So What If the Bible Doesn’t Mention Embryo Screening?

Contributor

Silence from Scripture on new technologies and the ethical questions they raise is no excuse for silence from the church.

Natalia Lebedinskaia / Getty

In every generation, the church faces a specific set of challenges. In our time, the great challenges concern new technologies and their intersection with what it means to be human.

Conversations among Christians today are rightly focused on digital technology, above all smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence. There are other technologies worth worrying about, however. And on the human side of things, I see four fundamental challenges facing the church. So far as I can tell, churches and pastors are unprepared to respond with the urgency and authority demanded by the moment.

Each is distinct, but all are related:

the delay and decline of marriage and birthrates on one hand and the increased rates of indefinite or lifelong singleness on the other;
the advent of romantic relationships with lifelike chatbots, buttressed by AI-generated, photorealistic pornography;
the widespread availability of cheap cosmetic surgery and other forms of invasive body modification, from Botox injections to semaglutide shots like Ozempic; and
the extraordinary range of new technologies designed to begin or end human life that are already being used by the rich and will increasingly become affordable for the middle class.

That final biomedical challenge will be my primary focus here. On the reproductive side, it includes artificial contraception, surrogacy, and in vitro fertilization (IVF), as well as egg freezing, genetic editing in the womb, genetic screening of fertilized embryos, and artificial wombs.

Not to be outdone, end-of-life devices match these innovations with ever more ingenious ways to dress up self-slaughter in Hippocratic garb. No longer is euthanasia limited to pills or intravenous drugs; step inside a suicide pod and let the slow release of nitrogen gas dignify your death in a therapeutic key. It affirms your autonomy right up until the moment when there’s no you left to claim it.

You can see how these challenges are inseparable from technological developments. But they are also the product of a society both defined and exhausted by alienation, substitution, and self-enhancement.

Men and women are polarized from each other, failing to pair off and form families. They are, perhaps unwittingly, building lives bereft of siblings and cousins, children and grandchildren, for when the final hour comes. This alienation makes all the more attractive the substitutions of porn, chatbots, surrogacy, and sperm donation—not to mention doctors who administer the final dose instead of priests who administer last rites.

Yet a lingering desire for connection simultaneously pushes us toward enhancements like Botox to suppress the signs of death or perhaps improve one’s standing in the hook-up apps. Screening fertilized embryos is a kind of enhancement too, if that’s the right word for throwing away children deemed unfit.

Some of these challenges are imminent but not yet present: Artificial wombs have yet to be developed for human use; genetic editing isn’t publicly available; and assisted suicide remains illegal in many states.

But for the most part they are present-tense realities. They are already with us, and by “us” I don’t mean a handful of elites in Manhattan and Los Angeles. I mean ordinary folks across the country, including those who fill the pews on Sunday mornings. They’re in red counties and the Bible Belt. They’re not on the outside; they’re not “the world.” They’re on the inside; they’re church folk.

And their churches, for the most part, have little to nothing to say about these things. Why?

One reason is simple enough: The Bible doesn’t talk about them. Open up the glossary in the back of your Bible, and you won’t find ChatGPT, CRISPR, or IVF. There are no chapter-and-verse citations for lip fillers, egg freezing, or practical questions like the “right” age to get married or the “ideal” number of children.

New moral and technological questions require renewed study of Scripture for authoritative guidance. The Bible is not a spiritual FAQ. True, the Bible does answer our biggest questions. But if you live long enough or read your Bible deeply enough, you’ll see that the Bible cannot and will not answer every specific question in advance. It is authoritative in and for all of life, but it doesn’t speak directly or explicitly about every subject. How could it?

Mature Christians, and especially pastors and whole churches, must therefore be able to give confident scriptural answers to new questions even when overt biblical teaching is lacking.

In the absence of explicit answers, many believers and church leaders reach for vague talk about “discernment” or “conscience” or “the Spirit doing a new thing.” This is often well-intended, and has the ring of Christianese, but in practice, discernment is often little more than a permission slip (Prov. 29:18). It ends up making grave ethical matters into subjects for private judgments born of little more than instinct, however sincere or prayerful. It places pressing questions in the category of adiaphora, or indifferent matters.

And if the message is that a given topic is indifferent to the church, then you can bet that ordinary Christians will assume it is likewise indifferent to God. Which, in practice, means: Do as you please.

This is why I began by saying that churches are unprepared for these challenges. They are unprepared because their doctrine of Scripture is insufficient to the scale of the problem and because baked into this doctrine is an altogether too low view of the church—of its authority as well as the authority of its pastors.

In American churches, these inadequacies were long held at bay by a latent social conservatism—people generally esteemed marriage and children and the social supports that make them possible and desirable. This worked in tandem with a wider society whose most pressing social issues (including divorce and poverty) were directly addressed in Scripture. Thus, a broad consensus could be presupposed among the people.

But now neither our surrounding culture nor our churches are doing the formational work to generate a similar consensus, and technological change has made our questions distant enough from biblical teaching that even pastors feel adrift and unsure what to think, believe, or do.

Consider the question of artificial contraception. Beginning in the 1930s, Protestants (including evangelicals) just about sprinted from restricted permission under limited circumstances to no-questions-asked, near-universal adoption of contraceptive methods. The rationale: The Bible doesn’t expressly forbid it. And if the church must be silent where the Bible is silent, then it follows that the absence of a prohibition functions as tacit authorization. If you doubt me, try telling a group of evangelicals that contraception is wrong and see how they react. (If that’s not enough, follow up by saying the same about vasectomies.)

It usually comes as a shock to learn that this issue was never divisive between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation; in fact, beginning with Luther and Calvin, all major Protestant theologians were united on the question for a full four centuries. I lack the space to summarize their case, but suffice it to say that the Reformers weren’t taking their lead from Rome and would have been happy to dissent had they seen biblical basis to do so.

At a minimum, this kind of unanimity for such a length of time (both before and after the Reformation) ought to persuade Protestants today that contraception is a moral and theological question—that its permissible use is not a foregone conclusion unworthy of discussion. Perhaps it also ought to persuade us that the burden of proof lies with those who would permit its use rather than those who side with tradition.

If contraception was the canary in the coal mine for insufficiently examined sexual ethics, IVF is the same for biomedical ethics. The arc of acceptance has run a similar course; the logic follows a kind of “pro-life consequentialism.” Here the idea is that if a technology purports to save or enrich human life, then the ends justify the means. Since it is impossible to demonstrate that the Bible directly forbids in vitro fertilization, and since one end of the process is a human life, many evangelical pastors are at a loss—if they see this as an ethical issue calling for their input at all.

By far the best, most theologically powerful, and most biblically thoughtful case against IVF was written by Oliver O’Donovan in 1984. Begotten or Made? is a little book that packs a punch. O’Donovan, now 80 years old, is a British ethicist, a Protestant, and an ordained pastor. His book is a model of serious moral engagement that avoids easy answers while looking to Scripture and tradition for authoritative help in navigating new biomedical and technological terrain.

To be clear, my purpose here is not to rehearse the full arguments regarding technological interventions like contraception or IVF. It’s to note the perennial pattern that accompanies them: Questions of legality override those of morality; individual autonomy trumps ecclesial authority; the apparent silence of the Bible speaks louder than the testimony of tradition or theological reason. And so, within just a few years, congregations acquiesce to the “inevitable.” What was once unthinkable becomes the norm.

Some Protestants look to Rome for help here. The social teaching of the Catholic Church is indeed an impressive resource for Christians who feel ill-equipped to draw the logical and moral lines from God’s Word to pressing contemporary questions—from labor unions to marriage to bioethics—that cannot be answered with simple chapter-and-verse-citations. Not a few Protestants have crossed over to Catholicism because of this tradition.

Conversion isn’t necessary, though, to see Rome’s social teaching as a model. It is a standing rebuke to the notion that God is ambivalent about the concrete particulars of our social, sexual, medical, and technological lives. It is equally a rebuke to ideas about the church that would strip ministers of authority, undermine pastoral duty, or leave believers without guidance for these challenges that no one person or couple can handle alone.

God’s people need help. These are the issues that dominate their lives. How can silence be an appropriate response?

It’s true that each of us must pursue the will of God as best we can, in the particular circumstances of our individual lives, in concert with a local congregation, reading the Bible prayerfully with others. But no part of that should lead us to reject or diminish pastoral authority. Without it, we will not live with an absence of authority; rather, we will open up a vacuum that the broader society will all too happily fill. Hence the aforementioned church folk screening embryos, opting for cosmetic surgery, and turning to chatbots for companionship.

For churches to move from silence to authoritative application of Scripture will inevitably be messy. Sometimes pastors will go wrong.

But what’s the alternative? Once we understand the challenges at hand, is silence not a kind of cowardice? However understandable, it is rooted in fear—of offending people, of repeating the mistakes of the past, of interfering in believers’ private lives. Consider that even though purity culture went awry, we still speak to teenagers about dating (another topic never directly mentioned in the Bible). Why would we be silent on these new challenges?

Let me conclude with a final example: the idea of the “seamless garment.” Among pro-life Catholics, this concept is an attempt to connect issues at the beginning and end of life—abortion and euthanasia—to issues during life’s long middle—family, vocation, labor, welfare, poverty, prison, immigration, and so on.

There’s no denying that some versions of the seamless garment suffer from sentimentality while others serve to sneak in partisan policy proposals under the banner of moral doctrine. Even so, learning about the seamless garment in graduate school was a minor revelation for me. It helped me step outside of hot-button debates and, from that wider perspective, grasp the full sweep of human life as a tapestry knit by a loving God.

In particular, it helped me comprehend the law of Moses, the prophets of Israel, the ministry of Jesus, and the church’s tradition as an undivided whole. I came to understand that feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and caring for single mothers were integral expressions of pro-life commitments, and that affirming this connection in no way detracted from the inviolability of the child in the womb. Given these new challenges around technology and humanity, we need a Seamless Garment 2.0, one that encompasses all I’ve discussed above and more.

I would not presume to tell pastors or fellow theologians exactly what they ought to say. It’s a massively complex range of subjects. But just for that reason, we have to start talking. God’s people are depending on us.

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

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Church Life

The Chinese Evangelicals Turning to Orthodoxy

Yinxuan Huang

More believers from China and Taiwan are finding Eastern Christianity appealing. I sought to uncover why.

Saint Sophia Cathedral in Harbin City, China.

DuKai photographer / Getty

In the late 2000s, as an undergraduate law student in Beijing, Justin Li grappled with questions about justice, morality, and the meaning of life. Atheism felt increasingly inadequate in providing answers to these big questions, and Li became a believer through a campus Bible study shortly after he began attending its meetings.

Li worshiped in an evangelical church that held contemporary services shaped by joyful, fast-paced praise songs. But the upbeat worship music, coupled with his busy work schedule, “made his heart even less quiet,” said Li, who is in his mid-30s.

Then he stumbled upon Ancient Faith Radio, a digital network of broadcasts offering Eastern Orthodox liturgical music and teaching. The melodies he listened to were simple, solemn, and contemplative. “It felt like another world,” he said.

Li began exploring the Eastern Orthodox tradition while studying theology at the University of Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall. He read widely, comparing Protestant and Orthodox arguments about the faith, and found the Orthodox responses “more persuasive than expected.” He joined the Orthodox church in China in 2022.

“There was a deep dissonance between the beauty I found in the writings of the early church and the functional pragmatism of much [of] evangelical church life,” Li said on a Zoom call from a room lined with Chinese evangelical theology books, now flanked by Orthodox icons and a wooden cross.

Li is not the only evangelical of Chinese descent who has turned eastward in recent years. A burgeoning number of Chinese believers find Eastern Orthodoxy appealing because it offers a connection to a historically rooted faith and a richer experience of the spiritual life—aspects that contemporary evangelicalism seems to lack.

Last year, I interviewed seven Mandarin-speaking Christians from mainland China and Taiwan about their conversion to Orthodoxy. My interest in the subject arose out of personal curiosity after I conducted a research project on Chinese Christian communities in Britain four years ago, when I met with several Chinese Orthodox converts who came from evangelical backgrounds.

The seven interviewees with whom I spoke are highly educated, with most holding or pursuing doctorates in fields ranging from theology to physics and history, and are dispersed across Europe, Asia, and North America.

Although all of them first came to faith within evangelical traditions, their shift eastward arose not from any frustrations with evangelicalism but from a deeper intellectual and spiritual search shaped by their academic formation.

In their eyes, the path from Beijing’s bright praise songs to Byzantium’s ancient chants is not a wholesale rejection of evangelicalism but a search for spiritual ground that does not move.

Many of these Orthodox adherents long for historical depth. Because their theological imaginations had been shaped largely within modern evangelical frameworks, many discovered—often for the first time—the vast expanse of early Christian history that lies between the New Testament and the Reformation.

As they read the church fathers, learned about the early councils, and studied how the canon of Scripture was discerned, they asked whether their inherited evangelical structures had adequately preserved the breadth of the apostolic tradition.

Sarah Lin, a believer from Taiwan, encountered the Eastern Orthodox faith through a research project during her graduate studies in the United States. What began as academic curiosity gradually unsettled her spiritually.

As she read Byzantine texts on early prayer practices and monastic devotion, she felt surprised to discover how so many centuries of Christian life and thought had been rendered invisible within the Chinese-speaking church.

Lin also sensed a depth to prayer that she had never experienced before. Previously, she regarded prayer as a response to an “immediate spiritual feeling,” but she now understood that prayer could also be a “formative” experience that would shape her over time.

“Orthodoxy reordered my spiritual life—it taught me to pray before I feel ready and to be formed through habit, not just emotion,” she said.

Besides Lin, nearly every interviewee described a sense of hollowness in the fast-paced, event-driven, emotionally charged worship cultures they grew up in. In contrast, the spiritual disciplines Eastern Orthodoxy emphasizes, such as hesychasm (repeating short prayers), fasting, and liturgy, offered a framework for inner transformation that felt slow, grounded, and deeply embodied.

What these interviewees found compelling about Orthodoxy was not a mystical aesthetic but a different anthropology: the belief that the heart is shaped through habit, not spontaneity.

“In evangelicalism, devotion was often spontaneous or reactive,” Li said. “In Orthodoxy, it is habitual and formational. I do not wait to feel spiritual before I pray. Instead, I submit into prayer and am formed by it.”

Another reason some converts left evangelicalism is ecclesial fragmentation. Several people, particularly those who have lived in the West, spoke about the disorienting variety of doctrines, moral teachings, and worship styles within Protestantism.

For some interviewees, this raised questions about whether “Scripture alone” could sustain a coherent witness across time and cultures. In their view, Orthodoxy was attractive because of a perceived continuity that connected contemporary practice with the first millennium of the church.

Ephrem Yuan, a London-based PhD candidate, experienced his conversion to Orthodoxy in 2022 as a gradual, often reluctant transformation. Like Li, he did not grow up Christian. He became a believer in university, was formed in evangelical contexts, and later sought theological training outside China.

The Chinese evangelical church communities in which he was involved did not seem interested in preserving historic Christian traditions. Chinese theological education often jumped from the New Testament to Augustine to the Reformation, leaving out contributions from the Eastern Church and the seven ecumenical councils.

“This [history] is almost the entire backbone of the church’s first thousand years,” he said. “Yet it is missing from most Chinese Protestant understanding.”

In 2015, Yuan enrolled at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology near Boston, where he spent four years studying the Greek language and Orthodox spirituality. Six years later, he founded an initiative dedicated to making patristic and Orthodox resources accessible to Chinese readers. He translated several texts that introduced the church fathers to Chinese believers, and created a YouTube channel for people interested in exploring the tradition.

Yuan’s goal, however, is not recruitment but theological literacy. He envisions a future where young Chinese Christians can read the works of Basil the Great or Gregory of Nazianzus with the same ease as they now read Tim Keller or John Stott.

“The early saints and church fathers give us a spiritual and theological world that is both ancient and alive,” he said. “Even if someone remains evangelical their whole life, they can still pray with the early church, think with the fathers, and worship with the saints across the centuries.”

Orthodox churches in the US have been filling up with new converts, especially conservative young men. But the interviewees I spoke with do not expect a mass movement toward the tradition among Chinese evangelicals, even as they notice rising interest in aspects of Orthodoxy from their peers.

Converting to Eastern Orthodoxy from evangelicalism within Chinese Christian communities comes with certain challenges. When friends learned of Li’s conversion, their reactions were mixed. Some were curious. Others quietly distanced themselves. A few interpreted the couple’s later miscarriages as divine discipline for “leaving the faith,” which revealed to him how deep misunderstandings between Christian traditions can run.

Li remains at peace with his decision to become an Orthodox believer. “People are looking for a faith that is not only true but solid: something that can stand when everything around them is changing,” he said.

A previous version of this piece was published on ChinaSource.

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News

Archaeology in the City of David Yields New Treasures

Gordon Govier

Controversial excavation in Jerusalem reveals new links to the biblical record.

Givati Parking Lot excavations in the City of David in Jerusalem.

Oren Rozen / Wikimedia Commons / Edits by CT

My quest for the ark of the covenant was abruptly disrupted at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. Three hours into our flight to Israel and several hundred miles south of Greenland, the pilot announced that we were turning back to the US because Israel had closed its air space. Israel’s attack on Iran had begun.

Unlike Indiana Jones, I was not searching for the ark as it might exist today. The ark disappeared from the pages of the Bible during the latter days of the kingdom of Judah.

Instead of the ark’s departure from the Jerusalem temple, its arrival interested me. The arrival of the ark of the covenant designated Jerusalem as the Holy City of God.

The City of David is archaeologists’ name for the most ancient area of Jerusalem, a narrow ridge that begins near the southern wall of the Temple Mount and descends to the Pool of Siloam near where the Kidron and Hinnom valleys intersect.

Nineteenth-century photos of a bare hillside give little hint that a forgotten ancient city is buried underneath. Archaeologists began working in this area in the late 1800s and are still there to the present day, all while settlements spread across the hillside. But it wasn’t until the 21st century that the City of David became an attraction for groups of pilgrims and tourists eager to see biblical discoveries.

The organization driving the change is Rabbi Yehuda Maly’s City of David Foundation (often called Elad), “dedicated to revealing and preserving the birthplace of Jerusalem, transforming it into a premier national tourist center.”

In Jerusalem, such a simple proclamation, like its archaeology, has many layers and can be deeply controversial. In Israel, some see archaeology as a weapon wielded in the same struggle that includes the war in Gaza and the bombing of Iran.

Spurring my quest was a January 2025 news release that prompted memory of a conversation with Rabbi Maly almost 25 years prior. As I recalled that conversation and reviewed the news release, there seemed to be an obvious omission.

In that interview, Rabbi Maly mentioned that Solomon came to the throne and was crowned king in an impromptu ceremony at the Gihon Spring. It seemed then like a non sequitur: a king crowned next to a waterspout and not in a palace or a temple? The incongruity stuck in the back of my brain, but then the penny dropped when the news release arrived.

After my in-flight trip cancellation, I reached Doron Spielman, former Elad vice president and spokesman, via Zoom to continue my sleuthing from a distance and, as researchers often do, discovered more than I initially sought.

For many years, a portion of the City of David was a nondescript one-acre parking lot outside the Dung Gate that leads to the Western Wall.

As Spielman recounts in his book, When the Stones Speak, the City of David Foundation had a chance to buy the lot in the mid-1990s but couldn’t raise the money. When another opportunity came in 2000, the foundation quickly acquired it.

The Givati Parking Lot opened to archaeologists in 2007, and the work continues today. I had signed up to be an excavation volunteer with archaeologist Yiftah Shalev for a week during my trip. Instead, Spielman was my excavation guide from afar, describing the unparalleled opportunity to dig deeply into the history of Jerusalem.

“Thirteen different civilizations,” he said. “One hundred feet down and we’re still not at the bottom. It’s like walking through the pages of a book as you’re walking down the staircase. Every floor is another 200 years.”

Over the past 17 years, archaeologists have announced many discoveries from the Givati dig, including gold coins and gold jewelry, among the smaller items. A gold ring has been found in each of the last two years.

More precious than gold in the ancient world was ivory. In the ruins of a palatial home, destroyed when Babylonians burned Jerusalem in 586 BC, archaeologists recovered fragments of ivory in 2022 that had been inlaid in furnishings—the first time ivory has been found in modern Jerusalem, reflecting the days of Solomon (1 Kings 10; 2 Chron. 9).

Jamie Fraser directs Jerusalem’s Albright Institute for Archaeological Research, the center for US archaeology in Israel. He toured Givati earlier this year.

He compared previous excavations in the City of David to a series of telephone booth–sized probes scattered across a football field. Suddenly, an opportunity opened to dig up half the field. “In order to find big-scale stuff, you need big-scale excavations,” he said.

Opening up the excavation site further has yielded even larger discoveries. In 2023, researchers were surprised to discover a massive moat, 30 feet deep and 100 feet wide, separating the lower city from the temple and the king’s palace on the acropolis. Though the Bible has no specific indication that such a moat existed, it appears to have been part of the biblical landscape for much of the first millennium BC, going back perhaps as early as the time of King David.

“What blew my mind was the sheer scale of this dig,” Fraser said. “It’s reshaping the way we understand the mechanics of ancient Jerusalem.”

Similarly, that January 2025 news release described remains of an eight-room cultic sanctuary found on the other side of the City of David, within 100 feet of the Gihon Spring. Spielman said this sanctum, as he called it, was actually discovered in an excavation 15 years ago that had started out to uncover the oldest city walls of Jerusalem, from 3,850 years old.

“This is the Middle Bronze II period, roughly the time of Abraham,” Spielman said, “which means when Abraham meets Melchizedek [Gen. 14:18], those are the walls that Abraham saw.”

Within these rooms—which seem to have gone out of use several centuries after the Israelites built the temple and installed the ark of the covenant, around the time of King Hezekiah—were found a small olive oil press and winepress that the Israelites apparently used for rituals.

In another room, archaeologists found a masseba, a standing stone. Standing stones commonly mark sites of religious significance, such as with the stone Jacob erected following his dream at Bethel (28:18). Givati’s masseba is the only one standing in Jerusalem.

Two of the most important features of any ancient city were a water source and a temple or cultic installation. Now, in Jerusalem, they have been linked together. That suddenly puts flesh on the bones of the biblical story that started my quest.

The drama unfolds in 1 Kings 1. David is in his final days, and his son Adonijah convenes a banquet, anticipating his accession to the throne. The prophet Nathan takes the news to Bathsheba, knowing that Bathsheba’s and Solomon’s lives are in danger. She immediately goes to David, who confirms that Solomon should be king:

He said to them: “Take your lord’s servants with you and have Solomon my son mount my own mule and take him down to Gihon. There have Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anoint him king over Israel. Blow the trumpet and shout, ‘Long live King Solomon!’” (vv. 33–34)

To fill in the rest of the story, we have to go back to 2 Samuel 6:16–17, when David, “leaping and dancing,” installed the ark of the covenant in his new capital city: “They brought the ark of the Lord and set it in its place inside the tent that David had pitched for it, and David sacrificed burnt offerings and fellowship offerings before the Lord.”

Archaeologist Scott Stripling, provost of The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, has visited the cultic center with Israeli archaeologist Eli Shukron, who directed the excavation. Stripling notes there is a podium in this cultic center with the exact dimensions of the ark of the covenant. He believes the biblical reference to the oil that anointed Solomon and the olive oil press found in the cultic center reinforces the connection to Solomon’s story.

Stripling has been excavating Tel Shiloh, where the ark paused for 300 years in its journey from Mount Sinai to Mount Zion. “We know what’s going on at Shiloh. We understand the temple history. But the little period of David’s tabernacle has eluded us until now,” he said.

Eventually, when Givati has yielded all its secrets, the City of David Foundation plans to erect a multistory visitors’ complex called the Kedem Center. The foundation has a controversial plan to build a cable car that would increase access to the Western Wall and City of David and would terminate on the center’s top floor.

Doron Spielman said the City of David Foundation is still grappling with how best to open up the cramped quarters of the cultic installation to a flood of pilgrims.

“It’s one of the most important things we are doing,” he said. “That is the origin story of the Bible right there.”

Scott Stripling noted, “The first verse of the New Testament is ‘This is the story of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’ If you have a place where David and Abraham come together, that’s really exciting.”

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News

Displaced Ukrainian Pastor Ministers to the War’s Lost Teens

Jill Nelson

“Almost everybody has lost somebody, and quite a few people have lost very much.”

Pastor Alex Zaytsev, on the end of the couch in a red shirt, hosting his teen ministry.

Image courtesy of Pastor Eugene Grinishin

Ukrainian American pastor Alex Zaytsev has witnessed Russia’s war machine wreak havoc and tear families apart. When the full-scale invasion began in 2022, he initially remained in his apartment in the eastern city of Avdiivka and opened his church building as a bomb shelter for locals.

Yet a month later, Russian attacks on his town intensified and Zaytsev fled 25 miles northwest to Pokrovsk, where he helped with evacuations and aid deliveries. Zaytsev was born in eastern Ukraine and grew up in Washington state before returning to Ukraine in 2016 to serve as a pastor and missionary with Church Without Walls.

As the war dragged on, Zaytsev encountered teenagers—bored and restless—roaming the streets. Schools and businesses had closed, and virtual classes were unpredictable. So Zaytsev launched a teen ministry in one of his denomination’s church plants in Pokrovsk. Each morning, he unlocked the church building and welcomed the teenagers inside.

“My mission was to share the gospel with them,” Zaytsev told Christianity Today. “And I did this until it became too dangerous to stay in Pokrovsk.”

After Russian troops conquered Avdiivka in February 2024 and began advancing toward Pokrovsk six months later, Zaytsev moved again. This time he fled farther west to Ivano-Frankivsk, and he did not go alone—he brought along 20 teenagers seeking to escape the war’s frontlines. Another pastor joined him, and together they rented several apartments and a multilevel house for the group. Many had come from troubled backgrounds, and their parents had decided to stay behind or delay evacuation.

Zaytsev said Ukrainians are tired of war. Moscow is bombing civilian centers on a near-daily basis, families are split up, and soldiers are dying. More than 14,000 Ukrainian civilians have died since the war began four years ago, and nearly 4 million people have been internally displaced.

“Almost everybody has lost somebody, and quite a few people have lost very much,” Zaytsev said.

After seeing Moscow’s troops attack his city, he questions any cease-fire plan that does not include solid security guarantees. “Will other countries help us if we get attacked again? That’s the primary question that a lot of people have,” he said.

After a flurry of US-led negotiations in recent months, a new cease-fire proposal offers some hope for weary Ukrainians.

President Donald Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Florida last week to discuss Ukraine’s new 20-point plan to end the war with Russia. Zelensky said the two countries agree on most of the points, and Trump claimed a deal to end the war is “maybe very close.”

The plan allows Ukraine to maintain a peacekeeping force of 800,000 troops and join the European Union. It also includes explicit promises that Washington and its European allies would come to Ukraine’s aid in future conflicts. After his meeting with Trump, Zelensky said the president offered 15 years of security guarantees—short of the decades the Ukrainian president believes are necessary to prevent another war but a substantial improvement from prior US proposals.

The Trump administration’s original 28-point peace plan from last fall made major concessions to Russia and required Ukraine to reduce the size of its military, cede land, and agree not to join NATO. It offered only vague US defense assurances.

During talks with Ukrainian and European officials in mid-December, Washington agreed to provide Ukraine with “NATO-like” security guarantees—a hopeful sign for Ukrainians who have grown increasingly worried about the United States pulling its support. NATO’s Article 5 requires members to treat an attack against one of its countries as an attack against all and to respond with whatever measures are deemed necessary. Negotiators have not released details of the security protections, which still require congressional approval.

On Tuesday, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner met with leaders from more than 30 European nations to discuss Ukraine’s long-term defense assurances. The UK and France agreed to establish military hubs and build protected weapons facilities in Ukraine when the war ends. In September, French President Emmanuel Macron said that 26 countries from the so-called “coalition of the willing” had committed to sending troops to Ukraine in the wake of a cease-fire.

Yet sticking points remain, including convincing the Kremlin to accept new Western-backed security guarantees and negotiating territorial concessions.

Russia wants to control five Ukrainian regions, including cities such as Pokrovsk that it has not been able to conquer despite multiple attempts over nearly two years. Kyiv says ceding any territory to Russia would violate its constitution, while European leaders argue that such a concession would reward Russia for its aggression.

Putin has shown little interest in ending the war and has repeatedly demanded that any negotiated cease-fire address the origins of the conflict—in essence, Russia’s maximalist demands from day one of its invasion. Moscow has increased its attacks on civilian centers and launched massive strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leaving entire regions without power as temperatures dropped below freezing last month.

Zaytsev said most residents of Avdiivka will not return home even if peace talks are fruitful. The war destroyed much of the city, including a massive coke plant that helped fuel the local economy.

While 15 of the 20 teenagers who left with Zaytsev eventually reunited with their parents, five are still under Zaytsevhis care. Some come from troubled backgrounds, with alcoholic parents who struggled to care for them. All five teens came to faith in Christ through the Church Without Walls ministry.

In the meantime, Zaytsev is teaching the teenagers practical life skills like taking the garbage out before it stinks up the house, avoiding junk food combinations—such as energy drinks, chips, and gummy bears—on an empty stomach, showering regularly, using deodorant, and limiting themselves to a small (not big!) squirt of body spray. He has also taught them how to bargain-shop for coffee for church services, plan games for youth group gatherings, and manage conflict. The teens help prepare Communion, coffee, and cookies for the Sunday morning worship services.

The church Zaytsev planted in Ivano-Frankivsk 18 months ago grew quickly to about 40 people due to the influx of internally displaced people in the region. Two months ago, the 32-year-old pastor launched a second church plant there.

As world leaders continue negotiations and discuss funding to rebuild Ukraine, Zaytsev is laying the groundwork for healing and forgiveness among both teens and adults. He acknowledges that forgiveness may be difficult as long as Ukrainians are under constant attack, yet he reminds his congregants that it will be an important future step.

Zaytsev points them to the passages in Genesis that speak of Joseph forgiving his brothers for selling him into slavery. “This should be an example for us to strive for—that we also will have to forgive people who have caused us extreme pain,” he said.

- More from Jill Nelson

Theology

Why Christians Ignore What the Bible Says About Immigrants

Russell Moore

Columnist

Believers can disagree on migration policies—but the Word of God should shape how we minister to vulnerable people.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Image: Getty

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

Nothing can provoke anger quicker than mercy, when it’s directed to the wrong kind of people.

Marking the church’s Year of Jubilee, Pope Leo XIV invoked biblical language calling for kindness to migrants as human beings made in the image of God. There’s nothing the least bit controversial about this. It’s what the Bible says, what Christians have always believed, what official Catholic teaching makes explicit. The pope did not call for countries to stop enforcing their borders, nor did he give any specific policy proposals for how a nation should best balance security and mercy. He simply called on Christians to refuse harshness or mistreatment of vulnerable people.

Some people didn’t like this.

The blowback the pope received was not from fellow bishops or clergy or, as far as I know, from any large numbers of churchgoing Roman Catholics. Instead, political activists and social media conflict entrepreneurs blasted him, not so much for what he said as for the fact that he spoke to the issue at all.

Difficulty speaking to immigration is not a specifically Catholic problem—in fact, it may be more of a problem for other Christian groups. After all, every pope in recent years and many bishops have spoken consistently to this point. And, of course, the pope is the pope. He can’t be fired the way the pastor of a storefront Bible church in Aurora, Illinois, or Athens, Alabama, can. Some of these pastors are trying to figure out how to care for people in their communities who want to hear the gospel but are fearful of being arrested by immigration officials on their way to church.

This is not a simple matter of “Well, people who broke the law should be accountable.” Some of these people are following the right process—but may be unable to show up for court to adjudicate their cases for fear of being arrested in line. Some of them have broken no laws at all; they are Americans but have someone in their household, maybe a mother or a father, who is not. And some of them were doing everything right—filling out the right documents, working to provide for their families—when their asylum claims or refugee status was abruptly withdrawn.

One pastor said to me, “Most of my people want to know how best to pray for and to serve their neighbors here, but if I answer their questions from the pulpit, a small minority of the congregation is going to say that I’m ‘supporting illegals.’” One preacher, an immigration hawk who supports mass deportation, said he has the same problem when he tells people the church’s job is to minister to everybody, regardless of where they’re from or what they’ve done. Yet another minister confessed, “I don’t even know what my views on immigration or ICE are; I’m not trying to weigh in on that. I just want to remind people to love their neighbors, full stop. That’s Jesus. How is that controversial?”

Well, it turns out Jesus is very controversial—and always has been.

As a matter of fact, when it comes to the language of Jubilee, Jesus kept preaching until he reached the point where his hearers were outraged, for all the same reasons we see today.

In his hometown synagogue, Jesus turned to the scroll of Isaiah and read a passage that echoes directly the language of Jubilee from the Torah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19, ESV throughout). This reading was not controversial—even when Jesus made the audacious claim “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (v. 21).

Luke recounts, “And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth” (v. 22).

Most of us would call it a day and leave the teaching at this level of abstraction. Jesus, though, knew the applause meant they didn’t really get what he was saying. They wanted Jubilee for the poor and the captive so far as it applied to them, struggling people in an impoverished backwater of an occupied Roman territory.

But Jesus kept talking and implied this mercy of God applied even to people they didn’t like. He referenced from the Bible that the great prophet Elijah was sent to care not for one of his own people but for a Canaanite widow outside the borders of Israel. Jesus then pointed out, even more harshly, that Elisha bypassed countless Israelites with leprosy to heal a foreigner—not just a foreigner but a Syrian, and not just a Syrian but a Syrian soldier.

Again, Jesus did not even apply these scriptural principles at this point. He simply pointed out what the Bible had said. But “when they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath” (v. 28).

Jesus did not bumble into this crisis accidentally. He knew exactly what he was doing—and walked right toward it. Mercy destabilizes the moral bookkeeping of who is “deserving” of it. That’s true for all of us, and our responsibility is to keep hearing the Word of God until it reaches where we do not want it to go, where our passions rise up and say, “No, not that far.”

The Bible does not give a comprehensive public policy for migration or asylum. Christians of good faith can disagree on those things. But the Bible does give a comprehensive view on what we are to think of human beings, including migrants. The church has a mission to shape consciences around how we minister to scared and vulnerable people, regardless of whether we think they should have stayed somewhere else. And Jesus has already taken the question of “Who is my neighbor?” off the table (10:29).

What Jesus did with Jubilee is radically shocking. He took a year out of the calendar and announced it was pointing not to a date but to a person—to him. He is the kingdom. He is the deliverance. He is the Jubilee. What’s dangerous about this is not where it’s complicated (What counsel do I give someone who is illegally here but in danger back home and has nowhere else to go?). What’s dangerous is where it’s very, very clear—because it asks us whether our deepest loyalties are still capable of being interrupted by the Word of God.

The question is not whether the Bible is clear enough but whether we are still capable of being changed by it. That was controversial in Nazareth then. It’s controversial in Nairobi or Naples or Nashville now.

Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Books

Review

Apologetics Can Be a Balm—or Bludgeon

Daryn Henry

A new history of American apologetics from Daniel K. Williams offers careful detail, worthwhile lessons, and an ambitious, sprawling, rollicking narrative.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Oxford University Press

Is Christian faith reasonable? This question has haunted and delighted the Christian mind since Justin Martyr addressed it in the second century. Believing that the gospel constitutes the truest story about the world, Christians have still had to grapple with how our beliefs interact with outside claims to knowledge and experience of the world.

This tension has led many Christians either to entirely reject or to subordinate themselves to the world’s learning, but it has also been fuel for Christian intellectual culture. And it’s not just a question for intellectuals, an esoteric or cerebral pastime. Everyday believers confront related questions too: Should we accept the scientific evidence for macroevolution, climate change, or vaccine efficacy? Should we attempt to predict the date of the rapture? Should we buy into conspiracism like QAnon?

This cluster of big questions animates Daniel K. Williams’s riveting new book, The Search for a Rational Faith: Reason and Belief in the History of American Christianity. Over the past decade, in books like God’s Own Party and The Election of the Evangelical, Williams (a CT contributor) has become one of our nation’s great historians of 20th-century faith and politics.

In The Search for a Rational Faith, Williams turns his attention to new material: the history of ideas and, largely, prior centuries. He offers an intricate intellectual and cultural history of the enterprise that attempts to defend and promote the intellectual plausibility of Christian faith. (Today we call this enterprise apologetics, but in earlier eras it was known as natural theology, Christian philosophy, or, predominantly, Christian evidences.) Williams surveys apologetics in American Protestantism from the Puritans of the 1600s to Tim Keller in our time, covering a remarkable amount of historical ground in an ambitious, sprawling, rollicking narrative.

Historicization is particularly imperative for apologetics because it’s a discourse too often reduced to abstract ideas shorn of any messy human life—more like mathematics than preaching or conversation. Likely because of this, the history of apologetics has been an undertold story, even as an aspect of broader intellectual histories.

That makes Williams’s contribution all the more impressive. This book will join classics by Avery Cardinal Dulles (A History of Apologetics) and Alister McGrath (Christian Apologetics) in examining not only apologetics’ content but also its historical drama amid different social contexts and cultural pressures.

Williams’s book chronicles three epochal shifts in Anglo-American Protestant apologetics. First is a movement away from the Calvinist suspicion of reason’s capacity in the domain of spiritual truths.

Early Puritan Calvinism had its own internal scholasticism and intellectual flair, of course, but the Puritans’ ideas about sin made for a grim view of the capacity of human reason outside illumination by the Holy Spirit. This perspective precluded any hopefulness about unconverted people reasoning their way to knowledge of God. Conversion simply had to come first, and counterarguments to Christianity were dismissed as the moral corruption of the damned.

American Christians’ wide embrace of a more optimistic Arminian rationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, however, opened new space for rational arguments about faith. This theological perspective allowed that the human intellect, though insufficient and distorted by sin, could still reason its way to God and God’s basic truths. And if that were true, then empirical evidence could buttress the credibility of Christian belief and belief in the Bible.

The result was a new flowering of apologetics aimed at providing robust evidence for faith. In America, this Arminian approach fit well with the emerging political scene and benefited from a culture in which Christianity was basically seen as plausible, even among doctrinal outliers such as the deists and Unitarians. This evidentialism became integral to American intellectual culture writ large, including US college curricula, and seemed to harmonize insights from science, logic, history, theology, and morality. In a particular achievement of the book, Williams shows how this widespread apologetics culture influenced the American founders and the cultural penumbra of 19th-century American education.

Then came thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Charles Darwin—and the second major shift. The questions they raised about history, science, and knowledge itself proved deeply destabilizing for the centuries-long apologetics tradition. In Williams’s telling, biological evolution as such was not the primary challenge early on; that was readily finessed by many Christian intellectuals of the time. Far graver difficulty came from historical and religious pluralism and new views of the Bible and its authority in human life.

The third major transition, then, was the shattering of the apologetics tradition as it crashed upon the rock of 20th-century complexity. Mainline Protestants mostly lost faith in the older evidentialism, but at the same time they crafted alluring cases for Christianity grounded in experience, ethics, or civilization. (More recently, many of the erstwhile New Atheists who are newly Christian-curious have gravitated toward such pragmatic, instrumentalist arguments as well.) But eventually, Williams claims, mainliners relinquished even this, entering our own time with only a social-justice framework bereft of any notion of common human truth or rationality to which we can appeal.

This is a somewhat misleading analysis. It’s not as if mainline Protestants have entirely abandoned attempts to compellingly present the Christian faith, though certainly they largely spurn the term apologetics, and their philosophical infrastructure is different. Social-justice traditions themselves can exercise a type of “apologetics of goodness,” the enticing beauty of the lived witness of the saints. In this case, the actual living out and practicing of the way of Jesus’ life and ministry are the embodied persuasion and enticement to Christian faith.

Nevertheless, Williams ends the book seeing evangelicals as the last Protestants to take up apologetics as such in our time, viewing this effort as largely a successful project, especially in its cultural apologetics mode. Yet for all the book’s strengths, I’m left with the unresolved incongruity of, on the one hand, Williams’s claim that evangelicals are the lone (Protestant) defenders of a rational faith and, on the other, the reality that some sectors of evangelicalism seem mired in an anti-truth, anti-scientific, postmodern nihilism of power.

There are a few other limitations to consider, none of which should be taken as impugning a monumental accomplishment overall. The sidelining of Catholic and Orthodox apologetics (the former banished to a Siberian appendix) unfortunately reinforces long-standing patterns in American historical work of overlooking those traditions’ contributions to American life. Here the omission also misses an opportunity for thinking about the dynamics of intra-Christian apologetics.

Admittedly, Williams has so much material on the Protestant world that the decision was justifiable. Still, I wish we could have gotten a better index of the popular reception of apologetics on the ground, how average Christians across traditions received and lived these arguments from the intellectual elite.

My biggest concern about the book, however, is that despite serious progress compared to previous works, it needed to delve deeper into the shaping interplay between culture and ideas. For example, apologetics has historically been a very masculinized discourse, but Williams could have been insightful with more substantive attention to female apologists like Mary Astell, author of 1705’s The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, or Rebecca McLaughlin, a contemporary writer mentioned cursorily. The masculine style of Protestant apologetics deserves more exploration for both its peculiar allures and its blind spots.

Similarly, neurodivergence would have been a helpful issue to explore. Apologetics has played a striking role in the autistic community, both as a project to sooth social frictions and as a catalyst of disenchantment when apologists overpromise and underdeliver.

Likewise, Williams mostly deals with intellectual titans—and does so superbly. But he gives precious little space to the pop apologetics of consumer culture, which has arguably been more influential for a century. On this level, apologetics functions less to convert unbelievers than to help believers bolster their own faith. This can be an authentic intellectual discipleship, but it can also be triumphalist, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately self-deceiving. Adding more on this type of material would have enhanced the book.

The oversight reaches catastrophic proportions with Williams’s entire avoidance of the sheer devastation of the Ravi Zacharias case. This case is so important because it inescapably links apologetics to its social ramifications, dragging it out of its fortress of abstractions. That the best-known Christian pop apologist of the recent past was empowered by that very enterprise to take up serial sexual predation and heinous sexual sin provokes existential questions: about apologetics ensconced in Christian mass marketing and celebrity culture, about Christian conduits of trust and authority, about how views of truth get untethered from beauty and goodness, about how apologetics can be morally simplistic and tragically unloving, about how arguments are always borne by people, flawed people.

Even so, this book tables a rich intellectual feast. It has all the hallmarks of Williams’s previous, excellent work: textured attention to the intricacies of primary sources and sophisticated thinking about historical patterns.

The Search for a Rational Faith offers vividly fresh horizons on Western intellectual giants like Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and John Locke for their contributions to Christian apologetics (even when they have eccentric doctrinal beliefs). It also provides some deep cuts on obscure but intellectually potent figures. The book will fascinate anyone interested in apologetics directly, as well as anyone interested in American religions, intellectual history, and higher education more broadly.

There are also lessons for readers to glean. The role of doubt is crucial—and something with which so many of Williams’s figures struggle. His account explores doubt’s role in the mature faith of intellectually curious believers, a worthwhile contrast to some populist Christian cultures’ tendency to smother and expel doubt. There was (at least in certain forms and degrees) deconstruction way before deconstruction was cool, and Williams finds glimpses of intellectual anguish even in the faith of those most publicly zealous for the integrity and stability of their rational arguments for Christianity.

That, however, leads to a countervailing challenge: the role of certainty. So much of the apologetics tradition has been lustful for rational certainty in a way that betrays an underlying anxiety. That is not the foundation of every search for a rational faith, but a search born of anxiety may fall into a kind of idolatry, wanting certainty of conceptual conviction more than the truth of God himself.

At their best, apologetic arguments can be a balm, healing the wounds of anxiety, error, ignorance, and limited perception. But arguments can also be a bludgeon, wielded to domineer, ravage, and demonize. Out of the same mouth can come both blessing and cursing. “My brothers and sisters, this should not be” (James 3:10).

The Search for a Rational Faith could be an occasion for a renewal of apologetics and a celebration of what it has accomplished historically. But let it also be an occasion of reckoning with the hardest, most agonizing, and self-reflective questions about apologetics, as befits followers of the one who said the truth will set you free.

Daryn Henry is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and the author of A. B. Simpson and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism.

- More from Daryn Henry

Theology

Who We Are and Whose We Are

Robert S. Smith

Only Christ can teach us the truth about ourselves and enable us to fulfill our God-given purpose in an era of confusion about gender and sex.

Illustration by Chris Neville

Who am I? And how might I know?

These questions are as old as humanity, asked in the ancient world just as today. Already in the fourth century BC, the call to “know thyself” was inscribed above the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi.

Centuries earlier, King David asked a similar question about human significance: “What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” (Ps. 8:4, ESV throughout). Drawing from Genesis 1, he answered,

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet. (vv. 5–6)

While the Bible has much more to say about what it means to be human, David’s words here alert us to something fundamental: “Who am I?” is inseparable from the questions “What am I?” and “What is my purpose?”

It isn’t possible in this brief article to survey all that Scripture has to say on these questions. My aim here is more modest: to highlight four different approaches to reaching answers—approaches that are competing with one another not only in the world but also in the church.

The traditional approach (sometimes called essentialism) sees identity as something that is given to us to be received and lived accordingly. There’s great wisdom here, for it doesn’t take much reflection to realize that who and what we are is determined by a range of factors over which we have no control, such as where we are born, to whom we are born, what sex we are, or what name we are given.

In fact, identifying people in terms of such features is thoroughly biblical. Recall the moment, recorded in John 1, where Philip says to Nathanael, “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph” (v. 45). Name, place, sex, and relationship are key elements of identity—even for Jesus!

These features are still core to how we self-identify today. My name is X; I was born in the city of Y in the year Z; I’m the child of A and B; I’m married to C and am the father of D. In short, the traditional approach is alive and well.

Yet it stands in marked tension with a more contemporary approach known as constructionism. In this view, identity is something we create; it’s a project we undertake, not a gift we receive. Consequently, many no longer ask, “Who am I?” but rather, “How do I identify?”

There’s a measure of truth here as well, for many things about us are not set in stone. This is why we (rightly) speak of identity development in children. As we grow, we have all kinds of experiences and make all kinds of decisions that help form who we are and how we show up in the world. Identity is thus made up of both primary and secondary elements. The primary pieces are those we can’t choose or change, while the secondary things are more superficial, voluntary, or experiential.

But that kind of distinction rubs against the autonomous spirit of our age, which is determined to displace reception with construction. Many, therefore, claim that givenness can be overridden by choice. “We get the body we get at birth,” argues Juno Dawson, who identifies as transgender, but “changes are within our grasp. We can go against the grain. … None of us are beholden to our bodies.”

Rather than choosing between essentialism and constructionism, some have opted for a middle way that affirms portions of both. The synthesis approach (sometimes called interactionism) recognizes the difference and relationship between the fixed and the flexible elements of identity. The traditional approach never denied that there are things about us that can be changed—our names, for example, or where we live—so the distinction is really one of detail and degree.

In any of these approaches, the challenge for the secularist is the “Sez who?” problem. Who says what can and can’t be changed? Who says what’s primary and what’s secondary? Who says that a person born with a male body can’t be or become a woman (or vice versa)?

The answer to the latter question is straightforward from a biblical standpoint. For if there’s one thing Scripture makes abundantly clear, it is that God takes our bodies very seriously; they are key to who and what we are. (For more details, see The Body God Gives.) But if we abandon that worldview—and particularly if we replace it with a constructionist perspective—the answer may not seem so obvious.

Though in some regards less confused, even traditional and synthesis approaches to identity will run into trouble if they ignore God. Not just by failing to acknowledge his existence but—since we were made by him and for him as Augustine well said—not finding rest (or ourselves) until we find it in him. We will thus never begin to know who we are until we first know whose we are.

Theologian Michael Horton expresses it succinctly: “The ‘self’—understood as an autonomous individual—does not exist.” That’s why the so-called paradox of identity (we don’t find ourselves by looking into ourselves) is not really so paradoxical. We don’t find ourselves by looking inward, because we are not self-derived. We find ourselves only by looking outward to others and, ultimately, upward to our Creator.

And just as we didn’t create ourselves, so we cannot redeem ourselves. This is why we Christians speak of finding our identity in Christ. Is it any wonder Jesus said, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt. 10:39)? For only he, the Savior of sinners, can teach us the truth about ourselves, transform us into our true selves, and enable us to fulfill our God-given purpose.

Robert S. Smith is the author of The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory, CT’s Book of the Year Award of Merit selection.

- More from Robert S. Smith

News

A House of Worship Without a Home

Mia Staub

One year after the Palisades and Eaton fires, congregations meditate on what it means to be a church without a building.

Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church and Calvary Palisades Church a year after the fire.

Mia Staub / Edits by CT

Pastor Justin Anderson drove up the winding road to his new congregation’s church campus, nestled between two steep green hills and moments from the Pacific Ocean. The previous Sunday, he’d preached his first sermon to his new flock. Now it was Tuesday; the church’s school was in session, and its offices were alight with staff members ready to greet the week.

Anderson didn’t know that this first Sunday would be his only Sunday at Calvary Palisades. He didn’t know that on this particular Tuesday, January 7, 2025, the Los Angeles–area Palisades fire would begin to burn.

In that morning’s staff meeting, church employees gathered near a window, looking at smoke in the hills. Fifteen minutes later, they got an evacuation notice. Teachers, administrators, and church staff marched 460 students to a parking lot for parents to pick them up. Eventually, traffic got so bad that the last 150 students walked with staff members along the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), searching the lines of stopped cars for their families.

Anderson and the head of the church school tried to walk back up the hill to the campus to see what they could do. “We were completely surrounded by fire when we left. We’re coming back thinking, This thing’s gone. We got to Sunset [Boulevard] and PCH, and [officials] turned us away, wouldn’t let us back up the hill.”

Around a dozen places of worship were destroyed by the fires that hit Los Angeles this same time last year. Combined, the fires burned over 37,000 acres, destroyed over 16,200 structures, and claimed 30 lives.

As with any natural disaster, volunteers stepped up to help, and churches sprang into action. Firefighters from Mexico, Canada, and other states flew in to douse the blazes. Within days, community members were hosting supply drives in parking lots. (I heard a story about a woman who drove two hours from San Diego to bring her homemade tamales.) My own church made a database to connect people across the city who could open their homes for the displaced.

For a time, a city fragmented by highways and hills became a tight-knit community, offering a glimpse of what the kingdom of God must look like. According to GoFundMe’s 2025 report, Los Angeles was last year’s most generous city. Calvary Palisades alone said it received over $500,000 of support from around the world. Immediate needs like temporary housing, food, and clothing were shared about and met.

But as with any natural disaster, the news cycle moved on. Eventually, volunteers went home and supplies were exhausted. The Palisades and Eaton fires were declared 100 percent contained on January 31.

One year after the fires, church buildings still lay burned, damaged, or leveled, gated off and covered in sawdust. The work of recovery for the communities of Christians impacted by the Palisades and Eaton blazes is far from over. They’ve had to reimagine what worshiping together will look like in the months and years ahead while grieving their lost sacred spaces.

Rev. Dr. Grace Park described pacing the empty parking lot where Pacific Palisades Presbyterian Church (PPPC) used to be as akin to hearing that someone you love has died but not being able to see the body. She didn’t get closure.

The morning the fire began, the Santa Ana winds were abnormally strong, with gusts reaching up to 100 miles per hour. Park, one of PPPC’s pastors, stayed home on account of the weather. By 10 a.m., her phone was lighting up; church members and staff were evacuating their homes. Park and the church’s senior pastor, Matthew Hardin, traded texts and phone calls as the church school cleared out.

Later that evening, Park saw PPPC on television.

There was an NBC news reporter in our parking lot. (Our parking lot was quite large, and fire trucks were coming in there to park.) It was a live news feed, and the news reporter was saying, “I’m here in the parking lot of the Presbyterian church. I’m here with fire trucks. … There’s an ember. It just alighted on the church’s roof.” We’re watching it live, and I cannot believe it. I thought, She’s there. Fire trucks are there. They’re on it. They’re going to be on it. They’ve got to put this out. And then as the sun set, we just continued to get more photos of the church. It was on fire. We literally were just watching [the reporter] at the church as it burned down.

The first Sunday following the fires’ outbreak posed a challenge for preachers across the city. What message wouldn’t sound cliched or flippant? How do you speak to some church members who lost homes or even loved ones and others who emerged unscathed with a vague sense of survivor’s guilt? And practically speaking: Where do you meet when your regular meeting place is gone?

Palisades Presbyterian immediately received messages from synagogues and other houses of worship offering the church the use of their spaces. Ultimately, they spent that first Sunday at a church in Westwood. After a while, they moved to a church in Culver City. Now, they are meeting in the afternoons at a church in Brentwood.

“It was just like 9/11. … People were pouring in because they needed something to hold onto,” Park said of high attendance in the disaster’s aftermath. “We knew that people were going to come in, and then, after a while … they might leave.” Before the fire, the congregation had 100 people. Now, attendance is closer to 50.

Expressions Church, a young church in Altadena, led a prayer walk for its first post-fire service. Pastor Christopher Spolar had planted the congregation three months before, in October 2024, and the small community had been meeting in a rented space.

“It’s the Lord, I guess, that just kind of gave me this sense of peace or calm,” Spolar remembers. “Not panic, but as soon as I heard [about the Eaton fire], I just felt like … The building is gonna be gone.”

Sure enough, like Park, Spolar turned on the television to a newscaster standing in front of flames engulfing his church campus. “The Lord was saying to me, if the walls of the church had been burned down, be the church beyond the walls,” he said.

That first Sunday, Spolar read through parts of Acts, reminding his congregation of the early church’s humble beginnings. About 20 people showed up to worship with an acoustic guitar at Victory Park, its grounds streaked with burn marks. Then they prayer walked the neighborhood, visiting various checkpoints marking off areas where people were not allowed to pass as the fire continued to rage.

Expressions is now housed in the building of another church that closed in December. The theme of its one-year anniversary was “faithfulness.”

“Our vision is to help people live with Jesus and love like Jesus … . Our two big pieces are gospel witness and holistic renewal,” Spolar said. “And we got to be a part of that holistic renewal in a way that we never would have imagined.”

Members of Expressions Church, including those who couldn’t return to their own homes, helped distribute food, water, toiletries, and toys for kids. One year later, they’ve given out more than $100,000 in gift cards and hotel stays, meeting the spiritual and material needs of their community, even while grieving their own loss.

For its first post-fire Sunday, Calvary Palisades hosted an online service. Then they moved into a Seventh-day Adventist church in Santa Monica, which allowed them to host services for the next couple months. Then they moved into an empty chapel in Bel Air. On September 7, before the first day of the 2025–2026 school year, the congregation returned to their damaged sanctuary to hold baptisms among the burn scars and studs.

Rebuilding churches is a battle on multiple fronts. If they decide to rebuild old sanctuaries, congregations must file insurance claims and organize permitting and construction logistics. In the meantime, they rent temporary spaces, order replacements for incinerated hymnals and Bibles, navigate parking in new neighborhoods, and communicate new (and constantly shifting) meeting times to worshipers as they move from location to location—all in the midst of caring spiritually and emotionally for congregants, pastors, and their city at large.

“For the first month after the fire … I was curled up in fetal position in my bed and not eating. I was constantly on. The phone was ringing up to 2 o’clock in the morning … and it would start ringing at 5 o’clock in the morning, and you can’t not answer it because you know that people are just in trauma,” Park said.

At Calvary Palisades, you can still smell the smoke in the sanctuary. The bones of the building miraculously survived, but it will be a few years before its interior is fully restored. As has been the case for many homeowners and businesses, the church’s insurance coverage was not enough to cover the extent of the damage it endured.

“Where does that money come from when your congregation is in the place that it’s in, and the difficulty of asking people to participate in a building campaign when they’re trying to build their homes?” Anderson said.

Planning for the future is both hopeful and painful. “They lost the future that they had thought that they had,” said Park of her church. “They lost the future that they believed was there for them.”

She added, “We are very intentional in making sure that the church continues. … But we are committed to making sure that our church is there for our people.”

Expressions Church has seen its attendance shrink. At Christmas 2024, the community peaked at around 100 people; now, they’re about two-thirds that size. Attendees left California permanently, departed the state temporarily to stay with relatives, or moved into different neighborhoods in Los Angeles with more available housing stock.

Even if a congregant’s house won the “dark lottery,” as Spolar put it, and survived, the surrounding community will have changed. Neighbors have left; a convenient grocery store might be gone; or a favorite coffee shop is under construction.

Amid the soot, relics survive. Calvary’s stained-glass window and cross are intact, surrounded by the studs of the sanctuary. Expressions Church recovered its lectern, from which Spolar preaches in a new space down the street.

Park hadn’t expected to find anything when she visited the burn site. But there it was, standing amid the rubble: the Presbyterian church’s large steel cross. The next day, they retrieved it with a truck.

“It was very ironic,” Park said, “and made me realize what a weird sense of humor God has, to give us that as a gift to say, ‘It’s okay. There’s hope here. And there’s life in the ashes, and there’s life that can be had, and there’s hope that can rise from all this.’”

As I drove through the Palisades in November of last year, I was struck by new greenery shining on the blackened hills. Regrowth and rejuvenation is possible, I remembered. God’s mercy continues after the world burns. That’s one lesson churches in Los Angeles learned this year.

“The building burned down,” Park pointed out, but “we didn’t lose our church. We lost the building. … Church is not brick and mortar. … The church is her people.”

- More from Mia Staub

News

Norman Podhoretz Leaves a Legacy of Political Principle

Michael Cosper

The Jewish intellectual upheld the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Google

“If I wish to name-drop, I have only to list my ex-friends.”

So wrote editor and essayist Norman Podhoretz in the early pages of a 1999 book titled (unsurprisingly) Ex-Friends. Podhoretz, who died last month at age 95, was until his mid-30s part of New York’s left-of-center intellectual community. He broke with it once the “New Left” became more extreme and friendly to Marxism and communism.

Born in Brooklyn in 1930, Podhoretz was the son of Jewish immigrants who came to America from a region that has changed hands between Poland and Ukraine in the century since. In 1956, he married the writer Midge Decter, and they stayed married for 66 years until her death in 2022. Podhoretz helped to raise four children, 13 grandchildren, and 16 great-grandchildren.

In the 1970s, Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and others became known as neoconservatives, liberals (as Kristol put it) “mugged by reality.” They’d grown up in one intellectual ethos and found its principles lacking as the Cold War and Russia’s totalitarian influence continued.

As the child of immigrants, Podhoretz grew up understanding the reality of pogroms, gulags, and Communist atrocities, so for friends and colleagues to express any kind of sympathy for Marxism was a moral atrocity.

Podhoretz was willing to lose status in those intellectual and social circles to maintain his principles. As editor in chief of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995, he made the magazine a leading neoconservative voice.

“Neocons” were not social conservatives but believed America possessed a moral excellence because of its commitment to democracy and human rights and had a duty to extend its influence where it reasonably could. They also resolved to resist the spread of totalitarian influence around the globe.

Podhoretz and Kristol edited and published work from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Q. Wilson, Michael Novak, Charles Krauthammer, and many others. Podhoretz authored many books, including his autobiographical Breaking Ranks and (my personal favorite) My Love Affair with America. Each showed conviction, love of country, literary sensibility, and often caustic wit.

Podhoretz’s death comes as the notion of even having political principles has become tenuous. On the left and right, many politicians and pundits refuse to criticize their own side. The principled and courageous perspective that marked Podhoretz’s life and writing, with a willingness to leave former allies, is rare. The few politicians who do it—like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who broke with their party over January 6—often pay a price for being courageous, and lose their seats.

Today, publications like The Dispatch and The Free Press exist because their founders and many of their writers were unwilling to embrace progressive shibboleths or MAGA elements and thus had to leave institutions where they’d once belonged. Last month, Ben Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire, demonstrated moral courage at a TPUSA event and may pay a price for it.

As a Christian who believes that human beings are made in the image of God, I resonated with Podhoretz’s perspective. We should we care about democracy and human rights around the world because humans are made in God’s image. Why should we battle Marxist and Islamist dictatorships and hope to see human flourishing expand through free markets, entrepreneurism, and innovation? Because people are made in the image of God. For Podhoretz, religion was not central, but his point of view had deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Podhoretz also understood the importance of stewardship regarding the Western canon of literature, philosophy, and stories. He was grateful for the gifts our forebearers bequeathed to us, and we should remember how his ideas shaped the understanding of Ronald Reagan, Kirkpatrick, and others who led the global movement to defeat the Soviet Union.

Podhoretz’s body of work reminds us that we don’t need to “make America great again,” because its principles, legal structure, history, and symbols are already great. It’s a treasury to be stewarded, as the Constitution says, to made more perfect rather than deconstructed.

Podhoretz’s legacy of principled stands based on deep moral conviction deserves remembering. As our Jewish friends often say at a moment of loss, may his memory be a blessing to us—a nation in search of its soul—at this fraught moment.

- More from Michael Cosper

Culture

Hold the Phone?

Anna Mares

Faced with encouragement to lessen technology use, younger Christians with far-flung families wonder how to stay connected.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

When I was a little girl, my dad, an immigrant from Czechia, bought international phone cards to call my grandma. As Voice over IP technology improved, we switched from phone to Skype and, later, to FaceTime video calls to stay in touch.

Most days now, my dad washes the dishes with my grandma propped up on the kitchen counter via FaceTime. They discuss family news and the latest headlines in Czechia.

My Saturdays bear many similarities to my dad’s hours at the kitchen sink with Grandma. The apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. My fiancé and I are also long-distance, and we rely on WhatsApp video calls, Uber Eats deliveries, and Spotify playlists as our digital love language.

Sebastián and I call on WhatsApp and add his mom to the video call. Laughter imported from Bogotá, Colombia, comes through instantly as his mom’s bright smile fills the screen. Salsa music from passing traffic wafts its way into my apartment from over 2,000 miles away.

After we hang up, silence hangs in my room, quiet whiplash from the laughter and new, real memories of this virtual world travel.

Fascinating research is emerging about the ways digital technology shapes long-distance romantic relationships in particular, but remote communication may be important to any long-distance relationship. Those who have family and friends abroad often rely on technology that allows them to maintain and strengthen relationships virtually.

For Christians who know the temptations of technology, what do we do when our loved ones are far away and we can’t just unplug? What is the Christian response to using digital technology when we worship a God who promises to meet us not just intellectually but also physically through bread and wine? How can we give thanks for technologies that keep us connected while also admitting their pitfalls?

As Christians everywhere wrestle with these questions, many are finding that long-distance relationships mediated through technology are not sustainable unless supplemented by meaningful time together in person.

Kate Millar, 25-year-old poet and writer from Edinburgh, Scotland, spent three years in New York City writing poetry and working for Poets House. During most of her time in the US, her core relationships were mediated through FaceTime calls and shared Spotify playlists.

While in the US, Millar didn’t have a robust social network and had to rely on her mom and best friends, who lived 3,000 miles away in Scotland. For the first few months, Millar convinced herself it was possible to live two lives—one as a Scottish friend and daughter and another as a writer and New Yorker.

Millar spent up to three hours of her day in a virtual liminal space where she wasn’t really present in her Brooklyn apartment, instead using her imagination and a phone call to transport herself home. Digital technology, Millar found, implied she could always live elsewhere, untethered by physical limitations.

“Technology makes me want to live beyond my limits,” she said. “It promises limitlessness, and in some ways it gives it to us. We shouldn’t shun it for the ways that we can be expanded by it, deepened by it, and show each other love by it. But if it swells up to be more than that, if it’s our only mediator for relationships, that’s when it gets a little bit sketchy.”

The ability to be disembodied attracted Millar.

“Long-distance relationships make you disconnected from your body,” Millar said. “I was totally down for that. When I first moved to New York, I thought, I’m not a body. I’m just vapor. But we are embodied.”

Technology and a church tradition that emphasized an intellectual understanding of God hindered Millar’s ability to delve into the messy world of embodiment as a finite being.

“I didn’t value the Eucharist because I thought what my body can faintly taste is nothing compared to what my mind can grasp,” Millar said. “But my mind can barely grasp anything. Sometimes my body knows things before my mind does.”

Millar found that the lack of “physical witness” takes a toll on relationships. To limit her technology use, she considered getting the Brick, a palm-sized physical device that works with a corresponding app to restrict access to the most addictive parts of a smartphone. The only way to regain access is to tap the phone against the device.

Another option Millar considered was the Light Phone, a small “dumbphone” designed to reduce digital distraction by eliminating features like email, social media, and web browsing. But the current iteration of the Light Phone does not enable video calling.

“I didn’t have the luxury of making those technological choices because I would have amputated myself from really important relationships,” Millar said.

Instead, Millar decided to compare her virtual world of long-distance relationships with the French concept of billet-doux, or artifacts of love exchanged between lovers, such as pressed flowers or postcards. Millar believes there are many billet-douxonline that can convey care and encouragement in relationships even beyond those of romantic partners.

Sending your friend a meme, a new song, or a photo of something funny you see on your walk are all examples of technological billet-doux.

Millar thinks it’s unfair to vilify digital technology because, in her mind, for many people who are far from home, reliance on it is a necessity, not a choice.

Many digital technologies were a blessing and provision for her in a time of great loneliness while she was away from home. She wonders how healthy or useful it is to theorize about omitting tech altogether. Many issues of conviction and discernment are not black-and-white when it comes to how we live our daily lives as Christians.

“Because this is the way it is,” Millar said, “let’s live in it and make the most of it. Be aware of the shortcomings and aware of the unexpected blessing.”

Marko Vuletic, senior international relations major at Wheaton College, uses digital technology to sustain his long-distance relationship with his Canadian fiancée.

“Technology is not inherently evil,” Vuletic said. “Like pretty much any invention or new thing, it can be wielded and used for good.”

From virtual Netflix dates to video calls to show his fiancée the beautiful fall leaves on campus, digital technology helps mediate connection when the two can’t be together.

Nevertheless, Vuletic is still wary of allowing his online interactions to permeate his physical life. During his Sunday Sabbath he strives to opt out of tech use, instead writing poetry or going on a walk. Without a doubt, he said, he infinitely prefers time in person with his fiancée. However, he feels that navigating complex arguments remotely has helped the couple mature much faster.

“I feel like now, after three and a half years, the way we talk and argue is like a married couple,” Vuletic said.

But Vuletic doesn’t want connecting with his fiancée online to be an excuse for unchecked screen time. He uses Revelation 20:12 as the trellis for his digital-technology framework. “And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened.”

“I do not want to stand before God and have him say, ‘So you spent x amount of thousands of hours scrolling?’ What am I going to say? ‘Yeah, and I’m proud of that’? I’m going to be filled with regret.”

Vuletic worries for younger generations, considering his age group part of the “transitional” group when it comes to tech use.

“We can remember scraping our knees and playing outside,” he said, “not stuck inside on a screen.”

Thinking ahead, he and his fiancée have already decided they want to limit tech use as much as possible for their future kids, potentially fasting from technology on Saturdays and Sundays.

Vuletic tries not to let anxiety about the dangers of technology consume him, instead trusting in the Lord.

“God has given me life at this point of time, 2025,” he said. “How can I faithfully follow what Scripture tells me about not being of the world and being set apart, and still somehow exist in the world?”

To practice living in this tension, when Millar moved back to Scotland, she took a job at a bakery that was a 20-minute drive from her home but quickly decided to switch to a bakery that’s a 45-minute walk away. She treasures the time to be silent and fully present as she walks to work. Now she serves bread and baked goods to her neighbors.

“My offline life [requires me] to accept the reality I’m in rather than trying to strain toward some other imaginary reality I feel I could work toward,” Millar said.

She learned about the value of embodied faith and life after her season in New York City where she burned out from trying to live in two countries at the same time.

“That’s the myth technology promised me,” Millar said. “I was promised to be able to live in Scotland at the same time as living in New York.”

Millar has learned to focus on her in-person relationships and to put less pressure and fewer expectations on her long-distance friendships.

“I’ve removed myself of that burden to keep something feeling as if it’s in person,” she said. “I’ve removed technology from that burden and the other person from that burden. We don’t have to replicate an in-person relationship over the phone.”

Millar admitted it’s hard to practice what she preaches. A tangible way of living out faith communally is “showing up to church on Sundays and praying with my parents,” she said. While she’s not yet rooted in community the way she’d like to be once she’s more settled in Scotland, it’s something she’s working toward.

Daniel and Kerri Soriano, a young married couple from Aurora, the second-most-populous city in Illinois, believe living multigenerationally with Daniel’s parents, who are Mexican immigrants, helps them withstand the temptation to overly rely on technology to facilitate relationships.

“My superpower in thinking about this is I have parents [and grandparents] that grew up in poverty,” Daniel said.

Daniel remembers growing up in Aurora, a city that is over 40 percent Hispanic and Latino, and visiting his neighbors whose homes were full of the latest video game consoles and Apple products.

“They were a couple years ahead, when it came to technology, than my household,” he said.

There was an economic difference between the families, but also his parents just didn’t have digital technology as “part of their wiring,” Daniel said. He believes living multigenerationally is a great antidote to the technological rat race.

“Being connected perpetually to the generation before us is a way to say we’re not in a rush to keep up with other people or families on the block. In fact, we’re fine looking weird to other people,” he said.

While the incessant need to be like everyone else drove him to idolize digital technology when he was a teenager, Daniel is now wary of its promises. His dad communicates with extended family in Mexico and Indiana via WhatsApp, and since Daniel and his father live together, Daniel can watch him model his phone use in real time.

Kerri Soriano appreciates her father-in-law’s effortless disconnect from the addictive cycles many are prone to.

“When Daniel is going through depression, [his dad] asks if Daniel has gone outside today, touched a tree, or looked up at the clouds,” Kerri said. “There’s something so childlike and innocent and pure about him.”

When the couple discusses buying a new phone, Daniel’s dad is quick to chip in: “Why? Does it not work?”

Daniel considers his father’s naiveté about technology distinctly grounding. He believes that, for those who come from a different generation or don’t have as many privileges as many Americans do, the addiction to digital technology is puzzling.

“A lot of the questions we struggle with as a society are confusing for them,” he said.

Daniel’s dad doesn’t criticize technology altogether—he enjoys listening to music that brings him joy, his audio Bible, or recorded prayers. He appreciates digital technology’s capacity to keep him connected to loved ones who live far away.

“The way he interacts with technology is super admirable,” Kerri said.

Kerri, an expecting mother, often feels overwhelmed by the plethora of podcasts, YouTube videos, and online mom groups offering parenting advice. She enjoys asking her parents-in-law what they did as first-time parents without many of the technologies that appear so integral to raising children in 2025.

“They have really simple answers,” she said. “Sometimes really complex thoughts and questions have very simple answers.”

- More from Anna Mares

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