How Biblically Accurate Is ‘House of David’?

A look at polygamy, giants, and Goliath’s Greek armor.

David played by Michael Iskander in House of David

Jonathan Prime / Prime Video © Amazon Content Services LLC

The first season of House of David has just concluded.

Its eight episodes, streaming on Amazon Prime, covered only three chapters in the Bible: God’s rejection of King Saul in 1 Samuel 15, Samuel’s anointing of David in 1 Samuel 16, and David’s defeat of Goliath in 1 Samuel 17.

To fill in the plot, flesh out characters, and give their story more biblical and historical context, the show’s writers invented subplots, many of which draw on other parts of the Bible as well as later Jewish traditions.

Some viewers have wondered how much of this narrative is true to the Bible and how much is pure fiction—maybe even revision. Here’s a look at some of House of David’s central elements and how they match up (or don’t) with the biblical source material. (Spoilers ahead.)

David’s family

Let’s start with David’s family. In House of David, he is living with his father Jesse, five older half brothers, and some other people, including a young girl named Avva. It’s not entirely clear how these other people are related to Jesse—children? grandchildren? extended family?—but the show’s press kit says Avva, at least, is Jesse’s daughter and David’s sister. David and Avva’s mother, Nitzevet, is dead before the series begins, though we see her in flashbacks.

The biblical David’s immediate family was a bit different. He had more older brothers—either six or seven, depending on which passage you read (six according to 1 Chronicles 2:13–15, seven according to 1 Samuel 16:10 and 17:12). And his mother was still alive well into his adulthood; David arranged for both his parents to stay in Moab while he was hiding from King Saul (1 Sam. 22:3–4).

The biblical David also had two sisters, named Zeruiah and Abigail (1 Chron. 2:16–17); “Avva,” the name of the girl in the series, might be intended as a variation on “Abigail.” Interestingly, the biblical Zeruiah was the mother of Joab, one of David’s top generals—so the biblical Joab was basically David’s nephew. But in the series, Joab is noticeably older than David and is merely a “cousin” of his. (Joab is also, at this point in the series, one of the top soldiers in King Saul’s army.)

In House of David, David is called a “bastard” by his brothers and neighbors, and Jesse says he married David’s mother “unlawfully.” This backstory isn’t spelled out in the Bible but is loosely based on a Jewish tradition that says David was an outcast within his own family because of the circumstances of his birth. This tradition (or the filmmakers who used it) may have been inspired by passages from the Psalms in which David says his mother conceived him in sin (Ps. 51:5, ESV) and he was a stranger to his brothers, mocked by the people who sat in the city gate (69:8–12).

King Saul’s family

In the series, King Saul has a wife named Ahinoam, two sons named Jonathan and Eshbaal, and two daughters named Mirab and Michal. When Eshbaal, who is something of a libertine, suggests that he and Saul go to a tavern and meet some women, Saul replies, “You expect me to disrespect your mother?”

The impression we get is that Saul is a faithful monogamist. But the biblical Saul was not. Like other kings and wealthy men of the period, he had multiple wives (2 Sam. 12:8)—including, yes, Ahinoam (1 Sam. 14:50). He had at least one concubine whose name we know, Rizpah (2 Sam. 3:7; 21:8–13).

Saul also had at least seven sons that we know of: two by Rizpah, named Armoni and Mephibosheth, and five whose mothers are not specified, including Jonathan, Ishvi, Malki-Shua, Abinadab, and Eshbaal (1 Sam. 14:49; 1 Chron. 8:33), the last of whom was also known as Ish-Bosheth (2 Sam. 2–4). The biblical Saul had at least two daughters, named Merab and Michal (1 Sam. 14:49).

In the series, Saul calls his general Abner an “old friend.” The biblical Abner wasn’t just a friend. He was family, Saul’s first cousin (1 Sam. 14:50–51). The series also implies that Abner’s mother is the Witch of Endor, a medium who, in the Bible at least, summoned the spirit of Samuel at Saul’s request shortly before Saul’s death (1 Sam. 28:3–25). This connection between Abner and the witch is not made in the Bible but comes from rabbinic tradition.

The first season of House of David ends with Eshbaal putting himself on the throne while Saul is away on the battlefield. There is no basis for this in the Bible; in fact, Eshbaal isn’t even mentioned in the Bible until after Saul’s death (2 Sam. 2:8–10). Most of the show’s fictitious elements are meant to fill the gaps in the biblical narrative; this one threatens to throw the narrative off course. But we’ll see what happens next season.

No polygamy?

Saul isn’t the only monogamist in House of David. At one point, a man named Adriel says to Michal, “If my wife were dead, I would marry you myself and wake up every day a happy man.” But there was no reason—not in that culture—that Adriel would have had to wait for his wife to die before marrying Michal. As it is, the biblical Adriel married Michal’s sister Merab (1 Sam. 18:19; 2 Sam. 21:8).

The show’s reluctance to depict the polygamy of the times makes you wonder how it will deal with David’s many marriages. The series leans heavily into David’s romance with Michal, but after the biblical David married Michal (1 Sam. 18:20–27), he went on to have at least six other wives or concubines before he moved to Jerusalem (2 Sam. 3:2–5). The fact that he had children by all these different women was a contributing factor in the events that led up to the civil war between David and his son Absalom (see 2 Samuel 13, especially).

The capital city, Gibeah

Saul says he grew up in a “poor village,” and a few characters say that Gibeah—the capital city of Israel—is a former Philistine stronghold that Saul captured. He is now busy purging the palace of all the pagan art that the Philistines put there.

It is true that the Philistines had an outpost in Gibeah, though I doubt they had a full palace there (1 Sam. 10:5), and it appears that the biblical Saul may have actually come from that town (v. 26), which had been part of the tribe of Benjamin since Joshua’s day (Josh. 18:21–28).

Gibeah was, in fact, notorious, the site of an atrocity that sparked a civil war that almost resulted in the tribe of Benjamin’s complete destruction (Judges 19–21). So when the biblical Saul told Samuel he was “from the smallest tribe of Israel” (1 Sam. 9:21) … well, there was a reason for that. And it’s not insignificant that, when the people asked Samuel to give them a king and Samuel warned them about all the ways a monarchy could go wrong (1 Sam. 8), Samuel, under God’s direction, responded by giving them a king from that tribe.

The Philistines

The Philistine king Achish says his people “came from across the Great Sea” centuries ago to try to conquer Egypt. He also says the armor he is giving Goliath was “crafted by the finest Mycenaean blacksmith.”

All of this is historically sound. The Bible says the Philistines came from an island or coastal region known as Caphtor—now widely thought to have been Crete or Cyprus—around the same time that the Israelites arrived in Canaan (Deut. 2:23; Jer. 47:4; Amos 9:7). Most modern historians also identify the Philistines with the Peleset, one of the ethnic groups known as “sea peoples” who attacked Egypt in the 12th century BC.

The Mycenaeans were Bronze Age Greeks, and scholars have noted for years that Goliath’s armor and weaponry seem to have had certain Greek characteristics, like the bronze greaves that Goliath wore on his legs (1 Sam. 17:6) or the spear with a shaft “like a weaver’s rod” (v. 7), which many think is a nod to the looped cord that Greeks and others attached to their weapons to increase their range and accuracy when they threw them.

The fact that Goliath challenges the Israelites to resolve their standoff through a duel between two champions is also reminiscent of some of the clashes that we see in the Iliad. It’s a very Greek way to try to settle a battle.

The giants

Finally, the giants. In House of David, the giants are identified as descendants of fallen angels who mated with human women in the days before the Flood, as per Genesis 6:1–4. They also have more recent human ancestors; Goliath and his brothers live with their regular-sized mother, whose name is Orpah.

The link between Goliath and the fallen angels has a pretty solid biblical basis. The children of the angels and their human wives were called the Nephilim (Gen. 6:4). The Nephilim were identified with a race of giants known as the Anakim, or the descendants of Anak (Num. 13:33). After Joshua defeated them, the Anakim lived in a handful of Philistine cities like Gath (Josh. 11:22). And Goliath, like some of the other giants who fought David and his men, came from Gath (1 Sam. 17:4; 2 Sam. 21:15–22; 1 Chron. 20:4–8).

The Bible says nothing about Goliath’s mother, though. That detail comes from a Jewish tradition that says Goliath and his brothers were the children of Orpah, the Moabite daughter-in-law of Naomi who did not go to Bethlehem with her (Ruth 1:8–15). Because Naomi’s other Moabite daughter-in-law, Ruth, was the great-grandmother of David (4:13–17), the legend linking Orpah to the giants basically imagines that the fight between David and Goliath was a fight between two branches of Naomi’s extended family.

In House of David, the giants are living in a cave and mostly hiding from human society until Achish finds them and forges an alliance with them. In the Bible, the giants appear to have lived quite openly in a handful of Philistine cities after Joshua drove them out of the hill country of Israel (Josh. 11:21–22).

Also, the giants in the series are very, very tall—roughly twice the height of regular humans. Depending on the interview, the show’s producers have said their Goliath is supposed to be anywhere from 10 to 14 feet tall. The biblical Goliath was shorter than that, possibly by a lot. Most modern Bibles say Goliath was “six cubits and a span” (1 Sam. 17:4), or nine feet, nine inches, because that’s the height he has in the Masoretic text, an 11th-century manuscript that is the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible.

But the Dead Sea Scrolls (which are over a thousand years older) and some other ancient texts say he was “four cubits and a span,” or six feet, nine inches—just one inch taller than Martyn Ford, the actor who plays him! That still would have seemed very large at a time when the average person probably wasn’t much more than five feet tall.

There are many other details and much more foreshadowing to explore—for brevity’s sake, this will have to do for now. Cameras are already rolling on House of David season 2; we’ll have more biblical material to sort through soon.

Peter T. Chattaway is a film critic with a special interest in Bible movies.

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Theology

Easter Is for Remembering Our Martyrs

Nathanael Somanathan

More than 200 Sri Lankan Christians were killed for their beliefs six years ago. Their deaths beckon us to evaluate how we live.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Pexels

Weeping and wailing tore through Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday six years ago when Islamic extremists walked into the evangelical Zion Church, two Catholic churches, and three hotels to carry out a series of suicide bombings. At least 253 people, including 50 children, perished in an instant. Thirty-one of the people killed were evangelical, and 171 were Catholic.

I was not in Sri Lanka at the time, but I was quickly informed of what had happened. The very next day, I learned that my cousin’s 12-year-old son was one of the children who had died in the blast at Zion Church.

One photo stands out to me among the stream of pictures of the decimated churches that circulated online: a blood-splattered statue of Jesus at St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, a city on the western coast of Sri Lanka. It is a disturbing image to behold, but it captures how Christians in Sri Lanka felt in the aftermath of this attack: Easter had become a reminder that the body of Christ has not stopped bleeding.

Easter is traditionally a day of great joy, a celebration of the victory of Christ over sin, death, and the evils that plague the world. But for many Sri Lankan Christians, it is also a day of mourning and remembrance—a day to honor the martyrs who were targeted and killed for their faith.

Remembering the martyrs is indispensable to the Christian story and also to Christian discipleship. From the early apostles to Polycarp (the bishop of Smyrna), from Perpetua (the second-century noblewoman) to American missionary Jim Elliot, gospel transmission and church growth have not been without bloodshed. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” as the saying inspired by early Christian apologist Tertullian goes.

Martyrs of the faith are neither accidents nor tragedies in the story of the church. Rather, they are honorable seeds planted in the ground in the hope of the Resurrection. They are the highest expressions of a life well lived for Christ, beckoning us to do the same. We forget them at our peril because they teach us how to live on this side of Easter: fearless in the face of death, unbound by worldly desires, holding firm to Christ’s teachings, and living in full expectation of a time when death no longer has the final say.

Ramesh Raju, a victim of the Zion Church bombing in Batticaloa on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka, understood this Easter-inspired life better than anyone. He died heroically, preventing one of the bombers from entering the church, which could have drastically increased the number of casualties.

In February, I spoke with his wife, Chrishanthini, about the trauma she had experienced in losing her husband and being left to care for their two children on her own. Chrishanthini’s voice carried a surprising note of hope and confidence alongside an obvious sense of sorrow.

For several months before the bombings occurred, her pastor had been teaching the church about Christian suffering and martyrdom. Ramesh would come home after every sermon feeling overwhelmed with conviction and say, “Chrishanthini, we should not be living for the world! We should be living for Christ and be willing to even die for his sake.” The Rajus started praying that they would be counted worthy to suffer for the sake of Christ as a family.

After Ramesh’s shocking death, I wondered if Chrishanthini still felt this way or if she was angry and disappointed with God. As Hindu converts to Christianity, did her family feel that they had made a poor exchange? When I asked her this, she let out a soft laugh and quoted Philippians 1:29: “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him.”

In my conversation with Chrishanthini, it became clear that her family and church never thought that following Christ guaranteed a life of material blessings, perfect health, and uninterrupted happiness. For Chrishanthini, all believers must be prepared to face suffering—including the possibility of martyrdom—when they decide to follow Christ.

Chrishanthini recalled her pastor’s words on 2 Timothy 2:11–12 at a Bible study on March 21, 2019, which was also Ramesh’s birthday. That day, her pastor said in a sermon illustration that if Ramesh and a few others died for Christ, they would reap their reward in glory. Exactly one month later, Ramesh died.

Last year, the Catholic church in Sri Lanka began a process with the Vatican to honor and formally remember the victims of the bombings at St. Anthony’s Shrine and St. Sebastian’s Church as “heroes of the faith.” If this process is completed, the Catholics who were killed in the bombings will be recognized as saints, worthy of public veneration.

While Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians have a formal process of canonization to remember and honor their martyrs, evangelicals have been slow to develop a formal process of our own. This is because we want to avoid ascribing to the martyrs any special powers or access to God. Many evangelicals are active in advocacy groups for religious freedom in persecuted countries and support mission organizations and churches whose members have been martyred, yet I have found little reflection in evangelical circles on the role of martyrdom in preserving “the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude v. 3, NET).

There is no doubt that honoring, remembering, and meditating on the lives of the martyrs has a profound impact on our lives. Evangelicals can affirm a relationship with the martyrs through memory while rejecting any notion of a mystical connection.

Zion Church, a charismatic evangelical congregation, has taken concrete measures to remember its martyrs. The names and faces of the 31 worshipers who were murdered that Easter are displayed on a wall inside the sanctuary, Chrishanthini said. The martyrs’ names are also inscribed on a monument within a newly constructed prayer garden. Ramesh, along with the others who died on the most holy day in the Christian calendar, has become a powerful illustration of Christlike courage in sermons and prayers at the church.

Remembering the lives and examples of martyrs like Ramesh is important not only for Zion Church but also for other evangelical congregations in Sri Lanka to incorporate into regular rhythms of church life. We can do this by:

Including martyrs in our prayers of thanksgiving
Displaying pictures of them along with short descriptions of their stories in our church hallways
Setting aside days to remember individual martyrs relevant to our local contexts, like martyred pastor Lionel Jayasinghe (in addition to the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church)
Studying historical and contemporary martyrs in Sunday schools, youth groups, and discipleship programs
Encouraging artistic and musical expressions—such as songs, poetry, and plays—that honor the witness of Christian martyrs
Engaging in acts of service or outreach in honor of martyrs, demonstrating the impact of their witness in tangible ways

These practices of remembrance are integral to the preservation of the carefully cultivated witness of Sri Lanka’s church, one of endurance and resilience during the 30-year civil war that ended in 2009, frequent persecution of Christians, the devastating 2004 tsunami, and the 2019 Easter bombings.

To remember martyrs is to remember Christ, who still bleeds in the affliction of his body and bride, the church. When Saul encounters the Lord on the road to Damascus in Acts 9, he asks, “Who are you, Lord?” The answer he receives emphasizes Christ’s solidarity with the suffering church: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (v. 5).

In saying that he was persecuted by Saul, Jesus identified with his faithful followers who dare to put their trust in him, even at great cost to their lives. Saul became a witness to the resurrected Christ that day. As the apostle Paul, he would eventually profess, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21). This astounding declaration is the story of many who have encountered the risen Christ from the inception of the church. This is the story the Sri Lankan martyrs of the faith embody—one that we bring to life when we remember them on Easter, year after year.

Easter is rightly celebrated as Christ’s greatest achievement for those in Christ. But the Resurrection does not overshadow the Crucifixion. Taking up our crosses, denying ourselves, and following Christ are not pre-Easter stipulations that went away after Christ’s resurrection. Rather, Easter is a double vindication of Good Friday: It affirms both the finished work of the atonement and the example of Christ’s human life of surrender and obedience to the Father, even to the point of death on a cross (Phil. 2:8).

The church’s collective memory of martyrs serves as a stark reminder that in God’s economy, there is great strength in apparent weakness. Just as Christ’s humiliation and death appeared to have been the end of a great revolutionary movement, martyrdom and Christian suffering can appear unnecessary and ineffective. But Easter and the New Testament church tell a different story, one of triumph and perseverance despite opposition, persecution, and even death.

Toward the end of our phone call, Chrishanthini said she felt certain that Ramesh would receive the high reward of a glorious resurrection. This hope is what keeps her going each day as she serves at Zion Church as a Sunday school teacher, leads prayer meetings, and tells others about her husband’s sacrifice and the great joy of following Christ.

While Chrishanthini has lost her husband and her children have lost their father, they do not mourn as those without hope (1 Thess. 4:13). In the weeks following Ramesh’s death, their 14-year-old daughter, Rukshika, came to Chrishanthini with these words: “Amma, I would be honored if the Lord also calls me to be a martyr like Appa.”

Nathanael Somanathan is a pastor and lecturer at Colombo Theological Seminary in Sri Lanka. He is currently completing his PhD at the University of Birmingham, UK.

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Books

Review

What Supernatural Experiences Can and Can’t Show

Harold Netland

They testify to a world beyond our perception. But by themselves, they can’t confirm the central truths of Christianity.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons

In a remarkable 1988 article for The Sunday Telegraph, the distinguished British atheist philosopher A. J. Ayer, architect of a philosophical movement known as logical positivism, recounted his own near-death experience (NDE). Already suffering complications from pneumonia, Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon, causing his heart to stop beating for four minutes. But Ayer astonished his medical team by recovering and then telling them about an extraordinary experience. “I was confronted,” he recalled, “by a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it. I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe.”

One might expect that such an experience would prompt an atheist to reconsider views on God’s existence. But not Ayer—at least not publicly. “My recent experiences,” he wrote, “have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god.” He was ready, in other words, to admit the universe might be more complex than he originally thought, but not to the point of questioning its supposed godlessness.

Yet in a curious twist, another account suggests that Ayer did reconsider the question of God’s reality. Jeremy George, the attending physician, later reported that Ayer had told him privately, “I saw a divine being. I’m afraid I’m going to have to revise all my various books and opinions.”

What should Ayer have concluded from his experience? Do NDEs provide evidence for the reality of an afterlife or even the existence of God?

Popular apologist Lee Strobel explores these questions in his latest book, Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World. Across 12 chapters, Strobel examines the available evidence for a nonphysical mind or soul. His investigation ranges across an array of topics, including miracles, unusual dreams and visions, near-death experiences, ghosts, special experiences of Jesus, and the Resurrection itself.

Several chapters, rather than dealing explicitly with evidence for the supernatural as such, explain traditional Christian teachings on subjects like angels, Satan, demons, heaven, and hell. But his overall body of evidence—incorporating Christian doctrine, scientific research, and firsthand testimony—presents a plausible case for affirming a nonphysical or spiritual dimension to reality.

Strobel, the founding director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics, is a popular author and speaker. His influential “Case for” series includes The Case for Christ (1998), The Case for Faith (2000), The Case for the Real Jesus (2007), The Case for Miracles (2018), and The Case for Heaven (2021).

Seeing the Supernatural follows the format of these earlier books. In each chapter, Strobel first introduces a problematic issue and then interviews a Christian expert, whose testimony on the subject provides reasons for accepting the traditional Christian understanding. His writing is clear and accessible, avoiding technical jargon and complex arguments. And his conversational style gives the impression of inviting readers into the room and letting them listen in on the discussion.

Several topics addressed in Seeing the Supernatural—miracles, hell, dreams and visions of Jesus—have come up in Strobel’s earlier works. For example, chapter 11, on the Resurrection, covers substantially the same material as the Resurrection chapter in The Case for Miracles, with both chapters relying heavily on interviews with detective-turned-apologist J. Warner Wallace. Although in some earlier books Strobel included interviews with skeptics, this time the experts are all Christians.

Seeing the Supernatural is intended to answer a question Strobel asks in the introduction: “Is it truly possible in our scientific and technological age to be a rational person and still have faith in the existence of a realm we can’t see, touch, or analyze in a test tube?” This is an important question, as many today assume that modern science has rendered belief in a creator, immaterial souls, angels, and miracles untenable. The Christian faith presupposes such realities, and much of the book is concerned with providing evidence for a nonphysical or spiritual dimension.

But in defending the supernatural, what exactly are we opposing? Several terms need to be clarified. Belief in the supernatural is typically contrasted with a philosophy of naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism maintains that everything that exists is composed of natural entities that science can study, and that justified beliefs must be compatible with scientific findings.

Defined this way, naturalism is distinct from physicalism (or materialism), the view that whatever exists or occurs is ultimately constituted out of physical entities. Most physicalists are naturalists, although not all naturalists are physicalists. A related concept is scientism, the view that the methods and conclusions of the hard sciences provide the only proper paradigm for discerning what is objectively real and true.

In defending the supernatural, Strobel is responding to those who embrace versions of naturalism, physicalism, or scientism. There is no question that each of these frameworks is influential today. But we should be careful not to exaggerate this influence.

Strobel himself acknowledges that “interest in the supernatural is incredibly high in our culture.” He cites a 2023 study from the Pew Research Center that found that eight out of ten Americans believe “there is something spiritual beyond the natural world.” A more recent Pew study (from 2025) reveals that 86 percent of Americans believe that people have souls or spirits in addition to their physical bodies, and 83 percent believe in God or a universal spirit. In other words, American culture does not seem as disenchanted as we often assume.

Seeing the Supernatural advances two central claims. First, that a broad range of phenomena indicate a spiritual or nonphysical dimension to reality, including continuing consciousness after death of the body. And second, that these phenomena provide a degree of evidential support for the truth of central Christian beliefs.

Although related, the two claims are distinct. Regarding the first, Strobel amasses an impressive array of evidence suggesting that there is more to reality than what can be reduced to physical properties and processes. In one of the book’s strongest chapters, on the reality of the soul, neuroscientist Sharon Dirckx provides compelling reasons for rejecting the view that the mind (the center of consciousness) is identical to (or reducible to) the brain and neural activity.

In expounding a “clear and compelling case for an existence beyond our physical world,” Strobel is surely correct. The second claim, however, is more complex. To what extent do the phenomena Strobel identifies provide evidence for distinctively Christian beliefs? Particular phenomena might well point toward a spiritual dimension of some kind without entailing the truth of central Christian beliefs about God, angels, demons, heaven, and hell. In other words, the relevant evidence could be compatible with a variety of broader worldviews, and other considerations—such as a person’s background beliefs—might affect conclusions about the supernatural realm.

Consider, for example, near-death experiences. Strobel brings together impressive data from recent studies on NDEs, which include compelling reports from individuals who describe their own experiences when they were pronounced clinically dead.

Though individual accounts vary, there are certain commonalities, including the sense of “leaving” the physical body and existing in a nonphysical state; seeing one’s own corpse; entering and emerging from darkness; encountering a bright light; visiting another realm; evaluating one’s own life; experiencing feelings of joy, peace, and love; and sometimes meeting deceased relatives. Some stories convey the sense of having arrived “home,” combined with a reluctance to return to the present world.

There is a vast body of scholarship on NDEs. Given their prevalence throughout history and their occurrence today across cultural and religious traditions, it is clear that something extraordinary happens for many people at the point of death. It is implausible to attribute all these experiences to hallucinations, oxygen deprivation, or chemical changes that transpire when the heart or brain stops working. As Strobel reasonably concludes, “The best explanation for the totality of the evidence is that there is a postmortem existence of some sort. After our brain stops working, after our heart stops beating, after the doctors declare us dead—we still live on. Our consciousness survives. We survive.”

That consciousness survives physical death is supported by NDEs, but this conclusion can lend credence to various worldviews. Most religions teach some kind of continued existence beyond physical death, with major faiths such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, as well as many indigenous traditions, maintaining versions of reincarnation or rebirth. In recent decades, careful studies of NDEs in diverse cultural and religious contexts have indicated that this is a widespread phenomenon among humankind.

These studies demonstrate that NDE accounts, considered globally, feature significant continuities and differences alike. As Gregory Shushan, author of Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions, notes regarding this research: Although the accounts of NDEs worldwide share many common characteristics, these elements are expressed in the idiom of particular cultural frameworks and reflect accepted local beliefs. “This suggests,” writes Shushan, “that NDEs originate in phenomena that are independent of culture. … In other words, how the event is experienced varies by individual, resulting in narratives being interpreted and expressed in highly symbolic local modes.”

That something significant is encountered and experienced in NDEs seems clear. But it also appears that cultural or religious influences play a role in shaping each experience and its interpretation. In other words, NDEs by themselves might not provide compelling evidence for Christian theism, even if they belong within a broader constellation of paranormal events that can support Christian claims.

What distinguishes the case for a distinctively Christian supernaturalism from a more generic supernaturalism is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, for which there is impressive corroborating historical evidence. Reality is indeed more complicated than skeptics like Ayer imagined, and there is compelling evidence for the truth of central Christian claims about God and the afterlife.

Harold Netland is professor of philosophy of religion and intercultural studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is the author of Religious Experience and the Knowledge of God: The Evidential Force of Divine Encounters.

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Theology

Hooters and the Future of the Church

Russell Moore

Columnist

We should be glad if the restaurant chain closes. But there’s no solace in how these places are dying in a culture that now finds them too tame.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

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

Those of us who are traditionalist Christians have long said that the Hooters restaurant chain is morally bankrupt, but the time has come for it to be financially bankrupt too. Before we “family values” types take a victory lap, though, we should recognize that the chain—known for its scantily clad female servers and their wink and nod to male sexual appetites—is in trouble not because it’s too edgy but because it is not edgy enough. And that ought to tell us something about the future of American culture and the future of the church.

On one hand, a chain restaurant filing for bankruptcy shouldn’t be all that surprising. The post-COVID-19 years have transformed entire industries, and lots of them have suffered. The restaurant industry, in particular, has seen many chains—Red Lobster, for instance—facing uncertain futures. And, beyond that, no business lasts forever. Each has a life cycle, a rise and fall, just as people do. Yet, as a recent analysis by journalist Annie Joy Williams of The Atlantic shows, Hooters is losing ground for being too tame for an American culture acclimated to online pornography and OnlyFans.

Williams points to the Hooters restaurant in her hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, as an example of the chain’s typical business model “to sell just enough sex to be palatable to people like my Southern Baptist neighbors.”

“There weren’t any strip clubs in my town,” Williams writes. “There was just Hooters, and men could always say they only went there for the wings.”

This psychological dynamic reminds me of a preacher I knew many years ago who would rail with all the fervor of Carrie Nation against the use of “intoxicating beverages” and the kind of people who went to bars. He would make an exception, though, for medical purposes of rye whiskey as a cough suppressant.

Now, the preacher himself seemed to be wrestling with a persistent cough for decades. But he could tell himself he wasn’t like those he saw as degenerates who would outright ask for a beer on a barstool. His psyche could sleep easily—really easily, it turns out—knowing that he could get buzzed purely as a patient, not as a sinner.

In the half century from the sexual revolution to the digital revolution, a man who wished to sexually objectify women beyond what he could see in “respectable” society had to go to a strip club or a roadside sex shop or at least go out to purchase pornographic material from behind the counter in a convenience store. Any of those choices required crossing a psychological threshold—it required a man to admit, at least to himself, that he was intentionally going looking for something his conscience knew was wrong.

Hugh Hefner counted on a certain kind of “respectable” man telling himself and his friends that he read Playboy for the magazine’s cultured profiles of John Updike and Andy Warhol. And the guy at Hooters could claim that the club sandwiches were the real draw—what could he do about how the servers were dressed? Maybe this same man would be the one complaining at the deacon’s meeting at his church about how “immodestly” women were dressing these days.

The internet gave that man a way to pursue his illicit sexual fantasies privately, easily, without ever leaving the house. And it did so in an algorithmic way that allowed him to feel like he wasn’t making an intentional choice at all—that this was merely something that happened to him, that he never went looking to violate his conscience.

More recently, the sexual revolution changed sides with hardly anyone even noticing. The cultural left is still more likely to argue for government-funded contraception or legal abortion or the malleability of gender, but in many newer sexual battles—on #MeToo and sexual trafficking and the ethics of consent—those on the left are often viewed by America’s sexually hedonistic culture not as hippies but as puritans. The new right, on the other hand, invites porn stars to speak at political conventions and celebrates the pornographer (and alleged sex trafficker) Andrew Tate.

The Amherst faculty lounge is still more likely to talk about “ethical polyamory” than a conservative-coded place would—but for many ordinary Americans today, that seems less transgressive than preachy and moralistic. Elon Musk, meanwhile, openly says he doesn’t know whether he is the father of the child yet another woman to whom he is not married claims to be his, and this is met with yawns.

In this kind of environment, Hooters can hardly stay in business by being just “naughty enough.” Indeed, for many people, any moral objections to Hooters have become as quaint as television audiences’ shock at Elvis Presley’s gyrations or The Beatles’ long hair. As one “adult performer” told Williams at The Atlantic, Hooters is “just too tame for today’s customer.”

If Hooters is indeed not long for this world, we should be glad. These restaurants were always about exploiting economically vulnerable women. (Williams also quotes the manager of a strip club asking, “What’s the difference between a Hooters waitress and a stripper?” His chilling answer, which reflects the effects of desperation for food and shelter: “about six weeks.”) Indeed, Hooters was built on the willingness of an abundance of men to ignore the fact that the women working there are human beings made in the image of God, not meat for inspection and consumption.

But we should take no solace in how these places are dying. The chain is not closing because a superior view of marriage and family and sexuality won the argument. In a real sense, Hooters is gone because the argument was so decisively lost.

The nightclub down the road from you might be empty—but it’s because the people who once went there now prefer to get drunk at home, bingeing Netflix alone. The teenager next door to you might not be having premarital sex—but it’s more likely because he’s never around people in real life than because he’s crucified his lust with the gospel.

That ought to remind us of what Jesus and his apostles already taught us: Fallen, broken human nature might manifest itself in different ways, but, between Eden and Armageddon, it’s the same old fallenness and brokenness. And we must give the same old answer to it all. Culture-war coding can occasionally remix who takes what side in debating sexual restraint versus sexual license, but it can’t produce chastity and fidelity. The gospel can—and that’s much harder than choosing a tribe.

Hooters can also remind us that appealing to what the Bible calls “the flesh” is always, in the long run, a losing strategy, even on its own terms. The human appetites that can call the shots in our lives are not always sexual. Sometimes we are enthralled to other carnal appetites: lust for wrath and revenge or cruelty or envy.

Some would-be Christian influencers argue that, to keep up with young men, the church should be “edgy,” embracing anything and everything up to the line of explicit white ethno-nationalism. This is immoral, full stop. But it’s also self-defeating, as self-defeating as a parenting strategy of giving children a little bit of cocaine every night to keep them from trying heroin. And it never stops there. There is always someone edgier, someone who’s gone a bit further out of the Overton window. Cultural engagement built on winking, aren’t-we-naughty transgression always requires escalation. If you live by carnality, you will die by carnality.

The Hooters parking lot down the road might be emptier than it used to be. But will your church’s lot be fuller? What if your church were a place that offered something strange to an era of rule by appetite? What if it were a place where men and women learned to serve and love each other, not to use each other? What if instead of asking our young men to choose which appetites will govern them—sex or rage or ambition—we modeled what it would look like to put to death any and all of the passions that seek to enslave us? What if we offered a new picture to young women who’ve been told that their worth is measured in their sexual attractiveness and sexual availability? What if we showed them a vision of being joint heirs in Christ, loved and valued for who they are instead of how they can be used?

Exchanging one form of exploitation for another does not a counterrevolution make. But a church that offers the quiet power of the ordinary means of grace, of the ancient call to fidelity, is revolutionary still.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Ideas

Christians Are Conspiracy Theorists

Brad East

Contributor

But we are also tasked with knowing truth from lies, real hope from false hope, the breath of the Spirit from the suffocation of deceit.

Here’s the scene: One day you’re catching up with a friend, and he tells you, after some deliberation, that he’s recently joined a new group. It immediately sounds weird, even alarming. He’s hesitant to answer your questions but finally spills the beans.

This group has a confusing mishmash of philosophy and lifestyle guidance. It seems to have a lot of rules, including “voluntary” monetary donations. (Some of the early adopters, he says, fully merged their finances—isn’t that a red flag?) The group is small but growing, and he’s not sure how he first heard about it. He laughs nervously and clarifies that it’s “not a cult.”

The group, he goes on to explain, is led by a mysterious figure whom no one has seen for years. Group members insist he’s still alive—maybe in hiding? This part is especially strange. This figure will be in touch when you’ve joined, although admittedly he prefers to communicate through intermediaries (who just so happen to be on the group’s payroll).

As for the leader’s message, it’s bewildering: The world is not what you think it is. The authorities cannot be trusted. Something is off. Behind what polite manners and public officials let us say out loud, there’s an insidious, secret power at work. A constellation of powers, to be accurate, covert and nameless.

Granted, your friend admits, you can’t see these powers. But they’re there, all right. They influence the beliefs of leaders and the behavior of institutions at the highest levels. They influence your neighbors, friends, and family. They influence you.

More important, they are not to be trusted. Trust instead in this group, which serves as the vanguard of resistance. Start attending meetings. Rescind your acquiescence to the status quo. Swear a new allegiance. Submit to mysterious rituals. And once you do—you now notice a look in your friend’s eyes you’ve never seen before—you’ll have access to a type of knowledge and power others lack. You’ll never see things the same way again; you’ll even, in a way, be involved in saving the world.

Now what do you say? Are you put off? Is this a joke? Has your friend fallen prey to a conspiracy theory? Is this group the Freemasons? The Branch Davidians? QAnon? Is it about UFOs and aliens? X-Files or Alex Jones?

It’s none of these. It’s Christianity. The group is the church, and your friend is a new Christian.

By any reasonable definition, Christianity is a conspiracy theory. Let’s say it’s a theory of two conspiracies, in fact: the conspiracy of sin, death, and the Devil to put humanity and all creation in “bondage to decay” and the conspiracy by God to liberate creation and redeem his people through Christ (Rom. 8:18–23, RSV throughout).

I realize it seems odd to describe our faith this way, but that’s the proposition I’d like you to ponder. Because if Christianity is a conspiracy theory, then what follows for how believers approach other conspiracy theories in our culture?

Start with a working definition. A conspiracy theory is a form of stigmatized knowledge formally repudiated by elites and/or experts that alleges malign forces behind public events. Knowledge of this truth is kept from the public through official channels and is therefore difficult to prove. As a result, those who learn the truth tend to be suspicious of authorities and may form communities of dissent, or at a minimum be drawn to them. Within these groups, rejecting the public story on a given topic becomes a badge of honor—and belonging.

It seems plain to me that, on this definition, the church’s faith in the gospel qualifies as a conspiracy theory. This was certainly true at its inception, and I think it’s true in our time too.

To say the gospel carried a stigma in the Roman Empire would be a serious understatement. The Roman authorities mocked, despised, and punished conversion to Christ. When Paul and Silas came to Thessalonica, a mob responded by going to the city authorities and declaring, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also … and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:6–7).

To residents of Greece, the gospel seemed crazy—it turned the world on its head. Greek thought seamlessly wove together religious, moral, political, economic, and epistemic claims, and Christianity unraveled all of it. (Epistemic refers to knowledge, what we know and how we know it.) To ancient pagans, Christianity was quite literally insane.

As a Roman governor, Festus, says later in Acts, “Paul, you are mad; your great learning is turning you mad” (26:24). And as Paul himself writes to the believers in Corinth,

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Cor. 1:20–25)

The church, then, was born as a community of dissent—fathered, you might say, by divine foolishness. From the start, therefore, Christians doubted the official line and alleged that malign forces were within and behind the public events of the day. And Christianity’s most fundamental claims have always been, if not unfalsifiable, then at least difficult to verify with epistemic certainty.

Is it any different for Christians in the West today? Christian beliefs still come with stigma, whether moral or metaphysical. The Devil is still abroad in the world. The church still holds to Paul’s reminder that “we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12).

And elite institutions still reject the church’s claims. As in Rome—albeit for quite different reasons—it is illegal for our governments to endorse them. No wonder many Christians are slow to trust authorities, particularly epistemic authorities. Trusting them without remainder could well mean giving up the faith.

None of this is to say that Christians should give credence to (what I am tempted to call “actual”) conspiracy theories—much less to suggest that people who traffic in wild, ugly, reckless, or wicked deception and speculation are on a par with preachers and evangelists. God judges teachers of all kinds with “greater strictness” (James 3:1), and few of us would deny that news and social media are full of what CT editor Bonnie Kristian calls “epistemic poison.” I am not, therefore, advocating a kind of epistemic nonjudgmentalism, where we shrug at crazy beliefs because, after all, we all believe crazy things.

Instead, from the parallel between the gospel and conspiracy theories, I want to propose four ideas for Christians grappling with faith, knowledge, authority, and marginal beliefs.

First, the notion of a cultural mainstream—everything everyone “just knows” to be true—is at the least misleading and, I would argue, a dead end. As the early church well knew, the majority is not always right. Nor are the experts and elites.

Christians should be quick to see this since we believe things that are wild and even “fringe” when judged by secular standards. We also believe in sin, which darkens the mind and clouds human faculties of judgment. We should not be surprised, then, if the truth is difficult to obtain, neither easy nor simple nor obvious.

Second, appealing to elite or expert authority to disprove a conspiracy theory was always a logical fallacy, but in our moment it is a particularly ineffective one. We’re living in a time of mass distrust of elites, and “the experts” often disagree among themselves, even about the basics. Moreover, expertise is too often wielded not so much as knowledge but as power—as a conversation stopper that allows, in Neil Postman’s phrase, the “priest-experts” of our technocratic society to control the masses and serve their gods of “efficiency, precision, objectivity.” Conspiracy theories are often a muddled attempt by the epistemic underclass to throw off that yoke. In the hands of some, they become a cudgel for fighting back.

Third, just as the experts sometimes get it wrong, sometimes marginal beliefs turn out to be right—and that has consequences. “If you tell people not to listen to some prominent crank because that person doesn’t represent the establishment view or the consensus position,” observes Catholic New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “you’re setting yourself up to be written off as a dupe or deceiver whenever the consensus position fails or falls apart.”

Douthat gave the example of supposed weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. More recently, we could point to the lab-leak theory of the origin of COVID-19. In 2020, prestigious journalistic and scientific publications labeled this idea a baseless conspiracy theory. Yet we now know not only that it is a perfectly plausible, even favored explanation but also that elite epistemic authorities conspired to suppress it.

In writer Phil Christman’s words, “The facts warrant paranoia. At least, some of the facts warrant some paranoia. We cannot reject ‘conspiracy theories’ en bloc.”

Fourth and finally, although we are not without hope in a swirl of confusion and falsehood, we must not clutch at false hope. There are no epistemic good old days to which we might somehow return. There is no way to free ourselves of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” fake news and propaganda. Even if we didn’t have the internet, we would still be fallen human beings surrounded by misunderstandings and lies.

Yet even as the sinners we are, here is what we do have: “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf” (Heb. 6:19–20). This anchor is about more than salvation, past or future. It is also about knowledge. Faith in Christ is an epistemic anchor in the troubled seas of our time. Disciples of Christ can cast their uncertainties on him “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3).

Christians live by trust in a message from a God “who cannot lie” (Titus 1:2, NKJV). The gospel imparts “a secret and hidden wisdom,” which “God has revealed to us through the Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:7, 10). And this wisdom is nothing other than “Christ Jesus our hope” (1 Tim. 1:1), a living person who is always as good as his word.

The love of Christ is both cause and consequence of our hope and faith, and this includes Christ’s own love in us for others. If we have neighbors, friends, and family members under sway of foolish or fantastic notions, our duty to them is love. We need not look on them with mock sympathy or condescension. Nor should we imagine that we can bully them out of their beliefs with stats or fact checking or expert opinion.

No, what we can and must do, to cite Christman again, is will their good. We will one another’s good by sharing life together, and life is shared face to face—not in constant bickering about the details of distant debates but in drawing near to God and the ordinary goods he has granted us to hold in common. There is, alas, no pat solution—no simple test to tell the good conspiracy theories from the bad, the silly from the serious, the innocuous from the dangerous. Conspiracy theories we will always have with us, this side of eternity.

More than a century ago, G. K. Chesterton wrote about arguing with conspiracists. He advised that, when engaging the conspiracist mind, “we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there [is] something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.” I have argued that Christianity fits a certain definition of conspiracy theories, but Chesterton helps us to see that what ultimately distinguishes the truth of our faith from conspiracist falsehoods is this cramped and smothering lack of oxygen, a spirit of strung-out nerves and humorless assurance, which never fails to stifle joy, courage, and good cheer.

“In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33), Jesus told us. “For God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim. 1:7).

The air of the gospel is nothing less than the Spirit himself, the Lord and giver of life. This is what all of us are meant to breathe. And when we do, the Spirit’s fruit is born in us. As Jesus taught (Matt. 7:16), “You will know them by their fruits.”

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

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Inkwell

The Startling Fit of Scripture

Jim Beitler

Power that meets us in the moment

The Fire of Rome by Hubert Robert

I’VE WITNESSED THE POWER of the Word in the presence of a devil.

Eight years ago, my wife, Brita, and I were sitting together in uneasy silence, waiting for her to receive her first chemotherapy treatment of Adriamycin. We had been told the drug she’d be receiving was nicknamed “the red devil,” since it looks like black cherry Kool-Aid and kills rapidly growing cells, good and bad alike. A poison. We watched as the nurse who would be administering the drug put on a gown that looked like hazmat gear—more fitting, I thought, for chemical warfare.

The process didn’t go as planned. There was difficulty accessing Brita’s chemo port, leading to what felt to us like a very long delay. She was in pain and looked like she was going to be sick. I fidgeted in my chair, unable to help.

She spoke up, into the tense silence of the moment: “Should we read the midday prayers?”

We weren’t in the habit of doing so together, but she had tucked a volume of The Divine Hours by Phillis Tickle into her chemo bag. I opened the book and turned to the prayers for the day. One of the Scripture passages came from Isaiah, and I read it to her at a low volume, so as not to disrupt the other patients:

When the Lord has given you the bread of suffering and the water of distress, he who is your teacher will hide no longer, and you will see your teacher with your own eyes . . .

As we read this promise, we were stunned into a deeper, holier silence. These words, written some 2,700 years before in a language we didn’t understand, carried across the ages by scribes and translators and press operators, seemed written specifically for our moment, for us.

As my wife received a literal dose of “the water of distress,” we were reminded that the Lord would be present. Though I had long believed in Scripture’s authority over my life and, as an English professor, had read a good many books, I’d never before felt addressed by a text in quite that way.

ONLY RECENTLY HAVE I COME to see this moment in the chemo suite as emblematic of a feature of Scripture’s startling power.

This past December, a dear friend of ours emailed an excerpt from a Christmas sermon delivered over 400 years ago. It’s no new discovery, but an ancient truth made fresh, illuminating our profound moment of hope while my wife absorbed the waters of distress.

On December 25, 1610, the English bishop Lancelot Andrewes preached a sermon for King James at the great Palace of Whitehall—most of which would go up in a blaze at the century’s end, but not before growing to over 1,500 rooms and being regarded as one of the most impressive palaces in the world. The Christmas Day sermon was a longstanding tradition; from 1605 to 1624, Andrewes delivered at least 17 of them to the king.

Andrewes’s text in 1610 was the proclamation of Jesus’ birth to the shepherds: “And the angel saith unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10–11). What would the king of the most powerful nation in the world at the time, cushioned by the opulence and grandeur of Whitehall, think of the notion that the King of Kings’ birth was first announced in the fields to people of little account? Would a sermon about this strange manifestation of power resonate in the palace’s corridors?

Perhaps Andrewes didn’t worry about such questions as he prepared his message. After all, this was the same King James who had commissioned a translation of his own; perhaps Andrewes preached to receptive ears. Whatever the case, his sermon directly addressed his own questions. About the good news of Christ’s birth, he remarked,

This had been news for the best prince in the earth. That . . . these parties were shepherds, that this message came to them, needs not seem strange. It found none else at the time to come to; the Angel was glad to find any to tell it to, even to tell it the first he could meet withal; none were then awake, none in case to receive it but a sort of poor shepherds, and to them he told it. Yet it fell not out amiss that shepherds they were; the news fitted them well . . . “the Chief Shepherd,” “the great Shepherd”; and “the Good Shepherd that gave His life for His flock.” And so it was not unfit news for the persons to whom it came.

Andrewes’ remarks are a breathtaking example of the figural reading of Scripture, through which he reveals just how well the pieces fit.

ATTACKS ON THE CONGRUITY of the Scriptures occurred as early as the second century, when the theologian Marcion famously questioned the compatibility of the Old and New Testaments. Such arguments increasingly seem thinner and thinner to me.

As I’ve read and worshipped and prayed over the years, I’ve been repeatedly stunned by how well this strange collection of books, written by many hands in various genres over many centuries, holds together. And what’s most astonishing is not simply that it all fits but that it coheres with the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Such astonishment is, for the Christian, a primal posture. As the late theologian John Webster rightly observed,

If the church is what it is because of the gospel, it will be most basically characterized by astonishment at the good news of Jesus. . . . It is letting ourselves be taken up by that reality and its inherent authority, worth, and persuasiveness; it is having settled ideas and routines ruptured and transcended; it is being disconcerted by what is at once a matter of bewilderment and delight. . . . If the church is what it is because of the gospel, then its life and activities will betray an “ecstatic” character.

The reality of Jesus is astonishing, disconcerting, bewildering, delightful, ecstatic—simultaneously making sense of all of the other words of Scripture. Like Andrewes’s example with the shepherds, Scripture’s integrity has a reliable density and coherence. Creation and covenant. Exodus and exile. Sacrifice and shalom. Law and grace. Love and justice. The tree of life. The bread of heaven. The temple priest. The shepherd king. Jacob’s ladder. Joseph’s coat. Jeremiah’s tears. The water of distress and the living water bubbling up within. The cadences of the Psalter and the prophecies of Isaiah. The songs of Moses and Mary. Pentecost and the fruit of the Spirit. All of these find their full meaning in our Lord. We see in Andrewes’s Christmas sermon not just a reading of Luke 2 but a hermeneutic for reading all Scripture. And all of life.

I understand now why our experience in the chemo suite continues to astonish me. It’s because the moment revealed that the coherence and integrity of Scripture isn’t simply a feature of the text. The Word makes sense of the world. It fits.

Though we experienced a taste of this in the chemo suite, the fit I’m referring to here actually runs much deeper. Indeed, the story of Scripture—the Flood, the flight from Egypt through the Red Sea, the crossing of the river Jordan, the sacrament of baptism, the water and the blood—points to the great truth that God is present with us as we pass through the waters. Our own figures find their meaning in the Word.

THE SUMMER AFTER BRITA finished her chemotherapy treatment, I co-led a study abroad program to England for my college’s English majors. Brita and my two young boys joined us as we journeyed across the country, going to plays, visiting cathedrals, and enjoying walks in the Lake District. Early in our travels, we toured Salisbury Cathedral and were arrested by its remarkable baptismal font, designed by the artist William Pye. The font’s shape is cruciform, its waters so still that they reflect the cathedral’s arches above.

Other tourists and worshippers came and went, but Brita and I lingered there with our boys, quieted once again by words from the prophet Isaiah, painted in gold lettering around the basin:

DO NOT FEAR FOR I HAVE
REDEEMED YOU.
I HAVE CALLED YOU BY MY NAME
YOU ARE MINE.
WHEN YOU PASS THROUGH THE
WATERS, I WILL BE WITH YOU.
AND THROUGH THE RIVERS THEY
SHALL NOT OVERWHELM YOU.

Later that summer, while carrying our three-year-old on her back during a hike in the fells, Brita turned to me and said that she was starting to feel strong again.

I’VE WITNESSED THE WORD’S POWER firsthand. Even so, my engagement with Scripture has happened in fits and starts. There have been times when I’ve been all in, usually when preparing to teach a Sunday school class or deliver the occasional sermon at my church. And there have been seasons (more frequent, I’m ashamed to admit) when it has been so long since I’ve cracked open my Bible that I’ve forgotten where I put it and had to hunt among the bookshelves as if it was just another book among books.

But Scripture has an astonishing response to that too—and not just with a single proof text. Israel’s frequent faithlessness, Peter’s threefold denial, the early church’s waywardness: these are the figures of my heart. Somehow, across cultures and centuries, Hilkiah’s discovery of the Book of the Law, the crowing of the rooster in the high priest’s courtyard, and the apostle Paul’s admonishments are all meant for me.

The Word of God stuns by making sense of my fickleness toward the Word. Even in my fits and starts with Scripture, Scripture fits—and startles.

Jim Beitler is a professor of English and Director of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. He’s also an author, most recently of Seasoned Speech: Rhetoric in the Life of the Church.

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News

Canadian Evangelicals Brace for Trade War

Adam MacInnis in Ontario, Canada

“We just want everyone to be friends.”

VCG/VCG via Getty Images

At Golden Harvest Baptist Church in Stevensville, Ontario, the Stars and Stripes still hangs alongside the Maple Leaf Flag in the auditorium.

The church is Canadian, but it has American members too. Golden Harvest Baptist is just 15 minutes east of a main border crossing, the Peace Bridge, and basically located in the suburbs of Buffalo. One couple drives from Buffalo to Canada for Sunday services. Several church members live on the Canada side but drive to the US, Monday to Friday, for work. Several families in the church include Canadians married to Americans.

That’s never really been a problem before.

“In a border community, it’s just part of your culture that you don’t see the US as adversarial,” pastor Ryan King told Christianity Today.

But now Canadians are booing the American national anthem at hockey games. People are talking about boycotting US products in the stores, and maple leaves mark everything made in Canada to encourage people to buy Canadian. There’s an undeniable surge of patriotism in the country, and people who don’t seem patriotic enough are being questioned—even Wayne Gretzky, one of Canada’s most esteemed athletes, was challenged for his seeming lack of loyalty. A lot of people in places like Stevensville are taking down their American flags.

But Golden Harvest Baptist hasn’t done that, so far. The church is trying to avoid reactionary responses to President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that Canada should become an American state. It hopes to stay calm in the face of Trump’s threats of a trade war.

“We just want everyone to be friends,” King said.

A lot of Canadians feel betrayed by their country’s closest ally, though. And Trump’s tariffs—which could go into effect on April 2, a day Trump has dubbed “liberation day”—will likely hurt people in the church, King said.

Stuff will probably cost more at stores in the US and Canada, and some goods may not be available anymore. Car manufacturers that employ church members on both sides could be impacted. The tariffs might even drive up the cost of the Sunday school material the church buys from the US.

“It’s something everyone is watching super carefully, but it hasn’t happened yet,” King said.

Similar scenes are playing out across the country as Canadian evangelicals who have had close relationships with Christians to the south try to figure out what the sharp change of international relationship between the two countries will mean for them.

“People are a little bit bewildered,” said Brian Dijkema, a public-policy analyst who serves as president of the Canadian side of Cardus, a nonpartisan Christian think tank.

Dijkema’s denomination, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), may face particular strain, as it is in the peculiar position of being binational. Many evangelical denominations have affiliations with denominations on the other side of the border. But the CRC is a single legal entity in the US and Canada. About 25 percent of its congregations are north of the border.

Reciprocal tariffs will probably not raise costs for churches, according to Al Postma, the CRC’s Canadian executive director. Most of the materials exchanged across the border between CRCs in the US are digital and shared freely, not sold.

The leadership is concerned about the long-term consequences of a trade war, regardless.

“There’s a lot of anger and frustration and concern,” Postma told CT. “That’s true broadly within the Canadian population, and it’s reflected as well in our Canadian CRCs.”

In February, the church put out a pastoral letter recognizing the pain many Canadians felt hearing Trump and some of his supporters downplay the significance of Canada’s national sovereignty. The church lamented “the brokenness we are experiencing in our cross-border relationship.”

Postma believes the churches can continue to work together, setting aside the international politics. But Christians will have to work not to confuse the current political leadership with the nations as a whole.

Brian Stiller, a global ambassador with World Evangelical Alliance and a former president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, said he thinks most Christians, north and south of the border, will connect on the individual level.

“I suspect that most of us [Canadians] who are offended by the American impulse will forgive our American friends—who generally will be more tolerant and accepting of us than their president seems to be,” he said.

But the relationship between US and Canadian evangelicals may still change. Stiller said he expects corporations, in particular, will be hesitant about depending too much on American partners or contributing to American-led projects.

“This will salt our relationship,” he told CT. “The brininess of this moment will stay in the water.”

In this tense climate, Stiller encourages Canadians to focus on words of Jesus found in Matthew 5:44: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

The gospel, after all, is counterintuitive, he argues.

“When your inclination is to boo their anthem, stand in respect,” he said. “When your inclination is to despise their bullying, love them instead. I see this moment not so much a test of Americanism; I see it as a test of true Canadian Christian attitudes.”

In Niagara Falls, Ontario, the pastor of Grace Gospel Church agrees. Martin Goode said people in his community and his congregation are feeling a lot of anxiety, but he’s encouraging them to see it as an opportunity to respond in Christlike ways.

“Trouble and change are normal,” Goode said. “The challenge is what kind of people we will be in the midst of it.”

- More from Adam MacInnis

Church Life

Cafeteria Church

Amanda Held Opelt

Under the fluorescent lights, we come to commune, not to be entertained.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

For years, my church met in a theater—a newly constructed, state-of-the-art high school auditorium. Unburdened by the high cost of owning our own facility in Boone, North Carolina, the Heart was able to focus on other ministry goals. At the height of our growth, 800 people came over two services to experience our lead pastor’s dynamic preaching and music from our band, whose polished sound rivaled that of any professional production.

My church has always felt called to be a place where spiritual wanderers could come and experience hope and healing in Christ. Because we turned the house lights off during worship, many people slipped in late and sat quietly in the dark balcony, exiting before the benediction. While we were always seeking to integrate our visitors more fully, we accepted the idea that some of our Sunday morning attendees—seekers, perhaps, or those wounded by the church—simply wanted to experience the services anonymously.

And though we enjoyed the cheap rent, the theater did come with some hidden costs. Our leadership team spoke often about wanting our Sunday mornings to be authentic, not performative. Even so, our meeting space called for a certain kind of stagecraft.

This setup is typical for a church in the United States, where we owe the design of most modern church buildings in part to the fiery Presbyterian revivalist Charles Finney. In the 1830s, Finney rented one of the largest theaters in New York and outfitted it to house his growing congregation. So successful were his revivals in drawing emotional professions of faith that other churches began to follow suit, designing their sanctuaries with sloped auditorium-style seating and large stages.

The layout offered an advantage to church leaders who, like Finney, were increasingly structuring their services around two key elements: a lively sermon from a talented preacher and riveting worship from professional musicians. My church was, in many ways, the living legacy of that strategic architectural movement.

Because we rented our theater from the public school system, when the pandemic hit, we had little choice but to close our doors indefinitely as the high school implemented a strict lockdown policy. As the months dragged on and other churches reconfigured their gathering spaces so they could meet safely, we waited for the town to reopen.

While we worked hard to create online content and stay connected through video calls, it was clear that the coalescing feature of our church life had been our Sunday morning services in the theater. Families lost touch, and tithes stopped rolling in. When our church was finally able to meet at the high school again, “social distancing” was not hard to accomplish. Three out of every four seats were now empty.

We hobbled along for a while, generating as much enthusiasm from that stage as we could muster, hoping those seats would once again be filled. But the time in lockdown and the strenuous effort to rebuild had taken its toll. Staff members began to resign, including our teaching pastor. Most members of the worship team moved on.

Our church was no longer what it once was. The world was no longer what it once was. In light of that reality, we had two options: We could resign ourselves to our losses and close the doors of the church forever. Or we could try something new.

I’ve heard it said that the architecture of a church acts as a kind of spiritual formation. Though we had worked hard to avoid a showmanship mentality on Sunday mornings, something about meeting as a community of faith in that theater had encouraged spectatorship over participation, consumption over commitment. Our church body had spent an hour and a half every Sunday morning looking in one direction: at a stage. Despite our efforts, our physical space had cued all the people in that room to see themselves as the audience and those on stage as performers.

Now, that theater felt empty. We considered other spaces in the high school where our dwindling congregation could meet. The only other space large enough was the cafeteria.

Sticky-floored and smelling faintly of old pizza, the cafeteria was not exactly what most would call a winning strategy for growth. The room lacked a stage, a sound system, and any sense of formality. Rather than spotlights, we now basked in the glow of soda machines and buzzing fluorescent lights.

But that cafeteria had something unexpected to offer. If a theater is configured to facilitate spectatorship, a cafeteria is uniquely designed for communion. The Heart was now gathering in a room full of tables. Unlike when we were in the dimly lit, fixed rows, we were now face to face in a bright space where no one who showed up could hide.

The choice to move to the cafeteria coincided with another decision: We would not be hiring another teaching pastor. Instead, we would take a team approach to Sunday-morning sermons. The team—made up of our two remaining staff pastors and members of the congregation who had some Bible training—would collaborate throughout the week, working through the deeper theological questions presented by the text. Each of us would take our monthly turn filling the pulpit.

We simplified worship and set up a basic sound system. The minimalistic instrumentation meant that the voices of the congregation rose above the band, echoing off the walls of the cafeteria. Without the intimidation factor of the stage, more people began to sign up to play instruments or try their hand at harmonies.

We also incorporated a discussion time into every service. Members of the congregation could interact with the sermon right there on the spot, raising concerns or questions and sharing insights.

Our attendance stabilized. We balanced our budget. We welcomed some new families. But the success of our story can’t be measured in the number of attendees. Our growth has been in depth more than in breadth.

Our church, which we had always hoped felt like a family, began to actually operate as a family. Everyone in the community began to take responsibility for what happened on a Sunday morning—setting up tables and chairs, welcoming visitors, listening intently to the sermon so they could share their own thoughts during the discussion.

Without the stage, in the close quarters of the cafeteria, teaching now feels less like a presentation and more like a mutual conversation. With multiple voices amplified, we are safeguarded from the risk of personality-centrism. Relationships formed through these conversations spill over into the week, resulting in increased participation in small groups and community outreach.

Perhaps the most palpable difference is the freedom of Sunday mornings. The instrumentalists, though they are diligent to practice, can miss a note without the pressure of perfection that a stage tacitly demands. Whoever is teaching that week isn’t left alone to write the world’s most riveting sermon. No one wants our time together to be particularly sleek or polished.

We start late if the preservice conversation is especially lively. Babies wail and toddlers dance (badly) to the music, and no one minds. The pastors are seen as members of the community rather than masters of ceremonies. Because we are coming to commune rather than be entertained, grace for one another abounds.

Meeting at tables is no innovation; there’s history here, too. First-century believers were known, derided even, for love feasts that were open to all regardless of race, class, or religious background. The early church was prohibited by Rome from owning property; plagued by persecution, Christians often met in catacombs, hidden from the watchful eyes of their persecutors.

Beautiful, state-of-the-art spaces may feel necessary to draw a large crowd. They may be a way of providing the focus and formality that worship and study of the Word deserves. But I believe we are beginning to see that churches built, by intent or by default, around these theatrical elements too often lack the foundation needed to survive upheaval.

The cafeteria may not be forever. While our growth has not been astronomical, we’ve had enough increase in numbers that we’ve nearly reached seat limits. The acoustics are truly awful, making it hard for folks at the edges of the room to hear the sermon. The room has many distractions, and I, for one, am tired of shooing my six-year-old away from the lure of the vending machine during worship.

But if we do move back into the theater, we’ll bring our lessons learned with us. We’ll never turn the auditorium lights off, and we’ll brighten the room as much as possible. We’ll close the curtains to the stage and have the band and teacher all stand on the floor. We’ll bring in some moveable chairs so we can circle people up for the discussion time. We’ll maintain our team approach to teaching.

We’ve heard the old adage that the church is more than the building. But sometimes the church must transcend our buildings, must resist the cues and connotations imposed upon us by the spaces in which we meet. After all, in the new heaven and new earth, the community of saints does not appear to be gathered in a theater. Rather, the saints are feasting at a banqueting table (Isa. 25:6; Matt. 8:11; Rev. 19:9). And if that’s the case, then I say a cafeteria is as sacred a sanctuary as any.

Amanda Held Opelt is an author, speaker, and songwriter. She has published two books.

- More from Amanda Held Opelt

News

World Evangelical Alliance Seeks New Leader Who Can Bring Unity

Ken Chitwood

Can the next secretary general represent 600 million Christians and get them all to work together?

The WEA hopes to announce the next secretary general at the 2025 General Assembly in South Korea. Plans for the October meeting have been one recent point of contention.

Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

Peirong Lin, a deputy secretary at the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), likes to joke that evangelical is the most polarizing word in the world.

“Yet that is exactly what we are trying to unite around,” she told Christianity Today, “the euangelion, the Good News, the gospel, and what it looks like in different countries and contexts.”

Now the global organization of national and regional alliances representing 600 million evangelicals is looking for one person to help bring everybody together. The international council that oversees the WEA is stressing the need for unity as the search for a new secretary general gets underway.

“The Good News expresses itself in different ways around the world … and our responsibility as the WEA is to take a ‘world’ understanding to the gospel, not just a particular context,” Lin said. “The question for us going forward is how we can best represent everyone and work together.”

The search began 11 months after the resignation of secretary general Thomas Schirrmacher, who stepped down for health reasons amid ongoing controversies about the WEA’s participation in interfaith dialogue with Catholics. A plan for a quick search for a new replacement—one press release promised new leadership in six months—was scuttled. WEA leadership said it needed more time to review its organizational structure and consult more evangelical leaders about the strengths, weaknesses, and long-term direction of the alliance.

Goodwill Shana, the interim head of the WEA, said in an email that the appointment of a new leader will be a “very significant step for the WEA” and everyone wants to find “the person of God’s choice to lead us into the future.”

The WEA hopes to announce the name of the new secretary general at the upcoming General Assembly in October.

Plans for the October assembly have been one point of contention in recent days. One thousand evangelical leaders affiliated with Hapdong, Korea’s largest Presbyterian denomination, would not participate in the General Assembly. The letter challenged the WEA’s views of Scripture and the organization’s commitment to working on social issues, including Christian persecution, in collaboration with mainline Protestants and Catholics.

“The WEA’s theological stance is inconsistent with reformed and conservative evangelical doctrine, and our denomination should sever ties with the WEA due to its misalignment in faith and practice,” said the letter, which was published in a Korean church newspaper founded by Yoido Full Gospel Church, a 580,000-member megachurch led by Younghoon Lee, who is on the WEA’s official organizing committee.

The Christian Council of Korea (CCK), which was formerly affiliated with the WEA and represents 65 denominations, also voiced concerns about what it called the WEA’s “theological ambiguities.” The group’s former president, Seo-young Jeong, called for the General Assembly to be postponed until there was “verification” of the global organization’s orthodoxy.

CCK’s new president, Kyung-hwan Ko, has taken a harder line against the WEA, saying, “The gospel it preaches is not the gospel of the Bible.” In February, he announced plans to organize a forum of theologians to report on the WEA’s “apostate actions.”

The WEA declined to comment on specifics and reiterated its commitment to “unite the global church.”

The organization has also faced sharp criticism from the evangelical alliances in Italy and Spain, which said that the group crossed a line when the general secretary met with Pope Francis.

“We, evangelicals, do not bow our heads before the pope,” the Spanish group said. “We consider it necessary that we publicly express our resounding rejection of [Schirrmacher’s] participation in that event.”

Conflicts over the alliance’s association with Catholicism are not new, either. National evangelical associations in Italy, Spain, and Malta penned an open letter critiquing the WEA for not holding the line against Catholicism in 2018, and Italy, Spain, France, and Poland raised deep concerns about overlooked theological differences in 2013.

The next head of the WEA will be expected to navigate the disagreements and overcome the distrust.

According to Lin, the WEA is looking for “someone who can bring different people together to speak the Good News to all people in these troubled times.”

The next secretary general will also be expected to lead the alliance through substantial organizational updates, bringing the WEA into the 21st century. Making the organization more efficient and effective is a top priority.

“With Christians connected through the internet and global communications technologies, we don’t need alliances the way we did in 1846,” Lin said. “How can we [make changes] so it better serves our purposes in different countries and regions?”

Interviews of potential candidates are expected to start in June.

- More from Ken Chitwood

News

Wire Story

Judge Rules Against Johnny Hunt in Defamation Suit over SBC Abuse Report

Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

Court dismisses all but one claim in the former pastor’s case, which has cost Southern Baptists over $3 million.

Johnny Hunt

Screenshot from Youtube

A federal judge ruled against former Southern Baptist Convention president Johnny Hunt on Monday, rejecting his claims of defamation against Guidepost Solutions and rejecting nearly all the former megachurch pastor’s claims against the Southern Baptist Convention and its Executive Committee.

Judge William Campbell of the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee issued an order granting summary judgment in the case on Monday, with a memorandum detailing the judge’s decision forthcoming.

“We are grateful for this decision and the forward progress in our legal process,” Jeff Iorg, SBC Executive Committee president, told Religion News Service in a statement.

Hunt had sued Guidepost, an investigative firm, and SBC leaders for defamation and other damages after Guidepost published allegations of sexual assault against Hunt in a May 2022 report on an investigation into how SBC leaders had dealt with sexual abuse.

At issue was a 2010 incident in which Hunt allegedly kissed and fondled another pastor’s wife. Hunt, who had kept the incident secret for years, at first denied the incident occurred then claimed it was consensual.

In their court filings, Hunt’s lawyers claimed Guidepost had ruined his reputation and claimed the pastor’s sin were no one’s else’s business. Hunt, the former pastor of First Baptist Church in Woodstock and a former vice-president of the SBC’s North American Mission Board, claimed Guidepost and the SBC had cost him millions and sought more than $75 million in damages.

All counts of defamation, emotional distress, and the public disclosure of embarrassing private facts were dismissed against the SBC and the Executive Committee. However one claim alleging a tweet about Hunt from Texas Baptist pastor Bart Barber, who was SBC president from 2022 to 2024, was defamatory has not been dismissed.

Hunt served from 2008 to 2010 as SBC president and remained a popular speaker before the Guidepost report. Court-ordered mediation on the case failed last fall. A trial had been scheduled this summer.

The Executive Committee has spent more than $3.1 million in legal fees related to the Hunt lawsuit and a second lawsuit related to the Guidepost report.

Last month, the SBC’s Executive Committee decided to ask the denomination for an additional $3 million for the upcoming year to cover its legal bills, including those for the Hunt suit.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

- More from Bob Smietana - Religion News Service

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