Reasonable Doubt

In the summer of 1961, a team of Italian archaeologists was digging out an old Roman theater at Caesarea, on the coast of present-day Israel, when they turned over a block of limestone that somebody had chiseled up centuries earlier and repurposed as an ordinary step. It turned out to have a Latin dedication inscribed on it that read, “Pontius Pilatus.” Underneath it stated his title: “Prefect of Judea.” It’s the oldest physical evidence we have that Pontius Pilate existed, and it was carved while he was still in office. If you’re so inclined, you can go see it in a museum in Jerusalem today (although it might not be the best time to visit).

Before that repurposed piece of limestone was found, pretty much everything we had on Pilate came to us from writers who were not exactly big fans of the man. And when you actually read what they wrote, they paint a picture of someone who doesn’t look very much like the hand-wringing, conflicted bureaucrat we’ve seen depicted in paintings or acted out in movies and plays.

Pilate arrived in Judea around the year 26 C.E. It was considered a second-tier province. The position wasn’t really all that prestigious, and he had absolutely no patience for the people he’d been sent there to govern.

One morning during Passover, the chief priests came to Pilate with a problem. They’d spent the whole night seeing to it that Jesus was condemned. But they were living under Roman occupation, which meant they had no authority to carry out an execution on their own. If they wanted Jesus dead, they were going to need Rome to do it for them, so they’d brought him before the governor.

“You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” “What is truth?” retorted Pilate. After he said this, he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.”

-John 18:28-19:16, NIV

Pilate questioned him, but he couldn’t find anything to credibly charge him with. What he really wanted to know was whether the man was claiming to be a rival king. Caesar didn’t play around about that kind of thing.

If you’re paying attention as you read John’s account of this interaction, you start to notice something odd. As the trial wears on, this hard-nosed, decisive man seems to grow more and more anxious. The thing is, it isn’t because of the prisoner. In Pilate’s estimation, Jesus couldn’t have lifted a hand against him if he’d tried.

What seems to have rattled him was the crowd that had gathered outside, and what might get reported back to Rome. Pilate was a man with a lot to lose.

A crowd had caused problems for him before.

One of his first moves as governor was to march soldiers bearing Roman battle standards into Jerusalem in the middle of the night. The particular standards he had them carry bore the image of Caesar, which was exactly the kind of graven image banned by Jewish law. All of the governors before him had made a point of using Roman standards without the image of Caesar on them when entering the holy city out of deference to Jewish law. But Pilate was not a man who was inclined to pay deference to those he considered lower than himself, and the fact that he did this in the middle of the night signals that the man knew exactly what he was doing and how it would land.

To say that the people were upset when they found out about it would be an understatement. They marched down to his headquarters at Caesarea and then simply refused to leave. For five straight days they stood their ground in protest. Eventually, Pilate surrounded them with soldiers and told the people to break it up, or they would meet death where they stood. According to a Jewish historian named Josephus, the whole crowd called his bluff by dropping to the ground and stretching their necks out for the soldiers’ swords. They basically dared Pilate and his soldiers to kill them out in the open for all to see. Pilate hadn’t counted on that. He ended up backing down and had the offending standards removed from the city.

A man like Pilate remembers when people forget their place and defy his will. A man like Pilate doesn’t forget when people make him feel small.

And he wasn’t being paranoid to be concerned about what report might make it back to Rome. A few years after Pilate’s interaction with Jesus, a crowd of Samaritans would gather at Mount Gerizim, following a man who promised to dig up sacred objects that Moses himself had supposedly buried there. Pilate met them with cavalry and armed infantry, then cut them down and executed the leaders afterward. That turned out to be one brutal slaughter too many. The Samaritans took their complaint over his head to Vitellius, the Roman governor of Syria, and, in turn, Vitellius stripped Pilate of his office and shipped him off to Rome to answer for himself before Caesar himself. But that hearing never actually took place. Tiberius Caesar died before he got there, and after that, Pontius Pilate fades into obscurity. The man that Jesus had been brought before was right to be nervous about a report reaching Rome.

It’s easy to miss the threat hidden in the kind of power Pilate held. From the outside, he looks like a man in command, but underneath it he’s constantly worried about losing that power, and lives in fear of whoever has power over him.

Jesus’s statement, “my kingdom is not of this world,” usually gets preached as if Jesus is talking about heaven, implying that the only thing that matters is somewhere up there in the clouds, and this world down here is a lost cause.

But I think he was actually saying that, while his kingdom is present and real, it refuses to run on force and coercion the way Rome and the kingdoms of this world tend to.

Look at how Jesus explains it: If it had been the same kind of kingdom, his followers would already have been trying to bust him out with torches and pitchforks.

But they weren’t. A king whose followers refuse to pick up a sword because of their devotion to him and the way of life he’d called them to was incomprehensible to and incompatible with the Roman understanding of power.

A man named Walter Wink spent his whole career exploring what he called this “third way” of Jesus. In a lecture called “Nonviolence for the Violent,” he put it this way:

“Here indeed was a way to resist the powers that be without being made over into their likeness.”

That’s exactly what's happening in Jesus's interaction with Pilate. Jesus refused to bow before the power Rome insists it has by right, and he, just as emphatically, refused to become the monster he was fighting by taking up Rome’s brutal ways and weapons against them.

And, the thing is that Jesus’s refusal to fight fire with fire subtly turns the whole trial on its head. In the story that’s been told and retold for generations, the whole brutal system that put him to death has become the thing that has actually ended up being put on trial over and over again.

In John’s Gospel, the truth Jesus kept pointing back to was...himself. It was never just a set of bullet-point facts to mentally agree with or not. It was him.

So when Pilate countered with, “What is truth?” the truth he was asking about was actually standing a few feet in front of him, inviting him to become true as well.

But Pilate treated the whole thing like it was just a clever question at a dinner party and wandered off before any answer could be spoken out loud.

I suspect that he wanted a proposition that he could debate or spin. What he got instead was a person whose very way of being invited him into a new way of being human that would reshape his entire life and worldview. Pilate decided he’d rather keep the worldview and the assumptions he already had (thank you very much)

…and Jesus let him.

So, Pilate went back out to the crowd and told them that he found no case against Jesus at all. Then, he spent the rest of the day trying to get out of the whole mess.

He invoked an old tradition and offered them a holiday pardon, but they chose Barabbas, a violent insurrectionist, over Jesus.

He had Jesus whipped and beaten, hoping that might be enough to satisfy them

...but it wasn’t.

For me, the whole interaction between Jesus and Pilate hinges on that short exchange they have about power.

Pilate made a point to remind Jesus that, as governor, he had the power to set him free or crucify him. He genuinely thought that, between the two of them, he held all of the power in his own hands.

But Jesus calmly replied that any authority Pilate might have was allowed by God, and that he’d have to answer for what he did with it.

I find that absolutely remarkable. The condemned man, Jesus, seems to be free in a way that the governor, Pilate, simply wasn’t and couldn’t even imagine.

In the end, it seems to be a single sentence the crowd shouted at him that made Pilate’s decision land where it did: “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar.” Pilate was not about to risk his whole career over a Galilean he’d never even heard of before.

In Matthew’s account, Pilate called for a bowl of water to be brought out and made a big show of washing his hands in front of everyone. But I don’t think this is a matter of him agonizing over the injustice of what was happening. I think it was a calculated move by a man who’d made up his mind. He was signing off on an execution that he knew was wrong but had accepted as expedient. He just didn’t want the stink of it to stick to him. He wanted plausible deniability.

Then Pilate sat down in the judge’s seat, and the chief priests actually shouted the quiet part out loud: “We have no king but Caesar!” Think about who was saying that. These were the people who’d been praying for generations for God to send them a king. And here they are, swearing their only king was the Roman emperor, in order to persuade the occupying empire to execute one of their own people.

And so, Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified.

Historical source after historical source tells the same kind of story about Pilate over and over again. Philo was a Jewish philosopher over in Alexandria, and unlike Josephus, he was actually alive while all of this was happening. In a report he sent to the emperor a few years later, he described Pilate as “a man of a very inflexible disposition, and very merciless as well as very obstinate.” Then he rattled off the highlights of the governor’s tenure, including all of the bribery, the insults, and the steady stream of executions without anything close to a trial.

Pilate was not a man who lost sleep over pronouncing death sentences.

In this particular case, he’d signed off on the execution of a man he’d already told that crowd he couldn’t even credibly charge with anything.

The truth never stood a chance in that crowd. When a mob lets itself get worked up like that, it surrenders its discernment and its conscience. It no longer has ears to hear or eyes to see, because it no longer wants them.

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard talked a lot about this, very human impulse. In an essay he wrote in 1846, called “That Single Individual,” he linked it to the exact moment we’ve been talking about. He said:

“The crowd is untruth. Therefore was Christ crucified, because he, even though he addressed himself to all, would not have to do with the crowd, because he would not in any way let a crowd help him.”

It would be a mistake to hang all of this on one nervous, paranoid governor. It was bigger than Pilate. It was the soldiers, the chief priests, the crowd, and Rome itself. They were all part of it. They gave themselves over and became cogs in one big ugly machine of a system, and it did exactly what those systems always do. It protected itself. It protected power and privilege and labeled it ‘keeping the peace.’

Pilate may have looked like a powerful man. But he was really just part of a self-serving system, and he was frightened of the very power he thought he wielded.

He’d actually asked the right questions. He’d even come to the right conclusion about Jesus’s innocence. He had power, he had influence, and he even had the last word in this case. But he spent every bit of it protecting himself and upholding the status quo.

A verdict was rendered that day, but the man Pilate really condemned was himself.

An Appeal

“One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: ‘Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!’ But the other criminal rebuked him. ‘Don’t you fear God,’ he said, ‘since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.’ Then he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.’”

-Luke 23:39-43, NIV

When Jesus was crucified, there were two other men being crucified alongside him, one on each side.

Luke just calls them criminals, but Matthew and Mark use a word that in the first century usually referred to armed rebels. It’s the same word John uses to refer to Barabbas. So there’s more than a good chance that they weren’t just petty thieves or pickpockets.

They were most likely insurrectionists who had participated in armed rebellion against Rome and lost.

Either way, they were dying the same brutal and humiliating death Jesus was.

One of the criminals spent what little strength he had left hurling insults at Jesus to mock him. “Aren’t you the Messiah?” he shouted, “Then save yourself…

…and us too while you’re at it.”

In his mind, the cruel joke worked because he couldn’t conceive of a Messiah who wouldn’t violently overthrow their Roman occupiers in vengeance and beat them at their own game. He couldn’t imagine a Deliverer that wouldn’t turn the tables and help them do a little crucifying themselves.

But the other criminal was different. Don’t get me wrong, he was just as guilty as the other guy, and he was slowly dying an excruciating death as punishment. But, while the first criminal channeled his suffering into scorn, this man allowed his suffering to lead him to a moment of clarity where he was finally able to take an honest look at himself.

In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown writes:

“Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.”

In his suffering, this violent man became stronger and more courageous than he had ever been in his whole life.

The first true thing out of his mouth was about himself and the other crucified criminal: “We’re getting exactly what we deserve.”

And then he told the truth about Jesus: “This man has done nothing wrong.”

Then he turned his head toward the innocent man dying beside him (whose own friends had scattered hours before) and made a request that sounded absolutely insane: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

That’s weird, right? I mean, how does this guy know who Jesus is? What evidence did he have? There was a man dying beside him, with a sign Pilate had nailed up over his head to mock him that said, “the king of the Jews,” but everyone saw that for what it was. A crowd made up of his own people clearly didn’t consider themselves to be his subjects. But this guy looked at this dying man hanging under a sign intended to humiliate him, and claimed him as his king.

I’ve thought about this a lot, and I suspect he was betting his last breath on the hope that another kind of kingdom and even another world was possible where coercive power, violence, death, and even our own mistakes don’t have the final word.

And Jesus doesn’t waste any time with his response: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

When that guilty, condemned man breathed his last, he walked through the gates of paradise as an innocent man.

Now, don’t misunderstand. I’m not trying to turn this into some kind of a Hallmark movie, and the criminal didn’t figure out some kind of last-minute cheat code. In his final moments, the man actually switched sides. He let go of the myth that power wins...that money wins, that fear and coercion win. He let go of the myth that might makes right.

And then, he told the truth about who he really was, and threw in his lot with a king who defied how the world insisted things work and with a kingdom defined by love, redemption and the kind of grace that runs out to meet even a convicted criminal who sees that kingdom, falls in love with it, and says yes.

And don’t miss where God was in all of this. Because make no mistake, this is all God. And that’s what those enthralled by the world’s domination system have so much trouble understanding. They can’t wrap their minds around a crucified God. But the crucified God IS the God of Christianity.

Yes, Christianity’s hope and power are found in the resurrection. But you can’t get to the resurrection without a God who not only becomes human in the incarnation, but who also allows himself to be put to death by his own creation, and then comes out the other side in victory for their sake. Most people don’t actually want a crucified God, and they certainly don’t want to follow one.

But, in Jesus, the incarnated God was put to death as a falsely convicted criminal, executed by the state, hung between two insurrectionists the empire was disposing of like garbage.

And the first person this crucified God welcomed into his kingdom, from the cross on which he was being executed, was exactly the kind of person the system was designed to discard.

At the darkest moment in the story, God tipped his hand and showed us whose side he’s been on all along.

And note the word Jesus used here: paradise. It’s an ancient word, borrowed from Persian, and it means a garden, a walled royal park, the kind of living, green, well-watered place you’d find on the grounds of a king’s palace. Jesus vindicated the hope of a man who claimed him as King by welcoming him into his royal garden.

Closing Argument

Years later, the apostle Paul sat down to write a letter to the church in Corinth. Corinth was honestly kind of a mess. They couldn’t stop keeping score. They were always arguing over who was the most important or who was the most impressive. They were a church that was still having trouble letting go of how the world’s domination system says things work. So, Paul decided it was time to remind them how God actually operates. He tells them:

“...God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and he chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose what the world thinks is unimportant and what the world looks down on and thinks is nothing in order to destroy what the world thinks is important.”

-1 Corinthians 1:27-28, NCV

I have no idea if Paul was thinking about Pilate and the criminal on the cross when he wrote that, but I think of them when I read it.

Maybe that’s the truth God’s been inviting people into the whole time. The divine power that spoke all of Creation into existence has always been a power that gives itself away. It was never the dominating, coercive kind that Pilate and others like him have put their faith in throughout history and right up to the present day. On a Friday a couple of thousand years ago, it looked for all the world like the Way of Jesus and the God most clearly seen in him had lost. But I think it may be one of the clearest glimpses we’ve ever been given of the nature of the actual strength and power of God.

Pilate and power-hungry people like him can’t comprehend God’s power, so they keep trying to use God’s name to bless the kind of power they do understand and lust for.

And if we’re not careful, you and I can end up sorting people pretty much the exact same way Pilate did. We split them into the ones who matter and the ones who don’t, the people who look different from us, come from somewhere other than we do, or believe something that makes us nervous because it’s different from what we already believe. They’re the ones we’d just as soon let the system deal with quietly, so we don’t have to.

Look, I’m as uncomfortable with that last paragraph as you are. But the thing is, we prove or disprove it by how we spend our attention, our money, our voices, our votes, and even our mercy. It’s so very easy to feel righteous and justified, even as we put our faith in systems that use power in ways that are antithetical to the Way of Jesus…in his name.

If we aren’t careful, we can reduce the Gospel to a matter of a few steps we follow to secure our own afterlife rather than the Good News of a Kingdom that makes fools of those who put their faith in their own wisdom, that reveals the weakness of those who use their strength to crush others for their own benefit, and that reveals how paltry and small the things we treat as important actually are, while it reveals the immeasurable worth of what and who the world wants to discard like worthless trash. The Gospel is good news for them, if it’s good news for anybody

...and so are we

…if we actually believe in it.

This is the fourth article in a series about women in the church. These pieces are based on sermons I preached a while back at my church, but I’m posting them now in response to the very public vote the Southern Baptist Convention just held on women in leadership. The first article worked through 1 Corinthians 14, the second worked through 1 Timothy 2, and the third traced the trajectory of God’s story from Genesis to Pentecost, with a short appendix on where my own Restoration Movement history actually lands on this. You can read those by clicking HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

A couple of months ago, my youngest daughter, Chloe, told me one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard in my life.

We were playing Mario Kart (the old-school Wii version, with the plastic steering wheel, as God intended), and Chloe told me that if you unplug the sensor bar from the Wii and put two candles in front of the TV, the controllers would still work.

I scoffed and explained, at length, why this was utter nonsense. There would be nothing running into the console to make a remote control function!. Candles don’t plug into the Wii, and even if they did, they’re still just candles! There would be nothing plugged into the actual device to receive the signal!

My wife, Dana, then joined Chloe in her obvious delusion and said, “I don’t know... I think we should try it!” (Dana makes this move a lot, and I should tell you, it usually works out exactly as it does in this story.) I said, “There’s just no way. Okay, try it. I’m so sure that this won’t work that, if it does, I’ll tell the whole church tomorrow at the beginning of my sermon that you were right and I was wrong.” They looked around and found two sad little melted-down tea light candles, put them on top of upside-down coffee mugs (to make them tall enough), and unplugged the sensor bar. Then Chloe foolishly grabbed a controller as if she was actually going to be able to play the game with it.

But here’s the thing: It actually worked.

I don’t understand whatever alchemy or black magic makes it work, but I promise you that it does. I looked it up, and it has to do with infrared light and positioning or orientation or something like that, which didn’t really help me understand it much better. But whether or not you or I understand why or how something works doesn’t really affect the reality that it does, in fact, work.

I was wrong. I admitted it to Dana & Chloe immediately (to their great amusement). I even followed through and confessed my wrong-headed wrongness to the church at the start of my sermon the next morning. And now, if you’re reading this, I guess I’m confessing it to you.

I bring this up not because it has all that much to do with the subject at hand, but because it’s a decent mindset to bring to a subject like this if we’re going to talk about it honestly. I was confident that I was right. I had reasons that made sense to me. And I was still wrong. I’m sure something similar has happened to you. That’s worth remembering as we finish up this series on a subject where most people are already pretty confident in what they already think.

Household Codes

Sometime in the fourth century BC, a philosopher in Athens sat down to explain how a proper household should run.

Aristotle was basically writing out what most people around him already assumed. A household has three relationships in it, he said: a master over slaves, a father over children, and a husband over a wife. Each relationship works a little differently, but the direction only ever runs one way.

“Of household management we have seen that there are three parts, one is the rule of a master over slaves, another of a father, and the third of a husband. A husband and father rules over wife and children, both free, but the rule differs, the rule over his children being a royal rule, over his wife a constitutional rule. For although there may be exceptions to the order of nature, the male is by nature fitter for command than the female, just as the older and full-grown is superior to the younger and more immature. The freeman rules over the slave after another manner from that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child, although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees. For the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority; and the child has, but it is immature.”

- Aristotle, Politics

In the Greco-Roman world, household codes were a genre that everyone recognized. So, when Paul sat down to write letters to house churches in Rome, the world was still running on exactly this template, and he used the same form everybody already recognized. And then, like the best M. Night Shyamalan movies, he added a twist that changed everything.

I want to show you exactly what he’s doing and how he does it, but first, we need to deal with a verse that almost everybody drags into these conversations.

Neither, Nor

Eventually, almost all debates about women in the church end up here:

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

- Galatians 3:28, NIV

The more progressive voices in the room usually bring it up first. “See, right there?” they say, “It cancels out every category. Case closed.”

Then, more cautious voices push back, and honestly, their usual objection is fair. “Look at the context,” they’ll say. “This is about salvation, not roles. Read a few verses earlier. The point is that the ground is level at the foot of the cross. It’s not saying anything about who leads.”

But both sides are missing something, and it’s not a small thing.

Yes, the ground is level at the foot of the cross. That’s true, and it’s certainly part of the point. But the other part of the point is what that truth implies. You are not just saved. You are made an heir of God, a co-heir with Christ. Your status is tied to God’s future, not your present condition. That’s what all the inheritance language in this passage is pointing to.

Remember that the power disparity between men and women is a result of the curse in Genesis. It simply doesn’t exist before what we refer to as “the fall” and the articulation of the curse.

The Galatian passage argues that for those in Christ, the categories the world uses to rank people’s value & importance no longer have the power to do so, even though if you looked around at the time, you’d still see males and females, Jews and Greeks, as well as slaves and free people. Paul isn’t claiming that Christians are all rendered androgynous when they come to Christ any more than slaves and masters or Jews and Gentiles vanished the moment he wrote this letter. The claim he’s making is something else entirely. In God’s future…in God’s in-breaking Kingdom, none of these categories can be used to gain power over anyone else or to devalue them. As a matter of fact, if you are doing that, you are at odds with the Way of Jesus.

We are called to be citizens of a kingdom that hasn’t fully arrived yet, ambassadors of God’s future already at work in the present. The job of God’s people is to live that future into the present right now, on purpose. It isn’t to preserve and maintain the terms and consequences of an ancient curse that marked the fracturing of the harmony that God originally called “good” and “very good”.

The Problem With Labels

I think very few of us realize what our reliance on categories and labels does to us. David Dark explains it well:

“When I label people, I no longer have to deal with them thoughtfully. I no longer have to feel overwhelmed by their complexity, the lives they live, the dreams they have. I know exactly where they are inside, or forever outside, my field of care, because they’ve been taken care of. The mystery of their existence has been solved and filed away before I’ve had a chance to be moved by them or even begun to catch a glimpse of who they might be. They’ve been neutralized. There’s hardly any action quite so undemanding, so utterly unimaginative, as the affixing of a label. It’s the costliest of mental shortcuts.”

- David Dark, Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious

Labels and categories are mental shortcuts that bypass the actual connections we are meant to have as people. They literally plug people into predetermined characterizations that we’ve already assigned value to. (The same is true for ideas and concepts, but why labels like “conservative” and “liberal” are as useless in theology as they are in politics is another subject for another article.) Shoehorning people into categories that allow us to remain comfortable and keep us from having to actually consider them, much less really see them, is, in my view, a form of violence. It is an act of violence against their personhood and worth, and it is an act of violence against the Kingdom of God.

House Rules

Now let’s get back to Aristotle’s Greco-Roman world and their household codes, because this is where we get into the other texts that people always reach for, and there really is more going on here that most people understand.

There are three household codes in the New Testament: Ephesians 5:21-6:9, Colossians 3:18-4:1, and 1 Peter 2:11-3:22. In this article, I’m going to focus on the Ephesian text since the other two overlap with it pretty heavily, but I’d encourage you to read all three.

“And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything. For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself... Children, obey your parents because you belong to the Lord, for this is the right thing to do... Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear... Masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Don’t threaten them. Remember, you both have the same Master in heaven, and he has no favorites.”

- Ephesians 5:21-6:9, NLT

For most of us, no matter which side of the argument we are on, this is an uncomfortable passage in places, especially once you hit the slave and master language. But notice that nobody in this conversation (except for extremists who aren’t really interested in having the conversation) is arguing that the slavery instructions describe a pattern we need to restore today. Even Complementarians, who are more comfortable with most of the terms of this text, don’t really try to justify slavery as a part of God’s intended order. So what’s actually going on in this passage?

If you don’t already know what I’m about to tell you, I’ll go ahead and warn you that it’s something you can’t unsee, and it completely changed how I read these texts.

Household codes like the one I quoted earlier from Aristotle were common documents. Everybody in the Greco-Roman world knew the genre on sight. They follow a recognizable pattern. Here’s Philo, a Jewish philosopher writing around the same era as the Apostle Paul:

“Wives must be in servitude to their husbands, a servitude not imposed by violent ill-treatment but promoting obedience in all things. Parents must have power over their children. The same holds for any other persons over whom the man has authority.”

- Philo

And Josephus, the Roman-Jewish historian:

“The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed, for the authority has been given by God to the man.”

- Josephus

My undergraduate degree is in psychology, and one of the things you notice when studying the early giants of that field is that some of what they wrote seems embarrassing and backward by today’s standards. But you eventually realize that these were real people in a real place at a real time, working with what they had. As regressive as their work seems to us, it’s actually quite progressive given where the field was at the time. It eventually dawns on you that it can only seem so backward because it is exactly their work that moved us forward to be in a position to see it that way.

Paul and Peter were writing directly into a world where this genre already existed, and where everyone recognized the format of a household code the moment they heard it. So when Paul opened with “submit yourselves one to another,” his audience knew exactly what kind of document this was. But, right from the start, they would also realize he was subverting it.

Every other household code from this era runs exactly one direction, and one direction only: Here’s the patriarch, and here’s how everyone under him behaves toward him, full stop. End of instructions. But Paul’s version starts by adding reciprocity that didn’t exist in the Household codes before he got his hands on them. He doesn’t say “submit to one another except I only mean some of you who are one gender exclusively submitting to the other gender, just like in those Household codes you’re already familiar with.” Rather, Husbands are told to love their wives the way Christ loved the church, through self-sacrifice, not control. It’s true that slaves are told to work with integrity. But, their masters, remarkably, are reminded that they have a Master too, and that Master shows no favoritism.

As Rachel Held Evans put it:

“It’s hard to see how Peter and Paul’s remix of the household codes, when compared to the most popular of the day, could be read as anything but profoundly subversive, given the high value they place on wives, slaves, and children, and the way they hold ruling men accountable to a heavenly Master and a heavenly Father.”

- Rachel Held Evans

N.T. Wright makes a similar point about the logic underneath what’s going on here:

“The Stoics, who provide some of the closest pagan parallels to these household lists, based their teaching on the law of nature: this is the way the world is, so this is how you must live in harmony with it. Paul bases his on the law of the new nature: Christ releases you to be truly human.”

- N.T. Wright, Tyndale New Testament Commentary: Colossians & Philemon

And William Barclay explains:

“The Christian ethic is an ethic of reciprocal obligation. It is never an ethic on which all the duties are on one side. As Paul saw it, husbands have as great an obligation as wives, parents have just as binding a duty as children, masters have their responsibilities as much as slaves. This was an entirely new thing.”

- William Barclay, Commentary on the Letters to the Philippians, Colossians and Thessalonians

When we set Paul’s household code alongside every other household code circulating at the time, it’s clear that his actually moves the story forward rather than protecting the status quo. There’s even a strange, self-deconstructing quality built into it. Follow the logic all the way through, and it starts dismantling the very hierarchy it describes. “Masters, treat your slaves the same way, since you both have the same Master” is not a command that leaves the institution of slavery standing for long once people actually take it seriously.

It All Comes To A Head

Even though we’ve already talked about the concept a little, I can’t just skip over the part about headship, because the text brings it up.

“For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything.”

- Ephesians 5:23-24, NLT

Here are a few things to notice:

First, this whole passage is prefaced by a call for mutual submission. That sentence comes literally two lines earlier, not four paragraphs back.

Second, as I mentioned in the first article in this series, the word for “head,” kephalē, means source as often as it means authority, as in the way we still talk about the head of a river. Contextually, Paul uses it the same way here that he does in 1 Corinthians 11. But, for just a minute and for the sake of argument, I’ll concede and look at this passage through the lens of male spiritual leadership. The thing is, Scripture is consistent that Christian leadership is never about lording authority over anyone. It’s a matter of responsibility, not rank. It’s not about a man getting his way while everyone else (especially if they can’t grow facial hair) complies. Men are challenged to exercise any leadership in the model of Christ himself: self-sacrificial, grace-filled, oriented entirely toward helping the people around him become who God made them to be. When men lead in any way, it should be in the model of the one…

Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!

-Philippians 2:6-8 NIV

There’s a word for when someone who sets aside their own privilege and advantage for the sake of others, for someone who makes themself nothing by taking on the very nature of a servant when they don’t have to, for someone who humbles themself…there’s a word for someone who chooses obedience to something they don’t have to for the sake of others: Submission.

A few years ago, Dana’s parents had come to visit, and we were hanging out with them in the pool because it was hot that day in South Carolina. The church where her parents attended had just installed elders for the first time, so that’s what we’d been talking about. Then, Dana said, “Daddy, you should be an elder!” My father-in-law, Jim, kind of tucked his head in that “Aw, shucks” way of his and said, “Well…Ah…you know I’m not really qualified. I don’t meet one of the Biblical qualifications. I don’t ‘desire the office’”. I looked over at him and grinned because I knew I had him. I said, “Jim, think about anyone you’ve ever known who desperately wanted the office and title of church elder. Are any of those people the kind of people you actually want as a church elder?” He chuckled a little bit and said, “Well, no. I guess not.” Then I said, “Jim, what are the other Biblical qualifications to be an elder?” He looked thoughtful for a minute and then listed some of the Biblical qualifications, which focus on the kind of character this person is supposed to have. Then I asked him, “Jim, is that the kind of character you are trying to have in your life? Is that the kind of man you want to be? Do you desire to become the kind of person that God wants to be a church elder?” He looked thoughtful for another minute and then he chuckled and smiled (because he knew I had him too) and said, “Well, yeah. I guess you’re right. You know what? You’re pretty tricky.”

When you look at it in the context of the household codes that were ubiquitous at the time, that’s the shape of this whole passage, especially when it comes to men (who were not given any reciprocal responsibility in those other household codes). It’s a call to become a certain kind of person, not a title or a claim on authority, whether or not anyone ever gives you a title for it. If anything, it’s a call for men to step up and become worth following, not a call for anyone else to be silenced or put in “their place.”

And submission runs both directions from the start, spelled out two sentences before “wives submit,” with 1 Corinthians 11 teasing the mutuality out even further.

If we are the people of God’s future, then we ought to look like it. In his image God created them, male and female, he created them. If we’re going to reflect God to the world, we do it together. We don’t get there by silencing half of us.

So, let me end with an invitation to any men who have read all of this to the end:

Men, to be clear, I welcome whatever debate or discussion you want to bring to the table here, but this time, before you try to do any of that, you must answer the questions above. If you don’t, everyone who reads it will know you refused. (Or, I guess they may decide that you tried to comment without reading the article)

Women, you can make whatever comment you want to, but it would also be pretty great if you answered the same questions. Again, these are stories that need to be told about women who often go unrecognized.

If you grew up in the Churches of Christ and/or are currently affiliated with Churches of Christ as I am, there’s a decent chance someone’s already told you that letting women teach or lead is a departure from our tradition. I assumed the same thing for years, and it honestly never occurred to me to dig into our history on the subject. It turns out our tradition isn’t nearly as uniform as we often assume.

This is meant to be a short appendix to Part 3 of this series. The main article makes the broader Biblical case for the trajectory of God’s story. This piece is specifically for people who share my own religious heritage who may be wondering whether affirming women’s gifts means abandoning the convictions of the Restoration Movement. It doesn’t. In fact, some of the most conservative voices in our own history were further along on this than many of our current congregations.

David Lipscomb

David Lipscomb co-founded what became Lipscomb University, edited the Gospel Advocate for over fifty years, and held views that would strike most modern readers as deeply traditional: For example, he opposed instrumental music in worship and argued for strict adherence to New Testament patterns. He was also a radical pacifist who believed Christians should not vote, hold office, or participate in human government at all. Oh, and full disclosure: He didn’t believe women were permitted to preach. So you might reasonably assume he’d have zero tolerance for women teaching men in any context.

You’d be wrong, though.

In the August 25, 1910, issue of the Gospel Advocate, Lipscomb answered a question about whether a woman could teach a mixed Bible class (one that included both men and women). This was his response:

“At the Sunday school, the woman does not usurp the place of a man in teaching all present. Only a few who wish to be taught or to teach attend. The woman does not teach before all who are present. She takes her class, old or young, to themselves and teaches them...Suppose a number of men, women, or children, or all combined, were willing to study the Bible and a woman was the best teacher they could find and they were to meet at her house to get her help, and she was to teach them in studying the Bible...Suppose it were more convenient to meet at the meetinghouse and study the Bible at an hour not used for the regular meetings, would this be sin?”

Lipscomb’s answer was no. To be clear, he was still drawing lines I wouldn’t draw, but he had no problem with women teaching men if the woman was the best teacher available. That’s not a progressive position by modern standards, but it’s not the hard complementarianism that gets sold as the traditional Church of Christ view either.

C.R. Nichol

If Lipscomb surprises you, C.R. Nichol might blow your mind.

Nichol was one of the most influential preachers in Churches of Christ in the early twentieth century. He reportedly baptized around thirty thousand people. He was a professor of Bible at Harding College and Pepperdine College, and he served as president of Thorp Spring Christian College. He was a powerhouse debater and an unquestioned conservative.

So imagine my surprise when I learned about a book he wrote in 1938, called God’s Woman: The Place of Women in the Social and Religious Life as Revealed in the Bible. In it, this unquestionably conservative Church of Christ preacher and Bible professor argued that though women tended to be physically weaker than men, “that does not argue she is his inferior in mental ability” (p. 43).

He went further. With a not-so-subtle swipe at male sexism, Nichol says that men, by “devoting ourselves to a reasonable amount of reading,” can discover that women have matched men’s intellectual ability in every field of endeavor. He argued that, creationally, women and men are equal, but prejudice had taught many men that women were mentally and psychologically inferior. Nichol believed this cultural prejudice had been imposed on and read into the Biblical text and that doing so had led many within the church to assume unbiblical attitudes and restrictions toward women.

Surveying Old Testament women, Nichol devotes four pages to Huldah, one of the most important prophets in the Bible, despite her frequent lack of recognition in Restoration Movement circles. He notes how this female prophet’s ministry was certainly not limited only to other women and that she instructed the most powerful men of her day. Nichol goes out of his way to stress that Huldah taught men and did so with the authority of the Holy Spirit. He even anticipated the counterargument that Huldah is just “the Old Testament” and therefore doesn’t count. He writes:

“Sex relationship was the same in the days of Huldah that it was in the days of the apostles. Huldah was inspired by the Holy Spirit to teach a group of men, and she did teach them without violating the law of Jehovah. Though we do not have inspired men and women today, it does not follow that a group of men may not be taught by a man, or a woman” (p. 28).

He goes on:

“They knew the prophetess Huldah was in the city, that she was a mature woman, and they elected, or the king commanded them to go to her for instructions. Huldah, the prophetess, was inspired by Jehovah to teach the high priest, the men with him, and through them the king. By Jehovah’s approval she taught them, for God inspired her to do the teaching. This woman, Huldah, taught a group of men without usurping authority over them, and women can teach men today without refusing to be in subjection to men!” (p. 30).

Then this:

“Though there are some restrictions thrown around women in their work of teaching, no man has the right to deny her their right to teach save as the Lord has circumscribed her activities as a teacher.”

That’s the conservative Church of Christ preacher, professor, and college president, C.R. Nichol, in 1938, saying that no man has the right to prohibit a woman from teaching beyond what God actually restricted.

Next week: Transcending Categories and Cracking Codes.

Head Theology and Gut Theology

My dad was a preacher, and something he used to say in his sermons has always stuck with me. He’d make his point and then say, “Now, you don’t have to take my word for this,” and then he’d send people back to the text. I find myself saying the same thing a lot these days. Truth isn’t afraid of questions. If a position can’t survive an honest close look at the Biblical text, it wasn’t ever really standing on the Bible to begin with. I don’t want you to take my word for any of this. I’m asking you to take the Bible seriously and do the work yourself.

So let’s start by talking about something that makes this conversation difficult. There’s a difference between the theology you hold in your head and the theology you carry in your gut. Your head theology is the theology you’ve researched, thought, and reasoned your way to. Your gut theology, on the other hand, is what you feel to be true, usually without ever examining it. The two don’t always see eye to eye, and when they disagree, the gut tends to win. You’ve probably reasoned your way toward something better before, but still found you couldn’t make yourself take the step. That gap is where fear lives. There’s a reason the most repeated command in all of Scripture is some version of “Do not be afraid.” Every time we let fear make the call, we stop moving forward in faith.

The hardest part is that, as Kathryn Schulz points out in her excellent book, Being Wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right.

There’s no internal alarm that goes off to tell you you’ve made a mistake. That’s why changing your mind takes courage and humility, and it’s also why a faith that only ever confirms what you already wanted to believe should make you a little suspicious.

Not a Rulebook

A lot of us were presented with the Bible as if it were an instruction manual or a code of law, a flat set of rules dropped out of the sky so we could keep everything exactly as it is. I want to suggest that this is the wrong framing, and that almost every fight we have about women in the church begins right there.

If the Bible is mainly a rulebook, you end up in some strange places pretty fast. You have to explain why God apparently issued a first draft of his law, watched it go badly, and then circled back with a revision. That isn’t the God I see in Scripture, and honestly, it isn’t how the Bible talks about itself. What I find instead is a library of documents, written in different genres by different people across centuries, all chronicling the real interactions between a real God and real people. And from beginning to end, that story is going somewhere. It keeps calling people forward. It refuses to let them stay where they started. (You can read more on that HERE.)

That framing changes the whole question. We aren’t here to freeze the church at some preferred moment in the past and defend it. We’re here as people who believe God makes good on his promises, which makes us ambassadors of God’s future. To read the Bible well, you need to know where the story is headed. So let’s trace it out, from the first page to the last.

Them

Before there’s a curse, before there’s a power struggle, before anyone is arguing about who’s allowed to speak, there’s this:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.’ So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.’”

- Genesis 1:26-28, NLT

Notice the pronouns. When God speaks about himself here, the pronouns are plural. “Let us make human beings in our image.” Scholars debate whether that’s God addressing the heavenly court or an early hint of the Trinity, and I’m okay with it remaining ambiguous. But look at what God makes in God’s (plural) image. God doesn’t make a man and then add a woman later as an accessory. The text says he created “them,” and it deliberately leans into their differences. “Male and female he created them.” It’s as if the only way human beings can fully bear God’s image is together.

Then comes the commission, and it’s addressed to both of them: “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it.” The “governing” was always meant to be shared. There’s no hint anywhere in this passage of one ruling while the other assists. There’s a “them,” made in God’s image, and they are given this assignment together. Remember that, because the story keeps calling us back to it.

The Spirit Poured Out on All People

Generations later, out in the wilderness between Sinai and the promised land, something happens that’s worth noticing. Moses is worn out from leading a complaining nation by himself, so God takes some of the Spirit resting on Moses and spreads it among seventy elders. When that Spirit settles on them, they begin to prophesy. According to the text, that looked like a threat to some people. If the authority that had been concentrated in Moses was suddenly being distributed among seventy other people, surely that watered down Moses’s authority. Even Joshua, Moses’ right-hand man, wanted it stopped.

“Joshua son of Nun, who had been Moses’ aide since youth, spoke up and said, ‘Moses, my lord, stop them!’ But Moses replied, ‘Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!’”

- Numbers 11:28-29, NIV

Now, look at Moses’ answer. He doesn’t guard his turf, and he doesn’t treat the sharing of the Spirit that had rested on him as if something had been stolen from him. He looks at the expansion and wishes it would go even further. He wants it to reach past the seventy elders, past the men, all the way to every one of the Lord’s people. He was longing for something that hadn’t arrived yet: a future where God’s Spirit rests on everyone.

Centuries later, the prophet Joel picks up that same thread and doubles down. And then, on the day of Pentecost, with the crowd actively wondering if the disciples had gotten drunk before lunch, Peter stands up and tells them that the wait is over.

“Then Peter stepped forward with the eleven other apostles and shouted to the crowd, ‘Listen carefully, all of you, fellow Jews and residents of Jerusalem! Make no mistake about this. These people are not drunk, as some of you are assuming. Nine o’clock in the morning is much too early for that. No, what you see was predicted long ago by the prophet Joel: In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit upon all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions, and your old men will dream dreams.’”

- Acts 2:14-17, NLT

Peter essentially says that what Moses once wished for is happening now, and it’s happening because of Jesus. Then notice exactly who gets identified. It’s not just their sons. The line reads, “Your sons and daughters will prophesy.” The Greek word translated “all people” here means exactly that: all of them. This isn’t some vague term that might technically include women if you squint at it really hard. It deliberately identifies men and women together.

That lands even harder once you consider what prophecy actually is. People sometimes try to soften it, as though prophecy were some lesser kind of speech that women could be allowed to do precisely because it doesn’t carry much weight as something like preaching. But that gets the whole thing backward. To prophesy is to speak for God, to declare his truth to the gathered people. Biblically, that’s authoritative speech of the highest order. When I preach, I’m studying my Bible and my books and then doing my honest best to understand it and tell people about it. Prophecy claims to be the very words of God. If anything, it outranks the sermon. So when the promise of God’s poured-out future specifically mentions daughters prophesying, that’s not just some filler line to skim past.

No Longer Any Curse

Now jump all the way to the last pages of the book. Revelation is a strange and often dazzling kind of literature called Jewish Apocalyptic, but every so often it pulls back the curtain and shows you something that sounds less like code and more like a semi-poetic preview of God’s future:

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.”

- Revelation 22:1-5, NIV

Most versions of the Bible drop a little heading over this section that says something like “Eden Restored,” and, while I frequently take issue with the headings that get added to the text, they actually get this one right. The tree of life is back, only now it’s somehow on both sides of a flowing river. But, here’s the line I want you to notice: “No longer will there be any curse.”

To really get what’s going on here, you have to remember what the curse was (and note the definite article: “the curse,” not just curses in general). The old rabbis described the original creation with the word shalom, which means a lot more than just the absence of conflict. It means harmony, wholeness, things working the way they were meant to work. It’s people in harmony with God, with one another, and with creation itself. When that selfish choice was made in the garden, it wasn’t just the harmony between God and people that got shattered. It was all of it. And among the consequences of that choice that God spells out in Genesis 3 is this one: The man would rule over the woman.

Look at that carefully. The man ruling over the woman shows up in the Bible as part of the curse that is a consequence of the selfish choice the people made. It’s a description of the brokenness sin introduced, not a blueprint God drew up in the beginning for how things are supposed to be. Nobody reads the parts about the pain of childbirth or the ground fighting the farmer and concludes that God wants us to emulate and protect those things. They’re the damage, not the design. The power struggle between men and women is a part of that same list.

So look at what Revelation does with it. In the picture of where the entire story finally lands, the curse is completely lifted. It’s removed. The trajectory of God’s story bends from harmony, down through the long damage of the curse, and back toward harmony again. Faithfulness was never about maintaining the terms of the curse and calling it God’s intended order. The point of God’s story has always been the reversal of that curse, not its preservation.

That’s what we actually sign up for when we follow Jesus. We aren’t trying to drag the church back to a frozen snapshot of the 1950s, and we aren’t trying to reconstruct a first-century household from the other side of the world either. We’re supposed to be the people who believe God’s future is real, that it’s already breaking through, and, as such, we’re supposed to try to live into that future, now. If God has gifted a woman to teach or to speak his truth to his people, then the question was never whether or not we’re going to allow it. The question is whether we’ll have the courage to stop defending the curse and step into the future God has already promised.

This article is the third in a series I’m adapting from a set of sermons I preached on the roles of women in the church. If you want to hear the full original lesson this piece is based on, I’ve included the video below. Next up: Transcending Categories & Cracking Codes

Somewhere around AD 55, a silversmith named Demetrius called a meeting in Ephesus that quickly devolved into a riot.

He made his living casting silver shrines of the goddess Artemis, and Paul’s preaching was, frankly, bad for business. So Demetrius gathered the other craftsmen and told them that the truth was at stake. Soon it seemed like the whole city was in an open-air theater, and for two straight hours the crowd chanted the same line over and over: “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.” It took the town clerk himself to climb up and talk the mob down before somebody got killed.

Paul loved that city so much that he kept coming back to it. A decade or so later, he sent a young evangelist named Timothy back into that same city to shepherd a network of house churches in that chaotic and not altogether friendly environment. First Timothy is Paul’s answer to the question every young minister eventually asks his mentor: I didn’t see any of this coming. What do I do?

This is the second article in a series about women in the church. These pieces are based on sermons I preached a while back at my church, but I’m posting them now in response to the very public vote the Southern Baptist Church just held regarding women and leadership. The first article addressed 1 Corinthians 14, the first major passage people typically cite in this debate. You can read that article by clicking HERE.

Now, on to the other passage everybody eventually circles back to.

“A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing, if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.”

- 1 Timothy 2:11-15, NIV

A Letter, Not a Law Code

It’s important to remind ourselves that even if you believe that the Biblical text is inspired by the Holy Spirit (which I do), 1 Timothy is an occasional letter written to real people at a real time in a real place. If, a few hundred years from now, someone found a letter that you had written to your significant other and immediately tried to read it as universal wisdom for all relationships, they’d probably come to some odd conclusions, right? However, if they were able to find out more about you and your significant other and the time and context in which you lived, they might be able to extract wisdom that you could apply in their time and place as well. In fact, I’d argue that the second method I just described was a more faithful reading that takes the text more seriously. The idea that we can take universal meaning from this particular kind of document that’s addressed to a particular recipient in a particular place and time, without considering the genre of the document and what the originally intended audience would have taken it to mean in their context, is just silly. Such an approach can only lead to misinterpretation. There may be applications beyond that, but you can’t get to it without considering those things.

And then there’s the way Paul actually writes. Right before he says, “I do not permit,” Paul does something subtle that he’s done before. In 1 Corinthians 7:10, he gives a command to married believers and immediately tells you where it came from: “not I, but the Lord.” Two verses later, addressing a different group, he flips it: “I say this, I, not the Lord.” He’s telling you, on purpose, which words are God’s and which words are his own pastoral judgment for a specific room full of specific people.

“I do not permit” in 1 Timothy 2:12 is the second kind of statement. That doesn’t make what he says unimportant. Paul is credited as the author of most of the New Testament and knew this church personally. But it raises a real question about what he means and how he intends for this to be applied.

Consider what Paul says in 2 Timothy 4:13:

“When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments.”

Nobody treats that as a universal command for every Christian to bring Paul a cloak along with some books and parchments. We instinctively know it’s a real man writing to a real friend about a real errand. The Holy Spirit inspired this letter without erasing Paul’s personality or the context and circumstances in and to which he is writing. That doesn’t make this Biblical letter less authoritative, but it does make it something you have to actually read and consider rather than just something you mine for bullet points and slogans.

So what crisis produced it? Paul actually tells us himself, twice. He opens the letter explaining why Timothy is in Ephesus at all: to “command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer” (1:3-4). He closes the letter the same way, pushing Timothy to “fight the good fight of the faith” against teachers who are “conceited” and chasing “controversies and quarrels about words” for “financial gain” (6:2b-5, 12). The whole letter, front to back, is about false teaching loose in these house churches.

As John Mark Hicks puts it in his book, Women Serving God, whatever is happening in 2:8-15, “they are part of his response to the presence of false teaching and instability in the Ephesian house churches.”

And the section about women isn’t a matter of Paul changing the subject. Verse 1 says “then,” and verse 8 says “therefore,” and in Greek, those are the exact same word. You don’t open a paragraph with “therefore” when you mean to say, “and now for something completely different.” Paul is still engaged in the same overall argument.

The Women Timothy Actually Knew

Read 2:9-15 by itself, out of context, and it sounds like policy. Read it inside the context of the letter it actually belongs to, and a pattern shows up that’s hard to un-see once you’ve seen it.

Widows devote themselves to prayer (5:5). In chapter 2, women are pushed toward prayer and godliness. Some women have learned to be idle (5:13), and some have professed false knowledge (6:20-21). In chapter 2, women are told to learn and profess godliness instead. Some widows are described as pursuing wealth instead of good works, chasing sensual desires, and “saying what they should not say” (5:6, 9, 11, 13). Chapter 2 names women wearing costly jewelry and clothing that flaunts their wealth and status, and tells them to be devoted to good works instead.

This is also where the popular reading of “modesty” falls apart. Paul actually defines his own terms here. He’s talking about braided hair, gold, pearls, and expensive clothes, which was a specific, recognizable flex of wealth and status rather than a permanent dress code or a statement about bathing suits or the length of one’s shorts. Nobody braids their hair today and feels convicted of sin, because we understand he’s naming something particular to that historical and geographical context. The question worth asking is why a display of wealth would’ve been a problem worth pointing out in the first place. As it turns out, Ephesus was home to the Artemis cult and its priestesses, and a “New Woman” movement was trending in Rome that pitched wealth and seduction as a woman’s fastest path to influence. It’s not a stretch to think some of these women had been pulled into exactly that mindset, and that it was bleeding into the church.

A closer look at two words in the original language brings some clarity. First Timothy 5:13 says some younger widows had become “busybodies who talk nonsense.” That word for “busybody” shows up nowhere else in the Bible except to describe the practice of magic and sorcery. In that cultural context, it’s also tied to something close to what we’d call illicit drug use. That’s the word’s actual range. Whatever these women were doing house to house, it wasn’t just harmless gossip.

Then there’s 2:12 itself. In Greek, the word translated “assume authority” or “exercise authority” is authentein, and it appears only once in the New Testament (and thus, the Bible, since the Old Testament is written in Hebrew). Paul had a standard, go-to word for authority, exousia, and used it elsewhere when he meant ordinary authority, but he doesn’t use it here. Authentein appears in Jewish writings Paul would’ve known, including 3 Maccabees 2:29 and the Wisdom of Solomon 12:6, where it carries a violent, domineering sense associated with pagan practice. (The Wisdom of Solomon and all but the first Book of the Maccabees were originally written in Greek). I suppose it’s possible that Paul reached for another word for authority that typically had a slightly different connotation and meant nothing by it, and then never touched it again for the rest of the New Testament, but I think it’s more plausible that he chose it because it described exactly what was happening in Ephesus.

So what is actually prohibited here? Try this reading on for size: He’s referring to specific women, almost certainly the same young widows mentioned throughout the letter, who were told not to teach until they reacquainted themselves with the gospel they’d been compromising. They were told to learn in quiet submission, which is the same posture expected of any disciple still learning, not a permanent muzzle. Paul makes the same point to Timothy personally in the follow-up letter: entrust what you’ve heard “to faithful people who will be able to teach others as well” (2 Timothy 2:2). The Greek word there is actually gender-inclusive. It means people. Paul had words for “men” specifically and used them elsewhere. Here, he chooses the inclusive one.

About Eve

Then there’s the line just about everyone thinks is strange: “Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.”

The traditional reading goes something like this: Adam was created first, which apparently gives men permanent authority because that somehow invests them with the rights of the firstborn between the sexes (which obviously didn’t exist at the time of Creation, since there was no tradition of…well, anything). Eve was deceived, and Adam wasn’t, which somehow proves women are just inherently more gullible than men and therefore can’t be trusted to teach or lead.

Try this. Go read the actual story in Genesis 3. I’ll wait…

…Done? Let me ask you something. How strong does that argument seem in light of what the text actually says? Adam is the only person in the text who receives God’s instruction directly about the fruit and the tree. Based on what the story actually tells us, if Eve knows about it, it’s because Adam told her. Now, when I was a kid, I somehow got it into my head that Eve and the serpent had this conversation alone, and then she went to find Adam and offered him some of the fruit. According to the text, that’s not the case. Seriously, look at verse 6:

6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

That’s right. Genesis describes Adam as standing right there for the entire conversation between Eve and the serpent, and he says nothing. When Eve hands him the fruit, he eats it without a single word of resistance. If you’re looking for a Biblical text to help build a case for male intellectual superiority, this is a really weird place to go looking for one.

Here’s another way to read what Paul is doing here: What if Paul isn’t trying to extract some timeless principle about gender roles from the order of Creation? What if he’s pointing at a pattern in the Creation story itself? The one who was instructed first (Adam) had listened to the one who’d been deceived (Eve). Paul does this exact same move again when he writes to the church at Corinth:

“I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3).

Eve functions there as a way of illustrating how deception spreads, so he can talk to them about deception that’s spreading through a church. He’s not making some kind of religious argument claiming that women are more limited in intellectual capacity than men. I’ll ask you: which reading makes more sense in 1 Timothy, where the word “deceived” shows up twice in a single verse within a letter that’s been about deception since chapter one?

Even the strange line about being “saved through childbearing” starts to make sense in this reading. The NIV’s “women will be saved through childbearing” obscures something the original Greek implies. The New Revised Standard Version is closer:

“the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.”

The pronoun here is singular. That being the case, it almost certainly points back to Eve specifically, and the Greek carries a definite article. It doesn’t refer to childbearing in the abstract, but to the specific childbearing that runs through Eve as mother of all the living, all the way to the birth of Christ. Even in the wake of her deception and the damage it caused, Eve is saved through the very thing that brings the Savior into the world.

What I can say for now is that a letter written to help real people in a real church in a real time and place navigate a real issue they were really facing was never intended to become a muzzle for every woman in every century that came after it. Read on its own terms, it looks a whole lot less like a wall designed to keep women in their place and more like a door Paul was trying to pry open.

This article is the second in a series that I’m adapting from a set of sermons I preached on the roles of women in the church. If you want to hear the full original lesson this piece is based on, I’ve included the video below.

Next up: Christian Women & The Trajectory of God’s Story

On June 10, 2026, messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting voted by about three to one to advance a constitutional amendment barring churches that affirm, appoint, or endorse women as pastors (their terminology). The language doesn’t stop with the title. It covers the functions of a pastor and the act of preaching. Because it amends the SBC’s constitution, it will need a second vote of affirmation next year for it to take effect.

Now, to be clear, I’m not a Southern Baptist. I grew up in the Churches of Christ, and we certainly have our own long and complicated history with this question. But the SBC’s very public vote on this puts a national spotlight on a tense Biblical issue that’s been debated within Christianity for a very long time. Almost all of it comes down to a handful of verses in the Bible. I want to look at those verses carefully because I think there’s more going on there than most people assume.

God’s Bouncer?

Several years ago, when I was just starting out as a young youth minister at a church in Albany, Georgia, we traveled to Atlanta for the national convention of one of those organizations that trains kids and teenagers to do churchy things well. The boys were trained to lead singing, read scripture, and preach. The girls were trained to lead singing, read Scripture, and speak…to rooms full of other girls. At the convention, they did all of this competitively against students from other congregations. And, yes, it was every bit as weird as it sounds.

My wife, Dana, and I had been working with one of our female elementary school students for months on public Scripture reading. On competition day, I walked over to the assigned ballroom to watch her do what she’s worked so hard on.

An older woman stopped me at the door and told me I couldn’t go in.

I started to explain that one of the girls inside was one of my students, that I’d helped her prepare, and that I just wanted to watch her read what my wife and I had helped her practice. The woman cut me off and (somewhat condescendingly) explained to me that if I went in and sat down while that elementary school girl read into a microphone from a stage, the little girl would be usurping my authority. That, she explained in a world-weary voice, would be unscriptural.

Sometimes, the perfect response just comes to you. To be honest, I’m still undecided on whether it was brilliant and inspired or just satisfyingly sarcastic and cathartic. But I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t a little proud of it.

“But, by your definition, aren’t you usurping my authority right now?”

That honestly didn’t go over well. She still didn’t “allow” me into the room, and I’m pretty sure that, to this day, she probably still doesn’t get why that’s funny.

She wasn’t a bad person. She was just applying a Biblical text as faithfully as she knew how. The problem was the interpretation she’d been handed.

My Confession

For years, I gave people a “safe” answer to this question, and by “safe,” I mean I gave an answer that kind of sounded smart while dodging the question. Although it increasingly left a bad taste in my mouth, I kept giving it anyway.

It was my wife, Dana, who finally made it clear to me that silence isn’t a neutral position. Silence always functions as a vote for the status quo. She also showed me several things in scripture that she understood intuitively that had taken me more study than I’d like to admit to even get close to.

While I’m at it, I also owe a debt to John Mark Hicks. His book Women Serving God is the most rigorous and honest treatment of these texts I’ve found. His online writing and the conversations we had while I was working through this material shaped it more than I can adequately say.

So I did the work. I read the texts carefully and studied the scholars on both sides of the issue. As always, I’d never ask you to just take my word for anything. I’m asking you to take the Bible seriously and do the work as well.

Before this series goes any further, I should probably point you to an article I published earlier this year on how I read and interpret the Bible (and why). It’s called The Good Book(s), and it lays the foundation for everything I’m doing here. With all of that being said, let’s get into it.

Extra-Biblical Evidence

Around 112 CE, a Roman governor called Pliny the Younger wrote a letter to the Emperor Trajan. He was trying to figure out what to do with a religious group in the province of Bithynia that was causing him administrative headaches. In the letter, he mentions that he had tortured two female slaves to get information. Honestly, he was actually kind of a terrible person. But the point is that he called these women ministrae, which is the Latin word for ministers, deaconesses, or servants of the church.

Pliny wasn’t a Christian. He didn’t have a theological stake in any of this. He was simply describing what he observed: women in the early church holding specific roles that were visible enough to attract the attention of the Roman government.

That’s the historical and cultural context in which these texts were written. Women were already leading and serving as deacons. But for many of us, that history is difficult to reconcile with specific Biblical texts as we were taught them. We usually read these passages as timeless rules or as a part of a pattern we are supposed to emulate.

Silenced?

The argument usually begins with these instructions to the church at Corinth:

“Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.” (1 Corinthians 14:34-35, NIV)

That two-sentence passage has become one of the primary justifications for excluding women from leadership in many traditions. But if we are going to take the Bible seriously, we have to look at the text closely.

Context: Seeing The Bigger Picture

First, we need to look at what 1 Corinthians actually is.

Paul didn’t write 1 Corinthians as some kind of timeless doctrinal statement. He wrote it as a letter to a particular congregation in a particular city with documented particular problems. How do I know that? Because he actually addressed the letter to them and mentioned specific things they are dealing with throughout the letter. The church at Corinth was, for lack of a better way to say it, a chaotic mess. It’s true. Whereas in his letters to other churches, Paul thanks God for their great faith or their generosity, when he writes to the Corinthian church, he says that when he thinks of them, he always thanks God because of how much grace God has given to them (1 Corinthians 1:4). Paul then spends sixteen chapters managing factions, lawsuits, and the misuse & abuse of the Lord’s Supper.

Chapter 14 is specifically about maintaining order in worship. It addresses how everyone in the gathering is supposed to speak and interact with one another so the whole assembly can function.

Three chapters earlier, in chapter 11, Paul speaks directly about women praying and prophesying in the assembly. He is concerned with the social signals they send when they do it. The modesty he emphasizes has nothing to do with modern dress codes. It is about status. He asks those with wealth not to walk into a room of equals wearing gold and elaborate hairstyles that broadcast their privilege. He doesn’t tell them they cannot speak. He assumes they are speaking. His focus is on how they can do it without shaming the poor. He wants their presence to strengthen the church rather than divide it.

This is the same Paul in the same letter. One text guides how women speak in worship, while the other silences them entirely. Both can’t be universal rules at the same time. One of them has to be responding to a specific situation.

It should be noted that some scholars take a different path here. Gordon Fee and Richard Hays have argued that verses 34-35 may not be original to Paul at all. They suggest these lines were a later addition inserted by a scribe. The manuscript evidence for that position is worth taking seriously, even though I’m not fully persuaded by it. But, I really don’t think I need to be. Even if Paul wrote every word of it, the letter itself doesn’t support a universal prohibition.

There’s also another translation problem that’s worth noting, and it has to do with a phrase your Bible probably contains in this passage. The phrase is “as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people.” Here’s the issue. Koine Greek didn’t use punctuation the way we do, which means translators have to make a judgment call about where that phrase actually belongs in the text.

The NIV places it with verse 33, so the sentence reads: “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace, as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people.” Other translations attach it to the opening of verse 34, so it reads: “As in all the congregations of the Lord’s people, women should remain silent.” I think you’ll agree that the placement makes a pretty big difference in the way you read it. The first reading closes out the thought about orderly worship. The second reading makes the silence command sound like a universal policy for every church everywhere.

There’s no way to know for certain which placement is correct. The punctuation simply isn’t there to settle it. I lean toward the first placement because it fits the flow of the surrounding argument better, but I want to be honest that it can’t be proven. What I will say is that wherever you land on it, I don’t think it changes the overall case very much. The other problems with a universal reading of verses 34-35 don’t go away either way.

A Word About “Headship”

There’s one more piece of chapter 11 that gets treated like an Ace in the hole. In verse 3, Paul writes that “the head of the woman is man.” For a lot of people, that settles the whole question. The head means the boss. The head means the one giving orders. But that reading leans heavily on an English word doing work the Greek may never have done.

The word Paul uses is kephalē. It literally means “a head,” as in the thing sitting on top of your neck. It can carry a sense of authority, but it can just as easily mean “source,” the way we still talk about the head of a river. And, the thing is, Paul tells us which way he’s leaning, because he keeps talking a few verses later.

“Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.” (1 Corinthians 11:11-12)

Rather than using kephalē to talk about some kind of gender-based chain of command, Paul is using it to talk about origin and mutual dependence. Contextually, that’s the clearest meaning based on Paul’s own words. Woman came from man in the old creation story, and from that time on, every man who has ever lived has come into the world through a woman. Paul runs the dependence in both directions and then hands the whole thing back to God. If he set out to install men as the only leadership of the church because of their gender, this is a strange way to go about it.

Powerful Women In The Bible

So which law is Paul even talking about? There’s a phrase right there in verse 34 that tends to get skipped right over. He says this silence is required ‘as the law says,’ and he never tells you which law he means. Across all of his letters, Paul almost always tells you which text he’s working from. He names the author, or he quotes the passage directly, so you can follow the argument yourself. Within this same chapter, just a few verses before verse 34, he writes, “In the Law it is written,” and immediately quotes from Isaiah. That’s his consistent practice.

But here he does neither. He says, “as the law says,” and just keeps moving with nothing attached to the claim at all. Scholars who have cataloged every citation in Paul’s letters have noted that this is the only place in his entire body of writing where “the law says” appears with no text to back it up. And when you go looking on your own for the law he might mean, you’re going to come up empty. There is simply no passage in the Old Testament that commands women to be silent. That law doesn’t exist.

What the Old Testament actually does say is worth noting, though: Deborah held the office of judge over all of Israel. When the military commander Barak was summoned to lead Israel into battle, he told her he wouldn’t go without her. Miriam’s title in Exodus 15 isn’t “Moses’ sister.” It’s “the prophet.” She led Israel in worship at the Red Sea with that title already attached to her name. When King Josiah found a lost copy of the book of the Law during temple renovations and needed someone to speak for God, he sent a delegation to a woman named Huldah. The prophet Jeremiah was alive and available at the time. The high priest Hilkiah was in the room. Josiah sent his delegation past both of them to find Huldah. She prefaced her response by saying, “This is what the LORD says.” In ancient Israel, to speak those words without a genuine prophetic calling was akin to blasphemy. Huldah spoke to them without hesitation, and the king staked a national covenant renewal on it.

Brothers & Sisters

It helps to back up and notice who Paul is addressing in the rest of chapter 14. If he had wanted to single out the men, Greek gave him a word for exactly that. The word aner (plural andres) means adult males specifically. But Paul doesn’t reach for that word in chapter 14. He keeps using adelphoi instead.

Adelphoi is technically a masculine plural. But any standard Koine Greek lexicon will tell you that this was the conventional form for addressing a mixed group of men and women. BDAG, the authoritative Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, documents it explicitly: the plural adelphoi regularly referred to communities of both men and women. Greek defaulted to the masculine plural for any group that included both sexes. The word for male-exclusive was andres, and Paul didn’t use it.

The NIV renders adelphoi as “brothers and sisters” throughout Paul’s letters, and that translation isn’t just some modern sensitivity update. It’s what the word actually meant in ordinary Greek usage.

Additionally, Paul doesn’t leave prophecy undefined. Two verses before the silence command appears, he gives the Corinthians a clear definition:

“But the one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouraging and comfort.” (1 Corinthians 14:3)

It’s public speech, addressed to the gathered church, meant to build people up. And in verse 31 Paul extends that invitation to everyone:

“For you can all prophesy in turn so that everyone may be instructed and encouraged.” (1 Corinthians 14:31)

He already established in chapter 11 that women were among the ones praying and prophesying in Corinth, so “all” isn’t rhetorical. It means…all.

That’s what makes the traditional reading of verse 34 so difficult to sustain. Paul had the male-exclusive word available throughout this chapter and this entire letter, and he kept passing it over. Three sentences near the end that supposedly bar every woman from speaking at all would be a truly odd thing for him to write. It would mean Paul spent an entire letter teaching women how to take part in worship and then took it all back in a few lines near the close. That just isn’t a natural reading of what he wrote.

Which Women?

Now, look back over 1 Corinthians 14. Paul uses the Greek word sigato, “be silent,” three times in the chapter. Verse 28 silences tongue-speakers if no interpreter is present. Verse 30 silences a prophet if someone else receives a revelation while they’re still speaking. Both of those are conditional, situational instructions that apply in specific circumstances, not as standing rules for every gathering.

The third silence, verse 34, follows that same structural pattern.

Look at the specific words Paul uses. The Greek word for “women” in verse 34 is gynaikes, which can mean either “women” in a general sense or “wives” in a marital sense. The Greek word for “husbands” in verse 35 is andras, which specifically means husbands. In Ephesians 5, translators render that same word pair as “wives and husbands.” Here, they split the pair, rendering gynaikes as “women” while keeping andras as “husbands.” You can’t apply the pair consistently in one direction without following through in the other.

And we need to look closely at the remedy Paul offers: If they want to inquire about something, he says, let them ask their own husbands at home. That remedy only works for a woman who has a husband. Widows, for example, have no husbands to consult. An unmarried woman is in the same position. If this command applies universally to all females regardless of age or marital status, Paul’s own solution fails the majority of the group he’s supposedly addressing. Are they only silenced if they get married? Are they just out of luck with regard to answers if they don’t get married?

The most internally consistent reading is that Paul is correcting a specific group of wives who were disrupting the assembly by directing questions at their husbands. The text tells us the disruption involves questions, and Paul’s solution points straight at a marital dynamic: save those questions for home. If a group of men had been breaking up the gathering with the same kind of interruptions, Paul would have come down on them just as hard. The problem was never that women were speaking. The problem was that the meeting had descended into chaos, and chaos doesn’t get a gender-specific pass. That’s a targeted instruction for a specific mess in the particular congregation to which the letter is actually addressed, not a sweeping rule for every gathering in every century.

Wrapping It Up (For Now)

Long before anyone framed this as a controversy, women were already at work in the church, and the earliest records treat that as kind of unremarkable. Phoebe was a deacon of the church at Cenchreae. Paul’s word for her is diakonos, and it’s the exact same word used for the office everywhere else in the New Testament, though many translations quietly swapped it out for “servant” when it refers to her.

Then there’s Priscilla. She and her husband, Aquila, helped Paul plant the church in Corinth, which means she’s not just some footnote in this conversation. She’s part of the founding story. The first time Luke introduces them in Acts 18, he names them in the order the culture expected: Aquila first, then Priscilla. But that’s the only time it happens that way. Every mention after that, in Acts and in Paul’s own letters, lists her name first. Luke and Paul do this independently and consistently across different books, which means it isn’t a coincidence. In the ancient world, placing the wife’s name before the husband’s was a deliberate signal of prominence. When she and Aquila pulled Apollos aside to correct his theology, her name leads in that account too. Apollos was one of the most gifted teachers in the early church, and the person who straightened out his doctrine was a woman whose name Paul consistently wrote before her husband’s, defying cultural norms.

Plus, Paul already told us which law he was referring to. He wrote it in another letter, in a line so clear it doesn’t need any additional commentary.

“For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Galatians 5:14)

This article is the first in a series that I’m adapting from a set of sermons I preached on the roles of women in the church. If you want to hear the full original lesson this piece is based on, I’ve included the video below.

Next: We’ll dig into 1 Timothy 2, the other passage everyone quotes.

This is the video of a recent sermon I preached from the book of Haggai. It’s about a community that lived with an unfinished, overgrown foundation in the center of their city for 16 years, until the ruins just became part of the landscape. We often convince ourselves that the timing isn’t right for redemptive work in front of us because we’re too distracted with self-serving impulses. This message examines how prioritizing comfort can function like an anesthetic, numbing us to our calling to the good, redemptive work God invites us into.

In June 1964, Nelson Mandela arrived at the prison on Robben Island to begin a sentence of life plus five years. He was forty-five years old. When he stepped off the ferry, the guards stripped him of his clothes and his dignity and assigned him a number. From that moment on, he was prisoner 466/64. The “64” was the year he arrived. The “466” meant he was the 466th person the South African government had decided to imprison on that island that year.

Robben Island sat about nine miles off the coast of Cape Town. For the men sent there, it was designed to be the end of their story.

Mandela spent years working in a lime quarry. It was a massive excavation site where the sun reflected off the white stone with a glare that eventually scarred the retinas of the prisoners and caused permanent damage to their tear ducts. They spent their days breaking boulders into gravel with picks and shovels. They breathed in white dust until their lungs burned. There was no evidence that their sacrifice mattered to anyone on the outside. There was no scheduled release date. There was no indication that the government was about to collapse. Nelson Mandela was a man being systematically erased from history, one shovelful of gravel at a time, with no foreseeable end to the story other than a pauper’s grave in the island’s cemetery.

During those years, he decided to do something that probably looked totally irrational to everyone around him: He decided to plant a garden.

He didn’t start with a plan or a budget. He just managed to get a handful of tomato seeds from a guard who had a little kindness left in him. The soil in the courtyard was packed hard and didn’t have much in the way of the nutrients plants need in order to grow. So Mandela and the other prisoners started what he called active collection. On their way back from the quarry each day, they stopped and gathered ostrich droppings. They carried them in their pockets and used them to fertilize the small, stubborn patch of dirt so it could support what they wanted to plant.

He eventually secured a larger strip of land against one of the prison walls and planted chili peppers, onions, and tomatoes. He spent the few hours they allowed him for rest on his hands and knees in the dirt, tending a makeshift garden that had no guarantee of flourishing.

On the day he planted those first seeds, Mandela had no idea that he would be released in twenty-six years. He was a man in his forties and then his fifties and sixties, tending a garden in a place he was told he would never leave.

He wrote about it later in his autobiography. He said that a garden was one of the few things in prison that one could control. “To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom.”

He didn’t plant those seeds and carry ostrich feces in his pockets out of some general sense of optimism. He did all of that because he refused to concede that the present moment was the final word.

Hope Leans In

When Paul gets to this part of his letter, he briefly starts to sound like a mathematician. He uses a Greek word that’s really a bookkeeping term here. It’s a word that’s used for settling an account or weighing two values against each other. He’s measuring the weight of the suffering his readers are enduring and comparing it to the weight of the glory he insists is coming. His conclusion is that they aren’t even in the same category. But, to be clear, he’s not dismissing their pain. He’s re-contextualizing it.

Then he describes the posture of all of creation with a word that literally means to crane one’s neck forward to see something on the horizon. It’s the image of a person standing on their tiptoes to see over a crowd. It’s a posture of intense, full-bodied anticipation. Creation isn’t just sitting back and waiting for things to change. Paul depicts Creation itself as leaning into the new world that God is bringing into existence.

This is where optimism and hope part ways. Merriam-Webster defines optimism as “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” Optimism is basically a passive forecast. It’s a feeling that things will probably get better based on current trends or a positive attitude. But Paul describes Creation as groaning in labor pains. They’re the groans of someone giving birth. It’s an active, painful process that is moving Creation toward something new. In Christ, we’re participating in a new birth that has already begun in Christ's resurrection.

Jürgen Moltmann spent decades working out what that actually means for the people of God. He said it better than I can:

“Pray and watch - that is only possible if we don’t pray mystically with closed eyes, but pray messianically, with eyes open for God’s future in the world. Christian faith is not blind faith. It is the wakeful expectation of God which touched all our senses. The early Christians prayed standing, looking up, with outstretched arms and wide-open eyes, ready to walk or to leap forward. We can see this from the pictures in the catacombs in Rome. Their posture reflects tense expectation, not quiet heart-searching. We don’t watch just because of the dangers that threaten us. We are expecting the salvation of the world. We are watching in God’s Advent. With tense attention, we open all our senses for the coming of God into our lives.”

- Jürgen Moltmann, Walking With God In A Fragile World

The people in the catacombs weren’t waiting for the empire to give them permission to believe God’s future was real. They had already chosen to live inside of it. Which is a good reminder for American Christians right now, because what passes for hope in a lot of our churches in 2026 looks a whole lot more like waiting for our preferred political outcome than like anything Paul was talking about.

When Words Run Out

Paul was honest enough to admit that there are moments in the middle of the struggle where the words are hard to come by and completely inadequate anyway. He described a condition in which our suffering is so intense that we don’t even know what we ought to pray for, and wordless groans are the best we’ve got. If you’ve been there, you know exactly what he’s talking about. If you haven’t been there, I guarantee you will be at some point.

This is a mode of active hope that we probably don’t talk about enough. It’s the conviction that when we’re broken, when we feel abandoned and alone, when we don’t even know what to pray for and wouldn’t have the words for it if we did, God’s Spirit searches our hearts and provides the prayer back to God for us. Rather than seeing us as inadequate because of our weakness, the God most clearly seen in Jesus meets us inside of it.

Verse 28 often gets quoted to mean that everything will eventually work out for our personal comfort or circumstantial success. But God doesn’t promise to grant our wishes like a genie, despite what the TV preachers tell you. What God actually promises is to use our circumstances to make us more like Christ, and not to abandon us in the process. Whatever the forces of evil in this broken world throw at us, God can still use it toward something good. That’s profoundly different than the interpretation that says God causes awful things to shape us into what he wants, as if God would give your kid bone cancer to make you a little more patient (and that would somehow be considered good). For the record, that god would be a monster, and I would certainly reject such a god in the name of Jesus.

Think about what Nelson Mandela was doing in that prison courtyard. He wasn’t tending his garden because he had a feeling everything was just going to work out, or because the prison had some great agriculture program for the inmates. He was tending it because it was a way to maintain his humanity in a place that was specifically designed to destroy it. That’s what God’s Spirit is doing in us. The groaning is evidence that the life of God’s future is already pressing against the limitations of the present. You know those wordless groans he mentioned? Read that in context. It’s a direct callback to the groans of creation he was just talking about. And what did Paul say about the groans of creation? They were the sound of something new being born.

Hope is the decision to stay in the dirt and tend the garden, trusting the Gardener even when the harvest is nowhere in sight.

The thing is, people of faith aren’t the people of the wait-and-see. We are those who’ve been called to a purpose that’s bigger and more comprehensive than mere survival. We’re being shaped into a people who can reflect the glory of God and bear the image of Christ because we’ve been refined in the fire of our past and present suffering.

You know that groan you feel deep in your soul sometimes? That’s the sound of a new world being born.

(And please, let’s not get bogged down in the predestination language in verses 29 and 30. I’m not sure any debate could miss the point of a biblical passage more thoroughly than that one does. Paul is not shoehorning a systematic theology of “divine election” into what he’s actually doing in this passage. He’s saying: God knows how the story ends and that’s our destiny, if we choose to accept it.)

Not to get too nerdy, but Moltmann argued that God’s relationship to the world is not spatial but temporal - not that God is “above” history looking down, but that God is “ahead” of history, drawing creation forward. In Religion, Revolution, and the Future, he put it this way:

“God is not ‘above us’ in a spatial sense, but he is ‘before us’ in a temporal sense. He is the God whose very essence is future... This God beckons us forward into the unknown, into the promised land of his future.”

- Jürgen Moltmann, Religion, Revolution, and the Future (1969)

Through faith and hope, we are the people who live out the Already in the middle of the Not Yet.

More Than Conquerors

Paul brings his entire argument home with a series of rhetorical questions he doesn’t expect anyone to answer, because the questions themselves imply the answer.

But before we get there, we need to look a little closer at the question itself. “If God is for us” is not some declaration that God is our team mascot, or that our side gets divine endorsement simply because we showed up and said the right things. The prophets actually describe that kind of thing as taking the name of the Lord in vain. Using God’s name to sanctify your own agenda is as old as the kings of Israel demanding divine blessing for wars God never wanted. What Paul is actually describing is something much more demanding: the assurance that comes to those whose lives have been surrendered to what God actually wants for the world. To say “God is for us” is a statement about whose agenda you’ve adopted, not about whose side God has supposedly been recruited to.

Here’s the thing about optimism: at its worst, it can actually make us complicit in great evil. If we sit back, stick our heads in the sand, and wait for God to take care of it, we’ve mistaken passive sentiment for active faithfulness.

In 2026, a version of Christianity is operating in the United States that seems to have convinced itself that it’s practicing hope when it’s mostly just waiting for its preferred political coalition to finish winning. It has marched itself to the National Mall, attached itself to the machinery of political power, and dressed its ambitions in the language of divine mandate. The V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report downgraded the United States from a “liberal democracy” to an “electoral democracy” for the first time since 1965, and researchers who study democratic decline now compare American democracy to countries like Mexico, South Africa, and India rather than to the stable democracies of Western Europe and Japan. The institutions that were supposed to hold power accountable are under sustained pressure. And a significant portion of the American church isn’t calling that out, because it’s inside the building helping run it.

Walter Wink called these structures the “domination system.” He spent his life arguing that the church’s vocation was never to sanctify whatever power happened to be in charge, but to embody a visible alternative to it. Paul understood this. Rome didn’t get a theological endorsement from Paul. It got lumped in with every power in the cosmos that would love to separate us from the love of God, and Paul’s answer was that none of them are strong enough to do it.

It is possible to work against God’s purposes, and it is certainly possible to ignore his will, but it is not possible to make God stop loving you. That may not be as comforting as it sounds. A God who stopped loving you might just ignore you and what you are doing in his name. A God that loves you is invested.

Hope is something profoundly different from all of that. Hope is active participation in a victory that’s already been won. God is beckoning us forward into His future, even as God is actively bringing His future toward us.

Then Paul closes his argument by listing everything that can go wrong: affliction, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, and sword. He says he’s convinced that none of it is powerful enough to separate us from the love of God. From there, he expands the scale to include death and life and angels and rulers and every power in existence, things present and things to come, and his verdict doesn’t change. Paul insists the love of God is the only force in the universe that can’t be exhausted.

And that’s exactly why hope isn’t optimism. Optimism sits back and assumes things will work out. Hope knows that the God whose love can’t be exhausted is calling us forward into a future where that love gets the final word, and that we’re invited to participate in bringing it about. A love like that doesn’t produce spectators. It produces people who plant things and build things and show up for things when there’s no guarantee any of it will survive the season.

Don’t call it optimism. Don’t you dare reduce something as powerful as hope to something as anemic as that. As with most things, Jürgen Moltmann says it better than I can:

“That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.”

-Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope

Tonight, the Ed Sullivan Theater will go dark after the final episode of a late-night talk show because CBS decided that the truth had become too inconvenient and expensive. The official narrative from the network attempts to frame this as a pivot in strategy or a shift in the late-night landscape, but the reality is far more cynical. Stephen Colbert is being pushed off the air because he refused to stop using the symbols of power to unmask the power itself. His departure is not the result of low ratings. It is a tactical removal executed under partisan pressure. We are watching a network trade its credibility for a seat at a table where silence and complicity are the only currency accepted.

Colbert first coined the term “Truthiness” on October 17, 2005. It was the name his satirical character on his previous show, “The Colbert Report,” gave to the kind of truth that we want to be true regardless of the facts. In those early years, he parodied the persona of the arrogant pundit to lampoon the unspoken but commonly held belief that the gut is a more authoritative source of reality than the head. However, the man we are saying goodbye to tonight is not that satirical character that shares his face and name. Over the last decade on The Late Show, Colbert stepped out from behind the mask to offer something more dangerous than parody. He offered a sincere, truthful presence that wasn’t impressed with power.

This approach required a specific kind of discernment. In the book of Proverbs, we are given two seemingly contradictory commands in the same breath. Proverbs 26:4-5 tells us not to answer a fool according to his folly, lest we become like him, but then immediately turns around and tells us to answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. Biblical Wisdom literature isn’t a set of binary, right-and-wrong rules but a call to the difficult work of discernment. Colbert is a master of this tension. He is brilliant at knowing exactly when a moment calls for him to satirically inhabit the folly in order to expose how ridiculous it truly is, and when he needs to stand in the plain light of the truth so that the darkness can be exposed. He understands that some fools need a mirror while others need the light of day, and he has rarely confused the two.

Søren Kierkegaard understood that the “crowd” is the ultimate untruth and that direct communication often fails because the audience has already hardened its heart against the facts. He believed that a deep, religious sincerity must often utilize a comic mask to avoid becoming a performative spectacle. By speaking as “one without authority,” the humorist bypasses the defensive postures of the powerful and forces a collision with reality. David Dark observes in his book, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, that we need jokes like we need clean air to rearrange our sense of self-importance and break down the walls of our own certainty. A joke clears a space for candor where conversation and even conversion become possible. By speaking as one who claimed no institutional power, Colbert exposed the fact that the lie only works if we all agree to play along.

This calling is as ancient as political power itself. Across cultures and centuries, the Jester was the only figure granted the license to speak the truth to the sovereign without being destroyed for it. From the courts of medieval Europe to the royal halls of India, the Fool was a functional necessity for the survival of the state. He served as a pressure valve for the hubris of the crown. By ending Colbert’s show and, bafflingly, late-night talk shows on the network altogether, CBS is dismantling one of the last public spaces where the emperor can be told that he, in fact, has no clothes.

Tim Keller once noted that Colbert represented a winsome, unapologetic Christianity that did not feel the need to shout to be heard. He proved that you can be deeply serious about your faith without being a bore or a bigot. Colbert’s approach offered an alternative consciousness to the dominant narrative of American exceptionalism. His perspective was unapologetically shaped by his Catholic faith and imagination, and the result was a truthful presence in a world that prefers comfortable lies. He chose the third way between passive acceptance and mirrored outrage, and he proved that humor is often the only honest response to the pretensions of the powerful.

Frederick Buechner argued in his book, Telling the Truth, that the Gospel is a comedy because it is the “high comedy” of the unexpected. It is the news that the worst thing is never the last thing, and it plays to our capacity for laughter even in the face of tragedy. Jürgen Moltmann further suggested that hope is a form of resistance that looks toward a future that is not yet visible. I believe that, at its best, Colbert’s satire functioned as exactly this kind of hope. By refusing to let the truthiness of the empire have the final word, he pointed toward a deeper reality where integrity, justice, and mercy get the last word. He reminded us that the Gospel is a comedy of the highest order because it insists that, despite all of their bluster, death and domination don’t win. I am going to watch the final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and then I’ll be canceling my Paramount+ subscription, as a matter of conscience. It is a small thing, but I refuse to subsidize a system that treats the truth as a liability and bows to those in positions of power who can neither face the truth or take a joke. The empire may have bought the network and the theater, but it can’t own the light. They may have taken the platform from one of the best late-night hosts to ever have the gig, but, as David Dark says, “No one gets to insist on the right to not feel silly.”

In 1990, a man stood up at a conference in Washington and did something unusual. He admitted the failure of his life’s work.

His name was Paul Weyrich. He co-founded the Heritage Foundation and had spent the better part of three decades trying to shape evangelical Christians into a reliable political voting bloc. He tried to use opposition to pornography as a mobilizing issue. He tried school prayer. He attempted to rally them around opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. And for nearly fifteen years, none of it worked.

Standing in front of that room, he was blunt: “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed.”

The thing that finally worked isn’t the story the movement tells today, and understanding the gap between the myth and the actual history is the only way to see the story that’s been running in the background for fifty years. Church-going voters weren’t the authors of the narrative that was being constructed. They were the building material.

Before we get into Weyrich’s answer, we have to look at how systems protect themselves. Marriage and Family Therapists have a term for what happens when a group in crisis locks in on a scapegoat. They call that person the identified patient.

The identified patient is the family member who’s been elected to carry the dysfunction for everyone else. This isn’t a conscious process, but it is a functional one. As long as there’s a designated problem person in the room, no one else has to examine their own role in the system. The story the family tells about itself stays intact. We’re all fine. The problem is them.

One of the foundational principles of family systems therapy is that the identified patient is almost never the actual source of the problem. They’re a symptom of deeper dysfunction that the system is protecting itself from seeing. The system protects itself by building a story in which everything that’s wrong can be traced back to a single person or cause.

Congregational consultant Larry Peers calls this a “problem-saturated story.” It’s a narrative that focuses entirely on who or what is wrong. The danger of these stories isn’t that they’re entirely false. Most have some basis in reality. The danger is that they’re eventually taken as fact rather than as a narrative created by a particular sifting of facts.

Once a community clothes itself in a story like that, the narrative starts to manage reality for them. New information gets co-opted as evidence or discarded if it doesn’t fit. Hopeful possibilities get abandoned before they can even start. The dysfunction the story was designed to protect gets more entrenched because the story redirects our attention back to the identified patient, rendering the actual dysfunction invisible.

The thing is, this dynamic is not only true in families. It plays out in churches, political parties, nations, or basically any system involving human beings.

I spent a significant part of my graduate work studying narrative theory and how it applies to leadership. It’s one of those things you can’t unsee. I’ve watched what happens to communities that organize their identity around who or what they are against rather than what they are for. I know what it looks like when a system loses the ability to hear anything that doesn’t confirm what it already believes.

I believe American evangelicalism is currently living inside one of the most effective problem-saturated stories ever constructed.

This story claims that America was once a Christian nation that belonged to “us”, and by “us,” it means Christian Republicans (because the story doesn’t allow for those two categories to be anything other than intertwined). It insists the Democratic Party represents everything that’s gone wrong. They’re labeled as godless, secular, and hostile to faith. If there’s something wrong in the country, the story consistently draws a line from the problem back to the Democrats. They’re obviously the problem. Republicans are, if not perfect, at least our side. And we’re never in doubt about whose side God is always on.

Every political compromise, every ethical shortcut, and every alliance with candidates whose character would disqualify them from church membership gets justified by the logic of the narrative. We don’t have to think about it because our story has already named the villain, and we know it can’t be anyone on our side of the aisle.

The thing is, someone crafted this story, and they didn’t write it for the church's benefit.

You Can’t Debate A Story

Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher who introduced the concept of paradigms, understood why we can’t just talk our way to agreement. A paradigm is the shared framework of assumptions through which a community interprets reality. It’s the lens so embedded in how we see the world that we don’t even notice we’re wearing it. Kuhn argued that when two people are operating inside different paradigms, they aren’t just disagreeing about conclusions. Paradigms shape the questions, the evidence, and the rules of the conversation itself. You can’t move on from one paradigm using the logic of another. As Kuhn put it, the competition between paradigms isn’t the sort of battle that can be resolved by proof.

That’s why rational conversations with someone deep inside this story usually end in bewilderment. You bring evidence, but they bring a counter-narrative. You bring history, but they bring what history means within their story. It doesn’t feel like a disagreement about facts because it isn’t. You’re actually speaking different languages.

A problem-saturated story doesn’t fall apart when it’s confronted with contrary evidence. It absorbs that evidence and turns it into confirmation. It doesn’t lose arguments so much as it reclassifies the people making the arguments.

The story is untouchable unless it’s unmasked.

The Historical Unmasking

Most evangelicals will tell you the Religious Right was born in response to Roe v. Wade in 1973. It’s a convenient story that offers stark moral clarity. The problem is that it’s historically false.

Christian historian Randall Balmer traced out the actual record in his work on the movement's origins. What he found is well-documented, well-sourced, and considerably less flattering than the origin story the movement believes and tells about itself.

The historical timeline tells a different story.

In 1969, parents in Mississippi filed suit to strip tax-exempt status from the “segregation academies” established to circumvent school integration. The Nixon administration was forced to act, and the IRS began threatening the tax exemptions of racially discriminatory private schools. Jerry Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian Academy was one of those schools.

Meanwhile, much of the evangelical leadership spent the 1970s on record as supporting limited abortion access. At the time, the issue was widely considered a Catholic concern rather than a Protestant or evangelical one. Falwell didn’t preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 26, 1978. That’s more than five years after Roe.

At the same 1990 conference where Weyrich admitted his failures, Ed Dobson, a founding member of the Moral Majority, confirmed the shift from the inside. He said he sat in the back rooms with the leaders of the movement and didn’t remember abortion being mentioned as a reason to do anything.

The thing that finally moved the needle was the IRS.

When the federal government threatened the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University over racial discrimination policies, the evangelical world finally responded. That was the genuine catalyst. The threat to segregated Christian schools created the political mobilization Weyrich had been trying to engineer for fifteen years. But you can’t build a national movement on that. The story needed a villain that was compelling enough to hold it together.

The tool that worked was abortion. It became the single issue around which evangelical political identity could be organized because it offered emotional intensity and the ability to make every other political question seem secondary. Political scientist Andrew Lewis has documented how the pro-life framework restructured the way evangelicals engaged every political issue until a single question of conscience became a total political identity.

But that identity needed an enemy.

Weyrich was building a voting bloc, not a theological movement. The evangelical community wasn’t an equal partner in that project. They were an asset being managed.

Once you see the history, you can ask the question the story works so hard to keep you from asking. To be clear, this isn’t about whether abortion is wrong or whether you disagree with the Democratic Party. Those are legitimate questions. The question underneath those questions is the one a good therapist would ask: Who handed you this story, and what were they trying to get from you when they handed it to you?

When that question can be asked honestly, you discover that the people who handed you this story weren’t primarily motivated by theology, but by political power and an attempt to preserve racial segregation. That’s not my opinion. That’s the historical record.

How the Story Got Amplified

In 1990, Newt Gingrich distributed a memo through GOPAC, the political action committee he used to train Republican candidates nationwide, titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” that advised candidates on how to describe their opponents. The recommended vocabulary included words like sick, pathetic, traitors, and decay. This was a deliberate strategy to reframe political opponents not as people with different priorities, but as enemies of civilization.

Steve Kornacki documents exactly how that language became the template for Republican political identity in the 1990s in his book The Red and the Blue. But the thing that accelerated its reach into everyday life was talk radio, followed by the advent of 24-hour news networks. Rush Limbaugh provided a template of an entertaining, confident voice telling you exactly who the enemy was and why they had to be stopped. Millions of people drove to work with those voices in their ears. By the time 24-hour television news arrived, the audience was already conditioned.

Conflict sells, and 24-hour news networks figured that out early. Networks need to hold an audience all day, and people don’t stay tuned in for calm reporting or good news. They need a reason to keep watching. The model doesn’t require dishonesty so much as it requires that nothing ever gets resolved. A partisan message that once had to be sought out now follows us into our cars, our living rooms, and even the waiting rooms of our doctor or dentist. The message is constant and consistent: the people on the other side are a threat to everything you love, and you can’t afford to stop paying attention.

It is worth saying clearly that Republicans weren’t solely responsible for all of this. Steve Kornacki documents how Bill Clinton’s response to Newt Gingrich’s tactics often validated the very framework it was trying to counter. Triangulation moved Clinton toward the culture war rather than past it. Then, when the Lewinsky scandal broke, the outrage infrastructure didn’t have to be assembled because it had already been under construction for fifteen years. Clinton didn’t build the machine, but he handed it a full tank of gas at exactly the right moment and arguably fanned the flames.

I’ll say what I always say here, and I know some of you are already tired of hearing it. I am not a member of any political party, and I don’t intend to join one…ever. I’m not saying that to feign impartiality. I’m saying it because the argument I’m making only holds if I’m not doing the same thing I’m critiquing, which is handing my convictions to some political operation and calling it faithfulness.

Weyrich didn’t stop at giving evangelicals a partisan political position. He conscripted them into a partisan political identity. When a political strategist builds your identity for you, it was never yours to begin with. It was a part written for you in someone else’s script.

The Cost

Here’s what makes this story genuinely tragic: The people inside it weren’t cynics or dupes. Their faith was real. Their moral concern about abortion was real. Their love for their communities was real. All of it got harvested and put to work for a project they didn’t design and were never fully told about. The architects needed bodies at the polls and dollars in the coffers, and they found a way to make sincere Christian conviction supply both. Some might call that politics. I’d call it identity theft.

Look at the price the narrative demands of the people inside it.

It requires that moral failure within the movement be explained away by the urgency of the threat outside it. It insists that almost any candidate is supportable as long as he’s on the right team. It demands that the church and the party look outward for the source of everything that’s wrong and never inward. It’s a structure that requires a scapegoat to work.

Walter Wink called this a domination system. It’s the logic of power-over and insiders-versus-outsiders that eventually becomes the air everyone breathes without realizing it. Every domination system requires a scapegoat to absorb the blame and maintain the illusion of group innocence.

This is a structural problem. When you organize your political identity around a designated enemy, that enemy stops being a fellow human being you disagree with and becomes the explanation for everything. The church's mission gets swallowed by the coalition's needs, and the gospel becomes the packaging.

Theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas wrote that the church doesn’t have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic. Its life together is its testimony. When the church’s life together is organized around partisan contempt, that contempt becomes the testimony. That’s what people outside the church see, and it’s how they’re determining who Jesus is or whether or not the church has anything to do with him.

And this story has a body count. I mean that in human terms. These are actual people I’ve sat in conversation with, everywhere from hospital rooms and funeral homes to Mexican restaurants over chips and salsa, who concluded from watching the church that Christianity is apparently about power and fear, so they walked away from it altogether. These were people who were told that faith required partisan loyalty, and couldn’t reconcile that with the Jesus they read about in the Bible. When they were told that the church and partisan politics couldn’t be separated, they believed it and chose Jesus without the party by simply leaving the church.

The Question Jesus Kept Asking

Jesus had a habit of approaching the most settled narratives in his world and unraveling them with a question. But he didn’t invent that approach. He got it from his Father.

“Who told you that you were naked?”

The question in Genesis 3 isn’t really about shame. It’s God asking where that story came from, because he knew he didn’t give it to them. Someone else did. And whoever told them that story had an agenda.

Jesus asked versions of that question everywhere he went. He asked it of the Pharisees, who had the sinners sorted out, and the disciples, who wanted to call down fire on the Samaritans. Every time, the question was the same underneath: who told you the story you’re living in? Is that story true? And what might you see if you stopped viewing the world through that lens?

The answer he offered was a different story where your enemy turns out to be your neighbor and where the outsider turns out to be the one the Father runs to welcome and embrace.

Who Told You That?

I’m not asking you to change your politics or your party affiliation (if you have one).

I’m trying to ask the question a good therapist asks when a family has been pointing at the same person for thirty years while everything keeps getting worse.

“Who told you they were your enemy?”

I’m not asking who you agree or disagree with or who you think is right or wrong about specific policies. I’m questioning the framework that says one party contains the problem and the other contains the solution. I’m asking about the story that makes it possible to overlook almost anything on your own side of the aisle and justify every compromise because the alternative is them: the bad guys…the scapegoats…the identified patient.

Who handed you this story, and what were they trying to get from you when they handed it to you?

Sources: Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” Politico (2014); Balmer, Bad Faith (Eerdmans, 2021); Steve Kornacki, The Red and the Blue (Ecco, 2018); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962); Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (1998); Larry Peers, Narrative Leadership (2008); Andrew R. Lewis, The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

In 1942, a former Disciples of Christ minister named Gerald L.K. Smith founded an organization in St. Louis, Missouri. He called it the Christian Nationalist Crusade. Smith wasn’t subtle about what he was building. His publication was called The Cross and the Flag, and it went out to a mailing list of over three million readers. His slogan was “Christ First in America.” His platform called for deporting immigrants, raising tariffs, fighting communism, and protecting what he described as the interests of white Christian Americans. In 1944, members of his America First Party endorsed the sterilization and deportation of all Jews.

Smith wasn’t just some fringe curiosity. He routinely gave speeches to packed halls and testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. H.L. Mencken, a Baltimore journalist who spent his career skewering American fundamentalism, wasn’t a sympathetic witness. But even he described Smith as “the gutsiest and goriest, loudest and lustiest, the deadliest and damndest orator ever heard on this or any other earth.” He ran for the United States Senate. More than 100,000 people voted for him.

In 1947, Smith formally established what he called the Christian Nationalist Party.

The phrase was coined, proudly and deliberately, by a man who wrapped antisemitism and white supremacy in the language of Scripture and patriotism.

I’m saying this as a minister of the gospel, not as some political commentator. I don’t belong to a political party, and I won’t be joining one as a matter of personal conviction. My problem with Christian Nationalism isn’t partisan. It’s Biblical. And since the Bible keeps getting invoked in all of this, then it’s about time we let the Bible speak to it.

I’m not arguing against Christians engaging in public life. William Wilberforce spent decades in Parliament dismantling the slave trade. Martin Luther King Jr. organized the most consequential moral movement in American history. Their faith was the engine that drove that work. The difference is that they were holding power accountable, not trying to seize it. Christian Nationalism seeks to absorb and control the state. That’s not what Wilberforce or King were doing. That’s something else entirely.

“It’s Just a Term the Media Made Up”

This is the first line of defense I hear when I raise the subject, and it’s the easiest one to dismantle.

Christian nationalists coined the term themselves. Gerald L.K. Smith named his movement, his party, and his crusade with those exact words in the 1940s. The State Historical Society of Missouri houses the Christian Nationalist Crusade Collection. The archives are public. It isn’t even a little ambiguous.

But the argument that it’s “just a media term” is doing something more than just revisionist history. It’s a deflection. It reframes a theological critique as a political attack, which means the person using it never has to engage the actual substance of the concern. If someone tells you that you have a tumor, the smart response isn’t to attack the doctor for ruining your day.

Two sociologists, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, spent years mapping this. Their research describes Christian nationalism as a cultural framework that fuses Christian and American identities into a single demand for political power, social conformity, and insider/outsider boundaries. It operates on a spectrum, and most people who hold these views don’t use the label. But the term describes something that’s measurable and historically documented. Calling it a media invention doesn’t actually make it one.

“What’s Wrong with Being a Christian and Loving My Country?”

Nothing. Not a thing is wrong with that. And this question deserves a genuine response, rather than some dismissive brush-off.

So, let me be clear: I love this country. I’m grateful for the freedoms I enjoy. I pray for the people who serve in public life. I have family members who have served in the military, and I honor their service and sacrifice. None of that is the issue.

The problem is what happens when love of country and love of God get fused into a single identity, when the cross and the flag become interchangeable or overlapping symbols, and loyalty to the nation becomes the measure of one’s faithfulness to Christ. The Bible has a word for giving that kind of ultimate allegiance to something other than God: Idolatry.

Patriotism is the love of a place and its people. It’s a form of gratitude. It involves the impulse to serve your neighbor and be a good steward of the land you’ve been given. Christian Nationalism takes that love and distorts it into an absolute claim. It says this nation has a unique covenant with God and that the boundaries of the kingdom of God and the borders of this country are one and the same. It necessarily creates insiders and outsiders, and it baptizes political power in the name of Jesus so it can use that power to enforce conformity.

Patriotism appreciates our home. The idolatry of Christian nationalism worships it. The Bible isn’t confused about where the line is.

God Already Warned Us About This

In 1 Samuel 8, the elders of Israel come to the prophet Samuel and ask for a king. They want to be like all the other nations. God eventually tells Samuel to give them what they want, but not before making something clear. “It is not you they have rejected,” God says, “but they have rejected me as their king.”

Then Samuel delivers a warning that reads like a prophecy and an autopsy at the same time. Your king will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots. He will take your daughters. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards. And when he’s done taking, you yourselves will become his slaves.

The people heard all of that and said, “No! We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations.”

That phrase should haunt every Christian who has ever argued that America needs to be “restored” as a Christian nation. The desire to look like the other nations, to consolidate religious identity and political power under a single banner, isn’t a matter of faithfulness to God. In the biblical narrative, it’s actually a rejection of God’s sovereignty. God grieves it. And then God gives them exactly what they asked for, and all of the consequences that come with it.

Solomon violated every limit God placed on kingship. He acquired horses. He accumulated gold. He took hundreds of wives. When he died, the kingdom was split in two and never recovered. The biblical writers don’t treat that as a mere political miscalculation, but as what happens when a nation decides that God needs a throne to sit on instead of a people to dwell among.

Now, someone will probably ask, “But what about David, Hezekiah, and Josiah? Weren’t they godly kings who brought genuine reform?” Follow the story to the end. David murdered a man and took his wife when his power gave him the opportunity. Solomon violated every single limit God placed on the institution. Even the best of the reforming kings left the idolatrous “high places” standing. The prophets never called for more aggressive administration. They pointed toward something deeper: Ezekiel called it “a new heart”. Jeremiah described “a covenant written on human hearts”. The Kingdom of God is an inside-out project. When we attempt to enforce it from a throne, we forfeit transformation for power.

The Temptation Jesus Refused

There’s a moment in the life of Jesus that should end every argument about whether God wants Christianity fused with political power.

In Matthew 4, the tempter takes Jesus to a very high mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” the tempter says, “if you will bow down and worship me.” It’s the most direct offer of political power in the entire Bible, and Jesus flatly refuses it. He doesn’t negotiate. He just quotes Deuteronomy and walks away.

That sets the trajectory for everything that follows. Jesus is offered the chance to build a kingdom the way every other kingdom has ever been built, through dominion, through the kind of top-down authority that Christian Nationalism insists God wants the church to exercise. Jesus says no.

He says no again after the feeding of the five thousand, when the crowd tries to make him king by force. He withdraws to a mountain by himself. He says no again before Pilate, when he tells the governor, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight.”

In different ways, Jesus is presented with political power three times. Every time, he refuses. If the Son of God refuses to build the Kingdom of God through political domination, what makes us think we should?

The objection that tends to come at this point is predictable: Jesus’s refusal was unique because his kingdom was uniquely spiritual, and Christians in a democracy have different civic responsibilities. But Paul wasn’t Jesus. Neither was Peter. None of the apostles claimed any kind of divine kingship, and they all refused to let Caesar determine their ultimate allegiance. Christianity’s refusal of coercive power isn’t a Jesus-only precedent. It’s the founding posture of the whole church. Democratic citizenship gives Christians real civic responsibilities. It doesn’t give the church a mandate to take control of the state.

The Image and the Furnace

In Daniel 3, King Nebuchadnezzar builds a golden image and commands every official in his empire to bow down and worship it. The penalty for refusal is death by fire. Three Jewish exiles refuse anyway. Their answer to the king is a remarkable statement of conscience: “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”

This is one of the oldest stories in Scripture about a political ruler demanding religious allegiance and equating loyalty to the state with divine worship. And the heroes of the story are the ones who refuse to bow.

The Beast That Demands Worship

The book of Revelation was written to churches living under the boot of the Roman Empire. It’s arguably the most politically charged book in the New Testament, and it’s honestly been misread more often than it’s been understood.

In Revelation 13, John describes a beast rising from the sea, empowered and authorized by the dragon. This beast demands worship. A second beast rises from the land and uses religious symbolism to enforce that worship. Together, they represent the fusion of political power and religious authority in the service of empire.

Most biblical scholars read the first-century context as the interpretive key here. The beast is Rome. The second beast is the imperial cult, the religious infrastructure that demanded citizens declare “Caesar is Lord” as a condition of participation in public life. The Christians who refused to say it were persecuted, exiled, and even killed.

Revelation warns about what happens when the state claims divine authority, when national power wraps itself in the language of worship, and political allegiance morphs into religious devotion. The early church saw this clearly, because they were being killed for their refusal to participate in it.

When Christians today drape the cross with the flag and conflate loyalty to a political leader with loyalty to Christ, they’ve done the very thing Revelation was written to warn them about.

“Jesus Is Lord” Was a Political Statement

In the first century, “Jesus is Lord” wasn’t a devotional bumper sticker. It was a direct challenge to the claim that Caesar was Lord. When Paul wrote in Philippians that “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,” he was echoing the language of the Roman imperial cult and subverting it. He was defiantly declaring that there’s a power higher than Rome, and that this power has a name.

The earliest Christian confession was a public declaration of allegiance to Christ over the State. Saying “Jesus is Lord” meant refusing Caesar’s claim to the same title.

Christian Nationalism inverts that confession. Instead of saying “Jesus is Lord, and therefore no nation, no party, and no leader can claim ultimate allegiance,” it says “Jesus is Lord, and therefore this nation and this leader have been chosen by God to rule.” The confession that once challenged empires is now deployed to baptize them.

Someone is probably already reaching for Romans 13. That text deserves more than a footnote, and I’ve addressed it directly in a previous piece. The short version is this: Romans 13 isn’t a blank check for state authority. It’s embedded in a sustained ethical argument about refusing to meet evil on its own terms.

What the Prophets Actually Said

The Hebrew prophets actually confronted this head-on.

When Amos condemned the nations, he didn’t limit himself to Israel’s religious failures. He condemned Damascus for its cruelty in war. He condemned Gaza for human trafficking. He condemned Edom for its lack of pity. He was holding other nations who claimed other belief systems to a moral standard they didn’t even acknowledge. But, then, he turned the same fire on Israel. “You only have I chosen of all the families of the earth,” God says through Amos, “therefore I will punish you for all your sins.”

God’s chosen people were actually held to a higher standard than everyone else. That’s what “chosen” meant: Not, “Selected to be God’s special favorites who can do no wrong,” but, “chosen to live a particular way for a particular purpose.” Any theology that suggests America has a special covenant with God really should read the fine print. Those covenants come with accountability, and the prophets make it devastatingly clear what happens when the people of God mistake divine favor for divine endorsement of whatever they want to do or think they deserve.

Micah compressed the entire prophetic tradition into a single verse: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Frankly, the prophets wouldn’t recognize a faith that wraps itself in the flag of any nation and calls that faithfulness to God. On second thought, they’d recognize it immediately. They just wouldn’t call it faithful or Godly.

The Barmen Declaration and the Church’s Most Dangerous Temptation

In 1934, as the German Christians movement was aligning the church with National Socialism, Karl Barth and the Confessing Church drafted the Barmen Declaration. For my money, it’s one of the most important theological documents of the twentieth century, and it was written in response to exactly the kind of national-religious fusion we’re discussing.

Its first thesis reads: “Jesus Christ, as He is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”

And then it adds a full-throated rejection that should be nailed to the door of every church in America that has conflated the gospel with a flag: “We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”

The Barmen Declaration wasn’t written in a vacuum. It was written because clergy in Germany were draping the cross in a flag bearing a swastika and calling it true Christianity. It was drafted because the church had convinced itself that national identity and Christian identity were the same thing, and that loyalty to the Führer was a requirement of loyalty to Christ.

I wrote my Master of Theological Studies comprehensive exam on that crisis. The case study I had to respond to was set in 1934. The questions it raised have haunted me for almost two decades. How do churches confuse partisan loyalty with Christian faithfulness? How does theology get bent to justify unChristlike behavior and policies that are made to feel necessary? When does neutrality in the face of evil start to look virtuous because faithfulness to the actual Way and ethics of Christ has gotten too inconvenient?

Those don’t feel like hypothetical questions anymore.

What It Costs Us

There’s something about Christian Nationalism that I don’t think gets the attention it deserves: Christian Nationalism destroys the church’s credibility.

The moment the church becomes the chaplain of the state, it loses its ability to speak truthfully to the state. Once the cross becomes a prop for political power, it ceases to be the cross and becomes civil religion, and exactly the “crutch” that Karl Marx accused it of being. It becomes a rubber stamp approval of the state that takes the Lord’s name in vain every time it’s invoked. And the people watching…The people outside the church, (the people Jesus told us to love), can see it. And they understand what it implies: If these people don’t trust the ethics or Way of their Christ enough to live them out in public life, then why should I?

When the church wraps itself in the flag, the unchurched accurately see a power grab dressed in religious language. When Christians defend political leaders with more ferocity than they defend the teachings of Jesus, the world files that as evidence.

A French sociologist and theologian named Jacques Ellul spent decades studying how propaganda reshapes the people it passes through. His core argument was simple: propaganda doesn’t inform people. It conscripts them. When the language of faith becomes the language of political loyalty, the gospel has been subverted and corrupted. The medium has become the message, and the message no longer has much to with Jesus beyond the utility of deploying his name for the cause.

Every time the church grasps for political power, it trades the Kingdom of God for a subservient seat at the table of whoever happens to be in charge.

The Real Question

To be clear, you can be a Christian and love your country. While I don’t personally affiliate with political parties, you can be a Christian and be a member of a political party, provided that you maintain a prophetic voice where necessary instead of just being part of a handy group of unquestioning yes-men. The real question is whether you are giving your country, your party, or any other faction your highest allegiance.

A man who published a magazine called The Cross and the Flag coined the term Christian Nationalism and ran for office on a platform of white Christian supremacy. The question is why that history tends to make us uncomfortable rather than careful.

In the wilderness, the devil offered Jesus every kingdom on earth. All it would cost was worship. Jesus said no.

The church’s calling in this hasn’t changed. It’s still to say no. It’s still to refuse to bow to the golden image even when the music is playing and everyone around us is already on their knees. It’s still to subversively and defiantly say “Jesus is Lord” and to truly mean it, which requires the courage to also insist that no president, no party, and no nation can have the Lordship that belongs only to Christ.

In 1850, the United States Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. The law required citizens in every state, including states that had outlawed slavery within their own borders, to assist in the capture and return of people who had escaped enslavement, and refusing to comply was a federal crime.

Christian ministers in the North who objected to slavery on moral and theological grounds were told, in no uncertain terms, that their faith required their obedience to this edict. The passage their critics pointed to was Romans 13.

Romans 13:1-7 NIV

1 Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

2 Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended.

4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

5 Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.

6 This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing.

7 Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

The message was clear:

• God ordained the government.

• The government passed the law.

• Obey.

Some of the ministers complied. Some refused. The ones who refused were called lawless, radical, and unfaithful to Scripture. Many of them broke the law anyway, sheltering fugitives and operating what became known as the Underground Railroad.

The thing is, we don’t honor the ministers who complied with the Fugitive Slave Act. We rightfully honor the ones who defied it. We name schools after the people who ran the Underground Railroad, not those who turned the runaways in.

But here’s the part that should keep us up at night: The ministers who quoted Romans 13 to defend slavery weren’t just being dishonest about what the text says. They were reading the words accurately. But what they were doing was something more sophisticated and dangerous. They were deploying a text selectively to baptize a political outcome they had already decided to support.

That’s the real problem with Romans 13 in American Christianity. We inherited a misreading of the text, which we reach for when it’s useful and then conveniently forget where we put it when it’s not.

The Pattern

When a president you voted for is in office, Romans 13 becomes a sacred obligation that we deploy to get others who don’t support that president in line: Submit to the governing authorities! Don’t resist! God is in control! Trust the process!

But when a president you didn’t vote for takes the oath, Romans 13 tends to disappear from the conversation entirely, and we, frankly, resent it when anyone tries to bring it up. Suddenly, the vocabulary shifts to holy resistance, prophetic witness, standing up for the truth, and refusing to bow to an ungodly agenda.

In 1998, the late James Dobson was the undisputed architect of the Evangelical moral imagination. During the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, Dobson was uncompromising. He wrote, “As it turns out, character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead others and to take them where they should go.” For Dobson in 1998, the moral claim to authority was inseparable from the character of the man holding it.

Fast forward to 2016, where Dobson found himself in a different position. Faced with a candidate on his side of the aisle whose character issues were well-documented, Dobson notably didn’t call him unfit to lead. Instead, he famously described President Donald Trump as a “baby Christian” who “doesn’t have a clue about how believers think, talk and act.” By 2017, the character requirement for leadership had vanished entirely. Dobson shifted to a reading of Romans 13 that demanded unconditional prayer and submission because the president had been “raised up by God.” The character of the leader hadn’t changed, but the partisan utility of the verse had.

The passage stays the same. The politics rotate. And every time it happens, Romans 13 gets reduced from a serious theological text to a rhetorical weapon you holster or draw depending on who’s sitting in the Oval Office.

The problem with that kind of reversal isn’t just personal inconsistency. It’s what it does to the church’s ability to speak at all. When the theological standard shifts based on who’s occupying the Oval Office, you haven’t just lost an argument. You’ve lost your credibility. People who have never cracked a Bible in their lives know a double standard when they see one, and they know exactly what it says about whether the people employing it should be trusted. Once they’ve seen it, no amount of subsequent exegesis can convince them you were ever reading the text in good faith. And when you do all of this in the name of Jesus, it isn’t just your own credibility you’ve damaged. The whole church gets a black eye.

What Paul Actually Wrote

To be clear, I take this passage very seriously. I always have. But it deserves a more careful reading than it usually gets, especially when it’s being deployed like a loyalty oath.

Paul doesn’t use the ordinary Greek word for “obey” in Romans 13. He uses “hupotasso,” a word that means something closer to “be subject to” or “recognize the claim of.” Biblical scholars have noted this distinction for decades, and we do well to pay attention to Paul’s word choice here. Paul is certainly not telling the church to do whatever the government says without question. Rather, Paul is acknowledging that governing authority exists within a framework God permits, and he’s counseling the church in Rome to navigate that reality wisely.

And, while we’re at it, the actual church he’s writing to here is kind of important. Paul was writing to a small, vulnerable faith community living under the imperial reign of Nero. These people had no political power, no democratic process, no right to vote, no right to protest, and no First Amendment. Paul wasn’t writing some universal theory of political obedience. He was conveying wisdom about survival to a church that could’ve been easily wiped out by the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of emperor.

Second, look at where the passage actually resides in the letter. Romans 12 ends with Paul’s instruction: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Paul goes directly from that sentence into the passage about governing authorities. He’s continuing the same ethical argument, not changing subjects. When we rip Romans 13 out of that context and hand it to any sitting administration, we are reading Paul’s words in a way Paul never intended.

Third, the passage has a limitation Paul himself built into it. He calls the governing authority “God’s servant for your good.” That phrase assumes a purpose. It assumes a standard. When a government stops serving the good of its people and becomes an instrument of cruelty and oppression, Paul’s own language starts pointing somewhere else entirely.

Context

The rest of Scripture doesn’t support an unlimited-compliance reading either. Neither do the rest of Paul’s writings.

The Hebrew midwives defied Pharaoh’s direct command to kill Hebrew babies. God didn’t condemn them. He blessed them because of it. Daniel’s three friends refused the king’s decree and walked into a furnace rather than worship an image of political power. Peter and the apostles told the Sanhedrin directly: “We must obey God rather than human beings.” That’s from Acts 5:29, and it sits in the same New Testament writings as Romans 13.

Paul himself wrote many of his letters from prison. He was jailed repeatedly by the governing authorities he described in Romans as God’s servants. If Romans 13 means what the people wielding it as an ace-in-the-hole want it to mean, then Paul’s own biography contradicts it.

The early Christians who originally received and circulated Paul’s letter were arrested, beaten, and executed because they refused to call Caesar “Lord.” If Romans 13 meant unconditional compliance with political authority, the people closest to Paul certainly didn’t live as though it did.

This passage has a long and bloody resume. It was used to defend the institution of slavery. It was used to support the Fugitive Slave Act. It was invoked by apartheid theologians in South Africa. Tens of thousands of German pastors used it to justify their silence and compliance under the Third Reich. And every single time this text has been weaponized to demand submission to an unjust system, history has eventually rendered its judgment, and that judgment has never been kind.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer read Romans 13 carefully, and he took Paul seriously. His conclusion was that a literal, isolated reading of this passage was not faithfulness to Scripture but, rather, a fundamental betrayal of the gospel. Bonhoeffer’s choice to resist cost him his life on a Nazi gallows. The pastors who chose compliance kept their pulpits and their lives, but they lost something far more important.

The Real Test

There is a simple way to determine whether your reading of Romans 13 is theological or tribal: Ask yourself whether it applies equally regardless of which party holds power.

If you quote it to defend one president and ignore it under another, you aren’t reading and applying Scripture. You’re just using it.

If you tell people to submit quietly when your party is in power and then amplify every criticism and conspiracy theory when the other party wins, you aren’t following what Paul wrote in Romans 13. You’re just following partisan propaganda dressed up in theological clothing.

If you appeal to Romans 13 to silence any criticism of a leader you support but don’t practice what you preach when someone you don’t support is in office, you have a clear consistency problem that no amount of Biblical interpretation can fix.

This isn’t a left-right issue. I’ve watched it happen in both directions. I’ve seen progressives discover the importance of submitting to authority the moment their preferred candidate took office and conservatives discover the importance of prophetic resistance the moment theirs left. The standard by which leaders are evaluated has to remain consistent regardless of who is in power. As a minister who, out of personal conviction, holds no allegiance to any political party, I don’t have (or want) the luxury of pretending otherwise.

What It (Really) Requires

When we read Romans 13 honestly within the full scope of Paul’s argument, it does something more demanding than either side of the political spectrum wants it to do.

It doesn’t give the government a blank check, and it doesn’t grant unlimited authority to whoever happens to hold power at a given time. Rather, it places governing authority within a moral framework where its legitimacy is tied to its purpose. “God’s servant for your good” is not an uncritical endorsement. It’s a job description, and like any job description, it implies the possibility that the leadership in question can fail to meet its requirements.

And, I want to say this clearly: This passage does not give the church a blank check either. It doesn’t allow Christians to reach for this text when it’s useful, only to set it aside when it’s not. If a text like this means anything at all, it has to mean it all the time, not just when our own party is in power.

What the passage actually calls for is a posture of engagement with governing authority, which is neither a matter of blind obedience nor reflexive rebellion. It calls for the kind of discernment that recognizes authority without worshipping it, that respects order without abandoning conscience, and that evaluates power by the character of the God who permits it rather than by the party that wields it.

That’s a harder reading than either side probably wants. It doesn’t give you a magical, bulletproof Bible passage to shut down all of your opponents. Instead, it hands you a mirror.

Paul ends this section by telling us to give everyone what we owe them: taxes, revenue, respect, and honor. But we often forget that debt is a two-way street. In the economy of the Kingdom of God, honor isn’t a blank check we hand to anyone with a title. A leader who demands honor and respect while violating the very good they were appointed to protect is asking for payment on a debt that is not owed to them. You cannot honor a lie in the name of Jesus. You cannot, in the name of Jesus, respect cruelty. To give honor to injustice is not obedience to what Paul wrote; it is a betrayal of the God that Paul was writing about.

The Real Question

Romans 13 is not a loyalty test for citizenship. It is a theological claim about where ultimate authority actually resides. And the answer Paul gives is not “with the government.” His answer is “with God.”

The moment we use this text to sanctify our political preferences, we’ve committed the exact error the text was written to prevent. We have mistaken the instrument for the hand that holds it.

Romans 13 isn’t asking us “which political leader will you obey?” It asks something far more important: “Who is Lord?” And if your answer is Jesus, then every political allegiance on earth just became provisional, partial, and permanently subject to a higher authority that no election can grant and no inauguration can revoke.

If you only remember that when the other party wins, you’ve already answered the question.

You just might not like what your answer reveals.

Early on, I was looking at this text just because this was the Sunday after tax day in the U.S. But, after a week where the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus (or a Christ-figure), and then claimed that he thought the image depicted him as a doctor after receiving bipartisan backlash (which, to be clear, does not make more sense), the passage seemed to be more timely and have more to say than I had anticipated.

Full disclosure: I picked this text because tax day was last week, and the passage mentioned taxes. But the wind of the Spirit blows where it wants to, and this developed into something much bigger and more challenging than that.

For almost twenty years at this church, I’ve demonstrated repeatedly and consistently that I don’t speak from a politically partisan perspective and that I won’t use this pulpit for politically partisan purposes. In all that time, I haven’t. I’m not going to today. I won’t do it in the future. And technically, I can’t, since I don’t occupy a partisan position in the first place.

I’m not a member of a political party. That’s my personal conviction, and it’s not a conviction I’m particularly trying to bind on any of you. If you’re a Democrat or a Republican, I’m not asking you to change that. But true allegiance to the Kingdom of God should certainly outrank allegiance to any political party. So if you align with one or the other, your job inside that party is to be a prophetic voice, not an uncritical mouthpiece for it. Your primary allegiance shapes every other subordinate allegiance you carry, not the other way around. If what you or I call our primary allegiance is modified to fit one of our other subordinate allegiances, we may be confused, or we may even be deluding ourselves, about where our primary allegiance actually lies.

Here’s the thing: most people use the word “political” when they actually mean “partisan.” But politics and partisanship aren’t the same thing, and I’m convinced that treating them as if they are has cost the American church more credibility than almost anything else in living memory.

The dictionary defines politics as “the activities involved in getting and using power in public life, and being able to influence decisions that affect a country or a society.” Another definition calls it “the total complex of relations between people living in society.” That means politics isn’t just about elections or government. It’s the entire structure of how human beings live together and who holds power over whom.

That’s a very different thing from partisanship.

The dictionary defines partisanship as “strong and sometimes blind adherence to a particular party, faction, cause, or person.” Unchecked partisanship ends up convincing people to lock into defending their team or tribe, regardless of what their team or tribe does. If we aren’t careful, we end up trading our consciences for team jerseys.

This kind of rampant partisanship isn’t just a political failure for the church. It’s a theological failure.

The church’s allegiance is to Jesus Christ. Jesus doesn’t promote or endorse any political party’s platform. He never has. He never will, no matter what they tell you. The Pharisees tried to pull him into the partisan conflicts of their time and place, and Jesus never took the bait. His Kingdom is organized around entirely different priorities than any earthly politically partisan faction. When any Christian minister gives allegiance to partisan loyalty, the people in the congregation have lost one of the main voices in their lives that is supposed to be free from it.

But, just as importantly, a Christian minister who goes silent every time the subject involves power, governance, or the conduct of those in authority, that minister hasn’t kept the church out of politics. They’ve just made a political choice in favor of whatever partisan interest benefits when the church keeps its mouth shut. Worse yet, that choice means that particular minister is offering no resistance to worldly powers who would co-opt the church in service of advancing partisan interests instead of the interests of the Kingdom of God, while strongly implying those interests are the same. Choosing silence when power is abused is still a choice, and it’s a choice that always favors whoever is doing the abusing.

The Kingdom of God has never been silent about the relationship between power and the people it either protects or crushes. We like to think of the prophets as mystical fortune-tellers, but they were actually the most grounded political critics of their time. The prophets spoke with the kind of specificity that made powerful people in powerful places very uncomfortable.

The prophet Amos stood in the middle of a prosperous, self-satisfied nation and named its economic and judicial sins out loud, by name, without apology and without softening the indictment for the comfort of the crowd. He saw a system where the poor were sold for a pair of sandals and unflinchingly told Israel it was sin.

Ezekiel is just as specific. For generations, we have tried to domesticate the story of Sodom, turning it into a narrow warning about a single category of behavior. But Ezekiel unmasks that comfortable reading of Biblical history. He tells us that the actual sin of Sodom was that she was arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned. She had plenty of bread and plenty of security, but she refused to help the poor and the needy. For Ezekiel, the real sign that the nation has lost its soul isn’t found in its cultural debates or culture wars. It’s found in its refusal to recognize and acknowledge the image of God in the people it was supposed to protect.

And when we cross over into the New Testament, the pattern doesn’t change. John the Baptist stood before Herod and told the most powerful man in the region that what he was doing was wrong, and it cost him his head.

That’s the tradition I am standing in when I stand in this pulpit. And this tradition only sharpened over time, because when the early church picked up where the prophets left off, they didn’t just critique the empire. They made a claim that the empire just couldn’t tolerate.

The early church didn’t face execution for believing in personal salvation. They faced it because they said “Jesus is Lord” and knew exactly what they were saying and what it meant. You see, “Kyrios” (Kai-ree-os), which means Lord, was Caesar’s title. It was the language of ultimate authority, the language of divine right, the language of ultimate and final allegiance. When Paul wrote to the church in Philippi, which was a Roman colony where the imperial cult ran deep, and told them that every tongue would confess Jesus Christ as Kyrios, nobody there missed his point. When Polycarp, who was the bishop of Smyrna and a disciple of the apostle John, stood before the Roman proconsul and was told to say “Caesar is Lord” and offer sacrifice, he confessed Christ instead. The proconsul understood exactly what he meant. So did Rome. That confession cost people their lives, not because Rome was hostile to religion, but because Rome recognized a rival claim about who held final authority over human life when they heard one. If Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not.

And if Jesus is Lord, whoever sits in the Oval Office is not either.

Those people lost their lives over this. The worst that could happen to me, I guess, is that I could lose my job. I’ve prayed about that. I’ve talked to (my wife), Dana, about it, and we’ve prayed about it together. I’ve genuinely wrestled with it. And I believe the Holy Spirit has made it clear to me that silence is not something a minister of the Gospel gets to choose at these moments. If I get fired for speaking the truth in love, so be it. A minister who won’t tell uncomfortable truth to the people entrusted to him because he’s afraid betrays both his calling and the One who called him. My commitment to Christ and to truth does not permit me to allow that to be a factor. And I love this church too much to tell you anything less than the truth.

So, if my service to this church has meant anything to you, if you’ve seen anything of Christ in my stumbling attempts to follow him, I’m asking you to hear me out. Remember: truth is never afraid of questions.

The Trap

Matthew 22:15-17, New International Version

Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”

The Pharisees and the Herodians didn’t like each other. You have to understand that tension to make sense of this text. The Pharisees were the popular religious authorities who were deeply committed to the law and the preservation of Jewish identity against Roman influence. The Herodians were the political class who had decided that cooperation with Rome was more profitable than conflict. These two factions rarely found themselves on the same side of any issue, but they agreed that Jesus was a problem that needed to be solved.

They decided to solve that problem together.

They approached him in public and opened with heavy flattery. They called him a man of integrity who taught the way of God in accordance with the truth. They claimed he was not swayed by others and paid no attention to things like social status. To be clear, the praise was actually a trap designed to make it impossible for him to dodge the question they followed it with. If he tried to avoid the issue, the crowd would wonder why a man of such supposed courage had suddenly lost his voice.

The question was about the imperial tax that every person in a Roman province was required to pay. And their trap was airtight. If Jesus told them to pay the tax, he would lose the crowd. These people hated the tax because it funded the Roman occupation and forced them to acknowledge Caesar’s authority. If Jesus endorsed it, the Pharisees could label him a collaborator.

If he told them not to pay the tax, the Herodians would report him to the authorities. He would be labeled a revolutionary and a threat to public order. And Rome had very specific and very violent ways of handling threats to public order.

They thought they had cornered him. But they did not account for the fact that when people give Jesus multiple-choice questions, he almost never plays by their rules or accepts their limitations. False binaries don’t fool him.

The Coin

Matthew 22:18-22, New International Version

But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.

He asked to see a denarius, and someone in that crowd produced one immediately. If you move past that detail too quickly, you miss something that should have made everyone in that courtyard pretty uncomfortable. They were carrying Rome’s currency inside the Temple while Jesus carried nothing. They were already embedded in the system they were trying to use against him.

He held it up and asked whose image and inscription were on it. The coin they handed him was almost certainly a Tiberius denarius. One side bore the face of Caesar and carried the Latin inscription “Tiberius Caesar, Son of the Divine Augustus.” The other side said, “Highest Priest.” That wasn’t a neutral piece of currency. It was a theological statement pressed into metal. Every time someone exchanged that coin at a market stall, they were participating in the claim that Caesar was divine.

They gave the only answer they could: “Caesar’s.”

Jesus told them to give it back to him. He told them to give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s. Matthew tells us the crowd was amazed, and then they went away. That’s the Gospel’s way of telling you there was no rebuttal because there wasn’t one to give. Jesus hadn’t chosen one of their two options. He’d stepped entirely outside the framework they’d constructed and landed somewhere they hadn’t anticipated.

The trap became completely irrelevant the moment Jesus asked a much larger question that struck at the very foundation on which their trap depended. If the image on a coin determines to whom that coin belongs, then what does the image on a human being determine?

Everyone standing there had been reading Genesis since they were old enough to sit in the synagogue. They knew the answer. In the beginning, God created humanity in his own image. Theologians call this the Imago Dei, which in Latin means “the image of God.” It’s the foundational claim that every human being carries the signature of the Creator. God didn’t just scratch his profile on a little piece of metal. He placed his own image on every person who has ever drawn a breath. That act of creation established a claim that no government ever had or ever will have the authority to override.

Caesar can claim the coin. But he can’t claim the person, because the person belongs to a different Kingdom entirely.

The Image

Genesis 1:26-27, New International Version

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

If the denarius tells us who owns our money, these verses tell us who we belong to. But there’s a gravity in our current moment that tries to pull us away from that truth. We feel it every time we are pushed to see our primary identity as that of our party or tribe. We see it in that subtle shift where we find ourselves defending things we know are wrong because we’ve been told the other side is some kind of existential threat. This is a form of spiritual theft. It is an attempt to take the image of God that was pressed into your very being at creation and replace it with a cheap partisan brand.

We see this most clearly in the way we’ve begun to manufacture our own messiahs, although we mostly don’t call them that. We have all seen digital images of Jesus draped in a flag or standing behind a candidate or an elected official, as if the King of Kings were a consultant. (We’ve even seen one image this week where the President was depicted as Jesus or a Christ-like figure himself.) That isn’t just bad art. It’s theological forgery. These kinds of images attempt to co-opt the image of God and use it to baptize our own desire for power and our need to feel certain and right.

But the Gospel gives us a different way to look at things.

In 1948, a forty-year-old Polish Jewish refugee named David Tasma lay dying of cancer in a crowded London hospital ward. He had survived the wreckage of Europe only to find himself alone in a medical system that had no room for a patient they couldn’t cure. To the staff on the ward, David was an inconvenience. He was a man without family or money who was simply taking up a bed that could be used for someone with a future. They looked past him because he was no longer useful to the state.

But a young social worker named Cicely Saunders refused to let him disappear. She sat by his bed, and she listened to him because she believed that a person matters simply because they exist. While the doctors saw a terminal case, Saunders saw a man who bore the image of God.

Before he died, David Tasma gave her every cent he had in the world. It was a gift of five hundred pounds, which is about thirty thousand dollars U.S currency (adjusted for inflation). He told her he wanted his gift to be a window in whatever she built. That thirty thousand dollars became the cornerstone of the modern hospice movement. It happened because one woman recognized the image of God in a man the world was ready to forget. She knew that David didn’t belong to the hospital or the State. She knew he belonged to the Creator.

That’s the ultimate antidote to the tribalism that’s tearing apart our friendships, our families, our country, and our churches. You can’t dehumanize someone if you truly believe they are also made in the image of God. You can’t treat your neighbor as an enemy if you recognize that they carry the same divine signature that you do.

And here is the holy subversion of the answer Jesus gave: The coins may very well belong to Caesar, but even Caesar himself ultimately belongs to the God in whose image he’s made, whether Caesar likes it or not. Rulers, governments, and political parties have no ultimate claim on people, because even the ones at the top of the system are made in the image of One they didn’t create and cannot outrun.

So Caesar may have his little coins, and his trinkets, and his titles and his temporary power. But don’t you dare let any Caesar have your soul. And don’t you dare let any Caesar define who is or is not your neighbor, because God has already spoken definitively on the matter.

The danger of the partisan trap is that it eventually blinds us to what actually matters. We can lose the ability to see the image of God because, if we’re not careful, the image of the party starts to obscure and distort everything else. If we let it grow unchecked, we end up handing Caesar the sovereignty that belongs exclusively to our Creator. And if we let them, rulers, governments, factions, and parties will try to buy and secure their seats of power with a currency that no Caesar has a right to touch.

Benediction

May each of us leave this place with the courage to see the image of God in every face we encounter this week.

May we refuse to give to any earthly power the loyalty that belongs only to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

May we each find the strength to resist the fear that tells each of us to dehumanize our neighbor for the sake of a tribe.

May you and I be windows of grace in a world that has grown far too comfortable with the darkness.

And may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13, NIV)

This past Sunday, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image of himself on Truth Social. He was wearing a white robe and a red sash. His hand was placed on a sick man in a gesture of miraculous healing.

The iconography was unmistakable to anyone with a passing familiarity with the Gospels. When the backlash hit, the President himself said it was supposed to show him as a doctor, making people better. The image has since been deleted. The comment section debates it spawned haven’t.

What erupted in them wasn’t unique to this particular controversy. The same moves appear every time someone raises a moral or theological concern online. The topics change. The names change. The moves don’t.

Let me tell you who I am, because it matters for what follows. I’m a preaching minister formed by the American Restoration Movement. I hold a Master of Theological Studies and a degree in psychology with a minor in journalism. I teach biblical studies and comparative religion. I am not and will not be a member of any political party. Political parties demand more allegiance than I am willing or at liberty to give them. My convictions are theological, not partisan, and they’re rooted in the life and teaching of Jesus. As a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I don’t have the option of looking the other way when the image of Jesus is used to consecrate political power.

A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning. It doesn’t automatically mean a conclusion is wrong. It means the argument doesn’t actually support the conclusion. When we reason this way, we aren’t examining our beliefs. We’re defending them. Those are two very different things.

While the following list is far from exhaustive, these are the specific moves I saw repeated across the threads this week. They represent the most common ways we derail a conversation to avoid the actual point being made.

• Whataboutism shifts the conversation to something completely unrelated. If you raise a theological question about a president posting an image of himself as Christ, and the reply is a catalogue of things the previous administration did wrong, you’re no longer having the conversation you started. You’re having the one someone else decided you’d be having instead.

• The Ad Hominem goes after the person rather than the point. It most commonly takes the form of the TDS label, short for Trump Derangement Syndrome. It pathologizes the speaker so the argument never has to be addressed. A label isn’t a counterargument. If the observation is wrong, show me why. There is a quiet irony buried in the label itself. TDS is almost exclusively deployed by supporters against critics, as though opposing the President is a diagnosable condition. But if the phrase means anything at all, the more obvious candidate for derangement is the person whose devotion to a political figure has crossed into the territory of miraculous veneration, not the person raising a theological objection to it. The diagnosis, it turns out, fits the doctor far better than the patient.

• The Straw Man misrepresents your position so someone can argue against a position you never actually held. If I raise a theological concern about a specific image and someone responds as though I’ve attacked their entire political identity, they aren’t engaging my argument. They’re fighting a ghost.

• The Gish Gallop floods a conversation with so many unsubstantiated claims at once that addressing them all becomes exhausting. It creates the impression of overwhelming evidence while offering none.

Most arguments on social media aren’t really arguments. They are performances. When commenters use these tactics, they aren’t trying to get to the truth. They’re signaling to their tribe that they are loyal. They’re showing they can be counted on to disrupt any critique of the person they’ve chosen to follow. Truth doesn’t trend. Outrage does.

The image that sparked this controversy was making a theological claim. Its loudest defenders never actually engaged that claim. That, it turns out, may be the most instructive thing to see here.

On Easter Sunday, 1939, seventy-five thousand people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Marian Anderson had been scheduled to sing at the most prestigious concert venue in the city, Constitution Hall. But the Daughters of the American Revolution owned the building, and they had a strict policy: No Black performers allowed. First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned from the organization in protest, the NAACP got involved, and the Secretary of the Interior arranged for Anderson to sing outside instead, at the Lincoln Memorial, with the iconic statue of Abraham Lincoln looking on from behind her and the Washington Monument prominent on the horizon ahead.

Anderson was recognized as one of the greatest singers in the world at the time. Arturo Toscanini, who was widely considered the most celebrated conductor of his generation, said she had a voice heard only once in a century. She had performed in the great concert halls of Europe. Now she was standing at a microphone on the steps of a monument because the people who ran the concert hall had decided she didn’t belong inside because of the color of her skin.

She opened with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” Everyone in the crowd knew the words. Like most of us, they’d sung them since childhood.

And then she reached the third line and changed two words.

The original lyric says, “of thee I sing.” However, Marian Anderson sang, “to thee we sing.” When “I” became “we,” she wasn’t just singing for herself anymore. Everyone on that Mall who had ever felt like that song wasn’t for them suddenly found themselves included. And when “of” became “to,” the song stopped being a description of a nation and became something more like a conversation. She wasn’t singing about America now. She was singing to America. This woman, who had been turned away at the door, now stood on the steps and addressed the house directly.

A hush fell over the audience as she sang the line, and tears began to stream down many of their faces.

Her decision to change two words reframed something that previously felt to many like it only belonged to some of them in a way that opened it up to all of them.

Call & Response

Luke 4:16-30 (NIV)

“He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. ‘Isn’t this Joseph’s son?’ they asked. Jesus said to them, ‘Surely you will quote this proverb to me: Physician, heal yourself! And you will tell me, Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’ ‘Truly I tell you,’ he continued, ‘no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed - only Naaman the Syrian.’ All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.”

The first-century synagogue wasn’t exactly a sanctuary the way we think of one. It was the civic and religious center of the village, the place where Torah was read, disputes were settled, and a community defined and affirmed its identity. On the Sabbath, the service followed a rhythm that everyone in the room knew by heart. It started with a reading from the Torah, which was followed by one from the Prophets. When the reader sat down, it signaled to the assembly that the teaching was about to begin. Any adult Jewish male could be invited to read.

But not every man who walked to the front carried equal clout. In first-century Galilee, your family name often functioned as your credentials before you even said a word. Jesus of Nazareth was a craftsman’s son, who was back in his hometown after word had gotten around about what he’d done in Capernaum. He was about to stand up in front of people who had watched him grow up and…I think the technical term is “freak them out.”

Taking the Bible seriously sometimes means reading it slowly enough to ask uncomfortable questions.

Most of us read this as a two-stage story, where the crowd gives two different responses to Jesus in short succession. First, Jesus reads from Isaiah, and the room warms up to him. And then, something he says makes the crowd turn on him and become violent. The NIV translation of verse 22 supports that reading: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips.”

But that reading doesn’t actually hold up under its own logic. If the room had been charmed by Jesus’s reading, His response to them makes no sense. He doesn’t accept the praise. He pivots immediately to “no prophet is accepted in his hometown,” then tells them two stories about God’s mercy going to Gentile outsiders instead of Israelites like them. A man responding to a warm and receptive room doesn’t do that. That sounds more like a man responding to a hostile crowd.

The original Koine Greek in verse 22 is worth looking at here. The two verbs, martyreo and thaumazo, are genuinely ambiguous words. Martyreo can mean “to speak well of someone or “to testify against them”. Thaumazo means “to be struck hard by something”. It covers wonder and admiration, but it covers shock and offense just as easily. When you take the alternative readings seriously, you get the rendering that theologian and author Derek Flood offers in his book, Disarming Scripture. His version of verse 22 reads: “All bore witness against him and were shocked at the words of grace coming from his mouth.”

One translation shows you a room that’s warming up to him. The other gives you a room that’s already turned.

Part of that reaction was probably about Jesus’s claim that the prophecy he’d just read had been fulfilled in their hearing. But I think the thing that bothered them the most was what he left out.

Editor in Chief

Isaiah 61:1-2 (NIV)

“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn.”

Look at what Jesus actually reads in Luke’s account. He reads about good news for the poor, freedom for prisoners, sight for the blind, relief for the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favor. But, then, he stops, rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant, and sits down.

Don’t miss this. Jesus stopped what the prophet Isaiah wrote in the middle of a sentence. He left the rest of the prophecy on the table. “The day of vengeance of our God” never left his lips. That’s not an accident. You don’t find a specific passage in a massive scroll and then cut it off mid-sentence by mistake. This was an intentional, surgical, holy edit by someone who actually had the authority to do it, whether the room recognized his authority or not. Jesus read the mercy and left the vengeance behind.

Everyone in that room knew the rest of that sentence word for word. This was their text. They’d heard it their entire lives. Isaiah 61 was the anchor of their hope, the promise that God would finally settle the score and pour out judgment on their enemies! In their minds, the year of favor and the day of vengeance were two sides of the same coin. You just couldn’t have one without the other.

But Jesus separated them. He pointed to the favor, walked away from the vengeance, and said that the prophecy was fulfilled in their hearing. He wasn’t going to bring God’s wrath down on Rome. He was bringing God’s grace and mercy and offering it to everyone without exclusion.

That’s what made the crowd livid. How dare he? It wasn’t just that a carpenter’s son claimed to be the Messiah. It was the part of Isaiah’s prophecy he chose not to read. The crowd didn’t just want God’s favor. They wanted God’s favor exclusively, and they really wanted the vengeance, too. They were living under the heavy boot of Rome, but after six hundred years of being shuffled from one empire to the next, they were ready for God to send someone who would kick the empires back with some heavy boots of their own. But then, Jesus walked into their synagogue and edited out the part of the text their itching ears had been dying to hear.

Now, to be clear, none of that is the same as saying injustice doesn’t matter, or that six hundred years of imperial oppression was somehow fine. Jesus wasn’t editing out accountability. He was editing in a harder, more demanding kind of justice. “The Year of the Lord’s Favor” was not a pardon for Rome. It referred to the year of Jubilee, which was the ancient practice from Leviticus 25, where debts are canceled, captives are set free, and what had been taken is restored to those from whom it had been taken. Vengeance demands that the oppressor feel and experience what the oppressed felt and experienced, or worse. Jubilee asks a much more profound question: What would it look like if no one ever had to feel that way again? That’s a more ambitious and, frankly, beautiful vision of justice than any military overthrow could ever deliver.

This text was so central to Jesus’s identity that when his own cousin, the man who had announced him to the world, began to doubt while sitting in a prison cell, Jesus referenced it again. John the Baptist had sent his disciples to Jesus with the question, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” John had been preaching about the coming judgment and the fire of God’s wrath, but now he was sitting in a corrupt king’s prison cell, wondering why the hammer hadn’t dropped yet. Jesus sent back a list of his credentials: the blind see, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news. Everything he lists is a direct echo of Isaiah 61. But, once again, the day of vengeance is conspicuously, deliberately absent. Instead, Jesus replaced it with a warning: “Blessed is the one who does not stumble on account of me.”

Because if we’re still looking for vengeance, we’re going to keep stumbling over the Messiah God actually sent.

Jesus shows them that he is where the story was always going. He was revealing that all of those centuries of prophecy weren’t leading to a battlefield. They were pointing to him. Rather than disrespecting Scripture, he was showing them what the story looks like when it finally reaches the point it was always moving toward. As it turns out, the point is mercy.

The crowd in that synagogue wanted a Messiah who would bring the hammer down. Jesus showed them a Messiah who would take the hit himself.

The Cutting Room Floor

Romans 12:17-21 (NIV)

“Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary: ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

In Romans, Paul was writing to a church living in the literal capital of the empire that had executed Jesus. If anyone had a reason to want that vengeance clause restored, it was them. But Paul tells them not to repay evil for evil, not to take revenge, to feed their enemies when they’re hungry, to give them water when they’re thirsty, and to overcome evil with good.

Paul actually does quote that old promise about divine vengeance. He writes, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay.” But, if you look at the context, he quotes it to take the weapon out of our hands and put it on a high shelf where we can’t reach it, because he knows that once we leave the final score to God, we’re finally free to live like the war has already been won.

Following Jesus into the cutting room doesn’t mean pretending that the injustice around us is ok. It doesn’t mean staying quiet in the face of cruelty. It means refusing to become what we’re fighting against. It means trusting that God’s justice is bigger and more beautiful than our propensity for vengeance, and that the answer to a world that breaks people isn’t for us to add more breaking. It’s the patient, difficult, more Christlike work of restoration and reconciliation.

See, I think Paul understood exactly what happened in that synagogue in Nazareth. When Jesus rolled up the scroll and sat down, he wasn’t just making some weird point about how to read the prophets. He was announcing the way his people would live in the world. The Messiah who left vengeance on the cutting room floor was building a kingdom that leaves it there, too. He was announcing a kingdom where violence and revenge don’t get baptized with God’s approval and endorsement.

At this point, some readers may be concerned that I’m advocating editing the Bible to fit our own (or my own) preferences and comfort. I’m not, but it’s worth taking seriously, because plenty of people do exactly that. People always have.

For example, in 1820, Thomas Jefferson sat at his desk at Monticello with a razor and six copies of the New Testament in four languages. He carefully cut passages out and glued them onto blank pages, producing an 84-page document he called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” He kept the moral teachings and cut out every miracle, every sign and wonder, every resurrection. Jefferson edited the Gospels because the supernatural made him uncomfortable. He wanted a Jesus he could manage. That’s literally remaking God in your own image, or, as the Bible calls it, idolatry.

Jefferson used a razor to get a smaller God that fit his Enlightenment sensibilities. Jesus used a scroll to reveal a bigger one who will not be constrained by the little self-impressed and self-serving boxes we try to stuff God into.

The crowd in the synagogue in Nazareth refused to make the cut where Jesus did, and they were enraged at the implication that they should. They actually tried to throw Jesus off the cliff because they couldn’t handle a God who refused to be their weapon. The question for you and me is whether or not we are going to do the same thing. We have to decide if we’re going to keep insisting that God is someone Jesus insists God isn’t, or if we’ll allow Jesus to rewrite our stories to be stories of hope and reconciliation. Discipleship demands that we actually follow Jesus on this. If we don’t, we can’t honestly claim him as Lord. We’ve just reduced him to a mascot on the sidelines of the fights we want to pick.

On August 9, 1943, a farmer from the Austrian village of St. Radegund was taken to a prison in Brandenburg an der Havel and executed by guillotine.

His name was Franz Jägerstätter. He was thirty-six years old.

He left behind a wife, three daughters, a small farm, and a stack of handwritten notes about why following Jesus made it impossible for him to serve in Hitler’s army. Franz wasn’t trying to lead a movement or reform the institutional church. He wasn’t a theologian or a political strategist. He was a man who had come to the inconvenient conclusion that he could not serve two masters and still call himself a disciple.

Before refusing his induction notice, Franz did what any faithful Christian in his tradition would do. He went to his priest. He went to his bishop. Both men gave him the same answer. He had a duty to his Fatherland. God understood the difference between what a Christian was called to do personally and what a citizen owed his nation. The private sphere was for the Sermon on the Mount, but the political sphere operated by a different set of rules entirely.

They weren’t cruel men. They were reasonable men. They believed something very specific about how Christian ethics worked. They were offering him a loophole.

Franz disagreed, and he was beheaded for it.

In 2007, the Catholic Church declared Franz Jägerstätter a martyr. His bishop received no such recognition.

That story is not an anomaly. It is a case study. The argument his bishop made to him is the same one I keep hearing today, just dressed in different clothes. People tell me that I am conflating the way Christians are personally called to live with the way governments have to operate. They say those are different categories and that God knows that.

I want to wrestle with that claim for a moment because it isn’t a stupid one. It is actually quite sophisticated. It has a long history and is backed by serious thinkers. It has also blessed a stunning amount of violence in the name of Christ.

The Constantinian Shift

This wasn’t always the way the church thought. For the first three centuries, the followers of Jesus were remarkably clear about the fact that the Sermon on the Mount was a public vision for a new kind of community. While there were Christians who served in the Roman legions, the theological consensus focused on the church as a third way that didn’t play by the rules of the empire. Origen argued that Christians were the greatest help to the state precisely because they offered a different kind of moral imagination.

Everything changed when the church began to run the Roman Empire. When Constantine moved from the periphery to the center of power, the church faced a crisis of imagination. How do you govern an empire using a gospel that demands you love your enemies and turn the other cheek?

The answer was provided by thinkers like Ambrose and Augustine, who looked past the New Testament and toward the Roman philosopher Cicero. They adopted Cicero’s distinction between private and public duties. Suddenly, the Christian who was forbidden from retaliation in their personal life could support the retaliatory violence of the state with a clear conscience. The loophole was born. We convinced ourselves that the cross was for the individual, but the sword was for the institution. The church moved from being a prophetic witness against violence to being the moral architect of it.

The Logic of the Loophole

By the time we get to the Reformation, Martin Luther had formalized this into the “Two Kingdoms” doctrine. He argued that, as a “person,” a Christian is bound by the gospel, but, as a “prince” or “soldier,” that same Christian is bound by the laws of the world. It was a neat trick. It allowed the church to maintain its piety while the state maintained its power.

In the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr gave this a modern gloss. He called it “Christian Realism.” Niebuhr argued that while individuals might be capable of moral behavior, groups and nations are inherently immoral. Therefore, we shouldn’t expect the state to act according to the ethics of Jesus. We should only expect it to manage power and maintain a relative sort of justice.

This creates a vacuum where the Sermon on the Mount is effectively exiled from public life. It suggests that the “real world” is a place where Jesus has no jurisdiction.

When German Christians in the 1930s used this exact framework to support the Nazi state while personally identifying as followers of Jesus, Karl Barth and the Confessing Church had to write an emergency declaration in response. The Barmen Declaration of 1934 stated plainly: “We reject the false doctrine! As if there are areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords, areas in which we do not need justification and sanctification through him.”

What God Actually Expected of a Nation

The dual ethic assumes that God designed the state as his instrument for managing political life through force. But the Old Testament tells a very different story about how political authority came into existence.

In 1 Samuel 8, the elders of Israel come to the prophet Samuel and ask for a king. They want to be like all the other nations. God tells Samuel to give them what they want, but not before making something clear. “It is not you they have rejected,” God says, “but they have rejected me as their king.”

Then Samuel delivers a warning that reads like a prophecy and an autopsy at the same time. Your king will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots. He will take your daughters. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards. And when he’s done taking, you yourselves will become his slaves.

The people heard all of that and said, “No! We want a king over us.”

So God gave them Saul. And it went exactly as God said it would. Even when Deuteronomy 17 tried to set limits on the monarchy, the restrictions were striking. The king must not acquire great numbers of horses. He must not take many wives. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold. And he must write out a personal copy of the law and read it every day of his life so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God and not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites.

The king was under the law, not above it. And the law he was under was the same one that governed everyone else. Solomon violated every single one of those limits. When he died, the kingdom split in two and never recovered. The biblical writers don’t treat this as a political miscalculation. They treat it as a moral failure, judged by the same standard God had laid out from the beginning.

What the Prophets Actually Said

The Hebrew prophets made all of this explicit. When Amos stood up to condemn the nations surrounding Israel, he didn’t just condemn them for their religious failures. He condemned Damascus for its cruelty in war. He condemned Gaza for its human trafficking. He condemned Edom for its lack of pity. He was holding pagan nations to a moral standard they didn’t even acknowledge.

When Nathan walked into the throne room to confront David over Bathsheba and Uriah, he didn’t give the king an asterisk for political complexity. He treated the king like a man who had broken the law. When Elijah stood in the vineyard of Naboth to confront Ahab, he didn’t care about the economic interests of the crown. He cared about the blood of the innocent.

The claim that God holds nations to a lower standard has no home in the prophetic tradition. It never did.

The Most Politically-Charged Statement

Which brings us to the most politically charged statement in the New Testament: “Jesus is Lord.”

In the first century, that wasn’t a private devotional sentiment. It was a direct challenge to the “Lordship” of Caesar. When Paul wrote that every knee would bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, he was echoing the language of the Roman imperial cult. He was saying that there is a power higher than Rome, and that this power has a name.

Someone reading this is probably already reaching for Romans 13. “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.” I understand the impulse. But Paul wrote that sentence inside a letter that opens in chapter 12 with “do not repay anyone evil for evil” and closes with “do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Romans 13 isn’t a separate ethical category for how governments operate. It’s embedded in a sustained argument about the refusal to meet evil on its own terms. It’s doing specific contextual work that gets lost the moment someone lifts it out of that frame and hands it to a sitting administration. That text deserves its own article, and I am currently working on that piece. For now, we simply need to recognize that it doesn’t do what the dual-ethic crowd needs it to do.

What This Actually Requires

So what does the Way of Jesus demand of nations? It demands exactly what it demands of people. “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Justice demands a public arrangement of resources. Mercy manifests as a national refusal of cruelty. Humility begins when a sovereign state recognizes that it is not the center of the universe.

To be clear, this is not a proposal for a theocracy. I am not suggesting that the church should seize the government and force the world to act like Christians. Jesus himself refused political power three times: in the wilderness, after the feeding of the five thousand, and in the presence of Pilate. The church’s vocation is not to run the state, but to be the prophetic witness that tells the state the truth.

The prophet Nathan didn’t try to become king. Nathan just accurately called the king a murderer. The church is at its best when it refuses to behave like a worldly king, and it is at its most dangerous when it tries to be the king’s advisor by offering him a loophole.

The Price of the Loophole

There is something else this costs that doesn’t get enough attention. When we create a theological loophole for the state, we don’t just compromise our ethics. We compromise our witness.

Jürgen Moltmann captures the lethal irony of this in The Power of the Powerless:

“I should not like there to be any misunderstanding at this point. It may be necessary, indeed unavoidable, to carry on the struggle against the marching feet by means of marching feet, and to break the rods of the slave-drivers with our own rods, provided that there is no doubt about the right to resistance. This right exists when laws are broken, constitutions are destroyed, or fundamental human rights are persistently infringed. But even so, these struggles are still struggles in the night. They are not as yet the light of the final liberation. They are still caught up in the vicious circle of force and retaliation. They still do not bring lasting peace, or unswerving justice. The oppression of the poor is not a state of affairs with which one can rest content. The punishment of the oppressor is not a liberation over which one can rejoice.”

Franz Jägerstätter understood this better than his bishop did. He wasn’t thinking about the survival of the institution or the outcome of the war. He was thinking about his own integrity as a follower of Jesus. He knew that the moment you accept a double-standard for the state, you have already surrendered your own discipleship to a lie.

He chose the guillotine over the oath because he believed that the Kingdom of God is not a private matter that can be safely tucked away while we do the “unavoidable” work of the world. It is a public reality that demands our total allegiance.

The double-standard is a comfort we cannot afford. There is only one set of books. In the end, we won’t be asked if we were loyal citizens of a nation that demanded our participation in the “struggles in the night.” We will be asked if we followed the King who disarmed the powers by refusing to mirror them.

The loophole is not a strategy for the church to gain influence with the state. It is an exit ramp from the Way of Jesus. Franz Jägerstätter died because he refused to take it. We should be terrified of how easily we do.

At 7:06 this morning, the President of the United States posted this:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

I want you to read that again, slowly.

The United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national or ethnic group. The Convention is specific about what it protects. It doesn’t protect regimes or governments. It protects “peoples”, which means their culture, their language, their memory, their children, their future.

I keep coming back to the phrase “never to be brought back.” Regimes fall and are replaced. Governments collapse and reform. But “never to be brought back” means something permanent and irreversible, something that cannot be undone. Regime change ends with something else taking the regime’s place within a particular civilization. “Never to be brought back” starts with the civilization in question and ends with nothing. And that’s exactly what the Convention means by “intent to destroy.”

The man who wrote those words commands the forces conducting the strikes.

He ended the post, and I want you to pay attention here, with “God Bless the Great People of Iran.” A blessing does not cancel a death sentence. You cannot announce the permanent destruction of a civilization, invoke God’s favor on the people you’re destroying, and have those two things coexist without at least one of them being a lie.

I know what some of you may already be typing. You’re going to point to the Canaanites. In the Old Testament, God commanded Israel to destroy entire peoples. The logic of civilizational destruction has Old Testament precedent. I’ve heard it. I understand the argument.

But here’s what I need you to sit with:

Jesus is the interpretive center of the Christian faith, not the other way around. We don’t read Jesus through the conquest narratives. We read the conquest narratives through the lens of Jesus. And the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, who commanded his followers to love their enemies, does not have a footnote that reads “except for Iranians.”

Beyond that, this argument has a track record. It was used to justify the enslavement of African people. It was used, book, chapter, and verse, to justify apartheid in South Africa. Every time it has been deployed to sanctify the destruction of a people, the result has been catastrophic. We recognize trees by their fruit. That tree is rotten to the root.

And here’s the deeper theological problem. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s definitive answer to “never to be brought back.” A theology that celebrates permanent erasure has confused the character of God with the logic of empire.

Some of you may raise objections to my objection based on what Iran has done: what the regime has done to its own people, what it has funded, what it has threatened. I’m not dismissing any of that. But hear me on this: the moment our opposition to genocide becomes conditional on the behavior of the people being threatened, we have already answered the wrong question. This has nothing to do with what they may or may not have done. It has everything to do with who we are and who we are called to be.

Some of you may raise a different objection. You may say that nations operate by a different set of ethics than individuals do, and that what gets called murder in your neighborhood gets reclassified as strategy or policy in a war room. You may say that I’m applying Sunday school morality to a situation that demands harder thinking. I want you to know I hear that argument. I also want you to know that I think it’s the most dangerous idea currently circulating in Christian spaces, because it creates a moral exemption lane wide enough to drive a whole civilization through.

I’m working on a longer piece that gets into this more carefully. But for now, I’ll say this: the prophets of Israel addressed Assyria and Babylon with the same moral vocabulary they applied to Israel. They didn’t shrug and say that empires play by different rules. They named empire as empire, called its violence what it was, and announced that it would be held accountable. The idea that national sovereignty creates a separate moral universe (one where the character of God no longer applies, as long as it gives lip service to God) is not a Christian idea. It’s the oldest imperial lie there is.

I’m a minister. My job obviously isn’t to make foreign policy or forecast military outcomes. My job is to name what I see, clearly and without flinching.

What I see is a stated threat of genocide. I don’t say that for dramatic effect. I say it because what was threatened is literally what the word means. As a Christian (and I can’t believe I actually have to type this), I oppose all threats and acts of genocide. I denounce them in the name of Jesus.

And as a citizen of this country, I want to say this plainly: I do not consent. I do not consent to the commission of genocide in our name. We don’t get to outsource our moral responsibility to the people we elect. What is done in our name belongs to us.

So I’ll ask you the question I’ve been sitting with all morning: Where is your line? Because if this doesn’t cross it, I genuinely want to understand what would.

If the answer is “nothing,” then the question is no longer where your line is. The question becomes, to whom have you actually given your highest allegiance?

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On Easter Sunday morning, the President of the United States posted this on Truth Social:

https://truthsocial.com/@realDon.../posts/116351998782539414

There are a few things in this post that need to be named.

Let’s start here: This is beneath the dignity of the office. Full stop. Whatever your politics, whatever your view of foreign policy, a profanity-laced war threat posted on a national, not to mention religious, holiday is not what the presidency is supposed to look like. That used to be something everyone agreed on.

“Power Plant Day.” “Bridge Day.” These are civilian targets. Power plants keep hospitals running and children warm. Bridges move people, food, and medicine. Under international humanitarian law, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure isn’t a bold military strategy. It’s a war crime. International law experts have already said so.

“You’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH.” He posted that this morning. Easter morning. The morning the church gathers to announce, with everything it has, that the powers of Hell have been defeated. Christians part ways with Jesus when they celebrate bringing more Hell to earth.

“Praise be to Allah.” You may not know this, but Allah is simply the Arabic word for God. It’s not the proper name of the God of Islam. It’s just the word for God. Arab Christians, whose communities trace back to the first century, call God “Allah.” It’s the same word. Using God’s name as the punchline to a bombing threat on one of the most sacred days of the Christian year has a name. It’s called blasphemy.

I’m not speaking from a partisan position, and I’m not quoting partisan talking points. I don’t (and won’t) belong to any political party. As a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I don’t have the option of being silent about things like this.

The resurrection makes a specific claim. It says God doesn’t answer domination with domination. It says coercion and threat and death don’t get the last word. It says the powers of this world, with all their force and fury, fall flat at the tomb that stands empty.

“He is risen” and “you’ll be living in Hell” are not compatible sentences on the same morning.

The church’s job today, as it has always been, is to know the difference.