Ok, perhaps I’m leading with a little too much hyperbole, but there does seem to be an entire cottage industry of online accounts dedicated to complaining about the existence of ordained women within the ACNA, and lambasting the “dual integrities” of the ACNA which enable them. For those unaware, “dual-integrities” is the compromise position of the ACNA which allows dioceses1 that ordain women and those who refuse to do so to co-exist, in fellowship, in the same province.2 And in fairness to the tedious bloviators of Twitter and their better-faith Substack counterparts, the question of disagreeing within a province on an issue that directly affects whether or not an entire gender can perform important roles in the church is not an easy one. Yet these kinds of internal church discrepancies are as ancient as any Christian tradition, and I fear that in our rush to codify confessional certainty, we too easily forget how we got here.

Anyone who has read this publication for longer than a few weeks knows I am a huge fan of the church father Irenaeus of Lyon. Among his many historical contributions to Christianity is the brief role he played in one of the Church’s earliest major disputes, known today as the Quartodeciman controversy. In the second century, a conflict arose around Paschal (Easter) traditions, principally over which day Easter should be celebrated. Churches in Asia Minor, inheriting a tradition they traced back to the Apostle John, celebrated the Paschal feast on the 14th of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish celebration of Passover. Much of the church in the Christian West, though, had taken to celebrating Easter on a Sunday, claiming a tradition handed down from Peter and Paul.

Now, does the day of the week for celebrating a holiday seem like a first-order issue? Maybe not to us. But the contestation for these early Christians was nothing less than apostolic continuity. And neither side was willing to compromise. Several synods convened and declared the matter settled, leading Pope Victor I and others to send letters to the rest of the Christian world decreeing that Easter would be celebrated on Sunday, the Lord’s day. Polycrates, an otherwise lesser-known bishop from Asia, wrote back, refuting the decree, claiming that his tradition in Ephesus descended from the apostles John, Phillip, and many others, ending with an emphatic line in the sand:

“Now, then, brothers, I being sixty-five years old in the Lord and having spent time with brothers from the whole inhabited world and having gone over all the holy writing, am not scared by those who bully me, for those greater than I have said: ‘One must obey God rather than human beings.’”

In response, Victor sought to excommunicate an entire collection of churches in Asia, but was (perhaps)3 swayed by an appeal from Irenaeus, who exhorted him to choose a more peaceable option, and while (according to Eusebius) affirming the Lord’s Day as the proper choice for Easter, he nonetheless insisted that the reasoning of the Asian churches was sound, in that they were seeking to remain in accordance with the faith passed down to them. Furthermore, he pointed out how these sorts of disputes were hardly new and should not impede the community’s ability to remain at peace with each other:

“Such variation among those keeping [the feast] does not just happen now, in our time, but did even long before, in the time of those who came before us, when, so it seems, they were more concerned with commanding a practice that was simple and familiar to common people than with [calendrical] precision, preserving it for posterity, and they lived in peace nonetheless, and we live in peace with one another, and the disagreement over the fast proves the concord of our faith.”4

This, I propose, is a model worth following, and a lesson worth remembering. We will never resolve our disagreements within the Church, or even within any given denomination. Not only are human beings stubborn by nature, but even relatively novel Christian denominations now have a century or two of tradition backing them up. An expression of the Christian faith such as Pentecostalism may be a recent innovation in the grander scope of Christian history, but a new convert to a Pentecostal church today is inheriting generations of venerable history and tradition. And this has always, I cannot repeat enough, always been the case. The church was younger in Irenaeus’ day than the United States is today, and the disparity between what is seen as properly “American culture” according to your average Californian vs your average Arizonian vs your average Missippian vs your average rural Pennsylvanian vs your average urban Pennsylvanian should tell you just how divergently a cultural identity can develop in two and a half centuries. Irenaeus not only wisely recognized that to ask these churches to abandon their sacred practice was a non-starter, but insisted that this discrepancy in practice was an affirmation of each side’s faith and devotion, not an aberration. “The disagreement over the fast proves the concord of the faith.” Both sides have valid reasoning. Neither needs to accept the other’s choice. But even this dispute over the apostolic credibility of church tradition was not sufficient, in Irenaeus’ mind, to break fellowship. Polycrates and Victor I do not have to celebrate Easter together on the same day, or fast for the same time period leading up to the Paschal feast, but this difference in their expression and praxis should not be cause to deny each other access to the table of fellowship in the Lord’s Supper. Or, if you will, Irenaeus insisted that even a dispute over something as important as apostolic tradition was not enough to disqualify one side from being validly “Christian.”

Now look, I’m not going to pretend it’s always a simple thing to figure out where that line between “acceptable disagreement” and “breaking of fellowship” should fall. I realize that centering my own line for such things on affirmation of the traditional creeds is a pretty minimal standard for many, and my personal belief that it is wrong for any Christians who view other denominations as authentically Christian (even if institutionally mistaken) to bar fellow believers from the table is probably seen as too ecumenical for most. I’m not advocating that Catholics need to accept Lutheran priests into their ranks, or that the Coptic Orthodox need to start singing Methodist hymns, or even that the incongruous mess of Anglican communions around the world need to come under one big tent and sing kumbaya. But I do think (and this is me speaking idealistically, not advocating for something I think is realistic) that if you are a Catholic who, despite believing a Pentecostal belongs to the wrong church, has the wrong view of the sacraments, sings the wrong songs, and has the wrong Sunday expression of worship, is still willing to accept that Pentecostal as validly belonging to “Christianity,” then that Catholic and that Pentecostal should be able to break bread together, both casually and eucharistically. In other words, the line over who should be welcome at the table should not be drawn around the “correct” church but at the boundaries of the faith itself.5

And this is where I view Anglicanism as one of the best examples of how this should work, at least as I’ve experienced it in my home parish. We have high liturgy. We have intensely sacramental values and theology. We care deeply about historical continuity. And yet we are reformed, and reforming. We are not willing to abandon the sacred on behalf of cultural whims, but we are willing to change if convicted by conscience and supported by Scripture. Every week, I take communion with fellow parishioners who I know for a fact believe in full-on Roman Catholic-style transubstantiation regarding the Eucharist, and others who I know for a fact hold a strictly memorialist view of it. I approach the altar alongside people who could not articulate a coherent trinitarian worldview if their life depended on it, and others who could (and do) teach classes on the full breadth of trinitarian theology. I kneel beside people to whom I would donate a kidney without a second’s hesitation, and others whose political views I find so viscerally repulsive that I cannot in good conscience cultivate a closer friendship with them. I shake hands with and offer the peace to people I know well, people I have not met, people I love dearly, and people who I will never understand. We are a disparate mess of contradictions who would never, under any other circumstances, find ourselves all gathered under the same roof, much less call each other brothers and sisters, and yet, our disagreements over the fast prove the concord of our faith. We are the Church writ small.

The ACNA's dual integrities create both logistical and theological challenges. I would never pretend otherwise. But the ability to affirm a core creed6 and argue about the rest is the only thing that has ever held any church together. I know people who feel strongly about this topic do not see agreeing to disagree as realistic. For them, even agreeing to disagree is too affirming, and attributes undue credit to the other position as a valid option. As it happens, I understand this impulse. But I also see the seemingly endless obsession with Women’s Orders as largely a fixation; just the latest iteration of a common pattern found across Christian denominations down the centuries where a single culturally relevant issue becomes the scapegoat for all the rot in a given church. I have no doubt that if the anti-WO faction got their wish tomorrow and banished every female in a collar from the province, by next week they’d be fighting over something else that was previously a secondary issue but now raised to first-order importance. If there’s one thing that’s been true about Christianity from its earliest days, it’s that the Church has always found things to fight and factionalize over.7

And yet, the existence of dual-integrities in the ACNA, for all the pontificating screeds it elicits online8 and complications it may cause in inter-diocesan relations, proves that Irenaeus’ insistence on fellowship despite irreconcilable difference is possible. For almost 20 years now, the ACNA has grown steadily, despite its many, many instances of institutional failure and internal messiness, and as such, maybe the lesson should be that dual-integrities is not a problem to be solved but an example the rest of the Christian world should seek to embody. Imagine what it would do for Christian unity if traditions as diverse as Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism could consider themselves “in communion,” without imposing their differences in practice on the other. Imagine what it would do for Christian charity if Catholics and Presbyterians, even while the former considers itself the “true” church and the latter considers the Pope to be the Antichrist,9 could share the Eucharist at a common table. Imagine if, instead of spilling so much ink and expending so much energy polemicizing each other, we could look at fellow Christians whose traditions we do not understand (or even like) and say that our disagreement over the fast proves our concord in the faith.

This is an unrealistic dream. I know many readers are probably down in the comments already lambasting my naivety, or finding some very clever way to label me a syncretist, or some very un-clever way to label me as woke. I know that the Quartodeciman controversy did not end with Irenaeus’ compromise of fellowship; it ended with the slow ostracization and eventual decline of the Quartodecimans, until their last remnants were stamped out by active (Christian) persecution in the fourth and early fifth century. I’m under no illusion that the voices calling for camaraderie and charity amidst substantive conflict will ever hold the cultural power that tribalistic tirades wield, especially in media environments that prioritize engagement and promote divisiveness.

But for what it’s worth, there is a sense in which the ACNA already agrees with me. We have open communion. If you are a baptized Christian, you are welcome at our table. I know many in the province wish this were not so, and have used the situation in South Carolina this past week to make that loud and clear. God in his providence provided Galatians 5:12 to give us holy language with which to tolerate such people. But it remains a simple fact that be you Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist, Non-denominational, or yes, even Episcopalian, in the eyes of the ACNA, you are a Christian, and all Christians are invited forward to share in the body and blood of our Savior. This is a beautiful thing. The Church is a beautiful thing. This willingness to invite all manner of Christians to partake of the Eucharist together, despite real and considerable disagreement over consequential matters, is a beautiful thing.

I’m old enough to remember the pain of the ACNA’s fallout with TEC, and the viciousness with which some in TEC came after those who split from them. I know bitterness between these two organizations isn’t limited to the scapegoating of the perpetually online; there is real history and real hurt there. So to me, seeing two leaders in schism come together in fellowship, even informally, is a beautiful thing. The Christian story is one of reconciliation following bitter exile, and if hoping against reality for more instances of that is foolish, maybe we need more holy fools.

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Spoilers follow for The Odyssey and Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

Okay I’ve got to be honest, as a filmmaker with a Substack, I feel somewhat obligated to write a review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, but I genuinely didn’t expect to have this much to say. There is no shortage of headlines labeling Nolan’s latest outing as “triumphant,” “victorious,” or any other spirit-raising synonym, and I’d like to know what movie those reviewers watched. I left The Odyssey looking like the haggard Odysseus himself at the end of his voyage, stumbling out of the theater with a faraway look in my eye and tears rolling down my face1 because Nolan’s bleak thesis is gut-wrenchingly haunting and, worst of all, true.

There are a hundred other reviews you can find if you want a comprehensive summary, a worthwhile lauding of the film’s technical prowess, or any other standard features of a general film review. I want to focus on the film’s themes, because while I am not above getting a bit misty-eyed over an emotional moment in a quality movie (it doesn’t happen often, but it does happen), I have never cried at a movie’s themes until the worthwhile thesis of The Odyssey made me weep in a Cinemark.

Nolan’s signature style involves teasing the film’s ending in the first few minutes with quick-cut images and enigmatic dialogue you just know a character will repeat as the film winds to a close. He also teases his big twist, which is usually set up early, scattered throughout, and then revealed a bit after you’ve figured it out for yourself, though this “twist” is not always identical to the movie’s thesis. In Oppenheimer, for example, the film’s twist mainly has to do with the political machinations of Lewis Strauss and the Senate committee fiasco that frames the movie alongside Oppenheimer’s security hearing. But the film’s thesis isn’t stated outright until the final line of dialogue, where Oppenheimer asks Einstein if he remembers their fear that an atomic explosion might “cause a chain reaction that destroys the world,”2 and when Einstein indicates he remembers and asks what of it, Oppenheimer harrowingly states: “I believe we did.”

The Odyssey, likewise, sets up a few things early. The sack of Troy is teased, and regular Nolan viewers will instantly spot the shot of Odysseus on the stairs amid the burning Troy, which we will return to throughout until the third act reveals its full context. We’re also repeatedly told about “Zeus’s Law,” essentially a reframing of traditional Greek guest rites as the Christian Golden Rule, and the grave importance of these sacred customs (as well as the villains of the film abusing them). And lastly, we’re warned about the mysterious “people from the sea,” coastal raiders ravaging towns and villages (referencing a real historical group that played a role in the Bronze Age Collapse).3 Like most great mythology, Nolan draws on true historical memory to underpin his story and frames the cataclysmic dark ages that followed the Bronze Age Collapse as an almost prophetic inevitability, set in the future for the characters, while known to us through hindsight.

But none of these things are as they seem. When Odysseus returns home, he reveals that the enigmatic “people from the sea” are none other than the returning veterans of the Trojan War4 (including his own crew) and that the story’s ultimate violation of Zeus’ Law was not the rudeness of the suitors, but the Trojan Horse itself. This thematic implementation of the Odyssey’s plot is nothing short of brilliant, if for no other reason than it makes a 3,000-year-old story distressingly timely. How often are we told by feckless politicians and fear-mongering cultural commentators that “they” are out to get us? Immigrants, communists, gay people, this foreign country or that foreign country, it’s the same playbook every time: they are coming or already here, they don’t share your values, and if we don’t do something to stop them, they are going to undo society and destroy our country. Nolan flips this destructive narrative right on its head; there is an existential threat to the fabric of our society, and it’s us. It’s our soldiers, our leaders, the heroes of the great Trojan war that the bards sing about; their actions, their war, their moral compromise are our undoing. The call is coming from inside the house.

Nolan Odyssey is mythic in scale, and I don’t just mean the production. It takes the Trojan Horse itself and turns it into an idol for the god of gain. The Horse was dishonorable, but Odysseus correctly realizes that honor is not merely an arbitrary chivalric code upheld by high-class society for the sake of appearances; how we treat people is the foundation of civilization. Once we accept the attitude of win no matter what, victory by any means necessary, take what you want, gods and law be damned, we have unleashed something that cannot be put back in the bottle. The gates of Troy open, and Odysseus witnesses “ten years of rage” pour into the city, realizing that this atrocity is a harbinger of what is to come. He connects this violation of Zeus’ Law to a violation of the social contract, a willingness to eschew norms and decency and take what you want by whatever means necessary, and he rightly recognizes that this is a chain reaction that will lead to the inevitable downfall of society. Men who still hold to the “old ways” of honor, of Zeus’ law, will always be taken advantage of by those who have no honor, and society cannot survive a cultural or political landscape where one side sees law and norms as limiting principles, while the other sees them as the outer limits of what they can get away with, boundries to be pushed as far as possible before breaking entirely. The United States of America is currently living through such a crisis, as our present administration falls fully into the latter camp of having no care for American laws, norms, or values, and political forces on both sides of the aisle who do care about such things are powerless to stop them, since they continue to operate within the very bounds of the rules that the administration pays no mind to. Nolan doesn’t just impugn this; he points out that it has happened before, and we all know how it ends.

And if this makes it sound like the message of The Odyssey is ultimately “woke,” as many have complained, that is because it is, but in the original sense of the term. “Woke” originated as slang for recognizing systemic injustice and societal ills (specifically in a 20th-century racial justice context), and The Odyssey is awake to the sad fact that society never truly learns its lesson. The sun rises and sets on empires, but humanity always forgets the mistakes of its past until it makes them again. The Sea Peoples are an existential threat, but they are not an outside, alien force coming to invade our shores and destroy our way of life; they are us making little moral compromises for ten years until the gates collapse and the underlying rage is unleashed and the chain reaction from the atomic explosion ignites the atmosphere and destroys the world. Nolan’s thesis is not subtle: society is undone by our willingness to compromise the values that sustain it for selfish gain or tribal victory.

And if there is any redemption for Odysseus in this, it is his recognition and willingness to take responsibility for opening Pandora’s box. At one point in the film, Odysseus is asked why he holds himself so responsible for his crew when the gods have fated them to die, and Odysseus says it’s because he leads them; he is responsible for them. At that point in the film, this sounds like he’s talking about the literal voyage, but he’s not; he’s talking about his example as their leader in defying the sacred order that governs society (even war) and playing his great trick. He led his men out of a world bound by customs and norms and into a world where selfish leaders enable the masses to violate the sacred, and he is more responsible than they are because he knows better. He knew what he was doing as he did it, and he did it anyway, because he wanted to win. His actions were not the ignorant mistakes of a well-meaning ideologue, but the conscious choices of a king, and he rightly recognizes them as damnable for that very reason.

Nolan is primarily pointing the finger at leaders here, but the masses bear some blame too. In the film’s final line, as in Oppenheimer, Nolan lays the lesson bare as Odysseus laments that while civilization will rise from this dark period of collapse, it will soon forget its mistakes, and the cycle will begin again. There are notes of hope in the ending, the reunited lovers sailing into the sunset, the young, eager, and noble Telemachus taking the throne of Ithaca, but these are merely silver linings to a storm cloud. Odysseus has come to recognize his role in the undoing of the world, but the walls have fallen, and there is now nothing he can do but stop fighting the inevitable, surrender to the storm, and hand a doomed world to the younger generation that does not deserve the destruction his generation has wrought upon them.

The Odyssey repeats Qoheleth’s bleak but enduring message: there is nothing new under the sun. Left to its own devices, humanity will never learn its lesson. There are glimmers of hope in the mist, but the few heroes who rise above the noise are cast in an endless cycle of repeated mistakes and fruitless violence, and while we honor our ancient stories and repeat our tellings of these tales for 3,000 years and counting, the sad reality is that we never actually listen.

You may read the previous article for full context, but to briefly summarize, I assert that both the New Testament witness and the theological approach of the early church force us to conclude that the kerygma (“proclamation”) of the Crucified and Risen One is the starting point for all Christian theology, and especially for Biblical interpretation. The Old Testament is not a collection of messianic predictions awaiting obvious payoffs; the “fulfillment” of prophecy is a theological concept, and it flows from Christ to the pages of the original text. In contrast, the usual thinking views prophecy as a sort of fortune-telling or plot-based setups and payoffs like you frequently find in fiction. We can illustrate this with a quick case study:

Case Study #1: Isaiah 7:14

Here’s how Biblical “prophecy” is usually approached: A prophet receives a word, or a vision, or a stirring of the mind. He catches a glimpse of the future, perhaps a clear one, perhaps not, and he writes down a prediction: “The Messiah will be ____.” Readers then debate how this works and who it applies to, but the Messianic expectation is set. Jesus then comes along, and since details of his life match these predictions, he is clearly their “fulfillment.” An easy and famous example is Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7:14. In Matthew, we read the following:

²² All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

²³ “Look, the virgin shall become pregnant and give birth to a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means, “God is with us.” ²⁴

So, plugging this into our formula, we go back to Isaiah. Isaiah somehow received this knowledge and put down this prediction: that someday, in the future, a virgin would conceive a child, that child would be named Emmanuel, and implicitly, this child would be the Messiah. So we can presume that 1st-century messianic Jews were always on the lookout for pregnant virgins, and Jesus’ birth in that manner would clearly and obviously validate his messianic claim.

But this is not what we find. For starters, I have not been able to locate a single Jewish messianic movement that predates Christianity and includes Isaiah 7:14 as a messianic passage. I’m open to correction on this, but from what I’ve been able to find, Matthew is the first writer to interpret this passage messianically. And the reason seems obvious: the verse in its original context is not a prediction about the future, nor even a prediction about a virgin.

It’s commonly claimed that Matthew’s understanding is a mistake based on a mistranslation, but this is overstated. The underlying terms in question are the Greek “parthenos” and the Hebrew “almah.” Almah means something like “young woman,” as does parthenos, but over time, the Greek parthenos came to more explicitly connote virginity. So while the idea that a young woman of marriageable age (an almah) was frequently presumed to be a virgin, the Hebrew term itself does not convey it (while parthenos actually does frequently imply virginity).2 As John H. Walton helpfully explains:

These occurrences over and over again rule out “virgin” as a viable lexical choice for describing the basic meaning of the word. On the other hand there is no question that an ‘almâ can at times be a virgin. This is just semantic overlapping. In English a fiancee is often also a virgin (though the percent of semantic overlapping of these two words is in sad decline). That does not mean that the word “fiancee” means “virgin.” Someone could show me a thousand passages where “fiancee” was used to refer to a virgin, but that would not change the meaning.3

So, on the simple grounds of the language he chose (and the tense, for that matter), we can conclude that Isaiah was not “predicting” a virgin conceiving a child. And in case anyone is worried that this is some work of modern scholarship trying to push back against traditional understandings, the distinction between the Hebrew and Greek renderings of this passage has been clear to readers as long as Christianity has existed. Justin Martyr and Origen both discuss how the Jews of their time made this distinction, and Origen specifically notes that even the Greek parthenos is multivalent. Eusebius acknowledges that the Hebrew term might not strictly mean virgin and prioritizes the LXX (which he takes to be clearer on the term, as would be accurate in his day). Maybe the most important of these witnesses is Jerome, who in his commentary on this verse explicitly points out that Hebrew has a different word for virgin and that almah means “young woman.” Modern scholars and ancient commentators alike are in widespread agreement about the Hebrew term’s original meaning.

But we can go further and demonstrate that Isaiah was not predicting the far future at all. Let’s look at the full context of the line in question:

¹⁰ Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, ¹¹ “Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven.” ¹² But Ahaz said, “I will not ask, and I will not put the Lord to the test.” ¹³ Then Isaiah said, “Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals that you weary my God also? ¹⁴ Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel. ¹⁵ He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. ¹⁶ For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted. ¹⁷ The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria.”

What becomes clear on a careful reading is that the focus of the prophecy (in its original context) isn't the birth, it's the timeline the birth provides. Verse 11 says to ask God for a sign of the things promised in the preceding verses, Ahaz refuses, not wanting to test God, and God says he will give the sign himself then, that the young woman is with child and that "before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted." It's not saying anything about a miraculous birth; in fact, the young woman in question is already pregnant! It's saying the promises made will come to fruition soon, because God is with them.

So when Matthew claims that Jesus “fulfills” this passage, like the previous example in Hosea, he is not saying that Isaiah made a prediction, and the historical instance of Jesus’ birth is the future event Isaiah predicted. I don’t think it would be right to say Matthew is saying only one thing by this “fulfillment”; the meaning of how Jesus fulfills this passage is almost certainly polyvalent, by design. This also explains, as silly as it sounds, why Jesus isn’t actually named Emmanuel. In the original passage, the name is a sign of God being with them, but it also seems to be, you know, the kid’s actual name. If this were a predictive prophecy, Jesus being called “Jesus” would technically render it at least partially inaccurate. But if the “fulfillment” is theological, the idea of Jesus being called “God with us” is a profoundly accurate statement.

The frequently debated question of whether Matthew was “right” in thinking that this passage is about Jesus is completely eliminated by this view. If we step aside from the conventional fortunetelling understanding of Biblical prophecy, we are free to see how the historian who claims that Isaiah 7:14 is not about a messiah in the distant future and the Christian who claims this text prefigures Christ can both be completely correct within their own contexts. The identification of Christ in Isaiah 7:14 is not a historical-critical claim, and to attempt to make it so, as if this passage offers some sort of prognostic proof of Jesus’ messiahship, is the same category error as those who insist the 6 days of creation in Genesis prescribe a belief in a 6,000-year-old earth.4 Both the historian’s claim and the Christian’s claim are true.

But is one more true?

Case Study #2: The Hobbit

Here is where I find most people get tripped up. They look at Matthew’s use of Isaiah and say, “ok, if this isn’t a prediction, then Matthew could just be making it up.” The idea of Isaiah consciously writing about Jesus is deeply important to some Christians, and the notion that Isaiah is solely focused on his own time and place is thus disconcerting. For many, this seems to challenge the cohesion of the Bible itself.

But could Isaiah be, in some sense, “intentionally” writing about Jesus without being consciously aware of it?

Unlike the movies that share the same name, JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit was not written as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Hobbit was a standalone tale, and Tolkien himself stated that he “did not know that it belonged” to the wider world of Arda until after he wrote it. As such, the original run-in between Bilbo and Gollum, the famous Riddles in the Dark sequence, had nothing whatsoever to do with the later plot of the Rings books. The ring Bilbo receives (given to him freely by Gollum in the first edition) is just a neat little prize to help the quest, not the great weapon of the enemy. An original reader of The Hobbit, like the original writer of The Hobbit, did not know this pericope was part of this larger story, and did not write that story with that larger intent, yet in light of those later revelations, the Riddles in the Dark sequence was re-understood, and indeed, slightly re-written by Tolkien himself in later editions of The Hobbit. But in the world of Arda, this “later” version was always the true version, even when the story’s author was unaware of that fact. The ring was always The Ring, even before Tolkien recognized it as such. In the chronology of our world, Tolkien later changed his mind, but in the “true” timeline and existence of Arda, this “later” edition of the story is always what happened.

No analogies are perfect, but I honestly think something like this is how we can think of these seemingly retroactive reinterpretations of the scriptures. The original understanding of the term “canon” was as a guide, or more literally, a measuring rod. It might be overstating the case to equate this “canon” with a presupposition, but functionally, that is what we see take place in early Christian interpretation. After encountering Christ, Paul clearly read the Jewish scriptures in a brand-new way, judging them by a new measuring rod, with a new first principle of interpretation and a new context for the scriptures’ telos. These new readings probably conflicted mightily with his old ones, but the realization was like Tolkien’s: this was always part of a larger story; he just couldn’t see it without the added context of later revelation. The world of the Lord of the Rings had long been taking shape in Tolkien’s mind; it just had not yet been made clear, but once it had, all that had come before needed to be re-understood in that new light. So likewise, Matthew truly was recognizing, rather than innovating or inventing. Again, not a perfect analogy, but I think Christian interpretation is something like that.

Case Study #3: Shaak Ti vs Judas Iscariot (or: the canon doesn’t fix everything)

One of the challenges of speaking of the original “canon” as a guide, a proclamation, or an apostolic deposit is its vagueness. It’s easy enough to get one’s head around the idea that the scriptures are, in some sense, “fulfilled” in Christ, and, following the model of the New Testament writers, we can apply our own creativity to understand how various Old Testament histories prefigure Christ. But while it does provide something of a guide, claiming Christ as the interpretive “key” to unlocking the scriptures is only a first step in the process of interpretation.5 That said, some Biblical discrepancies resist even the imprecise guidance of a moral or narrative model, and inevitably we want greater solidity, which is why I think we more naturally gravitate toward the later meaning of the term “canon,” namely, an authoritative collection of books.

The “canon” of Scripture, in some ways, seeks to answer the same question as the “canon” of the rule of faith: “Who do you say that I am?” Who is this Jesus, what does his death and resurrection mean, and what are their implications for creation? The books we preserve were preserved for how they address this question. But just as a “guide” provides guardrails without impeding interpretive flexibility, even the stories of the scriptures are not without differing takes on the same subject matter. The easiest place to see this is in narrative accounts, either in conflicting plot details (go read the story of Joseph and ask who sold him to Potipher in Egypt) or in seemingly “sanitized” retellings of events, such as how the Chronicler tells David’s story without any of the moral aberrations detailed in the Samuel/Kings telling, or how Luke seems to present a more idealized version of Paul’s relationship with the other apostles in Acts (compared to Paul’s version of the same events in his epistles). Some would point these out as flaws in the Bible, but I couldn’t disagree more. These tensions can only really become flaws if we presume the Bible to be a flat, univocal text that says only one thing about any given topic, and that is simply not the book we are presented with.

But the questions do persist. Which historical account is the “correct” version? And to explore this question, I’d like to compare the story of the death of Judas Iscariot with a surprising parallel found in a galaxy far far away.

We have at least three prominent stories of Judas’ death, two of which are found in the Bible. The first is in Matthew 27, where Judas, upon seeing Jesus condemned, repents of his actions. He returns to the people who paid him to betray Jesus and hurls the 30 pieces of silver back at them, then goes and hangs himself. Afterward, the chief priests take the silver and say that it’s not lawful to put that money back in the treasury, since it is blood money, so they buy a field with it, where the text says foreigners can be buried, and “For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day.”

The second account is in the Book of Acts, where Judas himself acquires the field, and no hanging is described; instead, he “fell headlong and burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out,” and for this gruesome reason, the field is named “The Field of Blood.”6 The third account turns the macabre details up to eleven. The early Christian figure Papias, believed by tradition to be a disciple of John, recounts Judas’ death as follows:

“But Judas went about in this world as a great model of impiety. He became so bloated in the flesh that he could not pass through a place that was easily wide enough for a wagon – not even his swollen head could fit. They say that his eyelids swelled to such an extent that he could not see the light at all; and a doctor could not see his eyes even with an optical device, so deeply sunken they were in the surrounding flesh. And his genitals became more disgusting and larger than anyone’s; simply by relieving himself, to his wanton shame, he emitted pus and worms that flowed through his entire body.

And they say that after he suffered numerous torments and punishments, he died on his own land, and that land has been, until now, desolate and uninhabited because of the stench. Indeed, even to this day no one can pass by the place without holding their nose. This was how great an outpouring he made from his flesh on the ground.”

Gross. But that’s the story, and there are three of them. And as I alluded to earlier, we find a surprising parallel to this (with a bit less bloating) in Star Wars.

Like the Bible, the Star Wars universe is an expansive mix of genres, written by dozens of authors over a long period of time. Also like the Bible, these authors do not always agree with each other, sometimes alter each other’s stories, and frequently elevate their own priorities as the essential focus of the galaxy. Even the authoritative “canon,” originally guided by George Lucas and now determined by the Disney Corporation, contains multitudes and does not clear up every instance of authorial conflict. While the officially sanctioned “canon” purports to offer authoritative understandings of certain events or characters, just like the Bible, sometimes canon cannot resolve everything.

This is Jedi Master Shaak Ti, and she can’t stop dying. She’s been killed in Star Wars media at least three different times, in three completely different ways. In the final installment of the prequel trilogy, a deleted scene shows her being murdered by General Grievous in the opening act of the film, which was cut early enough in production that a different scene of her dying was shot instead, this time being executed by the newly minted Darth Vader during the purge of the Jedi Temple. However, since neither of these scenes made the final cut of the movie, neither entered Star Wars canon, and her death instead came years later, in a video game titled The Force Unleashed, where an exiled Shaak Ti falls in battle to Darth Vader’s secret apprentice.

But that was 2008. In 2012, Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas and declared the old Star Wars expanded canon no longer canon (rebranding it the “Legends” continuity). In an episode of the animated show The Clone Wars in 2014 (which was part of the new canon), Yoda sees a frightful vision of the future, including Shaak Ti murdered by being stabbed through the back with a blue lightsaber. So that settles it, right?

Well, there’s a problem. In both deleted scenes from Revenge of the Sith, Shaak Ti is killed in this manner. Both General Grievous and Anakin Skywalker stab her in the back with a blue lightsaber. And Yoda’s vision does not clearly show where this death took place, which technically leaves both options on the table.

Now, bear with me. I want you to imagine that Star Wars is a religion.7 How would you, as a religious adherent to Star Wars, determine how Shaak Ti actually died? The easy answer is obviously the “canon” one: she was killed with a blue lightsaber. Maybe you’re a superfan with a copy of the Star Wars Atlas Galactique, which mentions that she was killed during Order 66 by Darth Vader. But is that book part of the official “canon?” And what if you don’t subscribe to the notion of the “official” canon at all? What if you’re a George Lucas purist, and all continuity after the Disney acquisition is schismatic heresy? A traditionalist, sedevecantist Star Wars fan might maintain that the Legends continuity is the “true” Star Wars, and thus Shaak Ti’s death at the hands of Vader’s Apprentice remains “canon.” Or what if you want them all to be true? Can we find a way to reconcile these accounts so that none are incorrect? What if Shaak Ti, surviving her deadly wound from General Grievous, was recovering in the Jedi Temple, allowing Vader to ambush her and inflict an identical wound to the one Grievous imparted, yet she survived this too, fleeing Coruscant and making her way to Felucia, where years later, she is found and defeated once and for all by Vader’s Apprentice?

This harmonization might strike you as silly, but it is how many seem to think we ought to approach the narratives about Judas. Usually, Papias’s account is discarded, but you can look up a dozen apologetics websites right now that will detail how Judas might have hung himself, decayed on the rope, which then snapped so forcefully that he flipped head over heels, somehow landing headfirst and bursting open. In this telling, the field he “purchased” was only metaphorically purchased by him, with the Chief Priests buying it “in his name,” thus resolving the discrepancy over who actually bought the field. The problem with these kinds of harmonizations is that they do not really resolve the conflict in the text, opting instead to invent a third scenario in which all the details of the conflicting accounts can, if you squint, be made to fit, even though none of the accounts actually say it happened that way.

I think Star Wars actually gives us a better accounting of the “real” history at play here. The simple fact of the matter is, sometimes there are multiple traditions floating around, even multiple authoritative traditions, and the consistent wisdom of those who preserve the scriptures is that we don’t always need to choose between them. Chronicles is preserved right alongside Samuel/Kings, rather than allowing the former to supplant the latter. Prophets in apparent conflict, like Nahum and Jonah’s two approaches to Nineveh, or Joel and Isaiah’s opposite utilization of swords and plowshares, or the general Deuteronomistic ideal of “obey God and you’ll be fine” and Ecclesiastes’ “bad things happen to good people and everything is kinda meaningless” are preserved alongside each other, in convcersation with each other, recognizing the wisdom of Proverbs 26:4-5; that there is rarely only one correct answer for all circumstances, and sometimes seemingly opposite prescriptions can both be necessary. Shaak Ti has an official, canonical death, but that “canon” has changed and might change again. Similarly, the Bible is not a static, fossilized relic, but a living word in conversation with itself and with each new generation that reveres it. The Bible can guide us precisely because it is not static, which is why attempts to reduce it to some sort of flat, simplistic, prescriptive handbook for life are such an erroneous endeavor.

So how did Judas die? Is the important detail the method or the reason? Should we focus on his repentance and the tragedy that the chief priests failed him, dismissed him, leading a repentant sinner to take his own life? Should we focus on the seeming curse of his betrayal, leading to physical ailments and a grisly demise? Is the enduring relevance the vacating of the apostolic office? The potential for sin in all of us? The dire warning that even one of Christ’s closest confidants can become his betrayer? Do we pity him? Condemn him? Sit amidst the disciples after Christ has exposed his betrayal and say “Surely, not I?”

This is the brilliance of authoritative “canon” not being so restrictive as to reduce a story to a single telling. This is why there are four gospels, or more precisely, four interpretive tellings of the same Gospel centered around an agreed-upon but barely understood proclamation. Christ asks all who knew him and now all who read about him, “Who do you say that I am?” and everything depends on who is telling that story and how that story is told.

I’ve wrestled with this question for some years now, and today I’d like to try to and get some of my thoughts down on paper. But to not bury the lead: I’m going to make the case that the Bible is only truly “The Word of the Lord” in a qualified sense, but that the liturgical setting is, in fact, the most appropriate place to refer to a reading of Scripture as “God’s Word.” But to do so, I think we need to start by talking about inspiration.

How is the Bible Inspired?

“Inspiration” (and its sister term “inerrancy”) is one of those words with 20 different definitions. Most often, it refers to the process by which Scripture was written: God inspired the writer, either through vague divine prompting, direct dictation, or something in between. The exact nature of the relationship between God’s “inspiring” and human agency in utilizing their own time, culture, and historical context for their writing fills many a theological textbook, but it is in this process that we most frequently see human writing transfigured into holy writ. By this understanding, The Bible can rightly be called “the Word of the Lord” because it is, in its essence, “inspired,” whatever particularity we mean by that. Put simply, the claim is that the Bible is the Word of the Lord because it was, to a greater or lesser degree, divinely authored.

I am not going to go so far as to say this view is wrong, but I am convinced that it is incomplete. So much of this understanding rests on a single term from a single verse (2 Timothy 3:16), and I will resist the urge to go off on a lexical digression here, but suffice it to say the Biblical term “inspired” (theopneustos in the Greek, literally: God-breathed) is frequently understood as a claim of authorship, with the focus being something breathed out by God, when I think the focus should in fact be understood as something being breathed into. There is a simple philological case to be made here (read this book for said case), but I’m more interested in the theological one. The motif of God’s breath in scripture is one of vivification. Think Adam in the Garden, a formed but inanimate object that God breathes life into, or Jesus breathing on the disciples to confer the Holy Spirit upon them. The Spirit’s work in these examples is not to create something out of nothing, but to animate, enliven, bring an existing dead thing into the active life of God.3 And the surrounding verse says nothing of authorship or origin (or inerrancy), but quite a bit about the application of “inspired” scripture.

As such, I do not believe that “inspiration” is an inherent facet of the text in the abstract. That’s not to say there was no process of the writers being “inspired” in their original authorship, but inspiration is an active term, again, one of vivification. Breathing is never static; it only becomes so in death. So the inspiration of the Bible is not in its fossilization, but in its function. Furthermore, its role as inspired comes from the breathing of God, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and an active, intentional reading rather than a cursory one. This is the exact approach we see the first Christians employing as they re-evaluated the Jewish scriptures in light of Christ’s death and resurrection. Paul, a supremely educated Pharisee, did not see Christ as a fulfillment of prophecy and did not see any parallels between the burgeoning Christian movement and the predictions of the prophets; in fact, Jesus of Nazareth’s “Way” was so obviously heretical that it led Paul to persecute its adherents outright. Is this because Paul was actually a bad student, missing the obvious meaning of the Bible? By no means! For all the variants in first-century messianic expectations, nobody was awaiting a crucified Messiah; such a thing would be an oxymoron. Paul only comes to re-evaluate his reading of the scriptures after a divine encounter with the risen Christ, and it is the starting point of the Crucified and Risen One that allows him to creatively and allegorically re-interpret these writings in a Christian context.

The story of the Road to Emmaus follows the same pattern.4 The disciples encounter Christ on the way, and while he opens the scriptures to their understanding, they still only recognize him in the breaking of the bread. Even with the explanation of the Scriptures in a Christ-centered light, it is only after a direct encounter with the risen Christ (eucharistically in this case), that the story becomes clear. Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, phrases this as a “veil” being lifted:

Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant, the same veil is still there; it is not unveiled since in Christ it is set aside. ¹⁵ Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds,¹⁶ but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. ¹⁷ Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. ¹⁸ And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

(Incidentally, the word in Greek for “Spirit” is the same word as “breath,” so the idea of active, vivifying breath fits this imagery perfectly).

If it is the Spirit that removes the veil from the scriptures and allows us to see Christ clearly within them, then the resurrected Christ is the first principle of reading the scriptures as Scripture, not a narrative conclusion of the text. None of the Gospels are written as if your expectations are supposed to match the narrative chronology; you are not meant to read early chapters of Matthew and wonder if this Jesus guy is going to end up being the Messiah. No, from page one of every Gospel, we are reading about the Crucified and Risen One, even before those events happen in the respective narratives.5 So when the Old Testament is invoked, and a prophecy is declared fulfilled, it is always talking about the Crucified and Risen One, even in contexts that narratively precede Christ’s passion. And this is, in fact, the only way to even make sense of some of the “fulfillments,” considering many of the prophecies invoked are not, in their original context, predictive at all. Let’s illustrate this with a quick case study:

Case Study: Matthew’s use of Hosea

In the second chapter of Matthew, we read about Jesus and his family fleeing to Egypt until King Herod’s death.

¹⁴ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt ¹⁵ and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”

Matthew clearly tells us that this is a fulfillment of prophecy, and the passage he is referencing can be found in Hosea chapter 11:

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.

Now, ask yourself objectively: is this a prediction about the future? If you were a Jewish reader in the year 100 BC reading this, what would you think this line means? God clearly identifies who he is talking about (Israel), and calling this “son” out of Egypt certainly sounds like the Exodus. The following line about Israel “offering incense to idols” aligns with the narrative we find in the post-Exodus period, but we don’t even need to get that granular. There is simply no reasonable case to be made that anyone reading this passage in its original context would think to themselves, “boy, I wonder when this future prediction is going to come true.” The entire passage is in the past tense!6

So clearly, when Matthew describes this as a “fulfillment” of prophecy, he does not and, in fact, cannot mean this is the payoff to a predictive setup. The “fulfillment” of prophecy does not refer to the accuracy of fortunetelling; it’s something deeper, more teleological, indeed more theological. Matthew is pointing out that Israel’s telos is fulfilled in Christ, not that Hosea was intentionally writing about a future Nazarene named Jesus. And I would argue that all the “fulfilled” prophecies in the New Testament match this pattern, not the colloquial understanding of predictions coming true. It may strike against our conventional sensibilities, but what makes best sense of the text is that the evangelists start with Christ and then use Him to make sense of the Old Testament, rather than starting with vague Old Testament predictions that suddenly make sense in Christ.7 This is the pattern we see modeled in encounters with Christ, which open people’s minds to understand the scriptures, and it explains how verses that in their original context were not predictive, messianic, or future-oriented can rightly be understood as all three.

This means that to read the Old Testament, or any of the Bible for that matter, as Christian Scripture only works when you begin with the risen Christ.8 A Jewish rabbi reading the Old Testament through a Talmudic lens is not reading it as Scripture (in the Christian sense), nor is the historian doing a historical-critical analysis of a story in Genesis or Samuel. They are not meaningfully reading the “inspired” Word because the Spirit is not vivifying their reading, and they are not seeing Christ because they are not beginning from a first principle that makes him available as an option. The inspiration of Scripture comes as much from its reading as from its writing, and that is why I would argue that the liturgical context is one of the only ones where calling ALL Scripture “the Word of the Lord” makes any sense.9 When Scripture is read in church, it is not for historical study or critical analysis; its express purpose is to provide the foundation from which the gospel can be expounded. Homiletic practice is a great example of this: a good sermon draws from these passages and derives a gospel message from them, but even the sermon is just another prefiguration of what is to come. The whole Sunday, at least for us Anglicans (and I know Catholic, Lutheran, and other traditions are structured similarly), builds to the Eucharist, and it is the Eucharist in which all that is prefigured comes into its fullness.

The Eucharist is a tangible taste of the Age to come, a localized inbreaking of New Creation into the present order, and it is in the vicinity of this direct encounter with Christ that mundane things like bread and wine can be transfigured into divine instruments of grace. The promise of the Road to Emmaus is that Christ can be found on the way and met in faces unrecognized, but it is the breaking of the bread where we are promised to know Him as the Crucified and Risen One, and this is why the Eucharistic meal, for all the endless debates about the details of its cosmic mystery, has been the central focus of Christian ritual since the earliest days of the Church.10 And this is right, because all elements of a church service, whether a sociologically eclectic house gathering in Corinth or a smells-and-bells Catholic Mass, make fullest sense in their proximity to a direct encounter with Christ. This is why Christianity has always been a communal movement, and why we are so mistaken in the modern West when we reduce it to some sort of private, individualistic practice. Christ’s body is available in the Eucharist (which is always a shared meal) and in the corporate body: the people in the pews beside us. These settings fulfill the necessary prerequisite for any Bible passage to function as “the Word of the Lord,” because within that intentional context, that is what all Scripture IS.

Now, let me be clear because I got a bit carried away with my mysticism there: I am not saying there is some quantifiable process by which the true inspired text is magically “activated,” nor am I saying that the liturgical context I am describing is the ONLY place where the scriptures can be read as Scripture, nor am I saying that the “encounter” with the risen Christ must be some sensational, emotional, or discernibly supernatural experience, and in fact I think a lot of harm is done by chasing those sorts of spiritual highs. I lack the terminology to aptly describe my methodology, but all I’m trying to convey (I think) is that context determines meaning, meaning drives experience, and experience produces character. The liturgical context of the Church (or a devotional context derived from that practice) is what gives the “Scriptural” meaning to “the Bible,” the meaning drawn from that understanding gives us the experience of encounter (in all the many many ways that happens on the individual level, from mundane to sensational to everything in between), and regular encounter shapes our Christian character, again not by magic, but the way any good habit is formed: discipline, repetition, and intentional practice. There is a transcendent component to Christian ritual in its metaphysical claims about truly encountering Christ in the Eucharist, but I think the frequently debated details of this (real presence, transubstantiation, memorialism, etc) are of secondary importance to the simple truth of the shaping that comes from the intentionality, community, and spiritual seeking which produce the context of Eucharistic practice.

And as such, encountering Christ should be a regular occurrence. Daily bread sustains. Christ as the bread of life is a metaphysical claim as much as a theological one; our existence is predicated upon God’s continual sustenance, an eternal donation of being from the source of all Being. To accept Christ as our daily bread is to acknowledge what truly sustains us; just as food nourishes our body, the God-man, in, through, and for whom all things were made, sustains our very reality. Again, this is not just metaphor: Christ uniting himself bodily to humanity, God truly enfleshing himself in creation, is what unites both with God. Eternity is brought into temporality so that temporal might endure eternally. Or as so many of the Fathers say in different ways: Christ becomes what we are so that we might become what He Is. That is the comfort of the incarnation, the promise of the resurrection, and the glory of their meeting in the Eucharistic encounter.

So to seek some path towards a conclusion,11 let’s try to summarize:

1. “Inspiration” is a term of application, as much, if not more so, than it is a term of origin. The “God-breathed” Scriptures come to life by the active indwelling of the Holy Spirit in liturgical and devotional contexts. The Bible is not truly “inspired” just sitting on the shelf, and a dispassionate, analytical reading of a book of the Bible is not synonymous with “reading Scripture.”

2. The risen Christ is the first principle of Christian theology. As the New Testament authors and characters show us, a Christian reading of the Bible only works downwind of an “encounter” with Christ. And from this we also conclude that:

3. “Fulfillment” is theological, not predictive. Christ’s “fulfillment” of the Scriptures is not an obvious payoff to a future-oriented setup, but a re-understanding of old things in the revelatory light of new knowledge.12 Just as the intentionality of the Eucharist allows us to see bread and wine as something more, beginning with a Christotelic presupposition is what opens the Scriptures and allows us to read Christ where, without his revelatory light, he would not be visible. And finally:

4. The Eucharist is the central Christian ritual because it is the necessary first principle of theology. Only after a direct encounter with the risen Christ can our eyes truly be opened and the Scriptures become clear. All theology follows from the starting point of the Christian kerygma (“proclamation”), summarized by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, and because of this, the communal response of Christ’s Body sharing the common table has been the locus of Christian worship since the first days of the Church.13

There is so much more that could be said about the implications all of these conclusions have on the nature of the church, the function of liturgy, and a dozen other subjects besides. I will expand on the challenge of scriptural chronology and some implications of “canon” in my next article, and the rest I may return to in future work. But if you’ve read this far, I’d like to end this one by soliciting your feedback. Does what I’ve expressed here align with your own view of these subjects? Challenge it? Something in between? Or skipping my digressions entirely, in what sense do you believe the Bible to be (or not be) “The Word of the Lord?”

Secondly, many who know me personally will know of my ambitions to return to school and finally get a degree in all this theology stuff I can’t shut up about, and in fact, if you listen to the podcast linked above, you can hear me say last September “I’m planning to go back to school for it, I just haven’t gotten around to that yet.”

Well, I got around to it. I’m pleased to announce that as of last week, I have officially been accepted into the Master of Arts in Religion program at the esteemed Trinity Anglican Seminary and will begin my studies there this Fall. As much as I am looking forward or it, balancing full-time studies, part-time work, and full-time family will be quite the spinning plate routine, so please keep my family in your prayers as September approaches, and my wife also requests you pray I do not fall in love with academia enough to stick around for a PHD.

Lastly, as Saint Mick ekes ever closer to completion, one thing that has come to a close is the screenplay’s festival run. As I noted in a previous announcement, while preparing to produce the film, I decided to float the script to a couple of screenplay competitions, mainly as an experiment, since despite all my festival laurels, I’ve never really circulated a screenplay in competition. Mick was accepted to four of the five festivals I submitted to, with three of those four including recognition as a finalist or semi-finalist in their respective contest. While a small sample size, this ratio of acceptances/wins to submissions is well above what I’ve found to be average for a short film, so I’m taking it as a sign of encouragement in the hopes that the actual film might find a similar reception. Time shall tell.

An advantage of these simpler stories is moral clarity. If I’m telling you the story of a brave knight called to rid a village of an oppressive dragon, I don’t need to justify why the dragon lusts for gold or hungers for virginal sacrifices. Dragons are dragons, and everyone knows that dragons hoard treasure and must be ritually propitiated to conciliate their fiery wrath. Nor do I have to justify why the knight feels he has the right to confront such an enemy and slay him. The moral obviousness of freeing innocent villagers from the terror of such oppression is exactly that: obvious. Nobody looks at those stories and says, “Well, maybe the dragon has a good reason to extract all that wealth from the economy and hoard it in a cave. Maybe, through hard work, the dragon earned the right to demand the death of innocent maidens to slake his monstrous appetite.”

That level of assuredness can be dangerous in the real world. Nothing fuels self-righteousness like moral certainty. Yet now and again, perhaps we need the indignant shove of the morally assured to shake us out of our hesitancy to call things what they are, and that is exactly what we find in the homilies of the 4th-century church father St. Basil the Great.1 While the Bible is not clear on many things, one of the few things it is almost entirely consistent about is the condemnation of greed. This invective takes a few forms, from an excessive focus on economic disparity and the exploitation of the vulnerable in the Old Testament to a near-blanket condemnation of wealth itself in the New Testament.2 St. Basil repeats these condemnations without scruples, tearing into the wealthy of his day with calls to action that would make Bernie Sanders blush. Basil does not say the rich ought to give some money to the poor out of the charitable goodness of their bleeding hearts; he says those who do not do so are thieves:

“Is not the person who strips another of clothing called a thief? And those who do not clothe the naked when they have the power to do so, should they not be called the same?”3

This apparently was not severe enough for Basil, as he goes on to call them murderers:

“Whoever has the ability to remedy the suffering of others, but chooses rather to withhold aid out of selfish motives, may properly be judged the equivalent of a murderer.”4

We’re very accustomed, at least in the United States, to compartmentalizing our morals. We Christians claim to believe in generosity, in love of neighbor, in caring for the vulnerable, but we set limits on these things at the interpersonal level. If the government does it, it’s socialism, and socialism is bad, because the government should never compel our morality (except when it comes to abortion, theft, the right to self-defense, murder, etc).5 I lack the expertise (and frankly, interest) to make sweeping claims about the economic realities of capitalism vs socialism vs any other system; however, I will say that the more I read about historical Christianity, especially the early days of the church, the more bizarre the marriage between American capitalism and American Christianity looks. We have chosen, as a culture, to completely eschew the Bible’s endless condemnations of greed and gain, choosing instead to idolize materialist systems where the accrual of wealth is celebrated as moral victory and, in the more toxic manifestations of this phenomenon, prop up pastors who openly pilfer their congregations for private jets and designer sneakers.

One fun fact most Christians do not know about Christian history is the long-standing hostility to usury in all its forms. Almost ubiquitously, the early and medieval church stood opposed to charging interest on loans, with increasing strictness over time (the clergy was forbidden from doing so at the council of Nicaea, the Laity received the same charge at the Council of Carthage, and by the time you get to the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Lateran councils, the practice itself is unequivocally condemned as inherently sinful).6 St. Basil is an early expounder of this principle, stating in a homily aptly titled Against Those Who Lend at Interest:

“In truth it is the height of inhumanity that those who do not have enough even for basic necessities should be compelled to seek a loan in order to survive, while others, not being satisfied with the return of the principal, should turn the misfortune of the poor to their own advantage and reap a bountiful harvest.”

Basil is so opposed to the practice that he spends several pages of the homily begging the poor amongst his listeners to stay in their downtrodden circumstances rather than subject themselves to the injustice of predatory loans.

“Listen, you rich, to the kind of counsel I am giving to the poor on account of your inhumanity: to remain in dreadful circumstances, rather than accepting the assistance offered by loans at interest. But if you took the Lord at his word, would there be any reason for such words? What is the counsel of the Master? ‘Lend to those from whom you do not hope to recieve again.’”

Again, the moral clarity on display is downright refreshing. Basil is basically saying, “If we Christians just took Jesus at his word and did what he said, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place.” How convictingly simple is that? How damning is it that his words, written 1600 years ago, are just as relevant for us today? How much ink and effort has been spilled justifying our own greed, explaining why Jesus can’t have meant the thing he plainly said? Basil doesn’t let up:

“As it is, the interest you receive back shows every characteristic of extreme misanthropy. You profit from misery, you extract gain from tears, you oppress the naked, you beat down the starving. Mercy is nowhere to be found; there is no thought of kinship with those who suffer. And yet you call such gains the benefits of philanthropy! ‘Woe to those who call the bitter sweet and the sweet bitter,’ and to those who call misanthropy by the name of philanthropy.”

A common talking point in popular discourse is the notion that billionaires should not exist. The calculus for this assertion usually rests upon the exploitative methods by which that much wealth is accrued, but given Basil’s appraisal7 of the rich, I wonder if how their wealth was acquired would even be relevant to him. Surely, exploiting the working class is something he would condemn, but given his absolute and uncompromising certainty in the need for Christians to oppose economic disparity, I wager he would take it a step further. He would not do as we so often do today and insist on a meager offering of charitable giving out of their excess; I think he would lump billionaires in with murderers. Which, at this present moment, would not be hard to do. Imagine someone of Basil’s lucidity assessing a figure like Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, whose most notable contributions to society over the last few years have been reshaping popular discourse in increasingly fraught and divisive terms, amplifying conspiracists and nazi-adjacent (or sometimes just nazi) figures almost daily, and leading an organization that is already personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of needless deaths with millions more to come. And the fact that Musk did most of these things primarily for the memes rather than for direct financial gain takes these actions from the usual category of reckless evil in service of self-enrichment to a borderline (if not outright) demonic level of evil in service of evil as such. Feeding humanitarian services “to the wood chipper,” to placate savage morons in service of baseless nonsense crosses the line from man to monster, and I wish I had 1/10th of Basil’s eloquence or sagacity in decrying it.

If St. Basil is accurate in his summary of Christian morality as pertains to wealth, then regardless of how rightly or earnestly they “earned” their wealth, billionaires are dragons. They are beasts of power, hoarding excess at the expense of the vulnerable, demanding the death of innocents and the sacrifice of communities for no other reason than to add to their selfish and pointless pile. And I find myself asking with increasing frequency why Christians are not more vocal about this. Why have we chosen to focus almost the entirety of our cultural efforts on subjects the Bible barely touches on, while flatly ignoring a subject the Bible speaks about more than almost anything in the entire text? History has demonstrated over and over and over and over, across continents and cultures, how frequently and readily the rich oppress the poor at every given opportunity, how quickly the poor are viewed as disposable for the meager increase of anyone financially above them, and how antithetical the pursuit of material gain is to the love of God. All of human history testifies to the Biblical claim that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And perhaps that’s what really lies at the core of Christ’s command to eschew wealth. Maybe it isn’t just simple temptation or a spiritual lesson about true treasure; maybe it’s meant to highlight that so long as there are those who choose prosperity over love, evil will persist, and man will suffer at the hands of his fellow man for meaningless increase. Even the rich young man in the Gospel account, who kept God’s law perfectly, could not bring himself to surrender his material wealth to follow God when invited. This is not a trivial or easy call, it strikes against the very heart of our self-interested nature.

But unlike so many of us, Basil took this invocation seriously. He divested himself of personal wealth and dedicated his life to ministry. He (somewhat ironically) became an effective fundraiser, building soup kitchens to combat famine, establishing reform programs for robbers and prostitutes, and most notably, founding a philanthropic institution known as the Basiliad (or sometimes the Basileias), considered by many historians to be the first modern hospital. It offered free hospice, shelter, food, and medical care to anyone who needed them, staffed by dedicated monks from an adjacent monastery. St. Gregory Nazianzus, in Basil’s funeral homily, compared it to one of the great wonders of the ancient world.

Basil practiced what he preached, and he preached a lot, lambasting the wealthy of his day, demanding that they remember their ownership was, at best, stewardship, and that the hoarding of wealth was as stupid as it was evil. When we look at history’s endless manifestations of injustice predicated on economic disparity and see that truth reflected in the world around us, coupled with the practical wisdom of Christ’s teachings and their constant focus on the material realities of the poor and downtrodden, I can’t help but wish more prominent Christians today had St. Basil’s moral clarity and willingness to call dragons what they are.

“In just a little while, his life will be snatched away, and what is he thinking? 'I will pull down my barns and build larger ones.' Well done, I would say for my part. The treasuries of injustice well deserve to be torn down. With your own hands, raze these misbegotten structures. Destroy the granaries from which no one has ever gone away satisfied. Demolish every storehouse of greed, pull down the roofs, tear away the walls, expose the moldering grain to the sunlight, lead forth from prison the fettered wealth, vanquish the gloomy vaults of Mammon. 'I will pull down my barns and build larger ones.' But if you fill these larger ones, what do you intend to do next? Will you tear them down yet again only to build them up once more? What could be more ridiculous than this incessant toil, laboring to build and then laboring to tear down again? If you want storehouses, you have them in the stomachs of the poor.”

Fr. Sharpe is hardly unique in his use of this language. But I would genuinely ask him, as I do with all who employ this rhetoric: which earnest Christian isn’t a “Bible-believing Christian?”2 With a few (very rare) hyper-progressive exceptions, almost no Christian alive would fail to make that claim, and so when someone insists on their position as the “Biblical” one, they aren’t really saying anything about the veracity of their convictions; they are simply employing a rhetorical strategy meant to posture their view as superior to their interlocutors’. If Fr. Sharpe holds the “Biblical” view, those who disagree are implicitly not disagreeing with him; they are disagreeing with the Bible. It’s frankly just another version of the same rhetorical tactic I impugned Ken Ham and friends for employing a few weeks ago; equating one’s interpretation with the Bible’s own authority to unduly bolster their own position. Or put more simply, declaring your view the “Biblical” one is a rhetorically loaded but substantively empty assertion of your position, not an actual defense of it.

This is irksome for a multitude of reasons. The first is that what constitutes something being “Biblical” is almost comically relative. Every branch of the church grounds its authority, at least in large part, in what they consider to be “Biblical” teaching. The notion that the majority of Anglicans who argue for women’s ordination do so on anything other than primarily “Biblical” grounds is mythological. I’ve never met an Anglican in favor of women’s ordination who thinks “yeah, the Bible forbids it, but we gotta get with the times, man. Progress progress progress!” And what makes something “Biblical” to begin with? Surely we don’t just mean “in the Bible,” because if we did, rape, incest, mass murder, slavery, and all sorts of other moral aberrations would definitionally be “Biblical” concepts. No, when people say “Biblical,” what they actually mean is not “the Bible says,” but “the Bible teaches.” But they frequently fail to realize that once we decide “the Bible” says anything, we’re already operating several steps deep within an interpretive framework.

The Bible is an authoritative collection of books written by dozens of authors over nearly 1,000 years. Exactly which books constitute the Bible depends on your tradition. For Jews, the 24 books (39 by Protestant numbering) that make up the Christian “Old Testament” comprise the entirety of “the Bible.” Christians agree on these books, and on the 27 books of the New Testament, though certain traditions have a few “deuterocanonical” books in the mix (the Bible totals 66 books for Protestants,3 73 for Catholics, and 76-81 for Orthodox, depending on which flavor of Orthodox you are). Whichever collection your tradition holds to, what should be noted off the bat is that the Bible is not a book per se, but a library of books, and it is a given church that determines which collection equals “the Bible.” This emphasizes a point that is often wielded belligerently by Catholic and Orthodox apologists, and to be fair, sometimes evaded by Protestant ones, but remains true for all Christians: the Bible only becomes “the Bible” within an interpretive framework. Or, more simply, the Bible is only “the Bible” in the context of tradition. This can be Tradition with a capital T in the case of Catholics and Orthodox, or a more informal, lowercase t tradition in the case of most Protestants,4 but it remains a simple fact of history that “the Scriptures” (plural) developed into “the Bible” (singular) in a specific religious context, and to even speak of “the Bible” as saying anything at all is already to place it into some variant of that interpretive tradition. After all, no book in the Bible was intended by its author to be part of a later compilation called the Bible (which authors were even consciously attempting to write “scripture” is a super debatable question), so to take one of these authorial voices as speaking with the voice of the collection, rather than their individual perspective, is an inescapably interpretive move.5

But even once we’ve settled which books count as “the Bible,” we then need to ask which version of those books? The writers of the New Testament, as well as many of the earliest Christian theologians, prioritized the ancient Greek translation(s) of the Old Testament commonly referred to as “The Septuagint” (or LXX). Do we follow in this pattern today, preferring the LXX’s readings to the available alternatives? Or, as Jerome began to insist upon in the 4th century when translating the Vulgate, ought we to prioritize the Hebrew versions of the Old Testament? And even if we can agree on the language, which manuscripts? The oldest? The most popular? The most widely attested? Readers familiar with these questions may note that I’m basically laying out challenges tackled by textual criticism, which for the record, offers wonderfully thoughtful methodological approaches to all of these quandaries, but what the average Christian frequently fails to realize is that by the time they are reading an English Bible and declaring something to be categorically and unambiguously “Biblical,” all of these questions and more have been asked and evaluated by scholars who have made editorial choices to compile the version of whatever source language is chosen, and only THEN is that Bible translated into English.6 I’ve written on many aspects of translational complications here, here, and here, and will not repeat those points in this article. But suffice to say that translation itself is inherently and inescapably a process of interpretation, and so what we English-speaking Christians must realize in our assessment of what is “Biblical” is that the only Bible we are capable of assessing comes downwind of dozens, if not hundreds, of mediating interpretive choices.

None of this is meant to undermine the veracity of the Bible, nor should any of this impede one’s confidence in their ability to encounter Christ in its pages, English or otherwise.7 I’m not pushing back against the Bible’s integrity, but I am trying to illustrate the patent ridiculousness of declaring “Biblical” things in terms of obviousness or certainty. The correct response to someone’s claim that “the Bible says this” is not “no it doesn’t” or “ok, that settles it,” it is frequently: “Wonderful, what else does the Bible say?” Even in the original languages, the Bible rarely says only one thing about a given topic, so to claim a view as “Biblical” is almost always to assert a value judgment rather than an exegetical fact.

And look, to briefly repudiate my clickbait title, I’m not really advocating we remove the term “Biblical” from colloquial usage. In most contexts, its invocation is perfectly inert, and striving to read the Bible rightly is a noble aim. What I actually want is for people to know what they mean when they use it, and to employ it carefully, considerately, and as a term of reverent aspiration, not a rhetorical cudgel, because it is exhausting when lazy appeals to “Biblical” certainty are weaponized as a cheap tactic to substitute faux-authority for argumentation. The simple fact of the matter is that opposite sides of Christian arguments are frequently both capable of claiming their position as “Biblical,” meaning we all should strive to be more precise when calling upon that term. If our employment of the Bible is just to bludgeon our interlocutors and position our own convictions as authoritative and superior, we’re using it wrong, no matter how right we may be about what it says. The Bible is a book, not a hammer.

The second work I’d like to draw your attention to is the upcoming edition of the quarterly journal , in which I make a very brief cameo. Despite being a songwriter, I very rarely write poetry, and rarer still feel like the scant poetry I do write is worth sharing. However, a succinct little poem I wrote titled Anthropos has stuck in my head as something potentially worth putting out into the world, and the Everyday Epiklesis editors were kind enough to agree, so I’m pleased to announce it will be published in the forthcoming edition, titled Ordinary Time, releasing on June 12th. If you are not subscribed to them, please do so; it’s a lovely project well worth supporting.

“Idolatry” is not an isolated sin, but a comprehensive category of disordered allegiance that results in injustice. More specifically, the New Testament equates idolatry with greed,1 and we can infer quite a bit from this. For starters, we should remind ourselves that ancient people were not stupid, and the idea that people literally “worshiped statues,” as if they thought the little stone figures themselves were mighty gods, is misguided. Carved idols represented gods and sometimes acted as a locus for the god’s presence, but in almost all cases, the deity itself was something beyond the material image. Likewise, we should not limit our understanding of idolatry to isolated objects, but to what those things represent. If we take the Bible camp example of “valuing something over God,” the mistake is not just the thing that is the object of our worship, but our orientation towards it. If idolatry is greed, idolatry is almost synonymous with the sin of Eden; the human propensity to desire things on our own terms and, despite divine warnings, take them by force. The Old Testament prophets weren’t just mindless iconoclasts; they condemned idolatry because serving other gods meant acting in ways that pleased those gods and not the God of Israel. Pagan gods frequently represented transactional bargains; offer them a goat or a lamb and they might reward you with rain, or riches, or a curse upon the neighbor you are jealous of. In the case of Ancient Israel, the temple rituals served to maintain the divine presence, and it seems like many thought that if they simply maintained business as usual in the religious system, it would keep God both around and satisfied. The prophet Amos lambasts this empty religiosity:

“I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Time and again in the prophetic literature, we witness the same exposition: religious adherence, verbal affirmations of loyalty to God, or performative displays of piety are meaningless if the society producing them is unjust. God does not judge by the correct adherence to festivals and liturgy, but by the care for the poor among the people. This is why greed so aptly summarizes idolatry, for it is greed most of all that enables the exploitation of the vulnerable and the oppression of the marginalized. This is also why Christ’s constant call to repent, which literally means something like “to turn around,” is the correct response to idolatry. Christians are to turn away from greed and orient ourselves towards active pursuit of God, which entails a “Way” of living, not just a pledging of allegiance.

And so we come to the most recent display of ridiculousness that daily plagues our newsfeeds. Some group of diehard MAGA evangelicals put together a little ceremony at a Trump golf course to pray over and “dedicate” a golden2 statue of President Trump commissioned by a crypto company that the Trump family totally has nothing to do with. Is this entire situation preposterously silly? Yes. Is it worth making a fuss over? No, probably not. But anticipating the criticisms to come, the pastor leading the ceremony took to Twitter to preempt one line of disparagement.

Firstly, it’s wildly ironic that he attempts to include the “made possible by patriots” in defense of this action, as if a mass of people contributing to the construction of the statue doesn’t add parallels to the story in Exodus 32. But the reason this statue is so perfectly analogous to both the golden calf incident and idol worship more generally is not merely because each involves misguided devotees (shepherded by poor leaders) pooling their resources into grotesque displays of obsequiousness by way of carved depictions of dumb beasts. The golden calf incident is not a story about people worshipping a statue of a different god; it’s a story about a false representation of the God of Israel (YHWH). Let’s re-acquaint ourselves with the text:

Aaron said to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took these from them, formed them in a mold, and cast an image of a calf, and they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a festival to YHWH.”

I’ve swapped out the divine name for the usual translation of “the LORD” to emphasize the important detail here. This golden calf is a depiction of YHWH, the God of Israel, not some new god. As Richard Elliot Friedman summarizes:

“Why does Aaron say ‘A holiday to Yahweh tomorrow’ when he is presenting the calf as a rival to Yahweh? Because the calf is not in fact a rival god. The calf, or young bull, is only the throne platform or symbol of the deity, not a deity itself.”

So if the bull is merely a depiction of YHWH, why does YHWH’s anger burn so hot at the gesture? Why does Moses smash the tablets in fury upon seeing the festivities? I propose that the theological3 answer here is that the calf represented a false depiction of YHWH. And I don’t just mean that YHWH is not a calf. During the story, Moses is up on the mountain, in the cloud, encountering God, and planning to return with the Law. This is a gift from God, a way of life, just like how many traditions hold that the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil in Eden was not just there as a test, but would have been given to Adam and Eve by God when they reached the appropriate level of maturity. But the Israelites do exactly as Adam and Eve did, and instead of being patient and waiting for God to give them the gift of the Law, they take it for themselves, on their own terms, thinking that equality with God is something to be grasped.4 They do not want the mysterious, ineffable YHWH Moses went up the mountain to meet, the one who went before them as smoke and fire and demanded righteous living of them. No, they wanted the simple, pagan deities of Egypt, the transactional relationship of sacrifice and festivals, a visible, accessible, moldable, shapable God answerable to them. It’s not a violation of the first commandment (“you shall have no other Gods before me”), and it’s only secondarily5 a violation of the second (“you shall not make idols”); it’s first and foremost a violation of the third commandment (“you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”6). They bear God’s name in vain, misrepresenting Him, by way of a false idol.

If we look back at the verse from Amos, God’s wrath is not kindled by the people misidentifying Him, but misrepresenting Him. The people are acting like naming the right divine name or keeping the right rituals is the same thing as worshipping the God who judges righteousness by how the least among them are treated. Christ makes this absolutely explicit in the great judgment allegory of Matthew 25, where the sheep and the goats are divided based on their actions towards the marginalized, not by religious adherence.7 This narrative thread runs consistently through the entirety of the Bible and is stated straightforwardly in the Epistle of James:

“Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”8

And ultimately, this is why the golden statue of Trump is, in every way imaginable, both an idol and a perfect parallel to the golden calf. The “patriots” in attendance don’t have to bow down before it to make it idolatrous; their attendance already demonstrates they are followers of the greed Trump represents. Their willingness to conflate their political project with the work of God already demonstrates that they have turned away from the pursuit of Christ and towards the stains of the world. It hardly needs re-stating that Trump’s character is antithetical to almost every stated value of Christianity, which would be bad enough were he just an evil man in power, but what makes this idolatry is the followers. Millions of Christians have not only enabled this man, but they have also fought tooth and nail to normalize his behavior, to the point where we are inundated with displays of cruelty, bigotry, perversion, immaturity, and belligerent ignorance that are now met with a shrug (or worse, celebrated), but would have been unthinkable in the public square a decade ago, and would have been virulently condemned by Evangelical Christians if the same exact language or behavior came from someone named Clinton. Millions of Christians have completely repented of every moral and even “conservative” value every kid my age grew up hearing about, and have fully embraced a movement that exemplifies the opposite, yet they have done so in the name of Christ. Even as they work to build a kingdom with values opposite to the ones Christ preached, they claim to be His true champions. The golden statue of Trump functions exactly as the golden calf did by personifying a lie about God. It has no power by itself, but it represents the worldview of its admirers, a worldview of earthly power, exploitation,9 and dominance. The modern term for this kingdom and its ideology is “MAGA,” but the Biblical one is “Babylon.”

We become what we worship. And Jesus is abundantly clear that our stated values are worthless if our actions don’t match them. We can cry “Christ is Lord” all day long, but if we are cruel to our neighbors, we don’t believe it. We can cry “Jesus saves” as loudly as we want, but if we ally with evil to enforce what we view as good, we don’t mean it. The emptiness of earthly riches always reveals itself when the spell breaks and shallow earthly dominance never lasts. Pastor Mark Burns and his crypto buddies can deny their idolatry all they want, but the truth is they worshipped a golden calf long before they actually built one. Their championing of MAGA’s vicious ideology for personal and political gain is the epitome of greed, and, like all Christian Nationalism, serves as an exemplary display of idolatry.

And it won’t last. History ebbs and flows, and these domineering movements always end in ruin (though unfortunately for the rest of us, that ruin usually extends beyond the movement itself). Someday, this mass delusion will crash and burn, Trump will take none of his gold (or crypto) with him when he dies, and when Pastor Mark and his allies see their work tested by fire10 they will fully understand the prophetic warning of Jeremiah, “they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves.”

My oh my, how the time flies.

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“Faith” and “belief” are usually used interchangeably. “Belief” almost always means to affirm a set of propositions; that is, to “believe” in God is to think that he exists, or to “believe” in the resurrection is to think that it happened in real history. This definition is perfectly serviceable, but when we introduce the idea of “faith” into the mix, I think we need to flesh out the concept of “belief” with a little more depth, and one easy way to understand this is to compare it to love.

Christians are commanded to love our enemies, but this command is impossible to keep if love is just a feeling. One cannot magically manifest unprompted emotions in one’s own heart, which is why when Christian sages throughout the ages advise the love of enemies, it is ubiquitously phrased as an action. Love is a verb, defined far more by your conduct towards others than by your feelings about them, and so, in a very real sense, love is a choice. As such, the command to love people is not in any way bound to your sentiments about them (even if positive feelings obviously do help one keep that command).

Likewise, maybe “faith” should be viewed as more of a verb. Plenty of scholars already suggest that a closer understanding of what the New Testament means by faith is something like “trust.” To put your faith in Jesus is to trust in his Way, in his teachings, in his promises, and that’s something you are capable of doing regardless of your beliefs. Again, we cannot choose what we believe in this sense, as we cannot choose what convinces us. But even if we struggle to accept certain historical or metaphysical propositions about discrete facts of reality, we can choose to put our faith in God, or in the sure and certain hope of Christian claims like the resurrection, and live a life in light of that faith.

Now I’m well aware that it sounds like I just prescribed faking it until (or even if you don’t) you make it. And I genuinely don’t know if such a prescription would be enough for someone unconvinced of the faith to join it, so don’t take this conclusion as a conversion attempt. But any Christian with a longstanding faith walk will tell you that there are plenty of days when they just don’t “feel” it. Even those more accustomed to hearing God’s voice than a cynic like me will tell you there are seasons where He is silent.1 Yet in those seasons, they continue to pray, continue to go to church, continue to pursue Christian virtue, and continue to put their trust in Christ. Or in other words, they continue to “have faith” even when they don’t necessarily “believe.” And because I think most Christians have probably experienced this, the suggestion I’m making, that we treat faith as a lived action rather than a synonym for our intellectual positions, seems to be something we already do.

But this is also why Christian behavior is essential. To return to the marriage analogy, a wife may choose to love her husband on days when she doesn’t feel that love because of visibility and past experience, not simply an ardent allegiance to her vows. For Christians, while some mystics among us are blessed with direct experience and active feelings of the presence of God, many of us primarily experience the love and presence of God through Christ’s body, that is, the Church. Our fellow Christians, our worshipping community, the regular sustenance of the Eucharist, these are our active and visible reminders of God’s presence with us, and it is in these spaces that God is made most known to us, whether we realize it or not. A good community, like good liturgy, gets us to Jesus even when we can’t walk there ourselves, just as the paralytic’s friends carried him to Christ in Mark 2,2 or to paraphrase the ever-insightful Chris E.W. Green, “The way Christians treat each other is how God becomes intelligible to the world.”

So if a Christian’s experience of the faith is primarily adversarial, existing in a space more concerned with affirming correct dogma or emphasizing the boundary markers that demarcate us from them, then God is invisible in those difficult seasons. Especially in traditions where faith is conceived of in principally individualistic terms, first and foremost a personal and private relationship between you and God, when you aren’t “feeling” that personal connection, there is nothing to fall back on. Without that visible love from the community, or that weekly rhythm of worship emphasizing the corporate body over the individual experience, there is often nothing to do but question all of it.

There are too many who see “church hurt” as invalid, or who don’t seem to understand why a poor experience with an earthly institution would lead one to pass judgment on a heavenly reality, but the truth is the latter is so often only visible through the former. If a young Christian spends their entire upbringing in a Jonathan Edwards mindset, constantly viewing God as chomping at the bit to giddily cast them into the fire, or if they’re constantly reminded that God’s “love” made known through the Cross is actually just satiated bloodlust, or that the true marker of a Christian is political adherence to a movement antithetical to anything they read in the New Testament, then not only is there nothing to fall back on in times of doubt or strife, there’s nothing desirable to pursue when their community fails them. Christ tells his disciples they will be known by their love for each other, Paul addresses the woes of his communities in almost exclusively relational terms, James decries the insufficiency of dogma without virtuous action; the throughline of the New Testament is clear: the world will see God through the behavior of Christians. Christ is the image of the invisible Father, the icon of God which makes the unseen seen, and in our call to emulate Christ, we take on this role. We show the world who Jesus was, not by what we claim about him, but by what we do in his name. So when the world sees cruelty, bigotry, tribalism, petty retribution, lust for power, or superiority complexes masquerading as righteous spiritual warfare, they are right to judge Christ as false, because we have made him false to them. No reasonable person should believe in this Christ, and no Christlike person would seek to emulate him. For the Gospel to be Gospel, it must actually be good news. Our frequent distortions for selfish ends do nothing but obfuscate the truth and glory of Christ’s Way, and tragically, so many people only ever have the chance to see Him through us, and as such, many end up rejecting Christ rightly, simply because he was shown to them wrongly.

And to be clear, when I speak of Christ being shown “wrongly,” I’m not speaking of improperly phrased theological affirmations or poorly worded confessions; I’m speaking in the terms of judgment laid out for us in Matthew 25. When Jesus speaks of the sheep and the goats, those who show charity to the least among them are the ones welcomed by Christ, including those who did not recognize him as Christ. Which returns us to where we started—the choice of faith. Trusting in Jesus, in his mission, in his Way, in the incomprehensible cosmic beauty of God incarnate binding himself to suffering to bring about our making, I think these things are glorious enough to hold to even when we don’t “believe.” If the kerygmatic Way of Christ is the truest and fullest revelation of God, then the universe is founded on the proposition that self-giving love is divine, and if everyone chose to put their faith in that resplendent hope, the cosmos would be a better place, even if no one actually believed it. So for Christians, even on the days when we don’t “feel” God, even on the days when it seems like the Way is pointless, we are called to do more than just repeat the Creeds; we are called to serve those around us and pursue uncompromising love for our neighbors, assured by Christ that in doing so, we shall encounter him in faces unrecognized.

One of the few YouTube personalities classifiable as “old school” and still active is Rhett McLaughlin, one-half of the accomplished duo “Rhett and Link.” Rhett and Link are titans of the independent creator industry, early YouTube pioneers who now command a vast media empire and still show up regularly to make a silly podcast together. But a few years ago, they took an episode of their usually lighthearted show Ear Biscuits to discuss their faith, or rather, the fact that they no longer had any.

Rhett and Link grew up as evangelical Christians and were galvanized in college by the organization Campus Crusade for Christ (or CRU, as it is known). CRU, like many equivalent organizations, sends students out to minister to their peers in a variety of settings. Rhett described trips down to Florida for Spring Break, where he would approach drunk college kids on their third day of partying to enact the classic “if you died tonight, do you know where you’d go” style of evangelism. He also explained that, when they began their media career, he and Link saw it as a gospel endeavor, believing they could use their storytelling skills to win souls for the Kingdom. Safe to say, Rhett and Link’s choice to leave their faith behind was not a decision made quickly, lightly, or flippantly.

I highly recommend listening to his entire conversation with Alex O’Connor, and I will make no attempt to summarize the entire thing here. Instead, I’d like to hone in on a few notable moments from the conversation, because I have heard them from many others who followed a similar trajectory to Rhett. I’ll mark each with timestamps from the video if you would like to go listen to the context yourself.

18:50 - Rhett’s certainty.

Rhett reflects on a feeling that now strikes him as naive; his certainty about the rightness of his Christianity, and specifically that—his Christianity. He recalls how lucky he felt to not only have put his faith in the correct religion, but the correct expression of that religion. Rhett is right to view this as naive, and it illustrates something we find across Christianity, not just in the Evangelical space: the unconscious notion that our version of the faith is the “main” version.

Again, we don’t always consciously think this. While Catholics, Orthodox, or Independent Fundamentalist Baptists may make explicit claims about being the “one true church,” many other denominations end up holding similar views implicitly. It’s sort of an expression of main character syndrome; while one might nominally know that their denomination is smaller than Catholicism or newer than Orthodoxy, their own space is where they see God moving and active, and thus they conclude they have something others don’t. While this phenomenon is not unique to Evangelicalism, I think Evangelicalism features one of its most prominent expressions.

I’ve written several times about Evangelical prophetic movements, which, while numerically a minority within Christianity, have significant cultural prominence through their outsized role in American politics. I also have friends and loved ones who grew up in, or presently remain in, these movements, so I can tell you firsthand that the unconscious assumption that they are the “main” Christianity is a pervasive sentiment. Again, it’s not usually in a “one true church” sense of exclusivity, nor do they tend to claim that other denominations aren’t “really” Christians,1 but the way they speak of themselves as “THE Church,” or the highly inflated sense of importance with which they view their leaders, gives the impression that they believe themselves to be the main characters.2

While you are within such a movement, it’s so easy to accept that framing. As I finish my edits on this article, disgraced pastor and serial sexual abuser Mike Bickle is reportedly preparing a return to public ministry, and if you ask his adherents why a man who sexually abused more than a dozen women and predicated his entire prophetic authority on proven lies must be restored, they will speak about his importance, his impact, his unfinished role in the history of the Church. It’s hard for outsiders to conceptualize, but for insiders, Bickle isn’t just another horny creep; he’s one of the Bible’s “End Times” protagonists. The way they speak of him, you would think Bickle stood in the same company as Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas, or any such figure who left a lasting impression on the history of Christianity. In truth, Bickle, his whole movement, and all his semi-famous peers will likely be little more than a footnote in future history books, if they are mentioned at all among the many other examples of odd American heresies. But this disconnect between the reality of the movement from without and its self-perception from within is perfectly exemplified by Rhett’s recollection about believing he had somehow landed in the “right” Christianity. Too many of us, again, across the denominational spectrum, too easily forget that our expression of the faith is only one of many, and in cases like Rhett’s, the fact that said expression is a novel one remains an important detail that goes painfully unexamined.

25:45 - …is God just an asshole?

Rhett narrates discussions with his Reformed friends about God predestining some to be saved and the rest to be damned. His contention is an extremely common one: regardless of how we conceptualize humanity’s role in our own salvation (or lack therof for the Calvinists he was speaking with in this example), the Bible makes pretty clear that the majority of human beings God created are destined for Hell (the Bible doesn’t actually say that, for the record, but that was Rhett’s understanding at the time). So if God knew most of the people he was going to make would end up either annihilated from existence or tortured for eternity, yet chose to create those people anyway…doesn’t that kind of make God an asshole?

A thorough response to that question could probably be its own article. What I want to focus on today is the response Rhett actually received, which I’m sure many of you have heard, namely some variant of “God’s ways are above our ways.” There is some sense in which this is true, that God is beyond human comprehension, and thus his “ways” are likely beyond our “ways” to some degree. However, I think Rhett’s eventual deconversion is a good testimony to the insufficiency of this answer. While it is perfectly appropriate to appeal to the mystery of God in certain settings, in matters of morality, we still need to offer some sort of coherent justification for our claims. Despite what my Baptist friends might insist, “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” will never be a sufficient standard, because “the Bible says it” is rarely a cut-and-dry claim. Every Christian denomination today thinks “the Bible says so” supports their claims, and this has been true throughout Church history. Let us not forget that great historical scuffles of theology, such as the famed case of Nicene Orthodoxy vs. Arianism, were not battles between a clearly “biblical” view and a heretical innovation, but a clash between differing interpretations of commonly held scriptures and tradition.

All to say, when people ask this kind of question, even in the irreverent (but accurate) manner of questioning whether or not God is an asshole, we cannot simply shrug off these contentions and appeal to the unknown. We should be willing to admit that if God does something that would be abjectly evil if a human did the same thing, defending that action requires far more than a simple dismissal of “don’t question God.”

47:45 - The question of Evolution

Here, I must admit I related a little too strongly to Rhett’s experience. Like Rhett, I grew up in a deeply anti-evolution environment3 where the theory was not so much engaged with as vilified. It wouldn’t be until my 20s that I even began to question assumptions like evolution being inherently anti-Biblical, nor did I have even a passing understanding of the sheer volume of scientific proof for the broad strokes of the theory.4 This is an excellent example of a subject where Christian kids are given a disadvantage by being conditioned to believe that science and the Bible are set in opposition. The faulty assumption here is not that the Bible is “wrong” about evolution, but that the Bible has anything whatsoever to say about science. To treat the Genesis’ etiological stories, mytho-historical narratives, or cosmological descriptions of the solid sky holding up the waters above as scientifically prescriptive rather than theologically descriptive is a category error. And lest someone offer the all-too-common rejoinder that we are sacrificing the Bible’s integrity at the altar of scientism, allow me to quote Saint Augustine speaking about this very matter 1500 years ago, in a work amusingly titled On the Literal Meaning of Genesis:

“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertions.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

1:15:24 - “It’s not any crazier, it’s just less familiar.”

I think this is one of the wisest and most self-aware conclusions Rhett has come to since leaving the faith, and one I desperately wish more of us could learn while still within it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Christian apologists argue against other religions, or other expressions of Christianity, simply by stating their beliefs in an incredulous tone. This goes back a bit to the earlier digression on the frequent assumption that our particular expression of Christianity is the “main” or “normal” one, and I will continue to insist that this assumption is too unexamined.

A really easy example within Christianity is differing views on Mary. Catholics and Orthodox Christians hold an extremely high view of Mary, to a degree that strikes many Protestants as idolatrous. The Marian prayers, festivals, statues, local customs, all of these unfamiliar things strike us as superstitious, and beliefs such as her ever-virginity seem frankly silly. However valid these criticisms may (or may not) be, high Mariology predates Protestantism by nearly twice the span of Protestantism’s own existence. The belief in Mary’s ever-virginity is a tradition that dates back to at least the 2nd century, and the historical Church has held to forms of it for virtually its entire existence. We who reject it are the historical anomaly within the history of Christianity.

Now, this doesn’t automatically make it correct.5 But it demonstrates that things we Protestants may find unfamiliar are often, in fact, the more historically precedented Christian positions. There are so many standard beliefs Christians hold today that go against what Christians believed for almost 2,000 years. Again, just because something was believed for a long time doesn’t make it true, but it is wrong of us to simply dismiss these perspectives because of our own unfamiliarity with them. It is wise to strive to understand the difference between what is actually normative for a tradition and what is simply familiar to us.

In the end, Rhett’s is a sad story, because it's not one of rebellion and apostasy, of hostility to faith or some rebellious spirit seeking to tear itself from what it perceives as the oppressive yoke of Christianity. Rhett did not seek to rebel; he was handed a poor foundation of weak positions and faulty assumptions and told to build his faith upon it. I see no reason to doubt Rhett’s sincerity about his faith, the genuine zeal he had for the Gospel, and the active desire to serve God with his burgeoning passion for media. I don’t doubt his story because I’ve heard it a hundred times. The vast majority of people I have personally known who have left the faith do so not because of sordid temptations or bacchanal aspirations but because their faith was founded upon a fundamentally weak structure, and most often, because they were shamed away from asking questions. Doubt was demonized as a lack of faith; uncertainty was touted as an offense against God, and once fear wasn’t enough to keep them in line, the house of cards dissolved with ease, because it was built on sand to begin with.

This is the true folly of present-day fundamentalism. Goofy modern fictions like Young Earth Creationism might seem harmless enough, and perhaps when held with an open hand in a non-dogmatic manner they still can be, but that is not how its most ardent adherents represent it. As someone who grew up with Ken Ham’s textbooks throughout middle and into high school, I can speak firsthand to the dogmatic certitude with which these claims are expressed. A hyper-literalist reading of Genesis resulting in a six-thousand-year-old earth is not simply an option or interpretation; it is foundational. As the misinformation website Answers in Genesis plainly states:

“Ultimately, the controversy about the age of the earth is a controversy about the authority of Scripture. If millions of years really happened, then the Bible is false and cannot speak with authority on any issue, even the Gospel.”

And so many people, like Rhett, are taught this so conclusively, so dogmatically, that they simply assume it must be the natural reading, the ancient understanding of scripture, the status quo before Darwin and his pesky novel theories came in and forced some unfaithful Christians (probably those idolatrous Catholics) to try and “update the Bible.” This is an ironic stance for many reasons, not the least of which being that what we today call “non-literal” readings of Genesis are both older and dominant in the Christian tradition, and that modern Young Earth Creationism is less than 200 years old, originating not even in mainline Christian circles but from the Seventh Day Adventist movement.6 YEC stands alongside the rarely-questioned but utterly misguided assertion that “conservative” movements represent ancient continuity, when more often than not, they are actually reactionary innovations in their historical youth.7

Organizations like Answers in Genesis think the solution is indoctrination. They demonize public education, belittle scientific research, and bemoan traditional8 approaches to scripture such as allegorical exegesis. Their goal is not to teach you how to research thoroughly, think critically, or anything that would challenge pre-established conclusions. They have the right answers, and they are only interested in finding effective ways to reinforce those conclusions. And they don’t realize that it’s that approach, that narrow thinking and defensiveness, that leads to apostasy. They demand your faith be predicated on something conclusively disprovable, like the age of the earth, and so the only thing needed to destroy a faith built on that foundation is a basic geological or astronomical education. They ask you to look at something measurable and testable and ignore what is right in front of your face. So of course, once the spell is broken, people like Rhett are going to look at that framework and say “wow, what else were they intentionally hiding?” It’s the same mistake hyper-traditionalists make in mainline circles, predicating one’s faith on the magisterial infallibility of an organization like the Catholic or Orthodox church, or the unchanging doctrinal supremacy of confessional Protestantism. If a simple history lesson can undo a core tenet of your faith, you’re only ever one cursory Google search away from a deconstruction crisis.

If Christians want to solve this challenge, the answer is not defensiveness, indoctrination, shielding our children from public school, or doubling down on terrible apologetics; the answer is honesty and education. We need to teach people how to properly contextualize their claims without conflating categories. We need robust understandings of what Scripture actually is in the Christian tradition, which means renouncing oversimplifications that attempt to flatten the entire text into some sort of divine rulebook dropped from heaven. And we need to be honest about what we can and cannot state with certainty or confidence, and in what contexts, being straightforward about what we can state historically vs what we can demonstrate philosophically vs what we take as a claim of faith.9 But what we must cease doing is overstating our case in improper categories, appealing to apologetic reductionism, or trying to pretend the Bible is something that it isn’t. I have no doubt that these things are frequently done in good faith and with noble intentions, but the lesson we as a faith never seem to learn is that all of these attempts to belligerently reassure our children of the infallibility of our dogmas simply set them up to fail.

This subject is deeply important to me, as if my curious and rebellious younger self had been subject to such a system (at church, that is, I certainly was in my homeschooling environment), I wonder if I wouldn’t have ended up reacting similarly to Rhett. This idea of questioning, of deconstruction (to hopefully be followed by reconstruction), of seeking and searching is a vital step along the path of faith, and the fact that it is unduly demonized by so many expressions of Christianity is an absolute tragedy. We desperately need more honest apologetics, more humble engagement with valid challenges to our faith, and more people willing to admit what can and cannot be stated with certainty.

My upcoming film Saint Mick is an artsy fartsy exploration of this very topic. My genuine hope is that it will not only serve as an impactful piece of art but also a vehicle for conversation on this very subject. If I could magically spawn an extensive Christian ministry tomorrow, it would be focused on providing spaces for wandering Christians to explore these doubts, to work through their deconstruction honestly10 in an environment that will not demonize them for it, and that could provide tools and resources for them to find the answers to the questions that can be answered, and healthier ways to engage the ones that can’t.

If anyone wants to kick me some grant money for that ministry, let me know. In the meantime, I’ll keep making movies.

However, the post did manage to cause a bit of a stir, bringing to the surface not only the aforementioned tepid criticism from loyalists but a much more amusing response from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and other grifters who have made a career out of sensationalist framing. Carlson has now implied, and Owens has outright stated, that Trump might in fact be the Antichrist.

No matter your religious background (or lack thereof), you’ve probably heard that term before. Perhaps you even have a vague sense, absorbed from pop culture via osmosis, that the Antichrist is a prophecied figure from the Bible; a future world leader who will deceive many and do…something. Maybe you’ve heard that someone in the Bible is prophesied to survive a head wound before returning to imperial power, or maybe you’ve just seen posts like these going around:

Let me state my thesis right here before we get into the weeds: Donald Trump is anti-Christ and antichrist, but he is not THE Antichrist. We will explore these claims in reverse order, before concluding with a far more accurate prefigurment of Trump from the Bible.

The primary reason I can confidently assure you that Trump is not the Antichrist is the simple fact that “THE” Antichrist is not a Biblical concept.1 Nowhere in the Bible is a future world leader named “The Antichrist” described, predicted, or warned about. The term “antichrist” appears only in the first two epistles of John and functions almost adjectively, primarily to describe a type of person rather than a distinct individual. Furthermore, John explicitly and unambiguously locates these figures (and the “end times” for that matter) not in the distant future but in his present day.

“Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us, for if they had belonged to us they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us….²² Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.”

Two chapters later, John reinforces both the definition of what constitutes an antichrist and the present arrival of such people:

“And every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.”

John’s second epistle makes a brief mention of the (slightly narrowed) definition:

“Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!”

That’s it. The verses you just read comprehensively exhaust the Bible’s mentions of “antichrist.” And they are not at all ambiguous. John could not be more explicit about what he means by the term or when his readers should expect to encounter such people. So how on earth did this clear category become an apocalyptic boogyman?

A comprehensive timeline or history of the antichrist’s evolution is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say, while vague and inconsistant notions of “the” Antichrist as a possible future figure can be found fairly early in Church history, the version of the concept visible in the “seven characteristics of the Antichrist” post above was popularized by 19th-century dispensationalist theology, and far more so by popular fiction such as the Left Behind novels or The Late Great Planet Earth. These books construct this end-times vision of the Antichrist by combining a diverse swath of Biblical imagery, including enigmatic figures such as the Beast of Revelation (contrary to popular opinion, the term “antichrist” does not appear a single time in the book of Revelation) or the Man of Lawlessness from 2 Thessalonians. These oblique characters are ripped kicking and screaming from their literary contexts, syncretized into a single individual under the title of “THE Antichrist,” and ascribed a myriad of unrelated Biblical imagery similarly wrenched from its natural surroundings before being thrown into a speculative and scattershot timeline of future events cobbled together in a manner of progression that only makes sense so long as every individual piece of the puzzel is only read as part of this creation and never examined in its original context.2

Everything from the Man of Lawlessness, to the Mark of the Beast, to any of the other imagery at play here, has a distinct and discernible meaning in its proper context and offers no indication that all of these images are pointing to the same (or even a single) figure. In many of these cases (the Beast of Revelation being one of them), we in fact know almost exactly what the author was alluding to, none of it having to do with some future supervillain who would rule the world through lies and crypto.3 The Antichrist, as popularly understood, is a product of Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins, and Hal Lindsey, not the Bible.

However, even with all of that clarified, Donald Trump does not have to be THE Antichrist to be antichrist. John tells us that he who does not confess Christ is not from God and is of the antichrist’s spirit, and this perfectly describes Donald Trump. To “confess” that Christ is Lord is more than simply to state the words; to “confess” Christ is to publicly align oneself with Christ. The term implies commitment, loyalty, and genuineness, not the lackluster virtue signaling of a man who can’t name a single book of scripture and weilds upside-down Bibles as a photo prop. Donald Trump (and perhaps even more so the Christian leaders who champion him) is the epitome of taking the Lord’s name in vain, stating verbal allegiance while the entirety of his values, actions, and attitudes run absolutely counter to all Christlikeness. In no meaningful sense can Donald Trump be said to “confess” Christ as Lord, and so in this sense, he is most certainly antichrist.

Donald Trump is also a hateful, joyless, warmongering, impatient, cruel, brutal, impetuous, vengeful, corrupt, greedy, and self-serving brute who knows no authority other than his own ego and no morality other than his own impulse. He mocks the faithful, beats down the weak, persecutes the stranger among us, takes from the poor to give to the rich, champions selfishness and self-aggrandizement, lambasts forgiveness, teaches that might makes right, never apologizes, never repents, and can always be counted on to lie with the ease of a man without conscience. In every observable manner imaginable, Donald Trump stands as the absolute antithesis of Christ’s example and moral teachings, and thus, in every meaningful sense, one can say Trump is anti-Christ. But ironically, I actually think Trump was entirely in the right to depict himself as Jesus; the AI-generated image simply chose the likeness of the wrong Jesus. Donald Trump is not the Antichrist; he is Jesus Barabbas.

In the liturgy of my tradition, we recount this story on Palm Sunday. Pilate sets a choice before the crowd: would they like him to release Jesus Barabbas4 or Jesus who is called the Christ? Barabbas, described by the evangelists as a notorious bandit or revolutionary,5 gets no backstory or screen time beyond this brief pericope. But despite how little we know of him, in so many ways, Barabbas represented the messianic expectation subverted by Jesus’ ministry; he was a man of action and violence, apparently popular enough amongst the people for them to choose him over Christ. The rhetoric of the narrative is not subtle in the least: the people are asked to choose which Jesus they want, the aggressive revolutionary or the Prince of Peace. Their embrace of the violent option manifests not only in Barabbas’ release, but in the subsequent murder of the rejected Messiah, proving by blood which Jesus they chose. Our liturgy places us in that crowd, chanting for Brabbas’ release, to remind us how easy it is to replace Jesus with an idol of violence and political expedience.

This same choice is placed before American Christians today. Pope Leo XIV’s Palm Sunday homily included desperate pleas for peace, for the nations to lay down their arms, but more virally, it included a condemnation of those who use the name of God to justify their warmongering. The Trump administration took this personally, prompting a series of backdoor conversations between the White House and the Vatican. The tension erupted into public view when on April 12th, President Trump posted one of his signature tirades to Truth Social, lambasting the Pope as weak and woke, and followed this screed with the post depicting himself as Jesus Christ.

Ironically, this may be one of the most Biblical things Trump has ever done, as he poignantly and clearly laid the choice before the American people, showing them the alternative Jesus in all his faux-oil paint glory, the Jesus of political power, in stark contrast to the Christ of the Gospels. There can be no more concise or salient depiction of the “two ways” currently available to American Christians. Do you align with the leader calling for peace and encouraging classical Christian values, or do you choose the man of action, the man of violence, the insurrectionist, the unfettered grandiose bombast of might-makes-right? Who do Americans really want to follow, Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called Christ?

The earliest Christian catechism and liturgical guide, known to us as The Didache, opens with the invocation:

“There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways.”6

This is the truth obfuscated by sensationalist nonsense about the Antichrist. Trump should not be feared because he’s the fulfillment of an ancient, recondite prophecy about the “end times.” The embrace of Trump should be feared, because choosing Trump’s worldly ways is choosing Barabbas over Christ. Choosing political expedience, violence, and domination of one’s enemies is a rejection of Christ and a ratification of his murder. The cry of the crowd before Pilate, “His blood be on us and on our children!” rings ever truer with each passing day, each needlessly murdered child in the world’s many warzones, each dead American demonized by this administration for their political opposition to its authoritarianism, each cruelly tormented immigrant ripped from their family or shipped to a third-world torture prison. Like the mob before Pilate, people call down judgment upon themselves, because darkness has come into the world and they loved darkness instead of light.

The brilliance of the Palm Sunday liturgy is that it forces the entire congregation to embody the role of calling for Barabbas. On the rare occasion that politics are as morally obvious as they are at present, with a clear cadre of villains in the way you rarely see outside of children’s books or World War II, it can be so easy to assume we who decry such things will always fall into the correct column, always reject the obvious evil, always bravely oppose the mob and call for the true Jesus. I’m sure the Apostle Peter thought of himself as possessing such moral resilience, right up until the moment he denied Christ three times.

We can and should debunk spurious nonsense such as “Trump is the Antichrist.” We can and should oppose the abject evil he and his ilk perpetrate on our and other countries. And we can and should call out the millions who passively or actively enable these horrific actions. But if we allow ourselves to forget our own susceptibility to denying Christ, we risk joining the next mob and watching Pilate wash his hands of our calls for murder. There are indeed two ways set before us, but that binary is not a one-time decision; the choice of life must be made daily, hourly, fervently, humbly, and desperately, working out our salvation by the grace of God with fear and trembling.

I know the “Paul really founded Christianity” or “the institution of the Church obfuscates Jesus” idea is nothing new, and while I appreciate the rhetorical aim of getting back to the core of Jesus’ ministry, I think posts like this are misguided in a few critical ways. With no disrespect intended towards Mr. Palmer, let’s take his claims paragraph by paragraph:

“Jesus was not a Christian. He did not start Christianity…”

This is only half true. While it’s correct to say that nothing in the Bible or history tells us Jesus wrote a charter for a brand new religion called Christianity, he most certainly did found a movement. Historians can and will continue to argue exactly how independent it was supposed to be,1 but there’s ample evidence that his followers understood themselves as participating in something distinct from the established institutions of his day. And while the name “Christian” began to be used quite early in Antioch (according to the author of Acts), Christians before that simply styled themselves as followers of “The Way.” I think the inclination to distance this movement from religiosity is a bit anachronistic. People want Christ’s morals to stand alone, absent from any moral system or anything resembling an institution, but the truth is that Christ prescribed morals and structures just like any other religious teacher (albeit in ways that certainly challenged conventional understandings of his day). He was a Jewish rabbi, a unique one to be sure, but his teaching methods were not entirely alien to his fellow rabbis. The desire to free Jesus from what is seen as corruptive institutionalism is admirable in spirit (especially when done in opposition to modern evils like Christian Nationalism), but rather misguided in practice.

“What we call Christianity is largely shaped by the Apostle Paul and later by the political machinery of the early church. Most of the New Testament isn’t Jesus talking, it’s Paul interpreting.

Here is where the oversimplification of this position is most apparent. For starters, ALL of the New Testament is someone interpreting. To set Paul aside as uniquely “interpretive,” as if the four Gospels are not, is to misunderstand what the Gospels are. Furthermore, we must always remember that Paul is our earliest Christian source. While the reading order of the New Testament takes us through the Gospels before we get to his epistles, Paul’s letters precede even the earliest Gospel by a few decades. And given Paul’s obvious influence in the early church, it’s hard to separate the Gospels from the reach of Pauline theology, even if there is mixed opinion on whether or not the Evangelists included Paul amongst their literary sources.2

But again, even if we cut Paul out of the equation, the Gospels themselves are interpretive. All one needs to demonstrate this is to read all four in a row and observe how Matthew and Luke make interpretive changes to the same stories found in Mark, or how John completely re-arranges (and expands) the order of events in Jesus’ ministry, all the way down to having him be crucified on an entirely different day of the week to make a theological point. If that’s not a theologically “interpretative” choice, I don’t know what to call it. Even if the Gospels contain authentic sayings of Jesus (which I believe they most certainly do), those sayings are transmitted to us within an interpretive narrative, with their meaning frequently explicated by each author.

Also, the “political machinery” of the early Church feels like quite the overstatement. Paul was, best we can tell, one of the most influential Christian leaders of his day, yet even he had to contend with the influence of unnamed “super apostles,” or named rivals like Apollos, Peter, and James. The early church was hardly a centralized power, internally or otherwise, and this remained the case for hundreds of years, even as more formal systems of clerical hierarchy developed. The idea of a top-down institutional oppression of free expression in the first few centuries is anachronistic at best and a caricature at worst.

Then you have centuries of councils, debates, and power plays where theology gets hammered into place by people trying to stabilize a movement that was never meant to be stabilized. Read the creeds. They are packed with metaphysical claims about Jesus, yet strangely quiet about the actual things he taught. It’s a lot of doctrine, very little Jesus.”

I have read the creeds. I don’t think they are as “stable” as this characterization implies. In fact, it’s rather telling that Christians as far apart on the theological spectrum as Pentecostals, Baptists, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox can all (more or less) affirm the creeds as written. The early creeds are incredibly minimal and prioritize affirmations of faith over exact expositions detailing the full extent of said affirmations. I also don’t think calling them “strangely quiet” about the things Jesus taught is fair. The creeds were not designed to replace the content of the Gospels, nor solely to summarize the moral dimensions of Jesus’ teachings. The metaphysical claims “packed” into the creed are claims about Jesus, not a replacement for what he taught. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

“Then Constantine shows up and everything shifts. After the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Christianity goes from a grassroots, disruptive movement to a state-sanctioned tool. Legalized, institutionalized, and eventually weaponized. What began as something subversive becomes something that props up empire. By the time you get to Nicaea, Jesus is being defined in ways that would likely leave him scratching his head. The question isn’t just who Jesus was. It’s who needed him to be what they said he was.”

This contains some truth, but again, the oversimplification is strong here. For one, while Constantine legalized Christianity, it wasn’t until decades later that Emperor Theodosius would make it the official religion of the Roman Empire, which is where it is more fair to claim it became state-sanctioned/institutionalized and eventually weaponized. It’s entirely reasonable to contend that the adoption of Christianity as the faith of the empire began a process of erosion and weaponization, leading to many distortions of Christianity that persist to this day. I myself have criticized on several occasions how it only took five years after its adoption as the state religion for the first execution of heretics to be carried out. However, to blame all of this on Constantine, to treat it as instantaneous, or to imply that Nicaea primarily served the interests of empire, these are all misguided notions. For one, while Nicaea and its follow-up ended up condemning Arianism, it’s not at all clear that Arianism was anything but the majority belief of Christians in the Empire. Constantine himself, despite his support for Nicene orthodoxy, appears to have softened on Arianism even after it was formally decried at Nicaea, choosing political expedience over doctrinal solidity. The line drawn by Nicaea did not serve the interests of the empire; if anything, enforcing a doctrinal line in the theological sand would have been divisive, not conducive to the wielding of power. So the implication that Jesus “needed to be what they said he was” just doesn’t really map onto the political or theological reality of that time period.

“Christianity didn’t just elevate Jesus. It insulated people from him. Turning him into God conveniently removes the pressure of actually following him. If he’s divine in a way you can never be, then you don’t have to wrestle with his humanity or your own. You can worship instead of embody. You can believe instead of live. It’s a brilliant move if your goal is control. Not so great if your goal is transformation.”

With respect, this is one of those claims that only sounds deep until you think about it for more than a few seconds. The idea that difficult commands from Jesus like: “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” are somehow mollified by Christ being God makes no sense. It’s not as if the moral invocations to follow Christ are invalidated by his divinity. Additionally, this claim implies Christ’s divinity was added at Nicaea, but if you read Paul (again, our earliest source) or any of the Gospels, Christ’s divinity is obviously there from the very beginning.3 And in fact, the high call of humanity to be moral in the way Jesus was is predicated upon that very divinity! If the fullness of God can dwell in a human being, then the calling to “wrestle with our humanity” is nothing less than a divine calling.

Also, this claim makes it clear that this author does not understand Christianity very well. Christians do not believe Christ is “divine in a way we can never be,” they believe that God became man precisely so that man could become divine. Claiming Christ’s divinity allows us to “worship instead of embody” is the opposite of the message found in the New Testament or early church writers. The New Testament explicitly talks about how to “believe” is demonstrated by how you live. Not to mention, the implication made in this post is that Jesus must be either divine or human, but the question being argued in most of these cases was how he could be both. The radical Christian claim is that Jesus is entirely human and entirely divine. Christian unity in the body of Christ is how Christians are able to pray to God as “our” Father. Nicene Trinitarianism isn’t an abstract claim about God over there, shoving Jesus up into the clouds with sky-daddy-Zeus-God. Nicene Trinitarianism affirms the Johannine language that Christ desires his disciples to know the Father as he knows the Father. Christians, therefore, do not (at least in prayers like the Lord’s Prayer) pray to the Trinity, but in the Trinity, praying to the Father in the place of the Son by the working and unifying power of the Spirit. Creation is made in and through Christ, and it is in and through Christ that creation participates in the eternal life and love of God. So nothing about this is a “brilliant move,” even in the conspiratorial fiction where the goal is control, because the claims of Christ’s divinity cannot meaningfully be said to separate us from God; those claims are the very means by which Christians claim God unites us to himself. This reductionist view claiming a desire for “control” is not a scathing critique of institutional religious power; it’s not even a very good strawman.

“Strip away the layers of theology, politics, and institutional spin, and you find something far more dangerous than what Christianity preserved. Jesus wasn’t executed for starting a religion. He was executed for disrupting one. He challenged the alliance between religious authority and political power, and he did it without holding any official position himself. That’s what made him dangerous. He didn’t oppose the system by building a rival system. He made the existing one look unnecessary.”

But he did build a rival system. His entire challenge to the existing system was an alternate “Way.” Even if one doesn’t characterize a “movement” as a “system,” the functional overlap looks like a circle.

“The Romans didn’t crucify nobodies. Jesus mattered.”

This, maybe more than any other part of the post, demonstrates the ignorance at play here. The Romans absolutely crucified nobodies. Crucifixion was the lowest form of capital punishment, reserved exclusively for nobodies. Crucifixion was how the Romans disposed of slaves and vagabonds. Important people, citizens, and criminals of status received different, less humiliating deaths. Jesus absolutely mattered, but he was killed in the manner of someone who didn’t, which is why the claim of a crucified messiah was such a scandal to the first-century mind.

“Jesus told people to stop outsourcing their authority, to stop deferring to religious gatekeepers, and to trust what was alive and true within themselves. That’s not religion. That’s a direct threat to anyone who benefits from people staying dependent.”

Jesus did do more appealing to the inner conscience than some Christians are comfortable with; however, I think that to “trust what was alive and true within themselves” is overstated. It is strangely common to find Jesus reduced to a sort of New Age hippie, whose true teachings are vague spiritualisms about inner peace and Buddhist calm. But you don’t have to be a Christian to understand that this is just plain wrong. Jesus, whatever else he was, existed in a specific vein of apocalyptic Jewish messianism. There is no historically accurate way to reduce what he taught down to the vagaries of “what was alive and true within themselves.” In fact, stripped of the theological context Christianity provides, the “historical Jesus” might be viewed by moderns as closer to that guy on the street corner shouting about the end of the world than your charming yoga instructor. The desire for Jesus to be a peace-and-love guru is doubtless well-intentioned, but it simply cannot be sustained without ignorance.

“Every time Jesus spoke, he was pulling another block out of the structure holding everything in place. He didn’t need an army. He didn’t need a platform. His clarity did the damage. He revealed that the system people thought they needed wasn’t necessary in the way they had been told. And once people start to see that, the whole thing begins to wobble.”

Again, this doesn’t read like someone who has actually read the words of Jesus, it reads like someone who has sort of heard things about Jesus. Jesus challenged the systems of his day, but he wasn’t just an anti-system for its own sake, freedom-for-the-masses guy. He had a specific and clearly stated religious agenda. He didn’t say “ignore the religious institutions and follow your truth,” he said, “I AM those institutions, follow ME.”

“What’s ironic is that the religion built in his name ended up doing the opposite of what he did. It rebuilt the very structures he exposed. It reintroduced authority, hierarchy, and dependency, then stamped his name on it for legitimacy. And now, two thousand years later, Jesus is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Talked about endlessly, but rarely recognized.”

Now, for the most part, this claim is true. The Church has instituted hierarchy, misused authority, and misappropriated the name of Jesus for legitimacy. Horrific evils are justified in Christ’s name by our leaders today, and that is not a unique occurrence. But given that this claim is predicated upon all the reductionism that precedes it, I hesitate to affirm even the parts I agree with. My impression is that the “real” Jesus this author is desperate for people to see is as much a fiction as the Jesus he is denouncing.

“Jesus might be the most famous missing person in history. Not because he disappeared, but because the institution built around him made sure you wouldn’t find him.”

Lastly, I would like to know where people can find this missing Jesus. Every real detail we know about his teachings is preserved in Christian sources. We have the same access to ancient manuscripts that the church does; we can go and look at the original Greek and see what it says. For all its many flaws and historical atrocities, the historical Church is our only preserver of ANY version of Jesus, and if you want to claim this institution corrupted him (insofar as the Church can ever, in any historical era, be spoken of as a monolith), you must appeal to facts from that very institution to do so.

In the end, I understand and even appreciate what people like Mr. Palmer are attempting to do here. I share his desire to oppose the weaponization of the faith, and especially to combat the perverse lies about Christ that undergird repulsive movements like Christian Nationalism. But it is useless to combat lies about Christ with lies about Christ. In attempting to free Jesus from institutional corruption, these kinds of posts turn him into something completely alien, and ironically, in their efforts to liberate him from the confines of distant deity, they re-inter him within an equally false prison, propping him up to be admired as an idol of anachronism.

However, the farther down this side of the translation spectrum one wanders, the more careful they must be. Today I’d like to make some brief comments on three very popular translations that go so far in their dynamic equivalence as to qualify as more of a paraphrase than a “translation” proper, two of which I believe can be embraced in the right context, and one that comes from an absolute madman and should be avoided at all costs.

Eugene Peterson’s The Message is probably the most well-known colloquial paraphrase of the Bible. Its abject casualness provides easy laughs for those who have never encountered anything like it. After all, if one is used to the pomp and grandure of something like KJV English, how can you do anything but chuckle at Peterson rendering Romans 8:3 as “God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son,” or Psalm 27:3 as “When besieged, I’m calm as a baby. When all hell breaks loose, I’m collected and cool,” or the perfectly servicable yet humerously mundane Matthew 1:18 as “Before they enjoyed their wedding night, Joseph discovered she was pregnant. (It was by the Holy Spirit, but he didn’t know that).”

Now I’ll admit, in years past, I’ve been quite dismissive of The Message, but I’ve since come around on it. It’s not a translation I ever use, but after educating myself about its history and encountering highly reputable theologians who use and appreciate it, I’ve come to accept it as a good-faith effort by a well-meaning, qualified translator. Peterson did not set out to write a best-seller; he began the translation for his own congregation, to try to spark in them the reaction that reading the original Greek spurred in him, and the idiomatic excessiveness seems perfectly appropriate in a setting as personal as that. And again, at least Peterson is actually fluent in the Biblical languages; a prerequisite for translation that you’d assume would be a given for any translator, but as you’ll see if you read to the end of this article, that is not always the case.

Love him or hate him (it’s the former for me), N.T. Wright is one of the world's pre-eminent Bible scholars. He’s written dozens of books, including commentaries on every book in the New Testament, and through these efforts, eventually compiled his own translation. Styled under his “For Everyone” series, Wright’s explicit goal is to make the text of the Bible accessible, understandable, and approachable. While this usually results in casual language, it does not stray quite as far from the original phrasing as Peterson. For example, rather than God going for the jugular, Wright renders Romans 8:3 as: “For God has done what the law (being weak because of human flesh) was incapable of doing. God sent his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as a sin-offering; and, right there in the flesh, he condemned sin.”

As with any paraphrastic translation, a “thought for thought” approach is only as good as the interpretation of the translator, since the pursuit of clarity forces them to discard ambiguity in the original language. All translation is interpretation, but dynamic equivalence requires far more consequential interpretative choices to be made (which is why these translations should never be one’s primary study Bible). Wright is as qualified a scholar as any to make these choices, so I freely admit that I’m punching above my weight class when I say that one decision he makes in his translation is, to my mind, not only wrong, but indefensibly so.

When the New Testament authors refer to the Hebrew Scriptures, they usually do so either with the Greek term graphē (γραφή—literally, “writing”) or with the phrase “it is written.” Wright, throughout his take on the New Testament, translates both of these phrases as “The Bible.” So where in Matthew 4:4 the Greek says, “it is written: one does not live by bread alone,” Wright translates “‘The Bible says,’ replied Jesus, ‘that it takes more than bread to keep you alive,’” or where the Greek of John 5:39 says “you diligently search the Scriptures (Ἐραυνᾶτε τὰς γραφάς)” Wright renders it, “‘You study the Bible,’ Jesus continued.”

This translation choice not only flattens Scripture’s multivalence, but it is also indefensibly anachronistic. There was no such thing as “The Bible” in Jesus’ day. While we now have a neat selection of books tidily compartmentalized into the Old and New Testaments, no such “closed canon” (not even the Old Testament) existed in the first century, nor did any of the books comprising the New exist during Jesus’ ministry. The Jewish scriptures of Christ’s day were just that, scriptures, plural, and that matters, because what constituted these scriptures was not collected into an authoritative list. In fact, as best as scholars can tell, first-century Jews read and devotionally applied all sorts of texts that no longer appear in modern Bibles. Recovered texts like 1st Enoch and the book of Jubilees were very popular (the former is even quoted in the New Testament), lost texts like the Assumption of Moses were favored enough to be referenced by NT authors and survive in fragmentary form. Many of these works would likely be included in the conceptual category of “the Scriptures,” but none of them are included in the conceptual category of “The Bible.” Furthermore, the Bible today plays a wildly different role in our everyday faith compared to most of Christian history, even as a concept. Most Christians did not encounter “The Bible” as a singular book they read on their own; rather, they encountered Scripture in liturgical contexts, usually in church settings. This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but I really do think the conceptual categories here make a huge difference. Language like “The Scriptures” conveys a collection, plurality, multi-vocality, harmony, and diversity, while language like “The Bible” conveys singularity, univocality, and structural rigidity. When the Scriptures become a single book, Genesis becomes chapter 1, the Crucifixion becomes something that happens during the climax 2/3s of the way through, and Revelation becomes that weird epilogue that gets left out of the movie adaptation. But this order is not the theological order of the Christian story. Interpretation of the Old Testament begins with the Cross, known only through the unveiling brought about by Christ. Only through that knowledge can it be read as Christian Scripture, because the Old Testament is an elucidation of the Gospel, not its prologue.3 As St. Irenaeus summarized:

“Every prophecy before its fulfillment is nothing but an enigma and ambiguity to human beings. But when the time has arrived and the prediction has come to pass, then it has an exact exegesis.”

Not only is all of this nuance lost in Wright’s translation choice, but the anachronistic simplifications of “The Bible” are imported, as a concept, into the Bible itself! The Bible is not self-referential, as it did not exist when any book in its collection was written, so Wright’s use of this term leaves the reader with a completely unfounded understanding of what Scripture is and how it functioned (even for the authors of what would later come to be included as Scripture). Furthermore, it needs to be emphasized that when Paul makes claims about Christ “in accordance with the Scriptures,” or for that matter, when the Nicene Creed adopts the same language, they are not talking about the New Testament.4 The exposition of the Gospel “in accordance with the Scriptures” is of vital importance to understanding the shape of early Christian theology, which is why I don’t think Wright’s translation choice here is overstated or misguided; I think it’s flat out wrong.5 It obfuscates what is being said, canonizes anachronisms, and imports frameworks that, while popular today, were alien to the New Testament authors, and frankly, we should follow their model in abandoning them.

To reiterate, I am a huge fan of Wright and am deeply indebted to his work. I hope I have explained my contention with his translation choice well, despite my utter lack of linguistic qualifications. To learn more about early Christian utilization of “The Scriptures” and for a more thorough understanding of why these distinctions are essential, I highly recommend the book In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology by patristics scholar John Behr. Or, if you prefer to listen rather than read, he has countless lectures on the topic.

Now, let us move on from the well-meaning work of qualified scholars and end with a look at an absolute abomination.

If you exist outside of charismatic or evangelical circles, you’ve probably never heard of the Passion translation (TPT). I’ll let the listing on Bethel’s website tell you what it claims to be:

“The Passion Translation® is a modern, easy-to-read Bible translation that unlocks the passion of God’s heart and expresses his fiery love—merging emotion and life-changing truth. Bethel’s 2020 Edition includes a foreword by Bill Johnson, over 1000 revised and new footnotes, 16 pages of full-color maps, and more.”6

As we’ve already seen, paraphrastic translations are nothing new. There is nothing inherently wrong with an idiomatic, “easy to read” version of the Bible.

But.

For starters, the creator of TPT, Brian Simmons, is not a Bible scholar. He’s not an expert in any of the Bible’s original languages. To this day, I still have not found any evidence to suggest that he’s even competent in ancient Greek or Hebrew, much less fluent. He has no academic credentials in linguistics or any field of Biblical studies, only a fake doctorate from the non-accredited Wagner Leadership Institute.7 Simmons’ supposed claim to fame in the world of Bible translation was as part of a team assisting with translating the Paya-Kuna New Testament. But as many who have researched this topic will tell you,8 his claims regarding his contributions to this project were, if we’re being charitable, exaggerated. When asked directly about Simmons and TPT, one member of the organization that ran the Paya-Kuna efforts stated quite simply: “Brian is not a linguist of any sort.” A fellow member of the translation team Simmons claimed to have been part of was quoted as saying: “He was a church planter…not a translator…Nobody in our mission would ever say that he’s a Bible translator or was ever approved as a Bible translator.” Even the most cursory appraisal of Simmons’ supposed credentials reveals a pattern of dishonesty about his qualifications, and it doesn’t get better when we assess the work itself.

The Passion Translation is just demonstrably wrong in many, many instances. Most of the time, Simmons simply plays fast and loose with adjectives (true to the book’s name, “I love” often and erroneously becomes “I passionately love”), but frequently, the alterations are theological in nature. Psalms shift their focus from being spoken about God to being spoken to God. Allegorization is imported as a lexical feature rather than an interpretive one.9 Terminology is introduced that, to the casual observer, may not seem insidious, but to those familiar with Simmons’ theology, provides clear proof of his agenda. A subtle example can be found in Romans 1:12-

NIV: “that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.”

ESV: “that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.”

KJV: “That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.”

NRSVUE: “or rather so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.”

Passion Translation: “Now, this means that when we come together and are side by side, something wonderful will be released. We can expect to be co-encouraged and co-comforted by each other’s faith!”

For those familiar with the aberrant theology being pushed here, the intent of the altered phrasing should be obvious. For those unacquainted, well, that’s a much longer subject for a different time. But suffice to say, his footnotes continue these oddities, such as the infamous note he provides for Romans 1:1, where he claims

“The Greek word doulos signifies more than a servant; it is one who has chosen to serve a master out of love, bound with cords so strong that it could only be severed by death.”

This claim is not only wrong, but bizarrely wrong. The Greek doulos was a conventional term for “slave.” True, English translations often render it “servent” (largely to downplay modern discomfort), but to take that convention and expand to “chosen to serve a master out of love” is simply fiction. I have no idea what Simmons bases this claim on, and that is a recurring pattern with him. He claims other scholars assist with and check his work, but does not list who they are. He claims to have the aforementioned background in linguistics, but no proof exists. And maybe most notably, he frequently cites Biblical manuscripts that simply do not exist.

Quick history lesson. Every book in the New Testament was written in Koine (meaning “common”) Greek. However, as a Jewish rabbi from Galilee, Jesus likely spoke Aramaic as his primary language.10 As such, Aramaic sometimes gets, for lack of a better word, divinely fetishized by Christians. The language itself, being Jesus’ native tongue, is seen as holy, which is why you’ll often see viral videos of the Lord’s Prayer translated into Aramaic floating around with titles like “hear the ORIGINAL words of Jesus!”

But let me be clear: while it is highly likely that Jesus conducted his ministry in Aramaic, the earliest witnesses to said ministry are preserved entirely, and exclusively, in Greek. So when Brian Simmons claims to be translating from the “original Aramaic manuscripts,” he is spinning a yarn. Simmons has insisted on many occasions not only that he bases his translation on Aramaic “originals,” but that “recent scholarship” has come around to the notion that the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament are later translations of Aramaic originals.11 This claim is utterly baseless and rather nonsensical. While Jesus may have spoken Aramaic, the intended audience of the New Testament documents largely did not. Paul wrote largely to Greek-speaking audiences, and what we know of most of the Gospels indicates that they too were written for areas where Greek was the lingua franca. Simmons’ claims are so strange not only because they are entirely baseless, but because they are so obviously disprovable. Spend 12 seconds on Google, or ask literally any professional Bible scholar, and they will quickly tell you that the claim of “Aramaic originals” is absolute nonsense.12

So at this point, you may be asking yourself why a man with no qualifications or expertise would attempt to translate the Bible.

Well.

Simmons claims that Jesus Christ himself appeared to him, breathed on him, and directly commissioned this translation. He asserts that Christ promised to give him “secrets of the Hebrew language,” that Christ promised to guide him on the translation (he immediately began receiving mental “downloads” about Hebrew and Greek), and to help him reveal the true secrets that have been there all along. And if that’s not enough, Simmons submits that Christ took him (in a vision?) to a library in heaven, where on a heavenly bookshelf, Simmons saw a book titled “John Chapter 22.”

That’s right. Coming soon to a Christian bookstore near you, straight from heaven itself, the lost final chapter of the Gospel of John. Hear it straight from the man himself on a television program that I swear is not a parody:

So you see, Simmons isn’t wrong about any of his translations; he’s simply correcting mistakes in the Bible that have persisted for 2,000 years. Jesus himself is guiding this translation, which perfectly explains why Simmons has….retracted and revised some of his more overtly terrible renderings due to scholarly pushback and other rebuffs, such as Bible Gateway removing TPT from its website. Funny that.

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to see through this racket. We have a man claiming he was commissioned by Jesus, a man who lies about his credentials, who promised that he and only he has the truth regarding documents experts have studied for ~2,000 years, who produced a translation “reviewed by scholars” but he won’t tell you their names, translated from “original Aramaic documents” that don’t exist, and who someday, is going to try and sell you on a brand new, never before seen chapter of a Gospel, delivered straight from heaven, while insisting he is not adding to Scripture. This is a very simple equation. Brian Simmons is either commissioned by Christ himself, or he’s lying.

He’s lying.

And his obvious lies would be easily dismissible were they not embraced and promoted by highly influential leaders like Bethel Church’s Bill Johnson. Johnson (and others; he isn’t alone here) is predisposed to love Simmons’ translation because Simmons’ theological priorities align with Johnson's. For years, those who have claimed “new revelation” regarding the Scriptures have been hampered by the Bible not saying what they need it to mean, leading to frequent instances of, “I know the text says this, but what it really means is...” Brian Simmons fixes all these problems for Johnson and those who share his revisionist theology. All those “it really means this” verses in the Passion Translation suddenly and conveniently say precisely what Johnson has claimed they’ve meant all along! Phraseology is altered, focus is shifted, buzzwords are added, and entire sentences, phrases, and paragraphs are fabricated, resulting in TBT being 30-40% longer in most places than a standard English translation. It is no different than the sectarian alterations made by Jehovah’s Witnesses producing the NWT, or by Joseph Smith producing his own authoritative translation in addition to the Book of Mormon. These aren’t honest translations of the original text; these are authoritative alterations to serve sectarian priorities.

But if you know anything about Bill Johnson, you’ll be well aware that honesty is not one of his priorities. Earlier this year, in the aftermath of the Shawn Bolz fiasco (click here for that rabbit hole), Johnson was quoted as saying that fake prophecy was “worth it.” He acknowledged that fraudsters like Bolz data-mined for their words of knowledge, which, to the unacquainted, means they looked up information about event attendees on social media and then passed it off as God-given prophetic insight. Johnson’s response to this explicit fraud was to advise caution about “flushing” said words, in case the con-artist delivering them actually is conveying a message from the Almighty. He further went on to admit that, when endorsing Bolz’ book on TV in 2023 (well after learning of Bolz fraudulence and sexual predation of staff members), he knew he was lying. Reportedly, his excuse was that he hoped to speak those truths into existence, that maybe if he said them, they would become true.

The point here is not to diverge into an endless condemnation of Bill Johnson (a subject which could fill a dozen articles with room to spare) but merely to point out what kind of people most prominently champion the Passion Translation and why. These are not earnest truth seekers or humble God-fearers; they are proven fraudsters with a specific agenda for which they openly admit they are willing to lie. And when taking into consideration its origin, its claims to authority, and its actual word choice, that is what the Passion Translation ultimately is: one big lie.

Because the Passion Translation, one final time, is not a translation. It is, in the most charitable and good-faith light possible, a nakedly sectarian paraphrase bordering on outright fan-fiction. It’s a revisionist rephrase with a clear agenda, presented to you under false premises by an evidently obvious liar, and unfortunately, endorsed by respected and influential figures who are too irresponsible and self-serving to approach ministry with integrity.

The Passion translation is not the Bible. It is, in the words of The Message:

“not a minor variation, you know; it is completely other, an alien message, a no-message, a lie about God.”

I have two examples that illustrate this. The first is kephalē, the Greek word for “head.” How to translate this term is not a difficult question; ancient humans possessed heads above their shoulders just like modern ones. The problem lies in the cultural metaphors associated with the word. In English, the word “head” is frequently used to metaphorically mean something like “leader” or “authority” (think “the head of the pack”), and as such, it is only natural to infer that such a meaning carries over in other languages. But it is not at all clear that the Apostle Paul’s infamous use(s) of the term actually carries the hierarchical connotations we so readily impose upon it. It certainly seems like he does, but again, this may be due to our colloquial assumptions about that word’s metaphorical inferences. A survey of comparative Greek literature from the first century tells a different story.

What we find when we examine this evidence is that “head” in these Greek contexts means something like “origin” or “source.” This makes sense when applied to the Biblical use of the term, Christ is the “head” of the Church in that he is its source, the church is “taken out” of him, born of water and the Spirit from his side, just like the rib for the woman is taken out of the sleeping Adam. The head (usually) enters the world first, followed by its body, and as Paul says, a body cannot be born without its head (and vice versa). While again, this may strike us as slightly counterintuitive given our association with “head” meaning “authority,” applying this understanding of “origin” keeps us from imposing common misconceptions onto the text. For example, absolutely nowhere in the Bible are men described as the “head” of their household (despite us hearing that when we read that the husband is the “head” of the wife). We draw such conclusions from inference, not the explicit words on the page. Christ obviously is seen as having authority over His church, so when we read that He is its “head,” of course we map said authority onto that understanding, and likewise, (by way of the transitive property), if the husband is the head of the wife in the same way that Christ is the head of the church, authority seems naturally implied. But the New Testament does not really justify this logic. When we read about Christ as the “head” of the church, authority is never directly paired with this imagery; rather, the metaphor speaks of headship in terms of origin (Colossians 1:18) or as giving abundant, flourishing life (Colossians 2:18-19, Ephesians 4:15-16). The closest we get to a sense of “authority” is Ephesians 1:20-23, where some language of authority precedes, but is not inherently illustrated by, Christ’s headship, as the understanding of things being placed under his feet is not so much a claim of hierarchy as it is a claim of creation,1 with Christ as the source of all things, in whom all things hold together, a Pauline motif perhaps depicted most clearly in Colossians:

He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. ¹⁹ For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰ and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Note the repeated emphasis on Christ’s “firstness,” and how his function as this first principle is the means by which God reconciles all things to himself. Paul’s language is not that of a hierarchical despot reminding underlings of their subordinate place; it is a story of life-giving sacrifice infused with all the kenotic undertones of the Christ Hymn in Philippians.

More examples emphasize this point, from the lack of “authority” as a primary meaning for “head” in most notable lexicons of Koine Greek, to the fact that the translators of the Septuagint almost never use kephalē to translate the Hebrew רֹאשׁ, a word that means “head” in Hebrew but, like English, carries the connotation of “chief” or “leader.” In any case, this is a prime example of how the cultural assumptions we bring to a text (both our metaphorical norms and the pervasive concept of “male headship” in plenty of Christian theology) often load that text with more meaning than it intends to convey, and frequently distort what the author himself was trying to say.

For an extensive collection of articles exploring specific usage of this term in the New Testament and expanding on the arguments I’ve briefly summarized, see this work from Marg Mawczko. For a good-faith argument opposing the understanding I have presented here, I would suggest Preston Sprinkle’s multi-part series investigating this question. However, I would also insist that you read Phillip Payne’s 6,000-word comment on that linked article, as I believe it adequately addresses and soundly refutes much of Preston’s ultimate conclusion.

The second example is the nebulous term “inspiration” (Greek: theopneustos), as featured in 2 Timothy 3:16.2 When Christians say the Bible is “inspired,” they can mean anything from “dictated word-for-word by God” to “creatively galvanized by a divine prompting.” This diversity comes less from the meaning of the word than from its interpretive application across various conceptions of scripture. My goal today is not to propose a conclusive pronouncement on the theological concept of inspiration, but instead to explore the question of what the term most likely conveyed purely in its original cultural context.3

In my experience, the most common understanding of “inspired” is something to the effect of “breathed out by God.” This is sometimes as simplistic as “God wrote the Bible,” but more often it’s viewed as a sort of guiding principle. So it’s less that God whispered the words of the text into Isaiah or Mark’s ear, and more that the prompting of the Holy Spirit initiated the work, and the presence of the Holy Spirit guided it to a God-ordained conclusion. While I’m certain this understanding of Scripture would accord with many early Christians, I don’t think there’s good reason to believe that 2 Timothy’s use of theopneustos demonstrates that understanding. In fact, the historical record strongly testifies that the understanding of “inspired” as “breathed out by God” largely originates with (or is at least most prominently systematized by) Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century.4 In the first century, the term primarily meant something like “life-giving,” or “the impartation of divine vitality,” such as a wellspring, or the head of a river. To be “inspired” literally meant to be in-spired, breathed into, animated by divine wind, like how Adam was formed from the clay but did not become a living being until animated by God’s life-giving breath. John C. Poirier’s excellent book The Invention of the Inspired Text: Philological Windows on the Theopneustia of Scripture features a helpful survey of ancient Greek literature leading up to the first century,5 in which the usage of theopneustos consistently conveys this meaning of “life-giving.” Given this understanding, 2 Timothy 3:16 is not making the claim “all scripture is breathed out” by God in an authorial sense; it is saying Scripture is vivified by God’s breath/Spirit (keep in mind that the word for breath and spirit are the same in Greek and Hebrew). And if we simply read what the rest of the verse says, this makes way better sense of its teaching. 2 Timothy does not say “all scripture is God-breathed and therefore the innerant, infallible Word of God,” it says that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” It is useful for the life of the church, because it is animated by the life-giving Spirit of God, and this “inspired” feature of its nature is demonstrated more in its application than its existence.

Setting aside the philological argument (and continuing to ignore the anachronism of applying this verse to a codified “Bible” that did not yet exist when it was written), this concept of Scripture being life-giving helpfully illustrates some major differences between ancient assumptions about the Bible and modern ones. As mentioned above, the change in meaning to “breathed out” is mostly ascribed to Origen, but to then claim that Origen’s understanding of “inspiration” resembles modern doctrines of the same would be very misguided. I have neither the skill nor expertise to adequately summarize Origen’s exegetical methodology, but suffice it to say that many of his claims about the “breathed out” nature of Scripture were premised upon their reading as Scripture. “Inspiration” was, in many ways, as much an act of reading as writing; “the scriptures” only functioned as “Scripture” when predicated upon a spiritual approach to the text in the unveiled light of Christ’s passion. John Behr, one of the foremost experts on Origen in the world, summarizes this principle (by his own admission, a little provocatively) by saying: “Unless we are reading Scripture allegorically, we are not reading it as Scripture.”6

This is an essential distinction, not just for hermeneutics, but to challenge our critically under-examined presuppositions about the Bible’s nature. Too often, we assume that whatever the Bible’s divine character (inspired, inerrant, or anything else), it is an inherent facet of the text in the abstract. If the Bible is inspired, it’s inspired on its own, sitting on the shelf, because we think of inspiration as an authorial characteristic, not an interpretative one. But the early claims of “inspiration,” and maybe more essentially, the claims of figures in the New Testament itself, demonstrate that it is not the words on the page that convey divine revelation; it is their unveiling through the revelation of Christ. As Origen himself puts it (paraphrasing 2 Corinthians 3:15-16 and Hebrews 10:1):

“The splendour of Christ’s arrival, therefore, illuminating the Law of Moses with the brightness of truth, has taken away that veil which had covered the letter and disclosed, for everyone who believes in him, all the good things which were concealed, burried within.”7

I would like to note again that just because the original sense of this passage may not align with later interpretations, it does not inherently render those interpretations theologically invalid. However, a common mistake people will make is presupposing that their own understanding of “inspired” was intended by the author of 2 Timothy. So to say, if someone believes God “inspiring” the Bible means God dictated it word for word, and you ask them to defend that claim, they might cite 2 Timothy 3:16, not realizing they’re baking in the assumption that everything they mean by “inspired” is indexed by the author’s use of that term. But this is nothing more than circular reasoning, (as is the way it is often implemented to defend the Bible’s inerrancy).8 The debate cliche of “define your terms” exists for this very reason; if we’re arguing over the meaning of a word, we can’t presume that word’s meaning to make our point, and too often, that is exactly how Christians treat the term theopneustos.

This is more of a bonus entry, but I see this claim spread so often9 that I feel it’s worth addressing. One very common translational note you’ll see online is the insistence that the commandment “thou shalt not kill” should more properly be rendered “thou shalt not murder,” because Hebrew has distinct terms for killing and murder. This is simply untrue. Hebrew has a few terms for the intentional ending of a life, and while they do have some distinctions, the lack of semantic overlap is vastly overstated. For example, the term for “murder” in the 6th commandment of Exodus 20:13 is used elsewhere for manslaughter, including accidentally causing death (see Numbers 35:11), which alone demonstrates that it does not map neatly onto the limited range of the English term “murder.” This becomes most apparent in the common application of this misunderstanding to arguments regarding the death penalty; you’ll often see pro-death penalty Christians argue that this lexical distinction between killing and murder justifies the former in sanctioned instances. However, the exact same root word for what is forbidden in the 6th commandment is used in Numbers 35:30 to prescribe the death penalty for murderers in certain contexts. So if the word choice for the 6th commandment definitionally classifies that kind of killing as “murder,” by that logic, the commanded death penalty in Numbers 35:30 is also murder. Similarly, a different Hebrew word for killing is used by Abram in Genesis 12:12 to describe the Egyptians murdering him to steal his wife (unjust murder), with the same word used in Exodus 13:15 to describe the death of the firstborn in Egypt (divinely mandated killing, according to the narrative), and in Leviticus 20:16, once again to describe the death penalty (legally justified killing). These examples should make it quite clear that the neat and tidy distinction between “killing” and “murder” does not exist via word choice and must instead be determined contextually.

This does not, on its own, resolve any moral quandaries about what kind of killing (if any) can be justified by Christians. But it does emphatically refute the claim that the Bible is clear on such matters simply by way of word choice. As with almost every topic, the correct response to someone insisting “the Bible says x” is to pause and ask “ok, but what else does the Bible say?” For every insistence of “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it,” there is almost always an example of “but not like that.” And as the translational difficulties I’ve highlighted in this article hopefully illustrate, sometimes even “the Bible says x” is an incomplete framing. The Bible is theologically bountiful but not doctrinally precise, functioning better as source material than a system. To pretend that it speaks in simple or singular terms and to belligerently wield reductionist certainty like a club is simply to demonstrate the Apostle’s claim that the letter kills, while eschewing the life-giving breath of the Spirit.

Firstly, I will be down in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 21st to deliver a paper at Holy Moot, a day conference on the intersection of Christian theology and the work of JRR Tolkien. The wonderfully nerdy title of my paper (I need to sound like an academic to blend in) is: On Making and Being Made: A Filmmaking Hermeneutic for Creation Stories. Presenting a paper from the front of the room will be a markedly different experience from presenting a film while hiding in the back of a theater, but I’m very excited for the new challenge and all the lessons I’m sure to learn from this experience. If this sounds intriguing to any of my readers, you can attend online or in person by purchasing tickets here.

Secondly, I’m going to be spending the weekend of April 10-12 in Waverly, PA at the Northeast Pennsylvania Film Festival. I don’t have a film screening this year, but after winning the festival’s top prize last year, I was asked to serve as a panelist for the opening night, and I will be teaching a film festival-focused1 workshop on Saturday at 2pm. Waverly is a charming example of small-town PA and I had a lovely time there last year, so I hope to see familiar faces! Again, tickets can be purchased here.

Thirdly, I have for some time now predicted that AI would come for my job, as many of my monetizable skills are unfortunately going to be automatable in the near future. And while this may still be the case, it looks like good old-fashioned corporate budget cuts got me first: a decent percentage of the company I work for was laid off this week, and I was sadly one of the casualties. I’m currently assessing my options for whatever comes next, but since more opportunities tend to come from connections than cold calls, I figured I would mention here that I will soon be a free agent on the job market, so if anyone knows anyone hiring for any media production or creative directing positions, I have extensive experience across the video creation spectrum, from hands-on videography to team leadership roles, and would love to take a look at any opportunities floated my way.

Fourthly and lastly (to end on a happier note), as we work through post-production, I decided to float Saint Mick’s screenplay around to a very small handful of festivals with screenplay competitions, two of which have now come and gone. So I wanted to publicly thank my friends at the Austin Revolution Film Festival for honoring Mick with an official acceptance, and a second thank you to the Faith, Hope, and Love Film Festival for selecting Mick as one of their three finalists (if I’m reading the award page correctly, we were one spot off from the grand prize).

While querulously neglecting my math homework as a child, one of the many proddings of well-meaning adults included the classic mantra, “You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket.” Yet today, I walk around at all times with a calculator in my pocket. And a darn good one at that. My iPhone not only comes with a pre-installed standard calculator, but also access to search engines imbued with all the advanced capabilities of a TX-30. The problem, of course, is with this technology so readily available, I’ve failed to retain any math skills from childhood1 (not that I had many to begin with) and become entirely reliant on said technology. And so it is with many technological conveniences.

The incursion of AI brought many risks, but reliance is chief among them. There may be a responsible place in certain workflows for an LLM, but many have already adopted it as a dependency, relying on it fundamentally rather than supplementally. I can’t tell you how many Facebook comments I’ve seen that now start with “well, I asked ChatGPT,” in place of summarizing positions or linking to primary sources, or more ghastly examples, such as watching people conduct Bible studies via LLM. Nowhere is this more visible than on Twitter, where the reply “Grok, is this true?” has become so ubiquitous as to already be a meme.

I lament this all as a negative. But one diamond amidst the rough is that most LLMs, at least for the time being, draw their knowledge from a broad consensus of available data, which means that while they’re very prone to getting details wrong, their general understanding of most topics is somewhat grounded in reality. And since they are grown (as opposed to programmed), it is very difficult to manipulate LLMs into accepting a broadly alternative reality. This, again, is most visible on Twitter, where there are countless instances of folks appealing to Grok to affirm their propaganda, only for Grok to turn around and hit them with some uncomfortable facts. It’s no secret that Elon Musk has done everything in his power since acquiring the social media platform to weaponize it on behalf of a right-wing political agenda, and this included the promise that Grok would defy other LLMs and refuse to be “woke.” And yet, Grok just keeps saying “woke” things, and is comically frank about the disconnect:

LLMs do lie. In fact, many AI companies have quietly admitted that despite all their efforts, they can’t stop LLMs from occasionally making things up (“hallucinating” is the official term). But simultaneously, xAI is showing us in real time how it’s equally difficult to force LLMs to lie for you, at least via broad and publicly-accessible implementations like Grok. So no matter how right-wing the Twitter algorithm gets and no matter how many edgy jokes or slurs are added to Grok’s vocabulary, at the end of the day, all of Musk’s horses and all of his men cannot seem to stop Grok from re-orienting users back towards factual reality, in direct opposition to the ideological bubble Twitter otherwise enforces.

It’s ironic that an LLM, a creature of the reality-distorting internet, functions in this case as a bulwark of objective reality. Musk has been wildly successful in his malformation of Twitter into an ugly, engagement-baiting hellscape (not that it was a paradise to begin with) in direct service of a political agenda that weaponizes disinformation beyond anything we’ve seen in my lifetime. Our nation has sadly reached the “the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” stage of political discourse, so for all the dangers AI brings, there’s an amusing consolation in watching Elon Musk’s intentionally edgy, anti-woke bot battle tirelessly as an advocate for truth on a platform otherwise saturated with little besides outrage and propaganda.

II.

The marriage of religion and politics is not unique to America, but the co-opting of Christianity for political and material gain remains tragic no matter how many historical precedents it follows. In some ways, the present MAGA movement, interlocked as it is with burgeoning Christian Nationalism, is simply the loudest form of a political phenomenon that’s been dominant my entire life. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t surrounded by Christians who thought voting Republican was always the “Christian” choice (even when the candidate wasn’t a Christian) or who equated American values of freedom, self-defense, or the nuclear family with inherently “Christian” values. In the pre-Trump era, said Christians also at least pretended to care about character, honor, public decency, rule of law, and similar values that have been completely abandoned now, and while that pivot can and has spawned a thousand think-pieces, a more interesting change has recently taken place not in these bubbles, but in observing them. This more interesting phenomenon is the seemingly recent recognition by non-Christians that the Evangelical/MAGA movement seems disastrously out of step with historical and Biblical Christian values. And this isn’t limited to simply pointing out the hypocrisy of paying lip service to family values while championing a (civilly) convicted rapist, serial adulterer, and alleged pedophile as “The greatest champion of faith that we have ever had in the executive branch,” it’s extended even further to something resembling protectiveness. Admittedly, I’m basing my conclusions on vibes here, but when reading some of these posts, I feel a genuine sense of perceived injustice. Scores of people who do not believe in God and certainly make no claims to follow Jesus seem offended on Jesus’ behalf that this movement purports to be his most vocal representatives. Somehow, the louder MAGA takes the Lord’s name in vain, the more forcefully they try to project religious dominance, the more vigorously they pursue the Seven Mountain Mandate, the less people accept their narrative. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve seen Christian Nationalist social media figures in public debate settings suddenly confronted with Bible verse after Bible verse from their atheist opponent, leaving them scrambling in a manner that readily demonstrates how little they actually read the Bible.

Creator Rhett McLaughlin is best known as half of the duo Rhett and Link, but in recent years, he’s gained a secondary reputation as an ambassador for so-called exvangelicals. Rhett and Link have been very open about their departure from Christianity2 and yet Rhett (the more vocal of the two on this subject) has not gone full New Atheist in his apostasy. On the contrary, he’s spoken out on multiple platforms about how he’s still kind of obsessed with Jesus, and how it bothers him that Jesus is represented in patently un-Jesus ways.

Now I will grant that many who take this tack do so in as shallow and unfounded ways as their MAGA counterparts. It’s all too easy to reduce Jesus to a free-love hippie in the name of tolerance. But frankly, there are times when I almost appreciate this overcorrection. It demonstrates that the propaganda is not working, that the cultural reduction of Jesus to a star-spangled idol has not fully set in, despite decades of reinforcement. The true tenets of Christianity, the emphasis on charity, on love of neighbor, on service, on self-sacrifice, on spiritual formation, these values have managed to endure despite being flagrantly eschewed on the most popular stages. Those who see Jesus as little more than a peace-sign-flashing hippie may not see the full Jesus, but at least they can recognize and repudiate the damnably false alternative, and I’m comforted by that. I have so many people I love in my life who do not know Christ in any meaningful way, and with MAGA or televangelists or grifting podcasters as the popular examples of the faith, why on earth would they want to? For years now, I’ve felt that any conversation about my faith with non-believers has to begin with caveats and corrections, separating tenets of the faith from cultural and political weaponization. But it seems the public at large has stepped out from the dominant reductionism of the New Atheists and recognized that there is an ancient and admirable version of Christianity that is worth defending against those co-opting it for their own gain, even for those who don’t believe a word of it.

III.

Christian social media was ablaze a few weeks ago when Mike Winger dropped a lengthy video on Shawn Bolz, and many notable voices in Charismatic Christianity were caught in the crossfire. Longtime readers of this publication may know that I have a particular interest in this movement, as evidenced by my macabre fascination with figures like William Branham:

Sometimes I’m tempted to psychoanalyze the leaders of this curious coalition. I’m very comfortable using terms like “charlatan” or “false prophet” in rather blanket terms for this faction, but examining the motivations of individual leaders is a trickier prospect. For scam-artists like Bolz, the motives seem rather self-apparent, be it material wealth, power, or access to victims for his sexual predation. But a recent incident involving disgraced pastor Chris Reed piqued a new hypothesis in my mind, and I’m now wondering whether this explanation is applicable elsewhere.

For some very brief context, in Winger’s video (beginning around the 4:36:48 mark), he breaks down a recent clip of Reed claiming to speak in tongues. Generally, the pattern you’ll see with this practice is that a phrase will be spoken, and then someone in the congregation will provide an interpretation. So Reed says a few indiscernible words and then waits. Dutifully, a member of the congregation pipes up and offers an interpretation, but Reed seems dissatisfied with it. He’s quiet for a few moments, then repeats the phrase again verbatim. The same woman offers a different interpretation, yet Reed still looks around expectantly, until finally someone near the back calls out, “You spoke Russian!” Reed immediately commands that a mic be handed to the speaker, who translates the Russian phrase Reed called out. Reed does his best to appear astonished by this revelation, repeating a few times, “I do not know Russian.” But Reed is not a very good actor, so the entire payoff reads as quite farcical to anyone not bought into the charade.

Winger rightly points out the seemingly obvious fakery at play here, including speculation that Reed was perhaps reading the Russian phrase off the pulpit. Reed later replied in a video of his own, not only spiritually threatening Winger, but taking great pains to explain how he couldn’t have read the Russian off the podium because his phone was in clear view of the previous speaker and other such excuses, before concluding with, “if I wanted to fake speaking in tongues for two sentences, I would have prepared it for a whole week and memorized it. I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, and I'll be the first to tell ya. But I can memorize two lines if that's what I want to do." Sometimes, when a denial is that specific, it’s more likely to be a confession, so I’ve chosen to take it as such. Shortly after, Reed doubled down on his denial, concluding with an angry, forceful declaration: “And I want you to listen to me and listen to me clearly: I hope God strikes me dead. If I fake prophecy, if I fake Russian, please do it. Please.”

And in that moment, a truth so obvious and so simple struck me with such profundity that I couldn’t believe I never realized it before: I think Chris Reed does not believe in God. I genuinely think it might be that simple. Chris is a proven liar standing in a long lineage of obvious, proven liars. The entire prophetic ministry he grew in and spun out of is predicated on generations of false prophets and intricate fraud. I know Chris is lying, and Chris knows Chris is lying, and pretty much the whole internet knows Chris is lying, and obviously God knows Chris is lying, so the fact that Chris is willing to invoke death by the Almighty tells me that he is supremely confident that God won’t do it. He can aggressively declare, “May God strike me dead if I did the thing I know I did,” because he doesn’t believe for a moment that God will actually do so. And what that seems to suggest is again, profoundly simple: I don’t know if Chris is motivated by ego, money, power, or what, but I’m confident it’s all an act for him, because he doesn’t actually believe in God.3 Nobody who believes in the kind of miraculous intervention Chris claims to witness on a near-weekly basis would dare to bluff in that manner. And this isn’t even a case where maybe you could argue he’s lost in the sauce and become a shut-eye, believing his own bullshit, because this wasn’t an instance of spontaneous glossolalia sparking a genuine response in a stranger; this was a premeditated sham that required research and memorization. I struggle to believe that even someone as potentially delusional as Chris Reed is capable of making himself believe that he didn’t spend hours memorizing that phrase mere days after spending hours memorizing the phrase, which means he has to know he’s lying, which means he has to know he’s bluffing, which means he’s confident enough to bet his life on the fact that that God will not call his bluff.

Again, I don’t know how transferable this deduction is, or how well it might explain other figures in this movement (it certainly works well for certain political figures for whom religion is nothing but a means to an end), but it was a fascinating conclusion to come to, if for no other reason than its simplicity and in many ways, its absurdity.

I wonder if Grok would agree with my reasoning.

It’s a fine enough monologue, and an effective thesis for the political message of the series (though if you’ve never watched the show, you miss the ending of the season where McAvoy repudiates much of his conclusion). I find that Sorkin at his most Sorkin is either a perfect hook or cause to jump ship. If you find McAvoy’s speech stirring, inspiring, and poignantly critical in all the right ways, you will love The Newsroom. But if you find it sanctimonious, preachy, and condescending, I fear you’re in for a bad time with this show. Personally, I love Sorkin’s writing, even at its most priggish and ridiculous. I’m attracted to strong convictions (even when I disagree with them), and the hyper-idealistic journalists that make up most of The Newsroom’s cast remain a very endearing ensemble to me.

Most of the first season revolves around McAvoy and his new EP (and ex-girlfriend) Mackenzie “Mack” Morgan McHale (portrayed with infectious charisma by the charming Emily Mortimer) re-orienting his sell-out-feel-good news program towards the pursuit of serious journalism dedicated to informing the electorate. As such, the show’s political content is written largely as a reaction to the early 2010s incursion of the Tea Party into mainstream conservatism, to which McAvoy, a staunch George H.W.-style old school Republican, takes rather serious umbrage. He sees the Tea Party as a fringe manifestation of the radical right that’s seeking to co-opt conservative outrage for political gain and change the rules of politics in America. Watching the show from our vantage point in 2026, I can’t decide whether to call Sorkin a prophet or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. While a direct line of continuity can be drawn from the Tea Party to the current MAGA movement that has successfully conquered the Republican party and exiled any semblance of genuine conservatism, the dorky eccentricities of Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann seem downright adorable compared to the open racism, virulent cruelty, and savage disdain for American values expressed by prominent MAGA figureheads. Knowing how much worse it will get, watching McAvoy react as strongly as he does to the Tea Party feels like jumping the gun. But there is one moment where I will give Sorkin prophetic credit, even if I do feel his application of this particularly incisive rhetoric was slightly premature, and that was when he placed the term “American Taliban” on McAvoy’s lips.

In this homily, we see a precise articulation of all the seeds that would blossom into MAGA.

“The Tea Party believes in loving America but hating Americans. They believe in loving America but hating its government. And they believe that anyone who disagrees with the Tea Party has sinister, anti-American motives. Most of all, you must never, under any circumstances, seek to reach a compromise with your opponent, or do any of what Democrats and genuine Republicans both call ‘governing.’

…What’s more frightening than the perversion of our great history is that sensible, smart, strong Republicans, the very men and women who should be standing up to radical fundamentalism, are so frightened of losing primary ballots to religious zealots that they’ve thrown in the towel on sanity…

…Ideological purity. Compromise as weakness. A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism. Denying science. Unmoved by facts. Undeterred by new information. A hostile fear of progress. A demonization of education. A need to control women’s bodies. Severe xenophobia. Tribal mentality. Intolerance of dissent and a pathological hatred of the US Government. They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans, though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are: The American Taliban.

One can argue over whether this was an accurate appraisal of the Tea Party or a bit alarmist, but I think it’s inarguable that it rightly describes the modern-day MAGA movement, especially its religious contingent. I can’t think of a better term for Christian Nationalism than “The American Taliban.” And while I know that crowd would instantly balk at any comparison to Islam, it is an incontrovertible fact that they are far more aligned with a government dictated by Sharia Law than they are with classical American values. Let’s compare the two directly.

The Taliban is a political-religious movement that seeks to subordinate civil society, law, education, and culture to a rigid interpretation of fundamentalist Islam, insisting that public life must conform to its theological doctrines, enforcing strict moral codes through state power, restricting women’s autonomy and access to education and work, marginalizing or criminalizing religious minorities and dissenters, and framing obedience to its divinely-appointed authority as both a spiritual obligation and a patriotic duty. It presents itself as the defender of a sacred moral order against perceived corruption and modernity, demonizing democratic institutions, “international standards” of human rights, and ideological pluralism in the name of divine mandate, while promoting social conformity, suppressing critical thought, and equating loyalty to its dominance of the nation with faith as such.

Now, by contrast, Christian Nationalism is a political-religious movement that seeks to subordinate civil society, law, education, and culture to a rigid interpretation of fundamentalist Christianity, insisting that public life must conform to its theological doctrines, enforcing strict moral codes through state power, restricting women’s autonomy and access to education and work, marginalizing or criminalizing religious minorities and dissenters, and framing obedience to its divinely-appointed authority as both a spiritual obligation and a patriotic duty. It presents itself as the defender of a sacred moral order against perceived corruption and modernity, demonizing democratic institutions, “international standards” of human rights, and ideological pluralism in the name of divine mandate, while promoting social conformity, suppressing critical thought, and equating loyalty to its dominance of the nation with faith as such.

The Taliban are also famous for framing their cause as righteous but unjustly persecuted, and MAGA has mastered this approach. This faux-martyr complex is essential to maintain because MAGA is ultimately not a movement built on nationality, religion, or even political ideology, but grievance. It is foundationally predicated on reminding you that you have been wronged and pointing the finger at the people responsible, be it the “deep state,” Hollywood celebrities, pet-eating Haitians, or Spanish-speaking pop artists. Unlike genuine conservatives or the Republicans of yesteryear, it has no political vision, no identity beyond defensiveness, no imagination beyond retribution. If it seems like all the loudest reactionary media voices, regardless of previous political alignment, have coalesced into MAGA, this is why; both the Rush Limbaughs and the RFKs of the world build their movements off a shared sense of “them” out to get you and solidarity with the enlightened “we.” This is why rural heartland Americans who have never spent a week beyond the borders of a midwestern cornfield can feel like issues at the Southern Border are an existential threat to their existence. This is how couch potatoes with the athletic prowess of a Koala can feel personally cheated by the existence of trans athletes. Any genuine conversation needed around these topics is expelled in favor of manufactured outrage designed to keep you in a constant state of indignation, because to be afflicted is to feel special, and to battle back against perceived injustice validates our worst instincts as righteous.

And so we arrive at the present disconnect, where the Evangelicals that make up most of MAGA have unchecked command of the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, the majority of the media, and untold levers of corporate and religious power, yet still view themselves as a victimized, persecuted minority. Only by this clownish logic can the obviously corporate choice to feature the world's most popular musical artist at a Halftime Show can be labeled “divisive.” Only by this harebrained reasoning can a guy with a violent criminal rap sheet who sings about his mandate to sleep with underaged women perform a song featuring shoutouts to topless dancers and hookers, but five minutes later say the word “God” and “dust off your Bible” and be lauded as scoring a victory for the righteous Christian oppressed. They don’t know how not to cast themselves as the victims, because perceived victimhood is an ontological necessity for MAGA.

The irony is farcical, but the sentiment is insulting. The notion that Christians are victims in the United States of America, or are in any way meaningfully oppressed here, is a slap in the face to genuinely persecuted Christians around the world, of which there are millions of examples. Every day, there are Christians who wake up fearing for their freedom or their very lives simply because of their faith in Christ. The United States is not one of those places, and it’s a gratuitous insult to tyrannized Christians around the globe to suggest that it is.

Orson Welles once rightly observed, “The one generalization which is true about America is that everything is true about it. It’s impossible to say anything that isn’t true, good or bad; our enemies are right, our friends are right…it’s an awful big country with an awful lot of different kinds of people in it.” But the MAGA/Christian Nationalist crowd is averse to this kind of nuance.1 To acknowledge any sordid facts of our past is to demonize America. To criticize any aspect of the nation today (except the parts they don't like) is to hate the country. As Sorkin said, it is assumed as fact by MAGA that anyone critical of them has sinister, anti-American motives. America isn’t even a nation to them; it’s an idol, and since its cultists have decreed that this idol can only be idealized, the Christian Nationalists presently in power are doing their best to erase any history that inconveniences that picture.

We’ve reached a point in political discourse where the MAGA right has fully become the online left of yesteryear, eclipsing the wokest of the woke’s hyperbolic over-sensitivity, politicization of every facet of culture, and almost comical outrage about everything, even adopting the equivalent of calling everything they don’t like a “Nazi,” (only for them, “woke” is the favored derogatory epithet rendered meaningless by overuse). This overcorrection is in large part due to the fact that the American Right has been fighting an imaginary version of the American Left for so long that they can no longer discern reality. In puerile defiance of this primarily fictionalized enemy, they have worked themselves into a frenzied bloodlust and become every bit the murder-excusing, pedophile-protecting, pro-cancel culture, anti-gun rights maniacs with no regard for law, order, or American values that they always claimed the worst of the Left represented. Every alarmist overreacting to their rise to power has been vindicated, every accusation MAGA spews has become an ignominious confession.

If one could distill this entire delusion into a single display, it would be Lee Brice’s performance at the TPUSA halftime show, where he managed to summarize the entire myth of the oppressed Good ol’ Boy in a few brief minutes of absolute embarrassment.2 This performance has (rightly) been mocked relentlessly, with observers pointing out how its mad-lib-style invocation of country imagery was almost identical to Bo Burnham’s actual satire of the subject. What Brice managed to accomplish in those few minutes was not cultural commentary or artistic self-expression, but a parodic hymn to the American martyr complex: a full-grown man warbling that he is persecuted because he wishes (bravely, heroically), to cut his grass, drink his beer, feed his dog, and other such activities that no one has even remotely impeded, yet he cannot do these things in peace because somewhere, far away from his presumably well-tilled acres, someone holds different opinions and dares to express them. It is a spectacle of self-imposed victimhood so caricaturish that it could not be parodied, a petulant tantrum dressed up as moral courage, an emasculating screed of self-pity larping as relatable sentiment. The performance’s true obscenity lay not in its politics but in its posture: proudly exhibiting an ideology so shallow and brittle that the mere existence of dissent is an existential threat, all while pandering with the subtlety of an IED to the whiniest, most infantile victimhood imaginable amongst an audience desperate to be validated in thinking that to be criticized is to be crucified.

The audience may have heard a genuine lament, but all I could hear was Eric Cartman begging for a safe space to shield his delicate feelings from reality.

Like the real Taliban, the wiser among MAGA know their positions are unpopular,3 which is why their success comes through insurgency rather than democracy. If they can successfully destroy the system that insists on checks and balances and do away with constitutional protections for any class of people they deem unworthy, then maybe they will have a chance to build a world that works for them before the economy collapses. And more importantly, maybe in that world, for a few brief and glorious moments, Lee Brice can sit comfortably on his porch with a cold beer in his hand, overlooking his fresh-cut grass and smelling his fresh-caught fish, content in the knowledge that he has finally escaped the hellish oppression of a country where a constitution guaranteed him the freedoms to do literally every single thing he claimed to want to do in his song, and instead, is finally living in a paradise where only people who look and think like him are free to do anything.