‘One Battle After Another’ Is No Way to Live

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson plays out the dangers of extremism.

Photo Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. © Warner Bros. Pictures.

About a year ago, my Instagram algorithm graced me with a video of British comedian John Cleese describing the advantages of extremism. In true British style, Cleese explains that extremism makes us feel good: “It provides you with enemies. … A great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in the enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive, isn’t it?”

This clip came to mind as I watched One Battle After Another, the new film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. (Some spoilers ahead.) Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, it bears many of the ridiculous, hilarious, paranoid elements characteristic of that novelist’s work.

It also contains its fair share of warnings for our time—though it never gets preachy. Instead, One Battle takes a “show, don’t tell” approach to the dangers of our political landscape. It reveals how the allure of belonging and efficiency makes extremism enticing, tempting us to abandon our closest relationships. Ironically, it’s those we claim to be fighting for who often end up suffering the most.

One Battle spends its first half hour establishing the cat-and-mouse dynamic between a violent revolutionary group (the French 75) and the federal government, as well as the fetishized power dynamic of the groups’ respective leaders, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Captain Sean J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). From the film’s earliest scenes, these two exist in a sexual dynamic somehow both exploitative and permissive.

“Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio)—a less-assuming member of the French 75—also finds himself in an explosive sexual relationship with Perfidia. Together they have a baby, for whom Pat takes on the burden of care. Unable to reconcile her identity as both revolutionary and mother, Perfidia walks out, soon fleeing the country after outing her fellow revolutionaries to Lockjaw.

Now compromised, the rest of the French 75 must take on new identities and go underground. Assuming the name Bob Ferguson, Pat flees with his daughter, Willa, to the Northern California woods, where he lays low as a paranoid father for the next 16 years.

From there, One Battle skips ahead to “Bob” and his now-teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) living quiet lives. We get a brief glimpse of their strained but mutually loving relationship before learning the film’s new stakes.

Now a military colonel, Lockjaw is being considered for inclusion in an elite white supremacist group known—in true Pynchon-inspired wackiness—as the Christmas Adventurers Club (complete with “Hail St. Nick” salutes). To be included in this group, Lockjaw’s racism must be unadulterated. Putting his membership at risk are both his past sexual encounters with Perfidia (who is Black) and his suspicion that Willa is actually his daughter. Determined to erase his condemning past, Lockjaw sets out to locate and eliminate Bob and Willa.

This film runs for nearly three hours. It’s difficult to summarize, casting a complex narrative of intersecting storylines and characters. Still, undergirding it all is something consistent: the ever-elusive quest for purity.

Before abandoning her former lover, Perfidia tells Bob that “you and your crumbling male ego will never do this revolution like me.” In her view, Bob’s commitment to raising their daughter is a compromise. When Lockjaw seeks admittance into the Christmas Adventurers Club, its initiators tell him that they are “dedicated to making the world safe and pure.” The myth of purity is part of extremism’s allure. Yet it is also the source of its weakness, its fragility, its absurdity.

It’s the quiet revolution of sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro) that suggests another way. He may not be as exciting or effective as the French 75, but he’s certainly more loving and present. Rather than making use of pomp or violence, the sensei is present, peaceable, and resolute—though not passive—in the face of evil.

Sergio shows us an alternative to our impatient, results-driven politics, where things must change now and where any method—no matter how violent—is suitable to that end. He embodies what Jacques Ellul, the 20th-century French social theorist and resistor against Nazi occupation, describes as the true revolutionary spirit: “There is no need for us to try … to bring peace on earth. Instead, we ourselves must be peaceful. For where the peaceful are, there peace reigns.”

Where Sergio is composed and focused, Bob is frenzied and scattered. Nothing he does ultimately contributes toward his daughter’s rescue, and his drug-addled brain can’t even remember the French 75 passwords he needs to help track her down. When he finally arrives after a long chase, dust settled, he finds that Willa has already saved herself. When she demands that her father confirm his loyalty with yet another password, we see once again how extremism breaks down relationships and sows mistrust—even among family.

One Battle After Another is another great movie from the skilled hands of Anderson, and it delivers a relevant message for our own frenzied time. But it also lacks an eschatology of love. In the movie’s world of revolutions, where one battle follows endlessly after another, there is no in-breaking of hope. At best, there is a dream of a future generation who is able to achieve what this present generation could not.

Christians also acknowledge a certain hopelessness of ever making all things new before Jesus himself comes. Still, we embody an eschatological reality now, made manifest by loving not only our friends, family, and neighbors but also our enemies.

At no point in One Battle After Another does a character make a sacrifice for an enemy. There are great expressions of love for one’s own or for the innocent—but such limited concern will ensure that no progress is ever made in the pursuit of peace.

It is tempting, for example, to view Lockjaw as only a trope of white supremacy, beyond salvation and better off obliterated from the earth. Such perspectives reveal our own extremism. Lockjaw is insecure, neurotic, and desperate for acceptance. These are cracks in the farce, vulnerable places in the armor.

If we believe people like Lockjaw deserve only rejection and hatred, then we ensure that they will forever remain our enemies. If we would be people of peace, then we must do more than shoot at those who stand across from us. If we truly are to revolutionize the world, we must, like Jesus, be willing to die even for those who return love with hate.

Dane Rich holds an MATS in biblical languages from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. His writing has also appeared in Mockingbird and Ex Fonte, and he blogs regularly on his Substack.

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Culture

Review

Tyler Perry Takes on ‘Ruth and Boaz’

Haleluya Hadero

In his new Netflix movie, Ruth is a singer, Boaz has an MBA, and the Tennessee wine flows freely.

Perry Well Films 2 / Courtesy of Netflix

If Ruth and Boaz were to meet today and fall in love, what would it look like?

In Tyler Perry’s retelling, up-and-coming singer Ruth relocates to a small town in Tennessee to care for a widow and escape Atlanta’s music scene. There she crosses paths with Boaz (or “Bo”), a wealthy winery owner and former Marine who’s taken two tours in Afghanistan. As is often the case with the biblical Boaz in sermons, Bible studies, and YouTube videos about dating, on-screen, Bo is depicted as the total package: buff, kind, generous, and handsome with an MBA and a former Wall Street career. And as in the biblical version, love conquers in the end.

Netflix’s Ruth & Boaz is the first faith-based film released under a multiyear partnership between the streaming service, Tyler Perry Studios, and Devon Franklin, a Christian minister and motivational speaker based in California. Cowritten by Mike Elliott (Brown Sugar) and Cory Tynan (Play’d), it’s also the latest in a wave of contemporary biblical dramas garnering attention—though this particular adaptation will likely leave audiences wanting more.

Ruth & Boaz begins with Ruth (Serayah McNeill) and Naomi (Phylicia Rashad) meeting in less-than-ideal circumstances. Naomi’s son has brought his mother to see a performance by his new romantic interest, Ruth, who’s a rising star in Atlanta’s hip-hop scene. But at the show, Ruth’s sexually suggestive dances, revealing outfit, and magenta wig are a turnoff for her boyfriend’s mom. Viewers soon find out that Ruth also doesn’t enjoy the songs. But she’s confined by contractual obligations and discouraged from leaving by her friend Breana, the other member of the fictional musical duo 404.

Ruth and Naomi intersect again after tragedy strikes, killing both Naomi’s husband and her son. Having exited her contract with her producer around the same time, Ruth discovers a dark connection between the men’s deaths and her career. Meanwhile, widowed Naomi finds herself in a precarious financial situation, forcing her to move back to her hometown in Tennessee. She’s accompanied—initially against her wishes—by Ruth. Now in a small town, Ruth finds work picking grapes at Boaz’s vineyard.

Rashad’s depiction of the grieving, angry Naomi is the best performance in the roughly 90-minute film, which, like other Tyler Perry movies, plays on various tropes. The young Ruth is portrayed as a closed-off woman who needs to reopen her heart to love. Because of her past experiences, she starts off distrustful of Boaz and his efforts to get close to her. Her resistance lets up as she learns more about his character.

Boaz (Tyler Lepley), perhaps predictably, has no flaws and, frankly, too many accomplishments even compared to the righteous, wealthy biblical character. When the movie’s Ruth asks him at some point why he isn’t married even though he’s nearly 40, he replies that he’s “married to the vineyard,” a family business he began managing after his father died.

For viewers who know Tyler Perry’s work, the film should feel somewhat familiar. There are theatrical romance scenes (a mansion filled with candles for Ruth and Boaz’s first date); extravagant drama (at some point, the winery is set on fire); and some steaminess (women ogling at shirtless Boaz as he works on Naomi’s home).

Much debate has been had about what the Bible means when it says Ruth “uncovered” Boaz’s feet. In the movie, however, Boaz takes off Ruth’s heels to wash her feet before they tread on some grapes to produce wine. Then they kiss. But Ruth, afraid of how her past might affect the burgeoning relationship, dramatically runs out of his house before they can go any further.

The writing in Ruth & Boaz manages to stay clear of any overly liberal Scripture interpretations (for one, the two lovers don’t have sex before they get married). But I did find the film to be too concerned with how to translate the optics of a woman dating her boss to a modern audience.

Similar to the Bible story, Noami encourages the relationship. Ruth, however, is initially hesitant to embrace spending time with the man who hired her. Boaz is interested in Ruth but also stresses that he doesn’t want to “twist her arm” into anything.

For all the effort it takes trying to force an old story into our modern context of HR and sexual consent norms, the film also chooses not to explore some of the biggest plot points of the biblical narrative (such as the relative who was nearer in line to redeem Ruth).

Still, those familiar with the biblical story are rewarded; they will be more likely to draw conclusions about the characters (Breana = Orpah) and the places (Atlanta’s music scene = Moab) than secular audiences. This subtlety rewards a biblically literate audience in a way that’s perhaps surprising considering some of the film’s clichés.

Ruth & Boaz gives a nod to the fact that God worked in the background to arrange the relationship between its two romantic leads. But without the contextual, historical backdrop surrounding marriage, land, and redemption—without, to some extent, the whole drama of the Old and New Testaments—the core of the original story is obscured. The end result? A feel-good movie about two Christians finding love.

Haleluya Hadero is the Black church editor at Christianity Today.

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Church Life

To Black Worship Leaders, Gospel vs. Contemporary Worship Is a False Dichotomy

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

The discussion around Maverick City Music highlights how commercial success and congregational value are two different things.

Paras Griffin / Getty Images

Since its first album in 2019, Maverick City Music has been both praised and censured for its fusion of contemporary worship music and gospel.

The group took off with songs like “Jireh” and the Grammy-winning album Old Church Basement, collaborations with Elevation Worship that combined improvised vocals and tight choral harmonies from gospel music with the anthemic style of popular contemporary worship hits.

With over 3 million followers on YouTube and its consistent spot on the top of the Billboard Christian charts, fans say Maverick City Music elevates both contemporary worship and gospel genres. But critics worry that the group might allow distinct elements of gospel to become drowned out by the sounds of popular contemporary worship music.

“That fear is rooted in history, in a real erasure,” said worship leader and gospel artist Sarah Benibo. “Some fear that if Maverick City commercializes aspects of gospel, the genre will disappear.”

Norman Gyamfi, the music executive and marketer who cofounded Maverick City Music, stoked those tensions and fears this summer when he remarked that the group “outstreams the whole gospel industry” and suggested the decline of gospel music is imminent unless more artists start following in Maverick City Music’s footsteps.

In a podcast interview, Gyamfi criticized gospel vocalists for singing “too hard” and pointed out the relative lack of touring opportunities for gospel artists outside of the church circuit.

At a tumultuous moment in the music industry—artists and executives are trying to figure out how to capture a mass audience in an increasingly fragmented market—even the worship music niche is shaped by interest in profit.

But Black musicians and church leaders are cautioning against accepting the economic logic of the music industry as a way of determining which genres have more value to the church.

“Gyamfi is just doing what good businessmen do—trying to maximize profit,” author and musician Andre Henry wrote in response to Gyamfi’s interview. “But it doesn’t profit gospel music to gain all the white listeners in the world, just to lose its soul.”

From inside Maverick City Music, a collective of mostly Black singers and musicians, the mixed response to their popularity “felt confusing,” said Naomi Raine, a founding member known for her powerful vocals on songs like “He’s in the Room,” “God Will Work It Out,” and “Promises.”

“I think some of it is related to race, but we were also just so different. People don’t always appreciate ‘different,’” Raine told CT.

“We need all of it,” said Raine, referring to the array of music currently being produced by gospel and contemporary worship artists. “So I get sad and frustrated when I hear comments that put down certain movements or sounds.”

Unlike CCM, Black gospel predates the American recording industry. Its roots in African American spirituals and intersections with blues and jazz make it a distinct musical idiom.

CCM, on the other hand, is more of an industry than a musical genre. Contemporary worship music (now its own subgenre with its own characteristics and set of standard-bearers) has grown within CCM, adopting popular styles for use in music meant explicitly for congregational use and capitalizing on existing CCM infrastructure like Christian radio.

The racially divided audiences of gospel and CCM mirror systemic segregation in both the recording industry and in the American church.

From the manager’s seat, Gyamfi suggests that one style will inevitably overtake (or at least out-earn) the others when tracked by streaming numbers, touring revenue, and radio play. Pointing to successful worship artists like Chris Tomlin, Gyamfi said that contemporary worship music succeeds in the marketplace because it has met demand; it’s what people want to sing.

“Churches had stopped singing gospel,” Gyamfi said. “The churches that were growing were singing worship.”

It is true that in the US, churches seeing the most growth in attendance are megachurches, which are more likely to use popular contemporary worship music by artists like Tomlin, Phil Wickham, Elevation Worship, and Brooke Ligertwood. But services like Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) that track the use of worship music overrepresent predominantly white churches, giving an incomplete picture of musical worship in the US.

Laser-focus on profitability, streaming numbers, and even CCLI charts can obscure the highly localized nature of congregational worship and the diversity of musical practices in American churches. It can also push corporate interests to disinvest from music that has value to faith communities, or pit musicians against one another.

“Art is about borrowing, commingling, and collaboration,” said Benibo, a former member of the gospel trio God’s Chosen and former Willow Creek Community Church campus worship leader. “As a businessperson, you might see this as a zero-sum game, but when we’re talking about worship, we’re not talking zero sum.”

Dwan Hill, a Grammy-winning producer and founder of The Choir Room, says that the context and culture of a local congregation determines what kind of music will serve the body. And the devaluing of gospel as a participatory musical tradition usually flows from misunderstanding and unfamiliarity.

“In the Black church, some songs are communal and some songs are individual,” said Hill. “Black churches have testimony services, services that start with someone singing, praying, and telling their story. Then we [the congregation] respond.”

Hill says that, for those outside the Black church—especially those whose exposure to gospel music has been through media like American Idol—the congregational aspects of gospel might not be immediately apparent. Participation in call-and-response and joining in a spontaneous chorus is a learned skill, one that is learned in community.

“Runs and complicated chords and percussion are all expressions of a heart pouring out a story,” said Hill. “Sometimes we need someone to sing with heart, soul, and gusto about what God has done to remind us that we need to respond.”

Eric McAllister, a worship leader and the creator of Sunday Morning Songs, says that Black churches have a different relationship with virtuosic solo singing than most predominantly white churches.

“Participation, particularly in Black churches, is not limited to singing,” said McAllister. “There can be full-body participation as you listen to and ‘amen’ that soloist. And that doesn’t feel like a betrayal of what the church is gathered to do. Listening can be participation.”

Hill and McAllister both pointed out that the role of the soloist in the Black church is often to testify to God’s work in their life and to lift up the whole community. Musical showmanship and excellence is part of that.

“Putting on our ‘Sunday best’ isn’t an expression of ‘look at me,’” said McAllister, connecting the emphasis on musical skill to the practice of dressing up for church. “It’s a way of standing in front of God in the fullness of my dignity.”

Benibo said, at its best, a rehearsed, impressive musical performance on a Sunday morning is a musical offering that blesses the congregation and leads them to respond in worship.

“When you bring a musical offering to the body, you have to have worked. When I offer it to the body and to God, I want you to hear that I’ve been practicing, because that’s how much this means to me.”

Differences in performance practices and norms can feed the perception that certain styles of music are fundamentally not congregational. But Geraldine Latty, a worship leader, choir director, and visiting scholar at Baylor University’s Dunn Center for Christian Music Studies, says that genre and musical style do not determine whether a song is congregational.

“Whether a song is too complex in rhythm or style is entirely subjective,” said Latty. “Usually, it’s not the song that’s the issue, it’s how it’s taught.”

Latty, who has worked with church and community choirs in the UK and the US for decades, says that the simplest song by Chris Tomlin or an exuberant choral arrangement of a Hezekiah Walker song can be equally participatory for a congregation.

“The question isn’t ‘Is it too difficult to sing?’ The question is ‘Does it have content I can connect to?’”

The success of Maverick City Music showed that audiences were excited to hear music that brings gospel sensibility to popular worship music. But their popularity isn’t necessarily a sign that gospel music needs to change or that contemporary worship music is better serving the church.

“We have to be able to say that Maverick City is doing something new and different,” said Benibo. “We are so afraid that our differences will divide us or that we will end up melting into each other. But if you have a different way of doing this, teach me. And I’ll teach you.”

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Inkwell

Surprised by Questions

Carolyn Weber

To pose a good question—like Sayers, Socrates, and Jesus—is to invite someone into a journey.

Magdalene Tower

I remember clearly where I was sitting when someone asked me a question that would change the entire direction and purpose of my life.

Ringed in the sunlight pouring through the bay windows overlooking High Street in Oxford, we sat in two chairs tucked into a dorm room in Oriel College. Across the street sat St. Mary’s Church, one of the oldest churches in all of England, resplendent in her architecture. Below, despite the hustle and bustle of traffic and pedestrians on the busy street, time seemed to stand still. The question hung in the air, like the scent of myrrh in a tomb.

You should never underestimate the power of a good question.

Question has at its root the word quest, and indeed, to pose a question is to invite someone into a journey. To answer a question is to embark on an adventure.

I grew up more than a little put off by the Christian faith. Any Christians I knew (or presumed I knew) seemed to be so offensively sure of themselves that I had to battle the urge to roll my eyes whenever one came near. They pronounced and announced. They professed and confessed. They judged and sniffed. They said things like, “here endeth” and “blessed assurance.” You could hear the echo long after turning off the television or leaving the church.

So I was completely blown away when, as an avowed agnostic myself (not quite an atheist, since I couldn’t disprove God), someone I actually admired and thought of as “cool” asked me a question I had never, in my quarter of a century of life, been asked.

He asked, quite simply, “What’s your take on God?”

As someone accustomed to the rush of a North American student life, I felt like a hummingbird that had just hit the glass hard; I was stunned. I had never been invited into a genuine discussion about God. I answered my friend. And the more I answered, the more he asked. (One day, he would ask me another very big question, but that’s another article.)

What amazed me was how sincerely he asked. Not rhetorical questions. Not snide ones. But genuine questions reflecting genuine interest in what I thought. He asked questions like invitations. As Sir Francis Bacon said, “A sudden, bold, and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man, and lay him open.”

Jesus, of course, was a great questioner. Pastor Eric von Atzigen identifies 135 questions Jesus asks in the New Testament. They all strike at the heart of who we are, what we believe, and how we order our loves. Consider the Gospel of Matthew alone, and the progression of the interrogative order:

“Why are you so afraid?” (8:26)
“Do you believe?” (9:28)
“Why did you doubt?” (14:31)
“Who do you say I am?” (16:15)

Where are you? Jesus continues to ask us on our Father’s behalf—echoing God’s first question to mankind in Eden. And we are given the dignity of our own response to the Good News. He knocks and leaves us to open the door.

A question is a hook, a fisher of men and women. How would I answer to this God of questions?

We are asking fewer and fewer questions as we read and learn today. Or perhaps we don’t know what questions to ask. We satiate our minds with so much filler that they seem to no longer hunger for the real thing.

In her preface to The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers writes:

The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. … Particularly in the matter of Christian doctrine, a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous than that of the dark ages, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading.

Illiterate reading for Sayers occurs when “words are understood in a wholly mistaken sense,” when “statements of fact and opinion are misread and distorted in repetition.” The result, particularly when it comes to understanding the Christian faith, is the popular mind’s transformation of it into a “confused jumble of mythological and pathological absurdity.”

Sayers’s concept of illiterate reading caught my attention on many fronts. First and foremost, it struck me as a (hopefully) thoughtful Christian, since Christians cannot help but be the most essential of all bibliophiles, with the Holy Bible as the foundational “word in stone” of our existence. Secondly, after three decades of teaching, I have to agree with Sayers’s observation that “it is common knowledge among school-teachers that a high percentage of examination failures results from ‘not reading the question.’”

As a constant pedagogical refrain, I find I must not only remind adult students how to pay careful attention to the question being asked but also how to respond to that specific question. Upon initial attempts, they either simply regurgitate all the “knowledge” they have crammed into their recent memory in the hope of making a minimum grade, or they respond as though they have not understood what was being asked of them in the first place.

Sayers continues to state how “teachers further complain that they have to spend a great deal of time and energy in teaching University students what questions to ask.” From pure need, I have taught entire courses dedicated to the art of asking a good question. A truly good question. The kind, as Francis Bacon says, that “lays a man open,” or that Jesus employs to turn us back on ourselves, rhetorically, facilitating a conversation between ourselves and our very own soul.

During my time studying at Oxford, I continued to be surprised by questions. Most learning at Oxford takes place in tutorials, where students gather in small groups to discuss readings and assignments with their professor in an intimate setting. Rather than gathering in a large, anonymous amphitheater or sitting framed in muted squares online, real-life tutorials provide a place for intense discussion.

In such a group, one is required to take full responsibility for one’s own thoughts or positions. There is no tossing a paper on a random pile that the professor will not even read. In a tutorial, a student is laid bare: If you haven’t done the reading preparation, you are woefully exposed. If you haven’t thought through your argument, your views are vulnerable to being dismantled.

Yet beneath this incredibly intimidating and even frightening experience runs the electric current of an even greater one: the exhilaration of an earnest pursuit of truth. When we are met with questions and moved to ask questions ourselves, something profound takes place: a shift from pride to humility, from heedlessness to alertness, from indifference to engagement.

The crux of the tutorial system is the ancient art of asking questions. The Socratic method, named for the famous teacher of Plato, involves the teacher leading the student, question by artful question, further up and further in to the heart of a matter—Socrates’s key to examining life and making it worth living.

This is the model I’ve continued to use in my own teaching pedagogy, and which I see flourishing at the North American campus of New College Franklin, where I now teach. At this small Christian classical school, students are deliberately unplugged during class. Away from devices and dependent solely on their own brains, they engage with their instructor and their peers by asking questions to seek out truth through the inductive and deductive processes. The entire curriculum is based on this intimate, personal method of truth-seeking together.

I have met self-proclaimed irreligious people who have not asked—or refused to ask—questions about doubting wisely, let alone questions about believing wisely. The plague is all the same: a lack of genuine curiosity, a lack of humility at the heart of true truth-seeking. And I have met believers who are afraid to ask questions of their faith—afraid that somehow their faith will be shaken or that they will be judged even for asking.

Yet we see how Jesus himself did not fear such questions. In fact, his refrain “Do not be afraid” would seem to apply to questions—perhaps more than anything. He honors the asking and points us toward the places where the asking leads.

I find myself agreeing yet further with Sayers as she claims, “A third distressing phenomenon is the extreme unwillingness of the average questioner to listen to the answer.” We all know the type of person—the one who listens to something you are vulnerably sharing, but who is only waiting for you to finish your sentence so he can jump in with the sound of his own voice.

Can we enact holy listening instead? The Bible gives us the answer to every conceivable question, yet often, we do not want to hear. The more we develop a robust relationship with God, the more we hearken to his voice in our hearts and trust his work in our lives.

In their choice to turn away from God, Adam and Eve did not respond to the true question being asked of them—they did not practice holy listening. They took the Serpent at his most literal; they took his word over God’s Word. And ever since, the consequent misapprehension has sent generation upon generation tumbling into suffering and, most of all, into fear.

Once I left Oxford to study in the “larger world,” it was now my turn to be surprised not by the questions but by the lack of them. As I taught or interacted at various other campuses, I found myself agreeing with Sayers: We are a culture of complacent readers, even accidental or haphazard readers. We take in information but do not ask for what purpose we are reading. We gloss over, but we do not listen to what the text has to say.

Our reading must model our faith. As followers of Christ, how can we become literate readers? How can we be emboldened to ask the questions that matter and yet also be willing to listen to the answer?

To return once more to Sayers here, she writes, “In the creeds of Christendom, we are confronted with a set of documents which purport to be, not expressions of opinion but statements of fact.” How does this shape our purpose in reading?

How does asking and answering questions lead us back to God’s Word, its reading and comprehension, and then its application—not as ambiguous maundering but with absolute and teleological purpose? And finally, how can such inquisitive reading be applied to the texts of our own lives?

It is through reading itself that we can come to better know the Father through the written word of the Son by continuously asking how we can know the way: by remaining hungry and thirsty, in mind and spirit, for questions of truth and the wisdom of God.

Carolyn Weber is a professor at New College Franklin and the author of Surprised by Oxford. She lives in the Tennessee countryside with her family and animal menagerie.

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Books

Review

Don’t Give Dan Brown the Final Word on the Council of Nicaea

Fred Sanders

Bryan Litfin rescues popular audiences from common myths about the origins of Trinitarian doctrine.

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

Christians aren’t trying to speak in code, but sometimes we can sound like it.

Consider, for instance, the simple matter of the year 2025 being the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 325. Plenty of churches, schools, conferences, and magazines are celebrating by giving special attention to the Nicene Creed this year. Why not? It’s a round-numbered, landmark year and a great way to celebrate.

But if an interested observer happens to ask whether the Nicene Creed comes from the 325 Council of Nicaea, we have some explaining to do. Actually, the creed produced that year was different and shorter. But it’s symbolically important because it started the movement toward the better-known creed recited in churches across the world to this day. (Technically, it’s called the Nicaeno-Constantinopolitan Creed.)

That might sound like misdirection or double talk, but it isn’t. The year 325 and the “Nicene” creed written 56 years later really do belong together, and it all makes good sense, as long as you know the story that goes along with it. And by “story,” I mean a little bit of history and a little bit of theology.

In The Story of the Trinity: Controversy, Crisis, and the Creation of the Nicene Creed, Bryan Litfin cracks the code, leaps the language barrier, and delivers that history and theology. Litfin is a professor at Liberty University’s Rawlings School of Divinity, having previously taught for many years at Moody Bible Institute. Some time ago he began developing an engaging and accessible writing style, which he uses to great effect in this book about Nicaea.

The Story of the Trinity is under 200 pages long and is available in paperback for less than $20, which makes it the kind of nonintimidating object you might actually hand to a friend. But above all, you might recommend the book because of its high readability quotient.

Litfin’s authorial approachability starts with little courtesies, like showing how to pronounce a few hard words, explaining where key terms originated, and gamely admitting that paternity and filiation are “fancy words for fatherhood and sonship.”

His approachability extends to offering analogies for ancient geopolitical tensions in the church. For example, leaders in Roman Palestine and Syria may have defended Arius, who opposed the Nicene position on the Trinity, partly out of rivalry with metropolitan Alexandria. As Litfin writes, this might be like “a pastor today getting kicked out of New York City for what appeared to be conservative ideas. If those elite New Yorkers didn’t like a certain set of doctrines, that might be just enough reason for conservative Christians of Atlanta or Dallas to adopt them with gusto.”

It’s a loose analogy, and it may misfire for some readers. But it serves the purpose of inviting a broad range of readers into an imaginable historical setting, something like our own.

But Litfin’s commitment to readability determines a lot more than just these isolated features. It determines the shape of his whole project. He actively invites the kind of questions ordinary people might ask about Nicaea and its role in formulating the doctrine of the Trinity. In some cases, he channels these questions into chapter titles: Chapter 4, for instance, asks, “Does Yahweh Have a Son?” Chapter 6 poses the question “Maybe Jesus Is the Father?”

Similar thought experiments and queries appear throughout the book. As a theologian, Litfin must know that some of these are bad questions, but as a teacher he recognizes them as starting points for developing a better understanding.

Behind these decisions lies Litfin’s broad and generous sense of the obligations borne by anyone attempting to explain Nicaea at the popular level. It simply won’t do to open the book with some version of “Our story begins in 317,” when controversy first erupted between Arius and Athanasius of Alexandria, the church father known for articulating and defending the doctrine of the Trinity. In fact, readers don’t really enter the fourth century until the book is more than half over.

Up until then, we have not been creeping through the history of Christian doctrine so much as laying deep foundations in biblical theology. We get seven sprightly chapters on Old Testament monotheism, New Testament Christology, and eventually a few major figures like Tertullian and Origen—both Africans, as Litfin points out in an aside. Many of the key players in the early story hail from northern Africa.

Why so much biblical theology? Litfin doesn’t belabor the point, but he has obviously decided that what is at stake in Nicene theology will be compelling only against the backdrop of what the Bible says about God and Christ. The Story of the Trinity is not quite evangelistic, but it won’t risk leaving the foundations of the faith unstated while hurrying on to church history.

In fact, it comes close to offering a straightforward, disarming invitation to the gospel:

Are you ready to begin? Don’t worry; this won’t be a dry theological discourse that’s way over your head. Instead, in a step-by-step fashion, we’ll see how God has gradually revealed himself as a community of persons who eternally love one another, and who pour out their infinite love on the human race. To know God is to be invited into a community of perfect harmony and everlasting life. Who could ask for anything better than that?

Litfin is similarly gentle and patient (“Don’t worry”) with readers who believe in Jesus but aren’t already persuaded about the importance of creeds. The first chapter makes the case. In ten breezy pages, it asks and answers the question “What Is a Creed?,” starting with confessions of faith found in Scripture itself. Eventually, believers find themselves wanting more explicit accounts of how two core confessions—“God is one” and “Jesus is Lord”—go together. Nicaea offers itself as an answer. If theology is faith seeking understanding, creeds are confession seeking coherence and comprehensiveness.

The Story of the Trinity is a sweet chariot that swings low for a general audience. Does it also carry us home to theological precision? Yes, all things considered, it reaches remarkably high. Litfin writes for a popular audience but remains resourceful and responsible. At numerous points he includes stories and details that show he is not simply retailing widely available reports but has done the primary reading himself. He tucks the accounts of early church historians Sozomen and Socrates Scholasticus demurely into the endnotes; he offers quotations from the Theodosian Code, a collection of Roman laws made by its Christian emperors, to show how Roman leaders received the outcome of Nicaea.

The highest art is to conceal artistry, but Litfin slips in some little giveaways that let seasoned scholars know what he knows. One particular issue serves as a litmus test for whether a history of the fourth century is naïvely ignorant or critically credible. That issue is related to rhetoric from Athanasius, who famously taught his readers to label all defections from Nicene orthodoxy as “Arianism,” in reference to his chief opponent. That label certainly points to an important theological distinction, but Athanasius imposed it for decades on teachers who never claimed it for themselves.

Litfin nods to the “Arianism” problem: “Though we’ll use the term in this book for simplicity’s sake, it isn’t a very accurate expression. As it turns out, Arius wasn’t a key player in the decades after the Nicene council condemned him. Not many people wanted to claim his legacy, so he gradually disappeared off the scene.” It’s hard to imagine a defter handling of a historical stumbling point. Litfin makes it look easy.

While The Story of the Trinity doesn’t include original research (since that would be inappropriate for an introduction), it does display independent judgment. Specialists will quibble and gripe; it’s what they do. I winced to see Litfin perpetuate the myth of different “Trinitarianisms” in the Greek East and the Latin West. It’s a hallucination of outdated textbooks, and I doubt Litfin really believes it; he doesn’t let it mangle his reports about the theology of Augustine and of the Cappadocian church fathers, who defended the one Christian doctrine of the Trinity in diverse ways.

But advanced students of Nicaea should keep a sense of perspective about such things. If people ask you for a good, readable first book—in fact an only book—on Nicaea, there is a kind of madness involved in handing them scholarly staples like Lewis Ayres’ Nicaea and its Legacy (2004) or Khaled Anatolios’s Retrieving Nicaea (2011). Why not just send them to find R. P. C. Hason’s thousand-page opus The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (1988)? Why not tell them to learn Greek and Latin?

On the mean streets of modern life, I regret to inform you that the standard for knowledge about Nicaea has been set by serial fabulist Dan Brown. In the popular mind, the council was either an open democratic vote on whether Jesus is God (“What do you guys think?”) or an imperial power play by the Roman emperor Constantine. Apparently, people think the bishops gathered there invented the New Testament, colluding to suppress other testaments. I kid you not.

Into this present darkness Litfin has lobbed a lightweight light source, a highly readable introduction to Nicaea that helps Christians sound less like they’re talking in code. How great would it be if, when people thought about Nicaea, what came to mind was not The Da Vinci Code but the Theodosian Code? May it be. It is a great blessing to have at hand such a Bible-based, gospel-focused, basic introduction to the Nicene Creed and its theology.

Fred Sanders is professor of theology in the Torrey Honors College at Biola University. His books include The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything.

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Books

Review

Needing Help Is Normal

Agnes R. Howard

Leah Libresco Sargeant’s doggedly pro-life feminist manifesto argues that dependence is inevitable.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Notre Dame Press

Last year’s theme for chapel talks at the Lutheran university where I teach was “That Time I Asked for Help.” Most of these talks narrated a similar cycle: feeling a need, requesting help, and finding it ready. A few speakers confessed DIY dispositions or called out sins of self-reliance. Overall, the talks aimed to encourage students—who apparently don’t ask for help because they think they shouldn’t need it—to seek assistance from others.

That is a good lesson. But it seemed a surprising one to address to a population that looks to me fairly comfortable accepting aid, fresh as most are from 18-odd years of dependence on parents and quick as they are to avail themselves of college counseling and dining services, accepting due-date extensions or the occasional box of classroom donuts. Maybe their obstacle was not undue self-reliance but a misunderstanding of help itself as something narrow one accepts only in certain life stages (childhood), from certain authority figures (teachers or bosses), or after financial transactions (paying an Uber to take you to the airport rather than asking a friend for a ride).

A story Leah Libresco Sargeant recounts in her excellent book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto echoes this misunderstanding. An elderly veteran was unable to visit his wife at a nearby nursing home because he could not clear his driveway after a sudden California snowstorm. When at last he conceded his inability to remove the snow by himself, the abashed post he circulated on Facebook—“I never thought I would have to do this. … This is very embarrassing for me to even ask for help”—drew eager neighbors with shovels and a tractor. To Sargeant, the man’s reluctance to ask for help reveals the “sustained, bitterly cold cultural climate” we inhabit.

Our cultural climate is bitter. But can it really be true that a 79-year-old man never before asked for help or received it? It seems at least plausible that his wife gave him some help, asked or unasked for, through years of marriage. It seems plausible too that the daily life of a septuagenarian might have been laced with helps throughout: a server who remembered his special coffee preference, the nurse gentle at a blood draw, the driver who yielded right of way at a four-way stop. It’s just that he didn’t recognize these acts as the help they had always been. “Help” instead had become exceptional, something uncommon and extraordinary rather than constitutive of existence.

The normal condition for humans is dependence—we start and finish there, and by gradations we depend on others throughout our lives. A system presupposing independence has a “false anthropology,” Sargeant writes. She argues that society should do better to recognize human need. She argues that women, sometimes treated as inferior because of bodily realities, should not have to “prune themselves” to win equality.

The hinge connecting those arguments most directly is women’s proximity to dependence. All humans start life by depending on a female body for gestation, protection, and nourishment. Assuming independence as a norm degrades all but especially women, because biology and culture regularly situate women in service of others. As women care for the young, old, or sick, they depend, in turn, on others to assist them.

Though humans are fundamentally dependent creatures, another fundamental trait—fallenness, sin, plain selfishness—motivates us to pretend otherwise. The fallout isn’t limited to women. But the reality of sex differences over centuries has produced distortions.

On the first page, Sargeant observes that as a woman, “I move through a world in which my body is an unexpected, unanticipated, somewhat unwelcome guest. It is as though women were a late, unanticipated arrival to a civilization that developed without them and their needs in mind.” Her observations carry undertones of surprise, implying that builders of this world neglected to remember women would need to use it too. She identifies dangers from poorly designed structures, like medical research tested only for male patients or car safety devices that protect male bodies and incidentally injure female ones.

In fact, some builders of this world not only did not expect women’s arrival but also precluded it, letting their female counterparts in as guests if at all. Earlier voices in American feminism faulted that bitterly cold hospitality, and we now live in its aftermath.

It is a testimony to their achievements that some women readers may feel surprised to stumble on this warp in the world’s shape. The design flaws Sargeant impugns arose partly through overconfident haste in efforts to reverse sexist exclusion, slotting women into educational and corporate and public spaces made by and for men.

Some institutions still demand that women neutralize their femaleness as a price of entry, Sargeant finds, and she critiques manners that discipline women’s menstrual cycles or lock lactation behind closed doors. Invisible breast pumps and pills to suppress periods may be marketed as considerate gestures but effectively become tools for “helping women be better men.”

Builders of the world Sargeant moves through today knew about the female physical capacity to nurture dependence. They realized that women have periods and feed babies. But they treated that capacity as debility. Priority given to autonomy codes dependence as negative, subordinating and submerging a great source of flourishing.

It seems to me that these world builders thought nonsensically about dependence; assuming independence as our default condition is an irrational judgment about ourselves. That miscalculation ushered in a cascade of others. Seeing help as unusual takes a trick of the mind that recasts it as entitlement or commercial transaction. A faulty definition of help minimizes and monetizes; it devalues care work and excuses some from caring on the grounds that “I don’t need help and therefore you shouldn’t either.” But humans need and take help all the time.

The problem with the world Sargeant navigates is not just that dependent bodies do not fit into molds made for independent ones—because in fact the molds were not made for independent individuals. They were made for individuals trailing support systems behind them, systems providing domestic, relational, and organizational assistance, often from women. These helps could be hidden in plain sight or taken for granted—an underrated figure of speech that stings in this case since whatever is taken is not received as a gift.

The key terms in this book’s title—dependence, dignity, feminist, manifesto—find relation to each other in ways that can repair faulty definitions of help. Dependence is a fact of human life. It is a feminist concern because denying it disadvantages women distinctively. Sargeant’s feminism seeks redress not mostly through balancing scales or leveling playing fields or valuing diversity. Instead, it goes beyond those, recognizing that women’s salient contributions to common thriving come through the biological fact of help.

That is the other hinge linking dependence and feminism: What humans can know by observing motherhood is a detail not to derogate but to claim as an ideal. What Sargeant makes manifest is the reality of human dependence and the good of serving it. Dependence is a basis of dignity as we embrace what we are and grow into service.

Sargeant also shows that dependence stimulates growth. Those who serve expand their capacities. Those who are served fill out the truth of our creatureliness. The body of all together, as community or church, grows through mutual aid. In Sargeant’s reimagination, even unglamorous tasks often classified as women’s work blaze into occasions of agency and virtuosity. Some of the most dazzling sections of the book feature Sergeant reframing tasks of repair or housekeeping as “refactoring,” finding radiant creativity in the mix of skill and care.

The book’s focus on women affords a conclusion important for men too. Appreciating dependence does not mean nodding its approval in a category of humane concepts nice for people who like that kind of thing. Sergeant beckons men to join in this nurture so they don’t miss out on “opportunities for connection and kenosis.”

The truth Sargeant makes manifest inspires her manifesto. For sure, there is a lot of work to do refitting spaces to be friendly for disabilities, encouraging young adults to befriend seniors, and handing babies to dads to hold. But a revolution is not requisite to get people to do these things. People already are doing them, as her pages illustrate.

What Sargeant invites is fundamentally a change of mind first before a practical set of actions. Her book appears in a series, Catholic Ideas for a Secular World, translating insights from Christian traditions to make them accessible to readers beyond. Her insight deserves an especially wide hearing, especially if Christians can proclaim it with right emphasis: less servant leadership as claimed by people more interested in the “leadership” part, and more outright service. Less self-sufficiency and more self-gift. We all bear dignity. We all need help.

Agnes R. Howard teaches humanities at Christ College, the honors college at Valparaiso University. She is the author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human; her forthcoming book is Disoriented: Embodied Life in Strange Times.

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News

Died: John Huffman, Pastor Who Told Richard Nixon to Confess

Daniel Silliman

The Presbyterian minister and CT board member committed to serve the Lord and “let the chips fall where they may.”

Courtesy of John Huffman / edits by Christianity Today

John Huffman, the one minister who told US president Richard Nixon he should confess during the crisis of the Watergate scandal, has died in California at the age of 85.

Huffman was the minister of an evangelical Presbyterian church in Key Biscayne, Florida, where the president frequently went to relax in the 1970s with his close friend businessman Bebe Rebozo.

Nixon rarely attended church outside of the White House services that he closely controlled. He was always afraid a minister would use the pulpit to say something critical and embarrass him. But the president went to Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church when he was in town, partly because he was more relaxed in Florida and partly because he trusted Huffman, who had trained with evangelist Billy Graham and popular New York preacher Norman Vincent Peale.

Huffman had a reputation for being young, good-looking, fun, and “with it,” preaching sermons that were upbeat. But he also addressed sin from the pulpit and frequently spoke of the temptations faced by his affluent congregation on the sun-drenched Florida coast.

“Many of us today don’t want Christ around,” he said in one sermon, which was reported in Miami News in 1968. “We may pretend to worship him and call ourselves Christians but we don’t want to disturb the comfort of our lives.”

In 1973, the young minister grew concerned by reports that Nixon was preventing the investigation of underlings who had broken into the Democratic Party headquarters during the presidential campaign and bugged the office phones. Nixon appeared to be covering up a crime—a suspicion that was later confirmed by the secret recordings the president had made of all his conversations in the Oval Office and the Executive Office Building.

Huffman decided he would have to disturb the comfort of his own life and Nixon’s, saying something pointed about the need to confess. He knew it would be awkward and felt the temptation to flatter the president. Many ministers at the time attempted to use their access to Nixon to say something important and then quailed, choosing instead messages that were benign or fawning.

Huffman decided he had to speak up. He believed this was his responsibility as a minister and as someone with deep affection for Nixon.

“I really loved the man,” he told Christianity Today in 2024. “If I have a real, good friend—forget public life—if I’m his friend and he’s my friend, I hope he’s a friend enough to me to point out things, gentle, and help me be better. So that’s what I tried to do.”

Huffman told Rebozo that Nixon should “step before the nation and say exactly what he knew or didn’t know about the Watergate break-in and coverup, asking the forgiveness of God and the American people.” The businessman blocked him from speaking to the president directly. Then, when Nixon sat in a pew that Easter, Huffman preached on Acts 26 and how the Judean king Agrippa was judged for feigning ignorance.

Nixon fled the church without stopping to shake hands and retreated to Camp David. A year and a half later, he resigned in disgrace.

“Rebozo never forgave me, but Nixon knew I told the truth,” Huffman told CT. “Every human being is a human being. And every human being is afraid of being discovered.”

Huffman later served at First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh and then accepted a call to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in 1977, an ECO congregation in Newport Beach, California, where he pastored until his retirement in 2019. Huffman served on the board of Christianity Today from 1980 until 2015.

Former CT president Harold Smith recalled Huffman as an example of faithful leadership and a dear friend.

“John walked alongside me and the board during some of the hardest days to hit our ministry and publishing generally. His wisdom and well-timed words of encouragement got me through more than a few dark nights of soul, and kept the board ever focused on our vision and mission,” Smith said. “John consistently sought to walk and talk the twin watchwords of Christianity Today’s founder Billy Graham: conviction and love.”

Huffman was born to Dorothy Bricker Huffman and John Huffman Sr. on May 24, 1940. His father was an assistant minister at Park Street Church in Boston, where he worked under Harold J. Ockenga, one of the key institution-builders in American evangelicalism after World War II.

The elder Huffman, along with ministers Torrey Johnson and Billy Graham, helped found the evangelistic outreach ministry Youth for Christ the same year the junior Huffman was born.

Some of Huffman’s first memories included traveling with his father and his father’s friends on ministry trips and listening to evangelical leaders, including future CT editors Carl F. H. Henry, Harold Lindsell, and Kenneth Kantzer, talk at his parent’s table. In his self-published memoir, A Most Amazing Call, Huffman recalled being a child and walking on a beach in Massachusetts with Graham and hearing someone call Graham, then in his 20s, a “young whippersnapper” still “wet behind the ears.”

Huffman accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior at age five. At school, he told his teacher they should move his birthday celebration from May to September because that’s when Huffman had been born again.

The family moved to Wheaton, Illinois, when Huffman was a teenager and his father accepted the presidency of Winona Lake School of Theology in Winona Lake, Indiana. Much of the job involved traveling to raise funds from rich businessmen, including J. Howard Pew, “Colonel” Harland Sanders, Pierre du Pont, J. C. Penney, and Eli Lilly. The younger Huffman traveled with his father frequently and learned a lot, he told CT, about interacting with powerful people.

“You treat people with respect, but you don’t bow and scrape,” he said. “Never think a person is that much higher than yourself. We’re all equal.”

Huffman felt a strong draw to politics and dreamed of being an elected leader himself one day. He idolized the young, smart, scrappy, and aggressive vice president: Richard Nixon. When Huffman attended Wheaton College, he became president of the campus chapter of Young Republicans. His big project, as he later recalled, was bringing Nixon to campus to speak during the presidential campaign of 1960.

Nixon addressed a crowd of about 30,000, according to the Associated Press, and spoke about the importance of putting truth above private ambition.

Huffman had questions about how easy that was to do in politics. He felt the drive he saw in the vice president—an instinct to shoulder his way to victory—but was cautioned by a prominent evangelical to take care lest he waste his life or lose his soul.

Samuel Shoemaker, considered one of the best preachers of the era, warned him politics was a dangerous game with great temptations and it did not guarantee he’d accomplish anything of significance. Shoemaker, who was in his 60s at the time, urged young Huffman to consider following his father into ministry.

Huffman hesitated, even considering going into journalism and becoming a TV news anchor, but ultimately decided he was, in fact, called to ministry.

He attended Princeton Theological Seminary and took a position on the staff at Marble Collegiate Church, working under Norman Vincent Peale. Huffman met his future wife, Anne Mortenson, while traveling with Peale in Hong Kong. They were married in 1964, Huffman got ordained, and they accepted a call to the church in Florida.

It wasn’t his first choice, Huffman told CT. Or his second. Or third. But the congregation in Key Biscayne gave him a chance even though some members were concerned he was too young and others were worried he might be too liberal. He was, for his part, a bit disappointed.

“I thought I was heading into oblivion,” he said. “It was scary—and exciting.”

Huffman thrived in Florida, though, getting an opportunity to minister not only to the president but also to an island of young professionals who wanted to grow in their faith and a rotating cast of powerful people spending time on Florida’s beaches and golf courses.

He was careful to “just preach the gospel,” he said, regardless of who was in church, and to remember he was preaching to everyone, not just the most powerful person in the room.

“There may have been someone else in the congregation who needed to hear what I said more than the president,” he said. “You’re there to serve the Lord. That’s the important part. Let the chips fall where they may.”

The year after Huffman told Nixon to confess, he accepted a call to be pastor at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh, a prestigious pulpit at a respected and historic congregation. Decision magazine did a photo essay on the church while Huffman was there, naming it “one of the great churches in America.”

Huffman struggled a bit at the church, though, feeling caught in conflicts between denominational loyalists, transdenominational evangelicals, Presbyterian charismatics, and Reformed traditionalists. He fought with church trustees and had sometimes-weekly meetings with lay leaders who told him he was a disappointment.

After a few years, Huffman decided to accept a call to an unknown church in Newport Beach, California, known at the time as a sparsely populated sand spit with some rundown vacation houses.

People in Pittsburgh were shocked he would leave, Huffman later recalled. No minister in the church’s two-century history had ever left. Prominent evangelical leaders including Graham, Peale, and Ockenga warned him he would lose influence.

But Huffman prayed that he would be in the center of God’s will and accepted that the move was right. He ended up serving at that church from 1978 to 2009, when he retired. Then he joined St. Andrew’s as a member and continued to worship with the congregation until his death.

“I will never fully understand quite how it all happened,” he told CT. “But I can now say with full assurance that God knew precisely what he was doing.”

Huffman joined the board of Christianity Today shortly after moving to California. He helped steer the ministry into the digital age, backing president Harold Myra’s “print plus” plan to get CT online. He became chair of the board in 2006 and helped president Harold Smith manage CT’s response to the financial crisis of 2008, which “directly threatened” the existence of the magazine, Huffman recalled, and required the layoffs of 60 percent of the 165-person staff.

The ministry survived, and Huffman welcomed a new era of CT when Timothy Dalrymple became president in 2019. Huffman said he hoped CT would “remain strong” for years to come, “fulfilling for future generations the essence of the Billy Graham vision.”

His wife, Anne, and their daughters Carla and Janet survive him. The couple’s eldest, Suzanne, died in 1991 at age 23.

Correction: A previous version of this article said Huffman joined CT’s board in the late 1970s. According to his autobiography, he joined early in 1980.

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Culture

Is This Heaven? No, It’s Banana Ball

Josh Lindblom

What baseball’s most amusing team gets right about joy in sports.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash, Pexels

“Is this heaven?”
“No, it’s Iowa.”

That iconic exchange from the classic baseball film Field of Dreams captures something deeper than nostalgia—it hints at the possibility that sport, when rightly ordered, can brush up against the divine.

It taps into a deep longing we have for all the wrong in this world to be made right, including every field or court, pool or pitch. And maybe, just maybe, the Savannah Bananas are giving us a glimpse of part of the picture.

Exhibitions by the popular team—in sold-out professional stadiums or viral social media clips—are joyful. Fans dance in the stands, batters perform choreographed walk-ups, pitchers throw trick pitches, and kids run on the field like they belong there.

The Bananas are still highly skilled athletes, and their approach has clearly captured fans. Under owner Jesse Cole, the Bananas grew to a regional favorite with a massive waiting list, then to a national phenomenon, selling out major league ballparks on their national tour. The team played before their biggest crowd ever—81,000—at Clemson University this year.

With the lip-synching players and rump-shaking umpires, you could write Banana Ball off as a gimmick. I did at first. But then I realized that the Savannah Bananas weren’t out to replace the MLB. They’re reframing the game to engage more fans.

“Our goal is to spread joy and have fun. We want people to go home saying that they saw something that they have never seen before on a baseball field,” said Bill LeRoy, catcher, emcee, and captain for the Bananas. “We care so much about our fan’s experience and we think less about ourselves.”

Caring that fans feel joy, feel seen, and believe they belong: that’s not just good entertainment—that’s kingdom work.

Any good theology of sport begins in creation. When athletes run, jump, swing, or throw, they express something inherently human: bodies made for movement, minds made for strategy, hearts made for relationship and joy. Their activity reflects the delight of a Creator who watched his world unfold and called it “very good.”

But with the Fall, what God designed as a gift became an idol, and our games began to reveal our brokenness as much as our brilliance.

We commodify athletes, elevate winning above character, and measure value in stats and salaries. Youth sports became pipelines of pressure. Athletes became performers first and people second. What was meant to be joyful and relational became tied to ego, identity, and worth.

The good news is that God did not leave his world—or sport—broken. Through Jesus, he began his work of redemption, not just saving souls but renewing all of creation. The joy of play, the beauty of competition, and the relationships forged in sport are not meaningless distractions; they’re echoes of Eden and previews of restoration.

Seen through this lens, sport becomes a classroom of formation. Plenty of us have seen hints of God’s redemptive work in traditional sports: a coach calling out potential in a young player, a team rallying around a discouraged teammate, or an athlete competing with integrity.

I see it all over the Savannah Bananas, and Adam Wainwright, St. Louis Cardinals legend and an outspoken Christian, did too when he showed up as a guest pitcher for Savannah in July, when they turned Busch Stadium from red to banana yellow for two sold-out games.

Wainwright walked the field with Cole, the owner, beforehand. “He was looking up into the upper deck trying to figure out how to get players up there during the game so that every fan who attended felt important,” Wainwright said. “What I took away from the experience … was their overall love of baseball and their genuine desire to be great entertainers for the fans.”

At Banana games, joy is tangible and contagious. It points to the kind of unburdened life Jesus promises (John 10:10), where people live free from the relentless scorekeeping of a broken world. One fan told me after attending a game, “I haven’t laughed that much in years, and it was just a baseball game. Or maybe not ‘just’ a baseball game.”

Another fan described a young boy—maybe eight years old—walking out of the stadium holding his dad’s hand, still buzzing from running the bases with the team. He looked up and said, “Dad, I want to play baseball like that, where everyone’s smiling.” That’s not just a great fan experience; that’s formation. That’s a picture of sport shaping the heart for joy rather than fear.

The Bananas blur the lines between players and fans, creating a shared experience of belonging—kids running on the field, fans dancing with players, strangers celebrating together. This is a picture of biblical fellowship (Acts 2:42–47), where joy and belonging are shared, not earned, and where every person feels they have a place.

The players remind us that competition, at its best, is about partnership, not punishment. It’s about calling out excellence in one another, celebrating effort, and recognizing that even an opponent is a fellow image-bearer who can make you better.

When competition means domination or proving worth at someone else’s expense, it distorts the human heart. But if we understand competition as mutual striving together to become what we’ve been created to be, then opponents are not enemies but partners in growth. Iron sharpening iron (Prov. 27:17) isn’t about hostility—it’s about mutual development, about calling one another to higher excellence and deeper character.

It shouldn’t surprise us that this team includes plenty of outspoken Christians, players who see their platform as more than performance. They invest relationally, share their faith, and embody the good news that worth isn’t defined by stats or contracts but by grace (Eph. 2:8-9).

“For so long in my career, all I cared about was my stats and winning/losing. Baseball was my idol, where I found my identity, and where my worth came from,” said LeRoy, whose approach changed when he joined the team eight years ago after playing college baseball in Georgia.

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A post shared by Bill LeRoy (@bill_leroy)

Learning to put other people first helped him move on quicker from his failures and focus more on Jesus. LeRoy got out of his comfort zone to take the mic, sing, and dance. “I had no plan of ever having these specific skills or this job,” he said. “I owe everything to God.”

Backflipping outfielder RobertAnthony Cruz posts pre-game prayers, holds team Bible studies, and organizes worship nights outside the Savannah stadium. The team’s high-energy singalong, dance-along soundtrack includes Forrest Frank’s trendy “Your Way Is Better” and Elevation Worship’s “Praise.”

They point beyond the fun of the game to the deeper hope found in Christ. Another player summed it up: “We want people to know they’re loved—not because they bought a ticket, but because they matter.”

The Savannah Bananas, for all their intentional focus on the joy of the fans, remind us that sport is about a bigger story. The Bible tells the story of a God redeeming every corner of creation, and sport is not outside of his concern. It is one of the arenas where his renewal takes shape.

We can expect more from sports. Every whistle blown, every base touched, every cheer from the stands can echo something eternal when rooted in love and joy.

What if success was measured by joy and growth, not just wins? What if parents and coaches helped kids love the game—and each other—well? What if athletes stepped on the field not to prove their worth but to live from it, free to create, compete, and connect as image bearers of God?

Josh Lindblom played professional baseball for 15 years. A father of four with a master’s in biblical studies, he currently serves through Pro Athletes Outreach and Congruency, helping players and leaders align with their purpose.

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Church Life

The Pastor Who Rescues People from Japan’s ‘Suicide Cliff’

Kazusa Okaya in Shirahama, Japan

Yoichi Fujiyabu has spent three decades sharing God’s love to people who want to end their lives.

The Sandanbeki cliff in Shirahama, Japan.

WikiMedia Commons

Most people visit Shirahama, a resort town along Japan’s southern coast, for its sandy beaches and restorative onsens (hot springs). But some travel there because they want to die.

At a church close to Shirahama Beach, the piercing ring of a phone slices through the stillness of the night. “Moshi moshi?” Yoichi Fujiyabu answers. On the other end, a trembling voice whispers in Japanese: “Please … help.” Fujiyabu grabs his keys, jumps into his car, and speeds into the night. His destination: Sandanbeki, a majestic cliff overlooking Shirahama’s shores. It’s also one of Japan’s most infamous suicide spots.

The headlights cut through the suffocating darkness. There, a lone figure emerges in the beam. Fujiyabu steps out of the car. The ground crunches beneath his feet as he walks toward a shadow before him.

This scene is from the 2019 documentary The Pastor and the Cliff of Life and is one that Fujiyabu, the pastor of Shirahama Baptist Christ Church, reenacts over and over again, often in the wee hours of the night.

For nearly three decades, Fujiyabu has stood on the frontlines of suicide prevention in Shirahama. To date, he has stopped more than 1,100 people—he records the details of every person he has rescued—from taking their lives at Sandanbeki.

Sandanbeki is a five-minute drive from the center of town. Because the cliff is nearly 200 feet high and the ocean below it has a strong current, it is a popular destination for people wanting to die by suicide, as bodies are often swept away without a trace.

“It’s such a beautiful place, which makes the contrast even more striking,” Fujiyabu said as he guided me toward the windswept cliff on a hot day in late August. A breeze whipped in from the sea as sunlight danced upon the waves. Everything looked like a picture-perfect postcard until my eyes landed on a solitary stone monument, erected in memory of those who died by suicide at Sandanbeki.

As I walked toward the cliff with Fujiyabu, we came across a public phone booth. Most of these booths have vanished across Japan, but the town has kept this one operational so desperate people can call the Shirahama Rescue Network (SRN), a nonprofit run by Fujiyabu and his church.

Outside the booth, a large sign bears the words Telephone of Life along with a paraphrase of Isaiah 43:4: “You are precious and honored in my sight. I love you.” Under it, bold letters plead, “Please call us before you make [this] important decision.” The SRN hotline is the only number listed on the sign. Fujiyabu and his team have placed five of these signs in the vicinity, in hopes that people will reach out before deciding to end their lives. Inside the booth, a cross adorned with flowers hangs above a worn paperback Japanese Bible and a bright green telephone.

As we drew closer to the cliff’s edge, Fujiyabu pointed to several sites where people had jumped and others where he had pulled them back from the brink. Whenever he gets a call—about three to five times every month—and arrives at the cliff, his first task is to locate the caller. Once he does that, he tries to guide the person into the backseat of his car, away from the cliff’s edge, and listens to his or her story.

The public phone booth at the Sandanbeki cliff. Image courtesy of Kazusa Okaya.

These encounters are rarely straightforward. Some reject his presence outright or are hostile toward him once they are inside his car, often because they waver in deciding whether to take their own lives.

In such moments, Fujiyabu often drives slowly through the town, circling its streets until the person calms down and feels safe. Only then does he bring people to his house or to a dormitory run by SRN, as they have nowhere else to go after cutting ties with family members, leaving their jobs, and selling all their possessions.

Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, 53-year-old Fujiyabu cuts an athletic figure. His easy smile gives him an almost-boyish look. Yet behind his childlike grin lies a quiet determination and an unmistakable strength of will.

Fujiyabu first stepped into the Shirahama Baptist Christ Church as a young boy because a girl had invited him to attend a service. “It was an impure motive, just like most kids,” he recalled. As he continued attending church, he slowly began to understand the love of God. By the time he was 10 or 11, he became conscious of his faith in Christ.

He also developed a deep interest in relief work after reading the children’s novel Harp of Burma, which chronicles the story of a Japanese soldier who decides to stay and devote his life to tending the dead in Burma (Myanmar).

In elementary school, he tried to raise money for refugees living in Ethiopia and Cambodia. After months of effort, he managed to collect only 1,000 yen (around $7 USD), leaving him feeling powerless. Then, at a church summer camp when Fujiyabu was in sixth grade, his pastor preached on Acts 3. In the passage, Peter tells a beggar, “Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you” (v. 6).

“That struck me,” Fujiyabu said. “I realized that even if I didn’t have much to give, I could share the gospel.”

This moment planted the seed of Fujiyabu’s calling: to bring Christ’s message of hope to those in dire need. In many ways, this calling was also a natural outcome of his time in the Shirahama church community. He had grown up witnessing his predecessor, Taro Emi, build a suicide-prevention ministry at church. Emi started rescue operations at Sandanbeki in 1979, decades before Fujiyabu took on the role of pastor.

Fujiyabu recalled encountering people whom Emi had taken under his care. Once, he saw an unfamiliar woman weeping in church. Another time, Emi suddenly appeared with a small child who stayed with him for several months.

“I became a Christian because I saw the consistency between the gospel message preached at church and the way pastor Emi lived out his faith,” Fujiyabu said. “I thought, God’s love is real, and it is here.”

Shirahama Baptist Christ Church. Image courtesy of Kazusa Okaya.

As he studied pastoral ministry at Tokyo Christian University—Japan’s only evangelical higher education institution—Fujiyabu never intended to return to his hometown congregation. That changed when Emi asked him to return to pastor the Shirahama church. He offered a salary of 50,000 yen ($330 USD) each month, an amount way below the poverty line in Japan.

Fujiyabu thought Emi was testing him to see if he was up for the task. “But when I started working, I realized [Emi] was serious,” Fujiyabu said. “That really was our monthly salary. That really taught us to trust in the Lord’s provision.”

Fujiyabu began as Shirahama Baptist Christ Church’s associate pastor in 1996 and took on the senior pastor role three years later. At the time, the church was barely hanging on, as it only had roughly ten weekly worshipers.

Today, the church has more than 50 regular members, including people who have moved to Shirahama from around the world for work. Around 20 of them are people whom SRN has rescued from Sandanbeki.

At first, the church faced numerous conflicts between its old-timers and people rescued from the cliff, who tended to struggle with gambling or porn addictions, alcoholism, or mental health challenges. Items in the church would break or go missing. Some believers began saying they did not want to worship with these newcomers. Yet Fujiyabu repeatedly told them the church is a place for imperfect sinners and they needed to help each other in their weaknesses.

“I want my church to be like a zoo,” he said, adding that the kingdom of God isn’t tidy or polished.

Fujiyabu’s pastoral work extends far beyond Sunday services and dramatic late-night rescues at Sandanbeki. Early in his ministry, he realized that rescuing people from the cliff and providing temporary shelter was not enough, and he wanted to offer more concrete ways to cultivate individual and communal healing.

Besides running the dormitory, SRN also operates an array of businesses in town. There’s a takeout restaurant called Machinaka Kitchen, a company retreat center, a cleaning service, a farm, and more. These workplaces provide training and equipping for people rescued from Sandanbeki and generate financial income for the ministry.

The interior of Machinaka Kitchen. Image courtesy of Kazusa Okaya.

Fujiyabu also wants to help young people avoid seeing suicide as an option to take when they face challenges in life. The church offers an afterschool educational program and a distance-learning high school for those who drop out. Two years ago, they launched Noko Noko, a government-backed parenting center on the second floor of Machinaka Kitchen, to offer counseling for families in crisis.

Most of the infrastructure SRN and the church utilize comes at little cost. Fellow Christians and the local government rallied to support Fujiyabu’s ministry by donating building space or offering heavily subsidized rents.

Among SRN’s mostly Christian staff is Ching Khan Nem, a believer from Manipur, India. Nem first came to Japan to study English at Tokyo Christian University. In 2019, she visited the Shirahama church as part of a mission trip and had lunch with various people living at SRN’s dormitory. The atmosphere there felt very tense, and many of the people she dined with seemed “lifeless,” Nem said. “I felt deeply convicted that I wanted to serve here [and] bring joy and warmth into the lives of people in despair,” she added.

A year later, Fujiyabu invited Nem to work at SRN. Today, Nem is involved in multiple projects, including the distance-learning high school, an English-language program she helped start, the church’s summer camp, and Machinaka Kitchen.

“Fujiyabu pours his life into ministry and is willing to tirelessly work every single day for it,” Nem said of her experience working with the pastor. “People also criticize him for overwork, but that is just who he is.”

Fujiyabu isn’t fazed by others’ remarks about his ministry and work ethic. “People think I’m reckless because I just do what I believe is right, whether it seems plausible or not,” he said. “I’ve simply continued to do what God called me to do—listening to the needs of the town and its people.”

Japan’s suicide rate is the highest among seven developed countries, according to a 2018 World Health Organization report. While overall suicides in the country have declined for several years, numbers remain high, with more than 20,000 deaths annually. Youth suicide rates are especially notable: Last year, suicides by children and teenagers reached an all-time high with 527 recorded deaths.

Long working hours, social isolation, pressures in school, and stigmas surrounding mental health challenges are some of the oft-cited reasons for the East Asian country’s high suicide rate. Shame is another contributing factor, as Japanese culture implies that people should avoid becoming a meiwaku, or a burden to others. Family members often treat a person’s struggles, like job loss or crippling debt, as deeply shameful. Such stigma can drive some people to want to vanish from society altogether.

Evangelical churches in Japan have taken little substantive action in addressing the issue of suicide. Many hold the view that engagement in social work is characteristic of liberal Christianity, a criticism that Fujiyabu himself has faced from fellow believers and missionaries. In his view, though, the most pressing need for the gospel in Shirahama is how it can address the problem of suicide.

Most people in Japan rarely turn to the church when they need help, Fujiyabu lamented as we wound through Shirahama’s streets. “The church is irrelevant,” he said. “I wanted to change that. I wanted the church to be a place that mattered to the town.”

At Shirahama town hall, Fujiyabu introduced me to Itsuka Kiyomiya, the only social worker who oversees psychiatric health in its 21,000-strong population. “We consider SRN a vital social asset,” she said. “Even when the police find someone near the cliff, all they can do is provide money or temporary shelter. That’s why SRN’s work is invaluable.”

The partnership between town hall and SRN runs both ways. The authorities call the nonprofit when someone needs a place to stay long-term. In turn, SRN relies on Kiyomiya to connect people with the help or services they need, like unemployment benefits.

Yet the church and the town have differing perspectives on what restoration and healing look like. Many people eventually leave the church after they feel better, which Kiyomiya calls “true independence,” as people “no longer need to depend on the church.”

Fujiyabu smiled but disagreed: “I’m not too happy about that. I want them to remain, to be part of the church even after they’ve recovered.”

Fujiyabu recalled a recent example of what growth and healing in a Christian context look like. About three years ago, a man in his 40s was at a bar drinking and pouring out his troubles to the bartender when the latter responded, “You should try the church. There will be people there who will help you.”

The man, who had no prior Christian connections, went to Fujiyabu’s church, where the community welcomed him and persistently walked with him through his struggles. He started reading the Bible every day and became immersed in church fellowship. Today, he is one of the church’s newest baptized members.

Not every Sandanbeki rescue has had a positive outcome, however.

In 2000, Fujiyabu took in a frail young man who seemed determined to rebuild his life. Despite Fujiyabu’s caution against moving too quickly, the man insisted on finding work and soon secured a job. At first, Fujiyabu was hopeful, as the young man seemed to be managing well. But within weeks, the man started experiencing conflicts in his workplace and told Fujiyabu he wanted to quit his job. Fujiyabu urged him to persevere.

“That was when our relationship broke,” Fujiyabu said. “He felt I wasn’t understanding him.” The young man eventually resigned from his job and told the pastor he was returning to live with his parents.

Two months later, the police called Fujiyabu. They had discovered a man’s body with the church’s business card in his pant pocket. The young man had not gone back to his family but instead had ended his life.

The news devastated Fujiyabu. “It was my mistake,” he said quietly. He felt he had broken the young man’s trust by being too harsh toward him. For months, Fujiyabu questioned whether he could continue in ministry. “I realized that no matter how much time and effort you give, a person can still choose to end their life,” he said. “You cannot make that ultimate decision for them.”

It was Fujiyabu’s wife, Ayumi, who helped him carry on. The couple met at university, and Ayumi currently helps to run SRN’s afterschool education program and Machinaka Kitchen.

Yoichi Fujiyabu and his wife Ayumi. Image courtesy of Kang Tu-kyŏng.

In their early years of ministry, late-night calls from Sandanbeki would often interrupt family dinners. The Fujiyabus’ two children had to stay silent until the calls ended, and Ayumi eventually had to ask Fujiyabu to bring the phone into another room.

The family also had to learn how to live with strangers. Before SRN established the dormitory, everyone lived together at the church. The Fujiyabus would share meals with the people rescued from Sandanbeki, who would later sleep in the church hall or other rooms in the building.

Integrating family and ministry life is important to Ayumi. “I believe God created each individual, and within his plan he has sent them to our church,” she said. “That perspective makes all the difference.” As Fujiyabu wrestled with what next steps to take after learning of the young man’s suicide, Ayumi told him, “I have made up my mind. I will dedicate myself to this ministry.” Her determination became his turning point.

The people whom SRN rescues from the cliff currently live together in a church-owned dormitory a five-minute walk from the church. Although the number of guests fluctuates, around ten people live there for several months or years in some cases. They follow a fixed schedule that Fujiyabu hopes will train them to lead a disciplined lifestyle in preparation to reenter society.

Every day, residents start their day at 6 a.m. by praying in chapel, then spend the rest of the day cleaning, preparing food, and working in various SRN-owned services such as Machinaka Kitchen.

In the evening, each person writes a self-reflection in a notebook, which Fujiyabu reads and comments on. In his conversations with the people he has rescued, he focuses on talking about God’s forgiveness, grace, and mercy. “The key to change is to understand that God loves them,” he said.

As my day with Fujiyabu drew to a close, I dined with seven people—one woman and six men—currently living at the dormitory. Shimohira, a soft-spoken man in his mid-30s, shared about his past candidly with me. CT agreed to use only his last name, as cultural stigma around suicide persists in Japan.

Shimohira had spent years running from his failures and weaknesses and felt caught up in a relentless cycle of negative thoughts that pointed to only one escape: death. After Fujiyabu and his team pulled him from the cliff’s edge at Sandanbeki, he struggled to adapt to the strict routine of dormitory life. He frequently clashed with his roommates and bristled at Fujiyabu’s criticism of his shortcomings.

Over time, something changed within him. “I began to face my weakness[es],” Shimohira told me. “I started bringing my pain not to myself, not to others, but to God.”

Church was foreign to him, so at first he sat disengaged through morning prayers and Sunday services. Gradually, the sermons and worship songs began to speak to him. Fujiyabu baptized him early this year, and he now sings in the church choir.

“I began to see that God loved me even though I am weak,” Shimohira said. “I don’t know whether it will be this church or another, but I want to spread the work that I am doing here right now.”

The future of Shirahama Baptist Christ Church and SRN, however, now feels uncertain. Five years ago, Fujiyabu was diagnosed with a rare form of abdominal cancer. The chemotherapy he received caused debilitating side effects like chronic kidney failure. Some days, the pain is so great that Fujiyabu is unable to rise from his bed. His illness has forced him to make difficult choices, such as canceling the kids’ summer program.

Fujiyabu refuses to give in to despair. He wants to continue responding to Jesus’ love and encouraging people to know and believe in Christ. “I am hopeful because ultimately it’s not about me or the organization,” he said. “It’s about God.”

- More from Kazusa Okaya

Culture

An Ode to the Long Season

Marvin Olasky

Why fans love a game designed to break their hearts.

Brayan Rocchio and manager Stephen Vogt of the Cleveland Guardians celebrates Rocchio's walk off three-run home run to defeat the Texas Rangers 9-8 in ten innings and win the National League central division on the final day of the regular season.

Nick Cammett / Getty Images

Major League Baseball, what’s not to love?

A lot of people don’t love it, and for good reason. Some batters swing for home runs, even with two strikes, instead of trying to make contact and advance a runner. Some pitchers are just throwers, not artists painting the strike zone. Some $30 million players are whiners. Besides, football has more smashups, basketball a constant flow.

And yet, Major League Baseball’s regular season, with its relentless, day-after-day 162-game pace, is a test of character. That’s particularly true at season’s end, where after 161 games some playoff spots depended on the last day’s results: In the American League, for example, Sunday’s games made the Toronto Blue Jays champions of the east and the Cleveland Guardians winners of the central division.

To get another sense of closeness at the edge in baseball as compared to other sports, in the American League the best team won only 8 percent more games than the sixth and last team to make the playoffs, and 40 percent more than the worst team in the league. In the National Football League, by comparison, the best team won 40 percent more games than the lowest team to make the playoffs, and 367 percent more than the worst team in the league.

The song that still chokes me up at the end of each NCAA basketball tournament, “One Shining Moment,” is about one kind of tension:

The ball is tipped,
And there you are.
You’re running for your life. …
Time is short,
And the road is long.
In the blinking of an eye,
Ah, that moment’s gone.

But the MLB season, which started at the end of March, is not short: six months with “games” every day.

Little League events should be games. MLB contests are not. Savannah Bananas exhibitions are fun like an annual trip to the circus, but the season that just concluded required long diligence in the same direction. Paul thought lengthy competition was worth remembering. He wrote to Timothy about his hard season: “I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near.I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:6–7).

Two millennia later, two writers captured this sense of perseverance and persevered themselves. Roger Angell wrote at The New Yorker for over 70 years and died at age 101 in 2022. Bart Giamatti left the presidency of Yale University and became MLB’s commissioner in 1989 but served only five months. He died of a heart attack at age 51, eight days after banishing Pete Rose from baseball for gambling.

Sin affects sport as it does everything else, yet Angell wrote this in The Summer Game: Baseball “requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge. … Baseball’s clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher’s windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch.”

Is that tension bad, and should we shun the result: someone wins, someone loses? Paul drew from earthly experience when he wrote to the Corinthians, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize” (1 Cor. 9:24). A baseball season is not spiritual life or death, but it’s more than entertainment, for as Giamatti wrote to the Americans, “Winning is not everything but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.”

For those with a strong spirit, baseball is full of frustration. By “character” I don’t mean the ability to come up big in the clutch, exciting though that is. It’s more a batter not going small when he hits a line drive—but directly at a fielder.

Character is dealing with disappointment. Baseball is the sport that best reflects a fallen world in which a person can do what’s right—and life goes wrong. As Giamatti wrote, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”

And when a fielder makes an error? Angell wrote, “What really makes baseball so hard is [its] retributive capacity for disaster if the smallest thing is done wrong, and the invisible presence of defeat that attends every game.” Character is also bravely standing up when a small thing done wrong becomes crushing.

Angell described a postgame television close-up of a future Hall of Famer after the Boston Red Sox were one strike away from winning the 1986 World Series, then failed: “Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face …. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry.”

The American League and National League playoffs begin Tuesday.

- More from Marvin Olasky

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