Like the Cedars of Lebanon: Baptists Honored for Lifelong Service

Jayson Casper

Recognized for the promotion of women’s rights and inclusive education, two leading figures relate civil war struggles and the challenge of special needs.

Mona Khauli (left) and Nabil Costa (right)

Edits by Christianity Today / Source Image: Courtesy of Nabil Costa / Créel / Baptist World Alliance

Lebanese Baptists have reason to be proud. This month, two senior members of their community, Mona Khauli and Nabil Costa, were recognized for their faith-based work on behalf of their nation.

Mona Khauli, the 85-year-old executive director of the national Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), was honored by the Baptist World Alliance (BWA) for her human rights work.

“Honor comes from God,” she said. “Having been in his service all these years, I do not need any from people.” She did, however, note her acceptance may be useful to inspire others.

Costa, general secretary of the Association of Evangelical Schools in Lebanon (AESL), was locally recognized with the inaugural Créel Award as one of the top luminaries hailing from his nation’s southern region for pioneering leadership in special needs education.

“As a son of Maghdoucheh, I am pleased to be honored here,” he said of his Greek Catholic agricultural village, located five miles southeast of Sidon, which hosted the ceremony. “But our victory comes only from the Lord.”

Khauli experienced such triumph firsthand amid constant loss due to the civil war.

Assuming her role in 1977 following many years of volunteering, Khauli was immediately plunged into the reality of ongoing bombardment in Muslim-dominated West Beirut. So she turned the YWCA headquarters into a women’s hostel, receiving displaced Lebanese of all religious confessions.

The Syrian general occupying their neighborhood assigned his men to mount a missile launcher on YWCA’s strategically-placed rooftop. Khauli rushed to confront him. We have women here, she told him. Would you accept men running through the quarters of your mother and sister?

Anxious the whole time, she had to think on her feet when the general mentioned the Muslims among them. Change the name of your organization, he said. How can Christians oversee Muslims?

Khauli refused, setting a pattern of fidelity to the YWCA’s faith foundations, later repeated in peacetime.

“You are under the authority of your president, who trusts you because you serve Syria,” she told the general. “We are under the authority of Christ, and therefore we serve everyone in his name.”

Before the war, Khauli’s predecessor had helped establish Lebanon’s Young Women’s Muslim Association, under Islamic leadership. The Christian version developed a reputation for vocational training, offering programs for women’s employment in government and the banking sector.

The war caused the YWCA to shift their focus from work to relief. Khauli negotiated with militia leaders to ensure neighborhood bread distribution and street cleaning. But vocational training became more important than ever, as war-widowed women were forced to open shops to care for their families.

Mona Khauli (center) receiving the human rights award from Baptist World Alliance.

Khauli navigated narrow alleyways and landmine-laden underpasses, just to get safely to work each day.

“We worked under shelling, sniping, and kidnapping,” she said, noting how her husband endured one day of the latter. “But we maintained the Christian faith, impulse, and motto of the original YWCA.”

After the war ended in 1990, Khauli led an initiative—called Come, Let Us Rebuild—to expand income-generating projects and promote women’s leadership in society. In 1997, the YWCA led training sessions for female candidates in the municipal elections, and a few years later assisted those running for parliament.

Working with business leaders and multiple first ladies of Lebanon, Khauli put up billboards on the streets, raising awareness about women’s rights and domestic violence. And in 2004, the YWCA opened the first shelter for abused women and children.

While overseeing 800 multi-faith volunteers in nine regional associations, Khauli and her fellow executives resisted the international YWCA trend to water down the confession of faith. When our husbands and sons are dying in war, she told multiple symposiums, we don’t have time to question the fatherhood of God—we need him for divine protection.

It wasn’t long before Muslim women wanted to partner in leadership with YWCA’s good work of serving all communities—including the aunt of the prime minister. Though completely different in context, Khauli’s answer reflected the same conviction with which she spoke to the general. Our Christian mission guarantees we will not be political, she said of the organization’s place in Lebanon’s sectarian system. We will not impose our faith on you, and you can trust us since we serve in the spirit of Christ.

Lebanon’s Protestant churches drew most of their members from the historic Catholic and Orthodox denominations. Once distrusted similarly, Khauli said the YWCA today has the Maronite patriarch, Lebanon’s foremost Christian cleric, as one of its strongest supporters. But far from being just a social organization, several members told her their faith has been strengthened by her commitment.

The YWCA leadership starts all meetings with prayer and reflective meditation. And although a Muslim-background Christian is part of the leadership in the northern, Sunni-majority city of Tripoli, any direct proselytizing is left to the churches.

“If you stand up for your faith,” Khauli said, “you pass it on through your life.”

This includes her own community. Khauli spoke of confrontations with “chauvinist Baptist leaders” in her work to ensure that women’s voices are heard in congregational affairs. She was only the second woman to serve as a deconess in her home church in Beirut, but by the completion of her tenure as president of the Lebanese Baptist Women’s Union in the late 1970s, she won permanent representation for her post in the national Baptist convention.

By 1995, she was elected vice president of the BWA, the first Middle Eastern woman to occupy that role. And on July 4, in recognition of her lifetime of service, the BWA awarded her the Denton and Janice Lotz Human Rights Award at the annual gathering in Norway.

“This honor is an uplifting fulfillment of the promise in Psalm 92:12,” Khauli told delegates. “The righteous … shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon, they shall still bear fruit in old age, to declare that the Lord is upright.”

During the conference the BWA launched the Global Baptist Mission Network to coordinate work among 17 national associations and their 7,000 missionaries. Lebanon is an inaugural member.

The BWA also welcomed new partners from Niger and the Palestinian territories, and established new membership categories in aid work, missions, and education. And the first organization recognized in the aid category is the Lebanese Society for Educational and Social Development (LSESD), with AESL’s Costa as CEO.

“Inclusive education is restoring the value of evangelicals in Lebanon,” said Costa, “just as the missionaries did a century ago.”

In the 19th century, Western Protestants came to Beirut in the then-Ottoman Empire province of Syria, and focused on education—including the groundbreaking formal instruction of girls. The American University of Beirut was founded in 1866, and the first Baptist church was planted in 1895. Today, though evangelicals represent only one percent of the population, the AESL serves 20,000 multifaith students in 35 affiliated schools.

Lebanese minister of social affairs, Hector Hajjar (left), presents Nabil Costa (right) with the Créel award.

In 1998, American Baptist missionaries handed over Arab Baptist Theological Seminary, Beirut Baptist School, and Baptist Publications to local leadership, who formed LSESD as its umbrella entity. Under Costa’s leadership, LSESD later added a youth ministry wing that now focuses on outreach, as well as Middle East Revive and Thrive (MERATH) for disaster relief and community development.

In September, LSESD will celebrate its 25th anniversary.

But it was the SKILD Center (Smart Kids with Individual Learning Differences), founded in 2011, that won him the Créel Award—created to inspire hope by highlighting the regional and often small-town origins of nationally influential leaders. Costa believes that special needs education—as a voice for the voiceless—is helping evangelicals move out from the fringes of society.

“Individuals who actively work towards the betterment of marginalized groups are truly rare,” said Joelle Bou Younes, founder of Créel, a media and event planning company. “They should be appreciated for their selflessness and dedication.”

Under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Tourism, the Maghdoucheh presentation followed a similar event in Tripoli that honored Lebanese from the north. Regional celebrations are also planned for Mount Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Other southern recipients included the former director of general security, business and media leaders, an internationally celebrated violinist, and the mayor of Sidon, who was educated in an AESL-affiliated evangelical school.

Costa received his award from the minister of social affairs, and honored in testimony by the president of Notre Dame University–Louaize (NDU). In partnership with SKILD, in 2019 it became the first Lebanese collage to offer a study program for those with special needs.

Prior to this in 2013, Costa coordinated with the Ministry of Education and the British Council to launch Lebanon’s National Day for Students with Learning Difficulties. The same year, SKILD partnered with the Sunni Makassid school system to establish its special needs department. Today the country has 30 public and 50 private schools with inclusive education. This includes two AESL institutions, and at LSESD’s Beirut Baptist School, over 10 percent of the 1,400-member student body suffer some form of learning disability.

“I am simply an ambassador for the Lord,” said Costa. “God recognizes this, but he also gave us grace in the eyes of those around us.”

He owes it all to his son.

At age 5, Christopher Costa could not sit still in class. Medicine controlled his behavior but only made him sleepy. The family sent him to a specialized school, but discovered it was not equipped to educate the students.

Few were. Only after travel to the United States did Christopher receive a proper diagnosis to address his learning difference. Upon the family’s return to Lebanon, Costa founded SKILD and thereafter enrolled his son in an Orthodox school, then one of the few with professionally trained caregivers.

Last month, Christopher graduated from NDU.

“God created us all in his image,” said Costa. “So we treat these students as brothers and sisters.”

Meanwhile, Lebanon continues in the throes of economic depression, and may soon be without a central bank chief. The country already has no president, a caretaker prime minister, and a rapidly emigrating population. There is little hope to latch onto.

In the midst of such suffering, the BWA honored Mona Khauli, a woman of perseverance. And whereas the south of Lebanon is viewed most often through the lens of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, Créel showcased Nabil Costa’s compassionate ministry that transcends sectarian boundaries.

“Our work for the Lord is not in vain,” he said, quoting I Corinthians 15:58, moving seamlessly to the forward vision of Nehemiah 2:20. “The God of heaven will give us success. We his servants will start rebuilding.”

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Inkwell

An exercise in longing

Kate Millar

Photography by Sylvia Bartyzel

Through longing He extends the soul, by extending He makes room in it… So let us long, because we are to be filled…That is our life, to be exercised by longing. — Saint Augustine

I cried once into my soup, thinking
of the Jerusalem cowslip leaves,
pale blotches in the green, a teardrop
trail of some planting god––was that so?

(Groan at these my infantile words, always
coming out more surface than I want

I want for nothing. My steps don’t make
these moors materialize. My gaze doesn’t create
the sunset remnant, filament, fine gold string,
a strand of hair placed on the moorland crest.

((By someone? I ask for more than this
sight: imprints left in snow gathering dirt

Don’t give me the whole truth,

I am dust, deaf to the canticle sounds
on the wind. This impervious heart,
the dark churned muck in January
formed below the iron gate of Inverleith park.

(((What do I do with all this wanting?
The droplets, they are soundless as they fall

I once drove in the fog at night,
car headlights casting cataracts across
the road. I felt I could have stopped the engine
and the darkness would erase me peacefully.

((((A ritual attempt: I light a match and hold it
to my face. Fire, as old as doubt, old as searching

Don’t give me the sea for my thirst,

I search the dark, in bed, thinking
of the rocks forming in my trapezius,
the boundaryless black erasing my childhood
bedroom walls, my post-it note prayers.

(((((Greedy for revelation––maybe someone sees
that in me. That it is my detriment

I like to think that Abraham felt this once
when he stood on empty ground, thinking
of Isaac and that voice he thought he heard
of sacrifice, south winds sounding the same as north.

((((((Did Abraham feel this when he remembered walking
with God beneath the lapis lazuli sky, stars like scattered silt?

don’t give me the sky when I ask for light.

Kate Millar is a 22-year-old poet from Edinburgh, Scotland. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School in New York City. She was the Principal’s Scholar and Lawson Memorial Prize winner at The University of St Andrews for her studies in English literature. Her writing has appeared in A New Ulster and Lucent Dreaming.

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Theology

In Indonesia, Light Skin is Prized. Some Christians Are Pushing Back.

Mellie Cynthia

Despite entrenched colorism in society, believers show how the Bible redefines a woman’s self-worth.

A woman walks past a promotional billboard at a shopping mall in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Jewel Samad / Getty

Growing up on the Indonesian island of Java, Happy Natalisa remembers being mocked for her dark complexion. Her classmates called her si hitam (black) and orang Papua because her father was Papuan, an ethnic group hailing from Indonesia’s easternmost province in Western New Guinea.

Her appearance affected how she served in the church. She preferred to be behind the scenes, choosing to join the prayer ministry rather than becoming a worship leader. Later, she realized this was caused by “seeds of insecurity.”

“I felt sad and even questioned God why I was born in Java, which caused trauma in my teenage life,” said Natalisa. She yearned for lighter skin. It was only through the help of her college discipleship group years later that she was finally able to accept her skin color and find her self-worth in God’s view of her. Still, the 28-year-old’s daily skincare routine includes a tiny pink bottle of face serum that promises a brighter, lighter complexion by protecting her skin from the harsh exposure to Indonesia’s tropical sun. Her friends now compliment her on her “radiant” skin, Natalisa says with a beam.

Like in many countries globally, skin-lightening products are wildly popular among Indonesian women, as most consider “bright and glowing skin” to be the epitome of beauty. Skincare regimens that include creams, lotions, treatments, or pills—some of which have been found harmful and ineffective—have blossomed into a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. In Indonesia, the skincare market is projected to reach nearly $19 million by 2030.

With a population made up of more than 1,000 ethnic groups, Indonesia is built on the idea of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, meaning Unity in Diversity. Yet the preference for lighter skin, which has its roots in colonialism, remains pervasive in Indonesian society and is perpetuated by advertising and media.

In the midst of this, some Indonesian Christians are working to challenge the narrative. Through women’s ministries and promoting ethnic diversity in churches, they’re redefining beauty based on biblical values.

Indonesia’s history of colorism

Today’s Indonesian beauty standards began during the Dutch colonial era of the 1600s, which established a social hierarchy that placed those with white skin as the most superior, those of Chinese descent next, and indigenous Indonesians at the bottom.

“The intelligent, the virtuous, and those to be emulated [were] the ones with fair skin,” said Esther Kuntjara, professor of linguistics and culture at Petra Christian University in Surabaya. “That was the policy employed by the Dutch at that time. It has become deeply ingrained here.”

Even after Indonesia gained independence in 1945, discrimination and inequality based on skin color persisted through colorism, the favoring of lighter skin tones over darker ones. People with lighter skin typically received advantages in their workplace and relationships, while those with darker skin faced systemic disadvantages and prejudice.

The use of light-skinned models in beauty and cosmetic advertisements—first imported from the US or Europe, then from East Asian countries—have also influenced how Indonesians view beauty, says Agung Kurniawan, a psychologist in Surabaya.

The underrepresentation of diverse skin tones on TV, film, and social media also contributes to a mere-exposure effect, where individuals develop a preference for what they are familiar with. “The impression that beauty is associated with fair skin has greatly influenced Indonesian women, resulting in the proliferation of skin-whitening products in Indonesia,” Kurniawan said.

Today, research shows that Indonesian women don’t like the whiteness of Americans or Europeans “since [the skin] appears reddish-white, like shrimp.” Chinese skin color is also not preferred because of a long history of discrimination against Chinese Indonesians. Instead, Japan’s colonization of Indonesia (1942–1945) has led to the pervasive notion of fair-skinned Japanese beauty.

For 32-year-old Helen Marlina, a Christian who works at a multinational public relations firm, using skin whitening products is an investment for her career. “If I don’t have bright-looking skin, I feel like I’m not credible enough to do my job,” Marlina said. “I also feel that society generally finds women with lighter skin more attractive in everyday social interactions.”

Meanwhile, Retno Lopis, a 53-year-old housewife who lives in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, said that when she started to apply a local skin whitening ointment, she found her once oily and dull skin rapidly became lighter and brighter. Yet she stopped using it because she felt uneasy and was unsure about the safety of its ingredients after seeing the rapid changes. Although she no longer uses any skin whitening products, Lopis said she still believes women with fairer skin look cleaner and well-groomed. “I want to eliminate such a mindset, but I observe that women with darker skin tend to look dull and older.”

Educating the future generation about inner beauty

The preference for fair skin is so entrenched in Indonesia society that even today, parents discourage their children from marrying someone from a different ethnicity with darker skin. Chinese Indonesians don’t want their children to find spouses of another race unless they are light-skinned Westerners, Kuntjara found.

For instance, when actress Nana Mirdad posted a photo on Instagram of her and her lighter-skinned husband, she received comments questioning their match, with one netizen commenting that she should be “grateful” that someone with such dark skin could find a light-skinned husband. Under a screenshot of the comment, Mirdad wrote: “Never feel inferior about our skin color, whatever it may be. Being fair-skinned doesn’t mean it’s better than having a tanned complexion. Let's stop making distinctions.”

To overcome the negative effects of media and advertisements to younger generations, Kuntjara believes it is vital for parents to educate their children at home. She said that parents should teach children not to judge people based on their skin color or physical appearance, but instead value others based on their heart, mindset, and attitude. While this may seem like commonplace advice in the West, it’s novel in Indonesia.

“There’s a reciprocal relationship between media influence and people’s perception,” she noted. “If society becomes aware that the concept of light skin is merely a product of people's perceptions for certain interests, the narrative may start to change.”

Natalisa’s mother, Erina Saraswati, noted that in raising her children, she has taught them that even when others mock them, they should not respond unkindly. “I told them, ‘Let them say negative things about your appearance or dark skin, but remember that everyone has strengths and weaknesses,’” Saraswati said. “So I encourage [Natalisa] to focus on her excelling in school. As they grow and mature, I also teach them to bring these experiences to prayer and to forgive those who make fun of them.”

A Christian theology of beauty

Susanna I. Setiawan is working to combat these unattainable beauty standards among Christian women through her ministry, Wanita Bijak Indonesia (Wise Women Indonesia). Since 2001, Wanita Bijak has provided guidance and mentorship for women, ranging from teenagers to adults, to experience gender restoration as God’s creation. Through biblically based lessons on a woman’s uniqueness, her roles, and how she can become a role model, the ministry aims to help women apply God’s Word to their everyday lives.

The organization initially started with mentoring women in a local church and has now grown into a nationwide organization with small groups in 91 cities across the country as well as online Bible studies that have reached Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, China, and the Netherlands.

“It began with the fundamental awareness that being created as a woman is a precious beauty bestowed by God the Creator,” Setiawan said. “As a woman understands and recognizes her own value, she will find peace within herself and embrace her entire existence.”

Wanita Bijak started with camps and mentorship classes for single and married women. It then expanded to serve teens, and now includes specific groups for women in different life stages or circumstances: widows, young mothers, teachers, women in ministry, and pastors’ wives. In these classes, Wise Women brings speakers to teach the Bible and facilitates group discussions.

In its mentoring programs about holistic beauty, Setiawan said most participants share that they are unhappy with their physical appearance. Many hold tightly to society’s beauty standards of a slim body, a slender face, double eyelids, and smooth, fair skin. So Setiawan points to Song of Solomon 1:5, “I am dark, yet lovely, O daughters of Jerusalem,” to show that God’s idea of beauty isn’t based on the shade of a person’s skin.

In Wanita Bijak classes, Setiawan often notes that the Bible never emphasizes physical appearance as the sole measure of a woman’s beauty. Rather, women in the Bible like Rebekah, Abigail, and Esther are described as beautiful because of their faith, attitude, character, and good deeds. She also stresses that it’s fundamental for women to have a true understanding of themselves based on the unchanging standards of God’s Word so they feel secure and are not easily shaken by the teachings of the world (Col. 2:7–10).

A 2016 study by Biola University supported that point: Of the 243 Christians surveyed, those who believed that their bodies are holy and intentionally created by God were more likely to feel good about their bodies. Setiawan noted that when Christians accept Jesus, the Holy Spirit dwells within them, and their bodies are no longer their own but belong to God. Therefore, “we pay attention to our physical appearance, not because it determines our worth, but because we know that we are already valuable,” she said.

She also noted that beauty standards vary by country and change over time, creating an ever-moving target. Rather than chasing the latest trends, Christian women should take care of their body and “showcase clean and healthy skin while highlighting its beauty, regardless of our skin color.”

One of the Wanita Bijak participants is Setiawan’s own daughter, Stephani Chara. Now 23, Chara recalled struggling as a young teen with insecurity over her tanned skin and feeling envious of women who were “more naturally beautiful.” After joining the ministry’s teen-focused Girls’ Talk program, she gradually learned her inherent value in God’s eyes trumped external opinions on what is beautiful.

“I eventually learned how to take better care of myself and my skin,” Chara said. “But even so, the outside will never change what’s truly already on the inside, my perfect value and worth given by God himself, who had woven me perfectly in my mother’s womb.”

Diversity and inclusion within God’s people

Churches can also help end discrimination over skin color by becoming more inclusive, says Jefry Lie, youth pastor GKBJ Kelapa Gading, a Baptist church in Jakarta. Many churches in Indonesia self-segregate by ethnicity, such as Batak churches (where the majority are from the Sumatran tribe Batak) or Chinese churches. Lie’s church is about 90 percent ethnically Chinese, while the remaining 10 percent are either Javanese or from East Indonesian cities like Ambon and Manado.

Lie himself is half Chinese and half Torajan (an indigenous people group in South Sulawesi), and encourages churches to be safe spaces where people from all ethnicities and cultures can feel welcomed, accepted, and valued. “When the church is not limited by specific skin color or culture, the congregation becomes accustomed to diversity, thus fostering a broad perspective within the community about the meaning of beauty,” he said.

Despite being predominantly Chinese, non-Chinese believers make up some of the core leaders and ministers of the church, “so, even though they are a minority [at church], they feel welcome,” Lie said. Still, they face challenges as some in his church remain suspicious of people from different ethnicities, viewing those with dark skin as “less than.”

In leading the church’s youth group, Lie sees these ideas filtering into young people, as the Chinese youth don’t want to socialize with or date non-Chinese.

“I teach teens and young adults that such stigma does not come from God,” Lie said. “I encourage them to interact with people of all ethnicities and who have different skin color, both in church ministry and in social settings, so they can broaden their perspectives, realizing that individuals from different ethnicities are not as they might have thought.”

For Natalisa, the despair over her dark skin only dissipated through a closer relationship with God and a supportive Christian community. “I didn’t dare to develop myself until I realized the value of self-worth in the eyes of God during college discipleship,” she recalled. She joined a small group where friends not only affirmed and accepted her, but also helped her embrace herself as God created her to be.

By viewing herself through a biblical perspective, she was finally able to brush off the culture’s beauty standard. With this understanding, her perspective on herself changed.

She points to Genesis 1:26—“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness’”—as the lynchpin that helped her accept her appearance.

“From this verse, I understood that I am already created in the image and likeness of God, so why should I change it?” Natalisa said. “If the Almighty says I am already perfect when he created me, what more needs to be changed?”

Maria Fennita and Ivan K. Santoso contributed to this report.

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Theology

Misreading Scripture with Artificial Eyes

John Boyles

I asked ChatGPT to interpret the Sermon on the Mount. Here’s what I learned about AI’s exegetical errors.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash

This piece has been adapted from an article that was originally published in the Biblical Mind.

In the past several months, it has been difficult to avoid discussion of artificial intelligence or, more particularly, ChatGPT and a host of other chatbots developed by technology companies. Based on the popularity of the topic (and often handwringing tone) within higher education and technology reporting, I decided I needed to see what ChatGPT would say about the Bible.

Specifically, I wanted to explore how ChatGPT interprets the Sermon on the Mount. I did this for the sake of the young undergraduate men I mentor—especially since our group is convinced the sermon is meant to be followed and we are committed to living it out in our everyday lives.

In my conversations with the bot, I was struck by the fact that ChatGPT holds up a mirror to the North American church, as well as to the broader Western scholarly community, by sharing three major shortcomings with us as we have been shaped by the spirit of our age:

First, ChatGPT metaphorizes and individualizes Scripture without a clear method for when and why, without warrant, and often in direct contradiction to the text itself. Second, the bot’s interpretations are ignorant of the interpretive traditions that produce them. Third, because the bot is disembodied, its interpretations are necessarily disembodied—and thus a bot is unable to recognize the realities of Scripture and interpretation. Each of the above tendencies present in AI’s responses is in some way a reflection of historic weaknesses in our own human interpretation.

When I asked ChatGPT, “How should we interpret the Sermon on the Mount?” the chatbot spit out an expected definition, including “Many people interpret the sermon on the mount as a blueprint for how to live a good and meaningful life and as a guide for how to treat others.” It ended its response with “Ultimately, how the sermon on the mount is interpreted will depend on an individual’s personal beliefs and values.”

When I asked, “How do you interpret it?” ChatGPT responded, “As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I do not have personal beliefs or values, so I cannot offer my own interpretation of the sermon on the mount. I am designed to provide general information and answer questions to the best of my ability, based on the information and knowledge that I have been trained on. I am not capable of personal opinions or interpretations.”

But it quickly became apparent that, when asked the right questions, ChatGPT would indeed interpret the Sermon on the Mount, whether by providing a specific interpretation or by offering several and adjudicating among them, although it would not explain its method of interpretation.

For example, when asked about Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 5:29–30 (“If your right eye causes you to stumble …”), ChatGPT responded, “It is important to note that this passage should not be taken literally. Jesus is using figurative language to make a point about the seriousness of sin and the importance of avoiding it. He is not literally instructing his followers to mutilate their bodies in order to avoid sin.” It’s not that I necessarily disagree with this claim, but I was struck by the firmness and certainty it expressed, when only two questions earlier it told me it was incapable of interpreting the sermon.

The more that I explored specific teachings with ChatGPT, the more it seemed to pitch toward a metaphorical interpretation of Jesus’ teachings. So, I finally asked it whether there might be a specific teaching in the passage that should be taken literally. Here was ChatGPT’s response:

It is difficult to say with certainty where in the sermon on the mount Jesus speaks literally, as the use of figurative language in the Bible is complex and often debated. The sermon on the mount … contains many examples of figurative language. In general, the Bible often uses figurative language to illustrate a concept or to make a point, and it is not always clear whether a specific passage is meant to be understood literally or figuratively.

One possible example … where Jesus speaks literally is Matthew 5:38–39, where he says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” In this passage, Jesus is quoting a well-known proverb, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” and he is then offering his own teaching on how to respond to violence and aggression.

He is not using figurative language, but rather is offering a clear and straightforward instruction about how his followers should respond to such situations. However, it is important to note that this is only one possible interpretation of this passage, and there may be other ways to understand it.

But as I continued to press it on these specific teachings, it ended up claiming that anyone who takes Jesus’ teachings about nonviolence literally is “pollyannish.” When I questioned it about that claim, it retreated and apologized. Yet it continued to maintain its caution around taking this and other teachings in the Sermon on the Mount literally. (Two additional examples of this are that Matthew 5:32 does not forbid divorce but simply prizes marriage and that Matthew 5:22 is not actually about someone being in danger of hell but rather emphasizes the seriousness of anger.)

As I questioned its process of arriving at these interpretations, ChatGPT said its understanding of the Bible came from its training based on “a large number of texts,” including translations of the Bible and literature about the Bible, although it is unable to say what these are. (It can and does reference specific translations, but it won’t confirm whether they were used in its training.) It also stated its claims are based on “the broader message of the Bible”—and when I questioned it about where it got this framework for interpretation, it primarily invoked Paul’s writings as an instrument to refine Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.

I wanted to suss out what ChatGPT means when it produces phrases like “the Bible consistently teaches,” a passage is “generally understood to mean,” and “most Christians understand [a text] as.” In the process, ChatGPT revealed a tendency to individualize passages that are actually addressed to a community—which emerged when I posed the following question: “How did you arrive at the conclusion, then, that the ‘Bible consistently teaches that harming oneself is not an acceptable or moral response to temptation or sin,’ when historically Christians have denied themselves food, water, medical care, sleep, etc. in attempts to stave off sin?” ChatGPT responded:

I apologize for any confusion that my earlier response may have caused. While it is true that some Christians have practiced self-denial or self-mortification as a means of resisting temptation or sin, the statement that “the Bible consistently teaches that harming oneself is not an acceptable or moral response to temptation or sin” is not accurate or complete. The issue of self-harm or self-mortification is complex and has been subject to different interpretations throughout Christian history, and the Bible itself contains passages that could be interpreted as supporting or condemning such practices.

ChatGPT goes on to reassert its interpretation that Jesus was speaking figuratively in Matthew 5:29–30 and then summons Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 for backup, making the striking claim that “our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and should be honored and kept holy” (striking because of its pronoun choice).

After some discussion of the pronoun in the Greek text, where ChatGPT asserted the second-person pronoun was singular but eventually admitted it is actually plural in the Greek text, ChatGPT actually reversed its individualistic interpretation and affirmed a collective meaning of 1 Corinthians 6:19–20.

This discussion and our continued chat about 1 Corinthians 6 were illustrative of the bot’s tendency to confidently assert an interpretation of a biblical text, admit an error around a detail, and then, upon questioning, change its interpretation—with a response that included an admission of inaccuracy or exaggeration. And yet the bot usually wrapped that admission in a reassertion of the very claim it has just undermined.

Why does ChatGPT continue to produce figurative and metaphorical interpretations of Jesus’ teachings? Why is it so easy to convince the chatbot to flip its claims on something like Paul’s use of temple imagery? There are at least two possible reasons: First, ChatGPT has no account of its own training and the traditions informing these interpretations, and second, ChatGPT has no connection to lived experience or reality. As it confidently asserted when I first asked it, it has no “personal beliefs or values.”

Despite this, it vigorously pursues an interpretation when asked, privileging certain perspectives and sometimes outlawing or excluding others. It does so because the words are a statistical game, not Scripture to be lived. It is only parroting what it has been trained on—which is a body of texts that it cannot identify because it seemingly no longer knows what they are (if it ever knew, and if know is even the proper term).

This presents a two-fold problem for Christians who might seek out information about the Bible from ChatGPT. First, one cannot be certain of the sources of the perspectives offered by ChatGPT. Jesus asserts several times in Matthew that his true disciples may be known by the fruits evident in their lives (5:15–20; 12:33–37; 21:33–46). If one cannot access the life of the interpreter and thus the fruits it has produced, how might the Christian know whether the interpretation comes from a true disciple of Jesus?

Second, ChatGPT and other large language models are “black boxes,” meaning we do not know what is happening to generate the responses they provide. Both Christianity and Judaism have historically emphasized engaging with the past and present religious community and that community’s interpretations of sacred texts and traditions.

ChatGPT, however, denies it is interpreting—while simultaneously pulling a sleight of hand to interpret the Sermon on the Mount through a tradition that it has hidden even from itself. For ChatGPT, there is no community debating, discerning, and living their way into and through interpretations. There is only the statistical game of language tokens.

Finally, as the young men I mentor know well, there is a knowledge that comes only through living the teachings of Jesus. ChatGPT cannot do this, and it never will be able to do it. As it told me when I asked about its use of our in discussing bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures are “not applicable” to it. Because it has no body, it has no experience of the topics signified by the words it interprets and uses.

In the end, ChatGPT offers us a mirror and a caution. ChatGPT’s interpretations of the biblical texts are a distillation of the spirit of our age. Like ChatGPT, we tend toward metaphorical interpretations of Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. Like ChatGPT, we tend toward individualizing interpretations of Paul. And like ChatGPT, we tend to forget or be ignorant of whose interpretations have formed our own interpretations of the text. These tendencies are interconnected.

After all, the problem is not the tendency to metaphorize Scripture but rather the default to a metaphorizing interpretation as a kind of short circuit when we are unable or unwilling to examine the text’s interpretative tradition and application. ChatGPT cannot do these latter two things, but we can. Thus, ChatGPT exposes us to ourselves.

This experience with ChatGPT therefore cautions us to consider the value of any interpretive tendencies it exposes. Will we treat the Bible as a statistical game of tokens? As words and ideas to be bandied about in disembodied dialogue? Or will we take up the challenge of Jesus to be wise, to hear his teachings, and to do them (Matt. 7:24) in community with one another?

In a word, will we outsource our understanding of the Scriptures? Or will we choose to live together, seeking the meaning of these texts through our history and our common commitment to God and thus teaching them to those who come after us (Matt. 28:20)?

John H. Boyles is associate professor of Bible at Abilene Christian University.

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Theology

Barbie and Ken Go East of Eden

Hannah Anderson

For Christians, Greta Gerwig’s latest film is an opportunity to reckon with the “fortunate fall.”

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Questions about gender and sexuality plague the evangelical church, from the SBC to the PCA. Books on the topic are proliferating. In that context, it’s understandable that some folks see the new Barbie film as another volley in the gender wars. But Greta Gerwig’s latest project is far too layered to be read through a literalist hermeneutic.

Rather than offering a blind affirmation of feminism or a critique of patriarchy, the movie explores how we use ideology to bypass the messier work of growing as humans. The gender wars are not the plot so much as the setting. They shape the world in which Barbie and Ken pursue maturity. Consider Ken’s character arc. Forever condemned to be “just Ken,” Barbie’s beau finds his identity through relationship to her. He “simps,” or fawningly submits to her, by following her into the Real World. Once there, however, he catches a vision for a different life—one where men rule but more importantly feel seen and valued. Crediting this to The Patriarchy™, Ken carries the idea of male superiority back to Barbie Land as a shortcut to his own growth. The movie tracks with Christine Emba’s recent observations that modern men are in “a widespread identity crisis—as if they didn’t know how to be.” This loss of self, she argues, is what fuels the popularity of right-wing masculinity gurus from Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate. Those voices seem to offer young men a path forward. That it so often trends toward misogyny, as Ken’s own journey does, is only part of the point.

Eventually, Ken reckons with the roots of his discontent, which are less about social order and more about an abdication of self through posturing and performative identity.

Barbie’s journey, too, is directed away from gender stereotypes and toward mature personhood. But unlike Ken, who learns his own value, she learns to embrace her own imperfection. When Barbie is inexplicably struck with thoughts of death and her heels drop to the floor, she seeks help from Weird Barbie, a guru-like outcast. In a scene that parallels The Matrix, Weird Barbie offers her a choice: She can either go back to non-reality, or she can move toward knowledge by taking on a quest in the Real World.

Instead of a blue pill or a red pill, however, she offers Barbie a pink high heel or a Birkenstock sandal (one that will accommodate her now-flat feet). Even though Barbie wants to pick the high heel and return to a state of ignorance, various questions and challenges force her to leave Barbie Land in search of answers. Both Barbie and Ken venture beyond plastic tropes to discover their full (and sexed) humanity. While these existential questions are refreshing in a mainstream movie, the real magic is found in how they move toward maturity: through imperfection and mistake.

As Vox critic (and former CT columnist) Alissa Wilkinson notes, the movie is a kind of retelling of the Fall. In both Genesis and Barbie, a prototypical woman reaches for forbidden knowledge and then offers it to her male companion. Both are met by a loss of innocence and exiled from perfection. For evangelicals, framing maturation in light of original sin can be deeply unsettling, especially because Gerwig seems to suggest that experiential knowledge is necessary to human development. By contrast, we understand the Genesis narrative as a story of rebellion. In choosing what was forbidden, the woman and man disobey and come under a curse that will plague their entire existence—from the earth under their (flat) feet to their own bodies. Even more, much of evangelical theology and practice is aimed at reversing this curse. We understand Jesus as the Second Adam, come to redeem and restore what was lost (Rom. 5:12–20). We look forward to the day when we are perfect once again.

And yet, within this frame, we sometimes overlook the process by which God sanctifies us. As we confess our sinfulness, we then convince ourselves that life with Christ will be an upward trending line of increasingly good performance that eventually results in perfection. Having begun by the Spirit, we’re pretty convinced we can continue in our own strength. But insofar as this approach to discipleship denies our humanity, we will struggle to live with our imperfection. As a counselor told me recently, “You’re not an angel, Hannah. You’re a human being.” Here, theology can help us. While rightly understanding the Fall as a loss, theologians from Ambrose to Augustine to Aquinas to Wycliffe have also named it a “fortunate fall”—one that reveals God’s goodness in a way that human perfection cannot. As John Milton renders the idea in Paradise Lost,

O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness!

We do not sin that grace may abound (Rom. 6:1); and yet, grace abounds. Somehow God can take our failures and bring from them a richer, deeper understanding of both ourselves and his grace. In a divine irony, we only understand grace when we have need of it. Or as Jesus puts it in Luke 7:47, the one who has been forgiven little, loves little, while the one who is forgiven much, loves much. In this way, sanctification requires that we leave behind plastic ways of being and embrace our God-given humanity, flawed as it is. It requires that we move from idealized forms to the complexity of embodied lives. It requires that we leave Barbie Land. For Christians, this process is undergirded by Christ’s own incarnation, which affirmed the goodness of human existence even in a cursed world. And it’s secured by Christ’s death and resurrection, which offer both forgiveness and hope in the face of our failures. As we embrace the imperfection of our lives, and as we accept a world marked by doubt, sin, and death, we do so confident in the reality of God’s love for us. In the end, it’s not our mistakes that make us whole but God who redeems our mistakes. It is God who, despite knowing our every weakness and disobedience, calls us to rest in his perfect obedience.

Or as a friend of mine put it recently, it is God who through Christ says to his faltering children, “I know exactly why you are where you are even more than you do. The reasons are even deeper than you know. And I am personally going to vouch for you. Just be.” In this way, the love of God makes us real.

Hannah Anderson is the author of Made for More, All That’s Good, and Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul.

Books

On Stage and in Theaters, Corrie ten Boom Testifies Again

Interview by Daniel Silliman

How Rabbit Room playwright A.S. Peterson adapted ‘The Hiding Place’ for a new generation.

The Hiding Place Film

The story of one humble Dutch family has long riveted American evangelicals. Corrie and Betsie ten Boom, simple Christian watchmakers living with their father in the Netherlands, risked everything to protect their Jewish neighbors from the Holocaust. And they endured unspeakable evil at the hands of the Nazis with faith, hope, and Scripture, always testifying to the goodness of God and the power of forgiveness.

More than 50 years after the ten Booms’ story first reached American audiences with the publication of The Hiding Place, audiences packed a Nashville theater to see it retold on stage. Next week, the Rabbit Room’s theatrical production of The Hiding Place is coming to cinemas across the US, with two special showings in more than 800 locations on August 3 and 5.

CT caught up with playwright A. S. “Pete” Peterson to ask him about the challenge of adaptation, the problems with portraying Nazis, his incarnational understanding of theater, and the compelling, convicting mystery that’s at the heart of the ten Booms’ testimony.

Why do you think Corrie ten Boom’s story still grabs us? What it is about The Hiding Place that’s so compelling?

Corrie ten Boom and her family are part of our cloud of witnesses. They have stood in a place where we cannot and they testify to something we cannot understand. That gives me, I think, the opportunity to believe in the absence of evidence that I can see myself.

There’s a mystery at the heart of the story that’s almost impossible to define. The sense that the ten Booms had of the sovereignty of God and their ability to be grateful in the worst circumstances essentially do not make sense. But I don’t mean that they’re crazy. I mean they understood something mystical, something powerful, something important for us all to wrestle with. It’s convicting. It’s compelling. But I think it’s also mysterious.

Why did you want to retell the story?

I didn’t have any experience with The Hiding Place before this. When I was called and offered the opportunity to adapt it, I said, “Let me go read the book.” I immediately saw how important the story is. They’re wrestling with the biggest possible questions.

For those who don’t know, Corrie and Betsie ten Boom lived in the 1940s; they hid Jews in their home in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. They were caught and sent to a concentration camp. Betsie dies there. Corrie comes back and spends the rest of her life testifying to the way her faith helped her in that terrible situation.

But the book is a bit out of date in the sense that it’s written to a different generation. I thought this is an opportunity to give this to our current generation. I think we have to find new ways to tell stories. I really wanted to honor the significance of the ten Booms’ testimony.

How did your perception of the story change? Did you come to understand some aspects differently through the work of adapting it for the stage?

Yeah. A lot of people think it’s Corrie’s story, that she’s the hero of the book. I would argue Betsie ten Boom is the hero of this book.

It’s Corrie’s testament to Christ and written to honor her sister. She had seen her sister become a kind of saint. The only way to talk about it is as a saint, a capital C Christian of the church. Betsie in the story is just an otherworldly character who walks into a death camp and starts thanking God for fleas and thanking God for her own nakedness. It’s kind of shocking. If you’re not careful, she really comes across as a loon.

We had to really figure out how to portray Betsie as a grounded human who comes to some extraordinary conclusions. We had to work really hard to portray Betsie in a way that woos the audience into her perspective on the world.

Can I ask you about the Nazis? Did you wrestle with how to frame them, how to portray what Nazis are?

Man, it’s complicated. Just to start, in the book there are multiple Nazis that we decided during adaptation to tie into one character so that the audience would be able to relate to the arc of the Nazi experience. You lose some things. Like the Nazi who interrogates Corrie was actually more sympathetic to her and helped her in a number of ways, but that didn’t work dramatically. As you’re assimilating characters, you have to think, These are real people, with real family trauma, and real family trees.

On a more philosophical level, one of the first things I did was jump on a plane and visit the ten Boom house in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, and then drove across Germany to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where Corrie and Betsie were. I needed to experience that before I could write anything.

A concentration camp is like the negative of the Grand Canyon, if that makes sense. You see pictures your whole life, but then when you go you stand on the rim of it, you can’t imagine how much bigger it is than you ever imagined. At Ravensbrück, standing in the gas chambers, standing in front of the oven, it’s so much deeper and darker and wider than you ever imagined. It’s impossible to portray the enormity of true evil.

I was surprised that the Nazis in the play—the two who really speak—are atheists. They’re antagonistic to Christianity in general. But historically, 95 percent of Germans were Christians. The churches very much adapted to and accepted Nazism, which the churches in Germany today work very hard to remember and repent of. They will tell you, “We were part of something evil.” Why present the Nazis in the play as people who didn’t share the same faith as Corrie and Betsie ten Boom?

It’s something we wrestled with. Ultimately, where I landed was, I was wanting the show at a meta level to be a work of theodicy—Corrie trying to think about how does God permit evil—and that needed an antagonist. It was helpful to have a Nazi be that antagonist.

The other thing is that, in her book, the Nazis that she encountered were very hostile to Christianity. Nazis came in and saw her reading the Bible and said, “Why are you reading this trash?” In her experience, she encountered Nazis who were antagonistic, and I don’t know that I can explain that, because you’re right about the history. But that was her experience.

Yeah, but only about 1.5 percent of people were atheists. The top Nazis and top Christian leaders were promoting a kind of heroic Christianity, purged of Judaism and “Jewish influences,” so Christianity was more about winning and less about, you know, the scandal of the Cross. It really changes things to portray her enemy as atheists.

It’s an interesting question. But the reality is, as Corrie portrays them in the book, she did have multiple encounters with people who were specifically anti-Christian and atheistic. And it was helpful dramatically.

You’ve written novels before. How different is theater? What are the biggest challenges of adaptation?

On the surface level, when you write a book and release day comes around, you sit in your room to deafening silence and hope somebody’s reading it. When you write a play, you go to opening night, and even if people didn’t like it, they stand up and clap.

The form of the novel is inherently interior. The novel’s greatest strength is it reveals the internal life of a character. Theater is inherently three-dimensional and, I would say, incarnational. I create something as a writer that is unfinished. It cannot be experienced as it is meant to be experienced until other people incarnate it in three dimensions on the stage and make it its full self.

That’s also a fascinating theological thought to me. You could almost think of the law as theater, the law as something that God gave to Moses that we couldn’t understand fully until the Incarnation showed up.

It’s also beautiful to me that it’s a communal art form. When I write a book, it’s all on me. In theater, I write the best thing I can, but then you get into rehearsals and there are 30 or 40 people bringing their art to bear. And that’s always better than I could have done on my own.

What did you see in the play, in the process of rehearsals, that wasn’t just your intention but something coming to life through the collaboration or incarnation of the play?

There’s a moment at the end of the show where Corrie is offered an opportunity to offer forgiveness. The way that I had written was pretty matter of fact. Corrie is pretty matter of fact in the book. But as we rehearsed it, we really saw how delicate that scene needed to be. If it’s easy to forgive, we’re minimizing the evils of the Nazi regime. But if we make it too hard, that doesn’t work either.

The process was, we did a couple of readings of it back in 2018 down in Houston. Then we did developmental workshops. That’s where everybody says what’s wrong with it and I try and keep my mouth shut and then go back and fix it. Then we did, I think, four weeks of performance in Houston. Then COVID got in the way, and I spent most of the pandemic reworking the play. When it came to the stage in Nashville, that was another version.

That scene, the way it ultimately worked out, you can see the struggle on Corrie’s face. When you get the actors involved, actors are incredibly emotionally intuitive people. They teased all sorts of nuance out that I had not seen, and it was beautiful.

It didn’t change how it was written on the pages. But it changed the way the scene breathes and is enfleshed before the audience.

What’s next? Do you have another play you’re working on now?

We are in active development for my adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I’m really interested in digging into the theological aspects. The story is fundamentally theological, but most adaptations downplay that part. But the theology is remarkable. Dickens knew his theology. Like, he named the main character Ebenezer for a reason—“Hither by thy help I’ve come,” you know? So I’m excited to share that with people soon.

- More from Daniel Silliman

News

Amid Quran Burning Outcry, Should All Blasphemy Be Banned?

Jayson Casper

Sweden’s desecration of Islam’s holy book has prompted a bid to burn the Bible. European evangelicals condemn the offense but link the freedoms of expression and religion.

Protestors in London raise the Quran during a demonstration against the Quran Burning In Sweden.

Loredana Sangiuliano / SOPA Images / AP Images / Edits by CT

Swedish evangelicals fear a human rights retreat, as the fallout continues from last month’s Quran burning.

Earlier this month, Iraq expelled the Swedish ambassador after Swedish police authorized the burning of the Torah and the Bible in front of the Israeli embassy in Stockholm—though the Muslim applicant did not go through with it.

“If I burn the Torah, another the Bible, another the Quran, there will be war here,” stated Ahmad A. “What I wanted to show is that it's not right to do it.”

Though unintentional, he succeeded in showing the neutrality of Swedish law. There was scant outcry from Christians to protect their Scripture, but overall many Swedes are sympathetic to his plea. More than half favor prohibition of the burning of any religious books, up from 42 percent in February.

To do so may require reviving blasphemy laws that were scrapped in the 1970s. Following a similar incident last year, the former prime minister of Sweden stated such acts should be prosecuted as hate speech, lamenting the waste of budget to protect rogue actors. And after this round of international outcry, the government announced that it is currently exploring if such a law can be passed.

But across the European continent, Christian leaders are expressing alarm.

“If you can’t burn the Quran, can you put it in the toilet?” asked Olof Edsinger, general secretary of the Swedish Evangelical Alliance. “There are many ways of desecration, and you can’t stop them all.”

Fully condemning the offense itself, he clarifies that any law—however broadly worded—would be tailored only for the religious community that is offended. The issue is with Muslim reaction, he says, and every limitation shrinks the space for freedom of expression.

It is a hard-won right for Sweden’s evangelicals. Prior to the 1952 Religious Freedom Act, many free church believers joined atheists and other religious nonconformists to seek refuge in the United States. Conversion to Catholicism, for example, was subject to exile until 1858.

“If our culture—and the West in general—bows to outside pressure,” Edsinger said, “it will be a clear step backwards.”

So far, the West is resisting, though the world is not. At the United Nations Human Rights Council earlier this month, no European nation except Ukraine voted to approve a nonbinding resolution “affirming [Quran burning] shall be prohibited by law.”

It passed, 28 to 7, with 12 abstentions. Put forward by Pakistan and Palestine, 19 Muslim-majority nations joined autocratic China, Cuba, and Vietnam, calling member bodies to “prosecute acts and advocacy of religious hatred that constitute incitement.”

The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) criticized the vagueness of the UN resolution.

“International law specifies the criteria—not the acts—for what amounts to hate speech,” said Wissam al-Saliby, a Geneva-based WEA human rights advocacy officer at the UN. “This resolution raises the question of what exactly constitutes forbidden speech.”

The UN’s Rabat Plan of Action already has a six-point criteria, he says, and countries should have worked together until the resolution gained consensus.

The goal, Saliby says, must be to form inclusive communities of welcome for all. And dialogue is necessary, for some European states are starting to restrict many religious believers from the public square.

Some in the Arab world, however, see a double standard.

“When they attack Jewish people, they get legally punished,” stated Mohammad Nokkari, a leading Islamic judge in Beirut. “When they attack homosexuality, they get legally punished. But when it comes to Islam, they have the right to.”

Jon Aalborg, former Church of Norway senior advisor for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, notes that Balkan, Pakistani, and Somali-background Norwegian Muslims suffer from “very real” excesses of freedom of expression in the form of disparaging insults. But society in general treats them well, he says, and finds it easy to sympathize with them—especially against Quran burning.

But if Sweden revives some aspect of its former blasphemy laws to accommodate Muslims, Aalborg says, it must specifically not outlaw the criticism—even insult—of any religious books or systems of belief, including Christianity.

Like Edsinger, he believes proper legislation will be very tricky to define. But he also sees many in the Muslim world as manipulators, “blatantly attempting to get what they can out of it.” He specifically criticizes Turkey’s president Recep Erdoğan for linking the issue to Sweden’s NATO accession.

Many Islamic leaders have ignored repeated Western statements criticizing the act of desecration. Pakistan’s ambassador nonetheless demanded condemnation as “the least they could do” after the failure to gain full consensus at the UN vote.

And the populist Iraqi cleric who called for mass protests railed against supposed US hypocrisy for condemning his followers’ storming of Sweden’s embassy in Baghdad, but not the act of Islamophobia in Stockholm.

Earlier this week, the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation suspended the status of Sweden’s special envoy, asking consideration of the same for any nation that allows desecration of the Quran.

One Swedish imam, writing in a Qatari publication, urged Muslim rethink.

Commending Sweden for 200 years of non-colonizing neutrality, he praised the freedom that not only permitted burning the Quran, but the public collection of funds by a proselytizing group committed to building a mosque in every village.

Muslims, he says, many of whom are calling for the boycott of Sweden, should avoid rupturing relations.

“This humane Swedish society was and is firmly opposed to any attempts to burn the Quran,” stated Idris al-Marrakeshi. “Chief of these elements is the church.”

The Christian Council of Sweden (CCS) signaled its support of Muslims immediately after the first offense. Aggression against any religious community, it stated, harms everyone with religious identity. Beyond issuing simple condemnation, in their highly secularized nation, believers in God must stand side-by-side.

To help convey the level of frustration Muslims have felt over the Quran burnings, CCS theological advisor Jan Eckerdal, a Lutheran minister in the Church of Sweden, points out that comparing it to burning a Bible can be misleading.

While Islam sees a physical copy of its holy book as the literal words of God, Christianity centers the Word on the person of Jesus. The closer comparison, for many believers, would be to burn the Eucharistic bread and wine—representing the very presence of Christ.

Even so, he clarified that the CCS opposes blasphemy laws, and does not demand that Quran burning be banned. But it welcomes police investigation if the act—provocatively performed at a mosque on a major Muslim holiday—constituted a hate crime under existing Swedish law.

And like Marrakeshi, he finds the Muslim-world reaction unfortunate.

“It hides the fact that the majority of Swedes are against the burnings,” said Eckerdal, “and increases precisely the polarization that those who burned the Quran wish to achieve.”

But provocation, properly done, is not always bad, says Leonardo De Chirico.

“Sometimes our prophetic role requires challenging others’ religion in a dramatic way,” said the Italian Evangelical Alliance’s theological commission chair. “But our priestly and royal roles demand respectful and peaceful interaction.”

Against the prophets of Baal, Elijah portrayed a clear and challenging confrontation. Jesus, when cleansing the temple, also theatrically rebuked his religious opponents.

But the burning of the Quran was “stupid,” he says—though it is not the role of the court to prevent it. On the contrary, it is dangerous, and seeking narrow definitions of hate speech risks making every abrasive statement illegal.

It was not until 1948 that Italy’s constitution guaranteed religious freedom.

Recalling the past persecution of evangelicals and the derogatory language still frequent today, De Chirico calls for society to cultivate a principled pluralism, and Christians have a role to play through the “soft” social posture recommended by Miroslav Volf and the “civility” of witness sought by Richard Mouw. In such an environment, he says, acts of religious offense should receive “cultural reprimand.”

Jaume Llenas, the Spanish national coordinator for the Lausanne Movement, cited a colonial-era champion.

Roger Williams, he says, was the American father of religious conscience and church-state separation, who taught that the first tablet of the Ten Commandments must not be enforced by the state. The only way to secure obedience, Llenas summarizes, is effective preaching of the gospel.

Unlike De Chirico, he sees no role for deliberate provocation. But sometimes it will be attributed anyway.

“In countries where there are anti-conversion laws, Christians can be seen as provocateurs for sharing God's love with people of other religions,” Llenas said. “There is a scandal of the gospel that we cannot avoid.”

A Pew Research Center analysis notes 79 nations with blasphemy laws, including 18 of the 20 Middle East and North African countries in the study. In Iraq, for example, the public insult of a symbol or person held sacred by a religious group is punishable with up to three years in prison.

Europe, Llenas says, must not move in that direction. It took centuries to achieve freedom of conscience and expression on the continent, with freedom of religion not granted in Spain until 1978. Minimum regulation maximizes human rights—for Christians and believers of any religion.

But those immigrating to the West have adjustments to make.

“We welcome believers of other religions,” said Llenas. “But they should accept that Europe is a continent where they will not find the same limitations to freedom of expression.”

For now?

Edsinger notes that the historic homogeneity of Swedish society has yielded conflicting levels of public support for basic liberties. Gender equality is secure, for example, registering 96 percent approval according to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey.

Religious freedom, however, esteems heterogeneity. Only 53 percent of Swedes consider it “very important,” one of the lowest levels in Europe. Most people everywhere prefer those like themselves, he said, making this an easier liberty to sacrifice.

As head of the Evangelical Alliance, Edsinger defends religious freedom dearly. His community is often misunderstood and criticized, and pluralism is protection. But with it comes the necessity of allowing insult, even the burning of the Quran.

“The public square must welcome all,” said Edsinger. “After all, people are allowed to be stupid and mean.”

- More from Jayson Casper

News

Young Christians in South Korea Are Apathetic About Reunification

Isabel Ong

“In my lifetime, I have never heard a church talk about reunification or peace between North and South Korea.”

A man hangs a national flag wishing for the reunification and peace of the two Koreas on the wire fence in South Korea near the border of North Korea.

Ahn Young-joon / AP Images

Solga Kim grew up singing the popular Korean folksong “Our Wish Is Reunification.”

Part of the lyrics goes like this: “Reunification carried out with all heart and soul / Reunification will revive our nation.” But the tune’s heartfelt desire for peace and unity between North and South Korea does not seem to be a melody that the Korean church often sings today.

“‘Peace’ in the Bible in Korea is often translated as personal inner peace, and it is rare for churches to preach the peace of the Bible in connection with the relationship between North and South Korea,” said Kim, a teacher who lives in Incheon, South Korea.

“In my lifetime, I have never heard a church talk about reunification or peace between North and South Korea.”

The two countries have been divided since July 27, 1953, when an armistice agreement was signed at the close of the Korean War that called for all military forces to be withdrawn, hostile activity to be suspended, and prisoners of war to be repatriated. The two countries, however, have never signed a peace treaty and are technically still at war. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the armistice agreement. But today, reunification seems more like a pipe dream as young generations of South Koreans are becoming increasingly disinterested in being part of a unified Korea.

While interviews and surveys by CT suggest that Christians in South Korea are largely supportive of reunification, they hold differing ideas about how to accomplish it. Gen Z and millennial Christians—otherwise known in Korea as the MZ generation—are lackluster in their support due to social and economic pressures. Korean churches also lack consistent effort and awareness in promoting reunification as a key concern for congregants.

But some Christians are taking concrete steps toward this long-held dream, whether through pursuing language integration or providing creative educational approaches to educate young minds on God’s heart for the Korean people.

Youthful sentiments

According to a 2020 survey, Gen Z South Koreans are “relatively apathetic” regarding reunification and experience little affinity with North Koreans. Only 12 percent view North Korea in a positive light. Nearly half (47.1%) of people in their twenties said that unification was “not necessary,” compared to 23.8 percent of people in their forties, according to a 2021 survey.

When CT sent a questionnaire to a Korean Christian chat group to gather Gen Z responses about their attitudes toward reunification, 15-year-old Seo Yoon Jin responded, “I don’t think it’s necessary. Unification would be good culturally, but many conflicts are expected due to economic and ideological confrontations.”

“Rather, I think that if [South and North] Korea end the war and become divided, it will make the relationship between the two countries better,” she wrote.

Jin is not the only teenager who thinks that complete separation between North and South Korea is an ideal outcome. Many young South Koreans regard North Korea as a “poor, totalitarian state” whereas the South is “wealthy” and “democratic,” and find that this economic disparity cannot be resolved well.

No data on Christian attitudes toward reunification is available, but In-cheol Shin, a biblical theology professor at Korea Baptist Theological University, believes the proportion of MZ Christians who support reunification is approximately 20 to 25 percent. Shin believes that this percentage will continue to shrink, and attributes the decline to a lack of church investment in promoting reunification.

“I’m 57 at the moment. At one time, the church strongly educated [people] that we need reunification and that North and South Korea is one country. Now, the church is not interested in reunification,” he said.

Previous generations of South Koreans felt that reunification was a task imbued with ethnic, economic, and spiritual meaning, said Nam Sang-deuk, director of youth training at the Fourth River Project.

Current generations, however, may view unifying North and South Korea as a risk for several reasons, Nam said. Firstly, many young South Koreans view faith as a personal relationship with God rather than as a way to impact society. Secondly, most have never set foot in North Korea and have only met defectors, whereas older generations came from hometowns in the communist country. Thirdly, because of the church’s inconsistent messages, reunification is seen as a political rather than religious issue.

MZ Christians CT interviewed say they hope to see the North and South unified, but they acknowledge broad apathy amongst their peers and an inclination toward individualism that may well reflect the hollowness of their support.

“The idea of reunification just lingers in our thoughts or is sometimes brought up in a conversation, and the end result is usually [along] the lines of, ‘we should be grateful,’ ‘we should pray for them,’ ‘reunification is an important matter,’” wrote Shin’s son Dongmin, a 27-year-old Hanyang University business administration graduate, in an email to CT. “I think most young South Korean [believers] fall victim to surviving the busy life and intense competition of South Korean society just as much as non-believers.”

“When it comes to reunification, young Koreans around me tend to consider their individual needs ahead of considering the perspective of reunification on a larger scale,” added 27-year-old Sun-Woo Kim, a movie director who attends Union Presbyterian Church in Seoul.

“Discourse on unification can feel like a luxury for those in their 20s who are being pushed to the brink in their livelihoods, from issues such as high rates of unemployment and skyrocketing real estate prices,” said Seoul National University’s political science professor Kang Won-taek.

Making peace

A shared Christian faith was historically one of the bonds that continued to connect Koreans after the armistice. As Christianity Today noted in 1972:

Before the division as many as two-thirds of Korea’s Christians were northerners, and some of South Korea’s largest congregations are refugee churches. One of the best known of the refugees, Dr. Han Kyung-chik, pastor of Seoul’s 9,000-member Yung-nak Presbyterian Church, has said that had the Korean War been pressed to a successful liberation of the north, he believes that 80 per cent of the north’s 15 million people would have turned to Christ.

Between 1988 and 1992, South Koreans helped build two churches in Pyongyang, and in 2008 helped fund the rebuilding and expansion of one of the congregations, write Sebastian C.H. Kim and Kirsteen Kim in A History of Korean Christianity.

Among the most high-profile evangelicals to advocate for unification was Ik Hwan Moon, Presbyterian minister and New Testament scholar, who translated the Bible into Korean. Moon, who wrote the well-known poem “I Will Go to Pyongyang,” infuriated South Korean politicians when he actually did and was arrested after returning home.

Many older Christian leaders, many of them originally from the North, were skeptical of engaging communist North Korea and, in Kim and Kim’s words, “were strongly opposed to any compromise with North Korea and were actively anti-Communist.”

Their dislike of the government did not extend to the people. During food shortages and famines in the late 1980s and mid-90s in North Korea, conservative Christians and Pentecostals sent millions of dollars of aid to the North.

The “Reconciling Christianity” movement would soon emerge after a 1988 declaration issued by the National Council of Churches in Korea on national reunification and peace. Proclaiming 1995 as the “Year of Jubilee” in this declaration “brought the issue of reunification to the fore and challenged even conservatives to move from evangelism to humanitarian work and peacemaking,” write Kim and Kim.

“Furthermore, as a call for redistribution of the land, jubilee was linked to the ongoing struggle for justice for the poor which, after democratisation, became the concern of evangelical as well as progressive churches.”

In spite of this push toward peacemaking prospects, South Korean Christians today remain divided on how reunification can be achieved, as A History of Korean Christianity outlines:

Christian approaches to reunification can be summarised in three positions: unification as part of an anti-Communist campaign and mission agenda (conservative Christians), promoting dialogue between the two nations (progressive Christians) and involvement in a supportive and sharing humanitarian campaign (some conservative and most progressive Christians).

Seunghoon Song, a pastor in his late thirties who was born and raised in South Korea and currently lives in Vancouver, Canada, does not think reunification should occur by military force or by war. Neither does he think assimilation—where North Korea becomes bankrupt and suddenly surrenders to the South—will work because it is “unrealistic” to expect that two countries that have been separate for 56 years can accomplish this successfully.

Reunification ought to take place peacefully, emphasized Song, who cited Ephesians 2:14 as his guiding verse for how the “wall” between North and South Korea can be demolished: “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”

Other South Korean Christians CT interviewed agree that a more biblical understanding of peace is needed in pursuing reunification. Shin, the biblical theology professor, argues that Jesus’s teachings in the Gospel of Matthew depict the power of pacifism through inclusion, forgiveness, and love.

In today’s context, where South Korean men are sent for compulsory military service, talking about peaceful reunification may be difficult as they learn to regard North Korea as their enemy, say some of the South Korean Christians CT interviewed.

But Shin is convinced that displaying Christ-centered love is one way of overcoming the animosity and hateful bias between North and South Korea. “If the purpose of Jesus’ teaching to love your enemy can be interpreted as loving your own people, it can be an emotional ideology for the people of the two Koreas who are repeating the pain of confrontation and conflict,” he wrote in a 2020 paper.

Mapping the future

For some Christians and churches in South Korea, reunification is not a far-off dream but a sought-for reality they are working towards every day.

Yoido Full Gospel Church runs a “unification diocese” that serves North Korean defectors by helping them to integrate into South Korean society. Missionaries from South Korea or from the Korean diaspora live in China, close to the North Korean border, to minister and evangelize to North Korean defectors. Song, the Korean pastor in Canada, was formerly with the Far East Broadcasting Corporation in South Korea, which sends radio broadcasts of Christian messages to North Korea.

Kim, the teacher in Incheon, has heard mostly negative stories about how churches in the South evangelize to their North Korean neighbors. North Korean defectors in South Korea are often encouraged to become Christians and share their testimonies at church. In doing so, sometimes they receive a “financial reward.”

“It is very regrettable that North Korean defectors build a relationship with the church” through an economic transaction rather than a personal encounter with God, she said.

Outside of the church, some Christians have decided to advocate reunification within their particular areas of influence. Bosun Kang is an assistant professor in Korean education from Daegu University who is researching language differences and integration between North and South Korea. Besides the economic and social disparity between North and South Korea, language differences add another layer of cultural separation. For instance, the most common Bible translation in South Korea is the New Revised Standard Version (개역개정), whereas North Korea uses their version of the Joint Translation Bible, which was created by South Korean Protestants and Catholics in 1977 (성경전서). “For example, the word ‘God’ is written as hananim (하나님) in South Korea, but it is written as haneunim (하느님) in the North Korean Bible,” said Kang.

Kang sees his work in language integration as a God-given vision that may “solve the division” between North and South. He has worked with North and South Korean scholars to produce a shared dictionary of terms in both languages, an idea that was initiated by Korean Bible translator Ik Hwan Moon. While the dictionary was supposed to be published in 2013, the project is now on hold because of worsening relations between the two countries and the pandemic, says Kang.

Despite that setback, Kang is working on ways to educate South Korean students to systematically learn about language differences between the North and South at school. “Only when the language differences between the two Koreas are accurately identified and integrated will it be possible to communicate accurately between the people of the two Koreas,” he said.

Educating and reforming young minds is also a priority for Nam, Fourth River Project’s youth training director. Nam currently runs the Three Seas Center, which holds camps or visits for South Korean students and North Korean refugees. So far, about 1,000 youth between the ages of 12 and 18 have visited the center, and they are seeing an increasing number of visits by public schools and by teenagers who live abroad, said Nam.

During their time there, students will talk about “the history and pain of the Korean peninsula” and that “God’s heart toward this land is not a divided land, but a unified land, and this speaks of restoration,” said Nam. They also meet with missionaries who have served or visited North Korea and go on prayer hikes together.

Nam faces several challenges in his work promoting reunification. “Generation Z and millennial Korean Christians do not have time. Most of the education on unification conducted by Christianity and churches is event-oriented. And the events are mostly information-oriented or preaching meetings.”

While running a camp for North Korean refugee school students and middle and high school students from the Fourth River Project’s River of Life school, which shuttered in 2020, a North Korean defector was puzzled, as no one had asked where he had come from and how he had arrived in the South. A River of Life school student replied, “I’m curious, but just coming here with you is enough!”

“The attitude of the River of Life School students was very touching. We opened our hearts to each other by accepting them as they are rather than seeing them from a certain point of view as North Korean defectors,” said Nam.

“Ezekiel 37 describes the conditions that must be premised in order to become a united nation. That is, dry bones must come to life. It is true that in order to achieve unification, I, my family, and the church, who are like dry bones, need spiritual revival,” said Nam.

“Therefore, what we need to prepare for unification is to become people of God who are full of prayer and love.”

MZ South Korean Christians like movie director Sun-Woo Kim echoed Nam’s hope-filled convictions. “I believe there will be a successful reunification if we choose to rely on the Holy Spirit and work through the Spirit,” he said. “I believe one soul is more precious than an entire nation’s economy.”

Additional reporting by Julian Chae and Morgan Lee

- More from Isabel Ong

Why US Christians Must Wrestle with a Korea Divided in Two

Chris Rice

70 years after the country was split in half, Americans have a responsibility to assist in ending this unresolved separation.

Flags of North Korea, rear, and South Korea, front, flutter in the wind as pictured from the border area between two Koreas.

Yonhap / AP Images / Edits by Christianity Today

In 1992, the American evangelist Billy Graham flew to Pyongyang to meet face to face with Kim Il Sung, the founding leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Mounting tensions between the United States and North Korea did not prevent Graham from preaching in two of the city’s official churches, meeting with church leaders and seminarians from around the country, and presenting Kim one of his books.

Two years later, Graham returned against the wishes of the US government. “I was told that war could break out at any minute. That’s how dangerous it was,” he said afterwards.

Graham, a staunch anti-communist, was interviewed on national television and visited Kim Il Sung University, where he spoke in front of 400 students and faculty.

“One of my reasons for going at this time was to express my concern for peace in the region and to make whatever small contribution I could to better relations between our two nations,” he said later of his visit.

American Christians have a long and complicated history with this part of the world. For decades, the US has had a significant military presence in South Korea. Prior to the Korean War, which began in 1950, hundreds of missionaries spread the gospel throughout Korea, which was one undivided peninsula for centuries.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the 1953 Korean War armistice, an agreement which ended the military fighting but left the Korean people divided into two isolated countries without a peace treaty. Given the US history of intervention and presence in this part of the world, and following the lead of Korean people working for peace and gaining inspiration from Graham’s courage, American Christians have a responsibility to assist in ending the longest unresolved separation of a people in modern history.

Crossing borders of division

Korea has always been a part of my life. I grew up in Seoul, South Korea, the son of Presbyterian missionaries. From 2014 to 2019, I led six teams into North Korea for humanitarian work.

Hundreds of US missionaries like my parents worked alongside the Korean people before, during, and after the war. While at times complicated by serious failings and misuses of power, missiologists often regard these 140 years as one of the most effective periods of mission history.

Graham’s trips in the 1990s opened the door for Christian humanitarian agencies to serve in North Korea, many of which worked for decades after. Unlike the missionaries before them, these agencies don’t plant churches, don’t do evangelism, and don’t distribute Bibles. But for 25 years, these humanitarian agencies have been at the forefront of relief and development work in the country—from Christian Friends of Korea and its superb tuberculosis work to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), where I currently work, providing food and medicine to support children recovering in hospitals and bringing North Korean agricultural experts to the West.

The work of these faith-based agencies echoes the ministry of Bible characters who, sensing God’s tug, crossed borders of division with a willingness to take risks and engage face to face with a person or community their people feared or didn’t understand.

Jacob went to Esau seeking to heal their broken relationship (Gen. 32:3–33:17). Esther risked her life to plead the case of her people before the king. In Jesus’ most famous parable, the Samaritan crossed the road to a stranger in distress, regardless of his ethnic identity or religious affiliation (Luke 10). Following the call of the Holy Spirit, Peter went to the Roman military center of Caesarea to engage a commander named Cornelius (Acts 10).

These stories reveal not only courage, but a virtue rarely practiced in our time: empathy. Because news about North Korea largely focuses on the threat of nuclear attack or tense political relations, few Americans may see the country beyond the risk it might pose to the US. Meanwhile, with 70 years of no peace agreement, no encounters with North Korean people and few at the diplomatic level, Americans have had little opportunity to learn more from the 26 million people (a population around the size of Australia) living there.

A lack of empathy for the other side poses the greatest danger in the North Korea and US relationship, one US general told me, not military buildup. “North Koreans don’t understand Americans and the way we think,” he said. “And Americans don’t understand North Koreans and the way they think.”

As the Bible stories demonstrate, practicing empathy doesn’t mean pretending everything is okay. Meeting North Korea’s leader didn’t change Billy Graham’s mind about realities he disagreed deeply with. But empathy does mean doing more than condemning and criticizing. It requires curiosity about the dangerous “other” to engage them as human beings, to understand why they do what they do, and to meet face to face not only to speak but to listen.

Few American Christians will have the opportunity to personally travel to North Korea to serve people with vulnerabilities alongside the dedicated doctors, nurses, and kitchen workers there. But all of us can work to provide what Mennonite peacemaker John Paul Lederach calls “critical yeast,” small but powerful actions that interrupt histories of distrust and hostility.

Providing critical yeast

For many US Christians, the first step in embracing a role as “critical yeast” is by learning, lamenting, and praying. This starts by educating ourselves about the Korean War. Many of us know far too little about the conflict that falls between World War II and the Vietnam War. But for the Korean people and Americans with Korean heritage, the war changed their lives and those of their loved ones forever.

In 2020, 100 Korean American Christian leaders signed a statement of lament, asking American Christians to mourn the aftermath of the Korean War. Four million people died (including two million Korean civilians and 32,000 US troops) and millions of Koreans were separated from their families by the war and remain so even to this day, with the people of North and South Korea nearly completely isolated from each other.

Peter Cha at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Soong-Chan Rah at Fuller Seminary, and Eugene Cho at Bread for the World were among the statement drafters. “We believe that God is faithful, and that the arc of the universe in God’s victory in Christ bends toward justice, reconciliation, and beloved community,” they wrote. “We pray that someday all Korean people will be able to return to the birthplaces of their ancestors, to meet face-to-face across the peninsula, and to recognize each other as sisters, brothers and image-bearers of God.”

Second, US Christians can provide critical yeast through financial and prayer support to faith-based humanitarian agencies, which are a face of compassion to vulnerable people in North Korea. Such organizations worked in North Korea for over two decades until the COVID-19 closure of North Korean borders in 2020. Due to hostility between the US and North Korean governments, staff and volunteers from organizations like MCC, American Friends Service Committee, Samaritan’s Purse, and World Vision are among the few Americans who have regularly visited North Korea.

Through working alongside North Korean counterparts in areas such as health and agriculture, these Americans challenge the narrative that reduces the country to a hostile enemy by interfacing with North Koreans as fellow human beings, traveling through the country together and eating together. Supporting such individuals and their organizations in work with their counterparts is one way we can strategically extend our resources and compassion to people with vulnerabilities in North Korea.”

Third, US Christians can consider the American government’s involvement in the Korean peninsula and the responsibility we bear as citizens to influence public policy. As the Korean American statement drafters put it succinctly, “the prophetic call of the church is to speak truth to power, and that can call us to political action.”

Due to its role in the Korean War, the United States must be a signer of a peace agreement to end the war. Christians can pray for, raise awareness of, and rally around the signing of such an agreement. And we can support laws like the Divided Families Reunification Act, which supports family reunion opportunities for American families and their relatives in North Korea.

While isolation and punitive pressure efforts (including sanctions) on North Korea have been vigorously applied, especially regarding human rights and nuclear weapons, they have failed to change the situation. Diplomacy guided solely by pressure, which doesn’t seek to understand how the “threatening other” thinks, is dangerous and lacks moral imagination. As Nobel Peace Prize winner and Christian political leader Nelson Mandela of South Africa put it, “When we dehumanize and demonize our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.”

The fact that the United States and North Korea have no diplomatic relations—no ongoing channels of communication, negotiation, and trust—is dangerous. Disagreements, misunderstandings, and threats can easily escalate into conflicts and increase the risk of war.

Indeed, the US has diplomatic relations with many other nations it is in high tension with, such as China. One critical yeast moment occurred in 1971, when an American ping-pong delegation visited China. “Friendship matches” led to cultural exchanges and planted seeds for eventual diplomatic relations, like Republican president Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972 with totalitarian leader Mao Zedong. The leaders met at a time when China had nuclear weapons, and the relatively recent Korean War—which the Chinese call “Resisting America and Assisting Korea War”—had led to the deaths of 180,000 Chinese soldiers.

In 1995, just 20 years after the Vietnam War, the United States established diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which is still a communist state. Since then, Vietnam War veterans including the late senator John McCain have become leaders in reconciliation initiatives between veterans on both sides. If China and Vietnam, why not North Korea?

Fourth, we can provide critical yeast by following the lead of courageous South Korean Christians working across the divide. To be clear, just as American Christians disagree about how to address the history of racism, South Korean Christians deeply disagree about how to engage North Korea. For some the North is perceived as an enemy nation. For many in the younger generation, it is another country. Meanwhile, others view the North as a family member to pursue healing with.

One of my mentors in peacemaking work was Syngman Rhee (no relation to the first South Korean president) who served as the first Asian American moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Rhee grew up in Pyongyang, and after communist troops killed his father, a pastor, during the war, his mother sent him and his brother to the South, where he joined the military.

After later immigrating to the US, Rhee went to seminary and joined the civil rights movement. As a Presbyterian church leader influenced by Martin Luther King Jr., Rhee was one of the first Korean Americans to visit North Korea in 1978. His mission was not only to cross divides, but to see if his family was still alive after 28 years of separation and no contact. His mother had passed away only three months earlier, but Rhee was briefly reunited with his siblings. When Rhee returned to South Korea, some called him a traitor and “communist lover.”

Yet as Rhee said to me once, “Chris, reconcilers are called to be bridges. And bridges get walked on from both sides.”

Other South Koreans are following that call. For example, Bae, Min Jeong a young South Korean woman I know, didn’t grow up feeling the trauma of the divided Korean peninsula. For her, North Korea was another country.

In college, however, she joined an InterVarsity Korea visit to the China–North Korea border. During a boat ride to view the North, she was instructed not to reveal she was Korean, and was full of fear. Suddenly, for the first time in her life, she saw two North Koreans up close—two soldiers sitting on a beach. They put down their guns by the river, waved at the boat, and offered a greeting in Korean.

“One of them looked exactly like my younger brother,” she said. “Only then did I understand that we are one people.” Minjeong said she “just cried and waved my hand.” When she returned to the South, she redirected her life toward a passion for reconciliation.

Not natural, normal, or inevitable

When I was growing up in South Korea in the 1970s, two groups of Americans were ever-present: missionaries and military personnel. While the Western missionaries have since left and South Korean churches have for decades been sending missionaries across the world, over 28,000 US troops are still stationed in South Korea, including the largest US military base on foreign soil. The truth is, the United States has indelibly shaped the ecclesial, military, and economic landscape of the Korean peninsula. As some of my South Korean friends say, “We think of the United States as a Northeast Asian nation.”

My friend Sue Park-Hur, a Mennonite pastor with ReconciliAsian, often reminds me that the Korean divide should concern not only “Korean Americans, but all Americans; war is not just our past.” This 70th anniversary year of a divided Korean people leaves US Christians with a responsibility and call.

As the first US missionaries to an undivided Korea knew, that divide is not natural, normal, or inevitable. Pursuing humanitarian cooperation and constructive diplomacy doesn’t erase deep disagreements, but it connects us to a deeper call. As the Korean American Christian leaders put it, “We believe our deepest motivation to engage the Korean divide as followers of Christ is not political or economic but as peacemakers and agents of reconciliation, following Jesus’ costly way of the cross—of discipleship, forgiveness, and justice which restores broken relationships.”

Given its potential to trigger a devastating war, the situation on the Korean peninsula is one of the most dangerous peace and security issues facing our planet today. In 1994, when the Clinton administration was seriously considering war with North Korea, Graham’s visit helped defuse the situation because he was able to help North Korea's leader and President Clinton understand better what the other was saying.

Graham told reporters, “My prayer is that the trip might have made some contribution to peace in a complex and potentially dangerous part of East Asia.”

At this historic and volatile moment, it’s time for the American church to follow in Graham’s footsteps to take diplomatic and border-crossing risks.

Chris Rice is director of the Mennonite Central Committee United Nations Office in New York City, and was previously co-founding director of the Duke Divinity School Center for Reconciliation. His new book is From Pandemic to Renewal: Practices for a World Shaken by Crisis (InterVarsity Press).

- More from Chris Rice

Theology

The Latest Black Tragedy Is My Trauma Too

Nicole Massie Martin

Communal suffering has to be reckoned with. And so does God’s healing word.

This image taken from police body cam video shows a police dog attacking Jadarrius Rose in Circleville, Ohio.

Ohio State Highway Patrol / AP Images

A few weeks ago, I arrived at the airport a little early to pick up a friend and decided to pull over in the emergency lane to wait. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but there were 20 cars already there, so I figured my decision wasn’t too bad.

Moments later, however, I heard a siren and saw police car lights in my rearview mirror.

Without warning, my hands began to tremble, my breathing quickened, and my legs started to shake. I called my husband and told him what was happening. My body was going into full-fledged panic mode.

As the officer approached, I could barely catch my breath. Images of Black men and women shot for minor offenses raced through my mind. Would I be labeled as a criminal who broke the law, or as a mother, wife, and minister who served the Lord? Would I be lumped into the countless names of Black people who have died for misdemeanors, or would I be among the privileged few who escaped alive?

By the time the officer came near to my car, I could barely see. He stood at a short distance, asked me to breathe, and helped me to calm down. With my husband still on speaker phone, I finally found the words to say, “I’m sorry.”

What followed in my mind was, “Please don’t hurt me.” In that moment of panic, I could not distinguish the kind officer in front of me from everything I had seen on the news.

My traffic citation gave the other offending cars an opportunity to drive off and, when he finally left, I began to cry. I cried for all of the Black men and women who begged for their lives and still died. I cried for Manuel Ellis, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Alton Sterling, and so many more.

The list grows by the day. During a recent traffic stop near Circleville, Ohio, an unarmed man named Jadarrius Rose was pulled over for a missing mud flap and then attacked by a police dog. As I watched the horrific video, I wept again.

This time, the tears triggered pictures of Walter Gadsden being attacked by a police dog during a civil rights protest on May 3, 1963, in downtown Birmingham. A black-and-white photo shows a police officer holding a young Black high school student by his clothes as a dog rips at his flesh. This image is in my bones, in books on my coffee tables, and accessible to my children online. This story and others are in my head and in my body, passed down from generations of traumatized ancestors who’ve gone before me.

I’m left to ask: How can we understand things that simply don’t make sense? How can we find healing from generations of embodied pain? Most importantly, how do we change the system so that Black people don’t get choked during an arrest, shot for misinformation, suffocated for small crimes, or mauled over a missing mud flap?

The answer is neither in defending so-called “Blue Lives” nor in defunding the police. The answer is now and has always been in Jesus Christ.

By drawing on faith, I am not minimizing the deep social and political disfunctions that allow racism to persist, or the Jim Crow tendencies that continue long after laws are gone. Instead, I am tapping into the strength that empowered civil rights leaders to march while being blasted by fire truck hoses. I am calling on the power that drove my great-great-grandparents to transition from slavery to freedom for the sake of their children’s children. I am trusting in the presence of Christ and the great cloud of witnesses who believe in his name.

Standing up for justice is the calling of the church in times like these—and always. Those of us who are Black Christians are responsible for naming and tending to the pain that’s triggered every time we see racist tragedies in the news. Ignoring this moment in history only exacerbates the mental health problems that often plague our communities.

When communal trauma goes unaddressed, it hides in the recesses of our minds and turns into fears we knowingly and unknowingly pass on to our children. Instead, we need to speak God’s Word of healing over Black bodies and minds in ways that inspire action and revive hope.

“Statistics are unnecessary for those of us who carry in our hearts the experience of being black in this country,” writes Esau McCaulley in his CT cover story on Paul and police ethics. He continues:

The United States, historically and in the present, has failed to protect us. It has used the sword to instill a fear that has been passed down from generation to generation in black homes and churches. That dread, however, has never had the final word. Instead, black Christians have reminded themselves not to fear those who can only kill the body. At our best and most Christian moments, we have demanded our birthrights as children of God.

The same message of hope needs to be proclaimed in other churches as well, not just Black ones. They too will be suffering because of this news. They too are called to lament the brokenness of this world, tend to the pain of brothers and sisters who suffer directly, and demand accountability and change in our systems.

Sometimes it’s easy to overlook Black trauma as something that happens to “them” and not “us.” When this happens, Christians miss an opportunity to exercise the biblical language of communal lament. It draws us closer to others and most importantly to the suffering of our Lord.

As the church, we are called to stay in solidarity with those who grieve and carry the burdens of those who suffer. That means refusing to be desensitized by incidents of police brutality in Black communities and being willing to do something—anything—about it.

Nicole Massie Martin is the Chief Impact Officer at Christianity Today.

- More from Nicole Massie Martin

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