The Rebellious Act of Rolling Back the Stone

From Jesus to angels to the apostles, Resurrection Day instructs us on earthly and heavenly authority.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

We don’t hear too much about the angels in Easter sermons, but they did play an important role in what went on in the garden that morning. I acknowledge now that I got carried away in my youthful rhetoric in my political activism days in the early 1970s when I said in a speech, “On Resurrection morning, the angels committed the first Christian acts of civil disobedience.”

But they did do some illegal activity. The apostle Matthew reports that Pilate ordered a guard of soldiers to make the tomb “as secure as you know how” (27:65). The soldiers affixed Pilate’s seal to the stone barring entrance to the tomb (v. 66)—and breaking that official seal was a crime punishable by death. But Pilate’s efforts were to no avail. The angels struck down the military guard, and “an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone” (28:2).

The resurrection of Jesus was a defiance of Pilate’s authority. On Easter morning, the kingdoms of Jesus and of Pilate clashed. Whatever Jesus meant, then, when he told Pilate that the two of them represented different kinds of kingdoms (John 18:36), the unsealing of the tomb made it obvious that Pilate had no authority to cancel the Resurrection.

We should not be surprised, then, that the apostles later confronted local authorities with the proclamation “We must obey God rather than human beings” (Acts 5:29). And following the example of Easter morning, they welcomed angels—who often confronted political power elsewhere in Scripture (Dan. 3, 6; Acts 12)—who were sent to unlock the gates imprisoning them.

And then the women at the tomb: The words of women did not count for much in that patriarchal culture. A woman could not give testimony in a court of law. If one man killed another man and the only witnesses were a hundred women, no one saw it, from a legal perspective. But here Jesus tells Mary to report to the apostles what she has seen. Luke’s gospel captures the significance of this: “But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense” (24:11).

Mary Magdalene’s role in the Easter story certainly deserves an upgrade. Another time in the ancient past, the Lord searched for a woman in a garden. On that occasion, the woman and her husband hid from their Creator. Many Eves later, the risen Lord looked for a weeping woman in a garden, and he gently called her by name. Mother Eve had rejected God’s authority in response to the Serpent’s challenge to her to be her own god. On Easter morning, this daughter of Eve met her Lord in the garden and cried out to him through her tears: “Rabboni!” (teacher).

We rightly see the Easter narrative as having to do with authority: Some of us must accept it as true out of a fundamental trust in the utter reliability of God’s Word. But the actions of the angels and Mary’s encounter with the risen Savior point us more concretely to the authoritative power of Jesus Christ as the King of Kings and the supremely trustworthy witness to the truth.

Richard Mouw is a senior research fellow at the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University and former president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

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Theology

The Cross that Saves and Heals

Jeremy Treat

Good Friday’s message to a wounded world.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

Wilshire Boulevard runs like an artery through Los Angeles, stretching 16 miles from downtown to the Pacific Ocean. It’s named after Henry Gaylord Wilshire, an influential real estate developer who once marketed a strange 1920s invention called the Ionaco, an electric healing belt.

According to Wilshire’s advertisements, the device was plugged into a household light socket and worn around the body, where it was said to improve the blood and increase oxygen in the body, restoring the user to health. It was promoted as a cure for a wide range of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, and arthritis. Medical experts later dismissed it as quackery, but that didn’t stop people from buying it. Wilshire sold more than 50,000 belts.

It’s easy to laugh at something like the electric healing belt. But there’s a deeper reason people bought them: Wounded people long for healing.

Today, we still search for healing but may turn to cutting-edge medical treatments, wellness culture, self-help programs, therapy, spiritual practices, or online advice about how to optimize our bodies and minds. Some of these may genuinely help. But beneath promises of optimization, there lies the same deep human desire to be healed and made whole. Good Friday speaks directly to that longing. It tells the story of a God who entered a wounded world not only to forgive sin but also to bring healing.

While this essay focuses on healing, I want to make clear that the Cross is a multidimensional work of God’s grace: In Christ’s death we find forgiveness of sins, victory over evil, justification before God, the removal of shame, and many more benefits within the broader story of the kingdom of God. My hope here is that we would remember the essential yet often overlooked truth that Good Friday is the source of our healing.

We know something in us—and in the world—is not the way it’s supposed to be. Every ambulance siren, every crowded emergency room, every whispered prayer beside a hospital bed reminds us that something in this world is deeply wrong. We live in a world marked by illness, injustice, grief, broken relationships, anxiety, and despair.

The longing for healing is one of the most universal human experiences. The Bible describes this condition with a striking metaphor: The world is sick.

According to the prophet Isaiah, “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint” (Isa. 1:5, ESV throughout). The sickness is not confined to the soul but pervades our entire being and even the world we inhabit, yet its deepest root is our estrangement from the God who made us.

But the Good News of Good Friday is that God has not abandoned his creation to its sickness. He has entered it to bring healing. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus restores sight to the blind, strength to the lame, hearing to the deaf, and dignity to those society has pushed to the margins. Yet these miracles are more than displays of compassion or supernatural power. They are signs of a deeper mission: Jesus came as the divine physician for a sick world. In him, the Lord who “forgives all your iniquity” and “heals all your diseases” (Ps. 103:3) has entered history, beginning a restoration that will culminate in “the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2).

It’s important we recover Jesus as Healer alongside Jesus as Savior. In Luke 5, after calling a tax collector to follow him, Jesus explains the heart of his ministry: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick” (v. 31). The implication is clear: Humanity is the patient. Jesus is the healer.

Jesus also expands our understanding of what constitutes healing. In Mark 2, when a paralyzed man is lowered through a roof to reach him, Jesus first declares, “Your sins are forgiven” (v. 5). Only afterward does he tell the man to stand and walk. Physical restoration and spiritual restoration are intertwined.

The New Testament even reflects this overlap in its language. The Greek word sozo is often translated “save,” but it can also mean “heal” or “make well.” Biblical salvation is not just about forgiveness in a legal sense. It is also about the restoration of the whole person and ultimately the whole creation.

Scottish theologian John Swinton notes the Bible doesn’t have a word precisely equivalent to the modern medical definition of health. Today, we often think of health simply as the absence of disease. The Bible paints a richer picture. It speaks instead of righteousness and peace, of being in right relationship with God, with others, and with creation. The Hebrew word shalom captures this vision: harmony, wholeness, life working the way God intended (Isa. 32:16–18; Col 1:19–20).

This vision of shalom stands behind one of the most famous prophetic descriptions of the Cross:

He was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed. (Isa. 53:5)

Notice the suffering of the servant deals with our sin and brings peace. Through the suffering servant’s wounds, healing flows. But how does Jesus bring that healing?

The Gospels carefully recount the physical wounds of Christ. He was scourged with a whip embedded with bone and metal (John 19:1). Soldiers struck his face (Matt. 26:67). A crown of thorns was pressed into his skull (John 19:2). Nails pierced his hands and feet (20:25). Yet his suffering was not just physical.

Emotionally, he experienced profound sorrow, even sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44). Relationally, he was betrayed by Judas (Matt. 26:47), denied by Peter (vv. 69–70), and abandoned by most of his disciples (v. 56). Spiritually, he bore the crushing weight of human sin, crying out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (27:46).

Matthew connects Jesus’ healing ministry to Isaiah’s prophecy: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases” (8:17). In other words, Jesus does not merely remove suffering from a distance but takes it upon himself, bearing in his own life the brokenness he came to heal.

Although we feel helpless watching someone we love suffer, Jesus did what we cannot do. Because he was fully God and fully human without sin, he could bear the wounds of the world on our behalf. He entered into our suffering to overcome it. Henri Nouwen was right to call Christ “the wounded healer.” The healing he offers does not come from a distance. It comes through his own suffering love.

Although healing and wholeness have been accomplished at the Cross, our experience of them unfolds in what Christians often call the “already and not yet” of the kingdom of God. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, the decisive victory has already been won. Sin has been forgiven. Evil powers have been defeated. The restoration of creation has begun.

But the fullness of that healing has not yet arrived. We still live in a world of hospital rooms and funeral services. Christians still experience illness, grief, and mental anguish. Sometimes God brings remarkable healing in this life. Other times the healing we long for comes only in the end-of-time resurrection.

This tension can be difficult to live with. But it also points us toward hope. Good Friday reminds us that the deepest healing in the universe came through suffering love. Easter assures us that suffering will not have the final word.

One day the healing that began at the Cross will spread through the entire creation. Bodies will be raised. Tears will be wiped away. The fractured world will be restored to shalom. Until then, we wait in hope, trusting the one who bore our wounds. And by his wounds, we are healed.

Jeremy Treat is pastor for preaching and vision at Reality Church of Los Angeles and professor of theology at Biola University. He is author of The Crucified King, Seek First, The Atonement, and Everyday Discipleship.

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Books

Review

Manifest Destiny Was an Act of Volition

John Fea

Three books on early American history.

Illustration by Christianity Today

This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.

L. Daniel Hawk, Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice (IVP Academic, 2026).

What should Christians think about manifest destiny, the 19th-century belief in divinely inspired expansionism? Thanks to the work of American historians over the last half century, we know the expansion of white settlement had a devastating effect on Native American culture, including European diseases that devastated Indigenous peoples. Trade with Europeans transformed everyday life in Native communities.

As manifest destiny pushed Native Americans farther and farther west, they had to submit to US assimilation efforts, fight American troops to preserve their homelands and culture, and watch the United States violate or ignore treaty after treaty. It is not a pretty picture.

In Undoing Manifest Destiny, biblical scholar L. Daniel Hawk aims to expose this narrative of white expansion and to help Christians “dismantle” and “demystify” it. He examines its biblical justifications, particularly the ways Euro-American settlers appropriated scriptural narratives—such as the Israelite conquest of Canaan—to legitimize Native American dispossession. Hawk argues these Christian interpretations are theologically unsound, rooted in self-serving readings of selected biblical passages. By reexamining those texts, he seeks to undo the moral authority manifest destiny has long claimed.

Hawk has written a historically inflected sermon. The book says very little about the lives of actual Native Americans: He is more interested in white Christian narratives than in Indigenous people. White people are the villains, Native Americans are the victims, and little else complicates the picture. Such a binary approach might convince Hawk’s primary audience—morally conscious Christians interested in social and racial justice—and one hopes it does. But it is not a work of history.

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press, 2023)

Historian Ned Blackhawk, author of the National Book Award–winning Rediscovery of America, shares Hawk’s core premise: “Despite assertions to the contrary,” Blackhawk writes, “American democracy arose from the dispossession of American Indians.”

But Native Americans are not passive in his telling. Blackhawk insists that a “full telling of American history must account for the dynamics of struggle, survival, and resurgence that frame America’s Indigenous past.” He sees Native American societies “in motion, not stasis,” and argues that too many writers foreground elimination as the defining feature of Native history while minimizing “the extent of Indigenous power and agency.” Where Hawk’s Native Americans are victims, Blackhawk’s are at the center of the national story, offering a far more complex narrative.

Blackhawk offers a sweeping reinterpretation of American history. Spanning from early European colonization through the 20th century—the same ground Hawk covers—The Rediscovery of America shows how Native nations influenced diplomacy, trade networks, and even the formation of democratic practices.

Blackhawk reminds us that European colonization “was never a predetermined success” and shows how Native nations shaped the course of the American Revolution and the Civil War. He also recovers the contributions of Native American activists such as Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Henry Roe Cloud, and Vine Deloria Jr., who fought for Indigenous rights and challenged the “mythology of Indian disappearance.”

Blackhawk’s work builds on a generation of scholars associated with “the new Indian history,” an approach to the American past that centers Native agency rather than decline.

Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2001).

One of the most prominent voices in this tradition is Daniel Richter, whose 2001 book Facing East from Indian Country remains one of the best introductions to the field for general readers. I have used it with undergraduates for two decades.

Richter’s book is a masterpiece of historical thinking. He invites readers to reconsider early American history by metaphorically “facing east” from the vantage point of Native communities rather than looking westward from European settlements. The approach, which requires both historical empathy (walking in the subject’s shoes) and imagination, centers Indigenous Americans and reconstructs a world in which Europeans are on the margins.

“If we shift our perspective to try to view the past in a way that faces east from Indian country,” Richter writes, “Native Americans appear in the foreground, and Europeans enter from distant shores. … Cahokia becomes the center and Plymouth Rock the periphery.” For Richter, the story of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is best described as North America during the period of European colonization rather than as the European colonization of North America.

In the end, Hawk, Blackhawk, and Richter all want to expose the darkness of manifest destiny (in its various manifestations—I am using the term loosely here). Hawk uses the past to preach, and in some cases sermons are necessary. Blackhawk and Richter, like all good historians, tell a fuller story that inevitably triggers the reader’s moral imagination without the homily.

John Fea is a visiting fellow in history at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and distinguished professor of American history at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

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Culture

Review

‘The Christ’ Audio Drama Testifies to Easter

Peter T. Chattaway

You can’t ‘come and see’ this depiction of Jesus, but you can definitely come and hear.

The recording studio for The Christ podcast.

Used with permission from Faith Media

The story of Jesus has been told many times in print, in art, and on film. Now it’s been turned into a full-scale audio drama, The Christ, which is being released as a four-part podcast this week during the lead-up to Easter.

The podcast features some fairly big names, several of whom are veterans of the Bible-movie genre. David Oyelowo, who played Joseph of Arimathea in BBC’s The Passion and John the Baptist in The Book of Clarence, now plays Pontius Pilate, while Paul Walter Hauser, who recently voiced a sheep in The Chosen Adventures, plays John the Baptist. Patricia Heaton (The Star) hosts the show, while John Rhys-Davies, whose credits include One Night with the King and Peter: The Redemption (and, yes, a Bible-adjacent Indiana Jones movie or two), provides the narration. Jesus himself is played by Tom Pelphrey (Task, Ozark), who as far as I can tell is new to the genre but has spoken quite openly about his faith.

Listening to the podcast is a fascinating experience. When you read the Gospels, you can imagine how it all played out for yourself, and when you watch a movie or TV show about Jesus, the sights and sounds are provided for you. But listening to the drama—getting the sounds but not the sights—focuses the mind in different ways. It’s a little like watching an old silent movie about Jesus, except instead of showy facial expressions and hand gestures compensating for the lack of audio cues, you’ve got theatrical voices and precisely-timed laughter compensating for the lack of visuals (particularly when the villains are mocking Jesus). Even if the performances are a bit exaggerated to fit the medium, they can also be quite bold and effective, engaging the listener.

The producers of The Christ make good use of the form, from the hard-hitting sound effects when Jesus is crucified to the various storms and crowds in the background of other scenes. When Jesus goes into the desert after his baptism, his prayers overlap with flashbacks to his birth and childhood, and it feels like we’re listening to his thoughts and memories.

And just as Cecil B. DeMille’s silent classic The King of Kings showed Jesus healing a blind person from the person’s point of view, with a dark screen fading into an image of Jesus’ face, so too the podcast dramatizes the healing of the deaf-mute man by dropping the sound and muffling Jesus’ voice just before he says “Ephphatha!” (Mark 7:34).

The writing goes beyond the Gospels in interesting ways. In two of the Gospels, Jesus quotes a single line from Psalm 22—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—but in The Christ, he continues further, quoting even more of that psalm, while the narrator explains how another line from it was fulfilled when the soldiers cast lots for Jesus’ clothes. Sometimes the podcast makes its own connections to the Old Testament, as when Rhys-Davis quotes Jeremiah 17:9 (The heart of man is “desperately wicked”) while describing Jesus’ treatment on the road to Calvary.

The script also has a strong apologetic thrust. One of the disciples states that Jesus is either the biggest charlatan who ever lived or the sole supreme God; Heaton says Jesus fulfilled more than 300 prophecies; Rhys-Davies explains how Jesus was different from the false gods of his time; and the apostle John emphasizes the importance of deciding to believe that Jesus is the Christ.

Some of the creative choices are a little puzzling. Pilate’s wife keeps calling him “Marcus,” and only later do we learn the writers have expanded his name to “Marcus Pontius Pilate.” A historical basis seems to exist for creating a first name: Pilate’s personal name is not known, only his family names, and it stands to reason that his wife wouldn’t have called him by one of those, so the writers may have felt they had to invent another name for him. But because they don’t introduce him by his new name, his wife’s repeated use of it pulls us out of the drama just when it’s getting started.

Also, some of the plot points have been moved around in ways that might feel disjointed to listeners familiar with the story of Christ’s life. For example, when the disciples go fishing in Galilee after the Resurrection (John 21:1–4), they still haven’t seen the resurrected Jesus for themselves, and they grumble (or at least Thomas does) that Jesus has already appeared to pretty much everyone but them. They mention the women at the tomb, his mother, and the people on the road to Emmaus, among others. Jesus seemingly doesn’t appear to the disciples in Jerusalem (Luke 24:36–49; John 20:19–29) in this version of the story.

The dialogue is a mix of modern and archaic. Sometimes it’s very casual and familiar: When one of the disciples asks Jesus to teach them how to pray, Jesus replies, “All right, all right, maybe this should have been my first sermon.” Other times it falls back on the more stilted thees and thous of the King James Version.

Some of the other creative decisions are more intriguing than puzzling. When John the Baptist says the Messiah will baptize “with fire,” he’s speaking to Herod, in this production, and it sounds like a threat. I always assumed the biblical John, who spoke of Jesus baptizing “with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matt. 3:11; Luke 3:16), was alluding to the tongues of fire that alighted on the disciples’ heads when the Spirit came upon them at Pentecost (Acts 2:3), but maybe he did mean it in a more apocalyptic way. Also, the rather sweet-voiced angel who appears to Jesus in Gethsemane (Luke 22:43) makes yet another allusion to the Old Testament that carries its own hint of menace aimed at someone else—not Jesus!—but still, it’s not what I expected.

The show has effective moments, too, conveyed through sensitive performances. The portrayals of Joseph and Mary, and their awareness of the suffering that awaits both them and their son, stand out in particular. Mary alludes to the sorrows ahead of her when she asks Jesus to intervene at the wedding in Cana. Even at a time of joyous celebration, she knows what she’s setting in motion, and you can feel her preparing herself for it.

The brief exchange between the 12-year-old Jesus and the elders in the temple (Luke 2:41–52) is also quite good. Many films simply show Jesus standing or sitting in front of the elders when Mary and Joseph find him, but an audio drama can’t take that shortcut. It has to give you a sense of what Jesus was saying, and this gives you a good sense of the public speaker that he will go on to become.

At the heart of it all, of course, is Pelphrey’s performance as the adult Jesus. Equal parts warm, compassionate, vulnerable, and sincere, his interpretation of Jesus is a pleasure to listen to, from his recitation of the Beatitudes to his playful exchanges with his mother and his forgiveness of Peter. You can’t exactly “come and see” his version of Jesus, but you can definitely come and hear.

Peter T. Chattaway is a film critic with a special interest in Bible movies.

Theology

The Scandal and Grace of Christ’s Saturday in the Grave

Hardin Crowder

How Fyodor Dostoevsky saw the whole story of redemption in Holbein’s painting of the dead Jesus.

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein the Younger.

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

If we are honest, many of us do not know what to do with Holy Saturday.

Good Friday is terrible, but it is also dramatic and full of passion. Easter Sunday is triumphant, radiant, and full of song. But Holy Saturday is quieter and thus harder for us to inhabit. It asks us to remain near the tomb and to resist the urge to hurry toward resurrection before we have reckoned with the weight of Christ’s death and burial .

The Apostles’ Creed confesses that Jesus “was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead,” while the Nicene Creed declares that the eternal Son “became man” and, for our sake, “suffered death and was buried.” We should not mistake these as spare liturgical phrases placed between cross and resurrection merely to mark the passage of time between Friday and Sunday. They are the church’s way of insisting that the gospel is anchored in history, with a real flesh and blood body in a real tomb.

From the beginning, Christians have had to answer those who tried to make Christ’s humanity into a phantom thing. Docetists claimed that Jesus only seemed to have a real body and only appeared to suffer and die. Basilides taught that Simon of Cyrene was crucified in Jesus’ place. Even Apollinaris, seeking to protect Christ’s divinity, diminished Christ’s full humanity by denying him a rational human soul. Each heresy originated as an attempt to escape the reality of the Son of God lying dead in a tomb. Yet, against all such evasions, the creeds teach the church to say plainly what Scripture declares: The Son of God truly took our nature, truly entered our sorrow, truly passed through death, and truly lay in the grave.

Even so, this is the part of the story we are often tempted to rush past. We move quickly from the agony of Good Friday to the alleluias of Easter morning, as though the silence of the tomb were only an inconvenience between sorrow and joy. We prefer resurrection in full bloom to the hard fact that our Savior lay in the grave. But the church, at its best, lingers here.

On Holy Saturday, the church confesses that the Lord of life entered death itself, so that by going all the way down into our mortal condition, he might raise us up with him. It teaches us not to avert our eyes from the burial of Christ, because only those who have learned to keep watch at the tomb on Saturday will feel the full wonder of the stone rolled away on Sunday.

That instinct to rush from cross to empty tomb helps explain why Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb struck the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky so deeply. Holbein was a 16th-century German painter of the Northern Renaissance, remembered for his striking realism and unsparing eye for detail. Dostoevsky, the great 19th-century novelist, was famous for his exploration of themes of suffering, doubt, guilt, and the hard-won hope of Christian faith.

When Dostoevsky saw Holbein’s painting in 1867, according to the later recollection of his wife Anna, he stood before it as if transfixed, and she feared the shock might provoke one of his epileptic seizures. This story has been told and retold so often that it now feels almost legendary. But the deeper point is not that Holbein nearly destroyed Dostoevsky’s faith but that this painting forced Dostoevsky to look straight at one of Christianity’s hardest claims: that God entered death fully before conquering it.

I believe that is why Holbein’s painting impacted Dostoevsky so deeply. The painting does not soften the death of Jesus. It offers no halo of serenity, no early hint of Easter radiance. Art historians and theologians alike have noticed the same thing: Holbein refuses the pious instinct to make death look already defeated. Christ’s face is not peaceful. It is lifeless and spent. Holbein does not preserve what scholar Mia Mochizuki calls the “comfortable fiction of sleep.” Rather, he chooses to present Christ as unmistakably dead, and the painting’s long, narrow format makes the tomb feel claustrophobic, almost coffin-like. Christ’s body is gaunt, wounded, discolored, and hemmed into the narrow confines of the tomb. Put plainly, Holbein paints what Christian confession requires, though Christian sentiment sometimes resists: If Christ truly took our nature, then he truly entered our mortality. When Holbein paints Christ in the tomb, he paints a corpse.

Dostoevsky was never interested in a Christ sheltered from the raw conditions of human life. He was drawn instead to the God-man who entered them fully. J. I. Packer captured something essential about Dostoevsky’s imagination when he described its recurring burden as “the nightmare quality of unredeemed existence and the heartbreaking glory of the incarnation.” Holbein seems to hold both in a single frame. That is what made the painting so important to Dostoevsky. He had little patience for sentimental religion. He distrusted every version of faith that tried to speak of redemption without grief, repentance, suffering, or grace. Ernest Gordon put it well, too, when he said that Dostoevsky’s “hosanna of faith was hammered out on the anvil of doubt.” Holbein’s dead Christ belongs on that anvil. The painting gave visible form to one of the most searching questions a believer can face: What can faith say when the eye sees only death and defeat?

Dostoevsky returned to that question repeatedly, but nowhere more memorably than in The Idiot, his novel of innocence, suffering, and belief in a world too damaged to know what to do with goodness. At the center of the novel stands Prince Lev Myshkin, a man whose gentleness, honesty, and almost childlike openness make him seem foolish in the eyes of a society schooled in vanity, calculation, and appetite. He enters a world of damaged souls, restless desires, and spiritual confusion, and one of the clearest signs that this is no mere social novel is Dostoevsky’s decision to place a copy of Holbein’s dead Christ in the house of Parfyon Rogozhin, Myshkin’s dark rival and double. Rogozhin is wealthy, obsessive, and possessed by a destructive love that draws much of the novel’s violence into itself. As the publishers of The Gospel in Dostoevsky note in their introduction to this work, in such a house, the painting feels like a silent theological challenge, fittingly lodged in a place shadowed by jealousy, possession, and despair.

Again and again, the image radiates outward through the novel’s spiritual atmosphere. When Myshkin sees it, he recognizes at once the danger it poses. Myshkin sees right away that this is not a pious image that gently leads the soul upward. It is an image that presses the viewer down into the scandal of the tomb. The image depicts a Christ in the stark humiliation of death itself, stripped of even the dignity of sacred sorrow. In this way, it is a perfect foundational image for the novel, because in the fictional world of The Idiot, Dostoevsky is exploring the idea of what happens when goodness enters a world that has lost the capacity to receive it. As Sarah J. Young argues, Holbein’s Christ is not incidental in The Idiot. It is central to the novel’s theological architecture.

The protagonist, Myshkin, for all his tenderness and pity, moves through the story almost as a Christ-haunted presence, yet again and again his goodness seems only to expose the sickness around him. In that sense, Holbein’s painting becomes an emblem of the novel’s deepest tension: Can holiness survive contact with a world bent on deforming whatever is pure?

Then comes the meditation of Ippolit, a brilliant and bitter young man dying of illness, who speaks with the desperation of someone already staring into the grave. Looking at Holbein’s Christ, he sees in it only “nature,” only the body of a man crushed by torture and subjected to physical decay. And from that sight comes the dreadful question: “If Christ’s disciples had seen such a body, how could they possibly have believed he would rise again?” It is one of the sharpest statements of the modernist spiritual crisis that plays out in so many of Dostoevsky’s works. If nature is all, then beauty is crushed, innocence is crushed, and Christ himself is crushed. In Ippolit’s imagination, Holbein’s painting becomes a picture of a world ruled by impersonal force, a world in which even the best and holiest life can be broken and thrown aside.

Dostoevsky lets that possibility speak in all its bitterness because he knew how plausible it had become. He does not silence the modern voice of despair with quick religious slogans. He allows it to speak fully, and then he places it within a novel where pity, innocence, guilt, longing, and love continue to bear witness to realities that nature alone cannot explain. That is part of what makes Holbein’s painting so important across The Idiot. It hangs over the whole book like the atmosphere of Holy Saturday, teaching the reader how to inhabit the terrible interval between death and resurrection, between the collapse of visible hope and the possibility that grace has not yet said its last word.

Holy Saturday is the day between promise and sight. Good Friday has done its work. Easter morning has not yet dawned. The body of Jesus lies in the tomb, and the church waits in silence. It is the day when believers must reckon with the full weight of Christ’s death before they can speak of resurrection. Holbein paints that day with unnerving severity. And Dostoevsky understood, perhaps better than most modern writers, that many people live much of their lives there.

People rarely lose faith first in the seminar room. More often they lose it at the graveside, in the hospital room, in the prison cell, in the long aftermath of betrayal, in the spectacle of innocent suffering, or in the slow realization that the world does not seem arranged for justice. Holbein gave Dostoevsky an image for that crisis. Dostoevsky, in turn, made it part of his lifelong witness that Christian faith must be sturdy enough to stand before the tomb and still confess Christ.

That is why the painting did not make Dostoevsky less Christian. It made him less sentimental. It drove him toward a sterner, deeper theology of incarnation, passion, and resurrection. It confirmed that Christianity cannot be an anesthetic, an ideology, or a moral improvement program for the already capable. It is the announcement that the Son of God has entered the grave itself and come out the other side in victory.

In the end, Holbein’s dead Christ did not drive Dostoevsky away from the gospel. It drove him deeper into it. The painting stripped away every religious nicety and forced him to reckon with the awful realism of redemption: The Son of God truly took our flesh, truly bore our griefs, truly suffered under the curse, and truly entered the darkness of death.

But that is not the end of the Christian story. Holy Saturday gives way to Easter. The body Holbein painted so starkly is the body that did not remain in the tomb. The one who lay there cold and lifeless is the same Lord who rose in glory on the third day. That means the gospel speaks not only to the tasteful and the composed but also to the guilty, the grieving, the doubting, and the undone.

Christ has gone all the way down into the worst we fear, and he has come back with death’s keys in his hand. Because he truly died, sinners can truly live. Because he entered the grave, the grave is no longer the end. And so, even in a world that often looks as bleak as Holbein’s painting, the church still dares to say that Jesus Christ is risen, mercy is stronger than judgment, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Hardin Crowder is pastor of Dover Baptist Church in Manakin-Sabot, Virginia. He writes regularly on art and faith on his Substack, This Blessed Plot.

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News

Churches Try Drones and Skydiving Bunnies for Easter Outreach

Megan Fowler

“We want to make it about Jesus and getting people excited about the Easter season and going to church somewhere.”

People attend an Easter drone show at The Church on Masters Road in Manvel, Texas.

Dan Davis / Facebook / Courtesy of Megan Fowler

As Americans open their wallets to spend a projected $24.9 billion on Easter this year, some churches are thinking beyond Easter eggs and Passion plays, budgeting for helicopter rentals, skydiving Easter bunnies, and record-setting drone shows.

Many churches see Holy Week as an opportunity for community outreach, in some cases the bigger the better. Church leaders say they hope the spring-themed fun will serve the community, glorify God, and attract new Easter-weekend visitors to worship.

Compass Church in Monterey County, California, hosted its Easter egg drop at a local sports complex on March 28. A helicopter dropped 100,000 eggs on Rabobank Stadium in two separate egg drops, and the event also included a skydiving Easter bunny.

At Cultivate Church in Alabaster, Alabama, leaders expect their April 4 Easter outreach event to draw around 20,000 people. A helicopter will drop 20,000 eggs in three cycles for children of various ages while church members grill thousands of hot dogs to give away. They’ll also provide bounce houses for children. The event is scheduled the day after Cultivate Church holds a Good Friday night of worship.

Cultivate Church’s senior pastor, Brandon Matthews, told Christianity Today that the church began the community Easter egg drops in 2012, when it first launched.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic and occasional bad weather have forced the church to cancel the event, he says the community looks forward to it every year. “We do this to let the community know we want something for them, not something from them,” he told CT.

Though Matthews would love for unchurched attendees to find their way to Cultivate, he said the goal is ultimately for them to attend any church on Easter and beyond.

The River Community Church in Cookeville, Tennessee, will be the site of another big event: an Easter drone show sponsored by the local Christian radio station, 107.7 Grace FM. The church’s property includes a 100-plus-foot white cross visible from nearby Interstate 40, and on Good Friday, hundreds of illuminated drones will soar above the cross, creating a visual display that tells the story of the Resurrection. Viewers can tune in to Grace FM to hear narration accompanying the lights. The event will conclude with a fireworks display.

In a message on Facebook, Steve Tiebout, lead pastor of The River Community Church, said over 20 area churches had joined together to put on the event. He urged congregants to invite unchurched friends to join in watching the drone show and to tell them about God’s work.

“Bring people that never go to church. This will be something they’ll want to see, and then you can have those conversations afterward to share with them what Christ has done in your life,” he said.

In Manvel, Texas, The Church on MastersRoad has led a coalition of churches in putting on another drone light show telling the Easter story. Beginning on March 27, the nightly gatherings have drawn between 6,000 and 10,000 people per day and feature a rotation of worship leaders and speakers. The evening ends with a narrated drone display telling the story of each day in Holy Week. Each night’s show is bigger, starting with 5,000 drones. By Easter evening, the display will have 10,000 drones.

Manvel mayor Dan Davis announced on Facebook that the drone show broke the record for the largest drone show in North America. Jason Lee, pastor of The Church on MastersRoad, said the event is not about promoting specific churches. Ministers from 30 churches and about 300 volunteers are on hand each night, but visitors will not see a sign for any one congregation even though the event takes place in a field adjacent to four churches.

Lee said getting visitors to attend The Church on MastersRoad is “not even an objective” of the event. He said if visitors want to learn more about local churches, they can scan a QR code to find a church list.

“It’s not about the church and making one church more important than other churches,” Lee said. “We want to make it about Jesus and getting people excited about the Easter season and going to church somewhere.”

Lee challenged church members to rack up 10,000 cumulative miles of walking on the field to pray for the event. One lap around the perimeter of the property is about one mile, and as of March 31, participants had walked 4,500 miles, he said. Visitors could also stop by the testimony tent to record stories of God’s faithfulness in their lives.

“We defeat the enemy by the blood of the Lamb and the word of the testimony,” Lee said in a video posted to Facebook.

Matthews of Cultivate Church said when the community sees the congregation serving its neighbors, it makes those neighbors curious about church.

“We have found these events make it attractive for people to want to know more,” he said. “As long as we are pointing them to Jesus when they want to know more, then we see life change out of it.”

- More from Megan Fowler

Culture

The Evangelical Roots of North Korea’s Kim Family

Interview by Mike Cosper

Q&A with Jonathan Cheng on how the Christian gospel can be twisted for political aims.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source images: Catherine Field / Eric Lafforgue / Art in All of Us / Getty

Last month, North Korean president Kim Jong-Un said in a speech that the war in Iran highlights his country’s need to continue its nuclear program to protect against potential American threats. Christians living in this Communist country daily encounter their nation’s aggressive defense of its sovereignty on all fronts: geopolitical, ideological, and religious. To better understand North Korea’s commanding presence over its people and its posture toward the rest of the world, The Bulletin‘s Mike Cosper sat down with Jonathan Cheng, China bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal and author of Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult. Here are edited excerpts from episode 262.

What did the emergence of evangelical Christianity look like in North Korea and in the Kim family?

When Kim Il-Sung, the founder of North Korea, and his family first encountered the faith over 100 years ago, it was brand new in Korea. It was almost like the Book of Acts: There wasn’t even a fully translated Scripture that they could turn to. The Bible was being translated as they were encountering the faith, so there were deviations from orthodoxy because they were bringing their own context and traditional Korean folk religions.

The Koreans were really taken by Christianity. It was revolutionary. At that time, Korea was loosely divided into northern Korea and southern Korea. The official division of Korea into North and South came after World War II. In 1948, the capital of South Korea was Seoul, but the capital of Christianity was in the North in Pyongyang.

Early missionaries were northern Presbyterians primarily, but also Methodists. They arrived in Seoul—but didn’t succeed—in the late 1880s. Missionaries in Pusan (now Busan) at the very south of the Korean Peninsula had even less success.

But then one missionary, Samuel Austin Moffett from Indiana, arrived in Korea at age 26 in January 1890. He headed to Pyongyang, and before long, he found that he couldn’t keep the inquirers away. Koreans were queuing out his door to hear the gospel Moffett was preaching. It got to the point where he didn’t have time to eat or to sleep. This is how Pyongyang became the center of Christendom in the East. It was so Christian it was known as the Jerusalem of the East. Pyongyang had the largest Presbyterian seminary in the world and this vast missionary compound with high schools, hospitals, and seminaries. Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth Bell Graham, went to high school there.

By the time Kim Il-Sung was born in 1912, the Christian missionaries and the Christian gospel had been in Pyongyang for about two decades. His grandfather had constructed a Christian missionary school attached to a church in the village where Kim Il-Sung grew up. His parents were both very devout—his father a Christian teacher, and his mother what they called a “Bible woman,” effectively equivalent to a deacon. She would go around to the villages with Bibles and talk to other women, spreading the gospel.

Though Kim Il-Sung followed his parents to church, he claimed in his memoirs after he became the supreme leader of North Korea that he didn’t find it particularly interesting. He said he went because the pastors would give away pencils, notebooks, candy, and other things. He would fall asleep in the pews. He even claimed that his dad was an atheist and that his mother went to church only because she was so tired from her workweek that she needed somewhere to rest on Sunday morning, and a pew provided a place to sleep. However, all evidence points to the contrary.

I think he deeply absorbed the power of the Christian message and saw the power and respect American missionaries commanded at the pulpit. He also recognized the power of faith in perhaps a more nefarious sense: to inspire but also to control.

Kim Il-Sung became the leader of North Korea at the end of World War II. Joseph Stalin and the Red Army of the Soviets took North Korea, stopping at what is now the 38th parallel. The Soviets backed Kim Il-Sung for various reasons, and the Americans came and took the southern half of the peninsula.

How did this personality cult evolve around the family that is now running the country?

Kim Il-Sung ruled North Korea for almost half a century. Stalin and Hitler were at the peak of their powers for a fraction of that time. Stalin attended one year of seminary, and he built his cult of personality and helped Kim Il-Sung do the same. From the very beginning, it was, in many respects, a classic Soviet bloc cult to personality. In the early years in North Korea, you would frequently see their portraits hanging side by side.

Very quickly, though, Kim surpassed Stalin. The first statues were erected in North Korea for Kim Il-Sung in 1948. Today, there are thousands of them. Very early on, he was deliberate about making sure the education system was built around him. History was rewritten for him. Poems, songs, and hymns were written for him. He instilled in his people what you and I might call a faith in this 30-something-year-old Korean messiah.

The difference with the USSR and Communist China was that, after Mao’s and Stalin’s deaths, successors said they shouldn’t have allowed that to happen, and the statues came down. Kim Il-Sung was challenged, but he was never taken down. Stalingrad was renamed, but that sort of thing never happened in North Korea.

Not only did Il-Sung last for almost half a century as the leader; he was able to designate his son as the successor, Kim Jong-Il. Then Kim Jong-Il designated his son, Kim Jong-Un, the current leader, as his successor.

Three generations of Kims is completely antithetical to orthodox socialism or communism. You never saw Stalin or Mao try to cultivate his son. Eighty years into this cult of personality, it’s only continued to grow. There was never a period where they decided they’d gone too far and ought to dial it back a little bit. Never has there been a period in which, like with China over the last 20 or 30 years, you saw more interaction between the country and the rest of the world.

What is it about North Korea—whether it’s the governance or the culture—that allows it to pull this off so completely?

Often, you hear Koreans say that the Korean people don’t do things by halves. You hear colloquially that the Koreans were, in some ways, more soviet than the Soviets, more Communist than the Communists were. They were more capitalist than the capitalists were. So when they embraced Christianity, it was to a degree that just floored the missionaries.

Many times in early missionary literature, you find missionaries exclaiming, We thought we were coming to Korea to spread the gospel. I did not realize I would find my faith challenged here. Their fervency puts me to shame. I can’t stand next to these people that I’m supposedly here to minister to. They’re ministering to me!

Many of the Christians from the North fled to South Korea, and South Korea is now the second-largest missionary-sending nation in the world. It has one-seventh the population of the US. The biggest megachurch in the world today is in South Korea. Those who embraced Christianity weren’t lukewarm. These Christians were there for Sunday-morning worship, for Wednesday-evening prayer meeting, for spreading the gospel, for itinerating through the countryside distributing tracts. They were all in.

When Kim Il-Sung rose to power, he understood that if you get people’s hearts and souls, you have them completely. You could call it a grotesque insight, but I think that’s what he knew intuitively. He never articulated this, but I think that’s at work here. On a certain level, he took the Trinity and sort of replaced it. He said, What if I’m the father? What if my son is the Son? What if my ideology is the Holy Spirit? He set himself up successfully as a Korean messiah.

How did the transition take place from a country shaped by the evangelical world to a nation of personality cult?

Kim Il-Sung was able to redirect the passions of some of his subjects. While many Christians fled to the South, of those that remained, some were more conservative and some more left leaning. He was setting up a socialist state, and there has been, throughout socialism’s history, a strain of Christian socialism that persists to this day. It’s usually not been the mainstream, but there is a strong current there that traces itself to the Book of Acts, where the disciples shared everything together. Christian socialists interpret that as a socialist Jesus.

As Kim Il-Sung set up his nascent state, he tapped into this and recruited enough pastors to his cause. For example, his distant uncle was a conservative, revivalist pastor. Kim Il-Sung brought him on board, and this Reverend Kang became his ambassador to the Christians. He introduced Kim Il-Sung as a Moses who would lead North Korea to the Promised Land. Kim Il-Sung said he’d bring justice and equality. That’s the socialist promise, but that’s also an ideal that many Christian socialists have had for centuries.

Life today in North Korea is miserable because of this corrupt regime. It’s heart-wrenching to learn that this comes from a certain kind of Christian framing.

This evangelical history is so incongruous with the image of North Korea that we have today. I made two trips there in 2013 and 2017. You see people bowing before the statues, the portraits of the great leader everywhere. You see North Koreans memorizing his scripture and singing his praises. There are so many of these echoes of faith that you see in North Korea—the religiosity and the construction of an all-consuming kind of religious society. It’s unmistakable where this all comes from.

When you come to research like this, you pinch yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to believe. Billy Graham visited Kim Il-Sung twice, in 1992 and 1994, and he was stunned at how Christian it felt in so many ways, even though he knew on so many other levels it was the antithesis of everything that he stood for. When Graham visited Pyongyang, the North Koreans took him to Kim Il-Sung’s birthplace. It’s this little thatched hut on the edge of the city. Billy Graham turned to one of his companions and said, All they’re missing are the manger and the three wise men.

- More from Mike Cosper

Ideas

SCOTUS Ruling on ‘Conversion Therapy’ Is a Win for Christians

Daniel Bennett

This week’s Chiles v. Salazar ruling allows counselors freedom to serve their clients in the ways they see fit.

The U.S. Supreme Court building on Tuesday, March 24, 2026.

Bill Clark / Contributor / Getty

The US Supreme Court recently delivered a big victory for a Christian counselor and, in the process, bolstered the First Amendment’s protections for free speech. While it remains to be seen just how far this precedent will reach—beyond this case and to more explicit religious freedom issues—Christians should nevertheless be encouraged.

Chiles v. Salazar involved a Colorado law that prohibited counselors from offering to minors therapy that would discourage elements of their sexual identity and orientation. Put simply, the law banned so-called “conversion therapy,” including talk therapy. Counselors, the law stated, could offer only “acceptance, support, and understanding” for their minor patients.

When Kaley Chiles argued the law burdened her First Amendment right to use talk therapy with her clients, two federal courts ruled against her. Specifically, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals held that the law amounted not to a burden on speech but to a permissible regulation on “professional conduct.” In March 2025, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Chiles’s final appeal.

During oral arguments in November, several justices grilled Colorado’s solicitor general on the constitutionality of the state’s law. The Supreme Court’s conservatives were of course skeptical, but so were justices on the court’s liberal wing. Justice Elena Kagan wondered why Colorado’s law shouldn’t be treated as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned why Colorado was treating some sorts of speech as less worthy of protection than others.

On Monday, in an 8–1 decision, the Court ruled for Chiles. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch declared that Colorado’s statute violated the First Amendment by prohibiting counselors from having certain “voluntary counseling conversations” with their patients. Some may be content with their sexual identity and orientation, Gorsuch said, while others may want to change or eliminate certain attractions and behaviors. Because counselors would be prohibited from effectively working with some patients, the court held the law unconstitutionally favored some speech over others.

Gorsuch also explained that Chiles’s activity—talk therapy, absent any medical, physical, or other intervention—should receive the highest level of protection under the First Amendment. Colorado, the lower courts, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion described this type of speech as “conduct,” a category of expression more susceptible to regulation. But Gorsuch and seven other justices disagreed, saying, “The State’s premise is simply mistaken. … Her speech does not become conduct just because the State may call it that.”

Despite the 8–1 vote margin, it would be a mistake to assume Chiles v. Salazar is the last word on counseling regarding sexuality. Voting with the majority but writing a separate opinion, Justice Kagan said the issue in this case was neither the wisdom nor the constitutionally protected nature of Chiles’s counseling but rather the way in which Colorado wrote its law.

Specifically, Kagan pointed out that if a future law is content based yet viewpoint neutral—that is, prohibiting all talk therapy concerning sexual identity and orientation—the court’s reasoning might be different. But content-based laws that single out certain viewpoints, she reasoned, are almost guaranteed to run afoul of the First Amendment. And that is precisely what happened in this case.

This caveat notwithstanding, Christians can be encouraged by the Chiles decision. For one thing, it allows a counselor to provide care based on the needs of the patient. Obviously, Tuesday’s decision does not require counselors to prioritize “conversion therapy” for clients questioning their sexual identity and orientation. What it does do, however, is make all sorts of conversations an option in counseling relationships while barring states from privileging certain kinds of speech. Any time the government is prohibited from playing favorites regarding speech, Americans—including Christians—should rejoice.

Christians can also be thankful the government cannot impose restrictions on the sensitive conversations patients have with their counselors. Patients (including minors) struggling with questions about their sexual identity and orientation should want counselors to approach them with the highest degree of professionalism and attention to care, not with an eye toward what state regulations require them to say or not say.

Professional organizations like the American Psychological Association and American Counseling Association maintain ethics codes prohibiting counselors from imposing their own values on their clients. Both groups, however, offer differing guidance when it comes to the counseling and therapy methods raised in Chiles v. Salazar. When professionals have informed disagreements concerning best practices for client care, the government should not stifle that debate.

Finally, Christians can be heartened by yet another favorable Supreme Court decision with implications for religious expression. Although the court did not examine Chiles v. Salazar through the lens of the free exercise clause, it isn’t hard to see a connection given the case’s subject matter coupled with Chiles’s attorneys citing her Christian faith as motivation for her counseling. And while the result of this decision is more positive for free speech than for free exercise, it will not hurt future cases where religious freedom is front and center.

In the years since the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, the court has issued myriad decisions with favorable outcomes for religious freedom and expression—Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, and Mahmoud v. Taylor, to name just four.

Even Bostock v. Clayton County, which expanded LGBTQ rights under the Civil Rights Act, said legislation like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act may act as a “super statute” in safeguarding Americans’ religious freedom where rights claims conflict. Chiles v. Salazar is a continuation of an established trend.

While Chiles v. Salazar does give Christians reasons for optimism amid cultural headwinds in an increasingly negative world, we must not lose sight of where our hope is ultimately found. The psalmist David asks a question to which he knows the answer: “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?” (2:1). The answer he gives is a timeless reminder of God’s providence and sovereignty, even in moments where the world looks increasingly to be against God’s people: “Blessed are all who take refuge in [the Lord]” (v. 12).

It is right for Christians to give thanks for Supreme Court decisions like Chiles v. Salazar, which guarantee opportunities to interact with and serve our fallen world. But we should do so while remembering that our confidence and hope, in life and eventually in death, come from God alone.

Daniel Bennett is a professor of political science at John Brown University. He has written two books: Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (2017) and Uneasy Citizenship: Embracing the Tension in Faith and Politics (2024).

- More from Daniel Bennett

A Renewed Subscription and a Broadened Perspective

How one Texan lawyer found himself reading CT again and supporting the One Kingdom Campaign.

Hannah Glad

A Renewed Subscription and a Broadened Perspective

Scott Ball

In 2017, Brent Perry received a message from a friend with a link to a Christianity Today article, an open door welcoming Brent back to CT after several years away. Brent had ended his CT subscription, as well as all other subscriptions, around 2010. Online news had become more accessible, and he wanted to focus his time on reading more books. Now he found himself reading CT again online weekly.

“It was a thoughtful reflection on current events from a Christian perspective,” Brent recalled as he considered what had kept him reading CT after his friend’s message. “[It] would make some points or give me a perspective that I didn’t have.” The thoughtful reflection and different perspectives Brent found in CT became increasingly important to him as he—and the rest of the world—dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic and the deepening of political divides.

Many of the difficulties Brent faced at the beginning of the pandemic seemed to be taking place within the walls of the church his family was attending at the time. “The church wasn’t really much of a refuge at that point,” he said as he described helping a friend in a difficult position while the rest of his church seemed to complain and bicker and spread misleading information about the situation.

He found in CT examples of reasonable people dealing with similar things. “Having a place to read about what pastors were going through during that time and the stresses of it helped me understand what I was dealing with better,” he said. “To be outside of [my own church’s situation] a little bit was helpful. … CT became a reliable place to read about what’s happening in the Christian community.”

Outside the church walls, Brent dealt with divisive litigation as a lawyer and watched his law partner suffer from COVID-19 early in 2021, for weeks in the hospital on the brink of death. Not only was CT a hub of information and reflection on current events, it was also an encouragement. “You need some positive input in your life, some way to get away and think,” Brent added after explaining that CT was a place he could center himself.

Brent also found early in his consistent reading that CT was working to further God’s kingdom by sharing about the broader church. “The One Kingdom Campaign is really trying to enlighten us on what’s going on around the world and remind us that the Church is a lot bigger than what we perceive it,” he said. Because of this, Brent and his wife, Carole, decided to start supporting CT: “I thought I ought to contribute some to [CT] because [CT] was trying to further the kingdom.”

“Most of what we experience with the kingdom is through our local church,” he said. Having seen such divisiveness in the church in the past, it was helpful for Brent to read CT and get “a bigger picture than just what you’re dealing with on a weekly basis.” He said, “[Reading CT] helps keep you focused on the kingdom instead of on the turmoil. This is a global faith, and I’ve let the American lens kind of create turmoil for me.”

Brent was encouraged to read about the Church globally and see examples of good things happening elsewhere, like the growth of the Church in Africa. It was also helpful for him to read about the global Church for the sake of things closer to home.

Brent teaches a class at his church for parents of teenagers who represent different nationalities, many of whom are immigrants. In the group is a Hungarian chemistry professor, a couple from Mexico, a Russian–Ukrainian couple, an Ethiopian immigrant, an Indian couple, and a Nigerian nurse who’s a single mom to triplets. Because he works with this group, Brent intentionally reads broadly and pays attention to what’s happening in their home countries. “It’s really affecting them,” he said. “It’s affecting their families.” CT’s global reporting has helped Brent connect with the people in his church from different places.

Similarly, CT’s reporting has aided Brent in his work. In reference to Andy Olsen’s “An American Deportation” and his own work with a Latino congregation on a governance dispute, Brent said, “Articles like this one give me a real sensitivity to the issues these churches face. [The Latino congregation] want me to speak calmly about their members’ fears of a government that many of them voted for less than two years ago.”

CT’s content has also helped Brent and the parents he teaches connect with people from a different generation: their own kids. As a parent, Brent has been encouraged by the work of Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation. Haidt has been a guest a few times on CT’s podcast The Russell Moore Show, and Brent has shared what he’s learned with the parents in his class. “Everybody is just so concerned about ‘What are we going to do so we don’t screw up with our kids?’” he said. But Brent added that what he’s learned from Haidt “has given [him] the courage to encourage [the parents] to loosen their reins and trust God a little bit more with their kids.”

“I really appreciate the broad range of people that [Russell Moore] interviews … the breadth of voices that he brings to speak to the Christian community,” Brent shared when discussing The Russell Moore Show. In so much of CT’s content—across podcasts and the magazine—Brent has found a place that broadens his perspective through a variety of high-quality contributors and content. He said, “CT encourages us, all of us, to think and participate and give more broadly than we otherwise would.”

“CT helps define [evangelicalism], but it also keeps us informed of all the currents within it and where God is acting around the world,” Brent said about CT’s role in the broader church. “Evangelical Christianity needs [a voice], and [CT] is becoming a more important voice by the work it’s doing now, at a time when it’s really needed.”

Almost ten years into his renewed subscription, Brent’s go-to reading materials for flights now include CT’s print magazine: “If I’m going on a trip where I don’t want to work on the plane, I pick up the magazine and read it almost from cover to cover.”

Theology

Easter Is Not a Zombie Story

Russell Moore

Columnist

Jesus joined us in death—and defeated it.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: WikiMedia Commons

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

Most unbelievers are civil or even curious when we talk together about the Christian faith, with less than a handful of exceptions. One of those was on a university campus when a man said, “The 21st century is not the time for a zombie story, and that’s what Easter is.” His jab was that, by believing a previously dead man is now alive, we worship a reanimated corpse. “Ah,” I said. “The 21st century is a zombie story, and that’s what Easter undoes.”

My questioner was not stupid. He was right, of course, that we expect dead things to stay dead. That was true in the first century too. And he was right that we have an uncanny dread when we hear stories of things that are supposed to be dead but don’t stay that way. That was also true in the first century.

Even before his death, Jesus had to reassure his own followers that he was not an apparition. When the disciples saw his figure walking on the sea, “they thought it was a ghost, and cried out, for they all saw him and were terrified” (Mark 6:49–50, ESV throughout). When he appeared after the Resurrection, the disciples were again “frightened and thought they saw a spirit,” to which Jesus replied, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:37–39).

A zombie is kind of a ghost in reverse: A ghost is a soul disconnected from a body, and a zombie is a body disconnected from its soul. Both ideas are rooted in our fear of death and of the mysteries of what’s beyond. Ghost stories are usually about some sort of unresolved business—a grievance unavenged or a love unrequited. The concept of presence without embodiment is scary to us. Zombie stories are about corpses that are essentially just meat animated by appetite. There are bodies but no reason or imagination or love, just craving.

Zombies and ghosts are stories we tell about two sides of the same dilemma. Even those who do not recognize the authority of the Bible can see some truth in the ancient account that “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen. 2:7). We intuitively know that we are made of the same matter that’s in the cosmos around us. At the same time, we can reflect on that reality with a consciousness that transcends our biological makeup.

As Walker Percy wrote a half century ago, we feel sundered from ourselves because we seem to be neither organisms reacting to an environment nor intelligences standing apart from it. So we try to resolve the tension by thinking we are either merely animals, spurred on by conditioning or instinct or repressed sexual urges, or angels, potential gods who can transcend human limits. Our attempt to be all one or the other leads us to be neither: History has shown repeatedly that the refusal to be a creature turns a person into a monster.

And so here we are, over a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and we seem to have the worst of both stories.

We move like ghosts in this digital world—connected but disembodied, present but lonely. Many of us do not know our friends or acquaintances. We merely haunt them, lurking over their Instagram photos or their posts on X.

At the same, we feel like zombies. Our biological appetites are intact, but they are tossed to and fro by algorithms that tap into our limbic responses. Pornography can give the sensation of sexuality without intimacy. Online gambling can give the rush of earning without working. Even shopping can feel like the serendipity of finding exactly what you’ve been wanting—until you realize companies have only made it seem that way.

And what is the end result? Many people feel dead inside, hollowed out. When that gets intolerable, we have ways to try to go all in and become wholly ghosts or zombies. We can get addicted to drugs that speed us up or numb us down. We can become occultists seeking spiritual escape from the world or materialists trying to merge with it. And none of it works. That’s because the forces that offer solutions are the same ones driving the problems.

Zombies, after all, are devoid of reason or reasonableness, imagination or imaginativeness. All that moves them is what they want. And what they want is to feed off the life of others, to bite and devour what they cannot experience. And they are easy to command. All one must do is to find out what they want and drive them toward more of it, making sure there’s never enough.

The Bible actually has a zombie story, or at least a preemptive attack on one. The Serpent of Genesis 3 appeals to both aspects of the human makeup: zombie and ghost. We can act like animals, driven by appetite: “The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (v. 6). We can act like gods, free from the created limits of morality (“Did God actually say?” v. 1) or mortality (“You will not surely die,” v. 4). The aftermath the account describes is one of disconnection—from each other, from God, from the world around us, even from our own bodies.

Fallen humanity was then driven from the garden. What most of us do not think about, though, is why:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever”—therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. (vv. 22–24)

To leave a dying people with access to ongoing life would be leave them in a zombie existence that we can perhaps best describe as hell. Exile from the garden was judgment, yes, but it was also grace.

In the Gospels, the tomb of Jesus is described as being in a garden (John 20:15). Angelic beings are there, but the swordsmen—soldiers Pilate hired to guard the grave—fled the scene. Clothes are shed and folded in the crypt. Jesus approaches a weeping woman and calls her by name. And he tells her to “go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (v. 17).

In the resurrected Jesus, everything that was pulled apart now holds together—dust and breath, matter and spirit, heaven and earth, humans and God. The curse of death has ended. The covenant promises hold true. And Jesus’ message goes to the very ones who broke from him and fled at the arrest. He is “the firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18), whom we cannot follow now but will later.

And follow him where? As a pioneer, he is leading us into the very presence of God. All things are put back together there. And the Tree of Life is there (Rev. 22:2), unguarded and unharmed. It’s with a people who can eat of it, not as mere animals and not in limitless autonomy but as those who can say, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (21:3).

Jesus is no ghost—and he is no zombie. He’s a living man standing in the presence of God, and his life flows backward to us. We feel the first twitches of life, just enough to make us want to join him where he is. He joined us in our human nature and reconnected it to God. He joined us in our curse and undid it. And he joined us in the sentence of death and reversed it. We hide in the bushes, trembling in shame, when we sense the presence of God. He steps forward and says, “Here am I, and the children God has given me” (Heb. 2:13, NIV).

Easter is no zombie story. It’s the end of one.

Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.

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L. Daniel Hawk, Undoing Manifest Destiny: Settler America, Christian Colonists, and the Pursuit of Justice (IVP Academic, 2026).

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press, 2023)

Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2001).

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