different conclusion. The policy center’s study looked at insurance data from more than 865,000 women over a period of six years. Nearly 11 percent—around 94,000—experienced a harmful side effect, including infection, sepsis, and hemorrhaging.

Anderson said the study is the “equivalent of a category 5 hurricane hitting the prevailing narrative of the abortion industry” and “reveals, based on real-world data, the shocking number of women who suffer serious medical consequences because of the abortion pill.”

Experts in the field of women’s health disagree. Stella Dantas, former president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said the study “manipulates data to drive a myth” and it was not peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal.

Jennifer Lincoln, an ob-gyn in Oregon, said there is lots of evidence the drug is safe.

“Thousands of people have used mifepristone in conjunction with misoprostol to have abortions that are without complication 99.7 percent of the time,” she said. “It is safer to take than Tylenol and far safer than a full-term pregnancy and birth.”

The Ethics and Public Policy Center stands behinds its study and is asking the FDA to review the data. The regulatory agency last looked at the safety of mifepristone in 2019, during Donald Trump’s first term as president.

Pro-life advocates say that based on the policy center’s findings, the FDA should look again.

“If they’re serious about the practice of medicine and serious about the care of American people as patients, action is required based on this data,” said Brick Lantz, vice president of advocacy and bioethics at the Christian Medical and Dental Associations.

Lantz said the high rate of complications is truly alarming, and if those findings were happening in any other field of medicine with any other elective procedure, he’s confident physicians would lose their licenses for continuing to prescribe the drug.

Katie Glenn Daniel, director of legal affairs and policy counsel at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said there have been other studies that raise questions about the safety of mifepristone too and it’s time for authorities to take these concerns seriously.

She pointed to a peer-reviewed paper based on a study done by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute. The paper examines the claim mifepristone is safer than Tylenol.

Charlotte Lozier Institute director of life sciences Cameron Louttit found the claim is baseless. He said “those spreading it lack the evidence they routinely claim.” He argues it has been repeated so often, though, that it has “profoundly influenced public opinion” and made people think the drug is safe.

Daniel shares that concern and said deregulation that allows the drug to be mailed to people only increases the risk.

“When there’s no doctor involved, there’s no adequate screening, it should come as no surprise that there would be more women going to the emergency room,” Daniel said.

She hopes the FDA reviews the effects of loosening the rules on the availability of the drug at the same time the agency looks at the Ethics and Public Policy Center data on its safety.

“What they’re gonna find is that putting these drugs in the mail—including sending them to kids—is extremely dangerous,” she said.

Christina Francis, a doctor in Indiana and the CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said allowing people to purchase any drug without requiring them to consult with a doctor increases the likelihood of misuse and thus serious complication.

Women may take the drug when they’re further along in their pregnancies than the FDA says is safe, for example. Or, Francis said, they may not get screened first for the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy.

As a doctor in Indiana, she has personally seen an increase in complications from mifepristone as the drug has become more common.

She recalls one woman she treated who took mifepristone while 11 weeks pregnant. The woman showed up at the hospital where Francis works bleeding so severely that she needed a transfusion. She retained tissue that ultimately needed to be removed surgically, and additional complications impacted her kidney.

“Honestly, I wasn’t surprised to see the number of complications that they reported,” she said. “Women are not seeing a physician in person, many times not even interacting with a physician at all. They can go on these websites and just fill out a form and get these drugs shipped to them.”

Francis is pro-life and would like to see an end to all medication abortions. But the issue with the safety of mifepristone should matter to anyone who cares about women’s health, she said. Another review by the FDA would be good, she said, and she would like to see regulations around dispensation tightened again, at the very least.

“This is not how we provide medical care to women in this country—or shouldn’t be how we provide medical care to women in this country,” she said.

- More from Adam MacInnis

Theology

Was Seinfeld ‘Too Jewish’?

Marvin Olasky

How attitudes toward Torah define American Judaism.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Pexels, WikiMedia Commons

(For the first article in this series, click here.)

As America is becoming more politically polarized, American Jews are becoming more theologically polarized. According to Pew surveys, four in ten Jewish adults under 30 describe their religion as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” rather than Jewish. But 17 percent from 18 to 29 self-identify as Orthodox, compared with just 3 percent of Jews 65 and older.

The two opposed divisions in American Judaism are Orthodox and Reform, which has a similar place in Judaism as theological liberalism does in Christianity. In Judaism, a middle-of-the-road group is called Conservative, and 4 percent of Jews belong to branches like Reconstructionists (as my father was), who believe religious tradition is important but don’t believe in God. Five percent of Americans raised in Jewish households (including me) have faith in Jesus.

Orthodox and Reform Jews share genes but sometimes not much more. Pew research shows half of Orthodox Jews in the US saying they have “not much” or “nothing at all” in common with Jews in the Reform movement. Just 9 percent feel they have “a lot” in common with Reform Jews. The alienation goes the other way as well: Six in ten Reform Jews say they have “not much” or “nothing” in common with the Orthodox. Recent events and social media attacks, though, have reminded all Jews, regardless of belief, that they are one people. Nazis did not make distinctions.

Two leading products of American culture exemplify two kinds of Jewish households. Seinfeld ruled American television during the 1990s, ending its final season in 1998 on top of the Nielsen ratings. NBC entertainment head Brandon Tartikoff, a Jewish graduate of Yale, thought Seinfeld would flunk out because it was “too Jewish,” but the humor struck a chord.

Why? Like Woody Allen’s films, Seinfeld offered wildly stereotypical but entertaining portrayals. Many Reform Jews are thoughtful and committed, but there’s something in the Reform Jewish blogger Robert Schurz’s self-description as a “Seinfeld Jew” with “a worldly set of values” but also “pride in the artistic, literary, scientific, and political contributions of Jews all over the world.”

A cultural milestone that offered a different impression of Judaism was The Chosen, the 1967 novel by Chaim Potok that spent 39 weeks on bestseller lists, selling 3.4 million copies. It portrayed Orthodox families and teenagers who studied the Talmud, as Jews had done for centuries. In those days Talmud study seemed to be dying out, but it’s now making a comeback, particularly among the one-sixth of American Jews from 18 to 29 who are Orthodox.

Few evangelicals know about the role of the Talmud in Jewish life throughout the centuries. As Jewish sage Jacob Neusner wrote, “Nearly all Christians view Judaism not as a religion in its own terms, but merely as Christianity without Christ, pretty much the same religion but deeply flawed by the rejection of you know who. … Few grasp that Judaism is not merely ‘not-Christianity.’”

That’s true. To put it another way, traditional Judaism has, in a loose sense, its own new testament, the Talmud, encyclopedia-length and compiled from rabbinical debate during the five centuries after Christ. The Talmud records many mutually conflicting rabbinical views: It should not be thought of as a work of dogma, a catechism, or Scripture. The Talmud backstory is that Moses wrote down many of God’s instructions but that God also gave him an oral Torah that elucidated the text in countless ways. From a Jewish perspective, those teachings form the basis of Jewish tradition.

That backstory stayed back for a millennium, as temple sacrifices were a physical way of demonstrating devotion. Until AD 70, Jews could show their faith in God by following his rules for conduct, but they also had ritual sacrifice. Temple slaughterers must sometimes have been wading in blood, as those aware that they had broken the rules sacrificed cattle, sheep, doves, and other animals.

When Roman armies destroyed the temple in 70, they eliminated that safety net. Thereafter, rabbis argued that since their eternal lives depended on observing the rules, Jews had better not even come close to breaking them. The way to do that was to set up a second set of rules far beyond the biblical set. Saying they were merely going by the oral Torah, Talmudic rabbis created a new safety net by regulating almost every aspect of behavior throughout the week.

For example, where Exodus 23:19 states, “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk,” the Talmud says goats should not be cooked in any milk. Lips touching goat were not to touch milk at the same meal. Meat and dairy products of any kind could never be eaten together or within a period of several hours. Dishes or utensils used in one class of food were not to be used with another.

The Bible stipulates that God rested from his work on the Sabbath and his followers should do so also. Talmudic rabbis saw melakhah—the Hebrew word often translated as “work”—as any creative activity. They laid out 39 categories of forbidden activity, including sowing, plowing, reaping, grinding, kneading, baking, shearing wool, and spinning.

To preclude any transgression, they defined those activities expansively. Forbidden activities included weaving or separating two threads or more. Tying, untying, or sewing two stitches or more. Tearing, writing, or erasing two or more letters. Kindling a fire. Carrying any object outside the home.

To this day, Orthodox Jews do not light a fire of any kind on the Sabbath. Since driving a car requires putting a key into the ignition, which produces a spark, driving is prohibited. Animals also should not work on the Sabbath. Any use of electricity—turning on a light or a stove, opening a refrigerator that turns on a light—is also forbidden. (The refrigerator light is normally taped so as not to go on.)

Rabbis in essence tell followers, Behave the way you know you should. You can do it. Discipline your behavior, and your heart will eventually change. Observe rituals before you know why, and understanding will come. The idea is that the rules, if followed, will so restrain our evil impulses that we will act in a decent way most of the time. Talmudic wisdom passed from one generation of sages to the next, with vigorous debate about practical applications, spiritual meaning, and much else.

- More from Marvin Olasky

Books

Review

Geniuses Have Divine Gifts. Even When They’re Insufferable.

Kate Lucky

We don’t have to excuse their bad behavior to recognize God’s hand in what they create.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

I have never had much patience for geniuses. Very smart! Very productive! Also: very annoying. Think of the rude eccentric who talks out of turn, sharing his unsolicited opinions on subjects about which he knows very little. Or the bigwig scholar running late and not responding to emails, too absorbed in his own work to be considerate of others.

No wonder I nodded along to The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, Helen Lewis’s insightful (and very funny) new book about the excuses we’ve made for preeminent artists and inventors, from the creative minds of Renaissance Florence to the tech titans of Silicon Valley. “A suite of behaviours that would otherwise be inexcusable,” she writes of entrepreneur-turned-government-adviser Elon Musk, “are forgiven when they are the price of greatness.” Steve Jobs, “like Pablo Picasso before him, [would] successfully convince everyone around him that the a—holeness was indivisible from the genius.” Albert Einstein wrote out a contract for his wife that included the clause “You will stop talking to me if I request it.”

But Lewis’s indictment runs beyond what she calls the “deficit model of genius”—where “oddness is transformed into specialness,” alcoholism and drug addiction might be creative necessities, and psychological breakdown is perhaps to be expected. In a series of well-chosen case studies, she cleverly lays out other aspects of the myth. Geniuses, we suppose, are iconoclasts and rebels, venerated by history for going against the grain. They are offensive (because mere mortals can’t comprehend their brilliance). And they are singular.

Of course, reality is more complicated. Sometimes the “Semmelweis reflex”—named for the skeptical contemporaries of the doctor who discovered germ theory—is warranted. That is, sometimes weird ideas are just … wrong.

And geniuses are hardly solo enterprises. They are always supported by other people, whether colleagues in their labs (see Thomas Edison tinkering with the light bulb) or women typing manuscripts (see Leo Tolstoy and his long-suffering wife, Sofia). Moreover, they often benefit from being in the right place at the right time. The Beatles’ talent alone wasn’t enough. As Lewis notes, “You need the right collaborators, the right environment in which to flourish and a dollop of plain old good luck.”

In death, geniuses benefit from having their legacies carefully curated, an advantage enjoyed by figures like William Shakespeare and the painter Jackson Pollock. And speaking of death, you need a “memorable” one—maybe even a little bit early, before your shine has faded. “Go too soon and you haven’t had time to do your great work,” writes Lewis. “Stick around too long, and the memory of your later, lesser output might overwhelm your early success.”

I left the book more convinced than I already was that genius isn’t a helpful category. It’s detrimental for whoever is labeled as one, conferring status that just isn’t conducive to well-ordered relationships and a correct sense of a person’s place in the world. And it’s not helpful for us “normies,” either. Deeming someone a genius inclines us to overlook their bad (even criminally bad) behavior and overrate their off-the-cuff pronouncements on topics outside their domains.

Just as Hollywood and Silicon Valley shelter their respective stars, Christians are liable to idolize our greats, like brilliant Bible scholars and well-spoken pastors. Sometimes we risk excusing what we shouldn’t, turning a blind eye to wrongdoing. Society has incorrectly assumed, writes Lewis, that “superior knowledge and expertise in one domain confers authority in others.” But maybe the very gifted apologist doesn’t also know everything about dietary supplements or running for elected office.

Most dangerous of all, attempts to define genius have often turned racist and eugenicist. The first section of The Genius Myth traces that troubled history, from the taxonomies of eugenics researcher Francis Galton to the troubling applications of IQ tests and an ill-conceived sperm bank for Nobel laureates. Lewis mentions one such laureate, physicist William Shockley, who “proposed that those with IQs under 100 be offered cash payments in return for being sterilised.” He wasn’t the only thinker to float the idea—a horrific one, of course, if you believe that all people are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27).

That image bearing is foundational. But it doesn’t quite answer one of the book’s underlying questions: What do we make of extraordinary innovations? What of the phonograph, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” the Sistine Chapel, the MacBook?

God’s image bearers are equally human, equally dignified. That doesn’t mean we are all equally skilled at solving logic puzzles or sculpting clay. Some very gifted people really do produce exemplary things. Annoying as I have found the geniuses I’ve come across, I’m also a little jealous—of their monomaniacal focus, their sheer force of will, the research they produce, and the art they make. I wish Tolstoy had been kinder to his wife and Mozart had been better adjusted. But I’m still glad we have Anna Karenina and those piano concertos.

Lewis addresses this distinction at the beginning and end of The Genius Myth. Her argument is interesting (and, I think, convincing) for Christians. “We all hunger to experience the transcendent, the extraordinary, the inexplicable,” she acknowledges. Brushing up against genuine genus elicits a “vertiginous falling-away as you contemplate an artwork, or an equation, or a new concept … and have no idea how it was created by a human brain.” Looking out an airplane window, perhaps you’ve wondered along with Lewis, “How did the Wright brothers do it—how did they know to do it?”

“I wish that we would move back to the ancient idea of genius, something that is found in particular actions, or specific works,” she advises. Genius is divine and inexplicable and outside our control—inspiration strikes; the pieces fall into place. It’s one person’s possession only for a time, a temporary gift rather than a lifelong identity, an expression of God’s power and beauty and creativity.

As onlookers, we can only be grateful. We’re shaken. We’re awestruck. Now it’s just a matter of where we direct our worship.

Kate Lucky is the senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

- More from Kate Lucky

Church Life

Ten Years After Charleston

Haleluya Hadero

Staff Editor

Chris Singleton’s mother was killed at the Mother Emanuel church shooting a decade ago. He’s still preaching unity and love.

Courtesy of Christ Singleton

Chris Singleton had just wrapped up a summer-league baseball game when the phone call came. It was ten years ago to the day, June 17, 2015, and on the phone was Felicia Sanders, a member of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Come down as soon as possible, Sanders said, because something terrible had happened.

Singleton rushed over. And there he was told that his mother and eight other people had been murdered by a white supremacist in what was then the deadliest mass shooting at a church in American history.

In the days to come, Singleton would learn the details of the heinous attack as its horrors were reported in the national news. The murderer was a man named Dylann Roof. He’d entered the church—the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the South, known as Mother Emanuel—after casing it on numerous trips from his home near Columbia, South Carolina. On the day of his assault, Roof was welcomed into a Wednesday-night Bible study in the church’s fellowship hall, where a member, Myra Thompson, was leading a discussion on the parable of the sower.

With his head hung low, Roof sat silently next to the pastor of the church, Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, for roughly 45 minutes as attendees considered the passage. Then, as the group began closing prayer at around 9 p.m., Roof took out his gun and opened fire.

He killed nine: Pinckney; Thompson; Cynthia Hurd; Susie Jackson; Ethel Lee Lance; DePayne Middleton-Doctor; Tywanza Sanders; Rev. Daniel L. Simmons; and Chris’s mother, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton. A handful of others survived the shooting, including Felicia Sanders, who hid under a table with her granddaughter while Roof killed her son.

The massacre catapulted Mother Emanuel into the national spotlight. It set off conversations about racism, gun violence, and what the Confederate flag means in contemporary America. It also sparked debate about forgiveness—and its limits—as some family members of the victims extended forgiveness to an unrepentant Roof.

One of those family members was Chris Singleton. The night after the shooting, Singleton, then 18, told a reporter his family had forgiven Roof. It wasn’t a statement he had planned or prepared to make. “It was the Holy Spirit that placed that on my heart—and my lips,” Singleton told me during a recent interview.

In the decade that followed, several family members of the shooting victims shared their stories, Singleton among them. Following that off-the-cuff comment, he began traveling the country, speaking to students, nonprofits, churches, sports teams, and teachers about the dark day that has become central to his life’s purpose.

The goal, Singleton likes to say, is to be the opposite of his mother’s killer. He speaks often of eradicating racism and respecting people’s differences—of love and unity, though he understands unity must be appealed to, not demanded. Reaching one person who might otherwise be the next Roof, he told me, would make the whole project a success.

Singleton’s message is not a comprehensive solution to racial injustice in America, as he freely acknowledges. It’s a way to grab on to hope in the face of harsh winds, a real and raw demonstration of the Holy Spirit working in the lives of people despite unimaginable pain.

Born in Atlanta, Singleton moved to Charleston with his parents and two siblings around the age of 11. He remembers his father struggling with alcohol, which caused tensions between his parents and eventually led them to separate. That also left his mother with the challenging task of being the family’s sole provider as a high school track-and-field coach.

“One thing that was a blessing was that she never talked bad about him even though he probably deserved it in some cases,” Singleton said. “That’s the grace she showed toward our father.” She was a formative example for her son, who adored his father.

By the time Singleton entered middle school, the family had started attending church at Mother Emanuel. He served as an acolyte, and his sister participated in the praise-dance ministry. His mother, Sharonda, was working on a doctorate in speech-language pathology, but she soon became drawn to ministry and was ordained a few years later. Filled with joy, she dug deeper into her faith and spent more time praying and reading her Bible than ever before, Singleton told me.

In the months leading up to the shooting, things were looking up for Singleton despite his father’s absence. Then a freshman at Charleston Southern University, he’d started playing Division I college baseball, achieving a longtime goal. He’d recommitted his life to Christ and begun dating his now-wife.

The shooting scrambled everything. With one parent already largely out of the picture, Singleton stepped into a fatherly role for his younger brother and sister, who were 12 and 15 at the time. He pretended to be okay, trying to model strength and resilience for his siblings, who would move to Atlanta to live with an aunt. Later, however, Singleton realized he was only delaying the whole family’s grieving process.

The following fall he continued his college career, frequently traveling from Charleston to Atlanta for visits. In his junior year, Singleton was drafted by the Chicago Cubs, a job that allowed him to move his siblings back to Charleston. There they lived with his wife, Mariana, as he traveled the country for work with different baseball teams.

Around the same time, his father passed away, and Singleton finally broke down and fully grieved his losses. He saw a therapist for the first time and, in the off-season, began to take speaking engagements developing his themes of unity and love. When his baseball career ended in 2019, the talks became a full-time job. He prayed, Singleton told me, and realized that sharing his story was something he was “supposed to do.”

But in America’s polarized politics, Singleton’s hope-filled message is facing headwinds. In recent months, his speaking requests have dwindled, in part because of widespread cuts to diversity programs, which often funded his talks. In 2025, he said, he expects about half the 140 or so engagements he had last year.

And beyond that practical difference, a decade after Charleston, working toward unity—and its traveling companion, justice—can seem like a fool’s errand.

National conversations around race are shrouded in suspicion or outright hostility. Online, the loudest megaphones are often held by those who discount the reality of racism and present-day legacies of America’s horrid racial history—and by those who stand ready to cancel anyone for the slightest misspeaking or past sins they’ve acknowledged with remorse. Even inside the church, as And Campaign president Justin Giboney succinctly described in a CT article, the conversation about racial unity feels increasingly like “a battle between those who were blind to the sin of racism and those who believed racism and sexism were the only sins.”

Charleston’s churches are no exception to that national trend. Around the port city, reconciliation efforts have met roadblocks.

After the shooting, a theologically and racially diverse set of ministry leaders—Reformed and charismatic, Black and white—came together to found a reconciliation organization called 1Charleston. Named after a one-off conference that had taken place a year prior, it organized volunteers into further action, hosting workshops, conferences, and nights of prayer and worship.

The immediate motivation was the massacre, of course, but the organizers were working in a city that carries a particularly painful racial history. In 1822, South Carolina authorities squashed a slave revolt planned by Denmark Vesey, a leader in the church that would later become Mother Emanuel. Vesey and 34 others were executed, and the church was burned to the ground. And four decades later, Confederate troops fired the first shots of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter, located in the Charleston Harbor.

“A lot of people ask themselves, ‘How could this happen?’—and that’s actually the sentiment that galvanized us,” said Philip Pinckney (no relation to the pastor killed in the attack), a former pastor of a multiethnic church, who led 1Charleston for several years. “What do you mean, ‘How could this happen?’”

As it set about responding to that question with answers grounded in local history, 1Charleston was not without its difficulties. The organization encouraged multiethnic ministry, which concerned a few Black pastors, Pinckney told me in an interview. They worried that it would cause brain drain in the Black church, siphoning off promising leaders to other congregations and projects.

Pinckney, who was born and raised in Charleston, said he likely had hundreds of coffee meetups with pastors, most of whom were white. But after a few years, he tired of having the same conversations over and over. He felt as if he were endlessly trying to convince white clergy that directly addressing racism should be a priority in the church.

“The most charitable retelling would be that there was a constant need for more information,” Pinckney said. White pastors often answered his pleas to speak out against police killings by saying they didn’t want to “get political.”

Their sentiment, he mused, “really boils down to ‘It’s not my problem.’”

A few years after 1Charleston launched, Pinckney left, and the organization ultimately stopped its work. Pinckney also left pastoral ministry, though he said he’s still devoted to helping pastors become courageous about pursuing racial justice, which he sees as the prerequisite to unity. He still wants to encourage clergy to nurture conversations about race in America, including those that could inspire backlash from their congregations or come with some other personal cost.

In Charleston and beyond, that remains more easily said than done. The decade since the Mother Emanuel tragedy has been marked by contention around race both inside and outside the American church. Those few years include three bitterly divisive presidential elections, the racial justice protests of 2020, debates over critical race theory and where it’s taught, and rapidly changing policies around diversity programs in academic, corporate, and government settings. White evangelical support for Donald Trump has caused many Black Christians to question their future in predominantly white churches.

South Carolina, for its part, has made positive changes by removing some Confederate symbols from public spaces. But lawmakers in the state continue to sit on a hate-crime bill named after the late Rev. Pinckney, which rightfully has frustrated and angered some of the family members of the shooting victims.

Even amid setbacks, the perseverance of Singleton and many others who have labored around the call for unity is a reminder that the church is called to reconciliation with God and one another (2 Cor. 5:16–21)—both for ourselves and as a model to our unchurched neighbors. But for many believers, resignation and exhaustion have instead crept in. I feel it myself.

But though we may be weary, “let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9). Unity is more than a nice aspiration. It is a biblical command—but one to which we should appeal on the basis of love (Phm. 1:8–9). While pursuing justice, we must also “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3), get rid of divisions in our midst (1 Cor. 1:10), and be reconciled to other saints before God (Matt. 5:23–24).

We must preach the whole counsel of God, the parts that easily fit our political persuasions and the parts that don’t. Unity often comes at a cost—often, as pastor Thabiti Anyabwile wrote in 2018, at the cost of humility. Until what we see around us reflects what we will find in heaven (Rev. 7:9), perseverance, forbearance, and endurance must be our call.

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

- More from Haleluya Hadero

Theology

Walter Brueggemann’s Big Imagination and Even Bigger God

Brent A. Strawn

A grateful friend and colleague reflects on the towering Old Testament scholar.

Image courtesy of the C. Benton Kline, Jr. Special Collections and Archives, Columbia Theological Seminary.

Even now I remember the simple cover of Walter Brueggemann’s most famous book: dark gray with the title The Prophetic Imagination in red lettering. It was 1989, and I was an 18-year-old freshman at a small, denominational Christian liberal arts college in San Diego. In Spring of that year, I took a class on the Old Testament prophets, and one of my assignments was to read Brueggemann’s book and write an essay on it. Since I am something of a pack rat, I laid my hands on that essay and reread it the other day, shortly after Brueggemann’s passing on June 5, 2025, at 92 years of age.

What captivated me about The Prophetic Imagination, even in my young age, was Brueggemann’s definition of a prophet as one who nourishes “a consciousness and perception alternative to” that of “the dominant culture.” Prophets create that imagination first by critiquing the regnant world opposed to God’s will and second by energizing God’s people to a new way of life and being. All of that made great sense to me as someone raised in a holiness denomination, even as it made sense coming from Brueggemann, who was raised in German Pietism as the son of a pastor in the Evangelical and Reformed Church.

But something else struck me with equal force back in 1989, and it has stuck with me ever since: It is Brueggemann’s emphasis on the dangerous freedom of an unimaginably large God: “A free God is an awfully dangerous thing, and that is what the Lord is,” I wrote in my freshman essay. To put it more simply, in the words of Conrad Kanagy, Brueggemann’s recent biographer, who even wrote a children’s book about him, Brueggemann believed in a very big God.

The Prophetic Imagination, first published in 1978,went on to sell a million copies, go through two more editions, and be translated into six other languages. It is the one publication those unfamiliar with Brueggemann’s work have likely heard of, just as Brueggemann himself may be among the only biblical scholars nonspecialists would know by name. It was a watershed publication—still widely cited—affording its readers a new understanding of the prophetic task and new vocabulary to describe it.

Simply put, Brueggemann was one of the most prolific and influential Old Testament scholars of the past century, with a bibliography of over 120 separate titles. Even the most productive academic authors aspire to maybe three or four books in a career, whereas Brueggemann published fourteen in the last two years alone. Yet it is not just the quantity of published works but also their quality that amazes. Several of these books changed or redefined the field of Old Testament study.

The year before The Prophetic Imagination was published, for instance, Brueggemann authored the now-classic The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, the first study to treat the land as a serious subject in biblical theology. There can be no doubt that Brueggemann’s massive 777-page Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy will stand as one of his greatest works. There he offers the most compelling and comprehensive attempt to categorize and understand the various texts, traditions, and witnesses of the Old Testament. He treats these biblical voices as testimony—not only the core testimony of the good and trustworthy God familiar from the Law and the Prophets but also the counter-testimony concerning God’s absence and silence found in the lament psalms and Job, among other places.

Almost 20 years after publication of Theology of the Old Testament, Brueggemann published another extensive and remarkable book, Money and Possessions (2016). He once told me he had been tempted to title it Follow the Money. This volume, no less than any of the others, shows Brueggemann’s fluency in the language of Scripture as he moves easily back and forth between the Old Testament and the New. In my judgment, no other biblical scholar can match his canonical dexterity and profundity.

Brueggemann’s influence extended well beyond the world of academia, however. Like the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, Brueggemann was one of the few stratospheric Bible scholars who could write as easily for clergy and lay people as he could for the professional guild. He once remarked to me that to be a theologian for the church, one must write on the texts that matter most to the average Christian. It is thus unsurprising that he was popular with preachers, who are likely most familiar with Brueggemann’s numerous commentaries, which include major treatments of Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.

In addition, Brueggemann published important monographs, such as The Creative Word: Canon as a Model for Biblical Education, David’s Truth: In Israel’s Imagination and Memory, Israel’s Praise: Doxology Against Idolatry and Ideology, and Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation. Brueggemann was always innovative and creative, applying keen insights from Scripture to contemporary issues facing Christian faith and practice.

After college, I became even more familiar with Brueggemann’s many works, first as a seminarian, then as a doctoral student in Old Testament. But my knowledge of him became firsthand when I landed my first tenure-track job at Emory University. A week after arriving in Atlanta, Professor Brueggemann welcomed me to the area by inviting me to lunch. I was, needless to say, extremely nervous for that appointment at Athens Pizza in Decatur, Georgia.

As I came to learn—since that lunch became the first of many—Brueggemann always ordered the same thing (a Greek salad) after first confirming the size with the waiter (he preferred small) and asking for some crackers to go with it. Lunch was always kept to one hour, pretty much exactly on the dot. My initial fears over dining with the legendary theologian proved ill-founded. We spent most of the time laughing during that first lunch and those that followed.

Emboldened by his kindness—if not my youthful naivety—I asked Brueggemann to guest lecture in my introductory course the next semester, and he graciously agreed. The invitation was, of course, primarily for me to have a chance to hear him up close and in the flesh, though I was happy to let my students listen in over my shoulder. I still remember his delivery; his humor; his engaging, even thunderous voice; his passion; and his exegetical genius. The lecture was on Jeremiah, and to this day, my own introductory lecture on Jeremiah depends directly on his.

Those vignettes are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Brueggemann’s kindness—and not just to me. His colleagues, especially younger ones, widely know and love him for his generous gifts. My own list is far too long to recount, but I am especially grateful for the following:

I’m grateful for the chance to hear him preach and lecture. He once wryly described the difference between a lecture and a sermon as “about 40 minutes.” No less than four volumes of his sermons have been collected (The Threat of Life and The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann: 3 Volume Set).

I’m grateful for the chance to hear him pray. I first had the chance through his reading a publication of prayers before his classes and then during my visits to his home in Michigan. Brueggemann never bothered with standard introductions like “Dear Lord” or “Merciful God.” Instead, he just dove into the heart of his prayer with direct address; he knew God was already, always there. One of his most popular collections of prayers is entitled Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth; there are now at least four other volumes of his collected prayers in print.

I’m grateful for his poetic power. This manifested itself in his artistry as a speaker, preacher, and pray-er; in his argumentation as a writer; and in his observation as the most astute of exegetes. His clear, even brutal honesty in the face of the biblical text is unmatched, save by the clear, even brutal honesty of Scripture itself. Brueggemann’s unflinching fidelity to the text won him and his works, especially his commentaries, a wide following of fans across the ideological spectrum, from mainline progressives to conservative evangelicals and Pentecostals.

I’m grateful for his love for the church coupled with his sober-minded awareness of its many failings. He once told me over lunch (yes, at Athens Pizza) that the origin of his deep concern with justice was his firsthand observation of how unjustly his father had been treated as a pastor.

I’m grateful for his interdisciplinary insight. Brueggemann was a voracious reader who seemed to be interested in every topic and seemed to remember everything he read. Before his lead, biblical scholars rarely ventured outside the often-narrow confines of their discipline. Brueggemann, by contrast, ranged widely—incorporating remarkable gifts from the fields of economics, sociology, politics, and psychology, to name just a few. His stunning essay “The Costly Loss of Lament,” which changed my life and many others, even entire church cultures, would have been impossible to write without the work of British pediatrician and object-relations psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott.

I’m grateful for his graciousness and good humor. I once wrote a review essay of Brueggemann’s work where I registered my many appreciations but also a few critiques. One criticism concerned what I deemed an overuse of the adverb endlessly in Brueggemann’s writing. We humans are finite creatures, after all, so our interpretative endeavors are, no matter how capacious, also limited, most certainly not endless. Only God properly deserves such a predication, I argued. Brueggemann, in his inimitable way, sent me a handwritten note after reading it, thanking me for and congratulating me on the essay, by which he said he was “endlessly instructed.” Touché! That wasn’t the first nor the last time we laughed about that and all sorts of other things.

Along with others like Carolyn Sharp, Clover Beal, Timothy Beal, Conrad Kanagy, Patrick Miller, and especially Davis Hankins, I was blessed to edit a number of works for Brueggemann. The first book I edited for him was a volume on the theology of the Book of Jeremiah, then later one on the Psalms, followed by two others on Exodus and, again, one on Jeremiah. Most recently, he made me his coauthor, asking me to help him finish a short book on Isaiah, which is now in press. I had just finished the copyedits when I spoke to him for the last time, just two days before he died.

I first edited Brueggemann when I was 25 years old as editorial assistant for the journal Theology Today. He seemed to submit a new paper to the journal every few weeks, but during my 12 months in my post, I had the chance to edit only one. The essay was, notably, on preaching as much as it was on the Old Testament. I will never forget one specific line: “It’s hard to get God said right.” That single line has stuck with me for 30 years. It is both true and memorable—and it also changed my entire view of Scripture and theology.

It is easy now to see how Brueggemann’s many books, sermons, and prayers were—and still are—ways he tried to “get God said right.” All of us who have read, listened to, and watched him have benefited from those many attempts, even when we disagreed with some of his conclusions. It is, after all, hard to get the Lord said right. That’s why we will need to keep reading, keep studying, keep preaching, keep praying … perhaps even endlessly.

It is my belief that on June 5, 2025, one of God’s most gifted, beloved, and best “sayers,” Walter Albert Brueggemann by name, joined the goodly company of the prophets. His restless, endless search to get God said right is at an end; he now knows even as he is fully known. But his witness and his words still linger with us, beckoning us to live differently, alternatively, prophetically—above all, faithfully.

Brent A. Strawn is D. Moody Smith Distinguished Professor of Old Testament and professor of law at Duke University. He is the coauthor, with Walter Brueggemann, of the forthcoming book Unwavering Holiness: Pivotal Moments in the Book of Isaiah.

- More from Brent A. Strawn

News

Trump Made $1.3 Million on Bible Endorsement

Daniel Silliman

Financial records show royalty payments rolled in during presidential campaign.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

President Donald Trump earned $1.3 million off the sale of Bibles in 2024.

The White House released financial disclosure forms on Friday as the nation prepared for protests and a military parade celebrating the anniversary of the US Army. The 234-page report, covering the 12 months before Trump was sworn into office, shows his wealth vastly increased while he was running for president.

Trump earned $57.4 million as the “chief crypto advocate” and “inspiration” for a cryptocurrency company founded in 2024, in addition to other more traditional sources of revenue, such as the $50 million he earned from his Palm Beach, Florida, golf resort Mar-a-Lago, and $20.8 million from Trump National Golf Club Washington, DC, in Potomac Falls, Virginia. The president reported total assets of about $1.6 billion and annual income of $600 million.

One piece of that income came from the endorsement of the God Bless the USA Bible.

Trump endorsed the Bible around Easter, shortly after a New York State court threaten to start seizing assets if he couldn’t pay a $175 million bond while he appealed his conviction in a civil fraud case.

“This Bible is a reminder that the biggest thing we have to bring back America and to make America great again is our religion,” Trump said in a promotional video. “We must protect content that is pro-God. We love God. And we have to protect anything that is pro-God. We must defend God in the public square and not allow the media or the left-wing groups to silence, censor, or discriminate against us.”

The God Bless the USA Bible uses the King James Version and is published with a copy of the chorus of “God Bless the USA,” handwritten by country singer Lee Greenwood: “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free. / And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.” It also includes the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Bible sells for $59.99. Editions endorsed by Trump, including the Inauguration Day Edition, the Presidential Edition, and the Golden Age Edition, sell for $99.99.

The Bibles are printed for about $3 each in Hangzhou, China, according to the Associated Press. Religious books are exempt from tariffs on Chinese imports, the US Customs and Border Protection told Christianity Today.

Several editions of the Bible, including one celebrating Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, have sold out.

Trump has not disclosed how much he makes per copy. Royalties are paid to a licensing company called CIC Ventures. Trump was listed in the financial disclosure as CIC Ventures’ manager, president, secretary, and treasurer. The company also licenses Trump’s name to sell watches, sneakers, and guitars.

Tim Wildsmith, a Baptist minister in Nashville who reviews Bibles on his YouTube channel, said the God Bless the USA Bible appears to be cheaply made.

“I would expect this Bible to be maybe $15 to $20 tops,” Wildsmith said. “It disappoints me that it’s even out there, and it disappoints me that people are making money off of this. … This feels more like a money grab than anything else.”

Trump is not the first president to endorse an edition of Scripture. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt both endorsed Bibles. They were not sold for profit, however, but given to American soldiers going to fight in World War I and II.

Trump said he licensed his name to the God Bless America Bible because the Bible is his favorite book and “a lot of people’s favorite book.” Even some of his strong evangelical supporters have questioned how much he’s read it, though.

Author Eric Metaxas, for example, once wrote that Trump “has evinced a startling lack of familiarity with the Bible.”

When Trump was running for president in 2015, he refused to say what his favorite Bible verses were, protesting the question was too personal. When he was asked about the Bible again on the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said it was a great book that you could read 20 times and appreciate more every time and that he’d learned a lot from Scripture. Trump cited as an example the command “Never bend to envy.”

The phrase does not appear in the King James Version, the Revised Standard Version that Trump was given as a child, or any major English translation. Evangelical journalist David Brody said he thought Trump was probably conflating two passages. He asked for clarification and staffers told him Trump was referring to Proverbs 24, which says “Do not envy the wicked” (v. 1).

Brody argued that from one perspective, Trump’s inability to quote Scripture could be admired.

“Trump … had no desire to take the easy road and simply memorize a couple of Bible verses,” Brody wrote in The Faith of Donald J. Trump. “I had given him some of my favorite verses. A staffer could have come up with a few more, and even scripted some evangelicalish lines to sweeten the ears or stop the critics.”

Brody wouldn’t call Trump a Christian, though. Instead, in his book, he wrote that “Donald Trump seems to be on a spiritual voyage that has accelerated greatly in the past few years.”

God Bless the USA Bible has recently added several new editions to the lineup. One is endorsed by First Lady Melania Trump, another by Vice President JD Vance.

- More from Daniel Silliman

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