$100M Ad Campaign Aims to Make Jesus the ‘Biggest Brand in Your City’

Maria Baer

“He Gets Us,” an effort to attract skeptics and cultural Christians, launches nationally this month. But Christians still have questions about how the church markets faith.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: EnriqueM / Getty / James / Unsplash

If you haven’t seen the commercials yet, you will.

This month, what is thought to be the biggest-ever Christian advertising campaign will go national. Television commercials, along with online ads and billboards, will target millennials and Gen Z with a carefully crafted, exhaustively researched, and market-tested message about Jesus Christ: He gets us.

Those behind the “He Gets Us” campaign say they’ll spend $100 million—donated by a small group of wealthy anonymous families—on the national launch, putting the campaign in the same financial arena as big-name brands like Old Navy, TD Ameritrade, and Mercedes-Benz.

The video ads, some of which are already garnering millions of views on YouTube, feature striking black-and-white photos and a stirring piano track. Made under the direction of Michigan-based marketing agency Haven, each ad focuses on an aspect of Jesus’ earthly experience with which today’s “the struggle is real” crowd might resonate: Jesus was judged too. Jesus had fun with his friends too.

The ads direct viewers to HeGetsUs.com, where they can choose four ways to engage: chat live, text for “prayer and positive vibes,” sign up to join a small group with Alpha, or click through to a Bible reading plan on the YouVersion app.

It might be the largest campaign of its kind, but “He Gets Us” is hardly the first time Christians have adopted secular media strategies for spiritual ends. From televangelism to God billboards to viral videos, every time technology advances, many Christians see new opportunities to share the gospel of Jesus. This time, though, it’s being branded by professionals and boosted with a big-bucks budget.

There’s a marketing term for when someone who views an ad ultimately buys the product: conversion. Christians have another definition for that word: turning a life over to Jesus. It’s this tension between “selling” and “converting” that prompts some Christians to object to deploying business strategies in church or using the secular marketing playbook to promote Christianity.

“A lot of churches don’t use the ‘M-word’ when referring to marketing,” said Haley Veturis, a digital communications expert who’s worked with some of the biggest ministries in the US. But marketing “is exactly what they’re doing,” she said, whenever they serve their communities or invite people to a worship service.

Veturis, former social media manager for Saddleback Church, now runs the firm digifora with partner Justin Brackett, former marketing consultant for Lakewood Church. The two agreed that if evangelism is just marketing by another name, then whether churches have megachurch-size budgets or not, they’re always focusing some energy on marketing. It’s how they do it that often creates tension.

When firms like theirs encourage clients to “distinguish” their church from others or when they begin to advertise through billboards and online banners, it can weary some Christians. Marketing skeptics view such strategies as blurring the lines between sharing the gospel and “productizing” the church, as Brackett put it. They worry such ads could be seen as nothing more than luring future tithers into local pews.

The creators of He Gets Us say this is a strength of their particular campaign: It can’t be misunderstood as promoting a single congregation, because churches all over the country and across denominations are involved. The campaign partnered with Gloo, a company that specializes in using data to help churches, to help answer the calls and texts for prayer and recruit congregations to receive visitors who click for more information on HeGetsUs.com.

In an ad created by Gloo to recruit churches for that effort just before Christmas last year, a narrator asks, “What if, instead of all these consumer ads, Jesus was the biggest brand in your city this holiday?”

Decades after Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan introduced the idea that “the medium is the message,” some Christians object that treating Jesus like a consumer product could encourage non-Christians to treat him the same way once they get to church.

“The story of Jesus … doesn’t need to be sold, but it is worth sharing,” said Brad Abare, who used to run Church Marketing Sucks, an online resource that explored the tension Christians faced in differentiating evangelism from sales.

Since the “product” of the gospel message is transformation, people’s testimonies—their actual changed lives—advertise for themselves.

“Jesus knew the best way to spread the word was to live a life worth following,” Abare said. “So while the He Gets Us campaign is admirable for its intent, it does make me wonder that if we had more followers of Jesus worth following, what else we could put $100 million to work doing?”

The $100 million for He Gets Us comes from The Servant Christian Foundation, a nonprofit backed by a Christian donor-advised fund called The Signatry. (Both declined to name the donors who helped envision and pay for He Gets Us, who want to remain anonymous.)

Donor-advised funds are popular with evangelical investors who want to make large gifts without setting up their own private foundations. Wealthy clients invest with The Signatry, which will then either manage the money in an investment fund or help them find nonprofits to support. So far, The Signatry has given away over $3 billion from Christian philanthropists.

Last year, The Servant Christian Foundation approached Bill McKendry, founder and chief creative officer at Haven, concerned that too many young Americans are leaving Christianity and that more people were growing hostile toward faith. Their idea: a national media blitz for Jesus at a scale that no single church could afford.

McKendry said approaching American Christianity’s image problem with business savvy is what Jesus would have done. “[Jesus] crafted his language and his storytelling to resonate with people,” he said. “He told agricultural stories to farmers. He told fish stories to fishermen. … This culture is immersed in media, and we’re using media to reach them for Christ.”

McKendry, which has been involved in campaigns for Christian brands like Focus on the Family, Alliance Defending Freedom, and American Bible Society, had Haven develop—to put it in marketing terms—a “problem statement” that their campaign would answer: “How did the world’s greatest love story in Jesus become known as a hate group?”

The project began with six months of market research, including online and telephone surveys, to try to learn more about what McKendry calls the “movable middle.” Their research found that over half of American adults are religious skeptics or cultural Christians—people who believe in Jesus but don’t have an active relationship with him.

Prior to the national campaign, which will run through the end of the year, He Gets Us had a two-month test launch in ten cities in late 2021. During that time, it led 17,000 people to engage with the site’s offers to chat, join an Alpha group, or start YouVersion’s Bible reading plan. More than half of those who clicked through to begin YouVersion’s seven-day reading plan went on to complete the full week.

Steve French, president and CEO of The Signatry as well as The Servant Christian Foundation, said he hopes the campaign has an impact like the 1979 movie Jesus, which was created as an evangelism tool by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru). The film made a blip at the box office, but according to the Jesus Film Project, it has since been seen by 5 billion people and translated into over 1,000 languages. By 2004, The New York Times suggested it might be the most-watched and most-translated movie of all time.

So far, hundreds of churches have signed up to respond to people who fill out connect forms on HeGetsUs.com. Scott Beck, CEO of Gloo, which is running that digital infrastructure, said he expects many more churches will join when the campaign launches nationally. There is no theological criteria or statement of faith that churches must adhere to in order to take part.

“We hope that all churches that are aligned with the He Gets Us campaign will participate,” said Jason Vanderground, president at Haven. “This includes multiple denominational and nondenominational church affiliations, Catholic and Protestant, churches of various sizes, ethnicities, languages, and geography … ultimately, the goal is inspiration, not recruitment or conversion.”

That goal has made the ads somewhat controversial even apart from church marketing concerns. McKendry at Haven said some Christians have criticized the ads, saying that by emphasizing a God who “gets us,” they don’t give a full picture of Christ’s deity. (Some YouTube commenters, for example, took issue with a video released before Christmas about how “Jesus was born to a teen mom.”)

The criticism carries echoes of a longstanding rift among evangelicals: Does becoming “seeker sensitive” risk watering down the gospel?

“The church needs to understand that this campaign isn’t for them, it’s for Jesus,” McKendry said. “It’s to reach an audience we’re not currently reaching.”

But even bringing someone into the doors of a church isn’t necessarily “enough,” said Jason Daye, who formerly worked as a vice president at Outreach, which creates marketing materials for churches.

“The goal [of marketing] shouldn’t just be to get a bunch of people to show up,” Daye said. “If that’s your goal … then you’re missing out on the bigger piece of what we’re called to do. And that is to build those relationships that lead people to Jesus.”

McKendry said He Gets Us has the same goal; they’re just playing the long game.

“Is the goal that people become Christians? Obviously,” he said. “But more importantly for now … we need to raise their level of respect for Jesus, and then they’ll move.”

Despite disagreements about tactics or even the content, the He Gets Us team is confident that they’re starting where every successful ad campaign starts: with a good product. Market research, McKendry said, found skeptics were more likely to be convinced their values lined up with Jesus’ than with other religious figures like Mohammad or Buddha.

“Jesus,” said French, “is really the strong brand here.”

Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to indicate that Bill McKendry has worked with Focus on the Family and Alliance Defending Freedom as clients, though not under the Haven agency.

- More from Maria Baer

News

Do Russian Christians Need More Bonhoeffers?

Jayson Casper

European evangelical leaders discuss how membership in the body of Christ should guide believers when their nations are at war.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the flag of Russia

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

The first cleric has fallen to Russia’s new law.

Ioann Burdin of Resurrection Church in Kostroma, 215 miles northwest of Moscow, was detained for “discrediting the Russian armed forces” in his Sunday sermon.

His parish also allegedly shared an antiwar petition.

“We, Christians, cannot stand idly by when a brother kills brother, a Christian kills a Christian,” the statement said, as reported by the BBC’s Russian service. “Let’s not repeat the crimes of those who hailed Hitler’s deeds on Sept. 1, 1939.”

Does Russia—and the world—need more like him?

Christianity Today previously reported the frustration of Ukrainian Christian leaders that their Russian counterparts should be like Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The famous German theologian was executed in the waning days of the Third Reich for complicity in an assassination plot against the führer.

Ukrainian evangelicals want Russian evangelicals to at least speak out.

Hundreds have. But is it fair to ask them to do so? Russia’s new law, passed March 4, provides penalties of up to 15 years in prison for simply calling Putin’s “special military operation” a “war.”

Five European evangelical leaders advised CT on which should be paramount: safety or solidarity.

CT: Esther in the Bible, and Bonhoeffer in history, are exceptional examples of faith. But are they normative for Christians—especially Christian leaders—in times of conflict?

Leonardo De Chirico, chair of the theological commission of the Italian Evangelical Alliance:

In a sense, the whole church has been given a prophetic responsibility to denounce evil and injustice. Then there are specific prophetic callings that individuals receive from God, and they are ready to pay the price of exposing themselves to retaliations and persecutions.

Not all of us are called to be Esthers and Bonhoeffers in all circumstances, but some should. And all should support them in the priestly role of prayer and solidarity.

Loyalty to our nations is good, although it can become an idol. But loyalty to God and his global church takes precedence. I hope and pray that believers across the nations involved will show that their unity in Christ is stronger than their national allegiances.

Marc Jost, general secretary of the Swiss Evangelical Alliance:

I was very pleased and encouraged to hear that my Russian counterpart had courageously spoken out against his own government. But this is primarily a matter of personal calling and mandate, rather than a general duty of Christians, or of critically thinking Russians.

Although, of course, I very much welcome it.

Loyalty among Christians transcends all boundaries. The bond through Christ is stronger than that of a nation, even stronger than that of one’s own physical family.

Samuil Petrovski, president of the Serbian Evangelical Alliance and IFES Serbia:

This question is not new. Many years ago, when Ukrainian pastors asked Russian pastors to speak out against Putin, I remember not agreeing with that.

I know that most Christian leaders in Russia are against the war. They are praying for peace in their churches, and some of them are publicly demonstrating. They are under a lot of pressure. What is most important is the unity of believers in Ukraine and Russia.

Instead of being one-sided, as some people have done by displaying the Ukrainian flag and creating events for prayer for the Ukrainians specifically, they should also advertise the Russian flag and pray for the Russians too.

Christians should stand up in prayer, offer practical help, and appeal for peace—praying for the leaders on both sides. We must be extremely careful to avoid strong political debate, through which our Christian leaders can lose focus and forget the importance of Christ.

During the conflict between Serbia and Croatia, some pastors of evangelical churches gave strong statements where they encouraged NATO to bomb another country. Other pastors condemned them for this.

Initiatives on both sides tried to bring us together, to pray in a nearby neutral country. But some rejected this offer, saying, “The only place we can meet together and pray is in heaven.”

It ought not to be this way—whether in Serbia, Russia, or Ukraine.

Slavko Hadžić, Langham Preaching coordinator for the West Balkans, from Bosnia:

Christians need to take a stand for justice and truth, and against war and violence. But while we should not be silent because of fear, neither should we speak because of expectations from others. Our motive must be to please God alone.

In God’s kingdom there are no Bosnians, Serbs, or Croats. There are no Ukrainians or Russians. There are only those who are children of God, and those who are not. And the Devil uses some for evil on all sides.

Instead of condemning those who are still silent, we need to pray that God will give them guidance, courage, and wisdom to know what, when, and how to speak.

Vlady Raichinov, vice president of the Bulgarian Evangelical Alliance:

The Bible is abundant with stories of faith-based defiance against cruel monarchs and autocrats. Church history has also had its fair share of voices speaking up against injustice.

Paul said: “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person” (Col. 4:6, ESV). This combination of grace and salt should characterize our response to any public conflict. With love and veracity, mercy and virtue, poise and sting, we avoid the temptation to be either thick-skinned and unkind, or diffident and withdrawn.

This is especially true of authoritarian regimes.

Conscience sometimes whispers discreetly and unobtrusively, a shy voice reminding us of our identity, values, and commitments. At other times it is loud, blunt, and shrill, an internal whistleblower forcing us to seek a prominent change.

As a “conscience of society,” the church often speaks in a low-key, underground, word-of-mouth manner. It subverts social values one person at a time, slowly and patiently spreading its salt and light, until it manages to drill so many holes in the tyrant’s moral foundation that eventually his license runs dry and his dominance tumbles.

But at other times, the Spirit leads Christians to raise a sharp, uncompromising voice against crimes that have escalated too far. And then the church, still fueled by God’s Spirit, becomes a trigger and a flag-bearer of major, society-wide tectonic shifts. Its salt and light then influence the masses to perceive the injustice and motivate them to finally do something about it.

Our prayers are that God would lead Christians in Russia to carefully listen to God’s still and quiet voice, to faithfully hold to their calling to preach the gospel, and to courageously follow his prompting of what needs to be done in their terrible situation.

CT: What level of threat is necessary before a Christian is compelled to do something against evil?

De Chirico (Italy):

The less personal and immediate the level of threat, the more difficult it is to be motivated against it. If we are talking about systemic evil, some people do not even recognize it, let alone speak against it.

Here we are confronted with a war, with people dying, with destruction and despair, and with the threat of nuclear weapons. Things might be geographically distant now, but if not stopped, its ripple effects will soon reach out to the world.

This level of threat compels all of us to do something.

Jost (Switzerland):

Every injustice, and everything that puts our fellow human beings in danger, should be a call for Christians to do something about it.

But not every evil is my responsibility. When God shows an individual Christian an injustice, and touches the heart to act, then that person should be obedient to God.

Petrovski (Serbia):

Christians need to raise up their voice in all settings, not just when tragedy strikes. This should especially be when the evil is in our own neighborhoods, and sometimes this can be unpopular.

But it is very interesting that in the New Testament, we do not find the apostles writing directly against Caesar and the Roman authorities, but rather giving a strong call to prayer, perseverance, and the challenge to be salt and light in times of crisis.

Hadžić (Bosnia):

As Christians, we always need to stand against evil. Greater evil requires greater response, but we do not need to wait for it to grow.

It is very important to remember that our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against heavenly principalities. If we look with secular standards, there is one side which is guilty, and the other which is innocent.

But by biblical standards we are all guilty. There are people suffering on all sides, there are children of God on all sides, and there is need for God’s mercy on all sides.

When suffering and in pain or fear, it is hard to not look at the other as evil. Instead, we must recognize the Evil One, and stand against him.

Raichinov (Bulgaria):

As the Book of Proverbs states: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute” (v. 31:8). This is a general call of action, valid for Jesus’ followers, everywhere. However, on a day-to-day level, when Christians are in the gutters, busy bandaging wounds and counseling victims, the level of threat is to be evaluated on the spot, according to what God imprints into our hearts.

A silent cry caused by abuse would be most recognizable to people who have gained experience in dealing with violence or trafficking; others might be oblivious to the signs of danger. A loss of life during war or pandemic may end up as a statistic on a TV screen; when it hits closer to home, or when ministering to grieving people, desperate refugees, or broken families, then the level of threat is perceived differently.

But on a broader scale, Jesus’ new command to love creates in us a sensitive and caring heart that identifies with and ministers to people in pain, however severe.

How low is that bar? It’s as low as the personal dignity, health, or life of any human being threatened by another person, or by a natural disaster.

Is the chance of success a legitimate factor to consider? Or is a small act a mustard seed?

De Chirico (Italy):

Prophets act regardless of the outcome, ready to face opposition rather than winning the case. They care only about affirming truth and denouncing evil, calling all to repent.

But the Bible also calls us to a royal responsibility—living orderly lives and caring for others. In this role, we must weigh different factors. It all depends on which role—prophet, priest, or king—that we give precedence.

Jost (Switzerland):

As Christians, we are always invited to reckon with both our entrusted thinking capacity, and God’s immeasurable possibilities. Combining the two constitutes true wisdom.

Petrovski (Serbia):

Christians should stand up against any form of evil—especially war—but not only when the war has started. We should teach every believer to not take sides, to not accuse brothers and sisters in Christ, and to not demand action from them without knowing the full story.

Instead, we should invite all Christians in the world to pray for Ukraine, Russia, the European Union, and America. This is a global threat, and it is essential that we be peacemakers.

Hadžić (Bosnia):

Success is found in fighting fear—or the expectations of others—and in standing for truth and justice. If we do nothing, we will never know what would happen if we did. We must do what is right, and what God is calling us to do, regardless of any possibility of greater success than this.

Raichinov (Bulgaria):

This is not an easy issue. Our collective memory is replete with stories of totalitarian persecution. But as leaders suffered pressure, congregations held to their faith, met in secret, and smuggled Bibles despite the imminent danger of being reported to communist watchdogs.

Did they anticipate success and how would it have been measured? The one lesson standing out is their commitment to the subversive power of the gospel. Their sedition was spiritual: proclaiming Jesus, praying for governmental change, teaching their children to memorize Scripture, living a life of integrity, and loving their neighbor.

Eventually, the regimes disintegrated from the inside out. Consciously or instinctively, the church contributed by undermining the autocratic value system and quietly spreading a different worldview.

Jesus counseled in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not resist an evil person” (Matt. 5:39). How does this factor into the decision?

De Chirico (Italy):

There are entire libraries on the interpretation of the Sermon of the Mount. I take it as not addressing primarily the role of the state, but on personal dealings with evil people, ready to pay the personal price of their evil.

Jost (Switzerland):

The Sermon on the Mount challenges us in our personal relationships and encourages us to be peacemakers. Christians in political responsibility also have state power to execute and, for example, an army to lead.

But John the Baptist did not ask the [Roman] soldiers to lay down their arms, rather, to be just and fair in their efforts (Luke 3:14).

Petrovski (Serbia):

Jesus never called for riots or politically based movements in the Sermon on the Mount. And Paul calls us to bless our enemies, rather than curse them.

During our war, a few churches on both sides publicly prayed a blessing over their “enemies,” but there were other pastors who looked to the government for influence.

They were listening to Caesar rather than to Christ.

Hadžić (Bosnia):

We should not seek revenge, and we should not return evil with evil. Christians fight evil not with hatred but with love, not with curses but with prayer and blessing.

Where evil seeks to destroy, we seek to build.

Raichinov (Bulgaria):

At the end of the day, justice and vengeance belong to the Lord. Jesus has told us to be ready to turn the other cheek, and this is a basic value of our Christian faith. It involves not only seeking peace and building bridges, but also appreciating even the abuser as a human being created in God’s image and in need of God’s grace.

As the church grows more organized in its structure and recognized in society, it becomes a visible image of how God imagines people should live. At this level, the church has yet another task: to challenge the world order and offer Jesus’ upside-down value system in its place.

As a countercultural entity, the church is supposed to be a dissident, declaring God’s mind against injustice and evil. In a world of disorder and disinformation, broken beyond repair, the church should serve as a beacon of peace and truth.

Its responsibility is to defy demonic forces, call them out by name, and earnestly pray against their spread. By resisting hate and depravity; by identifying things like “war” and “tyranny” with their real names; and by drawing a clear line on moral perversity, self-absorbed power, and human sin, the church is providing this world with a frame of reference and pointing to another kingdom, one of shalom and love.

- More from Jayson Casper

Self-Care Only Works in God’s Care

Julie Canlis

Christian faith calls not for indulgence or self-denial but something else entirely.

Johan Armang / Pexels

A few decades ago, you might have found me taking pot-shots at John the Baptist’s “I must decrease” (John 3:30). Having witnessed the havoc it wreaked upon Christian women prone to self-abnegation, as well as the license it gave to authoritarian leaders prone to spiritual abuse, I was not a fan of this particular phrase.

That changed when I happened upon my 12-year-old daughter’s Pinterest board titled “Self Care” (alongside “Cute Animals” and “Cool Outfits”). I opened it and discovered bubble bath recipes, sassy girl-power quotes, yoga poses, pampering skin care routines, and promos for self-care products (read: luxury goods). Harmless? I wasn’t so certain.

It made me wonder if I had traded in John the Baptist’s camelhair tunic for luxury camelhair boots.

Christian theologians have always had revolutionary messages about the self, which are often paradoxical and profoundly countercultural. They take their cue from Jesus, who talked about losing one’s self in order to find it. About coming to serve, not be served. About death being the doorway to life. In none of these messages is Jesus downgrading the self. He is simply giving our selfhood a new foundation.

The early church followed in his footsteps, baptizing people and proclaiming the termination of a selfhood that was already leading to death. They remodeled Roman mausoleums into baptistries, sending a clear message through the architecture: You are going here to die. A deceased person is being buried here. Sin killed you—you were already dead—you are just enacting a death that has already happened.

When the convert rose from the clear waters of baptism, they were raised into a revolutionary idea of what it means to be a self.

For early theologians, this symbolic death of the self was the discovery of the true self in Christ. They believed they could “be” themselves while being a self-for-others. The secret to this fully developed selfhood was neither self-care nor self-abnegation—which, it could be argued, are simply different sides of the same theological coin.

Instead, when a person’s life “is hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3, KJV), their identity is fully stable, for it’s connected to the one who truly knows us, loves us, and doesn’t change. Knowing oneself and being oneself can only happen in relationship with knowing and being known by God and others. And to go one step further: Truly caring for oneself only happens when we have something bigger than ourselves to care about.

This is the secret to Lent. The early church, like a good parent, wanted to direct its children annually into a journey that would remind them of their primary selfhood: in Christ.

Historically, Lent arose from the 40 days when baptismal candidates fasted and prayed in preparation for their baptism on the eve of Easter. It didn’t take much time, though, until the whole church realized it wasn’t just the new converts who needed this cleansing process. Everyone needed it again and again. The entire early church, then, committed itself to remembering baptism and the new identity that it offers. Lent was not so much about self-hatred or self-punishment but the rediscovery of the self in Christ.

The problem with the self-care movement today is that much of it rests on a false dualism: that my selfhood and God’s are in competition, and that choosing something good for myself comes at the expense of God’s glory and vice versa. But this is just a modern dilemma, foreign to the church of earlier centuries.

Bernard of Clairvaux, a gentle pastor and abbot from the 12th century, helps us ground self-care in its proper relation to God and ourselves. For him, the love of self was a fitting and necessary part of being human and even a key part of our survival. At the same time, he understood that it was equally vulnerable to our disordered desires.

How is it possible to have a rightly ordered care for ourselves? Bernard took his monks on a pilgrimage of love, in which they moved beyond disordered self-love to one that was truly free for God and others.

Bernard begins by describing the first stage of love (self-love) as what he calls “natural human affection,” where we are weakened and nearly “compelled to love and serve ourselves first.” For Bernard, there is no intrinsic problem with having a self, but unfortunately, that self often gets infected with desires that lead to enslavement. This stage Bernard calls “love of self for self’s sake.”

In the second stage of love, we discover something larger than ourselves—God!—who is worthy of our love and delight. We begin to experience freedom from our disordered desires, even though this stage is still a subset of self-love, or the “love of God for self’s sake.”

But true growth in God comes at the third stage of love, when we begin to love God for who he is and not for what he can give us. This stage brings liberation, as our disordered desires begin to find their deepest calling in loving God and our neighbor.

“Once God’s sweetness has been tasted,” writes Bernard, “it draws us to the pure love of God more than our needs compel us to love him. Thus we begin to say, ‘We now love God, not for our necessity, for we ourselves have tasted and know how sweet the Lord is.’”

But Bernard isn’t done with us.

There is the fourth stage. Here, we come around full circle to a purified love of ourselves. Bernard calls this the stage of “love of self for God’s sake.” At this level, we engage in the most difficult spiritual discipline of all: seeing ourselves with God’s eyes, knowing ourselves as beloved, and loving ourselves as one of God’s beloved creations—warts and all.

“Such experiences are rare and come only for a moment,” says Bernard.

To those of us accustomed to believing that my self and God’s are in competition, this truth comes as a shock: What brings God glory is not our self-denigration but rather humble gratitude and freedom in knowing ourselves as loved by him and made in his image. This is true self-care, where we’re given the gift of seeing ourselves as God sees us and loving ourselves with his unalloyed love (1 Cor. 13).

When you remove God’s love from the picture, self-care is not part of the fourth stage but the first. It doesn’t attend to things that truly satisfy, nor does it convince us of our lovability. Ironically, the first stage is tyrannical, because the love of oneself is a devouring monster. It will never be satiated. I call this kind of self-care a luxury form of despair.

By contrast, Bernard’s fourth stage is a truly purified love of self that reflects God’s own enjoyment and acceptance of us. This radical message is what we’re unsuspectingly baptized into. What masquerades as “healthy” self-love without also demanding the Cross offers only a false identity.

A spirituality that begins with the death of the self (that our baptisms proclaim) is worlds apart from the kind abnegation of the self that many have suffered. Baptism puts us in touch with our real needs, by plunging us into the much larger reality of God and his love of us.

“I am not certain that the fourth degree of love in which we love ourselves only for the sake of God may be perfectly attained in this life,” writes Bernard. “But, when it does happen, we will experience the joy of the Lord and be forgetful of ourselves in a wonderful way. We are, for those moments, one mind and one spirit with God.”

With this freedom, we are able to move into a “disinterested” love of ourselves that is neither dependent upon self-care practices nor eschews them as worthless. For all its help, self-care can never take the place of being loved unconditionally.

The season before Easter is the space when we get to lean into God’s love. Lent did not originate out of a desire to self-punish or to focus on our sinfulness. It’s even more black and white than that: Lent is about death. But this crazy Christian message goes even further: It’s only through death that we begin to live.

Lent is when the whole church remembers our origins—origins that began in our baptism and Jesus’ baptism, too, where he heard the word that we can hardly believe: You are my beloved.

We have been baptized. We have been plunged into Christ. We can leave behind anything that keeps us from knowing we are loved by God and anything that prevents us from loving our neighbor as ourselves.

Lent is not an endurance stunt. It’s about reclaiming the idea that we are loved long before we enter the wilderness.

Julie Canlis is the author of A Theology of the Ordinary (2017) and Calvin’s Ladder (2012), winner of a Templeton Prize and a Christianity Today Award of Merit.

- More from Julie Canlis

Theology

Revenge of the Black-Letter Christians

Russell Moore

In our effort to honor all of Scripture, let’s not forget that Jesus is at the heart of it.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons / Tim Wildsmith / Susan Holt Simpson / Unsplash

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

I remember standing in a convention hall once, arguing with an elderly lady about the song “Jesus Loves Me.” Let me first say that I would thoroughly rebuke my 20-year-ago self for my overconfidence in the theological correctness of my “tribe.”

I even felt bad at the time—this woman reminded me of all the Southern Baptist ladies who taught me Sunday school (and “Jesus Loves Me”!), right down to the bouffant hairdo. I’ll bet she had peppermints in her purse, too. I was annoyingly polemical, and she would have had every right to pat me on the head, say, “Bless your heart,” and send me on my way.

We were on opposite sides of what was then a big doctrinal schism in my denominational tradition, and we were debating one of the points of contention in that controversy. I asked for her interpretation of a biblical passage dealing with whatever the subject was, and she said, “That’s Paul; that’s not Jesus. Jesus never said anything about that.”

When I turned back to another passage, she said, “That’s the difference between you and me. Your authority is the Bible; mine’s Jesus.” I responded, “But what do you know about Jesus apart from the Bible?” And she said, “I know everything I need to know: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know!’” And to that I said, “… for the Bible tells me so.”

I cringe when I think about how proud I was of “winning” that debate. When this woman walked away, I assumed it was because she couldn’t respond to my retort. Now I know she was probably thinking, Who is this punk, and how do I get away from him? That said, while I better understand the point she was trying to make now, I still agree with the point I made—though not the churlish way I made it.

There was a time when I was really worried about “red-letter Christianity”—which is the idea that the words of Jesus (printed with red ink in many Bibles) are more authoritative than the rest of the Bible and can override theological or ethical teaching found in, say, the Old Testament or the Pauline Epistles.

I still share that concern, and this mentality can be found in many places to this day.

At first glance, a prioritizing of the “red letters” makes sense. Jesus is, after all, more authoritative as a person than Moses or Jeremiah or Paul or John. If we were to find ourselves in a crowd of resurrected saints in heaven and some point of biblical interpretation comes up, no one will be looking at Nahum if Jesus is there.

The fullest revelation of God is Jesus Christ, and he makes sense not just of the rest of the Bible (Luke 24:27) but of the entire cosmos (Col. 1:17). The problem with this direction is not that it becomes too focused on Jesus, but that it isn’t focused enough.

Jesus’ view of the Bible is that it is the Word of God and cannot be broken. He reinterprets the revelation of God and the story of Israel, explaining how it is about him. Even when Jesus says, Moses said ___, but I say unto you … , it is never to explain away the hard edges of the Old Testament. Rather, Jesus sharpened those hard edges even further: Moses said no murder, but I say no rage in your heart either.

Jesus also told his disciples that he had more to say, things God’s people weren’t ready to hear just yet (John 16:12–13). And then, just as God chose prophets through whom to speak, Jesus did the same through his apostles (Eph. 2:20). Even the direct speech we see from Jesus after his ascension, such as his letters to the churches of Revelation, comes through apostles he has chosen (in that case, John).

Moreover, without a view of the inspiration of all of Scripture, we don’t have red letters at all. Almost everyone acknowledges that the first writings of our New Testament weren’t the Gospels but some letters of Paul. And the Gospels, when written down, weren’t discovered in a cave. They came through Matthew and John, disciples of the Lord—as well as Mark and Luke, associates of apostles like Peter and Paul.

The Bible claims that all Scripture is “breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16, ESV throughout), that the writers of any Scripture speak for God as they are “carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet. 1:21), and that the Spirit doing that carrying is “the Spirit of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:11). If that’s true, then, as I used to tell my seminary students, “Every word of the Bible should be in red letters.”

Many could see in red-letter rhetoric a slippery slope that would lead, in its extreme form, to an attempt to split apart Word from Spirit, Father from Son, head from body. Those dangers are all real. But increasingly, I’m seeing its mirror image, a kind of “black-letter Christianity,” which is just as perilous.

As with many other things, we tend not to see, as C. S. Lewis warned us in Mere Christianity, that the Devil sends errors into the world not one by one but two by two—in “pairs of opposites,” on either side of the truth. Right now, we should see that it’s not just the temptation of red-letter Christians to try to separate the Bible from Jesus. Black-letter Christians do it too—and the stakes are just as high, if not higher.

In Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry described Jayber the barber listening to Troy, a waiting customer, rail about rounding up all the Communists and having them shot. Jayber stopped, looked at Troy and said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

Troy replied, “Where did you get that crap?” When Jayber said, “Jesus Christ,” Troy could only respond, “Oh.”

Jayber reflects: “It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.”

When I first read that, I assumed Berry was constructing a hyperbolic scenario, to contrast authentic Sermon-on-the-Mount Christianity with the cultural version of it we so often see in American life. Over the past several years, though, I’ve seen the exact same scenario in real life—from evangelicals who would all say that they believe the Bible.

Over the past several years, we’ve had some evangelical leaders, and the politicians they support, ridicule the “weakness” implied in “Turn the other cheek.” If that were just the Bizarro world of cable television news, I would perhaps dismiss it. But several pastors have told me about how when they cited, parenthetically, “Turn the other cheek” or “Love your enemies,” they had someone ask afterward where they were getting their “liberal” ideas.

Another told me that after preaching on the Sermon on the Mount, a congregant told him, “We’ve tried the ‘Turn the other cheek’ stuff, it doesn’t work; it’s time now to fight.”

To be clear, the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t “work,” and it never has—if what we mean by “working” is seeing the world’s definition of success on the world’s timetable. Ending up crucified is no society’s definition of winning. That’s exactly the point Jesus was making. He turns all those definitions and expectations upside down.

We can see in many of the scandals happening in the church—and the scandals that haven’t yet happened but are bubbling beneath the surface—a way in which it is easy for us to think of Christlikeness not just as optional for leadership but as an impediment to it. Many (though by no means all) churches will (rightly) fire and discipline a leader for sexual immorality.

But when is the last time we’ve seen someone held accountable for quarrelsomeness or vindictiveness—things explicitly addressed by Jesus himself?

We can also see this tendency in a kind of preaching that seems suspicious of Jesus’ way of teaching—of story and parable and narrative, a way of teaching that’s consistent with the way God speaks in the Old Testament. A way of teaching that is presupposed by Paul and the other apostles even in their letters.

If every passage of Scripture—whether proverb or psalm or parable—must be turned into an epistle with a point by subpoint by sub-subpoint structure in order to be preached, then we are not actually teaching the Bible but something else: a systematic theology or an ethics manual. We are not saved by Christology; we are saved by Christ.

Thomas Jefferson cut up the Bible, taking out all the miraculous parts that his scientific mind couldn’t accept, and left only the ethical teachings of Jesus. That is not Christianity at all. If Jesus is just a moral teacher, he is just another deceased guru. But neither is the opposite tendency—to cut up the Bible leaving all the miraculous but ignoring the teachings of Jesus.

If Jesus is just an abstract means of delivering the systematic category of atonement, not a person who speaks to us and claims lordship, then he is just another debating point to win an argument or to claim one’s own orthodoxy. In neither case would he be worth following.

If all Scripture points to Christ and is interpreted in and through Christ, then that means all Scripture is “profitable” (2 Tim. 3:16), as Paul put it. When we hear any word of Scripture, then, we are hearing from Jesus, just as if he were speaking to us.

The question is whether these prophets and apostles are bringing a word from their own minds or a message they are carrying from their Lord. That’s always been the question, which is why Paul repeatedly says, “I am telling the truth; I am not lying” (1 Tim. 2:7). If we believe what the Bible claims for itself and what Jesus taught us about the Bible, then that question is resolved. The Bible is black and white and red all over.

But the red-letter Christians are right to remind us that when we see Jesus, we have seen the Father (John 14:9). Jesus is the full revelation of the glory of God (2 Cor. 4:6). As former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey put it, “God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all.”

The whole plot line of the Bible holds together in one person—the living Jesus of Nazareth. Less clear passages are interpreted by those that are clearer—and the clearest revelation of all is this person who said to us, “Come follow me.”

In other words: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Russell Moore leads the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today.

- More from Russell Moore

News

Ontario’s Most Influential Pastor Resigns Following Abuse Investigation

Kate Shellnutt

Anabaptist Bruxy Cavey preached “Jesus over religion” and drew record crowds of Canadians who were put off by traditional church. Now they’re reckoning with their former leader’s misconduct.

Pastor Bruxy Cavey

The Meeting House / Facebook

Update (June 7): Three months after his resignation, former Meeting House pastor Bruxy Cavey was arrested and charged with sexual assault. Police in Hamilton, Ontario, say the allegation was reported in April of this year.

The Toronto-area Anabaptist megachurch confirmed Cavey abused his power and harassed a younger member of the congregation through an outside investigation earlier this year. Since then, at least one other woman has come to the church with allegations against him.

Police believe there may be additional victims and have issued a statement saying there’s no statute of limitations for sexual offenses. After his arrest on Monday, Cavey was released. He will appear in court on June 27.

The Meeting House in south Ontario calls itself “a church for people who aren’t into church.”

Under that motto and the leadership of its shaggy-haired, proudly Anabaptist preacher Bruxy Cavey, the megachurch grew to become the biggest in the Toronto area, drawing thousands to its movie theater seats and home church small groups.

Like his denomination, Cavey was known for being apolitical and pacifist; he was an introvert who turned on the charisma on stage. During his 25 years in ministry, around 35,000 Canadians who had been disinterested, disenchanted, or hurt by other churches found a spiritual home and family at The Meeting House, and 8,000 still belong to the church, according to the Handbook of Megachurches.

This large community of members and former members is now grieving a blow they hardly expected from their own “megachurch pastor for people not into megachurch pastors,” as one scholar called him.

After a three-month-long investigation, Cavey, 57, publicly confessed on Tuesday to an “adulterous relationship.” The church said it amounted to abuse of authority and sexual harassment against a woman under his pastoral counsel, asked him to resign, and removed his teachings from its website. The victim and her advocates say Cavey committed clergy sexual abuse.

“In a way, the stakes were so high for Bruxy, and his crash is intensified because he promised us that he would not be that kind of pastor. … He basically was the megachurch pastor for people not into megachurch pastors,” said Peter Schuurman, who profiled Cavey in his book The Subversive Evangelical and described him as gentle, generous, and good humored.

Bruxy preached a message of “Jesus over religion.” He liked to tell the story of how he got a tattoo of the verse barring tattoos, Leviticus 19:28, as a way to demonstrate how Jesus freed him from his sin as well as the letter of the law.

“His whole persona and branding was based on the vision of a church that was more like a counter-culture’s Jesus and less like the now-defamed evangelical trope of prosperity, politics and emotional hype,” Schuurman wrote for Canada’s Christian Courier.

The news trickled out this week through social media, blog posts, and streamed videos. In comments, members of The Meeting House vented their heartache.

They offered prayers and solidarity with the unidentified victim. Some who were themselves abuse survivors grappled with the idea that their pastor had done this; one wrote that she “started to wonder if anywhere is trustworthy.” Several members said they hadn’t attended in-person services since the pandemic and that the situation made them question whether to return.

Adding to the upheaval, not everyone at The Meeting House was satisfied with the results of a third-party investigation, which did not call Cavey’s behavior sexual abuse. Danielle Strickland, a fellow teaching pastor at The Meeting House, stepped down in solidarity with the victim on Monday—the day before the church released its report and Cavey announced his resignation.

Strickland, who had been on staff at The Meeting House since 2019, was first to hear the victim’s story last year. She lobbied behind the scenes for the church to change the language in its statement, seeing how the woman who came forward felt “unheard” and “unsupported” in the process. “The whole truth needs to be told, or else not only will there not be healing, but I think there will be further harm,” Strickland said.

The former pastor shared a statement from her on Wednesday morning. More than 15,000 people tuned in for the remarks on Instagram Live, cheering on Strickland’s advocacy and the victim’s bravery in the threads below the video.

Through Strickland, the woman described what happened as a “devastating twisting of pastoral care into sexual abuse” when she was 23 and Cavey was 46—a decade ago. The woman said she still didn’t feel safe going public. “The findings failed to name this abuse of authority for what it is: clergy sexual abuse,” she said in the statement.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca43ERoIuAv/

Instead, the investigation’s designations of sexual harassment and abuse of authority have been repeated by The Meeting House in its official statements and a livestream town hall on Tuesday night.

When the question “Wasn’t this just an affair?” came up, Maggie John, chair of The Meeting House’s board of overseers, said no. “The investigator found that given how the relationship started, which was in a clergy counselor relationship, Bruxy abused his power and authority, and as the pastor Bruxy was responsible.” She said it went on for years.

Cavey did not use the word abuse or victim in his confession blog post, though he acknowledged the “dynamics of power and influence and an expectation of exemplary conduct” that come from his position.

“My failure is not a failure of the presence, power, or teaching of Jesus,” he wrote, “but an example of the pain someone like me can cause when I ignore his presence and fail to follow his teaching.”

https://twitter.com/Bruxy/status/1501378041896914948

Cavey’s misconduct and departure will affect his denomination, Be In Christ Church of Canada (BIC), formerly Brethren in Christ. In a statement to CT, BIC executive director Charles Mashinter said Be In Christ supports the church’s decision for Cavey to resign and has also removed his pastoral credentials.

The headquarters for Be In Christ are located at The Meeting House’s building in Oakville, Ontario (along with another Anabaptist-rooted network called Jesus Collective). The church makes up the biggest swath of BIC denominational members and is responsible for doubling its size over the past 20 years.

Under Cavey’s leadership, The Meeting House came to hold a pretty unusual place of influence in the Christian landscape. There are very few Brethren megachurches—a database by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research lists just four in the US—and all congregations tend to be much smaller in Canada, where worship attendance has been dropping for decades and as little as 6 percent of the population considers themselves evangelical.

“In Ontario, you’d struggle to find an evangelical Christian who hadn’t heard of The Meeting House and Bruxy Cavey … virtually everybody knows who he is and had tremendous respect for him,” said Robin Wallar, lead pastor at Lift Church in Hamilton. “It’s hard to know the immediate impact [of the recent revelations], but it’s generally pretty devastating to the church in Canada.”

Evangelical leaders couldn’t ignore the popularity of The Meeting House—many of them knew believers or even former members from their own churches who had landed at one of the church’s 20-some locations, which span from the Toronto area to Ottawa. And they also couldn’t bypass the points of theological tension with this Anabaptist, pacifist, egalitarian, yet conservative and evangelical pastor.

A few years ago, The Gospel Coalition Canada ran a series with Cavey, calling his church “our largest neighbour within the Evangelical world.”

The interviewer—Paul Carter, lead pastor of Cornerstone Baptist in Orillia, Ontario—asked whether Cavey’s “Jesus not religion” mantra maligns traditional evangelical churches and got him to clarify some of his theological beliefs, particularly his critique of penal substitutionary atonement. Despite theological differences, Carter remained friends with Cavey since.

Even with the shared leadership model Cavey described in a 2018 conversation with Carter and the team of pastors he referenced in his resignation announcement, he had been the face of The Meeting House, and it’s hard for people to imagine the church without him. One member from Strathroy commented on Instagram that she’s been a part of The Meeting House her whole life, having followed Cavey’s teaching since she was eight.

“The Meeting House without Bruxy Cavey at the front, it’s going to suffer a significant loss, but the legacy of an irreligious Anabaptist spirituality will linger,” said Schuurman, who lives in Guelph, Ontario, and directs a Christian network called Global Scholars Canada.

At the end of his dissertation, Schuurman considered what would happen when Cavey would eventually leave the church. He noted that megachurch research experts agree that fewer than 5 percent of today’s megachurch pastors end their careers in “significant conflict” such as sexual scandal.

Even in Canada, where Schuurman says they’re not “breeding superpower personalities,” the revelations around clergy misconduct seem to continue to come to light year after year (some recent, high-profile examples include Ravi Zacharias, Jean Vanier, and Todd Bentley).

US pastor Greg Boyd, a friend and fellow member of the Jesus Collective, had asked for prayer for Cavey in the wake of the allegations and amended his remarks to “acknowledge the power dynamics” of the situation. Matt Miles, executive director of the Jesus Collective addressed Cavey’s resignation, saying, “It is also important to recognize that this is not an isolated incident in the context of the wider church community. Abuses of power and sexual misconduct are antithetical to Jesus’ way of love and have caused deep hurt for many people.”

Cavey wrote the books The End of Religion and Reunion: The Good News of Jesus for Seekers, Saints, and Sinners and preached at The Meeting House, which was one of Canada’s early adopter of the simulcast multisite model, since 1997. The church has opted to remove recordings of Cavey’s sermons from its website as a result of his misconduct, which it believes represent a disqualification from ministry.

“We are followers of Jesus, not in a particular person. We’re grateful that Bruxy has pointed us to Jesus, to God. While we have amazing sermons and material, we also have a case of sexual sin, harassment, abuse of power and authority, that compromises the experience that we see in this person,” said John, the board chair, in the online town hall. “Because we want to avoid triggering the victim or any others that have experienced any sexual misconduct, we have chosen to not provide those resources at this time.”

[Editor’s note: On March 14, Herald Press announced that it would be pulling Cavey’s books. “We take our responsibility of resourcing the church seriously,” said publisher Amy Gingerich. “Given that The Meeting House asked Cavey to resign and removed all his teaching videos from their website and the Be In Christ denomination revoked his credentials for ministry, we at Herald Press cannot in good faith sell his books.”]

https://www.facebook.com/themeetinghousechurch/posts/5241945022502978

The Meeting House has made professional counselors available, in addition to pastoral care on staff, for those in the church who need extra support as they process the news and their own grief. The church said it hopes to continue to dialogue with the survivor.

Strickland, who also does ministry as a speaker and social justice advocate, told followers on Wednesday that the victim chose the name Hagar as a pseudonym. It’s a reference to the Old Testament figure who both suffered abuse and testified to a God who sees.

Hagar spent part of her statement offering a message to anyone in the throes of clergy abuse:

Maybe you feel confused because you deeply care for and want to protect your pastor from harm. Maybe you’ve been told you are the only one who understands them. Jesus sees you. He’s holding your face in his hands, looking you straight in the eyes, and speaking truth to you. You are being abused.

Jesus can rescue you from this abuse, and he can help you right now. Your life matters to him. He’s with you. Invite the light of truth to break the lies and secrecy that this pastor has trapped you in. Tell one person you trust. I know you can do it because I did.

Jesus is so much bigger than you can imagine, and he sees you, and he will never stop rescuing you.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Books

Review

C.S. Lewis Was a Modern Man Who Breathed Medieval Air

Louis Markos

As both a writer and a scholar, his work hearkened back to a “slow, contemplative, symphonic world.”

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source images: Steve Johnson / Unsplash / Public Domain CCO / Raw Pixel / Levan Ramishvili / Flickr

In the prologue to The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien tells us two things about his beloved hobbits that identify them as medieval in their thinking and their behavior. First, their relationship to technology is distinctively premodern: “They love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skillful with tools.”

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind

Jason M Baxter (Author)

IVP Academic

176 pages

Second, their taste in books runs toward old masters like Dante, Chaucer, and Thomas Aquinas; they would not have enjoyed or understood the radical originality of novels by modern writers like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, or Virginia Woolf. Indeed, “they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.”

Later in his epic, Tolkien extends this medieval ethos to the members of the Fellowship. When Gandalf questions Saruman the White as to why he is now Saruman of Many Colors, he is gravely disturbed by Saruman’s reply.

“‘White!’” he sneered. ‘It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.’” Gandalf responds in turn, rebuking Saruman’s Enlightenment understanding of wisdom: “In which case it is no longer white … and he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

Aragorn, who will eventually be crowned king of Gondor, expresses an equally medieval understanding of morality when he responds to the confusion of Éomer, nephew of King Théoden of Rohan. In a world so filled with strange signs and wonders, Éomer asks, “How shall a man judge what to do?” Aragorn replies: “As he ever has judged . . . Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

The British Boethius

Like his friend Tolkien, C. S. Lewis was a man who loved all things medieval and who infused all that he wrote with a premodern ethos that hearkened back to an older, more traditional understanding of technology, books, wisdom, and morality. In his new book, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind, Dante scholar Jason Baxter unpacks the full extent of Lewis’s medievalism. Just as Michael Ward demonstrated in Planet Narnia that Lewis keyed each of his seven Narnia Chronicles to one of the medieval planets, so Baxter demonstrates that the medieval worldview colored not only Lewis’s apologetics and fiction but his scholarship as well.

It is this Lewis, Lewis the scholar, whom Baxter, associate professor of fine arts and humanities at Wyoming Catholic College, compares to Boethius, a thinker who bridged the classical and Middle Ages by synthesizing the best of pagan learning and harmonizing it with Christianity. By translating medieval thought into a vernacular that the modern man could understand, Baxter argues, “Lewis became a British Boethius, the philosopher whom he once described [in The Allegory of Love] as the ‘divine popularizer,’ who had helped to create ‘the very atmosphere in which the [medieval] world awoke.’”

Modern readers are often shocked by Lewis’s aversion to cars and newspapers. And yet, Baxter explains, behind Lewis’s “irascible, curmudgeonly lamentations about newspapers and cars stands a well-thought-out conviction that the whole world picture had changed, from the slow, contemplative, symphonic world … to the world of speed, bustle, and machine.” The rise of the machine may have freed us from laborious chores, but it had social, spiritual, and psychological repercussions that altered our very view of reality. Even as it enlightened certain areas of science, it brought darkness to our perceptions of the world, ourselves, and others.

Baxter carefully ferrets out the nature of this darkness by mixing phrases from Lewis’s The Abolition of Man into his own analysis:

Lewis irreverently calls the hallowed scientific revolution a period of “new ignorance” because he believed that by choosing to focus on quantifiable measurements to the exclusion of all other types of inquiry, modern science had brought modern culture into an ethical and social desert, on account of its willful suspension of “judgements of value” and its decision to strip nature of all “qualitative properties” and to “ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity.”

This shift from qualitative to quantitative has led, in part, to that disenchantment of the world that Lewis struggled against in his fiction and nonfiction alike. In fact, as Baxter convincingly argues, Lewis saw this disenchantment as a more direct and insidious “evil enchantment” through which the modern world sought “to suffocate the supernatural sentiments within.” In resisting the hegemony of the machine, Lewis also resisted the ways in which a mechanistic view of nature and man robs us of our full humanity. As an educator, Lewis the scholar sought to restore to students a medieval mindset capable of what Baxter calls “the right sentiments of praise and admiration for creation.”

As we have lost our appreciation for that “slow, contemplative, symphonic world” that was the medieval cosmos, so we have lost our delight in the kinds of books medieval people loved, books that held up other criteria besides mere originality. The “greatest authors of the medieval period,” Baxter explains, were “shapers, composers, and recyclers of old materials. Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Malory borrowed and translated, but also mended, updated, and altered. They wrote traditional poetry in the sense that they felt it their chief task to dress old stories in new garb.”

To help us get into the medieval mind, and thus understand Lewis better, Baxter quotes a well-chosen passage from the Roman writer Macrobius that influenced Lewis both as a scholar and a writer, one that captures perfectly the medieval love for literary recycling: “You know how a chorus consists of many people’s voices, and yet they all produce a single sound. … That is my goal for the present work: it comprises many different disciplines, many lessons, examples drawn from many periods, but brought together into a harmonious whole.”

We may be impressed today by the vastness of space or by the unexpected twist at the end of a postmodern novel or film, but that experience is of a different order from the awe, wonder, and love that the medieval readers felt toward Dante’s great epic or the ordered cosmos upon which it was patterned. They felt at home in their universe and with their books in a way we no longer do. Things made sense; they had a clear order and purpose, a carefully crafted wholeness that pervades Lewis’s work.

For the British Boethius, schooled in ancient manuscripts and the medieval cosmological model, the “important thing,” writes Baxter, “was not necessarily inventing or concocting in an original style, but to renew, recycle, enliven the original, so that the old vision could be credible to those who live in an incredulous age.” Thus did Lewis allow us to breathe the air and experience the atmosphere of a world that was haunted and enchanted by the divine.

Beyond reason and niceness

Just as medieval cosmology and literature were holistic in their desire to fashion a thing of beauty that held heaven and earth, past and present, in balance, so medieval philosophy and ethics sought a higher fusion of divine and human, head and heart. Thus, whereas post-Enlightenment thought enthrones reason (ratio, in medieval parlance), medieval thinkers championed a deeper form of understanding and perception they called intelligentia.

For Boethius, Baxter explains, “Human beings spend most of their lives processing the world through ratio, the reason-using, argument-generating, fact-seeking rational faculty, but in exceptional moments the more elusive, intuitive, contemplative grasp—intelligentia or intellectus—opens up within and transcends ratio.” Although Lewis was a champion of reason and knew how to wield it, he fills his fiction and nonfiction with numinous moments in which we encounter a Presence that transcends reason.

In such moments, Baxter writes, we are filled with “the sense of the distance between our world and the world beyond, the ontological terror it produces, as well as the shrinking feeling experienced by the merely mortal creature, who is overcome by a desire to hide.”

While modern analytical philosophy seeks ever to dye the white cloth, darken the white page, and divide the white light, medieval philosophy yearned for a higher synthesis that yokes the transcendent with the earthly and the universal with the particular. In Lewis, Baxter argues, we encounter a good kind of mysticism that transcends the self without losing it, leading to a union with God that does not break down the distinction between God and man.

In Lewis, one finds a transcendent yet intimate morality that does not change from age to age or culture to culture. Baxter, showing keen insight into Lewis’s medieval ethical vision, writes that modernity “thinks of the apex of virtue as being nice,” whereas “ancient languages and primitive religions treat holiness as … a frightening and terrifying power that goes far beyond mere goodness.”

In a truly numinous chapter titled “Deep Conversion and Unveiling,” Baxter offers a parallel reading of Dante’s Purgatory and Lewis’s Till We Have Faces that affords original insight into what it means to move beyond mere niceness and goodness to holiness.

Once Dante has worked his way through all the levels of purgatory and entered the Garden of Eden, he is supposed to be pure of sin and clean of will. And yet, several cantos later, as Baxter observes, he is hotly berated by Beatrice and must “repent to the core” by offering up a full and painful confession of his deepest, most primal sins.

In a similar way, when Orual comes before the gods at the end of Lewis’s novel, she must do more than atone for her sins. She must, as Baxter puts it, “let her inner self be known,” unveil her “lifelong secrecy and self-deception,” and “let go of her hatred and resentment.” In the medieval minds of Dante and Lewis, half measures will not do. If ratio is to give way to intelligentia and niceness to holiness, then we must open ourselves not to the inert, deistic God of the Enlightenment but to the active, triune God Dante glimpses at the end of his pilgrimage: a God of light who woos and pursues, pervades and invades.

Only once we stop hiding from ourselves and God, writes Baxter, can we “come into the full presence of God, who is now a ‘Thou,’ encountering divinity in all of its purity and loveliness and mercy, and even fearful intimacy. Only this can wash away our fierce clinging to the small loves of this world, our twisted possessiveness, and can make us clean.”

Only by such means can we get back on the path of wisdom from which we have strayed.

Louis Markos is professor in English and scholar in residence at Houston Baptist University, where he holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His books include Lewis Agonistes: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World and Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C.S. Lewis.

- More from Louis Markos

Theology

‘This Is My Body,’ Broken into Three Views of Communion

James M. Arcadi

Christian tradition diverges on the nature and meaning of the Lord’s Supper.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiArt / James Coleman / Mau Mar / Unsplash

Lent is a season of preparation in which Christians get ready to celebrate the momentous events of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension.

Some use this season as an opportunity to draw near to God by engaging in confession, fasting, and meditation on Scripture. The Lord’s Supper has long been seen as one such occasion, and yet this sacrament is interpreted in a myriad of different ways across the Christian tradition.

The scene in the upper room on the night before Jesus was crucified is no doubt familiar. There Jesus Christ took some bread, drew his followers’ attention to it, and said, “Take, eat. This is my body.” He did something similar with a cup of wine saying, “This is my blood.”

I imagine Jesus’ disciples had a similar thought to the Jews who heard his controversial sermon in John 6 (“My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”) and said, in essence, “This is a difficult statement, who can even understand it!”

The difficulty of these statements about bread and body, wine and blood is no doubt proved by the diversity of interpretation that has arisen in the years since Christ first uttered those words. And although we probably won’t get close to unifying around a single perspective, we can attempt to gain a better understanding of the range of options.

In my view, approaches to the Lord’s Supper fall along something of a spectrum. As I see it, there are three main families of locations on the spectrum, each with various family members who are conceptual cousins to one another.

We might name these families according to the manner in which they think Christ is present in the Eucharist: Bodily, Spiritually, or Normally. I will attempt to plot these points on the spectrum as though they were cities on a map, according to where the main proponents of each Family resided.

The Bodily Family of views believe that when Christ says a piece of bread is his body, he means it literally. Figuring out how that can be the case is what distinguishes the cousins within this family.

For instance, the official view of the Roman Catholic Church—call this the “Rome” view—is : “transubstantiation,” where the “trans-“ prefix indicates a “change” to the “substance” of an object. For Roman Catholics, the substance—or the “what it is”—of the bread changes to no longer be bread, but the body of Christ.

This is, of course, all while there is no change in the appearance of the object itself: it still looks, smells, and tastes like bread. Roman Catholics believe that the substance of something can be separated from how it appears. For them, the object that appears to be bread is not bread but the body of Christ.

The next stop on the conceptual spectrum in the Bodily Family are what I call German views. These are the purview of Lutherans, for instance, but can also be found among Anglicans and the Eastern Orthodox. These perspectives believe with their Roman cousins that Christ meant his words literally, but contrary to the Romans, hold that the bread continues to exist as it appears.

There are (at least) two versions of German views, and we can plot these on the map as German cities. A “Wittenberg” view holds the body of Christ to be “in, with, and under” the bread, as the Lutheran quip goes.

In medieval theology, this view was called “consubstantiation” (con- “with”); the "substance” of the bread and the “substance” of the body of Christ existing with one another. But I assure you, most Lutherans dislike that term!

Another German view—let’s call this the “Nuremberg” view (for the 16th century Lutheran pastor Andreas Osiander)—holds that the way in which the body of Christ and the bread of the Eucharist are related is like the way the two natures of Christ are related in the Incarnation.

If you are looking for a term for this view, impanation is the one used in the tradition. Like the incarnation refers to being enfleshed (in- “into” + caro, carn- “flesh”), impanation refers to being embreaded (im– “into” + panis “bread”) as it were.

Moving along the spectrum from the Bodily Family, we come to the Spiritually Family. This family likewise holds that the bread and wine remain as they were but attempts to characterize the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

“Geographically” we move from the cities of Rome, Wittenberg, and Nuremberg to “Antwerp,” where we meet Edward Schillebeeckx, a Belgian Dominican of the last century. The name for the view he proffered is “transignification.”

Although a Roman Catholic, Schillebeeckx thought the distinction between the “what it is” of an object and “how it appears” was overplayed—and what he felt was important instead was the meaning of an object. For this view, the “change” (trans-) in the bread and wine of Communion is in their meaning (signification-).

According to Schillebeeckx, meaning is found in community. When our community—the Church whose head is Christ—designates an object that appears to be bread as “the body of Christ,” true participants in the community will embrace that meaning. Although this view did not catch on in Roman Catholic circles, those Protestants befuddled by the Bodily Family might find Antwerp a suitable residence.

Moving into more properly Protestant locations within the Spiritually Family, we come to “Geneva,” which characterizes the views of many contemporary Reformed and Presbyterian Christians.

In this view, the Holy Spirit uses the bread and the wine as vehicles to catalyze a connection between Christians and the risen Christ. Where this connection takes place is in the heavenly places (hence the “Lift up your hearts” of the Sursum Corda), but the Lord’s Supper is an occasion for this union with Christ to occur.

“Canterbury” is the next stop on the spectrum within the Spiritually Family; there we meet the view of Thomas Cranmer. Although his views on the Eucharist changed over his life, his mature view is referred to as a sacramental parallelism. That is, we receive the body and blood of Jesus on a spiritual level that usually, but not always, runs parallel to our receiving the bread and wine on a physical level.

For Cranmer what was important was that we feed on Christ in our hearts. Eating the bread of the Eucharist can contribute to that, but this spiritual feeding can occur even if we never taste the bread or wine.

The Normally Family of views believes that Christ is present in the Eucharist in just the same way he is normally in any location in the world at any given time.

In virtue of the divine attribute of omnipresence, these Christians hold that the Word is in all places, and therefore there isn’t anything special about the bread and the wine itself. Rather what is special about Communion, they believe, is what it motivates you to think about.

Another Swiss location, “Zurich,” serves as the most popular location within the Normally Family, and here we might find many contemporary Christians in Baptistic and Pentecostal traditions. Here the bread and wine serve as “visible words,” emphasizing the cognitive aspect of our actions associated with bread and wine.

One of my former professors quipped that for views in Zurich, the bread and the wine serve as flashcards for Jesus. See bread? Remember Jesus! See wine? Remember Jesus! Here the Lord’s Supper serves as an opportunity for remembrance and thinking deeply about Christ and his work—but not necessarily an occasion for a unique encounter with his presence.

Finally, we round out the Normally Family with another city, “Philadelphia,” a center of the Friends or Quaker tradition. According to this perspective, not only is Christ not uniquely present in Communion, but the practice of Communion is not normally done. We might take this to be the most extreme location on the spectrum for nearly removing itself from the spectrum altogether.

From my perspective, the most attractive view biblically, historically, theologically, and even philosophically, is “Nuremberg”—within the German lineage of the Bodily Family. I am especially attracted to the way this location on the spectrum points to the Incarnation.

Matthew’s Gospel tells us that a Virgin will conceive and give birth to a Son, and he will be called Emmanuel, which means “God with us.” Christians hold that when the Word became flesh to dwell among us, one divine member of the Trinity took on a second, human nature. In this regard, there are two unique but united substances in the person of Jesus Christ: both divine and human.

This longstanding thread of interpretation of the Eucharistic uses the Incarnation as a means for explaining how a piece of bread could be the body of Christ. That is, in a similar manner as Christ is both God and human, the object we eat at the Lord’s Supper is both bread and the body of Christ. In this way, bread and body are unified in a sacramental union, by a similar union as occurs in the Incarnation, which is a hypostatic union .

In the Incarnation, we see the lengths God went to be with us—so far that he became one of us. Likewise, in the Lord’s Supper, we see a God who continues to be present in our midst. By viewing the Eucharist through the lens of the Incarnation, the Word made flesh and the flesh made bread both attest to the reality that God is indeed with us.

James M. Arcadi teaches at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is the author of An Incarnational Model of the Eucharist.

- More from James M. Arcadi

10 Biblical Terms I Wish Christians Had in English

Jost Zetzsche

How the languages of the indigenous in Panama, a community in Siberia, and people in Papua New Guinea shape their understanding of God.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source image: Prixel Creative / Lightstock

You’ve probably read the articles about foreign-language words that don’t have an immediate counterpart in English. As a German, I immediately think of schadenfreude, that apparently untranslatable term for, well, schadenfreude—the guilty joy you feel in someone else’s misfortune. Kudos to you virtuous native English speakers for not having your own word for that smug feeling.

Other foreign words are also woven seamlessly into daily life, like the Swedish ombudsman, the Finnish sauna, or the Italian pizza. There are many others, of course, especially in a language like English that derived its uncommonly large dictionary from the treasure chests of many languages.

Then there are the words that haven’t made it into the English dictionary yet, though they’ve achieved notoriety as beautiful but untranslatable terms. (As a translator, I’ll add that “untranslatable” isn’t exactly true. It’s just that we don’t have a word-to-word equivalent.) This includes terms like Danish hygge, which alludes to a sense of cozy comfort in the company of others, or the Finnish sisu, the concept of hidden inner strength in times of adversity. These words enrich how we view the world and offer insights about their cultures of origin. (Again, I apologize for schadenfreude!)

What if we could similarly peel back linguistic barriers to see how other languages and cultures view God through the language they use? For almost five years I’ve been collecting and curating data about how languages around the world translate the Bible in different and often insightful ways. Here are a few examples of words I wish we had in English to understand and communicate with God more deeply:

1. Mär: pick one thing and one thing only (Teribe)

English has a richer vocabulary than most when it comes to translating the Greek word pistis as both “faith” and “belief.” But these words’ power as a testimony of faith are weakened by their non-Christian usages in English (“I believe that it’s going to rain tomorrow” or “I have faith in you, young man!”). I wish we could introduce a powerful term for faith like “mär,” used in Teribe, an indigenous language spoken in Panama. It means “pick one thing and one thing only.” That’s radical Christian faith.

2. Dao / 道: reason; path toward right living; speech (Chinese)

When John refers in his Gospel to Jesus as the Word, it’s a powerful echo of the act of creation in Genesis where God speaks the universe into being. John probably intended us to make this correlation, but it’s only one of many. In fact, his original Greek term, Logos, is a central concept of Greek philosophy, encompassing a large spectrum of meanings that through the centuries has included reasoning, the principle that permeates all reality, and the intermediary between God and the cosmos.

It’s easy to see how potently this term expressed the truth about Jesus Christ, building a meaningful bridge to the broader culture to which he was communicating. It’s possible that no language has ever found a perfect translation for Logos, but Chinese Bible readers encounter a translation that might be equally robust. Most Chinese Bibles translate Logos as Dao, the central term in every Chinese religious and philosophical tradition to describe reason and a path toward living right. Amazingly enough, it also means “speech.” In a remarkable overlay of two different but very rich and ancient cultures, Dao paves the way for us to understand John’s original message more deeply.

3. Yumi: we and you (Tok Pisin)

Some languages have a distinct advantage over English (and Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic) in their pronouns. English speakers use an ambiguous we, but many languages distinguish between an inclusive we (“you and I and possibly others”) and an exclusive we (“he/she/they and I, but not you”).

For example, the disciples ask Jesus on the boat during a storm, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mark 4:38, ESV). But who is included in that “we” who are perishing? Speakers of Fijian, Tok Pisin, and hundreds of other languages are forced to make an inference in this case (and in 2,352 other cases in the Bible), with deep theological implications.

Do the disciples believe that Jesus could also die? Is his sharp rebuke that follows based on their belief that he actually could die? Translation teams have differed in their interpretation, but the Tok Pisin translators chose the inclusive yumi to include Jesus among those who could perish. They noted that the disciples had waited against their better judgment and existential fears until they felt the danger to Jesus (and themselves) was too great not to wake him.

4. Dios y’ayucnajtzcapxɨɨybɨ: God’s word-thrower (Coatlán Mixe)

In secular use, a prophet is someone who foretells the future. In the Bible, though, prophets go beyond predicting the future to proclaim the words of God now. Readers of the Bible in Kuna, a language in Panama and Colombia, understand this broader meaning when they read about a prophet as “one who speaks the voice of God.” Papua New Guinean Ekari Christians call a prophet “one who speaks under divine impulse” (gokobaki tijawiidaiga wega-tai). And readers of the Coatlán Mixe Bible in Mexico are privileged to encounter a particularly vivid term in “God’s word-thrower.”

5. Ña̱ kúꞌu̱ ini yo̱ sa̱ꞌá ña̱yuu xi̱ꞌín yó: us loving others (Tezoatlán Mixtec)

Love is an abstract noun; it doesn’t denote an object (like table or tree) but refers to a quality or an idea. Greek and English are full of abstract concepts like love, but many other languages can’t support abstract nouns with no person or thing attached to them. What then do you do with a central text like “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant” (1 Cor. 13:4, NRSV)?

When Tezoatlán Mixtec Bible translators in southern Mexico were forced to try to understand the context of this passage, they realized that the text is not talking about some intangible, nondemanding quality but the nuts-and-bolts love of people loving people. Translation consultant John Williams said that the context “led [them] to conclude that 1 Corinthians 13 is not a love poem, but more of a rebuke to the Corinthians, showing how they were not loving one another.” As a result, the familiar English translation of “Love is patient” sounds very different when back-translated from Tezoatlán Mixtec: “That we love other people is that we give strength inside for them.” I wonder whether Tezoatlán Mixtec pastors are less likely to use this gritty passage in weddings than officiants who read our more abstract, romanticized English version?

6. Sen: intimate form of “you” (Tuvan)

You may have a murky memory from your high school French, Spanish, or German class about two different ways to address people—with a formal or an informal form of you (tu versus vous, tú versus usted, du versus Sie). English used to have this, too (you versus thou), but it was discarded some time ago from active vocabulary. French, Spanish, and German Bible translations all use the informal you throughout. But translators of other languages felt it was unnatural and confusing to omit a distinction used in their everyday speech.

Since the Greek text itself does not provide any immediate clues as to which form of address should be used, translators have to analyze the social standing of the main characters in each situation, especially in the Gospels and the Book of Acts, to make decisions about how to translate.

In Tuvan, a language in south-central Siberia, Jesus’ disciples speak to him during his ministry with the formal address. This is understandable because Jesus is their teacher, and we expect disciples to address their teacher with respect. But this might be surprising: After the resurrection, his followers speak to Jesus with the informal you, indicating a new intimacy to their risen Lord and Savior: “Lord, you know that I love you” (John 21:16).

7. Bideezhí: her younger sister (Navajo)

Jesus’ friends Martha and Mary were siblings. That’s what the Greek text tells us. What neither the Greek nor the English tells us is who was older and who was younger. For hundreds of languages, that’s a vitally important detail because they don’t have words for “just” brother or sister; their words need to indicate the birth order.

Overwhelmingly, the translators for these languages designate Mary as the younger sister of Martha. Why? Because Martha is typically named first, and she’s the one doing the housework. Are these irrefutable facts? Not necessarily, but they are the results of a careful analysis of the text and a detail that heightens our understanding of Jesus and his ministry.

8. Ambum: turtle (Aekyom)

Remember the story in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus had 12 turtles? It’s unlikely, unless you’ve read the Bible in Aekyom, a language in Papua New Guinea. People who speak this language count their age according to the number of times river turtles come up on the banks to lay their eggs. So when Jesus went to Jerusalem with his parents, he had 12 turtles. Imagine the turtle wealth of Methuselah!

9. P’ijil-o’tanil: heart wisdom; p’ijil c’op: word wisdom; p’ijil jol: head wisdom (Highland Tzeltal)

The Hebrew word chakam that is translated as wisdom in English is the heart of the book of Proverbs. But its wisdom isn’t just intellectual and philosophical; at times, it’s also practical, ethical, or religious. Most people can’t adequately express the rich range of meanings encompassed in that single term wisdom, but the approximately 40,000 speakers of Highland Tzeltal in southern Mexico can. They use three different terms to refer to the different kinds of wisdom in the book of Proverbs: P’ijil-o’tanil is “heart wisdom,” p’ijil c’op stands for “word wisdom” (also used for knowledge), and p’ijil jol is “head wisdom” (also used for insight or understanding).

10. Diri: engrave your mind (Ngäbere)

Human language is a marvel, one that opens pathways to remarkable spiritual insights. Each successive insight in the global conversation between speakers of thousands of languages and God can enrich our understanding of who God is and how he works in our lives today. As Ngäbere speakers in Panama and Costa Rica might say, may the Holy Spirit use these new teachings to “engrave your mind” with God’s heart wisdom, word wisdom, and head wisdom as you do the hard work of loving other people.

You can find all of these and thousands more examples at the United Bible Societies (UBS) Translation Insights & Perspectives tool at tips.translation.bible.

Jost Zetzsche is a professional translator who lives on the Oregon coast. Since 2016 he has been curating UBS’s Translation Insights and Perspectives (TIPs) tool. His latest book is Encountering Bare-Bones Christianity.

- More from Jost Zetzsche

Theology

Where the Wartime Stock Market Is, There Your Heart Will Be Also

Will Sorrell

Putin’s war on Ukraine has thrown the world into economic crisis. How should Christians lament the financial fallout?

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

War is upon the world. But videos of tanks, airplanes, and explosions are not all that fill social media timelines.

Many are worried about the stock market. Brokerage accounts, 401(k)s, and 529 plans have endured the twists and turns of a roller coaster these past two years—the pandemic, ensuing inflation, and geopolitical unrest have been relentless.

Last week, while the opening bell reverberated down Wall Street, and the clank of Russian tanks silenced the streets of Kyiv, some on Twitter concerned themselves with a falling market and a falling country.

Discussions followed in 280 characters or less, prompting a friend of mine to ask if it is right to feel anger when online concern centers on the stock market while lives are being lost. Unsurprisingly, as with most ethical issues, I believe the answer to that question is both yes and no.

In an episode of BBC’s Sherlock, the no-nonsense detective trips a smoke alarm, causing his suspect to glance at a hidden safe containing precious intel. When our world is on fire, what we first look toward reveals what our hearts desire most.

Ukraine is on fire, and the duet of greed and worry resound their cacophony throughout the world. These are poor reasons to focus on the market. The Christian life is one of overweighting eternal treasure and underweighting earthly gain, but crises like this confront us with the serpent’s slithering proposition: You can be like God and have it all. Earn all you can, and panic if you don’t.

The war in Ukraine provides an opportunity to repent—to forsake our greed and worry and embrace the spiritual practice of lament. It is not enough to try to stop our lustful aspirations for riches or our dogged fear of uncertainty. We need something, or rather, someone, to face and embrace.

“Lament is what happens when people ask, ‘Why?’ and don’t get an answer,” N. T. Wright wrote in a piece for Time magazine. “It’s where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about our sins and failings and look more broadly at the suffering of the world.”

Wright penned these words concerning the onset of COVID-19, but two years later, during this Lenten season, we find ourselves asking the same question: How long, O Lord?

Repentance over our self-centered worries is the first step of lament and should be the believer’s first instinct in times of tribulation. But just as there are unholy reasons to be anxious about falling stock prices, there are also holy causes for concern. Namely, bear markets harm the welfare of society and further the plight of the poor.

In the immediate aftermath of the incursion, the Russian market lost 45 percent of its value. It has only regained approximately half of what was lost, and Russian central bank interest rates have eclipsed a jaw-dropping 20 percent. These are devastating consequences both for Russian citizens who do not support a tyrannical invasion and for foreigners invested in emerging markets. Although US stocks have rebounded, oil has surpassed $115 a barrel, the highest it’s been since 2008.

Market volatility and rate swings have a much broader impact than just individual investment accounts. Lower share prices lead to increased costs of capital for businesses. It is difficult to raise money by issuing new shares or incurring new debt if your stock price is low, since freefalling share prices make investors and lenders nervous. Increased costs of capital lead to higher costs of living, as businesses raise the cost of goods to cover their expenses.

In short, war is expensive for the whole of society—but it is particularly hard on those in lower income brackets.

Ignoring cost-of-living implications from global conflict, market volatility has a significant impact on working-class people. The two primary indicators for financial stability in the West are home ownership and retirement account savings. Forty-five percent of recent retirees indicated that the lack of work options, along with health issues and family care needs, contributed to their exit from the workforce.

The median retirement account value for retirees aged 65–74 is $164,000, which is difficult to stretch to the average life expectancy of 80 in the US. That means even small changes in stock prices and interest rates can have enormous implications for families who are depending on 401(k) distributions.

But what exactly should lament look like when the world is in the midst of economic war?

While modern scholarship often attributes a three-party authorship of the Book of Isaiah, dissenting research argues that chapter 40’s shift in tone belongs to the same Isaiah of Jerusalem. If this is true, then Isaiah 40 is not addressed to exiles—but rather to those in Israel who are afraid, staring down a relentless army that is hellbent on stealing, killing, and destroying.

What is Yahweh’s response when those he loves face barbarous warfare at the gates of their city? What is the word of the Lord for those who fear the enemy, mourn the dead, and have nowhere to turn? What is God’s response when tyrants make the wells run dry and the savings accounts dip low?

Comfort. “Comfort, comfort my people.” “Speak tenderly.” “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low..” “And the glory of the Lord will be revealed” (Isaiah 40:1-5).

God’s lordship over all things includes the stock market and the world stage. It includes our concerns about how we will pay the bills, how the poor will survive, and how the persecuted will be avenged. It also includes the Lord himself blessing the dying, soothing the suffering, and pitying the afflicted.

So the next time your Robinhood account flashes red rather than green, remember that you are free—free to pause and pray for your finances, your family, and your neighbor. You are free to manage your money without greed or fear but with a heart of stewardship and sympathy for others.

You are free to ask God, “Why?” and to grieve the loss of life and welfare in the meantime.

You are free to repent and lament.

Will Sorrell (MDiv, MBA) oversees values-based investing at OneAscent. He and his wife are members of Grace Fellowship in Birmingham, Alabama.

- More from Will Sorrell

Ideas

Go Ahead. Pray for Putin’s Demise.

Tish Harrison Warren

Contributor

The imprecatory psalms give us permission to push boldly against evil.

Jamie Lorriman / Getty Images

I saw an image last week that I cannot shake: a Ukrainian father gripping the face of his young son’s lifeless body, which is entirely covered in a blood-stained sheet except for a halo of blond hair. This grief-stricken father presses his face against his son’s hair, clinging to him, desperate and broken. I close my eyes to pray and I see this image.

When I think of it, I am heartbroken. But I also feel angry. I brush up against something like a maternal sense of rage. An innocent child was violently killed because Russia’s leader decided that he wanted a neighboring sovereign country as his own.

The violence in Ukraine makes me, like many of us, feel powerless. I watch helplessly as tanks roll into cities, as civilian targets are shelled, as the lives of whole families are viciously snuffed out. What do I do with this anger and heartbreak?

As I discussed recently with David French and Curtis Chang, I find myself turning again and again to the imprecatory psalms. Each morning I’m praying Psalm 7:14–16 with Vladimir Putin in mind: “Behold, the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies. He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends” (ESV).

An imprecation is a curse. The imprecatory psalms are those that call down destruction, calamity, and God’s judgment on enemies. Honestly, I don’t usually know what to do with them. I pray them simply as a rote practice. But I gravitate toward more even-keeled promises of God’s presence and mercy. I am often uncomfortable with the violence and self-assured righteousness found in these kinds of psalms.

But they were made for moments like these.

In seminary, I had a Northern Irish professor who lived through the Troubles, the 30-year ethno-nationalist violence in Northern Ireland. He saw violence against the innocent firsthand.

When he was younger and a seminarian himself, he rewrote a psalm for a class assignment. In it, he prayed that any terrorist who made a bomb would have it blow up in his face. His American professor pulled him aside, chastised him for using such a violent image, and told him he needed to repent. My professor, reflecting on this memory, told me he realized then that his American professor had never witnessed unprovoked violence against innocents and children.

These psalms express our outrage about injustice unleashed on others, and they call on God to do something about it.

I strongly tend toward Christian nonviolence and pacifism. But I recognize that in the past, there have been times when calls to peace have been based in a naïve understanding of human evil.

In Who Would Jesus Kill?, Mark Allman recaps 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s view that “Christian pacifists have an overdeveloped confidence in human goodness; they believe that the gospel law of love is enough to rid the world of violence and evil.”

“For Niebuhr,” he continues, “such an approach is not only naïve, but heretical.” It’s based on a view of human nature that is fundamentally wrong: a stubborn insistence that we humans are not that bad and not capable of true evil and injustice.

The peace movement of the ’60s often embodied this naiveté. With its rejection of the idea of sin and evil and call to “make love, not war,” it often turned a blind eye to the depth of human depravity in the world. It assumed that humanity was in an upward arc of progress that ended in utopia. But if we are naive about how dark human darkness actually is, our prayers and hopes for peace end up being flimsy covers for corruption and destruction.

The imprecatory psalms name evil. They remind us that those who have great power are able to destroy the lives of the weak with seeming impunity. This is the world we live in. We cannot simply hold hands, sing “Kumbaya,” and hope for the best. Our hearts call out for judgment against the wickedness that leaves fathers weeping alone over their silent sons. We need words to express our indignation at this evil.

Those of us who long for lasting peace cannot base that hope on an idea that people are inherently good and therefore unworthy of true judgment. Instead, we find our hope in the belief that God is at work in the world, and he is as real—more real—than evil.

We hope that God will enact true and ultimate judgment. We look to him who knows every Ukrainian and Russian by name, who loves them more than I can understand, and who will avenge wrong and make things right.

We don’t forgo vengeance because we think that human evil is not worthy of vengeance but because we believe God is the avenger. We do not hope for peace only because we are indignant over unjust violence but also because we believe God is indignant and his judgment (not ours) can be trusted.

Psalm 35:6–8 asks God himself to act: “Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the Lord persecute them. For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit. … Let destruction come upon him at unawares; and let his net that he hath hid catch himself: into that very destruction let him fall” (KJV).

Very often in the imprecatory psalms, we are asking that people’s evil actions would ricochet back on themselves. We are not praying that violence begets more violence or that evil starts a cycle of vengeance or retaliation. But we are praying that people would be destroyed by their own schemes and, as my professor prayed, that bombs would explode in bombers’ faces.

If you’re like me and you gravitate to the seemingly more compassionate, less violent parts of Scripture, these kinds of prayers can be jarring. But we who are privileged, who live far from war and violence, risk failing to take evil and brutality seriously enough.

I still pray, daily and earnestly, for Putin’s repentance. I pray that Russian soldiers would lay down their arms and defy their leaders. But this is the moment to take up imprecatory prayers as well. This is a moment when I’m trusting in God’s mercy but also in his righteous, loving, and protective rage.

A Drink of Light: A Tish Harrison Warren column that ran from 2020 to 2022

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The British Boethius

Beyond reason and niceness

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