What Is (Artificial) Intelligence?

Four experts weigh in on knowledge in the age of AI.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyk

Theologians have historically identified several markers concerning what it means to be made in the image of God: rationality, the capacity to love, and the state of human righteousness before the Fall.

“It has proved all too easy in the history of interpretation for this exceedingly open-ended term ‘the image of God’ to be pressed into the service of contemporary philosophical and religious thought,” writes biblical scholar David J. A. Clines.

Today, we wrestle with the term anew given the technological landscape of nearly autonomous robots and large language models (LLMs). In many ways, we are asking what it means to be human. Particularly as generative artificial intelligence gains ground, we might start to question our place in the world. Can we have interpersonal relationships with ChatGPT? If we lose our jobs or our craft to artificial intelligence, do we drop down on the societal food chain?

Our questions aren’t just about our work but about theology and ethics. As Christians, we must ask what role intelligence plays in the imago Dei and whether AI is truly intelligent. We are not God, animal, or machine. Much of our world is set up for us to live less humanely, so how do we think about imaging God in an increasingly technological world?

For our July/August print issue, CT invited a software engineer, a researcher, a tech entrepreneur, and a professor to consider how we define intelligence—whether in mathematical calculations, our ability to love, or our ability to know experientially.

We are human, after all.

Kara Bettis Carvalho is ideas editor at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "What Is Intelligence?".

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Ideas

Don’t Conflate Intelligence with Value

Chris Krycho

Our obsession with AI’s capabilities misunderstands what intelligence actually is.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyik

Much of the contemporary debate about artificial intelligence tools such as large language models (LLMs) asks, first, whether such tools are truly intelligent and, second, what that means for us as human beings—for our work, for art, and even for our relationships. For Christians, this is often closely followed by questions or assertions about AI and the imago Dei. These are reasonable things to wonder about.

I submit, though, that these are mostly the wrong questions. They begin from wrong assumptions about intelligence. Consequently, they carry misleading notions about what it would mean for technologies like LLMs to be genuinely intelligent.

Worse, they misunderstand how intelligence relates to human nature. Intelligence is not one single thing at all. IQ tests deceive us because they suggest that intelligence is measurable and that a single number meaningfully represents intelligence.

Those tests do capture something real. They accurately predict how people will perform in college, for example, and are broadly indicative of people’s chances of success in a knowledge-based economy.

But there is much they do not capture. To illustrate this, consider: Are elephants more intelligent than dolphins? It depends on the kind of thing we ask them to do. An elephant cannot use echolocation to hunt and catch fish, and a dolphin cannot use its nose to pull fruit from a tree. Both of those surely entail kinds of intelligence and senses that are utterly alien to humans.

Likewise, some software systems can outperform humans at certain tasks that we think of as matters of intelligence because we experience them as part of our mental life. These include mathematical calculations or even sophisticated games like chess.

On the other hand, the most advanced robot cannot (yet) beat a person in a one-on-one game of basketball or scurry up a tree like a squirrel. Embodied action is still far beyond even our best programming ability, including the famously dexterous Boston Dynamics robots.

This highlights one way Western culture’s view of humanity is distorted: We have made more of intelligence than we ought. We valorize people who create software, write books, or pursue “the life of the mind.” We pity those left behind in society’s transition to knowledge work; we treat physical labor as menial instead of valuing the inherent goodness of embodied work.

Even this is reductive, though. It treats intelligence as a matter of facility. Living beings and humans in particular are not mere task-accomplishing machines. We have greater purposes. Playing games around a table does not “accomplish a task.” Neither does loving someone!

Thus, we cannot say what intelligence per se requires of us. Not only does intelligence belong in different measures and wildly differing functions to many kinds of creatures; it is also the wrong starting point for thinking about ethical obligations.

In fact, treating others’ intelligence as the basis of our ethical duties to them is perverse. This would imply that the more intelligent someone is, the deeper the obligation—and vice versa. Unborn infants, people suffering from progressive dementia, and severely mentally handicapped people would require less of us than a brilliant mathematician, scientist, composer, or poet. But our Lord teaches us the opposite: Whatever we have done to the least of his brothers and sisters, we have done to him (Matt. 25:40). Christians treasure and value humans of every capacity, not fixating on things like intellectual giftedness.

We could perhaps try to thread this needle by speaking of capacities instead of abilities. There is a long tradition of Christian thought dating back to the church fathers that connects the image of God to rationality—the ability to reason and act—rather than being reliant on or chained to instinct. This tradition distinguishes between a natural capacity in a kind of creature and the ways it may be distorted or absent in particular creatures of that kind. That is, we must distinguish between humans’ general capacity for reason and their individual ability to reason.

At its simplest, rationality is that ability to reason, and even that varies enormously. Both a newborn infant and a person with late-stage dementia may be unable to reason in this sense, but both still bear the image of God.

Even apart from disabilities, people have very different degrees of intelligence along the many different axes of intelligence. We have no reason to suppose that these differences resulted from the Fall or will be eliminated in the Resurrection. This seems obvious when considering physical talents, such as running or doing complex mathematics.

Intelligence is thus not the same as rationality, and it is certainly not identical to the image of God. We must not conflate actual intelligence with creaturely value or the image of God.

What then are the right questions? One is what it is to be human. This is an ancient question, but our new circumstances may help us reflect on it more carefully. Another is how we value human beings rightly (and perhaps other creatures too), not in terms of intelligence but in terms of their creatureliness. Our answers to these questions might give us cause to reject such paths or to walk them in a particular way.

Chris Krycho is a software engineer and composer. He is a member of Holy Trinity Anglican Church and has an MDiv from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "We're Asking the Wrong Questions".

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Ideas

Why We’re Desperate to Measure Intelligence

Marcus Schwarting

Humans’ ability to reason is not the same as AI gathering information.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyik

Five months prior to the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI researcher and Google vice president Blaise Agüera y Arcas described in The Economist his conversation with Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialog Applications), a precursor of later Gemini models. He wrote of the experience, “I felt the ground shift under my feet. I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.” Around a week later, Google engineer Blake Lemoine publicly alleged that LaMDA had become a sentient intelligence.

When we interact with an AI model, it can be easy to subtly ascribe some measure of natural intelligence to the system, even though none is present. As these models continue to be integrated into our technology and devices, how should we view AI systems, especially in the context of our own natural intelligence?

Natural intelligence is the God-given gift to understand and reason about reality, one another, and ourselves. By contrast, artificial intelligence is the subdiscipline of computer science concerned with building models to perform tasks often associated with natural intelligence, like solving a puzzle or summarizing a text. The gap between natural and artificial intelligence is sometimes portrayed as small but is in fact a wide chasm.

While some AI techniques are inspired by ideas in neuroscience and behavioral psychology, most models bear little resemblance to biological systems. Other AI methods draw from disciplines like signal processing, evolutionary biology, and Newtonian mechanics. For example, genetic algorithms are a class of optimization techniques inspired by evolutionary principles of natural selection, mutation, and speciation. AI researchers have remarked that “biological plausibility is a guide, not a strict requirement” for designing AI models. While a task may appear to require the biological machinery of natural intelligence, an AI model need not emulate this machinery to be successful.

Natural and artificial intelligence are not effectively interchangeable. Believing they are equivalent is an affront to those possessing natural intelligence and a disservice to those developing artificial intelligence.

Measuring natural intelligence is different from quantifying the performance of an AI model. Psychologists have long known that natural intelligence cannot be condensed to a single score, such as IQ. Many theories made to quantify natural intelligence have troubling roots in pseudoscientific ideas like eugenics, phrenology, and social Darwinism. And many intelligence scores were designed to privilege certain individuals over others.

Still, it’s challenging to measure natural intelligence, especially when including nonhuman intelligences. Evaluating the performance of an AI model at a specific task is comparatively straightforward: We query a model with a set of inputs and compare the outputs with our expectations. A growing number of benchmarks for large language models seek to quantify performance on tasks ranging from passing the bar exam to accurately translating texts to making moral decisions.

As AI models continue to improve according to industry-established benchmarks, we should learn from our mistakes when quantifying natural intelligence. Scoring the intelligence of participants with a single number can be dangerously reductive, regardless of whether the comparison is between two people or between two models.

Our need to measure the intelligence of our models and ourselves reflects how valuable (socially and monetarily) we consider intelligence. At least one open letter written by the Future of Life Institute and signed by many AI experts contained the same notable phrase: “Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence.”

Prioritizing intelligence as the only source of progress discounts other God-given traits like creativity and wisdom. Idolizing intelligence dismisses long-held Christian attributes like piety, humility, and self-sacrifice. Our societal worship of intelligence amid powerful AI models has led many to fear their own imminent devaluation. The science fiction stories we tell about a hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI)—wherein a superintelligent machine subjugates those it deems intellectually inferior—tend to mirror our own history. Our colonizing predecessors have readily done so in the past.

Christians can forge a path between the extremes of idolizing and repudiating intelligence. We know that we are required to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with [our] God” (Mic. 6:8). Intelligence alone is insufficient to carry out God’s will for our lives. We are called to “not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of [our] mind” (Rom. 12:2). So let us willingly surrender our natural intelligence to God for him to use and mold.

As for artificial intelligence, we should not confuse the tools we build with the minds we are granted. Let us instead wield all the tools given to us to further God’s kingdom.

Marcus Schwarting is the senior editor at AI and Faith. He is also a researcher applying artificial intelligence to problems in chemistry and materials science.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "We're Desperate to Measure Intelligence".

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Ideas

AI Offers Information. God Offers Wisdom.

Vineet Rajan

The data-information-knowledge-wisdom model puts artificial intelligence in its proper place.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyik

As a Marine Corps intelligence officer in my previous life, my job was to help senior leaders answer the difficult question of “What should I do?” I was to collect millions of pieces of data, organize them into information, put them into context, and through analysis give them meaning so we could have knowledge of the situation at hand. The senior officers would take that knowledge and then, using wisdom born out of experience, decide on a course of action. These decisions could mean life or death for the men and women under them, and as officers, we regularly felt the weight of that responsibility.

Today, as a father, husband, and CEO, many decisions I make still carry much weight. As humans, we’re always in life stages that contain risk: the development of our children, the relationships of our marriages, the jobs of fellow employees. We all make decisions daily—hopefully with wisdom. In the era of artificial intelligence, it only makes sense to appropriately incorporate this powerful tool into our decision-making processes.

The process I followed as an intelligence officer of moving from data to wisdom is not too different from how many of us make decisions in our everyday lives. In fact, the Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom (DIKW) framework established by systems thinker Russell Ackoff more than three decades ago captures the steps many of us unconsciously go through when moving from basic data to wisdom. Within this framework, data becomes information when it’s organized and put into context; it becomes knowledge when the information is analyzed and given meaning; and it becomes wisdom when we understand how to apply it.

If we’re being honest, we’re drowning in data and inundated with information, yet we’re always looking for knowledge and wisdom. Thankfully, AI tools can help with a lot of this process. Their algorithmic and computational capabilities are perfectly suited for collecting terabytes of data and organizing and contextualizing it into information for decision-making—typically in a matter of seconds rather than the hours or days it would take a mortal.

While AI provides informational knowledge, it’s also a slave to the data and information available to it. For the complex decisions of life—the ones involving real risk, often relational—we need more than information.

Knowledge can be informational, experiential, or (ideally) both. The Bible’s definition of knowledge expands beyond that of merely organized data and contextualized information. Instead, the Christian view of knowledge is deeply rooted in embodied people experiencing life in relationship with others—whether with God or with other humans (John 13:35; 2 Cor. 4:5–7).

Scripture speaks about how God wants us to know him—certainly through informational knowledge but ultimately in a personal relationship. Moses knew God. David knew God. In a similar but different way, Adam knew Eve. The knowledge God wants us to have is intimate and experiential, not merely informational.

AI can help us with so much in life, but like any created thing, it also has its limits. Rather than applying AI tools to generate data and information, many are attempting to leverage such systems to generate experiential knowledge and even wisdom.

A recent essay in Harvard Business Review highlighted the top use for AI as “therapy/companionship.” Acknowledging the differences between therapy and companionship, author Marc Zao-Sanders grouped them into one category because both “fulfill a fundamental human need for emotional connection and support.” Human connection and being known by others is a core part of what it means to be human. While the article speaks to the advantages of applying AI in this way, the arguments are made on the grounds of efficiency: It’s available 24-7, it’s inexpensive or free, and it does not “judge.”

But AI is not effective in terms of relationships. AI cannot provide companionship for the same reasons that it is limited in providing experiential knowledge or wisdom: It is not an embodied person who has perspectives and experiences from which to empathize and come alongside our lives. And therein lies the challenge. AI cannot know what it means to be a human because AI isn’t human. And in the midst of Western culture’s loneliness epidemic, mimicking relationships with AI has already had tragic consequences.

Attempts to apply AI in this way are akin to going back into Plato’s cave in search of the shadows of self-gratifying relationship, rather than enjoying the essence of relationships. In so doing, we are privileging efficiency over effectiveness, the artificial for the real.

While AI is very well-suited for complicated problems, humans are complex; what we need are experiential knowledge and God-given wisdom. We could attempt to use AI beyond its limits of processing complicated problems and providing informational knowledge and move into the realms of experiential knowledge and companionship, but it would be unwise to do so.

Vineet Rajan is the CEO of Forte, the fastest-growing platform for mental fitness. He has graduate degrees from Stanford and Cambridge, is a Marine combat veteran, and is an adviser for AI and Faith.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "From Data to Wisdom".

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Ideas

AI Is Making Humans Dumber

O. Alan Noble

Mimicry is not the same as having intelligence, or as comprehending love and art.

Illustration by Zhenya Oliinyik

We are, I fear, entering a human intelligence drought even as artificial intelligence is beginning to blossom. And this is not a baseless fear. According to a long-term study of teenagers’ and adults’ reading and numerical skills, both have been declining since 2012.

A Financial Times article that covered the study noted that 18-year-olds self-reported a marked increase in “difficulty thinking or concentrating” and “trouble learning new things” over the same time period.

These startling trends began before the COVID-19 lockdowns, which certainly had an additional adverse effect on students who were forced to switch to virtual classrooms. The first iPhone was launched in 2007, a few years before these trends started to appear in the data. It’s possible this is just a correlation, but given our real-world experience with smartphones, I think most of us would not be surprised that they are making us less able to concentrate, less able to read books or understand numbers—simply, dumber.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines intelligence as “the faculty of understanding.” To elaborate, I think intelligence refers to our ability to reason and understand information and experiences. Some of these experiences will be irreducible to data, like our feelings of love or beauty or injustice—things to which you can’t assign a number value.

Our intelligence is our holistic way of comprehending, interpreting, and reasoning through the information and experiences we receive and have. It is part of what separates us from animals and machines—we can think about ourselves thinking.

There is a reflexivity to our intelligence that is lacking in other creatures or creations. A machine, even an advanced AI model, cannot contemplate itself in the act of thinking. It can only process more information, like analyzing its performance or finding errors.

But I can tell you what it’s like for me to think about myself thinking about writing this article. And in fact, that quality of reflective intelligence is important to the human experience. It’s part of what gives our inner worlds texture and richness. It’s probably not a coincidence that those inner worlds are also currently under threat by the same technological forces that are making us dumber.

Intelligence is also more than mimicry. It’s true that, given enough data and processing power, AI systems will be able to generate content that appears to capture profound human experiences like love, beauty, or injustice.

You’ll be able to ask ChatGPT for a love poem for your valentine or an explanation of a great work of visual art, and the result will be a reasonable mimicry of real human experience, because it has processed billions of pieces of data and trained itself on others’ love poems and art. But that is not the same as having intelligence, as comprehending and understanding love or art. It’s the difference between knowing that a rose is used as a symbol for love and knowing what love feels like.

Understood as a unique human gift, intelligence demands a great deal of us. First, it compels us to humility. Any time an opportunity to comprehend information or an experience comes before us and we choose a posture of superiority or seclusion, we fail to exercise the full gift of intelligence God has given us. It is only in humility that we can accept a reality unfiltered by our prejudices and sins so that we can understand it in light of God’s revelation.

How you will interpret information or an experience using your intelligence is largely determined by a posture of humility or pride—like a book that confronts your assumptions about politics or a walk in the park that confronts you with the beauty of God’s creation. Pride shuts down our intelligence by defaulting to our prior assumptions and biases. Humility remains open to revelation and possibility, to correction and wisdom, engaging with intelligence in a process of understanding.

Second, we have a duty to exercise our intelligence by reading, reasoning, and practicing the virtue of temperance with our digital devices. Whether or not the data charted in the Financial Times article marks a direct causation between smartphones and a decline in intelligence in America, I think most of us have seen this decline in ourselves or those we love who are addicted to smartphones.

We don’t need a study to tell us what common sense and personal experience show: Spending hours every day on digital devices that train our attention to adapt to 30-second videos harms our ability to read and understand. God has given us a great gift in intelligence, but we squander it on ephemera and nonsense when we could be using it to glorify him and work for the common good of our neighbor.

Given the examples set by social media, we should expect that technology will only become more organized to appeal to our vices and worst instincts rather than training our intelligence, even as AI developers gain billions upon billions in funding. In other words, our society will probably continue to grow against our common good, including our collective intelligence. There’s just too much money to be gained in appealing to vice.

We have an opportunity to exercise what God has given us or to acquiesce to these social forces. We can practice humility and temperance, humbling ourselves before reality and using our technology in moderation. Whether technology makes us dumber or not is a choice we make. It is not inevitable. We can choose to read books, form our own opinions, and write our own ideas, or we can leave it all up to the algorithms, AI, and the machines. Let’s not squander the gift of intelligence.

O. Alan Noble is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and author of several books, including On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living.

This article appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "AI Will Never 'Know'".

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News

Universal Injunctions Are Over, but Not the Fight for Birthright Citizenship

Harvest Prude

The ruling left unanswered the question of what will happen to children born to immigrant parents in the US.

A protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court against the Trump administration looking to end birthright citizenship.

Alex Wong / Getty

A group of immigrant rights groups and parents are continuing their legal fight over birthright citizenship, days after the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration to limit judges’ ability to block presidential policy via nationwide injunctions.

Nationwide or universal injunctions stop the government from enacting or enforcing a law or policy anywhere in the country.

The Supreme Court decision did not address whether the Trump administration could end birthright citizenship, which guarantees citizenship to nearly anyone born in the United States, as the president attempted to do with an executive order issued on Inauguration Day in January. Instead, the 6–3 decision curtailed the judiciary’s ability to issue universal injunctions.

The majority sent the case back to the lower courts to decide how to act within the constraints of the new ruling, with instructions to “determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate.”

It represents a massive win for the Trump administration, allowing officials to carry out policies without being hampered by nationwide pauses issued from any federal district court in the country. The administration will still face challenges in court, but it can carry out the president’s agenda in the meantime.

Presidents from both sides of the aisle have been hampered by injunctions in the past. A federal judge in Texas paused the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone during the Biden administration, and the second Trump administration has racked up many pauses, such as for firing federal workers and over deportations.

The Supreme Court decision raised as many questions as it provided answers, including for pregnant mothers with temporary or no legal status in the country. Legal analysts expect that questions around the constitutionality of birthright citizenship will appear before the Supreme Court again. In the meantime, the Supreme Court issued a 30-day pause on President Donald Trump’s executive order from going into effect.

The same day the decision came down, CASA Inc. a nonprofit membership organization that advocates for immigrant and working class communities, and a group of other plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of babies who would be impacted by Trump’s executive order and their parents. Babies born on or after February 19 are “ineligible for birthright citizenship” according to the executive order.

“We are here to say that we are committed to fight to ensure that all US-born children have US citizenship at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” Conchita Cruz, with one of the groups, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), said at a press conference on Friday. ASAP was also a plaintiff in the case.

Also on the call was a Russian woman in the US on a student visa. When she and her husband found out about the executive order, they joined the lawsuit out of concern for their baby..

The woman, who only identified herself by her first name, Liza, said that because she and her husband had fled their country, they did not feel safe going to the embassy to get their baby Russian citizenship, and that without the injunction, their baby, who was born after February 19, would have been born stateless and without citizenship.

“I’m sad about what today’s decision means for all of the parents whose children are not protected by the preliminary injunction and who are now even more scared about their children’s future. Each of those parents should have to file to protect their children’s rights. That’s why we filed a class action today, and why I will be a class representative,” she said.

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said for lawsuits “challenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order…lower courts would be wise to act swiftly.”

Legal analysts were divided. Some viewed the decision as the Supreme Court ceding ground on checking an overreaching president, while others viewed reigning in the judiciary’s reliance on nationwide injunctions as long overdue.

“That universal injunction remedy is extremely important in cases where you have nationwide illegality by the government, as in the birthright citizenship case,” Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, said in an interview with CT ahead of the decision. And, he added, injunctions are also important in a separate case he is litigating on behalf of businesses concerned about Trump’s tariffs, “where many of the victims, for various reasons, are too poor or otherwise poorly situated to file their own cases, yet it may be hard to do a class action.”

“Class action lawsuits can help, but they’re not a complete replacement for nationwide injunctions, because there are class action certification requirements which will sometimes be hard to meet,” Somin said.

Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, acknowledged that taking nationwide injunctions off the table means more possibility of legal “unevenness,” where one part of the country is subject to a law that has been found unlawful in another part. But he said there are still legal remedies available to curtail a president who is abusing his authority.

“The Supreme Court can move quickly. And when it realizes that there are heavy concerns of national importance, where there is unevenness, it might be inclined to move more quickly as a result of it,” he said.

Since parties should be the ones to bring cases, courts shouldn’t give orders that affect people who aren’t party to the case, Muller argued.

Universal injunctions are “useful tools against executive orders and claims of executive overreach,” he said, “but there have always been claims of executive overreach and mechanisms to deal with them. It will definitely slow down some of the process, but it won’t fundamentally undermine our ability to get courts to resolve these issues.”

He noted that universal injunctions were “essentially nonexistent 15 years ago” and that their usage has skyrocketed, along with presidents relying more on executive orders rather than working with Congress to get things done.

As American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Adam White noted in The Dispatch, Trump has courted controversy by issuing a “tidal wave” of executive orders around dismantling federal agencies, defunding programs, and deporting immigrants. Many of his executive orders have faced injunctions.

The Harvard Law Review found that former president George W. Bush received 6 injunctions, former president Barack Obama received 12, and Trump received 64 during his first term. Former president Joe Biden received 14. So far, the second Trump administration has racked up at least 40.

“Trump has given a flurry of executive orders at much, much higher rates than other presidents,” Muller said. “So there’s no surprise that there’s going to be a much, much higher rate of challenges to these executive orders and a much, much higher rate of court orders related to those issues.”

The court did leave open the prospect of more litigation in the lower courts about exactly how much the injunction power should be curtailed. The justices also noted that plaintiffs negatively impacted by the ruling could seek remedy in other ways, such as through class action lawsuits.

“Federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority in Trump v. CASA. “They resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. … When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the courts to exceed its power, too.”

On day one of his second term, Trump issued an executive order that would end the practice of granting citizenship to children born of parents who were in the US unlawfully or on a temporary basis. He said the 14th Amendment was rightly applied to the children of former slaves but should not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1868, says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

It came in response to the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which held that a Black man who was descended from enslaved people was not a US citizen and thus had no standing to sue. The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution a year later. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that a man born to Chinese parents was a US citizen.

Trump’s order soon sparked legal challenges, and lower court judges of a few different jurisdictions sided with a group of states, immigrant rights groups, and pregnant moms to block the administration from enforcing the order. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to curtail the scope of the judges’ orders, arguing that these actions were stopping the executive branch from being able to accomplish its agenda.

The majority was persuaded.

After the decision came down, Trump said he was “grateful to the Supreme Court for stepping in and solving this very, very big and complex problem, and they’ve made it simple.”

“Thanks to this decision, we can now probably file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis.”

With universal injunctions weakened, the administration signaled plans to go after birthright citizenship as well as other executive actions that have run into judicial roadblocks, including ending funding for sanctuary cities and suspending refugee resettlement.

Correction: An earlier version of this story had “nationwide legality” in a quote that should have read “nationwide illegality.”

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News

Died: Jimmy Swaggart, TV Minister Caught in Scandal

Daniel Silliman

The spellbinding Pentecostal preacher became, for many, an example of what is wrong with Christianity.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

Jimmy Swaggart, the Louisiana televangelist whose name became a watchword for scandal, died in Baton Rouge on July 1. He was 90.

Swaggart was one of the best-known and most successful TV preachers in the 1980s, reaching an estimated half-billion people every week with riveting sermons about the struggle against sin and the good gift of God’s redeeming grace. Then, at the peak of his popularity, Swaggart was caught at a rundown motel paying a woman for sex.

In 1988, he confessed on TV that he had sinned, face contorted with tears as he apologized to his congregation, those watching at home, his wife, his son, his son’s wife, other Pentecostal preachers and evangelists, the Assemblies of God, and, finally, Jesus Christ.

“I have sinned against you, my Lord,” Swaggart said, “and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me.”

Forgetfulness couldn’t come fast enough for Swaggart, though, and when the Assemblies of God told him he couldn’t preach for a year, he rejected the discipline, left the denomination, and went back to doing what he had been doing.

He was caught paying a woman for sex again in 1991.

This time the confession was different: “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business,” Swaggart said.

The televangelist went on to shift the blame to Satan and to talk about the scandal as spiritual warfare, describing his own sexual acts as demonic attacks on him.

Swaggart also said Satan was behind all the criticism and condemnation. He argued that those who said he was wrong to stay in the pulpit through scandal were just giving voice to the Accuser, trying to convince Swaggart that he was a joke, “a sideshow,” and an international disgrace. He reminded himself the Devil is a liar and paid them no mind.

Swaggart’s ministry collapsed—but not completely. Eighty percent of his viewers disappeared. His 7,000-seat sanctuary emptied. Sales of his gospel albums slowed. Donations didn’t arrive in the mail as frequently. But Swaggart kept going.

He’s been used as a case study of scandal ever since.

Christianity Today editor Rodney Clapp saw Swaggart as an example of the failure of the modern church.

“Too often, in the spirit of an extreme individualism, the grand Reformation doctrines of sola Scriptura and sola fidei have been turned into pitiful escapes from responsibility and accountability,” he wrote. “Cases like Swaggart’s indicate just how much we need to restudy and then take seriously the New Testament doctrine of the church.”

More recently, historians such as Suzanna Krivulskaya have looked at Swaggart to see how ministers have avoided consequences.

“Disgraced celebrity preachers experimented with obfuscation and confession” and “learned to rebrand their downfalls as evidence of the gospel’s effectiveness,” Krivulskaya wrote. “Resolute in their insistence on the right to preach despite being caught in acts they otherwise label immoral, charismatic ministers of the television age appeared to be unstoppable—scandal and all.”

Swaggart was born on March 15, 1935, in the tiny town of Ferriday, Louisiana, near the Mississippi River. He was the first child of Minnie Bell Herron and Willie Leon Swaggart. His father—known as “Sun” or “Son” Swaggart—played the fiddle at dances and parties.

The younger Swaggart remembered a lot of parties in the earliest years of his childhood. He recalled them as drunken affairs, frequently ending in fights. His parents also drank and fought at home. Then, when he was five, they had a conversion experience, and everything seemed to change.

“Jesus came to my house,” Swaggart would later say. “When they got saved, the fighting ended.”

Swaggart had his own religious conversion a few years later, at eight, standing in line for the movies. He heard God speak to him, as he would recall the story, and say he wanted young Jimmy to give him his heart.

When the ticket machine jammed, Swaggart took it as divine intervention and gave himself to God. He felt God tell him that he had some special work for him to do and had set him apart “as a chosen vessel.”

He started preaching and preforming gospel music as a teenager. By 17, he’d dropped out of high school, married 15-year-old Frances Anderson, and gone into full-time ministry as a traveling evangelist.

It was a hard life. He frequently played piano, sang, and preached from the back of a flatbed truck. The young family struggled to survive on meager donations, sometimes as little as $30 per week. In later years Swaggart would tell a story about awakening to find their campsite consumed by a flash flood.

“The Devil had tried to take our lives,” he said. “For years to come, I would dream about struggling against that current and almost drowning.”

Swaggart said his greatest struggle, however, came from the temptation to join his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis, who was on the road pioneering rock-and-roll with Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Elvis Presley. Lewis was getting rich and famous singing and playing “Great Balls of Fire,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.”

Memphis record producer Sam Phillips, founder of the legendary Sun Records, wanted to sign Swaggart, too, to add some gospel music to the lineup. Swaggart turned him down after a great internal battle.

“Jerry Lee can go to Sun Records,” he said. “I’m on my way to heaven.”

Swaggart was ordained in 1961 and brought his ministry to radio. Within a few years, his program was on 700 stations across the US. He built a church in Baton Rouge that could double as TV studio and made the jump to television in 1971 with The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast.

Even people who didn’t believe Swaggart’s message were often mesmerized by his Pentecostal preaching.

“He bobs and weaves and shouts and cries and spins his own magic,” historian Randall Balmer wrote in CT. “Raucous and controversial … Jimmy Swaggart has rarely had trouble keeping people’s attention.”

People magazine called him “a spellbinding performer” who would “rant, weep, thrust his Bible high in the air,” using the whole stage and “whipping his followers and himself to a devotional frenzy.”

The TV ministry grew until, at its zenith, his sermons were reaching an estimated 510 million people in 145 countries. In 1987, Swaggart was receiving an average of $500,000 in donations every day.

Then came the spectacular fall. A minister named Marvin Gorman was mad at Swaggart for Swaggart’s role in forcing him to confess to an extramarital affair with a deacon’s wife. Gorman sought revenge, and his son Randy was a police officer who knew Swaggart was a frequent guest at a Travel Inn, where men rented cheap rooms for quick sexual encounters.

The Gormans set up a sting operation and captured Swaggart on camera going into the motel with a 27-year-old. The woman, Debra Murphree, later said he’d been paying her $20 to pose for provocative photos and perform oral sex a few times a month for several years. She knew who he was but said he told her to call him “Billy.”

Swaggart confessed to the Gormans. Then to church leaders. Then to everybody, including his wife and God.

He didn’t offer many details but said he’d been succumbing to this temptation since the early days of his ministry—nearly 30 years. He agreed to stop preaching for three months but wouldn’t accept the Assemblies of God’s requirements for a longer restoration process.

Three years later, Swaggart was caught again when a police officer pulled him over for reckless driving in Indio, California. There was a 31-year-old woman named Rosemary Garcia in the car. She said she didn’t know Swaggart. He had picked her up.

In case the implication wasn’t clear, Garcia explained it to a Los Angeles TV station: “For sex. I mean … that’s what I do. I’m a prostitute.”

This time, Swaggart offered the world no tears. He returned to the pulpit after just a few days.

His reputation suffered, though, and the ministry was never the same. Early in 1992, Frances Swaggart sent out a fundraising letter pleading with supporters to help make up a $1.5 million deficit.

“Despite what the world (and most of the church) says,” Frances Swaggart wrote, “we believe the best days for the ministry are ahead.”

In 1998, CT found the vast parking lot around his church mostly empty. Inside the sanctuary, large sections of seats were curtained off, the balcony was dark, and camera angles for the TV broadcasts were carefully controlled to keep viewers at home from seeing the “dearth of congregants.”

But not everyone turned away from Swaggart. Some at the church said they still believed he was anointed and that God didn’t withdraw anointing just because of a moral failing.

They forgave Swaggart his faults and even took some of the responsibility.

“The man is human,” one woman said. “Maybe he got so caught up in being an example that he couldn’t tell someone something was terribly wrong. Now he has. He’s said it to the Lord, and the Lord is going to get him some help.”

Others thought the scandals actually made Swaggart a better minister: He wasn’t as judgmental as he’d once been, they said, and put a lot more emphasis on grace.

Besides, they argued, wasn’t that the point of the gospel? Swaggart’s life and message showed “somehow God can take things that are wrong, like this problem,” a family member said, “and turn them around to His glory.”

Others, however, took away very different lessons. They saw hypocrisy. They saw abuses of Christian theology. They saw evidence that the whole idea of God and forgiveness was all a fraud.

“Religion is nothing more than an excuse,” one woman in California concluded. “Why does ‘God’ allow cheap grace? Because there’s no other kind but accepting responsibility for our own actions.”

Swaggart, for his part, insisted that grace was real. He said that was the truth of his life, that God had healed him, forgiven him, and cleansed him of his sin. He returned to the theme again and again, in sermon and song.

He re-released two songs on streaming platforms on June 13, a few days before he suffered cardiac arrest and went into the intensive care unit in Baton Rouge. One song is called “Mercy Rewrote My Life”; the other “He Looked Beyond My Faults.”

“My faults were great, and I’d wandered so far away in sin,” Swaggart sings on the nearly-eight-minute track. “But his loving heart knew just where, my Lord, I had been. / I cried aloud, and Jesus heard my, my humble, humble plea. / He looked beyond all my faults and saw my need.”

At the time of his death, Swaggart’s ministry said he’d preached on television for longer than any other evangelist. Swaggart is survived by his wife, Frances, and son, Donnie.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Theology

The God Who Must Not Be Named

Brad East

Contributor

Jesus, the writers of the New Testament, and observant Jews never say the name of God. So why is saying it such a trend among American Christians?

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Wikimedia Commons

In the Bible, names matter. They aren’t mere ornaments or masks hiding deeper, private identities. According to Scripture, one’s name is one’s identity. To reveal one’s name is thus to manifest oneself. That’s why, when one’s life is so profoundly interrupted as to constitute an utterly new beginning—a revelation, an election, a conversion—one’s old name will no longer do. Abram becomes Abraham, Jacob becomes Israel, Simon becomes Peter, and Saul becomes Paul.

Few things are more important, therefore, than getting God’s Name right. (I’ll be capitalizing it from here on out.) I don’t know the last time you thought about the Name of God. But whether or not it entered your mind, it’s probably been in your prayers. That is, if you pray as Jesus taught us: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name” (Matt. 6:9, RSV throughout).

That God would consecrate his own Name is the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer. Not only, then, have you likely recently prayed about the Lord’s Name. The Name matters so much to Jesus that its sanctification precedes everything else we might ask of the Father.

Yet what is the Name of God? That’s the question.

God and Lord are candidates, as are other terms and titles in the Bible, from El Shaddai (Gen. 17:1) to King of heaven (Dan. 4:37). Years ago theologian Robert Jenson argued that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19) is the personal Name of Israel’s God.

Beyond these, there is one moment in all of Scripture when God reveals his Name. At the burning bush, before the Exodus, the Lord declares his Name to Moses (Ex. 3). This is the Name by which Moses will announce exactly who sent him to Pharaoh, the Name by which the Israelites will know exactly who delivered them from slavery. Likewise, this is the Name that God declares to Moses after the Exodus, on Mount Sinai, when Moses asks God to show him his glory (33:17–34:9). God says this is his Name “for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations” (3:15). And that Name is …

Well, what is it? How do you spell it? And how do you say it? Should you say it?

Scholars call the Name the Tetragrammaton because it consists of four consonants: יהוה in Hebrew; y-h-w-h in English. The revelation of the Name is easy to miss in translation, because in most versions the Name is rendered in small caps as “the Lord” (Ex. 3:15). God’s proclamation in the prior verse, “I am who I am” (v. 14), is a pun or riff on the Name’s connection to the Hebrew verb “to be.” The God of Israel is who he is: His sovereign freedom is unconditioned by anything in heaven or on earth. He alone is Creator, Redeemer, and Lord.

My hunch is that you, like me, have sometimes heard pastors, authors, and teachers pronounce aloud one or more Hebrew reconstructions of the Name. In American Protestantism, this has become something of a trend, even a fad. Preachers and scholars alike enunciate the Name with abandon. Nor is this habit limited to certain denominational subcultures or to traditions with a special emphasis on Israel, Judaism, and Zionism.

On the right, for example, Reformed theologian Peter Leithart has used the Name for decades. On the left, the same is true of the late Walter Brueggemann, an influential Old Testament scholar ordained in the United Church of Christ. Somewhere in the middle, you have a figure like John Mark Comer, who not only endorses writing and speaking the Name but also authored an entire book about it: God Has a Name: What You Believe About God Will Shape Who You Become (2017).

The motivations behind this renewal of attention to the divine Name are morally and theologically unimpeachable. Chief among these is a full-throated rejection of Marcionism, the heresy that the Old Testament is not inspired Scripture and that the Creator God of Israel is not the God and Father of Jesus Christ. Quite literally nothing is more important to handing on the gospel than repudiating this perennial falsehood. Gentile believers can be insecure in relation to Jewish heritage, and even when this insecurity avoids anti-Semitism, it perpetually drifts into pitting “the Old Testament God” against “the New Testament God.” This is a bit like comparing “the bride of my youth” to “the mother of my children.” They’re the same person.

The Lord of Hosts; the Almighty; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—this is one and the same as the God revealed in the Incarnation. Jesus isn’t deity in general incarnate. He is Israel’s God in flesh and blood. And as Comer rightly says, this God has a Name. He’s particular. He has a nature, a character, a personality. He’s not us multiplied. He’s not our best ideas projected onto eternity. He’s certainly not Zeus or Baal or any other idol. He is himself, the Lord God of Israel; besides him there is no other (Isa. 45:5).

So far, so good. Should we then go further and join the vogue for saying the Name? After all, if this is the Name by which God shall be known and remembered forever, shouldn’t we use it? What else is the Name—or any name—for? Israel’s Scriptures are both our authority and our paradigm for talking about God, and they use the Name constantly—indeed, thousands of times. Why wouldn’t we follow their lead? In our prayers and our sermons, should we not imitate Moses and David, Isaiah and Ezekiel?

I don’t think so. In fact, I’d like to make the case that the recent fashion of speaking God’s Name is a mistake. An understandable mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

To be clear, there is no obvious permission or prohibition to be found in the Bible. This is one of those places where we cannot simply cite chapter and verse. We must instead exercise practical wisdom rooted in historical, scriptural, and theological judgment.

To begin, Christians should cease enunciating the Name out of respect for Jewish practice. Observant Jews do not speak the Name aloud. If they are reading the Bible and the Name is mentioned, they substitute Adonai, or “the Lord,” for it. English translations follow this practice. If, however, they want to be specific in their reference to the Name, whether in writing or in speech, Jews say HaShem, which literally means “the Name.”

It’s true that church practice cannot be settled by reference to the synagogue. Christianity and Judaism are divided over many things. Yet why add the Name to the list? Contemporary Jewish practice predates the writing of the New Testament. You may be sure that the Jews who wrote the New Testament were just as scrupulous in their reverence for the Name as Orthodox Jews are today. Nothing in the New Testament suggests an amendment to this reverence, and no one would suggest that the New Testament mandates pronouncing the Name.

Christian custom throughout history reflects this holy reticence. Given the agreement between the New Testament and patristic and medieval tradition, the burden of proof falls to those who would revise this long-standing discretion. If doing so erects unnecessary boundaries between Jews and Christians, offending the piety of men and women who descend from Abraham, love God, and seek to obey his commandments, why would we think this wise, loving, or necessary?

Second, there is a danger in Gentile fixation on Jewish language and history. This is the flip side of Marcionism. I’m thinking of the kind of Christian group that thinks it has found some secret level of faith in calling Jesus “Yeshua” or Peter “Simeon” or God “El.” The besetting temptation is to act as if the untranslated words contain a sort of magic. Hence, if we call Jesus “Yeshua,” then we are somehow closer to the “real” gospel or to the early church as it “actually” was.

Lest I be misunderstood, I’m not knocking attention or sensitivity to the details of Scripture. Every jot and tittle are significant. Nor do I have in mind Jewish believers in Jesus who quite rightly want to make explicit Jesus’ Jewishness, his messianic identity, and the names and titles that belong to him. Rather, I’m thinking of Gentile Christians who see Gentile faith in Abraham’s God as somehow second-rate and therefore in need of sprucing up with transliterated Hebrew. We can sympathize with the impulse without sanctioning the practice.

Third, given the common preoccupation with speaking the Name, there is a deep irony for those who insist on it: The truth is that we do not know its pronunciation. The current favorite is a reasonable historical reconstruction, just as previous generations did their best. Yet for those who believe that using Hebrew words will bring greater spiritual insight or authenticity, a best guess isn’t going to cut it.

I have already alluded to the fourth reason why Christians should not speak God’s Name. Put plainly, this is the example set for us by Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. Kendall Soulen, a professor of theology at Emory University, makes a powerful version of this argument in his recent book, Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Unity of the Christian Bible. Soulen draws attention to the fact that mention of God’s Name does not cease between the Testaments. On the contrary, the authors of the New Testament are positively enamored with it. They refer to it over and over again. Yet they do so in properly pious fashion: by not saying it.

At this point, one might make either of two objections. On one hand, the New Testament is written in Greek and quotes from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament. What of the Galilean Jesus and his disciples’ Aramaic speech? On the other hand, even bracketing translation, the practice of nonpronunciation reflects Jewish custom at the time. Even if Jesus did not speak the Name, perhaps this was for cultural rather than theological reasons.

In my view, this objection gives Jesus far too little credit. Had he wanted his followers to change this practice, he would have said so—and his apostles would have reported this to us. When Jesus merely alludes to the Name, as when he says, “Before Abraham was, I am,” he has to hide himself lest he be stoned to death (John 8:58–59). Just as the Lord’s Name can be transliterated into English, the same can be done into Greek. The issue has not been lost in translation.

Furthermore, it would be inaccurate to say that Jesus and the apostles merely observe a local convention, passively avoiding what might cause offense to the simple and unenlightened. They revel in the unspoken Name. This is evident in the extraordinary variety of euphemisms they deploy that refer to the Name without ever pronouncing it.

Once you see this in the New Testament, you’ll never be able to unsee it. Part of the reason you may not have noticed it before is its sheer ubiquity in the texts. Who, according to the apostles, is God? Answer: He is “Power” (Mark 14:62); he is “the Blessed” (v. 61); the one “who sits upon the throne” (Rev. 5:13), “who was and is and is to come” (4:8). He is “the Most High” (Acts 7:48), “Alpha and the Omega” (Rev. 1:8), “the Almighty” (Rev. 1:8), the “faithful Creator” (1 Pet. 4:19), the “Savior” (1 Tim. 2:3), and the “Majesty in heaven” (Heb. 8:1). He is—as the New Testament consistently quotes from the Septuagint—the Lord.

This practice is not theologically neutral. It teaches us about the nature of Jesus’ divinity. Jesus is Lord. That is the bedrock confession of faith in Christ (Rom. 10:9). Jesus isn’t a lord like Caesar. Jesus is Lord like God. Why? Because Jesus is God like God. He is, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” Jesus is the Lord, the holy Name in human form.

In other words, for the apostles, Lord is more than a title. It is the very Name of God, even as it is also the Name of Jesus. He didn’t receive it at a given point in time. The Name belongs to him by nature. From all eternity, Jesus is the Lord. In him the Name “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

If Jesus is the Name, because the Name is his from everlasting to everlasting, then we should look to him to learn how we ought to address God. This is the fifth and final reason for principled nonpronunciation of the Name revealed to Moses. For, thankfully, we do not have to speculate about how we should speak to God. Jesus was quite explicit about it. His disciples asked him how to pray (Luke 11:1), and he told them. I quoted his answer above. Like Jesus, we should address God with these words (Matt. 6:9):

“Our Father.”

This address, to be sure, is not a replacement for the Name. Nor is it unique in the same way, for it is taken from the human family. (Though I should add that Paul claims the order is reversed; according to Ephesians 3:15, all earthly paternity takes its name from the heavenly Father.) Nevertheless, “Father” is how Jesus himself addressed God, and his command—both an imperative and an invitation—was for us to do the same.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of this summons. God is not our Father by nature. Whether as creatures or as sinners, we have no right to call him Father. To call God our Father is a gift. It is Jesus extending his own unique relationship with God to us, including us in his sonship so that we, too, might be children of God.

Paul recognizes the shocking grace of this act. Because “every one who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Rom. 10:13; Joel 2:32), when we are baptized in the triune Name, God the Father sends “the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:6). The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of sonship, of adoption (Rom. 8:15), so that all who put their faith in God’s Name might become his sons and daughters—“born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).

On the eve of his crucifixion, before his arrest, Jesus prayed. Listening to his prayer, we become eavesdroppers on a mystery: the human petitions of God the Son to God the Father, offered in the power of God the Spirit. The High Priest of Israel is here interceding for God’s people before the throne. Over and over, he begs blessing and protection for his followers. Over and over, he addresses God as Father. And over and over, he speaks of the Name:

I have manifested thy name to the men whom thou gavest me out of the world; thine they were, and thou gavest them to me, and they have kept thy word. …

Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. While I was with them, I kept them in thy name, which thou hast given me. …

I made known to them thy name, and I will make it known, that the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them. (John 17:6, 11–12, 26)

Jesus has made known God’s Name to all who put their faith in him. He has kept us in the Name, for if we are God’s children, his Name is upon us. We are marked by it. We honor and revere it. We ask God to sanctify it. With Jesus in Jerusalem, we pray, “Father, glorify thy name.” And with Jesus, we hear the reply from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (John 12:28).

We do all this, however, not by pronouncing the Name but—to shift just two words around—by not pronouncing the Name. We certainly will not honor the Name through constant, casual chatter, slinging it around with a shrug. With regard to the Name, we believers ought to be like the Book of Esther, in which mention of God’s presence is all the more notable for its surprising and conspicuous absence. You will have noticed by now that this article is Esther-like in just this respect. The purpose is not to be coy. I am trying to practice what I preach, even in print.

In short, the church marks the holiness of the Lord’s Name through unswerving, unyielding, and reverent silence. By refusing to speak it aloud, we simultaneously indicate and participate in God’s work to set his Name apart from every other name in heaven or on earth. And by addressing God as Jesus showed us to do, we welcome others to do the same.

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

- More from Brad East

Theology

Muslims Believe in One God but No Savior

Marvin Olasky

With original sin dismissed, Jesus has secondary status.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Pexels, Unsplash

(For the first article in this series, click here.)

Yesterday’s article looked at Ashura, the holiday coming up this weekend, as a way of reporting on Islam’s two major divisions. Today, let’s see what unites devout Muslims, starting with an ironclad monotheism.

Muslims believe in one God, all-powerful and ever present, uncreated, without beginning or end, completely sufficient to himself, and ordaining everything that occurs. The power of Islam moved Arabs and many other people from polytheism, often accompanied by grotesque practices, to monotheism.

Through most of its history, Judaism has emphasized ethnic connections with one particular people. In contrast, Islam has gained about 2 billion adherents—only 15 percent of them Arabs—by welcoming people of every skin color and ethnicity. Muslims say pre-Muhammad prophets of Allah, including Abraham, Moses, and David, were sent to only one nation, but Muhammad is special because he was sent to all people.

Muslims have had their own problems with racial reconciliation, given the history of Arab development of the slave trade, but the Quran, like the Bible, is colorblind. The several million Muslims now living in the United States can trace their ancestry back to many countries of Asia, Africa, and Europe. And admission to Islam is easy: Say “There is only one God, and Muhammad is his prophet,” and you are a Muslim.

Muslims revere the 114 chapters (suras) of the Quran, which in Arabic means “the reading.” Muslims fight shirk, which is any attempt to attribute Allah’s qualities to anyone or anything else. For instance, it is shirk, a sin, to think or say that anyone else can bring rain, satisfy desire, or cause babies to be born. It is shirk to believe that anyone else has godlike knowledge or to seek information from astrologers, palm readers, or the like.

This emphasis makes Islam stand out in opposition to animistic or polytheistic religions that involve many gods or spirits who need to be placated. In Islam, Allah has no subordinates or competitors. He is not our Father in heaven, so we don’t approach him as children. He is our Lord, the master, and as his servants (some Muslims use the word slaves) we are called to obedience, not love. A minority of Muslims, influenced especially by the mystical Sufi trend in Islam, speak of mutual personal affection with the deity.

Humanity’s high place in the universe carried a cost. Suras 15:27, 35:1, 51:56, and 55:15 relate that Islam has two kinds of supernatural creatures: angels (created out of light) and jinn (created out of fire). Muslims say that when Allah created Adam, he commanded the angels, and Satan from among the jinn, to prostrate before Adam as a sign of respect, although not a sign of worship. All except Satan did so. When Allah asked Satan why he disobeyed, Satan replied, “I am better than he is: You created me from fire and him from clay” (Sura 7:12). Allah cursed Satan, who pledged to destroy Adam and his descendants.

But to Muslims, the cost is not too much for us to pay on our own. Christians argue that ever since Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, humans habitually sin. The only way to reverse the curse is through the intervention of the supernatural—the work of God’s grace because of Christ’s sacrifice. However, the Quran states that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve both sinned, then repented, without eternal consequences: “Adam was inspired with words of prayer by his Lord, so He accepted his repentance” (2:37).

That difference with Christianity is literally and metaphorically crucial. Islam has no cross on which Jesus (known as Isa) died for our sins and says we have no need of salvation because we are not dead in our sins. We are naturally able to do what the boss requires. By obeying Allah’s rules, we can get to heaven on our own.

Muslims do not acknowledge original sin and discount biblical passages that show its results. The Bible contains honest reporting about sinful individuals whom God chose not because of their own righteousness but because of his love. Muslims, though, see a record of great heroes that Jews and Christians somehow twisted during centuries of transmission. What for Christians makes the Bible ring true—its record of how Noah got drunk, Lot committed incest, and so on—makes part of it ring false to Muslims.

Muslims express reverence for much of the Bible, but when it and the Quran are in conflict, they go with the Quran. Some become angry about anything that shows God taking a human form. They are not pleased with biblical passages indicating that God walked with Adam in the Garden of Eden, wrestled with Jacob, or came to earth as Jesus in human flesh. Tahrif (meaning “distortion”) is the explanation held by most Muslims that the original biblical texts somehow have been altered or corrupted.

The difference is profound. The Bible emphasizes that God has pity on us and adopts us into his family. The Quran emphasizes that a just master allows us to be his servants but not his children. Chapter 53 of Isaiah describes the most important character in history in this way: “He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (v. 3). Muslims respect the rejected Jesus Christ as one of perhaps 124,000 messengers Allah has sent and one of the 25 listed in the Quran.

Yes, Jesus is in the list with Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Lot, Jacob, Joseph, Job, Moses, Aaron, Ezekiel, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Jonah, Zechariah, John, three others not cited in the Bible, and Muhammad. But Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified; instead, they hold that he was taken directly to heaven. There is therefore no resurrection. They do not see him as God.

Within Islam, that unbiblical depiction makes logical sense: Without original sin, we do not need a redeemer. Humanity is basically good but mistake prone. Muslims who sincerely repent and submit to Allah have their sins forgiven, with no help from Christ needed (Sura 39:53). Humans, using their intelligence and guidance from the Quran, can distinguish good from evil. Sincerity and good works bring salvation, as Sura 7:8 states: “As for those whose scale will be heavy with good deeds, only they will be successful.”

- More from Marvin Olasky

News

Hindu Mobs Killed His Friend. He Forgave Them.

Divya Chirayath

As India releases the killer of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his sons, one Indian Christian chooses acceptance.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Mahendra Hembram walked out of Keonjhar jail in India’s Odisha state in April to a hero’s welcome. Supporters adorned him with garlands and shouted, “Jai Shri Ram!” (“Hail Lord Ram!”). To awaiting reporters, Hembram claimed his innocence after 25 years in prison.

Associated with the Hindu extremist group Bajrang Dal, Hembram had been sentenced to life in prison for burning Australian missionary Graham Staines and his sons—ages six and ten—to death in 1999. Authorities granted him an early release on grounds of good behavior.

Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a Hindu extremist group affiliated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, welcomed Hembram’s release. “It is a good day for us. We welcome the government’s decision,” the group’s joint secretary Kedar Dash told The Times of India.

Many in the Christian community criticized the jubilation at Hembram’s release.

“He is a convicted killer, convicted in the most horrendous crime, and is now being quietly merged into civil life after a long stay in jail,” John Dayal, activist and spokesman for the United Christian Forum for Human Rights, told CT.

The 1999 murders shocked the world as a mob of Hindu extremists set on fire a Jeep with Staines and his two sons inside. Yet authorities have shortened the sentences of all of the attackers, which some see as a sign of the growing wave of Hindu nationalism in the country. India’s Central Bureau of Investigation initially arrested 51 people involved in the killing. However, over the years, the court acquitted all the suspects except Hembram, Dara Singh, and Sudarshan Hansda, alias Chenchu.

Singh, who was also convicted of two other murders, was initially sentenced to death before judges reduced his punishment to a life sentence. He is currently pleading to be released immediately. Chenchu, who was a minor at the time, saw his sentence of 14 years reduced to 8.

Subhankar Ghosh, a close friend of the Staineses and eyewitness of the murders, didn’t feel outrage when he heard of Hembram’s release.

Rather, the response of Staines’ wife, Gladys, after the murders is a model for Ghosh. Gladys publicly forgave the killers and returned to run the leprosy home where her husband had served. Today, their legacy lives on in the remote village where they once lived.

“Even Gladys has forgiven them, so who am I to say that I will not forgive?” Ghosh said.

Graham Staines first came to India in 1965 to work at the leprosy mission of the Evangelical Missionary Society in Mayurbhanj (EMSM). Missionaries first established the home in 1895 after the king of Mayurbhanj, Sri Rama Chandra Bhanja Deo, invited them to come and work with lepers. Bhanj Deo was especially passionate about eradicating the disease, as his daughter suffered from leprosy.

Courtesy of Subhankar Ghosh

Graham Staines (back row in green) and attendees of a Christian camp in Manoharpur.

Gladys arrived in Mayurbhanj in 1981 as a missionary with Operation Mobilization. There she met Staines, and the two got married two years later. Beyond the leprosy mission, they also served at local churches and held Christian camps to strengthen believers in the area.

Local members of Bajrang Dal were outraged to see people from the Santhal tribe embracing Christianity and believed the missionaries were destroying Indigenous culture. According to a letter Hembram wrote to his sister-in-law after the murder, they were enraged to see villagers eating beef—as cows are sacred in Hinduism—and to see the missionaries distributing sanitary pads and bras to the tribe members.

Things came to a head in January 1999, when Staines, his two sons, and several other Christians organized a five-day church camp in the jungles of Manoharpur village. Ghosh, a botany professor who often served with Staines, had been invited as a speaker. On the night of January 22, 1999, Staines and his two sons were sleeping in their Jeep, which was parked in front of a small church in Manoharpur. Meanwhile, Ghosh and another Christian, Gilbert Venz, slept in a small thatched mud house, about 650 feet away the jeep, according to Ghosh’s unpublished book, Flames of Fire.

Around midnight, Ghosh woke up to the loud sounds of a large crowd screaming, “Maro, maro! Dara Singh zindabad!” (“Kill, kill! Long live Dara Singh!”). He had no idea what was going on, and when he tried to go outside to look, he found attackers had blocked the doors of the huts so they couldn’t get out. It was pitch-dark, he wrote, and the house had no windows, only a small ventilator through which Ghosh saw the vandals deflating the tires of Staines’ Jeep, beating up Staines and his sons, and pushing them into the Jeep when they tried to escape.

He saw villagers running around trying to help the missionary, but members of the mob threatened them and beat them up. As he watched the vandals set the Jeep on fire and his friends being devoured by the flames, he helplessly knelt and prayed.

“We are so sorry that we could not do anything at this hour of death for Graham and the kids,” Ghosh wrote in his book. “We were filled with remorse and sorrow. Our heart was beating vehemently, crying to the Lord, why such a thing has happened.”

Witnessing the heinous crime took a deep emotional toll on Ghosh, who struggled with depression and trust issues. Many of Ghosh’s friends, including some within the Christian community, blamed him for not going out and saving Staines, even though Ghosh had no way out of the hut.

Courtesy of Subhankar Ghosh

Graham and Gladys Staines with their three children in 1996 which was 3 years before Graham and the boys were killed.

During the two-and-a-half-year trial, some lawyers falsely accused Ghosh and fellow ministry workers of killing Staines and then blaming it on the mob.

“The first three [or] four months were unbearable for me,” Ghosh said. “To see someone dying in front of my eyes [who was] doing good service and he was treated this way, I had almost become mad. I would not talk to people.”

Despite his grief, Ghosh believes he needed to accept what happened and forgive the killers. He went on to work at the leprosy mission, as well as to speak in churches and seminaries sharing Staines’ testimony.

“I have to reconcile the fact that Jesus went through all this, so who am I not to accept it?” Ghosh said. “Even in hard times, I have to accept these things. The Scriptures say that God, in Christ, was reconciling the world unto himself. And we are sent to be ambassadors of reconciliation.”

After a furlough in Australia, Gladys and her daughter, Esther, who was 13 at the time of the killing, returned to Odisha, where Gladys served at the leper clinic for five more years before returning to Australia. She told Indian news stations, “I have forgiven the killers, but the law must take its own course.”

For her work in India, Gladys won awards, including the Mother Teresa Memorial Award for Social Justice and the Padma Shri for Social Service, India’s fourth-highest civilian award.

“If we don’t experience the grace of God, we become bitter,” Gladys told CT in a 2003 interview. “We have to turn to God, not to others. Experience forgiveness and forgive others. Grace is available. Once you forgive, there will be healing.”

Gladys, who is now 74, last visited India with her daughter and grandchildren in December 2024.

Even after the Staineses left, their legacy lived on. EMSM now includes two leprosy mission homes, a rehabilitation center, a boys’ hostel named after the Staines boys, and the Graham Staines Memorial Hospital. The hospital was established in 2004 to fulfill Staines’ vision of providing health care to the marginalized people of Mayurbhanj. Although the rate of leprosy has decreased in the past few decades, Odisha continues to report more than 500 new cases a month.

Manoharpur, the remote village in eastern Odisha where the murder took place, has seen a growth in Christianity after the incident, Ghosh said. The village now has three churches, and many residents have accepted Christ.

“Those who had come to attack on that night, there were about 52 people,” Ghosh said. “Out of them, many have come to know the Lord and have joined the church.”

- More from Divya Chirayath

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