An essayist, he said, is a writer attempting to tell the truth who gets to claim he was only practicing when he turns out to be wrong. That lecture became “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” and it contains the sentence that should have ended the American church’s flirtation with industrial capitalism: the certified Christian, he wrote, is as likely as anyone else to sign on to the “conspiracy to murder Creation.”¹ We’ve always done it, and we do it still.

Berry died Monday at his home in Port Royal, KY, at ninety-two.

I came to him late, which I deeply regret. All those years as an elder in a Reformed denomination and I cannot remember his name coming up once, not in session meetings, not in a study, not from a pulpit. We had Sproul and we had Keller and we had a whole apparatus for explaining why the world was the way it was. What we didn’t have was anybody insisting the world was holy, and that our habits were a theological problem in greater measure than an economic one.

He also gave me the best defense of the essay as a tool that I’ve ever read, and he did it in the least likely, perfect place. He introduced himself to those Southern Baptists as an essayist and a dissenter, which is a really bold way to open in a Baptist seminary chapel, and then explained the difference between his trade and theirs. A preacher has to be right or wrong. An essayist who turns out to be wrong can say he was practicing. Then he added the part that hits home: an essayist speaks without needing an institution to authorize him, and a dissenter speaks without any such protection at all.²

The line about practicing reads like modesty, but it’s actually a description of what the form is for. An essay is thinking done in public at the speed of a person changing his mind, with no obligation to arrive where it started, and no requirement that the writer already be the man or woman the argument implies. A sermon can’t operate that way. A formal confession of faith certainly can’t either. I sit down every week and try the thing again, and if I got something wrong in March I get to say so in September or next week without anybody convening a court or review. Berry worked like that for sixty years and never once seemed embarrassed about it. Again, I love that.

A Deeper Well has mostly gone looking for wisdom in bishops and monks and the occasional formidable sister. Berry was none of those things. He was a layman who wrote poems on Sunday mornings when the weather was too good to spend indoors, and who thought the Bible was written outdoors and ought to be read that way too.³ If the series is about people who saw something the institution had misplaced, he qualifies without an asterisk.

He was harder on the institutional church than most of the people who have actually walked out of one. Half of the aforementioned lecture is an argument that treating the sanctuary as the one holy address forces you to call everything else secular, which then licenses certified Christians to walk out the doors and plunder the world God made and called good. He pointed out that the most important religion in the Bible is unorganized and frequently hostile to organization, that its central figures are shepherds and soldiers and craftsmen and prisoners and prostitutes rather than priests, and that almost none of the decisive encounters in it happen indoors. This is incredibly insightful.

Modern Christianity, in his reading, had specialized itself into the same shape as every other modern institution, counting success in attendance numbers and devoting itself to the strange business of rescuing individual disembodied souls. He thought the logical end of that project was arriving in heaven to find you were the only one there, correct at last yet completely alone. Then he handed the microphone to Huck Finn, who looked at Miss Watson’s version of the good place and made up his mind he wouldn’t try for it.⁴

. . .

The political right spent forty years trying to recruit him, and it’s entertaining to watch how completely their attempt failed. He had all the surface markings of a right-wing man: rural, traditional, suspicious of the federal government, devoted to marriage and family and place. Conservative magazines ran the obligatory interviews. Front-porch conservatism’s good ‘ol boys built half their vocabulary out of his select sentences. But then he kept declining to play his assigned part as some honorary member of the tribe.

In 2009, the University of Kentucky, his alma mater and former employer, accepted seven million dollars from a coal magnate and renamed a basketball dormitory the Wildcat Coal Lodge. Berry promptly withdrew the personal papers he had loaned the school. The university, he said, had sold an advertisement.⁵ He marched on the Capitol Power Plant the same year, and when someone asked whether he wanted to get arrested, his answer was that he did not want to, but he was willing, because nothing else was working.⁶ He had already been arrested once, in 1979, for trespassing at the Marble Hill nuclear plant in southern Indiana, the only arrest of his life.⁷ In 2011, he joined a sit-in in the governor’s office over mountaintop removal. This is not the resume of a man who wanted the Republican Party to rule the day.

Then there was the subject of marriage. In 2013, he published an essay in The Christian Century explaining why he would not lend Christian authority to a legal campaign against gay couples. His argument was that rights precede governments rather than being dispensed by them, which is about as close to a true conservative first principle as you can get, and he aimed it squarely at the people who had spent two decades assuming he was one of theirs. He never was. He wrote in that same essay that the present political atmosphere assumes everyone belongs to one of two sides, and that he found himself in disagreement with both of them, most sharply when either side wanted the government to enforce private moral responsibility.

His conclusion was that Christians insisting on enforcing their marriage doctrine through laws were participating in a culture of violence.⁸ Evangelical readers who had been quoting him about things like topsoil for twenty years discovered they had been quoting a man who actually meant what he said.

That is the corrective Berry brings, and it is why his brand of opposition landed harder than all the bluster and shouting does. He never argued from a standpoint of grievance. He argued from a settled account of what a human life is for, and the loud self-interest of the modern right simply did not survive that.

You cannot be angry at Wendell Berry for being angry, because he wasn’t angry. He was just unimpressed. And I love it.

. . .

He never used the word deconstruction and would have found most of the discourse around it rather exhausting, I’m sure. No memoir about losing his religion, no arc from certainty to freedom, no announcement of departure from the institution. What he had instead was a charge set at the base of the entire structure. The split he spent his life attacking, the one between spirit and matter, religion and economy, worship and work, is the same split holding up the building the rest of us grew up in. Pull it apart and see what remains standing.

If the ground is holy, the brick and mortar sanctuary stops being the only address God keeps. If creation participates in God rather than sitting outside him as inventory, then all that fallen-world talk that let us shrug at strip mines and poisoned creeks stops working as theology and starts working only as a cheap alibi.

He also told those Baptists he owed a considerable debt to Buddhism, and then declined the exit anyway. Christianity was “his native religion, for better or worse,” learned before he was conscious of learning it, lodged in his language and his dreams. You can turn away from a thing like that, he said, but turning away only binds you to a smaller version of it.⁹ So he stayed and worked on it. A Baptist layman stood in the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, told them their religion needed rebuilding from the foundation, and made clear he had no intention of leaving while the work got done.

What he offers the deconstruction crowd, mine included, is the thing most of us are often lacking the most. He had somewhere solid to stand. He was not organized around what he had walked away from. He had a farm, a county, a marriage, a river, and a set of obligations that did not care what conclusions he had reached about substitutionary atonement or the nature of the Trinity.

This is maybe Berry’s most critical lesson to us. Take all that away and deconstruction becomes its own kind of denomination soon enough, with its own shibboleths and a comment section to enforce them. All we’re doing, at that point, is just replacing one institution for another one. Berry avoided that, because his life was never an argument in the first place. It was the place he lived, and the writing was just an honest accounting of it all.

. . .

He also got things wrong sometimes, being human and all, and any memorial would be incomplete without acknowledging that. He described Robert E. Lee as more a tragic figure than a defender of slavery, for example, and he and his wife sued the University of Kentucky in 2020 to stop the removal of a Depression-era mural criticized for sanitizing the region’s history of slavery.¹⁰ A man who built an entire philosophy on the moral weight of staying put will sometimes defend the place he stayed in past the point where it deserves defending.

The loyalty that made him incorruptible on something like coal made him stubborn in this regard too. Both come from the same root, and you don’t get to keep one and discard the other with any consistency. He’d have granted me the point, I think, on the same terms he granted himself. Sometimes you’re wrong and you were practicing.

. . .

He wrote once that we should beware the machinery of longevity, that when a life is over the decent thing is to die, and that the forest does not hold itself back from death.¹¹ Ninety-two years, more than forty books, one hillside farm in Henry County that he worked for four decades. He kept warning us that the industrial arrangement was a bargain we had not read closely enough, and he was mostly ignored by the people best positioned to do something about it, which is the standard fate of anyone who tells a comfortable institution the truth about itself.

He was not a trained theologian. He simply thought the ground he farmed participated in God, and he refused to write a single sentence that pretended otherwise. Many of the professionals I read never got that far.

Endnotes

¹ Wendell Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” delivered as a lecture at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, 1992; published in Cross Currents 43, no. 2 (Summer 1993); collected in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (Pantheon, 1993) and The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 2002).

² Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” opening paragraph.

³ Berry describes the Bible as a hypaethral book, open to the sky, and best read outdoors, in “Christianity and the Survival of Creation.” For the Sunday poems, see A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 (Counterpoint, 1998).

⁴ Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation.” The closing allusion is to Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Berry quotes at the end of the same passage.

⁵ Kentucky Kernel, quoted in Sarah Ladd, “Kentucky writer, farmer and advocate Wendell Berry dies at 92,” Kentucky Lantern, August 31, 2026.

⁶ Inside Climate News (2009), quoted in Kentucky Lantern, August 31, 2026.

⁷ Kentucky Lantern, August 31, 2026. Berry recounts the Marble Hill action in “The Reactor and the Garden,” collected in The Gift of Good Land (North Point Press, 1981).

⁸ Wendell Berry, “Caught in the Middle: On Abortion and Homosexuality,” The Christian Century, March 20, 2013; revised and collected as “Caught in the Middle” in Our Only World: Ten Essays (Counterpoint, 2015).

⁹ Berry, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation.”

¹⁰ Associated Press obituary, August 31, 2026.

¹¹ Quoted in Kentucky Lantern, August 31, 2026.

The top: “MANY TIMES PEOPLE, INCLUDING SOME BELIEVERS, WANT TO ‘WISH SOMEONE’ INTO HEAVEN.” The bottom finished the thought. “BECAUSE THEY ARE KIND, POPULAR OR CHARITABLE, AND THEY TALK ABOUT GOD. IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY.”

No name (except for the Facebook user who posted it). No chapter and verse. A woman roughly one day dead, and a stranger on the internet already clearing his throat about the assumed entrance requirements.

The trouble is that Jesus gave exactly one extended account of the last judgment in the Gospels, and the criteria he lists there are, item for item, the ones the meme waves off as “not working.”

The parable in question

Matthew 25 puts the Son of Man on a throne with the nations gathered in front of him, and he separates them the way a shepherd separates sheep from goats. Then he explains the separation. “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”¹

Hmmm. Kind. Charitable. That’s the list. There’s no line here about correct doctrine, no reference to a moment of acceptance, no audit of anyone’s public theology or church attendance record.

What makes the passage strange, and what almost nobody quoting it seems to notice, is that both groups are bewildered. The sheep ask when they ever did any of this, and the goats ask the same question in reverse.² Nobody in the story was keeping score on either side of the fence. The judgment lands on people who did not know they were being judged by that standard, which means the one thing guaranteed to disqualify you is confidence about where you landed. That’s awkward.

Then Matthew twists the knife just two chapters earlier in the same Gospel. “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you.’”³ These are not the lukewarm folks. These are people with a ministry résumé. They talked about God professionally and they got the door.

The meme has the sorting mechanism exactly inverted. Talking about God is the thing Matthew treats as insufficient. Feeding people is the thing Matthew treats as decisive. Tell me how this isn’t so?

The strongest version of the other side

I can still recite the Reformed reply from memory, having made it plenty of times myself from the other side of a session table.

The first approach is evidentiary. They’ll say Matthew 25 describes the fruit of salvation, not its ground. Nobody earns the verdict by feeding anybody; the feeding demonstrates a faith already given. Paul is explicit that salvation comes by grace through faith and not from works, and then in the very next breath says believers were created for good works.⁴

On this reading the parable is a description of what redeemed people look like and the meme is a clumsy but still defensible attempt to keep the order straight.

Okay.

The second approach is exegetical and it’s also sharper. Jesus says the nations are judged by what they did for “the least of these who are members of my family.”⁵ The Greek is adelphoi; brothers. Throughout Matthew, that word consistently points at disciples.⁶ So the criterion here may be narrower than the popular reading assumes. How did the nations treat Christ’s own messengers, the hungry and imprisoned missionaries who came to them? That turns the passage into a judgment on the reception of the gospel, which is a very different thing than a general endorsement of charity.

Got it.

Both of these arguments have real textual precedence. Neither one, however, rescues the meme at issue here.

Let’s take the second approach first, and let me concede something at the outset. Sherman Gray spent 462 pages cataloging what more than six hundred writers said about this passage between the second century and 1986. On “all the nations” he found what most people assume, with roughly 59 percent reading the judgment as universal in scope. On “the least of my brothers” he found the reverse. A universalist reading of that phrase, the one that hears “the poor and the imprisoned generally,” does not appear in the tradition until the twentieth century, and Gray concludes that Matthew probably did not intend it.⁷

So the narrow reading has the older pedigree, arguably. Fine. Notice what that concession costs the meme, though.

If “the least of these” means Christ’s own disciples, then Matthew 25 becomes a judgment on the nations, on outsiders, measured by how they treated the church. It says nothing whatsoever about how a believer’s own life gets weighed. The passage cannot adjudicate Dolly Parton at all under that reading, and the meme is left holding a verse it never cited in defense of a standard it never stated. In other words, it still doesn’t work.

The modern move toward the broad reading happened for a reason and the reason is the astonishment. If the standard were “did you house an apostle,” everyone involved would know whether they had or not. You remember taking in a missionary, I’d wager. The surprise on both sides only functions coherently if the deeds were done with no reference to Christ at all, by people who had no idea whose face they were looking at.

Think about it. Gray would say that twentieth-century readers found that argument persuasive partly because they wanted to, and he may well be right about the motive. But the problem in the text is still there either way.

Which leaves this particular meme losing on both readings. Broad, and Parton’s record is the legit criterion. Narrow, and the passage was never about her anyway.

The fruit-and-root argument sounds good but fails in a different way. It’s a coherent theological position, and I have no interest in relitigating the whole Reformation over a silly Facebook post. But notice what the meme actually does with it. If the works are the evidence Jesus himself submits, then dismissing a life full of that evidence requires a bona fide counter-argument, and the meme doesn’t offer one. It just asserts that the visible record is somehow beside the point. That isn’t the fruit-and-root distinction that is often referenced. That’s discarding the fruit entirely and then claiming some private access to the root.

Drink Wisely has examined elsewhere how American revivalism inherited an essentially Orphic logic, in which a correctly performed transaction secures your status and everything visible afterward is commentary.⁸ The meme runs on that fuel. Either the invisible thing happened or it didn’t, and the books and the checks are decoration on top of a transaction nobody can audit.

. . .

The actual record

The meme raised the question of whether Parton was merely kind, popular, and charitable. Let’s open the file for a minute, shall we?

Her Imagination Library has mailed more than 332 million books to children since 1995, currently around 3.5 million a month, free, to any enrolled kid from birth to age five.⁹ She started it because her father could not read or write.

After the 2016 wildfires tore through Sevier County, killing fourteen people, the Dollywood Foundation stood up the My People Fund within forty-eight hours and sent one thousand dollars a month for six months to roughly nine hundred families who had lost their homes, with no means test attached. Donations came in fast enough that the final check went out at five thousand instead of one. Total distributed: $8.9 million.¹⁰ An unconditional cash transfer to disaster victims, regardless of income, which is a policy most conservative evangelicals would label socialism if an opposition party politician proposed it.

In April 2020, she gave a million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center; money that helped fund research contributing to the Moderna vaccine. She gave another million to Vanderbilt’s pediatric cancer program in 2017 and another for pediatric infectious disease research in 2022. She died in the same hospital.¹¹

And she talked about God constantly. For sixty years. Raised in the Church of God with a Pentecostal preacher for a grandfather, baptized at twelve, and by her own laughing account “saved about fifteen times” as a frightened kid trying to make sure it took.¹² She recorded gospel albums. She said out loud that even if she knew there were no God she would choose to believe it anyway, which is a stranger and more honest sentence than most systematic theology produces.¹³

So, the meme’s premise fails on its own terms not once but twice over. She did the works, she said the words. What exactly is missing from her confession of faith?

The disqualifying offense

Here’s what she wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t sort anybody.

“If you’re the fine Christian you think you are, why are you judging people? That’s God’s job. We’re not God. We’re not judges.” And then the line that gives the whole thing away: “I got too much to do on my own to try to do God’s work.”¹⁴

That’s the offense in a nutshell. In June 2024 the Federalist ran a piece headlined “There’s Nothing Loving About Dolly Parton’s False Gospel,” arguing that a real Christian would call out homosexuality as sin.¹⁵ The claim that authentic love requires calling out sin, and that gentleness is a failure of nerve, is durable machinery, and Drink Wisely has taken it apart at length elsewhere.¹⁶ The backlash was immediate and the writer told a reporter within days that she regretted using Parton as her example.¹⁷ Note that the writer regretted the example, not the assumed standard.

The standard survived intact. Only the target got walked back, because coming for Dolly is bad business and everybody knows it. So it goes back on the shelf until somebody less universally beloved needs adjudicating.

The meme performs the very same function here with less nerve. Nobody’s name on it, no verse attached, no actual argument to defend. Just a reminder that a gate exists and that the poster is apparently standing really close to it.

Matthew 25 has a lot to say to people who are certain about the heavenly seating chart. Both groups in that parable ask the same stunned question, and the ones who get the good news are the ones who had no idea they’d received it. The people confidently working the door don’t appear in the story at all. Or, rather, they do in Matthew 7, listing their impressive credentials to a man who says he’s never met them.

Notes

1. Matthew 25:31–36, NRSVue.

2. Matthew 25:37–39, 44, NRSVue.

3. Matthew 7:22–23, NRSVue.

4. Ephesians 2:8–10, NRSVue.

5. Matthew 25:40, NRSVue. The NRSVue renders tōn adelphōn mou as “members of my family”; the literal sense is “my brothers.”

6. See Matthew 12:48–50, 18:15, 23:8, 28:10, where adelphos language attaches to Jesus’ followers.

7. Sherman W. Gray, The Least of My Brothers: Matthew 25:31–46, A History of Interpretation, SBL Dissertation Series 114 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). Gray’s study confirms the general dominance of a universalist interpretation of “all the nations” while noting that a similarly universalist interpretation of “the least of my brothers” was not present until the twentieth century and was probably not intended by the author of Matthew.

8. Shawn Patrick Connelly, “American Christianity’s Secret Cult,” Drink Wisely, June 2026, https://drinkwisely.substack.com/p/american-christianitys-secret-cult.

9. “Dolly Parton Started the Imagination Library for Her Dad, Who Couldn’t Read or Write,” Holler, August 25, 2026. Figures also reported across AP-syndicated coverage the same week.

10. “Dolly’s My People Fund Finishes ‘Smokies Strong,’” dollyparton.com; Lilly Knoepp, “How Dolly Parton Gave $12.5 Million And Unprecedented Research To Sevier County,” Blue Ridge Public Radio, December 24, 2018.

11. “Live updates: Dolly Parton dead at 80,” CNN, August 25–26, 2026.

12. Reported from Parton’s appearance on Khloé Kardashian’s Khloé in Wonder Land podcast, July 2025. [OPEN ITEM: verify exact wording and episode date before publication.]

13. Ibid.; see also “Dolly Parton on 1st Time She ‘Truly Found’ God,” TODAY, July 10, 2025.

14. Widely circulated interview footage; text as reported in “Dolly Parton, 79, Shares Powerful Message About LGBTQ+ Community and ‘Fine Christians,’” AOL.

15. Ericka Andersen, “There’s Nothing Loving About Dolly Parton’s False Gospel,” The Federalist, June 6, 2024.

16. Shawn Patrick Connelly, “Soft Words, Hard Hearts,” Drink Wisely.

17. “Author says she regrets using Dolly Parton in essay that sparked widespread backlash,” Yahoo Entertainment / AOL, June 2024.

The last sentence in the line above is Thomas Aquinas. Not a progressive interpretation of Aquinas, not a liberal twisting of him, the actual position of the Summa Theologiae. God does not belong to a genus. God is not one existing thing alongside other existing things, however large that thing is thought to be. God is ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself, the act of existing rather than a thing that happens to exist.² Aquinas argued this in the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church made him a Doctor of the Church, and no one called him the antichrist for it.

James Talarico said it in a sermon in October, 2023. American evangelicalism, or at least a loud and well-funded portion of it, responded as though he had just burned a pulpit Bible.

What Talarico actually said

His sermon lasted about twenty minutes, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin on October 22, 2023, under the title “God Is Not Christian: Confronting Christian Nationalism.” Several of the news outlets circulating the clip in August 2026 printed the final line as “God is being self.” The church’s own transcribed manuscript reads “being itself,” and so, to its credit, does at least one of the conservative outlets attacking him.³ The others reprinted a garbled version of the sentence at the center of the scandal and nobody stopped to wonder whether it made sense.

Here is a detail none of the coverage mentioned, however. The assigned scripture reading that morning was Matthew 4:8-11, where the devil takes Jesus to a high mountain, shows him all the kingdoms of the world, and offers them to him.⁴ That is the text the sermon was preached on. A politician stood in a pulpit, read the passage where Satan offers political power, and then argued that Christians should refuse it. And this was reported as an attack on Christianity.

The nonbinary line many are up in arms about is a separate item; a full three years older. Talarico said it on the Texas House floor in October 2021, during debate on HB 25, the bill requiring K–12 students to play on sports teams matching their sex at birth. His argument at the time ran through Hebrew grammar and Genesis 1:26. The first two lines of Genesis, he said, use two different Hebrew words to describe God, one a masculine noun for divinity and the second a feminine noun for spirit, and so God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between.⁵

Neither statement made the news when it was first made. Both became news in the spring and summer of 2026, after Talarico won the Democratic Senate primary and became the person standing between Ken Paxton and a seat in the United States Senate. The timing of all of that is definitely not incidental to what follows here.

What they could have argued

I think it’s important to give critics their strongest case in an argument, so let’s do that. The argument has nothing whatsoever to do with Aquinas.

In the very same passage, immediately before the lines about categories, Talarico asked whether God would have made all these beautiful people with all their beautiful traditions for no reason at all, quoted the Sufi poet Rumi, and said there are many pathways to the sacred.⁶ That is a nod to religious pluralism, and pluralism does stand in tension with John 14:6 and with the exclusivist reading most of the tradition has embraced. Universalism has a real pedigree, running from Origen through Gregory of Nyssa, and I have argued elsewhere that the tradition contains far more of it than most Protestants are aware. Hard pluralism, however, is a different claim and definitely a minority one.

A critic who objects to this is actually doing theology, not just throwing a tantrum. The same critic could fairly ask what Talarico means when he calls himself a Christian who hates Christianity, a line he has used since at least 2021.⁷

Talarico’s Easter 2025 sermon shows the same pattern, which shows it to be a habit rather than a one-off improvisation. Preaching in Jim Rigby’s absence, Talarico quoted Rumi again, along with Muhammad, Gandhi, and Richard Rohr, and closed by placing Passover, Easter, and Ramadan side by side with the line that the lyrics differ while the hymn is the same.⁸ On the resurrection, he said Paul understood it as something happening to everyone all the time, and that resurrection means seeing Christ in everyone and everything. He never directly denied the bodily resurrection of Christ, but he never affirmed it either. The entire doctrinal concept moved into the present tense and stayed there.

Then there is his church itself, which is of particular interest to this discussion. Jim Rigby has pastored St. Andrew’s since 1984 and has spent four decades on the front lines of the PC(USA) fights over theology and sexuality. In 2006, the congregation was fighting for its standing in the denomination after granting full membership to Robert Jensen, a University of Texas professor and avowed atheist, for example.⁹ Rigby has said publicly that he does not believe in a literal resurrection. When the New York Times profiled Talarico in June, the subhead identified Rigby as a pastor who rarely uses the word “God.”¹⁰ Talarico was raised in that congregation and told the Times that Rigby is his pastor in every sense of the word, adding, however, that they do not agree on everything.

While this may be shocking to fundamentalist-leaning evangelicals, none of that makes Rigby’s theology Talarico’s precisely, and treating a congregation’s pastor as a candidate’s own confession of faith would be dishonest at best. But a critic looking for a substantive theological argument had one available in this narrative, sitting right there in the New York Times, in June, on the front page.

Nobody used it. Likely, and I don’t mean this as a pejorative, because few understood what it all meant.

God is not a being

What was attacked instead was the sentence that has the deepest roots in orthodox Christian history.

The apophatic tradition, which approaches God by ruling out what God is not, runs from Pseudo-Dionysius through Gregory of Nyssa’s argument for divine infinity and on into the Latin West through Aquinas. The core claim of the apophatic approach is that God is not a member of any category, including the category of existing things. Creatures have existence, but God is existence. David Bentley Hart has spent a career pointing out that most modern arguments about God, on both sides, are arguments about a very large discrete object located somewhere within the universe, which is not what any classical tradition ever meant by the word.¹¹

This produces a rather inconvenient result for the folks that took issue with Talarico on this point. A person who insists that God is a being, even the biggest and most powerful being ever, holds a position the classical Christian tradition rejected. The people calling this statement blasphemy are actually the ones who hold the heterodox view. A bit of irony for you.

That would be a satisfying enough place to stop, and it is where the viral defenses of Talarico have largely stopped. It is also incomplete, and the incompleteness of this argument is where the really interesting stuff exists.

On November 2, 2025, Rigby preached a sermon at St. Andrew’s called “God as Being or a Being,” and the church posted full transcribed manuscripts online. Here is his own account of the distinction as he understands it: traditional theology believes that God is a being, and mysticism remains silent before Being itself. He closed by inviting the congregation to consider the difference between God as a symbol of a Being, which he said is what most of them were taught, and God as a symbol of the profound depths of their own being. Earlier in the sermon he specified that mysticism, for him, has never meant supernatural.¹²

Read that closely, despite it being a bit convoluted. Rigby is not claiming Aquinas here. He is positioning himself against what he calls traditional theology, and he identifies traditional theology as the view that God is a being. The problem is that Aquinas would say the opposite, that classical theology is precisely the tradition that denied God is a being. So Rigby means something else by the same words in this case. God as a symbol for the depth of the hearer’s own existence, explicitly non-supernatural, closer to Paul Tillich than to the Summa. Rigby is confusing his “traditional theology” on this point.

So we have two claims, one sentence. Aquinas’s God exists in the fullest possible sense, independent of every creature, the source from which all contingent things borrow their existence. Rigby’s God is a symbol that dissolves into human experience. Both come out of the mouth as “God is not a being.” Interesting stuff.

Meanwhile, the outrage machine sensed that something in that pulpit differs from what it believes, which is indeed accurate, and then reached for the one sentence in the sermon that has actually been definitional orthodoxy since the thirteenth century. And the people defending Talarico by quoting Aquinas at his critics are describing a metaphysics that the church he was raised in has explicitly declined.

Are you following?

His verb line follows basically the same pattern as well. God as pure act, actus purus, with no unrealized potential, is Aquinas again, and the divine name given to Moses at Exodus 3:14 is a conjugated verb, ehyeh, regardless of what one makes of the theology built on it.¹³

There is also a modern lineage and it does not run through any seminary. R. Buckminster Fuller is the engineer and designer you know from the geodesic dome, and he was also a compulsive writer about systems, process, and what he took to be the operating principles of the universe. In a poem he wrote in 1940 and published in 1963 as No More Secondhand God, he put it this way: “God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun.”¹⁴ His reasoning was that reality consists of ongoing processes, that God is the articulating and not the art, the loving and not the abstraction, and that a static thing-word cannot name the source of a universe which never stops happening. He applied the same logic to himself, publishing a book in 1970 titled I Seem to Be a Verb. Mary Daly picked the idea up in Beyond God the Father in 1973 and made it a formal theological argument, and Rabbi David Cooper carried it into Kabbalah in 1997 with a book called God Is a Verb.

That is the actual popular career of the phrase. Talarico’s wording sits closer to Daly’s than to anything patristic, which is why the line sounds modern to people who hear it. It converges with actus purus by a completely different road, and Fuller, a lapsed Unitarian working from engineering principles, almost certainly did not know he was rebuilding Aquinas with a different set of tools.

Both genealogies are quite real. Only one of them gets mentioned by the people defending him, however, and neither gets mentioned by the people attacking him, because to trace a lineage a person has to know that lineages exist in the first place. They, largely, do not.

God is not a Christian

Desmond Tutu published a book in 2011 titled God Is Not a Christian.¹⁵ Tutu is an Anglican archbishop, a Nobel laureate, and no ecclesiastical proceedings followed this proclamation.

The argument doesn’t even require someone of Tutu’s stature. The word “Christian” first appears in Acts 11:26, applied at Antioch to a human community that came into existence at a specific moment in history. Contrary to seemingly popular belief, God did not join it. Jesus of Nazareth lived and died a Jew and never converted to anything.

And then there is Karl Barth, who spent his career demolishing the liberal theology of his own teachers and who still went further on this point than Talarico ever has. Section 17 of Church Dogmatics I/2 carries the title “God’s Revelation as the Abolition of Religion.”¹⁶ Barth’s argument is that religion is the human attempt to reach God on human terms, to secure God, to get God’s authority working on our behalf. So religion is unbelief. It is the thing revelation interrupts. And Christianity gets no exemption from this accusation. Barth says it is the true religion only in the sense that a sinner is a justified sinner, by grace and never by inherent superiority, which means Christianity holds no possession, no claim, no leverage of its own.

Consider when and where he wrote this. Barth was in Germany in the 1930s watching the German Christian movement fuse the gospel with the nation, and he was the principal drafter of the Barmen Declaration in 1934, which rejected the notion that the church could take its message from any source besides Jesus Christ and rejected the church becoming an instrument of state power. He was dismissed from his chair at Bonn in 1935 for refusing to swear an unconditional loyalty oath to Hitler and went home to Switzerland.

Here is why that ought to sting a little. The movement currently treating “God is not a Christian” as some sort of blasphemy is doing precisely what Barth built the doctrine of revelation to prevent. It has made Christianity a national possession, a political credential, a thing that certifies its holders and disqualifies everyone else. It has done what Barth called religion, arranging God into a form that serves the people arranging him. And the man who diagnosed this was not a liberal, was not a progressive, and did not survive the century’s great test of that diagnosis by being soft.

Rigby, from the opposite end of the spectrum, arrived at the same observation in that November sermon when he described the traditional God as a mascot representing Christianity or Judaism or America. Barth would have assuredly hated most of Rigby’s theology, but on this point they are describing the same disease.

Talarico’s own Easter sermon put the point in plain Matthew 25 categories. Reading the criteria Jesus lists for judgment, he noted that the passage says nothing about being a Christian, nothing about going to church, and nothing about reading your Bible.¹⁷ That is absolutely a fully defensible reading of the text as it stands and one a lot of Christians seem to ignore.

Here’s a test. Every person who is currently furious about this line would very likely agree, instantly and without argument, that God is not an American, not a Texan, and not even a Republican. The category error being committed here is identical. “Christian” hits differently with these folks only because God and tribe have been fused together so tightly that separating them feels like a heretical thought.

Which, by the way, was the precise thesis of the sermon. The reaction Talarico’s opponents gave is evidence of its veracity.

God is nonbinary

There is nothing new in the underlying claim, and nothing hidden about it either. God is spirit, according to John 4:24, and therefore incorporeal, and therefore has no sex. The Westminster Confession, the doctrinal standard of every Presbyterian body in North America, including the one Talarico is training for ordination in, opens its chapter on God by stating that God is without body, parts, or passions.¹⁸ The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in section 239 that God is neither man nor woman and that God transcends human fatherhood and motherhood.

Scripture itself is not shy about this point either. God cries out like a woman in labor at Isaiah 42:14, promises comfort as a mother comforts at Isaiah 66:13, and is described at Deuteronomy 32:18 as the God who gave you birth. Hosea 11 has God teaching Ephraim to walk. Jesus compares himself to a hen gathering her brood at Matthew 23:37 and tells a parable in Luke 15 where the figure searching for what was lost is a woman. Anselm addressed Christ as mother in the eleventh century. Julian of Norwich devoted three chapters of the Revelations of Divine Love to the same theme.¹⁹ My point is, none of this is a recent innovation as odd as it might sound to gender-triggered evangelicals and none of it has ever been controversial in the places where people read.

Talarico’s specific argument, though, does not entirely work, and pretending it does would be doing him the same disservice his defenders are doing him. Here’s why.

Grammatical gender is not sex. In Hebrew, as in Spanish or French or German, every noun belongs to a gender class, and that class governs how the words around it agree with it. It is a filing system for the language. It carries no information about the thing being named. Shulchan, table, is masculine. Eretz, land, is feminine. No conclusions follow about tables or dirt.

Elohim, the word in Genesis 1:1, is grammatically masculine and formally plural, yet when it refers to Israel’s God it takes singular verbs, which is why English Bibles render it “God” and not “gods.” If grammar settled the question, that word alone would make God plural, and nobody making Talarico’s argument really wants to go there. Ruach, which covers spirit and wind and breath, is usually feminine and sometimes takes masculine agreement anyway, so it is not even consistent on its own terms.

And Genesis 1:2 does not give a second name for God at all. The phrase is ruach elohim, a construct chain, two nouns bound together to mean spirit of God. Talarico’s argument requires that second word to be standing on its own as a divine name, and it simply is not. It is a possessive.

Gregory of Nazianzus dismantled exactly this faulty reasoning in the fourth century. In the fifth of his Theological Orations, he mocked the inference that God is male because the words for God and Father are grammatically masculine and asked whether the neuter noun for deity therefore makes God neuter.²⁰ A Cappadocian father, and one of the architects of the doctrine of the Trinity, agrees with Talarico’s basic conclusion and yet still manages to demolish his argument.

Genesis 1:26 does not help him out either. The plural in “let us make humankind in our image” is best read as a reference to the divine council, in line with 1 Kings 22:19, Job 1:6, Psalm 82:1, and Isaiah 6:8, or as a plural of deliberation. It has nothing to do with gender, and treating it as divine pronouns is the kind of claim that gets a person taken apart by anyone with a semester of Hebrew. This isn’t the Hebrew author playing at pronouns in any modern sense.

The word itself is also imprecise. “Nonbinary” describes a gender identity, which presumes a gendered self doing the identifying. The classical claim is much stranger and larger than that definition. God has no sex, no body, no parts, is not a self in the way creatures are selves, as we’ve already covered, and every gendered word applied to God is analogical.

The tradition is actually more radical than the thing Texas Republicans keep calling radical.

To his credit, Talarico appears to have noticed his inconsistency and reeled it in a bit. Pressed on The Bulwark by Tim Miller, who opened with a question about divine anatomy, Talarico dropped the Hebrew grammar argument entirely and cited Galatians 3:28 instead, saying the point may be provocative politically while not being controversial theologically, and telling critics to take it up with the Apostle Paul.²¹ Galatians 3:28 concerns human status in Christ rather than the divine nature, so the aim is still slightly off center but far more solid than his previous attempt.

Beer jokes

Talarico’s sermon opened with a list of reasons beer is better than religion. The first item was that when you have beer, you don’t knock on people’s doors trying to give it away. Several outlets led with this quip.

What most of them left out is where the list came from. Rigby was away on sabbatical. Talarico texted his pastor asking for some inspiration for the sermon, and Rigby sent him the beer list.²² So the material now being circulated as proof of a candidate’s contempt for the faith is a joke a Presbyterian minister of forty years sent to a seminary student who had asked him for help writing a sermon.

I spent a long stretch of my working life in the beer business, on the production side, the distribution side, and the retail side, so allow me to offer a professional assessment of the list. It’s a light lager. Nothing in it will offend anybody and nothing in it will be remembered. It has been circulating through church office email chains since the days of the fax machine, and it was worn out then.

So a twenty-minute sermon on divine transcendence got clipped for the punchline about door-to-door evangelists, because the punchline could be attacked without anyone having to look up what ipsum esse subsistens means.

The same coverage reports with considerable sensationalism that Talarico called the faith of millions of Christians a cancer. What he actually said is that there is a cancer on our religion, and he identified the cancer by name in the following sentence as Christian nationalism, which he called a sin the church needs to confess and cast out.²³ Removing the preposition turns the sentence into its opposite, by design.

The rest of the response to Talarico has been just about as theological (that’s sarcasm). Congressman Ronny Jackson compared him unfavorably to Beto O’Rourke. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller asked which of the six genders Talarico is. At a campaign event in Manor, while Governor Abbott worked through a list of grievances, a member of the audience shouted that Talarico is the Antichrist.²⁴ So, bottom line here, a sermon from back in 2023 surfaced in August 2026 for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Nicaea and everything to do with winning a Senate seat.

Albert Mohler is the surprising exception, and the contrast is rather instructive. On June 2, he gave the New York Times profile a segment on his podcast and did the thing almost nobody else did. He argued.²⁵ He credited the two reporters for opening the piece on Rigby, identified Rigby’s avoidance of the word “God” as a deliberate theological position and not a verbal habit, and told his listeners there was a real story here for Christians to reckon with. He reached a negative verdict, which he is entitled to do, of course, and he reached it by engaging what these two men actually believe about God, Scripture, and the resurrection.

That’s a theological argument. You can lose one of those. Asking which of the six genders somebody is isn’t an argument at all, and it can’t be lost, because nothing was risked. The real divide here is not left against right ideology so much as a battle between people doing actual theology and people just drudging up old gotcha clips.

What was lost

The really interesting question to me is not why a campaign ran opposition research. Campaigns always do that. The interesting question is why the research worked on anyone, and it worked because the audience receiving it could not tell Aquinas from Tillich if they had to, or either one of them from an insult.

That disparity did not occur by accident. Divine simplicity, aseity, incomprehensibility, the whole apophatic inheritance; none of it can be conscripted. A God who is being itself, outside every human category, unavailable to analogy except by concession, cannot be handed a party registration or asked to bless a policy platform. The doctrine is politically useless. What replaced it is a God who is thought to be a being, one item among the universe’s contents, large and powerful and situated squarely inside the same order of things as the people invoking him. A being can take sides; a being is useful. Being itself cannot and is not.

I served many years as an elder in a Presbyterian Church with a real theological tradition rather than a nationalist one. In all that time, though, and in all those session meetings, I do not recall the phrase “God is not a being” coming up once, and certainly not because anyone would have denied it.

Drink Wisely has examined elsewhere what the evangelical political test actually tests. This is the same discovery from a different perspective. A community that spent forty years insisting the country needed more theology in public life has produced an electorate that cannot recognize the basics of the faith, much less the Summa Theologiae when it is invoked.

The sermon’s assigned text, remember, was the devil on the mountaintop offering all the kingdoms of the world. Talarico preached for twenty minutes on the proposition that God exceeds the categories people keep trying to force God into. The response has been three years of people trying to force God into a category, at increasing volume, and with a straight face.

I think someone should tell them what they’re actually proving.

. . .

Endnotes

1. James Talarico, “God Is Not Christian: Confronting Christian Nationalism,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin, October 22, 2023. Transcribed manuscript published by the St. Andrew’s Sermon Transcription Project.

2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 3–4, 13.

3. The Daily Wire, Texas Scorecard, and others rendered the phrase “God is being self.” The Washington Stand, also critical of Talarico, printed “being itself,” matching the church’s manuscript.

4. Matthew 4:8-11, listed as the scripture reading in the sermon manuscript.

5. Texas House floor debate, HB 25, 87th Legislature, 3rd Called Session, October 2021.

6. From the same sermon passage.

7. Talarico used the phrase in a March 2021 podcast interview and returned to the theme in the 2023 sermon.

8. James Talarico, “Divine Losers: Resistance and Resurrection,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025.

9. Texas Monthly, January 2007.

10. Ruth Graham and J. David Goodman, “Are Texans Ready for Talarico’s Kind of Christianity?” New York Times, June 1, 2026.

11. David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale, 2013).

12. Jim Rigby, “Introduction to Christian Mysticism: God as Being or a Being,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, November 2, 2025.

13. Exodus 3:14, NRSVue.

14. R. Buckminster Fuller, No More Secondhand God and Other Writings (Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 28; the poem was composed in 1940. See also I Seem to Be a Verb (Bantam, 1970); Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Beacon, 1973); David A. Cooper, God Is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism (Riverhead, 1997).

15. Desmond Tutu, God Is Not a Christian: And Other Provocations (HarperOne, 2011).

16. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, §17, “God’s Revelation as the Abolition of Religion.” On Barmen and the Bonn dismissal, see Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (1976).

17. Talarico, “Divine Losers.”

18. Westminster Confession of Faith, II.1.

19. Anselm, “Prayer to St. Paul”; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chs. 58–60.

20. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.7.

21. “James Talarico: The Bulwark LIVE from Dallas,” The Bulwark Podcast, March 19, 2026.

22. Reported by The Daily Wire and The Washington Stand, August 2026, both citing the sermon audio.

23. From the sermon; see note 1.

24. Texas Tribune, March 12, 2026.

25. Albert Mohler, The Briefing, June 2, 2026.

None of this was a secret. It became a national story on August 16, when Jon Ossoff mentioned Harp by name at a campaign rally in Atlanta and the White House spent a week melting down about it. There are myriad clips online if you’re so inclined to watch.

Nine days before that, Punchbowl News published Jake Sherman’s interview with the president. Sherman asked what would happen if Democrats retook the House and moved to impeach him a third time. Trump answered, “Well, a lot of people are saying I’m one of the greatest presidents ever.” Sherman said, “They’re not saying that, though.”²

Whether the claim is false was settled by anyone with access to a real, legitimate poll. The live question is who “a lot of people” refers to, and the answer is that he is citing his sources. Who are his sources? Somebody prints the pages and walks them over to him. He is reading his mail. The people saying it are, in the main, the people on the payroll.

. . .

Kings they chose

When Trump’s religious supporters needed a biblical justification for a thrice-married, twice-impeached, four-times-indicted casino developer who has been convicted on thirty-four felony counts and found liable by a civil jury for sexual abuse, they went shopping in the old monarchy and came back with three names.³

Cyrus arrived first, by way of Lance Wallnau’s 2016 book and a 2018 film, and got his highest-profile endorsement from Benjamin Netanyahu, who stood in the White House and thanked Trump for the Jerusalem embassy decision by invoking the Persian king who let the exiles go home.⁴ The appeal is obvious. Isaiah calls Cyrus God’s anointed and God’s shepherd, and Cyrus was a pagan who never converted to anything. A man can be used by God for a purpose without being good.

Run that particular argument to the end of its own logic, though, and it stops being the compliment it is often intended to be. Isaiah also calls Assyria the rod of God’s anger, an instrument raised up to discipline a faithless nation, and then announces judgment on the instrument for taking credit: “Shall the ax vaunt itself over the one who wields it, or the saw magnify itself against the one who handles it?” Divine usefulness and divine approval are separate categories and the first one leans heavily toward expendability. Isaiah says twice of Cyrus, “though you do not know me.” Cyrus signs an administrative decree, funds a temple he does not worship in, and goes back to Persia. He does not campaign for the priesthood.

David came next, and he usually arrives already situated as a defense. David committed adultery and arranged a killing to cover it, and God kept him anyway. That much, at least, is accurate. It also drags 2 Samuel 12 into the discussion, where the prophet Nathan walks into the palace, tells a story about a poor man’s lamb, watches the king get furious at the villain, and says, “You are the man!” David’s answer is four words in English: “I have sinned against the LORD.” The whole reason David works as a comparison is that a prophet with access said the unsayable thing to his face and the king took the hit. Trump can’t take a hit. Anyone asserting the David parallel should be able to point at that scene in this presidency, but they cannot.

What is given instead is a printer.

Jehu is the third and the strangest. Jonathan Cahn cast Trump as Jehu in a 2017 book and told a National Faith Advisory Board gathering that the president had been called “according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king.”⁵ Jehu is the general who wipes out the house of Ahab, throws Jezebel out a window, and massacres the priests of Baal by luring them into a temple under false pretenses. Second Kings does record God having commended the purge. Then Hosea opens his book by announcing that God will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel. The prophetic tradition audited Cahn’s Jehu template inside a century and ruled against it. Somebody had to find Jehu in 2 Kings and then conveniently leave Hosea out of the press brief.

. . .

Kings they skipped

Rehoboam inherits Solomon’s kingdom and one decision. The northern tribes ask him to lighten the labor burden. He consults the elders who served his father, and they tell him to give the people relief and keep the country. He rejects that and consults the men he grew up with, who coach him to answer that his little finger is thicker than his father’s loins and that he will trade his father’s whips for scorpions. He delivers the line. The kingdom splits within the week and never reassembles. Nothing in the account suggests Rehoboam was slow. He asked both rooms. He preferred the room that made him feel large and powerful.

Saul comes back from the Amalekite campaign and stops at Carmel to set up a monument for himself. Confronted, he explains that he feared the people and obeyed their voice. A king who cannot stop performing for the crowd ends up taking orders from it, which is a peculiar destination for a man who believed he was truly in command.

Herod Agrippa puts on his robes, takes the throne, delivers an oration, and the crowd shouts that this is the voice of a god and not of a mortal. Acts says he was struck down because he did not give the glory to God, and that worms ate him. Josephus tells the same story without the theology and sharpens one detail. The men around Herod called out to him as more than human, and he did not rebuke them.⁶ Two independent accounts, and one diagnosis. A lot of folks said he was the greatest.

Which brings us to Ahab, who supplies the best-documented case of managed reality in the Hebrew Bible. Ahab wants to retake Ramoth-gilead and convenes about four hundred prophets, who are unanimous. Go up and triumph. Jehoshaphat, visiting, asks whether there is anybody else on the payroll. Ahab’s answer is one of the most self-aware sentences any king speaks in scripture. “There is still one other by whom we may inquire of the LORD, Micaiah son of Imlah, but I hate him, for he never prophesies anything favorable about me, but only disaster.” Fake news.

Ahab knows exactly which prophet tells the truth. He can produce the name on demand. He simply prefers not to hear from him.

Micaiah gets summoned, mocks the unanimity to the king’s face, describes a lying spirit loose in the mouths of the four hundred, and predicts the defeat and the death. He is sent to prison on reduced rations. Ahab rides out anyway, in disguise, so that nobody will aim at him in particular.

. . .

What the philosophers did

Plutarch wrote an entire essay on the problem, addressed to a Roman friend with power and money and therefore a predictable flattery problem. His diagnosis is that the professional flatterer succeeds because of a prior condition. Self-love has already made every person his own first and most persuasive flatterer, so the outside operator arrives to find the door open and the chair warm. The flatterer’s method is imitation. He holds no fixed shape and adopts whatever opinion the powerful man expressed most recently. His opposite is the friend, and the mark of the friend is frank speech, the one commodity a court (or Oval Office) cannot manufacture for itself.⁷

Augustine makes an important distinction in the fifth book of the City of God that is a propos here. He separates the love of glory from the lust for domination. A man who loves glory still wants the good opinion of people whose judgment he respects, which leaves him exposed to some level of correction from those people. A man who loves domination, however, will accept acclaim from anyone at all, which leaves him exposed to nothing. Augustine considered the first a vice, but he considered the second a catastrophe and he thought Rome had made that trade.⁸

Kant, I think, is the one to read on the courtiers rather than the king. He treats servility as a violation of a duty owed to oneself and puts it quite plainly: whoever makes himself a worm cannot complain afterward about being stepped on.⁹ The damage runs in both directions here. Harp’s letters to the POTUS read almost like a person fading away.

It would be an easy out to make a White House staffer the villain, but the appetite here belongs to the man who wants the printed pages. Any organization built to feed that appetite will produce a Natalie Harp on a regular schedule, and if she resigned tomorrow the human printer role would be reassigned by Friday. Iris Murdoch called the obstacle to moral seriousness the fat relentless ego, and said the work of morality is unselfing, the slow discipline of letting something outside the self count as real.¹⁰ A president who has arranged a life in which nothing outside himself is permitted to be real has not achieved greatness. He has, however, achieved considerable insulation and the fat relentlessness he seems to be going for.

. . .

Frank speech, current examples

Ossoff’s method is more useful than simple trolling, and it predates the rally line that set off the week. At Jay Clayton’s confirmation hearing for director of national intelligence in July, Ossoff asked who won the 2020 election. Clayton would not answer the question. Ossoff asked again, and again, and told him his testimony lacked credibility. The nominee’s inability to acknowledge a settled fact out loud did more damage than any speech would have.¹¹ As chair of the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations he has also run the unglamorous kind of oversight that produces documents, including a report on a private military housing company’s failures at bases in his own state.

His account of the Harp business, given to Jen Psaki, was the sharpest version of the argument. The president retreats into a circle of aides who function as a sort of security blanket. They tell him what he wants to hear instead of what he needs to hear, and the country is at war.¹²

The comparison everybody reaches for here is Andersen’s, and overuse has worn it smooth. The story is sharper than its reputation. Two con men sell an emperor a cloth that only the competent can see, and the trap holds because nobody in the palace will risk looking unfit for his post. Ministers file in, see an empty loom, and go write reports about the pattern and the colors. By the time the child says the obvious thing out loud, the fabric has cleared an entire chain of professional verification. The emperor is the mark. The court is the mechanism.¹³

Ossoff is also the most endangered incumbent in the Senate, the only Democrat defending a seat in a state Trump carried in 2024, and every word of this is campaign speech with a definite motive attached. The oversight record is checkable and mostly predates the campaign, which is the qualitative difference between a mere claim and a line.

Newsom’s method is different. He mimics the president in all caps, complete with the parenthetical self-praise, and he defends the practice as holding up a mirror so the behavior cannot be normalized. There is real force in that, in its way. Parody denies flattery its dignity, and the redistricting fight underneath the posts was substantive. The cost is that mockery runs on the very same fuel as the thing it mocks. Micaiah did not do impressions of the four hundred. He gave a competing account of the facts and went to prison over it.

. . .

The four hundred were clergy

What lands closer to home is that the prophets in Ahab’s throne room held a religious office. They were salaried, credentialed, and unanimous, and when the king wanted to hear that the campaign would go well, the professionals who told him so did it in God’s name.

American evangelicalism supplied the perfect comparisons in this narrative. Somebody had to go get Cyrus. Somebody had to find Jehu and drop Hosea. That was done by pastors and authors and broadcasters with degrees and publishing contracts, and it was done in the register of prophecy, which is the only register in the tradition where being wrong is supposed to end a career. Deuteronomy sets a plain standard for the trade. If the word does not come to pass, the prophet obviously spoke presumptuously. Nobody seems to administer that test anymore, which is how the same names keep getting invited back to make the same call about the next man.

In the same week that Central Command announced two American service members had been killed by Iranian fire in Jordan, Trump defended the length of the campaign by telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that the United States spent nineteen years in Vietnam and had only been at this one for four months.¹⁴ The war is now in its sixth month. The four hundred remain unanimous.

Ahab took the advice, put on the disguise, and rode to Ramoth-gilead. The King James has an archer drawing his bow “at a venture.” The NRSVue says he shot unknowingly. Either way the arrow went in at the seam between the scale armor and the breastplate.

Ossoff’s line at the Atlanta rally was that while the sailors fight his war, the president sleeps through his meetings, golfs, and trades stocks. Reporters covering the Manhattan criminal trial in 2024 filed the same observation about the defense table, which he denied at the time on the grounds that he was merely resting his eyes.¹⁵ Ahab’s court ran into a version of that problem at the end and solved it the way courts do. They propped the king upright in his chariot until sundown so the army would not see him fall.

Unanimity is not a forecast. Nobody in that throne room adjusted the arrow, and producing it cost the four hundred nothing at all. Micaiah did the prison time. Ahab did the dying. The prophets who said go up and triumph collected their wages and went home to their families, which is the durable feature of the arrangement rather than a flaw in it. Flattery is the safest job in any administration because the bill always comes due somewhere downrange, on the crews in the Gulf and under the flight paths, and never in the room where the advice was given.

Andersen knew this and put it in the last paragraph, where the emperor hears the truth from the child, decides the procession has to continue anyway, and carries himself prouder than before while the chamberlains walk behind him holding up a train that is not there. Nothing happens to the chamberlains. The moral belongs to them as much as to the emperor, and they are the ones still on the clock.

The printer is still running. Somebody is walking the pages down the hall right now.

Notes

1. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, reporting in The New York Times, November 2024, on letters Natalie Harp wrote to Donald Trump in 2023. The Times reported that its reporters reviewed the letters and confirmed their authenticity with two people with direct knowledge of them. The reporting recirculated widely following Ossoff’s August 16, 2026 rally remarks. [Insert direct link before publication.]

2. Punchbowl News interview with Jake Sherman, published August 7, 2026. The exchange circulated widely in clip form the same day.

3. Impeached by the House in December 2019 and again in January 2021, acquitted by the Senate both times. Indicted in four jurisdictions in 2023 (Manhattan, Fulton County, and two federal cases); convicted on May 30, 2024 on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records in New York, sentenced in January 2025 to an unconditional discharge. In May 2023 a federal civil jury found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation in the suit brought by E. Jean Carroll. The federal cases were wound down and the Fulton County case dismissed following the 2024 election.

4. Lance Wallnau, God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American Unraveling (2016); The Trump Prophecy (film, 2018); Benjamin Netanyahu, remarks at the White House, March 5, 2018, invoking Cyrus in connection with the Jerusalem embassy decision.

5. Jonathan Cahn, The Paradigm (2017); Cahn’s remarks to a National Faith Advisory Board gathering, quoted in Jason DeRose, NPR, January 20, 2025.

6. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 19.343–350. Compare Acts 12:20–23.

7. Plutarch, “How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,” Moralia 48E–74E.

8. Augustine, City of God, Book V, chs. 12–19.

9. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Doctrine of Virtue, §§11–12 (on servility).

10. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970).

11. Jay Clayton confirmation hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, July 15, 2026; see also MS NOW’s August 13, 2026 profile of Ossoff’s oversight record.

12. Jon Ossoff, interview with Jen Psaki, The Briefing, August 17, 2026.

13. Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (1837).

14. CNN reporting, July 18, 2026: U.S. Central Command announced two American service members killed and one missing after Iranian strikes in Jordan; Trump’s Vietnam comparison was made to Kaitlan Collins the same week.

15. Ossoff, campaign rally remarks, Atlanta, August 16, 2026. On the trial: multiple reporters in the Manhattan courtroom during the spring 2024 proceedings described the defendant appearing to nod off; Trump disputed the accounts. [Confirm a single citable report before publication.]

16. Scripture quotations are from the NRSVue except where the King James Version is identified. Biblical references in order of appearance: Isaiah 44:28–45:5; Isaiah 10:5–15; 2 Samuel 12:1–13; 2 Kings 9–10; Hosea 1:4; 1 Kings 12:1–19; 1 Samuel 15:12, 24; Acts 12:20–23; 1 Kings 22:1–38; Deuteronomy 18:20–22.

The sentence came from Chrysostom’s homily to the newly baptized. The church baptizes infants, he wrote, though they are not defiled with sin, so that they might receive holiness, righteousness, adoption, and inheritance.¹ Julian, who was bishop of Eclanum and one of eighteen Italian bishops who had refused to sign Rome’s condemnation of Pelagius, pointed to the line as evidence that the doctrine Augustine was defending held no standing in the wider church. The bishop of Constantinople had baptized infants for years without believing they carried anyone’s guilt.

Augustine answered Julian in six books. The aptly-titled Against Julian marches through Cyprian, Ambrose, Irenaeus, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Chrysostom, gathering testimony to show that the doctrine of original sin belonged to the whole church and that Julian was the outlier. When he reaches the Chrysostom passage, he turns to the Greek, points out where the Latin translation has been loosened, and produces a reading in which Chrysostom means only that infants have committed no personal sins of their own.² Curious.

You see, neither man was reading Greek. Both worked from Latin versions of the homily, and the versions were not even the same one. Antoine Wenger showed that Augustine’s appeal to the Greek text was itself conducted from a revised Latin translation.³ Two Latin-speaking bishops in North Africa and Italy argued over what a Greek bishop in Constantinople had meant, in a language neither of them had open on the desk.

That argument settled the question for the Western church, though, and the West has been living with that decision ever since.

. . .

What the words cover

Four major traditions use the phrase original sin, or its close cousin, and they mean four different things by it.

Read the fifth row across in the graphic I have provided. Interestingly, Trent and Westminster utilize nearly identical vocabulary yet land in opposite places. Read the second row and the distance between Constantinople and Geneva turns into a question of jurisprudence. Orthodoxy holds a person answerable only for what he himself has done. Westminster holds that the verdict is entered against him at birth, on the basis of an act committed by someone else.

Anyone who calls the doctrine clear and non-negotiable is defending one of these four positions with much more vigor than the evidence allows.

. . .

Before it had a name

The second and third centuries produced no shortage of pessimism about the human condition. Irenaeus, writing against the Gnostics around 180, describes Adam and Eve as children, made immature by design, and given a command they lacked the maturity to keep.⁴ Theophilus of Antioch says the same thing more bluntly, that Adam was an infant in understanding and could not yet receive knowledge properly.⁵ Athanasius, a century and a half later, describes humanity sliding back toward the nothing it was made from, held there by corruption and death, until the Word takes on a body to stop the slide.⁶ Gregory of Nyssa reads the garments of skin in Genesis 3 as mortality itself, a covering God grants so that the damage will not be permanent.⁷

None of these men thinks humanity is a-okay. They describe a species that is sick, immature, dying, and unable to fix itself, and every one of them thinks the situation requires God to somehow intervene in person. What none of them describes, notably, is a verdict. The disease travels but the sentence itself does not.

This distinction sounds academic and even trivial until you apply it to a specific infant, which is exactly what Chrysostom does when he baptizes one and says the child carries no sin.

. . .

Four key words in Latin

Romans 5:12 in the NRSVue reads that sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and death spread to all because all have sinned.⁸ The Greek behind that last clause is eph’ hō pantes hēmarton. The prepositional phrase eph’ hō has been read as causal, consecutive, relative, and several other ways; Fitzmyer catalogued nearly a dozen proposals and defended the causal one, which is what most modern translations carry.⁹ Read causally, the clause says that all sinned, and that death reaches each person on account of that person's own sinning.

The Old Latin rendered those two words in quo (In whom). Death spread to all men, in whom all sinned. The antecedent becomes Adam, and the sentence now says that every human being sinned in Adam, personally and retroactively, at the moment of the first transgression. This is no small difference, to put it lightly.

Augustine took the reading from a Latin commentary on Paul that circulated under the name of Hilary, which we now attribute to an anonymous fourth-century Roman writer scholars call Ambrosiaster.¹⁰ His Greek was rather thin and he readily admitted it. The verse he built on was one he could not check in the original.

Drink Wisely has examined elsewhere what happened when Luther took a Latin word and made a whole doctrine out of it. This is an even older instance, and as it turns out to be the more consequential one. David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox scholar who has spent years defending Augustine on other fronts, calls it the most disastrous misreading in the history of Christian exegesis.¹¹

. . .

Augustine, given his due

This questionable preposition did not invent the doctrine of original sin on its own, and any account that says it did wouldn’t survive five minutes with someone who has read much at all in his Anti-Pelagian writings.

Augustine inherited a church that already baptized infants and already described that baptism as remission of sin. Cyprian’s council of sixty-four African bishops had ruled in the 250s that infants should be baptized before the eighth day, and Cyprian’s reasoning comes remarkably close to Augustine’s, that the newborn has committed no sin of his own except that, born of the flesh after Adam, he has contracted the contagion of the ancient death.¹²

Ambrose said adjacent things in Milan. The liturgy of Augustine’s own church included exorcism and exsufflation in the rite for infants, and Augustine treated that practice as proof of the doctrine, adding that the church hisses at the child only to drive out the one whose sway the child was born under.¹³

The Latin Bible translation reinforced all of this, of course. Psalm 51:5 came to Latin readers as a confession of guilt from the womb. Job 14:4 in the Old Latin included a line about no one being clean, not even the infant whose life on earth has lasted a single day. Ephesians 2:3 called the human race natura filii irae, children of wrath by nature.¹⁴ Reading those verses in Latin, in a church that exorcised babies, a man who had spent his youth cataloguing the disorder of his own desires would read in quo as confirmation of what he already believed.

So the honest version of the charge is narrower and significantly harder to dismiss. The Latin mistranslation did not create the intuition; that already existed. It gave the intuition a mechanism, and the mechanism let a pastoral instinct harden into a full-blown metaphysics of transmitted guilt that the church would then be required to defend henceforth.

Julian recognized the shortcomings of this approach immediately, it seems. Guilt requires a will. An act I did not perform, could not have prevented, and was not present for cannot be charged to my account, and simply calling the charge inherited does not solve the problem either, since inheritance transfers property and guilt is not property. Augustine’s answers run through the mechanics of generation, the disorder of sexual desire, and the claim that all humanity was seminally present in Adam and therefore really did act in him. Each answer, however, merely relocates the difficulty. None of them resolves it. So, sixteen centuries later the Reformed tradition would stop trying to address it and simply legislate the result.

. . .

What it cost him

Julian pressed the point precisely where it hurt. If infants inherit guilt, and baptism remits guilt, then an infant who dies unbaptized is condemned, and the God who arranged this is a God who damns babies for a crime committed by a man in a garden.

Still, Augustine didn’t flinch and didn’t equivocate on his position. In De peccatorum meritis he holds that such infants suffer eternal condemnation, though he adds that theirs is the mildest condemnation of all.¹⁵ The Enchiridion uses the same formula, the mildest punishment.¹⁶ When the Pelagians proposed a middle destination, a place of rest and happiness outside the kingdom, Augustine rejected it explicitly as their invention and insisted there is no third place.¹⁷ Writing to Jerome, he said that anyone who claims such children will be made alive in Christ contradicts the apostle and condemns the whole church.¹⁸

Note what the qualifier does and does not do here. Augustine reduced the temperature slightly by postulating some kind of ease of torment’s severity, but he never touched the eternality of the damnation.

Everything the Western church has said on this question since that time has been largely an effort to escape a verdict it will not flat-out repudiate.

. . .

Rome applies the brakes

Trent took up original sin at its fifth session, in June 1546, and produced five decrees that are more nuanced than most Protestants assume.

The first four read as one might expect. Adam lost holiness and justice for himself and for all his descendants, transmitted that loss by propagation, and the loss is in each person as his own. Infants are baptized for the remission of that sin, and the sin must be expiated by the new birth.

The fifth decree is where Rome pumps the brakes. Baptismal grace remits the guilt of original sin and takes away everything that has the true and proper nature of sin. Concupiscence, the disordered pull of desire toward sin, remains in the baptized, left in place for the struggle, and it cannot injure anyone who refuses consent. Paul calls it sin, according to the council, because it comes from sin and inclines toward sin. Anyone who posits that concupiscence in the regenerate is truly and properly sin falls under anathema.¹⁹

Session VI added the other brake. Anyone who says free will was extinguished by Adam’s fall also falls under anathema. Trent’s language has the will very much weakened and bent, but still standing.²⁰

Modern Catholic teaching sharpens the same distinction. Original sin is contracted, not committed. It describes a condition, and in Adam’s descendants it does not carry the character of personal fault.²¹ A Catholic infant is born into a deprivation, and baptism ends that deprivation completely.

Augustine would have recognized the doctrine as such but resented the added qualifications.

. . .

Wittenberg and Geneva release them

Sixteen years before the council of Trent, the Augsburg Confession had already gone the other direction. Everyone born in the natural way is born with sin, meaning without fear of God, without trust in God, and with concupiscence. That disease of origin is truly sin, and it damns and brings eternal death now to anyone not born again through baptism and the Spirit.²² The article closes by condemning those who deny that original depravity is sin.

Trent’s fifth decree is aimed directly at that sentence. Westminster, ninety years later, aims right back at Trent.

The English divines wrote that the guilt of Adam’s sin was imputed to all his posterity, along with the death in sin and the corrupted nature, conveyed by ordinary generation.²³ From that corruption, they continue, we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.²⁴ That is the clause behind the phrase total depravity, and it goes well past anything Trent would have signed. Then comes the real collision. The corruption remains in those who are regenerated, and though pardoned and mortified through Christ, both the corruption itself and all its motions are truly and properly sin.²⁵

Trent said the phrase and anathematized it. Westminster said the phrase and confessed it. Two councils, ninety years apart, arguing over the same six words and their implications.

Francis Turretin finished the job. Working through the ninth topic of the Institutes, he distinguished immediate and antecedent imputation from mediate and consequent imputation and defended the former. Adam’s actual disobedience is charged to every descendant directly, prior to and independent of any corruption that descendant inherits or any act he commits.²⁶

Julian’s question, then, about how guilt could pass without a will was not answered; it was simply overruled.

The tradition then discovered it couldn’t really hold the line. Josué de la Place, teaching at Saumur, proposed that we derive a corrupt nature from Adam and that the corrupt nature is what grounds our condemnation, which preserved the doctrine while removing the legal fiction at its center. The national synod at Charenton condemned that position in 1645 without naming him. He answered a decade later with a distinction between mediate and immediate imputation, and Turretin dismissed the distinction as a smokescreen raised to evade a censure the man knew was aimed at him.²⁷

A Reformed professor tried to make the doctrine coherent and spent the rest of his career explaining that he had done no such thing.

Note the significance of the chronology here. Augsburg was 1530. Westminster was 1646. Turretin published between 1679 and 1685. The most severe version of the doctrine of original sin in the Christian world is, coincidentally, also the most recent.

. . .

The exemption department

A doctrine this total (pun intended) produces problems its adherents cannot handle, and the Western church has spent the better part of two millennia building in relief valves to ease the pressure.

The first one is Mary, and Augustine builds this one himself. In De natura et gratia he sets her aside from the discussion of sin out of honor for the Lord and says he would rather not pursue the question.²⁸ So, the man who insisted that no one escapes the condemned mass made an exception before anyone even asked him for one. That certainly didn’t take long.

Turning that instinct into formal doctrine, however, took five centuries and a brand-spanking-new theory of redemption. Bernard objected. So did Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, and Aquinas, all on the same ground, that a Mary who never contracted original sin is a Mary who did not need Christ to redeem her in the first place.²⁹ Duns Scotus broke the deadlock by arguing that preservation is somehow a superior form of redemption, since Mary was kept from contracting what she otherwise would have contracted, which makes her even more indebted to Christ than the rest of us.³⁰ Sixtus IV gave the conclusion papal cover in 1483 by forbidding either party to call the other heretical.³¹ Trent then wrote the exception into the original sin decree itself, declaring that it did not intend to include Mary and pointing back to Sixtus.³² Pius IX defined the dogma in 1854 and cited Scotus by name.³³

Got all that? But wait, there’s more.

The second relief valve is limbo, and it exists because Augustine’s answer on unbaptized infants was intolerable almost immediately. He had ruled out any third destination. The medieval West invented one anyway, as it was wont to do, distinguishing the loss of the vision of God from the pain of sense and assigning infants only the former. Aquinas went even further than that, granting them a natural happiness and no awareness of what they were missing.³⁴ An eternal lobotomy, I suppose. Lyons in 1274 and Florence in 1439 both declared that those who die in original sin alone descend to hell, though with unequal punishments.³⁵

Limbo was never specifically defined as church dogma. In April 2007 the International Theological Commission demoted it to a possible theological hypothesis, and the document is careful about its own standing, noting that the Commission is not an organ of the Magisterium and that its conclusions offer reasons for prayerful hope instead of certainty.³⁶

Five whole centuries of theological engineering produced a binding exemption for one woman. Sixteen centuries produced a non-binding one for dead children and then withdrew it. Neither project, ironically, addressed the very premise that made both necessary.

. . .

The Reformed relief valve, and its defect

Westminster deals with unbaptized infants in only a single clause. Elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who works when and where and how he pleases.³⁷

And the word elect has been under significant debate ever since. B. B. Warfield called the reading that finds non-elect infants implied in the clause one of the most astonishing pieces of misrepresentation in literary history.³⁸ He may be right about the drafters’ intent. He is harder to follow on what happened next, because in 1903 the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. adopted a Declaratory Statement announcing that the Confession is not to be regarded as teaching that any who die in infancy are lost, and affirming that all who die in infancy are included in the election of grace.³⁹

Denominations are not typically in the business of issuing clarifications about language that never bothered anyone.

The Evangelical Presbyterian Church, formed in 1981, had to decide which of the Presbyterian revisions it would affirm. Its Ad Interim Committee on Theology brought a Declaratory Statement of its own to the sixth General Assembly in June 1986, covering chapter 3 on the eternal decree and chapter 10 on effectual calling. On infants the proposed text held that chapter 10.3 is not to be regarded as teaching that those who die in infancy are lost, and that the salvation of those dying in infancy is grounded in the sovereign election of God, who saves by Christ through the Spirit.⁴⁰

The Assembly tabled the statement pending a ruling from the Permanent Judicial Commission, which turned out to lack a quorum. Commissioners then affirmed the Stated Clerk’s ruling that adoption would make the statement a descending overture requiring approval by three-quarters of the presbyteries. A hand count followed, sixty-nine to sixty-three in favor. A recount was then requested. On a standing count, the statement was defeated seventy-two to seventy-one.⁴¹

The next day a motion directing the permanent Committee on Theology to take up the issues the debate had raised was not sustained.⁴²

There you have it. I was a ruling elder in that denomination for fourteen years. I was not aware until this year that it had declined, by a single vote, nonetheless, to say that no infant who dies is lost, and then declined to discuss the matter further.

. . .

The best argument on the other side

The strongest case for inherited guilt is a structural one, and anyone raised inside the Reformed world has surely heard it.

Everyone dies, including infants who have done nothing. Universal death implies a universal cause, and Paul locates that cause in Adam. Everyone needs Christ, and if some human beings arrive innocent then the gospel becomes optional for them, which no reading of the New Testament permits. Remove inherited guilt and Adam’s sin becomes an example we copy, which is the position the church condemned at Carthage and again at Ephesus. Romans 5 requires a real solidarity in Adam parallel to the real solidarity in Christ, and solidarity that transmits nothing is only a figure of speech.

The East answers all of this without the imputation apparatus. Death and corruption pass to everyone, which supplies the universal cause. Everyone dies and everyone sins, which supplies the universal need. Athanasius builds an argument for the incarnation entirely out of corruption and death and arrives at a Christology no one has ever called deficient, at least formally. Two thousand years of Greek and Slavic Christianity have run without a doctrine of inherited guilt and have not produced a single Pelagian communion of which I’m aware.

An honest complication exists here that will require more than a footnote to address. The clean contrast between ancestral sin in the East and original sin in the West is, at least partly, a twentieth-century product. John Romanides drew the line sharply and John Meyendorff followed him. Read the Greek fathers directly and they turn out to be less uniform than that account requires, and Jean-Claude Larchet finds language of ancestral guilt in Maximus the Confessor, reading him as standing somewhere between the two conceptions.⁴³

That complication has obvious limits, of course, and those limits are the real proving point. The live dispute is whether the Greek fathers carry some notion of inherited liability. Nobody argues that they carry federal headship, immediate imputation, or a corruption in the baptized that remains truly and properly sin. The disputed ground lies nowhere near Turretin’s construct.

. . .

Read the whole verse

The version of original sin defended most fiercely in American evangelical pulpits is younger than the printing press, harsher than Rome’s, basically unknown in the Christian East, and built directly on two Latin words the original Greek scripture does not contain.

Hart points out that Augustine cites the first half of Romans 5:18 with enthusiasm and the second half with reluctance, though the two halves share a grammar and a conjunction and were written by the same man in the same breath.⁴⁴ Here is the sentence in its entirety.

Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.⁴⁵

Sixteen centuries of Western theology have largely treated the first clause in that sentence as an accurate description of reality and the second clause as just a metaphor.

Notes

1. John Chrysostom, Homily to the Neophytes, quoted in Augustine, Against Julian 1.6.21. The passage survives in this form largely through Augustine’s citation of it.

2. Augustine, Against Julian 1.6.21 (PL 44, 654–58).

3. Antoine Wenger, ed., Huit catéchèses baptismales inédites, Sources Chrétiennes 50 bis (Paris, 1970). Both Julian and Augustine worked from Latin versions of the homily, and the versions differed.

4. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.1.

5. Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus 2.25.

6. Athanasius, On the Incarnation 4–5.

7. Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration 8.

8. Romans 5:12, NRSVue.

9. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Romans, Anchor Bible 33 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 413–17.

10. Augustine cites the commentary on Romans 5:12 as the work of Sanctus Hilarius in Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum 4.4.7 (CSEL 60:528). Erasmus questioned the traditional attribution to Ambrose in 1527, and Alexander Souter, A Study of Ambrosiaster, Texts and Studies 7.4 (Cambridge, 1905), established the modern consensus.

11. David Bentley Hart, “Traditio Deformis,” First Things, May 2015.

12. Cyprian, Letter 64 (to Fidus).

13. Augustine, De symbolo ad catechumenos 1.2 (CCL 46:186); Against Julian 6; De nuptiis et concupiscentia 1.26. See William Harmless, Augustine and the Catechumenate (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1995), 261–65, and Harmless, “Christ the Pediatrician: Infant Baptism and Christological Imagery in the Pelagian Controversy,” Augustinian Studies 28 (1997): 7–34.

14. Psalm 51:5; Job 14:4–5 in the Old Latin, echoed at Augustine, Confessions 1.7.11; Ephesians 2:3. The Hebrew of Psalm 51:5 is a poetic self-accusation about the psalmist’s own condition and does not carry the doctrinal weight the Latin tradition placed on it.

15. Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione 1.16.21.

16. Augustine, Enchiridion 93.

17. Augustine, De anima et eius origine 1.9.11; 2.12.17. For the Pelagian position Augustine is rejecting, see De haeresibus 88.

18. Augustine, Letter 166, to Jerome.

19. Council of Trent, Session V, Decree Concerning Original Sin (17 June 1546), especially the fifth decree.

20. Council of Trent, Session VI, Canon 5.

21. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§404–5.

22. Augsburg Confession, Article II (1530); see also Melanchthon’s expansion in the Apology, Article II.

23. Westminster Confession of Faith VI.3.

24. Westminster Confession of Faith VI.4.

25. Westminster Confession of Faith VI.5.

26. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Ninth Topic, Question 9.

27. The National Synod of Charenton condemned the denial of the imputation of Adam’s sin in 1645 without naming Placaeus, who published his Disputatio de imputatione primi peccati Adami in 1655. On the charge that the mediate/immediate distinction was a device to evade censure, see Turretin, Institutes, Ninth Topic, Question 9, and R. L. Dabney’s later restatement of the same accusation. The synod sat from December 1644 into 1645, and sources give both years.

28. Augustine, De natura et gratia 36.42.

29. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 27, a. 2.

30. John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio III, d. 3, q. 1.

31. Sixtus IV, Cum praeexcelsa (1477) and Grave nimis (1483).

32. Council of Trent, Session V, closing clause of the Decree Concerning Original Sin.

33. Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus (8 December 1854).

34. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, q. 5, a. 3.

35. Second Council of Lyons (1274); Council of Florence, Laetentur caeli (1439).

36. International Theological Commission, The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized (19–20 April 2007).

37. Westminster Confession of Faith X.3.

38. B. B. Warfield, “The Development of the Doctrine of Infant Salvation” (1891).

39. Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., Declaratory Statement (1903).

40. Minutes of the 6th General Assembly, Evangelical Presbyterian Church (Livonia, MI, 16–19 June 1986), §6-25, which reproduces the proposed Declaratory Statement in full.

41. Minutes of the 6th General Assembly, §6-26 (the Stated Clerk’s ruling on descending-overture status) and §6-27 (the two votes).

42. Minutes of the 6th General Assembly, §6-34.

43. On the exegesis of Romans 5:12 among the Greek fathers, see David Weaver, “From Paul to Augustine: Romans 5:12 in Early Christian Exegesis,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 27.3 (1983), continued in SVTQ 29.2 and 29.3 (1985). For ancestral guilt in Maximus, Jean-Claude Larchet, “Ancestral Guilt According to St. Maximus the Confessor,” Sobornost 20 (1998). The sharp form of the distinction derives from John Romanides, The Ancestral Sin, trans. George S. Gabriel (Ridgewood: Zephyr, 2002), and John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976), 143ff.

44. David Bentley Hart, “Traditio Deformis,” First Things, May 2015.

45. Romans 5:18, NRSVue.

There is, of course, a cheap way to read this statement. Nobody in Rome in 2026 pays a price for repudiating Nicholas V, and an apology issued five and a half centuries after the fact costs the issuer nothing but ink. The encyclical anticipates that objection about forty paragraphs earlier, in a passage on transparency where Leo thanks journalists for keeping clerical abuse from being swept under the rug and states that the Church should not need to be compelled by outsiders to face uncomfortable truths about itself.⁴ That admission is the expensive one, because the abuse crisis is the case where the institution failed at precisely the practice it is now recommending to Silicon Valley.

Still, the apology happened. The interesting question is procedural, however. Rome has a way to say we understood this incompletely and now understand it better while keeping its authority intact, and most of the Protestant world does not.

The machinery Newman built

John Henry Newman sent An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine to the press in late September 1845 and stopped writing it mid-argument, because he had decided to become a Catholic and the book had already answered the question that prompted it.⁵ Protestant polemicists kept pointing out that the Church of the fourth century looked nothing like the Church of the sixteenth. Newman rightly granted the observation and reframed the implication. Living ideas grow. A doctrine held in seed form by the apostles could take centuries to reach articulation, and the growth would count as continuity rather than corruption provided it preserved type, maintained its principles, assimilated new material without losing its essence, and showed the other marks he laid out. He called these tests in 1845 and notes in the 1878 revision.⁶

The apparatus does something quite specific for an institution. It creates a category for having been incompletely right, which is different from having been wrong and also different from having been correct all along. An authority with that category available to it can revise itself without conceding that it was never an authority.

Consider the case it had to handle. In 1888 Leo XIII wrote that liberty of worship, understood as the freedom of every man to profess any religion or none, gives a man the power to pervert or abandon the most sacred of duties, and that such liberty is “no liberty, but its degradation, and the abject submission of the soul to sin.”⁷ He closed the same encyclical by declaring it unlawful to demand, defend, or grant unconditional freedom of worship as though these were rights given by nature.⁸ Seventy-seven years later, Dignitatis Humanae affirmed religious liberty as a right grounded in human dignity and requiring protection in law.⁹ Somebody had to explain how both belonged to one teaching office, and development is what did that explaining.

The same apparatus works beautifully as a device for pretending nothing ever changed, and it has absolutely been used that way. Rome makes monopoly claims of its own, and the 1870 definition of papal infallibility is the most glaring of them. The Church that apologized for slavery in 2026 is the same Church that spent the last four decades demonstrating that having a mechanism for institutional self-examination guarantees nothing whatsoever about actually using it. Rome can perform this operation. The question is what happens in traditions that cannot.

The East, where the machinery jams

Orthodoxy has a mechanism too, and it predates Newman by a whopping fourteen centuries. Truth gets settled in council, and councils have periodically reversed their predecessors.

The clearest modern case sits in Moscow. The Great Moscow Council of 1667 anathematized the Old Believers over Patriarch Nikon’s liturgical reforms, and the persecution that followed lasted for two and a half centuries, complete with exile, imprisonment, and mass self-immolation. More than 300 years later, in 1971, the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church lifted those anathemas, declared the old rites pious and salvific, judged the Nikonian reforms to lack canonical and historical warrant, and treated the curses as though they had never been pronounced. Metropolitan Nikodim’s report to the council said outright that 1667 had anathematized the Old Believers based on an incorrect view of the old Russian rites.¹⁰ Six years earlier, Paul VI and Athenagoras had jointly agreed to remove the mutual excommunications of 1054 from the memory and the midst of the Church and commit them to oblivion.¹¹

The 1971 action is a church saying that a council of the church got it wrong and did real damage to real people. A rarity indeed. It also accomplished less than it appears, however. Most Old Believer communities never returned to communion, and the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church’s own published assessment is blunt about why that was the case. The council said nothing about recognizing the validity of Old Rite clergy, so the gesture effectively reanimated a corpse and changed no facts on the ground. Fifty years on, the Old Rite metropolitan Korniliy turned the council’s own formula back on it, remarking that its decisions are themselves, in effect, “as if they had not been.”¹² An apology that leaves the underlying exclusion in place is received as public relations, which is a lesson freely available to anyone.

The larger problem is that the mechanism for Orthodox self-correction operates at the level of the individual autocephalous church and stalls above it. The Holy and Great Council convened in Crete in June 2016, the first such gathering attempted in roughly a millennium, and four of the fourteen autocephalous churches withdrew in the final weeks. Antioch, Moscow, Bulgaria, and Georgia stayed home over the prepared documents and a jurisdictional quarrel between Antioch and Jerusalem. Moscow’s synod afterward praised the meeting as an important event in the conciliar process while denying that it could be called pan-Orthodox, and Antioch’s synod declared it preparatory and not a council at all.¹³ Ten years on, Bartholomew is still publicly urging the absent churches to accept its decrees.¹⁴

So the East holds a mechanism in working order for a national church and effectively dormant for the communion. Rome’s problem is an authority that can revise but rarely wants to. Orthodoxy’s problem is a communion that would have to agree before it could revise anything, and it cannot seem to ever agree.

The Protestant paradox

This is the part of my research where I, frankly, expected to find nothing much and ended up finding quite the opposite.

The Westminster Confession says, in the chapter on synods and councils, that all synods and councils since the apostles may err and many have erred, and that they are therefore not to be made the rule of faith or practice but used as a help in both.¹⁵ Fair. The framers wrote institutional fallibility into the standards. Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda has been on the letterhead of Reformed bodies for four hundred years. On paper, no tradition is better equipped to admit error.

What the tradition lacks, though, is anywhere for corporate error to land. The doctrine of Sola Scriptura holds that Scripture is sufficient and that its necessary teaching is clear enough for the ordinary reader. Grant that, and a church cannot have been corporately and inheritedly wrong for three centuries about a plain teaching, because such a thing would mean the text failed at the one job the doctrine assigns it. Error has to be somebody’s misreading. The remedy for a misreading is a better reading, which needs a body willing to hold it, which is how the Reformation’s characteristic answer to being wrong became one of departure.

American Presbyterians ran the experiment in public.

In 1837 the Old School majority at the General Assembly abrogated the Plan of Union with the Congregationalists and ejected four New School synods, ostensibly over New England theology and revivalism, with slavery running as a current underneath the whole dispute. In 1845 the Old School Assembly declared that slaveholding was no bar to communion and that slaveholders would face no discipline, reasoning from Westminster’s own statement that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Charles Hodge had supplied the argument nine years earlier in a review essay for the Biblical Repertory, observing that the apostles received slaveholders into their congregations and demanded no manumission, and concluding that any man who calls all slavery sinful has placed himself “above the Bible.”¹⁶ In 1857 the New School’s southern synods withdrew, formally organizing the United Synod at Knoxville the following April. In May 1861, a month after Fort Sumter, the Old School Assembly adopted the Gardiner Spring Resolutions pledging loyalty to the federal government, the southern commissioners left over what they called a political test for church membership, and the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America held its first General Assembly that December in Augusta, merging with the United Synod in 1864 to become the Presbyterian Church in the United States.¹⁷ Four denominations stood where one had stood in 1837, a span of less than 30 years. The northern Old and New Schools reunited in 1869. The PCUS and the PCUSA waited all the way until 1983.

Look at what never happened across that entire sequence. No assembly said the church had taught wrongly. The doctrine of the spirituality of the church, which holds that the church has no competence over questions Scripture does not settle, did more than provide ample cover. It followed straight from the premises. If Scripture is clear and sufficient, and if Scripture does not plainly forbid slaveholding, then the matter has left the church’s jurisdiction and corporate guilt has nowhere to attach. Sola scriptura did not fail to produce an answer here. It produced one, and the answer rendered the question of institutional sin unaskable.

The arithmetic is available to anyone who wants it. NAPARC, the council where theologically conservative Presbyterian and Reformed denominations in North America keep company, started in 1975 with five member bodies and now lists somewhere around a dozen, depending on which year’s roll you consult.¹⁸ That count leaves out the PCUSA, the EPC, ECO, the Cumberland Presbyterians, and a long tail of smaller bodies that would fill another page. In 1997 NAPARC suspended the Christian Reformed Church, one of its own five founders, over the decision to ordain women. Even the council built to demonstrate that these churches belong together runs the mechanism on its own membership.

Two resolutions and the argument underneath them

Two American cases show the machinery straining toward something else.

In June 1995, at its sesquicentennial meeting in Atlanta, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution on racial reconciliation that repudiated slavery, acknowledged the role slavery played in the denomination’s founding in 1845, and apologized to African Americans for condoning and perpetuating racism. It passed overwhelmingly, by Richard Land’s later recollection, with something near ninety-eight percent, and made the front page of the New York Times.¹⁹ Gary Frost, the convention’s second vice president, accepted the apology on behalf of Black Christians from the floor.²⁰

Twenty-one years later the Presbyterian Church in America did basically the same work with more difficulty. A personal resolution from Sean Michael Lucas and Ligon Duncan came to the 43rd General Assembly in 2015 and was referred rather than adopted. Over the following year, some forty presbyteries submitted overtures in response. At the 44th General Assembly on 23 June 2016, Overture 43 from Potomac Presbytery passed 861 to 123 with 23 abstentions, recognizing, confessing, condemning, and repenting of corporate and historical sins including segregated worship, racial exclusion from membership and presbytery, the teaching that the Bible sanctions segregation and discourages interracial marriage, and participation in white supremacist organizations.²¹

Both resolutions are real, and I have no interest in diminishing them. What holds my attention, though, is the argument that had to be won first. Land’s account of the 1995 process describes people telling him we are not Mormons; we cannot repent for our ancestors.²² The 2015 PCA debate produced the same objection in Presbyterian vestments, asking whether commissioners were culpable for the sins of their forefathers and how a denomination founded in 1973 could confess sins committed before it even existed.

Overture 43 answers that objection, and the answer is the most telling document in this entire essay. Its rationale reaches back to the 1973 “Message to All the Churches,” in which the PCA’s founding generation declared their denomination the continuing church of the PCUS, and uses that self-description as the warrant for corporate repentance.²³ A denomination had to quote its own founding press release to establish that it was continuous with its past.

Rome has an instrument for this. The PCA, apparently, had a paragraph from 1973 and a floor vote.

In essentials, unity

I spent fourteen years as a ruling elder in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, whose motto reads in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity. The line is usually traced to Rupertus Meldenius in the seventeenth century, and it sounds like prudent modesty. In practice it is a boundary, however, because someone has to sort each question into a column and whoever holds that pen holds the denomination.

Nothing overly dramatic happened during my tenure. The arguments I sat through were the ordinary ones: whether an elder or deacon had to affirm Reformed theology to serve, and the complementarian and egalitarian question that ran hot through the denomination during those years. What I notice looking back is where I was standing. I argued the complementarian side back then, so this is not the story of a man who saw the trap because he was on the losing end of it. The sorting looked correct to me from inside the boundary, which is how it looks to everyone inside the boundary. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That is what the doctrine produces. A body whose authority rests on a text it believes plainly teaches what the body already holds has no available position from which to be the party in error.

Convenient to say the least.

Leo XIV writes in the same encyclical that the Church claims no monopoly on truth, quoting himself from an address in May 2025, and adds that truth is a good to be shared rather than territory to be defended.²⁴ The sentence sounds good, but also invites a raised eyebrow, given the institution issuing it and the 1870 definition sitting in the background. Set that aside and consider what allows the sentence to be written at all. It requires a tradition able to imagine its own past errors as actual errors. Development gives Rome that imagination whether or not Rome uses it. Conciliarity gives the East a version that works within a nation and freezes up between them. Sola scriptura gives the Protestant world an explicit statement of fallibility (at least at the level of interpretation and rule) and no place to file the resulting confession, so the confession becomes a schism, and the schism becomes a new body certain it has finally gotten the reading right.

The pattern will hold. Traditions that cannot say they were wrong for three hundred years keep finding out that they were, and keep handling it the only way they know. Somewhere right now a presbytery is drafting the overture that will become the next denomination, and the men writing it are certain they are the ones who were faithful and stayed. It’s those other guys.

Endnotes

1. Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026), n. 176, footnote 174. The footnote groups the four documents under “regulate and legitimize,” which covers a range. Sicut Dudum (1435) forbade the enslavement of baptized Canary Islanders, while Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) authorized Portuguese enslavement of Saracens and pagans. The encyclical’s own footnote does not distinguish among them.

2. Ibid., footnote 175, citing an Instruction of the Holy Office of April 1866 responding to questions submitted by Monsignor Massaia, vicar apostolic in the country of the Galla.

3. Ibid., n. 176.

4. Ibid., n. 138.

5. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, 1845). Newman sent the manuscript to press in late September 1845; the Advertisement is dated 6 October, three days before he was received into the Catholic Church.

6. Newman called the seven criteria “tests” in the 1845 edition and “notes” in the 1878 revision. They are preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, logical sequence, anticipation of its future, conservative action upon its past, and chronic vigor.

7. Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum (20 June 1888), 20.

8. Ibid., 42.

9. Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis Humanae (7 December 1965), 2.

10. Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, 30 May to 2 June 1971, abolishing the anathemas on the old rites issued by the Great Moscow Council of 1667. The council’s acts appear in Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii (Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate), 1971, no. 6, with Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov)’s report in no. 7.

11. Joint Catholic-Orthodox Declaration of Pope Paul VI and Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I, 7 December 1965, 4(B), read simultaneously in St. Peter’s and at the Phanar on the day before the close of Vatican II.

12. Metropolitan Korniliy of Moscow and All Russia, Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church, interview marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 1971 council, en.rpsc.ru.

13. Tom Heneghan, Religion News Service, reporting the Moscow Patriarchate’s July 2016 synodal response to the Crete council; and the Antiochian synod’s statement characterizing the meeting as preparatory.

14. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, address at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Stavrodromi, Constantinople, 1 June 2026.

15. Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. 31. Numbered 31.4 in the original and 31.3 in the American revision.

16. Charles Hodge, “Slavery,” Biblical Repertory and Theological Review 8, no. 2 (1836), reviewing William Ellery Channing’s Slavery; reprinted in Hodge, Essays and Reviews (New York, 1857). Hodge maintained this position through 1865, writing that he held precisely what he had held in 1836.

17. On the 1837 ejection of the New School synods, the 1857 withdrawal of the New School’s six southern synods, the organization of the United Synod at Knoxville on 1 April 1858, the Gardiner Spring Resolutions of May 1861, the first General Assembly of the PCCSA at Augusta on 4 December 1861, and the 1864 merger forming the PCUS, see the PCA Historical Center’s document collection at pcahistory.org, which holds the text of the Spring Resolutions. See also Harold M. Parker Jr., The United Synod of the South: The Southern New School Presbyterian Church.

18. The North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council was formed at Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1975 with five founding members: the Christian Reformed Church in North America, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Presbyterian Church in America, the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. The RPCES merged into the PCA in 1982, and the CRCNA’s membership was suspended in 1997 following its 1995 decision to open the offices of elder and minister to women.

19. Richard Land, “Richard Land on the 1995 Racial Reconciliation Resolution,” ERLC, 2 June 2025.

20. “A Review of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Progress on Racial Reconciliation, 1995–2015,” SBC Voices, June 2015.

21. Overture 43, “Pursuing Racial Reconciliation and the Advancement of the Gospel,” 44th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, 23 June 2016.

22. Land, ERLC.

23. Overture 43, rationale, citing the PCA’s 1973 “Message to All the Churches” and its description of the denomination as the “continuing church” of the PCUS.

24. Magnifica Humanitas, n. 25, quoting Leo XIV, Address to the Members of the “Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice” Foundation (17 May 2025).

Drink Wisely has spent a lot of time in the Cappadocians lately, in Irenaeus, in the wider Christian tradition’s strangest and most beautiful ideas about what God is doing with human beings. This essay goes after the doctrine most of us were familiarized with without ever knowing its real origins.

I recall new member classes met around a table in the fellowship hall, and were conducted not so much as a lecture as a guided discussion. The church elders took turns walking newcomers through the material section by section and whenever it touched on atonement, justification, or what happens when God looks at a sinner, I was usually among the first ones talking. I had an answer ready before anyone finished the question, and it came out sounding “authoritative” because I thoroughly believed every word of it. Christ’s righteousness, I’d explain, gets credited to you the way a coat gets thrown over what’s underneath, imputed, not earned. God looks at a believer and sees Christ, not the sin still tangled up beneath it. Over fourteen years as a ruling elder in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, formed inside Reformed orthodoxy, fond enough of Francis Turretin’s writing on forensic justification that I’d quote him from memory to people who had never heard his name before. I was so sure this was the most responsible, most biblical account of salvation out there that it never once occurred to me to ask where any of it actually came from.

The picture behind that language, even though nobody in the room ever described it just this way, is a courtroom, complete with a judge. a defendant with no case, and a substitute who steps in, takes the sentence, and lets the guilty walk out acquitted.

This construct didn’t come from where I thought it did.

Even the prayer every one of us memorized as children carries a quiet complication on this point. “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” is the line most Presbyterian kids grew up saying, and the Greek word behind it, opheǓlēmata, is exactly what it looks like: debt, the kind owed to a lender, not a legal charge brought by a prosecutor.¹ David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament takes the economic reading seriously rather than treating it as a synonym for sin in general.² Jesus taught his own disciples to pray about actual debt relief in a world of peasant farmers and Roman taxation, not primarily about a courtroom transaction between a wrathful God and a guilty defendant. The tradition assumed the legal metaphor ran all the way down the line but it didn’t even hold at the most repeated text in Christian history. Honestly, though how many of us have always read that passage strictly as debt = sin?

Where the Courtroom Imagery Came From

The doctrine I was teaching in those classes has a much clearer historical starting point than I ever realized: Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, written around 1098, to be precise. Anselm of Canterbury wrote Cur Deus Homo, “Why God Became Man,” to answer a very specific question. Why the incarnation, why the cross, why this and not some other arrangement? His answer borrowed the logic that was all around him. Anselm lived inside a feudal world of lords, vassals, honor, and debt, where an offense against a superior required satisfaction proportional to that superior’s rank. A crime against a serf was relatively cheap. A crime against a king was catastrophic. Sin, Anselm reasoned, is an offense against a King of infinite rank, which makes the debt itself infinite as well, and no finite creature can pay an infinite debt. Only God can do that; only a human being should have to do that, and Christ, being both of these, resolves the math perfectly.³

That’s satisfaction theory, technically, not the eventual penal substitution we all know, and the distinction is actually quite important. Anselm’s version has Christ paying a debt to restore honor, obeying where humanity failed to obey. John Calvin, four whole centuries later, moves the doctrine somewhere else almost entirely. Christ absorbing the actual punishment owed to sinners, submitting as a criminal to suffer what we would have suffered, appeasing God’s wrath rather than simply restoring God’s honor.⁴ That’s the version I posited as the definitive one. Most Presbyterians assume this is simply what orthodox Christianity has always taught about the cross. However, it’s really a specific, traceable, sixteenth-century sharpening of a specific, traceable, eleventh-century innovation, and both of them are younger than half of church history.

That is to say, if the assumption holds, the church spent its first thousand years or so getting the central doctrine of the faith wrong and nobody caught the error until an English monk eventually sorted it out. Nobody in that fellowship hall of ours ever put it that bluntly. I certainly never did.

Before the Court

For the thousand years before Anselm picked up his pen, Christians were more likely to imagine the cross in terms of a type of conquest rather than an acquittal. It was more like a battlefield. Christ confronts and defeats the powers that hold humanity captive, like sin, death, the devil, and the resurrection story is the victory announcement. Gustaf Aulén, a Swedish Lutheran bishop, went looking for this older reading in 1931 and gave it a name that stuck: Christus Victor. He found its themes running through the New Testament, through the church fathers, through Luther himself, largely buried under eight centuries of Latin satisfaction theology that had come to feel like the only orthodox option.⁵

Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century, offers his own version through what he calls recapitulation. Christ retraces the path Adam walked and gets it right where Adam got it wrong, healing human nature from the inside by inhabiting it fully. Athanasius takes the logic further still in On the Incarnation, landing on the line that still stops people cold: God became human so that humans might become divine.⁶ Not humans replacing God, but humans participating in God’s own life, taken up into a real relationship rather than simply issued a legal pardon from outside it. That’s known as theosis, and it ran through the Eastern church for centuries as comfortably as forensic justification would later run through Geneva. One picture can make salvation feel finalized in a single moment. The other treats salvation as something God keeps working in us throughout our entire lives.

Paul’s Own Vocabulary

Penal substitution depends heavily on Paul, so Paul is where the argument has to be tested rather than with later systematizers reading Paul through Augustine, Anselm and Calvin’s categories.

Start with the passage substitution advocates lean on the hardest. Romans 3:25 calls Christ a hilastērion, and the King James, along with most translations shaped by it, renders that word “propitiation;” the appeasing of an angry judge. But hilastērion has a specific place in the Greek Old Testament Paul had memorized long before he wrote a word of his own. It’s the standard Septuagint term for the kapporet, the golden cover of the ark of the covenant, the mercy seat, the place between the cherubim where God’s presence met Israel and where the high priest sprinkled blood once a year on the Day of Atonement (Exodus 25:22; Leviticus 16:2). English tradition still half-remembers this. When Martin Luther translated the passage into German in 1522, he reached for Gnadenstuhl, “seat of grace,” not language of appeasement, and William Tyndale followed him into English with “mercy seat.” The propitiation reading crept in later, through the Latin propitiator, and eventually hardened into the word most preachers grew up repeating without giving it a second thought.

Cambridge scholar Daniel Bailey’s dissertation on the passage makes the fuller case fort us. Paul is naming Jesus as the place where God meets humanity and atonement happens, closer to Leviticus 16 than to any kind of Roman courtroom scenario.⁷ That doesn’t resolve every question the verse raises, however, and the scholarly debate continues to our own day. But it means the appeasement reading generations of preachers regarded as self-evident was never as sure as it sounded from the pulpit, and even the Reformers’ own translation instincts pointed somewhere else early on.

What Paul reaches for far more often, and far more insistently, is participation. “I have been crucified with Christ,” he writes to the Galatians, “and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20, NRSVue). That’s not the language of a verdict handed down from a bench. It’s union, a shared identity, dying and rising folded into one continuous life. Romans 6 makes the same gesture at greater length: baptism as being buried with Christ so that believers might walk in newness of life, no longer enslaved to sin because they’ve died with him and been raised with him (Romans 6:3–11, NRSVue). And to the Corinthians, Paul writes plainly that anyone in Christ is a new creation, the old life gone, everything become new (2 Corinthians 5:17, NRSVue). That language describes transformation, actual and ongoing, embodied, and certainly something to keep living into rather than a legal verdict.

The verse most responsible for alien righteousness sits two chapters later in the same letter. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21, NRSVue). Read through Anselm and Calvin’s novel categories, that sounds like a straight accounting transfer, our sin moved onto Christ’s ledger, his righteousness moved onto ours. N.T. Wright reads the Greek differently. The word for “sin,” hamartia, carries a Hebraism running through the Old Testament, where the same word can also mean “sin offering,” the animal sacrificed on someone else’s behalf rather than a stand-in punished for someone else’s crime.⁸ And “the righteousness of God” is language Paul uses elsewhere in his letters for God’s own covenant faithfulness, not a transferable moral quality assigned to individual sinners. On that reading, Paul describes Christ functioning as the offering that deals with sin, so that those united with him come to embody that same covenant reality themselves, becoming, in Paul’s own phrase two verses earlier, ambassadors of God’s reconciling work (2 Corinthians 5:20, NRSVue).

Wright, of course, does not and will not persuade everyone. John Piper wrote a direct, book-length response defending the traditional protestant reading, and I would not attempt to hang the whole case on that one idiom anyway. But it’s enough to show the verse most responsible for the notion of imputed righteousness supports more than one careful reading of the text, and the alternative doesn’t require a courtroom scene at all.

We often called it alien righteousness back then, a phrase meant to protect the doctrine, since the righteousness credited to you was never your own; never intrinsic; it always belonged to someone else. I used that phrase constantly, confident it captured something essential. I’m no longer sure it’s as self-evidently accurate as it sounded at the time, since Paul’s own vocabulary, including the verse the doctrine leans on hardest, keeps pointing toward actual union and covenant identity instead of an entry on someone else’s legally-binding ledger.

Two Paradigms

Marcus Borg gave this contrast its clearest modern shape, in my view. In The Heart of Christianity, a book everyone ought to read, he lays out what he calls the earlier paradigm against the emerging one. The earlier paradigm treats Christian life as a matter of meeting requirements for a future reward, believing correctly, and securing an afterlife. The emerging paradigm treats Christian life as relationship and transformation, a way of being with God that changes how a person lives now rather than a transaction that determines where they go later.⁹ Borg wasn’t the first to notice this split, but he was one of the clearest at explaining why so many people raised inside the earlier paradigm eventually find it stops working under weight it was never built to carry. Myself included.

N.T. Wright makes a related case from a different angle in The Day the Revolution Began, arguing the Reformation, for everything it genuinely recovered, didn’t go far enough in rethinking what the cross accomplished, and that a courtroom drained of the New Exodus imagery running through the Gospels leaves the story smaller than Paul intended.¹⁰ Wright wants substitution folded back into the larger story of Israel and covenant, not extracted into an abstract transaction between God and an individual sinner. This touches on The New Perspective on Paul, which I won’t elaborate on here directly.

Peter Enns offers something different but related in its own way. He’s proof that a scholar can be formed entirely inside inerrantist, requirements-and-rewards evangelicalism, take the Bible and its historical context with total seriousness, and land somewhere the tradition that raised him never anticipated or endorsed. I recognize the shape of that path because it’s largely mine too, minus the doctorate. That trajectory is important for readers standing where I used to stand. I quoted Turretin, believed every word I said in that fellowship hall, and was certain the ground under the doctrine was as solid as the doctrine itself.

It wasn’t inherited directly from the apostles, it was inherited from an eleventh-century monk answering an eleventh-century question with eleventh-century categories, and further modified by a sixteenth-century lawyer into something harder still. The church survived a thousand years, and produced most of its theological depth, before either of these thinkers wrote a word. Hard to call something the one unchanging truth of the Christian faith when the faith ran its first millennium or so without it.

Awkward.

The Table, Not the Ledger

I don’t think the people teaching new member classes alongside me were wrong to care about grace. Reformed theology’s insistence that salvation isn’t earned, that human effort can’t purchase what only God can give, is absolutely worth holding onto. What I’ve come to think the tradition got wrong is more about where it located its center of gravity. It located the action in a ledger, a debt calculated and paid, and equated the closing of that book the gospel. Paul, and the church for a thousand years before Anselm gave it a courtroom, located the action somewhere else entirely: at a table, inside a shared life, in a transformation that keeps asking something of you for as long as you’re alive to give it.

That’s a life, not a moment or an event closed the day you believed the right thing or said the right words. Ongoing, unfinished by design. That’s a much harder gospel to fit on a brochure, granted. But I’m no longer sure that’s necessarily a mark against it.

. . .

Notes

1. Matthew 6:12, Greek text. See also discussion of opheǓlēmata versus paraptomata in the Lord’s Prayer tradition.

2. David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), notes on Matthew 6.

3. Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo (1098).

4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2.16.10.

5. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert (London: SPCK, 1931).

6. Athanasius, De Incarnatione 54.3.

7. Daniel P. Bailey, “Jesus as the Mercy Seat: The Semantics and Theology of Paul’s Use of Hilasterion in Romans 3:25” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1999). See also Exodus 25:22 and Leviticus 16:2 in the Septuagint.

8. N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 163–65. Compare John Piper, The Future of Justification: A Response to N.T. Wright (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), ch. 11, for the direct counter-argument.

9. Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).

10. N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York: HarperOne, 2016).

I recorded a short(-ish) video, talking through the news about Trump’s new vaccine order. Consider it a kind of random thought out loud. I don’t plan to trade the long-form essays for this by any stretch. Those will stay. But every so often a story breaks and I want to react before it’s a week old and three thousand words deep, so I’m going to intersperse these shorter commentary videos whenever the moment calls for one.

Fair warning, though. The tech learning curve here is roughly vertical for me. If the lighting is off or I say “um” like it’s punctuation (and I do), bear with me while I figure this all out. The ideas will be sharper than the production values for a while, I can promise.

One quick update, since the news kept moving after I hit record yesterday. As of today, almost nothing has substantially changed on the ground. No new research came with the order, insurance coverage hasn’t moved, and several states have already said they’ll keep following the pediatricians’ (you know, the actual experts) schedule because it’s the one built on (you know, actual) evidence.

Trump also floated the idea of spacing a one-year-old’s shots across five separate appointments, which is five separate copays and five additional chances to miss one, in service of a problem that, frankly, doesn’t exist.

Credit where it's due, though. The most memorable part of the clown show wasn't the president, who appeared to briefly nod off mid-signing, or his row of nodding officials. It was the woman behind him, hand pressed to her stomach (and nodding), that the internet decided was working a hidden button to jolt him awake. Seven million views for "The Zapper" (I prefer Vaccine Vixen) so far. I have no commentary on her and no idea what she was doing there, but when your Gold Standard Science rollout gets upstaged by a rumored belly-mounted taser, as a marketing professional I’d say the branding may need a second look.

Anyway. Here’s me on video, giving it a shot. Let me know what you think of the format and go easy on the delivery, please!

In New Hampshire, Scott Brown’s Senate campaign ran a digital ad pasting Chris Pappas beside photos of Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez under the caption “Comrade Chris.”⁴ Pappas is a fourth-generation co-owner of the Puritan Backroom in Manchester, a restaurant his family has run since 1917, where his grandfather is credited with inventing the chicken tender.⁵ Whatever else the man might be, he is likely not a Bolshevik.

The sloppiness is precisely the point here. It is a deliberate substitution being made, and it works so very well because most Americans have never had reason to learn that the word carries at least three separate meanings.

Three definitions, one word

Let’s see. We have:

Marxist-Leninist state socialism. State ownership of the means of production, central economic planning, single-party enforcement. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba. This is what Americans meant by the word in 1949, when Gallup first asked it, and it is still what MAGA types mean when they say it in our modern day.

Social democracy. A market economy with private ownership, higher taxation, and universal public services layered in. Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden are comparative examples here. Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen got tired enough of being cited in American presidential debates, in fact, that he went to Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2015 to say it himself. “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”⁶ He was correcting a record that had been repeatedly caricatured, and he went on to add that Denmark was close to a perfect country, which is hardly the remark of a man defending capitalism from Bernie Sanders.

Democratic socialism. This is where the right has a legitimate point that often gets wasted on really bad arguments. The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) own stated platform pairs immediate reforms like Medicare for All and tenant protections with a long-term aim of social ownership and democratic control of the economy. DSA uses that position to distinguish itself from welfare-state social democracy.⁷ The organization has said plainly that Sanders’ program, for example, does not satisfy the socialist goal of worker and social ownership.⁸

So DSA, by definition, is not the aforementioned Nordic model either. The group says so itself.

What follows from that admission is quite the opposite of what Johnson wants you to conclude whenever the word is used. The actual legislative agenda attached to these politicians is in the realm of childcare, housing construction, rent stabilization, bus fare, wage floors, and public health insurance. Every one of those programs already exists in some form or fashion in any NATO member state with a stock exchange. Nobody in Congress has introduced a bill to nationalize the steel industry, for example. The distance between DSA’s long-range theoretical goals and DSA’s Tuesday-morning policy work is enormous, and the right has decided to argue exclusively with a somewhat pie-in-the-sky theory while the policy sits on the table unaddressed.

The label and the ledger

Bernie Sanders did not endorse Francesca Hong.

Why is that important? Hong is a Madison chef and Wisconsin state lawmaker who ran for governor as an open democratic socialist, led the polling for weeks, and lost narrowly Tuesday night to David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive and the more conventional pick. Sanders stayed out of it entirely, in fact.⁹ Note that detail, because Sanders is supposed to be the movement’s patriarch, and he declined to spend a nickel of his credibility on an actual DSA-member candidate in a purple state.

Then look at who did get the endorsement. Peggy Flanagan won Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary the same night with backing from both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and she does not call herself a democratic socialist.¹⁰ In Michigan the week before, Abdul El-Sayed took the Senate nomination running on much the same policy list, also without the label.¹¹

The label is tracking something besides the policy, likely generational identity and a signal that a candidate has not been bought.

Mamdani is a dues-paying DSA member and I take his membership at face value. His budget, however, is the better evidence of his immediate intentions. His first win came just eight days into the job, when Governor Hochul committed funding for free childcare for two-year-olds, starting at 2,000 seats and scaling to 12,000.¹² Free buses stalled out because the MTA is a state agency and Albany declined to fund it.¹³ The city-owned grocery stores, the item conservatives cite most often as proof of Bolshevism, amount to five stores, one per borough, roughly $70 million in a budget request, and not one of them is open.¹⁴

Five grocery stores. In a city of eight and a half million people, with thousands of food retailers already operating, and Atlanta even running a municipal store of its own. Whatever that is, it is at best a pilot program.

Judge these people by their bills and not just their rhetoric. Ocasio-Cortez has spent eight years in Congress and the most radical document carrying her name is a nonbinding resolution about climate infrastructure. Sanders has spent four decades in elected office without once introducing legislation to nationalize an industry. Mamdani runs the largest city in the country and his flagship achievement is subsidized daycare for toddlers.

The obvious rebuttal to all of this is that I am being naive, that incrementalism is the strategy and the horizon is real. Fair enough. Then let the argument happen about the horizon, in plain language, conducted by people willing to actually say what social ownership would require and how they intend to get us there. Nobody is currently doing that.

The left keeps a word it never cashes, the right keeps a word it never defines, and the country argues about Havana instead of about daycare. It’s frustrating and I wish they would drop it. The word buys them nothing and seems to trigger everyone.

The polling shows the trick working

A fascinating poll from Gallup last December asked Americans what they liked and disliked about three economic terms. Free enterprise drew 81% positive. Capitalism drew 54%. Socialism drew 39%.¹⁵ Forty-two points of spread describing overlapping arrangements here. The country is largely arguing about vocabulary.

Push a bit further and it gets even stranger. Only 17% of Americans now define socialism as government ownership of the means of production, half the share who said so back in 1949.¹⁶ Among those who name something positive about it, the top answers are access to healthcare, education, and housing at 26%, and greater equality at 23%. Broader government control barely registers.¹⁷

The partisan split this demonstrates is the glaring fact. Fifty-four percent of Republicans, asked to name anything good about socialism, answered “nothing.” The highest positive response Republicans gave, at 12%, was a stronger social safety net.¹⁸ One in eight Republicans, when presented the entire concept, could only think to praise the very part their own party has spent two years cutting.

The best version of the other side

Conservative Christians have a real argument in here somewhere but I think it isn’t the one they think it is, exactly. Charity extracted at gunpoint is not charity. Agreed. The virtue in almsgiving lives in the giving itself, and a tax bill produces no virtue in the taxpayer, only revenue in the treasury. The early church in Acts shared its possessions voluntarily and locally, among people who knew each other’s names, and Peter tells Ananias directly that the property was his to keep. Substituting a federal agency for a local congregation replaces that model rather than scaling it. Further, the historical record on state provision crowding out private and religious charity is not nothing.

At a practical level, incentives are real. Universal programs are expensive, prone to capture, and administered by people with no particular stake in the outcomes they produce. The Nordic countries the American left admires are small, ethnically homogeneous, high-trust societies with very different labor markets and very different histories, and their models have never been demonstrated to transfer particularly well. That’s the reality.

Every part of that argument warrants a real, substantive answer. The problem is that the people making this argument in public are not making it. Or at least they’re not making it well. They seem to be more fond of just shouting “Fidel.”

What the text actually legislates

The economic provisions of the Hebrew Bible were law. The model was statute, embedded in the covenant code, with real enforcement attached. A creditor who kept seventh-year debts on his books had broken it.

Leviticus 25 requires agricultural land to return to its original family every fiftieth year, canceling accumulated holdings, because the land belongs to God and Israel are merely tenants. Deuteronomy 15 mandates the release of debts every seventh year and warns creditors specifically against calculating the calendar to avoid lending. Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 24 forbid farmers from harvesting the corners of their fields or going back for what they dropped, reserving that portion of the yield for the poor and the immigrant. Deuteronomy 14 sets aside a third-year tithe for the resident alien, the orphan, and the widow. Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy all prohibit charging interest to a fellow Israelite.

These are wealth caps, debt jubilees, mandatory food redistribution, and an interest ban. They were not optional and they were not administered by volunteers. That is a government doing exactly what American conservatives insist governments have no business doing, written into the founding legal document of the very tradition they claim as heritage.

The prophets show up when the laws lapse. Isaiah pronounces woe on those who add house to house and field to field until they live alone in the land. Micah condemns people who lie awake devising ways to seize property because they happen to have the power to do it. Amos indicts merchants who cheat the scales and buy the poor for silver. The target in every case is accumulation that requires someone else’s dispossession. Wealth by itself draws no fire.

The objection arrives right on schedule, of course. That was ancient Israel, a covenant nation under a theocratic legal code, and America is neither. Correct on every count, and it proves far too much. The same people making that argument cite Leviticus 18 on sexuality, hang the Decalogue in courthouses, and quote Deuteronomy on parental authority, none of which survives the objection either. A hermeneutic that retires Jubilee as culturally bound while preserving the sexual code as timeless moral law has ceased being a hermeneutic at all and has become an agenda.

The narrow version of my claim requires nobody to translate the sabbatical year into federal statute. Claiming a tradition’s authority while treating its most sustained and repeated economic commands as a period detail is a choice, though, and it ought to be defended as one. Land redistribution, debt cancellation, wage protection, and food access recur across the Torah, the prophets, the Gospels, and the epistles more often than almost any other subject in the canon. If that entire body of material carries no weight for how a society orders itself, then the Bible isn’t your worldview. It’s your vocabulary.

Jesus opens his public ministry in Luke 4 by reading Isaiah’s Jubilee language aloud and announcing it as fulfilled. James tells landowners that the wages they withheld from their harvesters are crying out. Matthew 25 makes the criterion of the final judgment food, water, clothing, medical attention, and visitation in prison, with no eligibility screening or theological exam anywhere in the passage.

The standard counter-text is typically 2 Thessalonians 3:10, “anyone unwilling to work should not eat,” which Paul writes to a specific congregation about specific idlers who had quit their jobs expecting the imminent return of Christ. He is rebuking apocalyptic freeloading inside a house church. The verse has traveled a long way from there to a Medicaid eligibility form. And the other favorite, “you always have the poor with you,” is Jesus quoting Deuteronomy 15:11, a verse whose second half commands Israel to open their hand wide to the needy precisely because poverty will persist.

None of this, it’s important to remember, makes the Bible a policy manual. The ancient agrarian economy maps onto virtually nothing modern, and anyone claiming Jesus endorsed a twenty-first-century tax structure is clearly selling something. But the direction of travel in the text is also not ambiguous at all, and it does not run toward the party currently invoking it with some frequency.

What they actually did

Johnson has been asked what he thinks about issues under the sun and answered that people should pick up a Bible off the shelf and read it, because that is his worldview.¹⁹ He is welcome to that standard, of course, but let’s apply it instead of just declaring it.

The reconciliation bill Johnson shepherded through the House and Trump signed on July 4, 2025, cut an estimated $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.²⁰ It attached work requirements and six-month eligibility redeterminations to Medicaid, mechanisms that Arkansas already field-tested, where people lost coverage over paperwork errors rather than any real failure to work.²¹ It cut food assistance and stripped internet costs from SNAP benefit calculations, trimming roughly ten dollars a month from about thirteen million households.²² CBO projected around ten million fewer Americans with health coverage as a result.²³

The savings paid for tax cuts.

Set that scenario against Deuteronomy 24, which forbids taking a poor man’s cloak as collateral overnight because he needs it to sleep in. The bill’s authors did not merely fail to enact Jubilee. They ran it in full reverse, moving resources from the sick and hungry toward people who already had enough, or more than enough, and then defended the maneuver by warning that the only alternative was Havana, USA.

The equivocation being employed here is the delivery mechanism for the policy. If the choice on offer is prescription drug caps or a gulag, guess what? The caps lose every time. Every hour spent litigating whether Chris Pappas is a communist is an hour not spent explaining why ten million people should lose insurance so the top bracket can keep even more. Don’t think for a moment this isn’t all by design.

The receipt

I don’t think Scripture flat-out endorses democratic socialism, as defined. I think Scripture predates the entire argument and would find the categories themselves unrecognizable. What Scripture does contain, however, is a legal code that caps accumulation, forgives debt, mandates food access, bans predatory lending, and treats the treatment of poor people as the measure of whether a society is in good standing with God. That much holds up. A movement that puts that book on the podium and then legislates in the opposite direction has a real problem, and the problem is not Zohran Mamdani or AOC.

I’m sorry, but the chicken tender guy is not the imminent threat to Christian civilization either. Someone ought to check the corners of the field, however.

. . .

Endnotes

1. Mychael Schnell, “House Republicans target democratic socialists in midterm messaging,” The Hill, July 2026.

2. Miles Parks and Franco Ordoñez, NPR Politics Podcast, transcript, August 2, 2026.

3. Schnell, The Hill, July 2026 (same report as note 1).

4. Paul Steinhauser, “Republicans relentlessly use Mamdani as socialist cudgel to bash vulnerable Democrats,” Fox News, July 11, 2025.

5. Chris Pappas candidate biography, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund; “Puritan Backroom,” Wikipedia (chicken tender attributed to Charlie Pappas, 1974).

6. “Danish PM in US: Denmark is not socialist,” The Local Denmark, November 1, 2015.

7. Democratic Socialists of America, “Workers Deserve More!” political platform, dsausa.org.

8. Democratic Socialists of America, “History,” dsausa.org.

9. Maham Javaid, “Four takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries in six states,” NPR, August 12, 2026.

10. Javaid, NPR, August 12, 2026.

11. Javaid, NPR, August 12, 2026.

12. “With 100 days in office, how is Mayor Zohran Mamdani doing?” The Haitian Times, April 13, 2026.

13. “Mamdani’s first 100 days: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” City & State New York, April 2026.

14. Amethyst Martinez, “When will Mamdani open a city-owned grocery store?” USA Today; budget figure per “100 Days in Office,” The Politics Society, April 21, 2026.

15. Lydia Saad, “How Americans View Capitalism, Socialism and Free Enterprise,” Gallup, August 6, 2026 (survey fielded December 1-14, 2025).

16. Frank Newport, “The Meaning of ‘Socialism’ to Americans Today,” Gallup.

17. Saad, Gallup, August 6, 2026.

18. Saad, Gallup, August 6, 2026.

19. Mike Johnson, interview with Sean Hannity, Fox News, October 26, 2023.

20. “By the Numbers: Harmful Republican Megabill Will Take Health Coverage Away From Millions of People and Raise Families’ Costs,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, August 2025, citing Congressional Budget Office estimates.

21. Congressional Budget Office and KFF analyses of the enacted reconciliation package; Arkansas precedent per contemporaneous state coverage-loss reporting.

22. “Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Explained,” NAACP Legal Defense Fund, citing CBO estimates.

23. Coverage-loss estimates vary by source and vintage, from roughly 7.8 million attributable to the Medicaid provisions alone to 16.9 million when ACA subsidy expiration and the 2025 CMS marketplace rule are included. “Around ten million” is used here as the figure defensibly attributable to the law itself.

That turns out to be rather useful. I have written twice now about caricatures I bought and later regretted, and both times I had years of my own deep-seated contempt to dig through before I could say anything that was really honest. This time there is nothing there to excavate. I get to watch the caricature being built from scratch, in public, by people who share the very religious tradition I came out of.

El-Sayed won the Democratic primary on August 4 by about a point over Rep. Haley Stevens, in what was reportedly the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in American history.¹ He is set to face Republican Mike Rogers in November. If he wins, he will be the first Muslim in the United States Senate.

What’s on the record

His father came from Alexandria, Egypt, to study engineering at Wayne State. El-Sayed was born in metro Detroit, studied biology and political science at the University of Michigan, then went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship for a doctorate, and captained the men’s lacrosse team while he was there. He finished his medical degree at Columbia and taught epidemiology on the faculty.²

Then Mike Duggan called. Detroit had come through bankruptcy with its public health functions outsourced to a nonprofit, and the department needed rebuilding from the ground up. El-Sayed took the job at thirty years old, which made him the youngest health officer in any major American city at the time. He started with only a small office and five employees.³

In his first year, he went after sulfur dioxide emissions from Marathon Petroleum’s refinery in southwest Detroit and effectively got them reduced. After Flint, he ran lead testing in Detroit schools. He got free glasses for kids who needed them. He cleaned up a badly broken animal control department. The state even put him on its Childhood Lead Elimination Board. He later ran Wayne County’s health, human, and veterans services department, serving 1.8 million people, where he expanded Narcan access, built out air quality monitoring, and launched a program to buy up and cancel medical debt.⁴

What’s also on the record

Bridge Michigan, a nonpartisan newsroom that ran the same scrutiny on every candidate in the race, found two real problems with El-Sayed.

The medical debt program has settled about $57.4 million for roughly 83,200 people. His first major television ad announced “$700 million medical debt erased.” That $700 million, though, is the two-year target. He repeated the claim at a rally with Bernie Sanders and called it the largest medical debt erasure in Michigan history. Bridge also found his free glasses numbers overstated.⁵

The second problem is the use of the word physician. He has used it on LinkedIn as well as at campaign events. He has never held a medical license in Michigan or New York, and his hands-on clinical work seems to have amounted to a four-week rotation after medical school. Michigan’s public health code reserves that title for people actually licensed to practice medicine. When Mehdi Hasan pressed him on it, he said he had taken his medical education in a different direction and suggested Hasan go argue with Columbia, since the degree came from its College of Physicians and Surgeons.⁶ That was undoubtedly a dodge and it sounded like one too.

I don’t want to just wave these instances off. A campaign ad that inflates a program’s actual results by better than a factor of twelve is no small lie, and a man who bills himself as a physician without a license has already clearly made a decision about what he is willing to let people assume is true. If a Republican did this, I would say so in harder language I’m sure.

Now let’s look at who surfaced these concerns. The license question came from Mallory McMorrow’s campaign, a Democrat running against him in the primary. The interview that pinned him down was Mehdi Hasan, who has never once been mistaken for a conservative. The debt figures came from a Michigan nonprofit doing ordinary accountability journalism. Every round of ammunition was public, documented, and free to anyone who wanted to make a case against him.

What they used instead

Rogers put out a statement after the primary saying he spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice, and that never in a million years did he think he would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.⁷

Here’s the thing, though. El-Sayed never said that. PolitiFact rated the claim false. So did Snopes. So did Lead Stories. The line came from Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer who campaigned for him, who said it in 2019 and walked it back within weeks. In April, before those campaign appearances, El-Sayed said plainly on Fox News that he does not think 9/11 was justified. Tom Cotton then repeated the smear anyway, and added that Islamic-Marxists are taking over the Democratic Party, and later had to correct himself.⁸

Let’s examine that alongside the credibility charge for just a second. The accusation is that El-Sayed shades the truth about his own résumé. Fair. The men making the accusations put a fabricated quote about the murder of three thousand people in front of more than a million people, and one of them had to walk it back. Still fair?

Tim Scott’s committee cut an ad calling him Abdulrahman Mohamed Abdul El-Sayed, the most radical Senate candidate in America, and spliced in a clip of him saying “I’m pretty damn dangerous.” The problem is that what he actually said was “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous.” They kept the boasting part and threw away the conditional, which was the context of the entire sentence. The NRSC’s own press releases had called him El-Sayed right up until the week he won. Then Scott went on CNN, looked into the camera, and said we should trust the man’s own words rather than anyone else’s. Asked by Manu Raju why the ad reached past the name El-Sayed actually goes by to dig out his full birth name, Scott said it had nothing to do with his being Muslim.⁹ Hmmm.

Four words cut to convert a jab at the Senate Minority Leader into a confession of menace, followed by a United States senator telling a national audience to trust the man’s own words.

This seems to me like an argument that refutes itself quicker than a cable news cycle.

The Senate GOP’s super PAC warned that El-Sayed would unleash terror. Rogers ads put him beside September 11 footage and bin Laden.¹⁰ And then Tommy Tuberville, catching an elevator on Capitol Hill after a Senate vote, told a reporter that El-Sayed was “basically a cheerleader for 9/11” and that the country hadn’t changed enough to put “basically terrorists” in office. Asked directly whether he was calling El-Sayed a terrorist, Tuberville said: “I say he’s got the ability to become one.”¹¹

I shouldn’t have to say it, but the man has never been charged with a crime. He has never been investigated for anything remotely like these insinuations. He ran a city health department, rebuilt it from five employees, and went to court over a refinery. Tuberville looked into a camera and said he has the potential to commit mass murder, apparently because he is guilty of being a Muslim who won a Democratic primary. Scandalous.

Three Christians and a footnote

Ted Cruz went on Fox and said this: “You see the green-red convergence where the communist and the Islamists, they want Sharia law. They hate Jews. They hate Christians. They hate capitalism. They hate America.”¹²

First of all, there is no evidence El-Sayed supports Sharia law. He calls himself a capitalist who understands how capitalism works. There is no evidence he has said a hateful word about Jews or Christians that I’ve been able to uncover. In the closing days of his primary, canvassing groups calling themselves Jews for Abdul and Muslims for Abdul worked the doors together.¹³

Cruz is Southern Baptist. His father is an evangelical preacher. He clearly seems to be able to disseminate fear and deception like breathing.

Mike Johnson posted that America faces an urgent question about whether we will remain the world’s great superpower or let radical Marxist Democrats destroy the foundations that make us the envy of the world, and that we must fight to keep the country from being overrun by mini Mamdanis. He was reacting to the win of a man who has said he is not a democratic socialist and describes himself as a capitalist, which makes the “mini Mamdanis” line a swing at a label rather than a platform. Drink Wisely has examined elsewhere why democratic socialism and Marxism aren’t the same thing, whatever they share in a word Republicans have been trained to flinch at. Johnson is also a Southern Baptist who talks about his “biblical worldview” more than any Speaker in living memory, and he could have learned what El-Sayed actually believes in the time it took to type the post.¹⁴

Then Trump, in Las Vegas the night the race was called, weighed in. “This guy hates Jews. Somebody said, oh, that’s a little strong. No, he hates Jews and he hates Israel.” He kept going. “He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart and there’s not a fricking thing he can do about it.”¹⁵

Read that middle sentence again. Go ahead. Somebody told him it was too strong. He was warned, in the moment, that he was going further than the facts allowed and he doubled down in front of a ballroom and a national broadcast. That is not a man who simply got it wrong. That is a man who was offered the chance to be accurate; to be careful about another person’s soul, and declined it out loud.

The footnote worthy of a note: sitting in Trump’s own cabinet, confirmed by the Senate and sworn in at the White House, is Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Oz is also Muslim, the son of Turkish immigrants.¹⁶ He is now in charge of a program currently covering roughly 160 million Americans. Cruz has said nothing about Oz wanting Sharia law. Tuberville has not suggested he has the potential to become a terrorist. Johnson has not posted about mini-Ozs.

The difference between Oz and El-Sayed is not so much their religion. Oz spent years publicly distancing himself from his faith, raised his children Christian, and swore his oath of office on a Bible. He votes with the party. The acceptable Muslim, it turns out, is the one who makes his religion as invisible as possible and comes to the right conclusions politically. The dangerous Muslim is the one who prays openly and wins a progressive primary. This was never primarily a theological objection. It is a tribal and partisan one.

. . .

The fruit

Here is what El-Sayed wrote in his Rhodes Scholarship application about why he wanted to study medicine in the first place. He said that his religion teaches that if one saves a life, he or she has saved all of humanity. He has said that morals kept on a mantel stop being morals and turn into things you admire and then walk away from when they get expensive.¹⁷

That is a man who seems to believe his faith obligates him to strangers. I attended enough elder meetings in church to know that if a candidate said that sentence with a Reformed Study Bible in his hand, we would have probably run him for office ourselves.

I am not trying to tell you a Muslim is a better Christian than the Christians. And I am not going to tell you that Medicare for All is specifically what Jesus would have voted for, because Jesus did not vote and the New Testament is not a policy platform. People who read it that way get exactly the results they went in looking for, amazingly, which is how we ended up with prosperity preachers and an evangelical Jesus who wants you to have a boat.

What I will say is that when I started pulling apart the theology I had spent decades inside, the creedal machinery is what came apart first. The Greek metaphysics, the substitutionary transaction, the inherited guilt and so forth. Whole foundational doctrines turned out to be Latin translation errors with sixteen centuries of touch-up paint on them. What survived, for me, was the ethical teaching, which is the part I had been quietly conditioned to treat as something closer to illustration than instruction. The sheep and the goats are separated by what they did. Fed, clothed, visited, welcomed. Nobody in that scene is asked what they believed about the hypostatic union. And the ones who are turned away are the ones who are certain they belong, which is the detail that should keep anybody up at night who has ever been so supremely confident.

So I left. Albeit not quietly and not without significant cost. And having left, I have no active stake at all in how this comes out. I am not defending Christianity, per se, and I’m not defending any particular version of Christian political engagement here. Which is why I can say without it sounding like apologetics: the test Jesus gave for spotting a false prophet was fruit. Not creed, not pedigree, and most certainly not the connotation of somebody’s name.

So we ought to look at the fruit on both sides. One man spent his thirties testing school water for lead and putting glasses on poor kids, then overstated his results in a campaign ad. The other men invented a quote about three thousand murders and pushed it to a million voters, edited a sentence into its opposite meaning on national television, stood at a podium describing the contents of a stranger’s heart after being warned they were going too far, and told a reporter a public health official has the potential to become a terrorist.

I don’t know about you but I know which of those I was taught to call out as truly bearing false witness. I learned it in the same space where I learned the Ten Commandments, and it was not a close call then either.

There is also a whole story about this very thing, by the way. A man asked Jesus who counted as his neighbor, obviously hoping for a definition small enough to live with. The answer put two religious professionals on the road, both of whom crossed to the other side, and a Samaritan who stopped. The Samaritan was the punchline in that story for a reason. Jews and Samaritans had despised each other for centuries by that point, over a rival temple, a different scripture, and generations of mutual contempt serious enough that observant Jews would sometimes walk miles out of their way to avoid Samaritan territory. He was the one the audience had already been taught to distrust on sight, which is the only thing that makes the parable work at all.

Now I am not accusing anybody’s grandmother of hating Muslims. What I am describing is a machine and a deliberate silence. The machine takes a man’s record, including his real and documented failures, and throws every piece of it away in favor of his name and his prayers. The silence is the sound of churches that would organize a boycott over a beer can saying nothing at all while a sitting senator tells a national audience that a Muslim public health official has the real potential to become a terrorist.

None of this costs anything politically. Eighty-two percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2024, up from seventy-six in 2020.¹⁸ That number is the reason Cruz and Johnson can say what they said and lose nothing. There’s no bloc large enough to make them pay for it.

The strangest part, though, is how easy the honest version would have been. Rogers could have held up the Bridge Michigan reporting, said his opponent inflated a program’s results by a factor of twelve and claimed a professional title he has no license to hold, and asked Michigan whether that is who they want in the Senate. That is an actual, real argument and it might have worked too. This isn’t to say I’m inclined to give the GOP actionable advice but that doesn’t matter. They didn’t want the argument anyway. They wanted the name and everything it supposedly entails.

Notes

1. Henry J. Gomez, “Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, notching a Midwest victory for the left,” NBC News, August 5, 2026. El-Sayed overcame roughly $65 million in outside spending, much of it from AIPAC in support of Rep. Haley Stevens. The Senate Leadership Fund has said it will invest $45 million in the general election race against Rogers. See also Mary Ellen McIntire, “Republicans rush to define El-Sayed as Democrats try to move past bitter primary,” Roll Call, August 5, 2026.

2. Britannica, “Abdul El-Sayed”; Ballotpedia candidate profile, 2026. El-Sayed earned a full blue as captain of Oxford’s men’s lacrosse team and was an assistant professor in Columbia’s Department of Epidemiology from 2014 to 2015.

3. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan appointed El-Sayed Health Officer and Executive Director of the Detroit Health Department in August 2015, making him, at thirty, the youngest health officer in a major U.S. city at the time. The department had been privatized to a nonprofit in 2012 amid the fiscal crisis that culminated in Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy filing. See University of Michigan School of Public Health, “After Bankruptcy: The Detroit Public Health Department,” event biography.

4. On Marathon: Abdul El-Sayed, “Detroit health chief: Don’t let Marathon up pollutants,” Detroit Free Press, January 6, 2016; “Marathon says it’ll cut emissions after backlash,” The Detroit News, March 28, 2016. On school water testing: Candice Williams, “DPS testing for lead, copper in drinking water,” The Detroit News, April 5, 2016. On board appointments: El-Sayed served on Michigan’s Childhood Lead Elimination Board, the state Public Health Advisory Commission, and the HHS advisory committee for Healthy People 2030.

5. Bridge Michigan, “Fact check: Abdul El-Sayed overstates claim he erased $700M in medical debt,” June 2026. The Wayne County program, launched under El-Sayed in 2024, aims to retire up to $700 million in debt for 300,000 residents over two years by purchasing it at a bulk discount. As of Bridge’s reporting it had settled roughly $57.4 million for just over 83,200 people.

6. Bridge Michigan, “Who is Abdul El-Sayed? What to know about Michigan Democrats’ US Senate winner,” August 2026. Michigan’s public health code defines a physician as an individual licensed or authorized to engage in the practice of medicine. The question was first raised publicly by Mallory McMorrow’s campaign in May 2026. The exchange with Mehdi Hasan aired in July 2026.

7. Statement from the Rogers campaign, posted to X and Instagram, August 5, 2026.

8. PolitiFact, “No, Abdul El-Sayed didn’t say U.S. deserves 9/11,” August 7, 2026; Snopes, August 2026; Lead Stories, August 2026. Hasan Piker made the remark during a 2019 livestream and retracted it that August. El-Sayed said on Fox & Friends, April 7, 2026, that he does not think 9/11 was justified: “Of course I oppose rape. Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified.” On Cotton’s repetition and subsequent correction, see Mediaite, August 6, 2026.

9. National Republican Senatorial Committee, “Abdul El-Sayed is the Most Radical Candidate in America,” press release and digital ad, August 5, 2026. A subsequent NRSC ad on August 7 likewise used his full birth name, which the committee had not used in its own materials before the primary; see NOTUS, “Republicans Are Running Ads Attacking ‘Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed’,” August 6, 2026. El-Sayed’s full line was “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous.” On the Capitol Hill exchange between Scott and CNN’s Manu Raju, see Mediaite, August 2026.

10. On the Senate Leadership Fund statement and the Rogers ad imagery, see CNN, “The GOP’s ugly response to Abdul El-Sayed,” August 6, 2026.

11. Tommy Tuberville, quoted by Brian Karem, Salon, “Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan causes a GOP meltdown,” August 6, 2026. Karem reports the exchange took place as Tuberville was boarding an elevator on Capitol Hill. Tuberville had previously drawn criticism for sharing a post juxtaposing an image of Zohran Mamdani with 9/11 footage and writing “the enemy is inside the gates” in March 2026.

12. Cruz made the remarks on Jesse Watters’ Fox News program on the night of August 4, 2026, referring to both El-Sayed and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Quoted in CNN, “The GOP’s ugly response to Abdul El-Sayed,” August 6, 2026.

13. On El-Sayed’s self-description as a capitalist, see coverage of his August 2026 primary win. On the joint canvassing, see Religion News Service, “Abdul El-Sayed could be the first Muslim senator. Here are 5 religion takeaways from his campaign,” August 5, 2026.

14. Speaker Mike Johnson, post to X, August 5, 2026. On El-Sayed’s response to the socialist label and Mamdani’s rejection of the “mini-Mamdani” characterization, see amNewYork and Anadolu coverage of Mamdani’s August 5 press conference. On the distinction between democratic socialism and Marxism, see “I Was Wrong About AOC,” Drink Wisely, August 2026.

15. Remarks by President Trump at Red Rock Casino Resort, Las Vegas, August 5, 2026. Quotations follow the event transcript (Trump Archive); the White House posted video of the full remarks the same day. See also Washington Examiner, August 5, 2026, and Roll Call, August 5, 2026, quoting the same passages.

16. Dr. Mehmet Oz, official CMS biography, cms.gov; Presidential Prayer Team profile, February 12, 2026, confirming Oz is Muslim. On Oz’s “secular Muslim” self-identification during his 2022 Pennsylvania Senate race, his decision to raise his children in his wife’s Christian faith, and his swearing the CMS oath on a Bible rather than a Quran, see Türkiye Today, “Dr. Oz swears on Bible despite touting ‘secular Muslim’ identity in 2022 Senate race,” October 7, 2025. Oz was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in at the White House in April 2025. Only about 10 percent of American Muslims identify as Republicans, according to 2022 research from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding.

17. On the Rhodes application, see Britannica, “Abdul El-Sayed.” The remark about morals on a mantel comes from an interfaith roundtable of pastors, imams, and a rabbi in Detroit in late July 2026, days before the primary, reported by the Associated Press and CBS News Detroit, August 2026.

18. NBC News exit polling, 2024: white born-again and evangelical Christians, 27 percent of the electorate, voted 82 percent for Trump against 17 percent for Harris, compared with 76 percent in 2020 and 81 percent in 2016. See Baptist News Global, “How Trump and Harris fared with faith voters in 2024,” November 12, 2024; “Evangelicals and the Exit Polls,” First Things, January 2025; and PRRI, “Religion and the 2024 Presidential Election.”

By the summer of 2018 I had already started to feel the floor moving a little bit under my theological foundation. Certain doctrines had stopped making sense the way they’d always seemed to before. I had questions I would not have permitted myself to ask just a few years earlier. But I was still a registered Republican, still an elder in a reformed church, and still seeing the world through a lens I had not stopped to examine more deeply because it didn’t feel like a lens at all; it felt like the plain and obvious truth.

And when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed up on the national scene, that hidden lens of mine worked exactly as designed. She openly called herself a democratic socialist and that was enough. I did not need to hear a particular policy proposal or read a position paper, because that word had already done the thinking on my behalf.

The word

Here is what I heard when she said socialist: bread lines, Politburo, the Berlin Wall, a boot on the neck of the free enterprise that God had apparently directly ordained somewhere in the fine print of the book of Genesis. Cold War socialism, state ownership of the means of production. You know, the gulag on an installment plan.

But here is what she was actually proposing. Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, tuition-free public college, and the Green New Deal. Pretty much like Denmark with inferior dental coverage. You can go ahead and think every one of those is bad policy, and plenty of thoughtful people can and do, but none of them involve seizing a factory. The argument against Medicare for all is about cost, provider capacity, and the transition mechanics of moving a fifth of the American economy around. This is a legitimate argument. I never made it myself, because I never allowed my reasoning to go that far. Most don’t.

Don’t get me wrong, there was definitely a defensible version of my objection. She intentionally kept the word, for example. Why would you do that? She has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization with a genuine internal conflict about whether the goal is a more humane version of capitalism or something well past it.{1} When a word carries that much history and negative connotation and you still choose to keep affirming it, people are naturally going to react viscerally to it. That’s not paranoia; it’s just the way language and meaning works.

But I never really made that argument either. I never once asked what she actually meant by it. The word was uttered, the alarms went off, and I chalked it up to proper discernment and a defense of freedom and liberty on my part.

Words equivocate. Meanings evolve and split and take on regional accents. Anybody who has spent any time at all with a biblical text in its original language knows this well, or they ought to, and I had spent a good amount of time with biblical texts. I knew perfectly well that a term can mean one thing in the fifth century and something else entirely by the sixteenth. I applied that care to this Greek preposition or that one and refused to extend it to a political label. The intellectual rigor was available to me, and I chose not to engage it. Why? It didn’t fit my narrative.

The other thing

That socialism read was wrong, but it was at least an argument with some substance. The second thing was worse.

Christian media and conservative talk radio decided that AOC was just plain stupid. Not mistaken, not naive. Stupid. A dim former bartender who wandered into Congress by accident somehow and could not independently think her way through a coloring book. That was the tenor of the repeated framing, touted so consistently that it stopped coming across like a claim at all and started to sound like normal background noise. I absorbed it, repeated it, and laughed at the jokes.

That said, let’s go to the tale of the tape here, Johnny.

This May she sat in an Energy and Commerce oversight hearing and asked the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, Jessica Kramer, whether the agency was tracking complaints that data center construction was contaminating residential drinking water. Kramer said she was aware of concerns about availability but had heard nothing about quality. So Ocasio-Cortez reached down and sat two mason jars of brown water on the table, which she had collected herself in Morgan County, Georgia, where Meta is building a data center and where she had gone in person to talk to the families whose wells had turned.{2}

“The only difference between clear water and this was that data center,” she said. “This wasn’t just one well. This wasn’t just one family’s situation. This is what the drinking water now looks like next to that data center.”{3}

Morgan County went for Trump by more than fifty points.{4}

She had the numbers with her too. Families shipping in water to cook and bathe, bills projected to rise by a third, ten percent of the community’s daily water going to the data center, the whole county on pace for a total deficit by 2030. Kramer said she would look into it as soon as she got back to the office. Ocasio-Cortez called for a congressional investigation, and a week later a bipartisan amendment directing the Energy Department to work with EPA on data center impacts to water and grid reliability was attached to a $58 billion appropriations bill by a Republican from Tennessee.{5}{6}

She came back to it in a full committee a few weeks ago. “We have one of the most precious and sacred water supplies in the United States. Once you compromise that, it’s done. Ask people in Flint, ask people across the country. When their critical water supplies are compromised it takes years, if not decades, to clean up again.”{7}

So that’s a Democratic Socialist congresswoman from the Bronx driving to rural Georgia to defend the well water of people who probably wouldn’t vote for her at gunpoint, and doing it well enough that Republicans signed onto the follow-up. Call it grandstanding if you want; call it simply politics. But stupid isn’t a viable adjective.

This is old form for her, incidentally. In February of 2019, six weeks into her first term, she got roughly four minutes with Michael Cohen in front of the House Oversight Committee. Nearly every other member on that dais, from both parties, burned their five minutes on speeches. She skipped the speech and asked where the documents were, who else had seen them, and what the committee would need to subpoena in order to compare Trump’s financial statements against his tax returns. Cohen named three people under oath. Ro Khanna singled her out afterward as the most effective questioner in the room, and a former Oversight Committee counsel writing for NBC made the same call.{8} That praise came from people who do this for a living and had no reason whatsoever to compliment a freshman.

Then there is the part of all this that was public the entire time, just a quick search away from anyone who cared to look. In 2007, as a high school student in Yorktown Heights, she placed second in microbiology at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, competing against roughly 1,500 students from more than fifty countries. Her project tested the effect of antioxidants on the lifespan of C. elegans, work she did out of Mount Sinai. MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory named an asteroid after her for it. Asteroid 23238 Ocasio-Cortez is a rock about a mile and a half wide, currently going about its business in the asteroid belt, named for a teenager’s research on free radicals.{9} Hmmm. Yep, dumb as a rock.

She went on to Boston University on a fellowship, interned in Ted Kennedy’s immigration office, and graduated cum laude in 2011 with a double major in economics and international relations.{10} Then she went home to the Bronx and tended bar, because it was 2011, she was carrying tens of thousands in student loans, and her family needed the money. I know, just shameful.

That last part is the best. Or worst. The bartending was supposed to be the punchline. In the world I was living in, a service job told you where somebody’s ceiling was, never what their circumstances were, and I had spent almost two decades in the beer industry standing behind bars and sitting at them. I knew better than almost anyone that the person pouring your pint might have a graduate degree, a failed business, speak three languages, or all of the above. I knew this firsthand and I still let the joke land when it came to AOC. It served my purpose.

She has her own answer on that question, by the way. Asked how she got so much out of Cohen, she credited the bar experience. Talking to thousands of people over the years, she said, forces you to get great at reading people and hones a razor-sharp BS detector.{11} Turns out the punchline was really the qualification.

Now put this exact frame up against the audience. The people telling me she had no brain went on to spend the following years vehemently defending a man who stood at a podium during a pandemic and queried as to whether disinfectant could possibly be injected into the human body, because he had heard it kills the virus in a minute on a countertop.{12} They defended a Secretary of Defense who put the flight schedules of F/A-18s into a Signal group chat two hours before the strike, then put much of the same material into a second Signal chat that included his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer.{13} You see, the intelligence test was never an intelligence test, it seems. It was really a loyalty test all along.

What it was and was not

When I wrote about being wrong on Obama, a portion of readers on the left told me the real explanation was my obvious racism I was too dishonest to admit. The charge is unfalsifiable by construction, which is what makes it completely useless. Deny it and you have proven it. I said then and will say now that my hostility ran through ideology, through policy, through a worldview that told me his politics were a threat to something I held deep and sacred.

I fully expect the analogous charge to resurface here, and I want to anticipate it with more than just a flat denial.

The straightforward version is true enough. I would have reacted the same way to a white male democratic socialist from Vermont, and in fact I did precisely that, for years, regarding Bernie Sanders. The trigger for me was always the position; the ideology.

But I am not going to pretend the contempt I heard for AOC arrived in any kind of a neutral container either. The specific vocabulary that was often directed toward her, such as the fixation on the sound of her voice, her clothes, her teeth, that infamous dancing video, that vocabulary does not attach to a sixty-year-old man from Burlington. It was already sitting there, assembled and ready, and I picked it up and used it without much inspection. I did not build that register; I adopted it. Adopting an ideology and actually deploying it are different acts, but both carry culpability.

That is as honest as I can get about it looking back. Anyone who claims total access to the machinery of their own reflexes is telling you a tale. I believed what I believed and I believed I was correct about it. That is, until I didn’t.

The lens, again

None of this changed because of one speech or one revelation. There was no road to Damascus moment on this for me. I started actually listening to her, in full and in her own words, without a talking head translating for me first, and the person I encountered bore no resemblance whatsoever to the figure I had been caricaturing for so long. She is quick, she is unusually good at the mechanics of a legislative hearing, and she is also wrong about plenty, just the same as every other politician who has ever held the job. I can claim all of that at once now without needing her to be a complete fool.

It turns out, I’ve been, am being, and will be wrong about some things too.

The pattern here was identical to Obama in this respect. As my theology deepened and expanded, my politics followed suit, mostly because both had been resting on the same tenuous foundation without my noticing. When you have been taught that a particular political persuasion is what Christian obedience looks and sounds like, dismantling the theology eventually costs you the political proclivities too. It takes a while. The doctrine tends to go first. The reflexes hang around long after the beliefs that justified them have quietly moved out, though. In fact, some don’t go without a long and difficult fight.

And that machine is still running. Watch what is happening to Zohran Mamdani in New York right now and you will see the same assembly line, same components, same finished product being propagated. Socialist as a synonym for Soviet. Unserious, unqualified, dangerous to something the accuser rarely bothers to specify. I recognize the process easily because I used to be one of the people it held in its sway.

For those who despise AOC, I do not care if like her politics. I care that you notice how little work it took to make you certain about what you think of her. That’s the part that should keep you up at night and make you do some soul searching. Are you fighting for your faith? For your country or party? Or are you fighting to bolster and support a system and a tribal expectation that you can’t see beyond? It very well could be the latter without you even realizing it; at least in any fully developed form.

That last question is, largely, rhetorical because I did it too. But now I’m not. I’m not making a claim to be better than anyone else, or somehow more enlightened, but I am recognizing that certainty is a hell of a drug and once it finally wears off a more objective, honest reality can begin to seep in. I regret my attitude toward President Obama and I regret my attitude toward AOC too. I’m ashamed of my former caricature of both of these public servants and hope that God continues to remove that veil and that I, and others, will learn to participate more and more in the divine nature and not our own agendas.

Notes

1. Ocasio-Cortez has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America since before her 2018 campaign. The organization’s internal debates over reform versus rupture are ongoing and public, and are not resolved by the label itself.

2. Michael Doyle, “Water woes unleash congressional calls for data center scrutiny,” Agri-Pulse, May 27, 2026. The exchange occurred May 20, 2026, before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

3. Quoted in “Ocasio-Cortez Corners EPA Administrator on Water Quality Near Data Centers,” Common Dreams, May 21, 2026.

4. Morgan County, Georgia, 2024 presidential results. Trump carried the county by a wide margin; the local paper reported that roughly three-quarters of Morgan voters chose him. Morgan County Citizen, November 6, 2024.

5. “Ocasio-Cortez Presses EPA Assistant Administrator Kramer on Jeopardizing Clean Water Access by Caving to Major Data Center Construction,” Office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, May 20, 2026. Full remarks as delivered are posted there. Her Morgan County visit was documented by More Perfect Union, May 18, 2026.

6. The amendment came from Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN), chairman of the Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, and was added to a $58 billion fiscal 2027 energy and water appropriations bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee. See Agri-Pulse, May 27, 2026.

7. “Ocasio-Cortez: ‘If Anyone Wants to Live Right Next to One of These Data Centers Here on this Committee, Please Raise Your Hand,’” Office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, July 2026, remarks delivered during an Energy and Commerce full committee markup.

8. Jeremy Herb and Manu Raju, “Preparation paid off for new House Democrats at Cohen hearing,” CNN, February 28, 2019, quoting Rep. Ro Khanna. See also the NBC News THINK assessment by a former House Oversight Committee counsel, February 28, 2019, and PolitiFact’s full transcript, “In context: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questions Michael Cohen during the House Oversight Committee,” February 28, 2019.

9. “Did U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Graduate Cum Laude from Boston University?” Snopes, April 3, 2019; Society for Science, “Intel ISEF alumna headed to Capitol Hill,” November 2018; NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory small-body database entry for 23238 Ocasio-Cortez.

10. Boston University Department of Economics, 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award citation. BU’s listing describes the degree as a BA in International Relations and Economics; her office described it as a double major. Both point to the same registrar record.

11. Ocasio-Cortez, quoted in Julia Conley, “’A Pretty Amazing Line of Questions,’” Common Dreams, February 28, 2019.

12. Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, April 23, 2020, Trump White House Archives. The transcript reads in part: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning.” Trump said the following day he had been asking sarcastically. FactCheck.org reviewed the full passage and found no clear indication in the remarks themselves that he was joking. See “The White House Spins Trump’s Disinfectant Remarks,” FactCheck.org, April 24, 2020.

13. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” The Atlantic, March 24, 2025. On the second chat, the New York Times reported April 20, 2025, confirmed independently by CNN, ABC News, and the Associated Press. The second chat included thirteen people, among them Hegseth’s wife Jennifer, his brother Phil, and his personal attorney Tim Parlatore, and contained F/A-18 flight schedules. Hegseth told reporters in Honolulu that “nobody was texting war plans.”

We learned that this all happened just recently.

In 2024, Christian Tornau, a Latinist at the University of Würzburg, took a phone call from an employee of the Bad Doberan Monastery Association in northern Germany. The ask was whether he would help decipher a twelfth-century manuscript, copied at Bad Doberan Abbey and now held in the diocesan library at Pelplin, Poland. The manuscript happened to contain six sermons that were attributed to Augustine. Four of the sermons were already known to scholars, but two of them were not.²

Skepticism was surely the correct first response, and Tornau had it. Medieval scribes attached Augustine’s name to texts he never wrote with the same enthusiasm a modern publicist might, because his name was the surest way to get a text taken seriously. So Tornau assembled roughly twenty Latin scholars in Vienna to subject the two unknown sermons to testing, and the panel agreed they are indeed authentic. The style, the humor, the distinctively North African tenor of the prayers all pointed to the bishop himself.³

A critical edition, prepared with Dorothea Weber and Clemens Weidmann, is expected from CSEL, the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, by the end of this year.

Both of the new (to us) sermons concern the Witch of Endor. As it turns out, she’s not from the LOTR Universe either.

The séance in the canon

First Samuel 28 is the passage preachers likely hope the lectionary skips. Saul stands on the eve of battle with the Philistines, and God has basically ghosted him. No dreams, no Urim, and no prophets. Desperate, the king who once expelled the mediums from Israel disguises himself, travels by night to Endor, and asks a medium to bring up the prophet Samuel from the dead.

So she does, as one would. Or something does. A figure rises, identifies itself as Samuel, and delivers the worst oracle in Israel’s story: the kingdom is torn away, the army will fall, and “tomorrow you and your sons shall be with me” (1 Sam 28:19, NRSVue). Saul collapses on the floor of the medium’s house, and the next day he dies on Mount Gilboa.

The passage absolutely tormented ancient interpreters, and for good reason. Torah bans necromancy outright, yet here sits a séance inside the canon, and it actually works. Every available reading costs you a doctrine in exchange somewhere to make it all fit. If the figure really was Samuel, then a forbidden practice successfully summoned a true prophet of God. If it was a demon impersonating Samuel, then a demon delivered accurate prophecy and we have folks summoning demons in the name of Israel. If God permitted the whole scene as some sort of judgment on Saul, the question only moves upstream a little way and remains a problem.

Why would a good and sovereign God let a diabolical act like this succeed at all? That is the theodicy problem in miniature, and it is exactly where, according to Tornau, the first of the newly recovered sermons ends. Augustine posed the question, laid out the understood interpretations, and then stopped. The congregation carried the problem home with them. On Wednesday he took it up again and weighed the readings against each other, still declining at that point to force a singular conclusion. Tornau describes the method as characteristic of Augustine. Present the options, withhold the final judgment, and allow the audience to actually do some of the thinking for themselves.⁴

A quick note on sources before going any further. The sermons themselves remain unpublished until the CSEL edition appears, so everything above rests on the University of Würzburg’s announcement and Tornau’s public comments thus far. The Latin is still in Pelplin. Whatever else those texts contain, we will find out in their totality when the scholars do their work to completion, and any conclusions drawn here obviously stand ready to be corrected by the texts themselves. That’s my obligatory disclaimer.

The Augustine we got instead

Here is the difficulty, though, from what we do know so far of this new discovery. The Augustine who largely shaped Western Christianity is not the man in that pulpit. That’s a pretty big statement but hear me out.

The Augustine the West assimilated is the anti-Pelagian controversialist of the later published works. From him we received guilt transmitted biologically from Adam to every infant ever born, a doctrine that has become virtually undisputed Christian orthodoxy even though it shouldn’t have. Humanity as a massa damnata, a condemned lump from which God rescues some and passes over the rest. Unbaptized babies excluded from salvation, by the way. Election settled by decree before the foundation of the world, with no reference to anything a person would ever do or choose. Luther, in the 16th century, absorbed that Augustine through his Augustinian priestly order and built the Reformation’s doctrine of the bondage of the will on its foundation. Calvin further systematized it. American evangelicalism still runs on this same fuel, even in congregations that have never read a page of him and couldn’t articulate the doctrines in any cogent way.

The tempting move now is to claim the newly found sermons as some sort of evidence of a secret Augustine, a generous soul hiding behind the doctrinaire, but the evidence will not likely go there. The Endor preacher and the theologian of the massa damnata occupied the same skull, often in the same decade. He returned to the Endor passage elsewhere in his writings and worried over it there too.⁵ What the recovered sermons do expose is a particular method rather than a hidden theology. A question held open across three days, interpretations offered as viable options, and a congregation trusted to reason alongside its bishop. Tornau even reads in these sermons Augustine’s willingness to consider that everyone, including those who appear most evil, remains capable of salvation through God’s grace, a pairing of “intellectual honesty and episcopal humility” he considers very Augustinian.⁶ The tradition chose to keep his verdicts and discard his patience, unfortunately, and that editorial decision was made everywhere, over centuries, by people who found particular verdicts easier to enforce.

The crack in the Augustinian foundation

There is a further problem with the verdicts themselves, and that exists in the text Augustine was reading.

Augustine worked from Latin translations of Paul’s writings. In Romans 5:12, Paul wrote that death spread to all eph’ ho all sinned, a Greek phrase meaning “because” or “inasmuch as” all sinned. Augustine’s Latin text rendered it in quo omnes peccaverunt: “in whom all sinned.” In whom. On that reading, all of humanity sinned in Adam, guilt passing down the bloodline almost like a title deed. David Bentley Hart has argued that this mistranslation ranks among the most consequential errors in all of Christian history; a defective pronoun that helped generate the entire Western architecture of inherited guilt.⁷ Augustine was arguably the most formidable mind Latin Christianity ever produced, and he built brilliantly, but he built where his available text pointed. Eleven centuries later, Luther read Paul through an Augustinian lens and inherited the direction along with the doctrines.

That argument is quite substantial and it calls for more room than this essay can give it, and it will get that room here soon and include in a forthcoming essay.

Wednesday

The tradition had two Augustines available to it and it chose the one with the pat answers. That choice is understandable. Answers travel well, fit neatly in catechisms, and give institutions something specific to enforce. Questions and open-ended problems require a congregation you trust, a bishop willing to wait, and one that will be okay with the eventual conclusions.

The other Augustine survived anyway, as it turns out, the way texts survive: copied at a Baltic abbey in the twelfth century from an exemplar now lost, shelved in a Polish diocesan library, unread for eight hundred years until someone picked up a phone. What came back is a small thing in the big scheme, two sermons on an obscure and troubling passage, but for three days in Hippo, the hardest question in the room belonged to the people in those pews. Their bishop handed it to them and let them noodle on it until the following Wednesday. Sixteen centuries on down the road, that may end up being the most radical thing discovered in the manuscript.

Endnotes

1. University of Würzburg, “Two New Sermons by St Augustine Discovered,” einBLICK, 2026, https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/einblick/single/news/two-new-sermons-augustine-discovered/ (accessed July 2026).

2. Pelplin, Diocesan Library, Codex 114 (195). Details of the discovery from the Würzburg release and subsequent reporting.

3. Tornau organized a summer school in Vienna in autumn 2025 at which twenty additional Latin scholars examined the sermons; all agreed they are authentic. University of Würzburg release.

4. Tornau, Würzburg release, on the two-sermon structure (Sunday service ending with the theodicy question; options weighed the following Wednesday) and on the open-ended didactic approach as typical of Augustine.

5. Augustine’s earlier treatments of 1 Samuel 28 include De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum 2.3 and De octo Dulcitii quaestionibus 6. In the latter, following Tertullian, he leans toward reading the apparition as a diabolical likeness of Samuel rather than the prophet himself.

6. Christian Tornau, quoted in “Lost Sermons from One of Christianity’s Greatest Saints Discovered After 1,600 Years,” Fox News, July 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/travel/lost-sermons-christianitys-greatest-saints-discovered-after-1600-years.

7. David Bentley Hart, “Traditio Deformis,” First Things, May 2015.

But here is what actually happened in that room yesterday. Dr. Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena from its chairman, Sen. Rand Paul, who has spent years positioning himself as one of Fauci’s chief antagonists.¹ Minutes into a hearing that ended up stretching past two hours, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and repeated the same sentence more than one hundred times.¹ At one point Paul announced, “Let the record record that the witness has refused to answer whether there’s a folder in front of him based on his Fifth Amendment right.”¹

When Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, tried to address the committee, Paul had him removed from the room by security.² The committee’s ranking Democrat, Gary Peters of Michigan, asked to hear from the lawyer and was refused his request.³ Paul closed by scheduling an August 5 vote on holding Fauci in contempt, and afterward floated the theory that a pardoned man may forfeit his Fifth Amendment protections, a theory he conceded has probably never been tested in court.⁴ Rand was big mad. Remember, this is the same Rand Paul who spent months criticizing Trump over tariffs and spending, a heresy that made him a villain to this exact crowd. Wednesday morning he became their avenging angel, of sorts. In this drama, the distance between traitor and hero is one hearing, apparently, and memory lasts exactly as long as the agenda requires.

The stagecraft involved here was more convoluted than what we saw during the hearing itself too. Days earlier, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he had located Fauci’s personal diary on government servers after an eight-month search and handed it to Paul and Ron Johnson, who published more than 1,100 pages without telling Fauci they had it.⁵ Which is, by the way, apparent proof that this crowd can release documents and files when it suits them. Remember that the next time you are told certain other files simply cannot see daylight. An eight-month search. For a diary.

The people calling Fauci a purveyor of dangerous and deadly medical advice take their health cues from RFK Jr., a man whose wackadoodle theories about medicine we will get to shortly, because they are germane. What did this treasure trove of incriminating prose end up revealing? According to Céline Gounder of KFF, no new science, no admission of a lab leak, nothing that advances the origins question at all.⁶ It did reveal that Fauci found his celebrity flattering, that Barbra Streisand called him about boosters, and that he kept notes on his press coverage. Scandalous! If that constitutes a smoking gun, though, I’d wager every pastor’s journal in America qualifies as a felony charge.

And that, I think, explains the tenor of my Wednesday inbox. Ever since word of the diary and the hearing got out, these folks were primed for vindication, and more than that, for retribution against a man they have spent the better part of five years building into their sworn enemy. The diary gave them nothing they wanted. Nothing enrages a mob like an acquittal.

The pandemic response itself does merit honest review. That’s how we learn and do better. School closures ran too long in many places, early messaging on masks reversed itself and damaged public trust, the definitional games around gain-of-function research funding at NIH were lawyerly at best, and lawyerly answers from public health officials cost the whole field credibility it has still not recovered. That’s all perfectly legitimate criticism. A serious country would examine all of that with sworn testimony, document production, and conclusions that follow the evidence.

What happened on Wednesday was the opposite of that, however. Fauci said in his statement that Paul’s only purpose in subpoenaing him was to extract some answer, any answer, that could support Paul’s repeated public promises to see him prosecuted.⁷ This was never subtle. Paul then spent two hours proving him right, capped off with a threat of repercussions and a contempt vote. You cannot spend literally years telling television cameras that a man belongs in prison, subpoena him, and then act hurt when his lawyers treat you as a prosecutor rather than an objective fact-finder. Any competent attorney in America would have given the exact same advice Fauci received. The Fifth Amendment exists precisely for the citizen who is staring down a government official who has pre-announced the verdict. This is precisely what Paul did.

Which brings me to the thing that my Wednesday correspondents seem to have conveniently forgotten. In 2016, Donald Trump told a campaign crowd, “The mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”⁸ Six years later, in a New York deposition, Trump invoked the Fifth more than 440 times across four hours and answered exactly one question, about his name.⁹ That deposition, for the record, came in the New York attorney general’s civil fraud investigation into whether he inflated his net worth by billions to obtain favorable loans,¹⁰ an investigation that ended with a judge ruling at trial that he had done exactly that, a finding that survived even when an appeals court later voided the half-billion-dollar penalty as excessive. His supporters characterized his silence as prudence and wisdom. They called it justifiable self-defense against an obvious witch hunt. Hmm.

Yesterday, the very same people watched Fauci do the same thing on identical legal reasoning, and reflexively concluded it points to fraud, lies and mass murder. The principle at work here is not a constitutional one. It is wholly tribal. The Fifth Amendment is wisdom when our guy invokes it and a clear confession when theirs does.

The case that Fauci lied to Congress rests on very much contested definitions of a research funding category, a genuine dispute that reasonable scientists still argue about. The case that Trump lies rests on the Washington Post fact-checking team’s documented tally of 30,573 false or misleading claims across a single term.¹¹ And that is just scratching the surface of his fact-checked distortions and blatant lies. If lying to the public disqualifies a man from trust, and perhaps it should, one of these figures has a real problem several orders of magnitude larger than the other. The people in my texts and social feed have chosen to burn the scientist and canonize the salesman, which suggests that lying was never really the issue at all.

Oh, and a word about expertise since so many of yesterday’s armchair virologists have strong opinions about immunology. If your medical training consists of Truth Social, Fox News, Facebook and a chip on your shoulder, you are more than welcome to your prescribed treatment plan. The man you trust over Fauci once stood at a White House podium and wondered aloud about whether disinfectant might be administered inside the body. His movement’s pharmacy of choice stocked livestock dewormer too. And the health secretary who spent eight months hunting Fauci’s diary? This is a man who claimed in more than one hundred public appearances that vaccines have poisoned an entire generation of American children, and who declared in a 2023 interview that no vaccine is safe and effective.¹² As secretary, he responded to a deadly measles outbreak in Texas by downplaying vaccination and endorsing unproven remedies like vitamin A.¹³ Measles cases have now hit a 35-year high on his watch.¹⁴ By all means, follow your own experts wherever they lead if that floats your boat. It would all be laughable if children weren’t dying of measles in 2026 though. Just spare me the lecture about who really endangers public health.

The rage I heard from some folks on Wednesday was nothing short of liturgical. It had the cadence of heresy-hunting, the old communal ritual where the tribe restores its purity by expelling one man and loading him with its sins. René Girard spent a career describing this mechanism, and he would have recognized what happened this week immediately. The community that cannot face its own pandemic grief, its own dead, its own complicity in all of it, resolves the cognitive dissonance by finding a single face to direct their hate toward. It works every time, and it has never once been true justice.

The last entry in the diary they seized, from December 2022, reads in part that “the far, extreme right and Qanon literally hate me.”¹⁵ By then two people had been arrested over credible threats to kill him.¹⁵ Paul and Kennedy spent eight months hunting for evidence of a villain. What they found, and published to the world without warning, was a tired old man recording the plain fact that a movement wanted him literally dead. Then that movement read it and proved him right by Wednesday afternoon.

And Wednesday’s proceedings will not be good enough for them. They will keep beating this drum until it produces a result they want, because what they want was never testimony or truth. They want their pound of flesh. They were made to wear masks once, poor things, and someone must pay for that indignity. They call what they’re after justice, and in fairness, they are using the word with real Christian Nationalist precision. Justice, in that theology, is purely punitive and retributive. Let the guilty pay. And guilt, in that theology, has nothing to do with crimes against humanity. It means failure to kiss the ring.

Endnotes

1. CNN, “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about Covid pandemic,” July 29, 2026.

2. NBC News, “Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions at GOP-led Covid hearing,” July 29, 2026.

3. NBC News live coverage, July 29–30, 2026.

4. STAT News, “Fauci, citing senator’s ‘unhinged obsession,’ pleads the Fifth,” July 29, 2026.

5. CNN, “Rand Paul releases Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diaries ahead of hearing showdown,” July 28, 2026.

6. The Hill, “Anthony Fauci set for tough Senate hearing on COVID-19 after release of diary,” July 28, 2026.

7. Time, “Fauci Pleads the Fifth at Senate Hearing on COVID,” July 29, 2026.

8. USA Today, “Donald Trump says he invoked 5th Amendment in deposition,” August 10, 2022 (2016 campaign remarks).

9. NBC News, “Trump invokes Fifth Amendment nearly 450 times in N.Y. AG’s civil probe,” August 10, 2022.

10. Trial ruling in New York v. Trump (Engoron, J.), February 16, 2024; CNN, “NY appeals court voids the nearly $500 million civil fraud penalty against Trump,” August 21, 2025 (penalty vacated as excessive; fraud liability upheld).

11. Washington Post Fact Checker database, final tally published January 2021.

12. AP/Yahoo News, coverage of RFK Jr. confirmation hearings, January 2025 (100+ appearances claim; 2023 podcast statement).

13. NBC News, “RFK Jr. spends his first month at HHS downplaying vaccines and targeting food additives,” March 2025.

14. The New Republic, “RFK Jr. Now Responsible for 35-Year Record High in Measles,” July 2026.

15. The Hill, “Rand Paul releases over a thousand pages

Big distinction.

I’ve watched this play out in primarily three places so consistently that I no longer think of them as entirely separate or isolated observations. In how people talk about salvation, God’s holiness demands a worthy sacrifice, a debt that has to be paid in full before the relationship can even start. In how people talk about their own spiritual growth, God is understood as basically displeased (if not with the person, with the sin), mildly to seriously, and sanctification becomes a long campaign of disciplining a person out of their failures. In how people talk about the wider world, about crime and immigration and who has it coming, God’s justice gets invoked as a predominantly retributive force, giving people exactly what they’ve earned. Three domains, one underlying picture of God; a God whose defining trait is holding people to account.

Marcus Borg painted this picture with much more detail than I could on my own, in a sermon from Days of Awe and Wonder that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about ever since I first read it. He calls it the monarchical model, God as Lawgiver and Judge who also loves us, built on the biblical image of God as king. Borg is careful to note the love is quite real in this model, it just arrives conditioned, contingent on repentance being earnest enough or belief being sturdy enough. The result, he argues, is that two people can use identical vocabulary, grace, sin, salvation, and mean two qualitatively different things, since the monarchical model and its alternative “virtually produce two different religions, both using the same language.”¹

The alternative is what Borg calls the divine lover model, God as the one who yearns for relationship rather than compliance. He borrows a line from the theologian Roberta Bondi that has apparently lodged itself in a lot of readers’ memories, since it lodged in mine within about a sentence, that God is besotted with us.² Besotted is an old word, one I had to look it up, for someone helplessly caught up in another person that is descriptive of something closer to falling in love than fulfilling an obligation. Borg traces this image through the prophets, through the Song of Solomon, through John 3:16, and argues it changes the entire operating logic of faith. Under the monarchical model the ethical imperative is to be good, because you’ll be held to account. Under the divine lover model it’s love what God loves, because that’s what relationship with a lover actually asks of a person.

I find Borg’s two models basically right, but also incomplete. The divine lover model is a real upgrade from the courtroom God, but it can still leave God and the believer standing across from each other, however warmly, one loving and one loved, one yearning and one being yearned for. There’s a further step available that Borg gestures toward without fully taking in his book, and it’s the step I’ve found myself drawn to over the last several years, tentatively, without any hard claim to have it fully worked out myself.

Where the monarchical God lives

Start with soteriology, since it carries the most structural weight of the three. The strongest form of the standard evangelical account doesn’t treat God as a distant judge demanding a third party settle someone else’s debt. It treats God as the one who bears the cost personally, in Christ, so that justice and mercy meet in the same act instead of trading off against each other. That’s a serious answer to a serious problem, and it takes the reality of sin very seriously. So far, so good.

What it still shares with the weaker, less nuanced version of the same idea is the basic shape of the metaphor, and the ranking underneath it. Guilt, penalty, satisfaction, acquittal, this is the forensic vocabulary, however loving the judge may be presiding over it. N. T. Wright has made essentially this same critique from inside the tradition, arguing that even careful, well-meaning versions of the doctrine smuggle in what he calls a “works contract,” a picture of “an angry, legalistic divinity” that the biblical text itself doesn’t actually support.³ And the reason the courtroom has to open before anything else can happen is that holiness functions, in this account, as the attribute everything else has to answer to. Love waits on justice being satisfied first. Whatever else God’s character includes, in this model holiness sits above it, the one trait the rest of the structure gets organized around. Sin is what gets paid for. It isn’t described as a condition a person is delivered from and re-formed out of, the way the participatory tradition describes it. The relationship with God only opens once the debt is cleared.

Sanctification runs on the same engine albeit at a smaller scale. If God’s basic position is evaluative, then spiritual growth becomes a long process of behavioral correction and modification, with God noticing what’s wrong and applying pressure until it’s corrected. I’ve heard this described, more than once, in language close to a parent monitoring a child’s report card. The believer’s inner life becomes a running audit. Am I doing better than last year. Am I still struggling with the same things. Growth gets measured the way compliance gets measured, incrementally, against a standard, with God cast in the role of auditor.

And then politics, which is where this theology stops being private and starts shaping how people vote, sentence, and legislate. If God’s core trait is retributive justice, giving people what they’ve earned, that becomes the default template for human justice too. Punishment is understood as righteous in itself, not only necessary. Mercy toward the undeserving starts to look like a category error, almost an offense against God’s own character, even though it lies at the actual center of the gospel accounts most of these same believers claim to hold as wholly authoritative. Most Reformed accounts already have an answer here that must be taken seriously. Grace, in this account, isn’t opposed to justice, it’s what redirects justice onto Christ instead of onto the guilty party, so that justice gets fully satisfied and mercy gets fully extended in the very same motion. That’s a more sophisticated position than the flat retributive picture, and it should be argued with in its strongest form, in fairness.

But redirected justice is still justice as the operating principle, still a system where someone has to bear the penalty before mercy becomes available. The metaphor hasn’t changed, only who absorbs the cost within it. A punitive God produces a punitive politics with remarkable consistency, and it looks like the predictable output of the model working exactly as designed, even in its most careful form. Justice, here, is still retributive, vindictive, and thought of in the pejorative sense only.

The turn past Borg

Here’s where I kind of reach the limits of my own certainty on the matter. I’m not a professional theologian, though I served for decades as a ruling elder and have spent a long time living inside this material, so what follows isn’t casual either. I don’t hold any of it as settled doctrine; more as a set of ideas that have proven more resonant, and I’d argue more faithful to the actual biblical witness, than the model I knew and believed for decades.

The first is participatory atonement, salvation understood less as a debt paid on a ledger and more as an act that draws humanity into God’s own life. Second Peter’s language about becoming “participants of the divine nature” points this direction, and so does Paul’s language of being in Christ, which reads very much as spatial and relational rather than legal. Paul uses some version of that phrase, en Christō, somewhere around eighty times across his letters, and the Greek preposition behind it, en, is fundamentally locational. It’s the word for being inside a house, inside a city, inside a body. To be en Christō is to be located inside Christ the way a person is located inside a room, which is an odd thing to say about a legal transaction and a very natural thing to say about a relationship someone has been drawn into.

The cross, on this account, isn’t about a payment. It’s an act of solidarity and invitation, God entering fully into human suffering and death in order to draw humanity through it into something larger. Jürgen Moltmann builds an entire theology of the cross on this same instinct, arguing that God does not stand apart from human suffering directing a legal proceeding but enters it directly, taking on “the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.”⁴

The second is theosis, the ancient Eastern Christian idea that the goal of the Christian life is that participation in the divine nature itself, an actual, ongoing transformation into the likeness of Christ rather than legal approval received from a distance. Under theosis, sanctification stops being an audit altogether and becomes something closer to formation, less about correcting failures and more about slowly becoming capable of a kind of love and presence that isn’t native to us yet.

The third is relational trinitarianism, the idea that God’s own inner life is a communion of persons in mutual self-giving love, perichoresis, a mutual indwelling, not a solitary monarch issuing decrees from above creation. If that’s what God’s own nature actually looks like, then the invitation extended to human beings isn’t approval in some objective standard. It’s an invitation into that same communion, into relationship structured by mutuality rather than hierarchy and requirement.

I don’t hold any of these three ideas in their textbook form (if such a form exists) at this point in my journey, and I’m not trying to sell a shiny, new systematic theology here. What draws me to them is the shape, participation over compliance, formation over audit, communion over courtroom. That shape has done more to change how I actually live than the monarchical model ever did, for all the years I spent trying to make that model work.

I can already hear the obvious objection at this point, that I’ve swapped a serious God for a permissive one, all love and no teeth, a comfortable deity with no real claim on anyone. I don’t think that objection persists, however, with what theosis actually says about sin. The monarchical model treats sin as a legal violation, serious, but bounded, the kind of thing a payment can (and did) settle. Theosis treats sin as closer to a sickness or a corruption working in a person’s actual nature, something that has to be healed, not merely canceled or forgiven, a diagnosis the Cappadocian fathers took at least as seriously as any courtroom metaphor does. That’s not a softer view of sin. It’s a different one, and arguably a heavier one, since a debt can be paid off in an instant but a corrupted nature has to be remade.

Older than it looks

There’s a second objection I need to address head-on, since it’s the one I expect from readers who know their historical theology, that all of this sounds like a modern, softer reading laid over an older, sterner text. I’d argue it’s actually the reverse. The Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén spent a career tracing the history of atonement doctrines and found that the participatory reading isn’t the newcomer, the legal one is. Aulén described the earliest Christian view of the cross, what he called the classic or Christus Victor model, as “the Atonement as a movement of God to man,” God personally and directly involved in humanity’s rescue, not a payment received from a distance.⁵ That model, he argued, dominates the New Testament and the writings of the church fathers for roughly the first thousand years of Christian history.

The fully worked-out satisfaction theory that penal substitution later grew out of doesn’t arrive until Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, written around 1098, nearly a millennium after the resurrection. Penal substitution as most evangelicals encounter it today is a Reformation-era refinement on top of that, which makes it, historically speaking, the newer model in this conversation, not the older one, whatever it feels like from inside a tradition that has treated it as bedrock for five hundred years.

The New Testament’s own vocabulary backs this up a lot more than a single proof text like Second Peter. Paul tells the Galatians, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20, NRSVue), language that describes identity merging rather than a debt clearing. He tells the Corinthians that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NRSVue), a claim about transformation, not a claim about a verdict. Neither verse is obscure or marginal. Both are at the center of Paul’s own account of what the cross accomplished, and neither one reads naturally as courtroom language. The participatory model isn’t a fanciful workaround for people who’ve lost their nerve about sin and judgment. It’s closer to the church’s first language for what happened at the cross, spoken continuously in the Christian East for two thousand years.

What actually changes

Let’s address soteriology first. Under the monarchical model, the operative question in prayer is usually some version of am I square with God right now. Under a participatory model, the question moves toward am I present to God right now, a different stance entirely, less anxious, less transactional, oriented toward relationship instead of status.

I’ll admit something at this point rather than just theorize about it. I spent decades in rigorous Reformed orthodoxy, in and out of church leadership, able to walk anyone through substitutionary atonement without hesitation. Fluency never fully quieted the nagging question underneath it. What if I’m still not enough. What if Christ’s righteousness, however sound the doctrine, doesn’t actually reach me the way it’s supposed to. What if something real is still required of me, and the whole system was a more sophisticated way of avoiding that. Full propositional assent to the monarchical model doesn’t reliably silence the audit voice, because the model answers a felt question with a doctrinal one, and the felt question keeps asking and wondering.

Sanctification next. The audit voice, the one running a constant tally of failures, doesn’t disappear easily, I’ll admit that much. But under a formation model, the internal voice has room to sound less like a disappointed parent and more like a patient teacher, someone working with a person over time, not grading them against a standard they’re perpetually falling short of. That makes a real difference in how a person talks to themselves at the end of a hard day, that’s for sure

There’s a second problem hiding in the same doctrine, this one about ease rather than anxiety. Tell a person their standing before God depends entirely on Christ’s finished work and nothing on their own, and you’ve given them real comfort. You’ve also handed them a permission slip. I’m covered, I’m saved, I always will be, regardless of what I do next. That’s a short step from the exact thing Jesus warns against in Matthew 25, where the sheep and the goats get sorted not by their theology but by whether they fed the hungry and visited the prisoner. Drink Wisely has examined that passage before, and it belongs here too, since a participatory model doesn’t erase assurance. It relocates the substance of the Christian life away from correct belief and back toward the very thing Jesus said it was actually about.

And politics, where the change is maybe most visible from the outside. A God whose defining trait is retributive justice produces believers who feel righteous declaring or imposing consequences on others. A God whose defining trait is drawing every person, including the ones we’d rather not draw close to, into communion produces something else entirely, an instinct toward restoration over punishment, toward understanding how someone ended up where they are before deciding what they’ve earned or what they’ve got coming to them. I don’t think this instinct wins every argument. But I do think it starts every argument in a different place, and starting in a different place tends to end in a different place too, more often than not.

Borg closes his own sermon with a poem, George Herbert’s Love Bade Me Welcome, about a soul too ashamed to sit at love’s table until love insists. I keep coming back to that image, not because I’ve fully worked out theosis or participatory atonement or what perichoresis actually asks of a life, but because I recognize the soul in that poem. I grew up assuming I’d have to earn my seat, whether through my own effort or through a legal transaction Christ completed on my behalf. I’m still learning what it means that the seat might have been offered all along, without any legal pronoucement standing between me and the table.

. . .

Endnotes

1. Marcus Borg, “Healing Our Image of God,” in Days of Awe and Wonder, chapter 12, delivered as a sermon at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, TN, Lenten Noonday Preaching series, March 24, 2000.

2. Roberta Bondi, quoted in Marcus Borg, “Healing Our Image of God,” in Days of Awe and Wonder, chapter 12.

3. N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (New York: HarperOne, 2016).

4. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

5. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement, trans. A. G. Hebert (London: SPCK, 1931).

This isn’t meant to be a defense of everything Allred said. Full disclosure, before this clip crossed my feed, I’d never heard of Adam Allred and had to look him up to see who he was. His line about the Bible being “voted on by a pagan emperor” is its own oversimplification, I fear. If he was gesturing at the very real impact Constantine and his successors had on the shape and institutional power of the church, however, he isn’t wrong about that. But that’s not what’s under scrutiny here. Driscoll didn’t just disagree with Allred. He made a series of specific, checkable historical claims, and got nearly all of them flat wrong. Impressive.

“Jesus wasn’t a Christian, he was a Jew.”

This is the line Driscoll opens with, calling it blasphemy twice, without ever once explaining why. He pivots straight into defending the Bible’s transmission history, as though a claim about manuscripts answers a claim about Jesus’s religious identity. It doesn’t, because Allred’s claim about Jesus’s religious identity happens to be accurate.

Jesus was circumcised on the eighth day, in keeping with Torah law.{1} He was presented at the Temple as an infant for the same reason.{2} Luke says he attended synagogue “as was his custom.”{3} He wore tzitzit, the tasseled fringes Torah-observant Jewish men wore on the corners of their garments as a reminder to keep the commandments. The woman with the twelve-year hemorrhage in Matthew 9 reaches specifically for those fringes, and the Greek word Matthew uses for them, kraspedon, is the same word the Septuagint uses for the ritual tassel commanded in Numbers.{4} He argued Torah interpretation with other Jewish teachers in the manner of a rabbi, and told a crowd directly that he came not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.{5}

None of this is a fringe reading, pun partially intended. It’s the starting point of nearly every serious historical study of Jesus published in the last forty years, including from scholars far more theologically conservative than either Allred or me. E.P. Sanders’s Jesus and Judaism, the book that reoriented a whole generation of historical Jesus scholarship, opens from exactly this premise.{6} N.T. Wright, who has built a career defending the historicity of the resurrection against skeptics, insists that Jesus only makes sense read as a first-century Jew working within Jewish categories, not against them.{7}

The word “Christian” itself doesn’t belong anywhere near Jesus’s lifetime. It shows up exactly three times in the whole New Testament, and the first instance says plainly where it came from: outsiders in Antioch coined it to describe the movement years after the crucifixion, once it had grown to include large numbers of non-Jews.{8} Jesus never used the word. He couldn’t have. It didn’t exist yet.

“He didn’t come to create a religion” is a different kind of claim, more interpretive than a flat historical fact, since it’s about intent rather than identity. But it’s not exactly a lonely position either. A lot of serious scholarship outside evangelical apologetics leans the same direction Allred does here, from Albert Schweitzer’s century-old case that Jesus expected God’s imminent reign rather than a new institution, through E.P. Sanders and Bart Ehrman’s work on Jesus as an apocalyptic Jewish prophet.{9} “Jesus wasn’t a Christian, he was a Jew” sits in a different category entirely, a plain description rather than a debatable opinion. Driscoll calling it blasphemy without ever engaging it stands in for the argument he never actually made.

“The Old Testament Canon was closed by the days of Jesus.”

It wasn’t, and this isn’t just a random opinion. First-century Judaism had no single, agreed list of scripture. The Samaritans held, and still hold, to a canon of five books, the Torah alone, rejecting the Prophets and Writings entirely.{10} The community at Qumran kept multiple copies of books like Jubilees and 1 Enoch, treating at least the former with something close to the authority of the Torah in their own sectarian writings, with no clear line drawn between them and the books that later became scripture.{11} One of those books even made it into the New Testament by name: the epistle of Jude quotes 1 Enoch directly and calls it prophecy.{12} The Greek-speaking Jewish world, whose scriptures the New Testament authors quote from constantly, used the Septuagint, a wider collection that included books Protestants would later exclude as “Apocrypha” but that Catholics and Orthodox Christians still read as scripture today. Even the edges of the narrower Hebrew collection were still being argued over well past Jesus’s lifetime. The Mishnah records rabbis at Yavneh, a generation after the Temple’s destruction, disputing whether Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs belonged in scripture at all.{13} “Closed canon” is a real historical claim with a real, much later date. It is not something that describes first-century Judaism at all.

“The Bible was not written hundreds of years after the fact. It was written by eyewitnesses.”

This is false under the historical-critical view, and it’s even false under Driscoll’s own preferred tradition too, which is the more interesting problem for him. None of the four Gospels names its author inside the text. The titles were attached by church tradition starting in the second century, decades after the books were written.{14} That’s the working consensus across the field of New Testament studies, not some fringe theory. But set that aside entirely and just take the traditional attributions at face value. Church tradition itself, going back to the early-second-century bishop Papias, holds that “Mark” was Peter’s secretary, writing down what he remembered of Peter’s preaching. Papias’s own account is explicit on the point: Mark “neither heard the Lord nor followed him.”{15} “Luke” says outright, in the first two verses of his own Gospel, that he’s compiling the testimony of others who were eyewitnesses “from the beginning,” which is Luke’s own way of telling us he wasn’t one.{16} That’s half the Gospels ruled out as eyewitness accounts by the very tradition Driscoll is defending, before a single skeptical scholar even enters the conversation. And Paul, whose letters are the earliest documents in the New Testament, never met Jesus before the crucifixion. He says so himself.{17} Driscoll is reciting inerrantist dogma here, not offering a serious scholarly position, and that dogma collapses on contact with the very tradition he claims to defend.

“The New Testament Canon is closed” by “the end of the first century.”

This one isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s a date, and it’s wrong by almost three hundred years. The standard reference work on this question, Bruce Metzger’s The Canon of the New Testament, identifies the first list matching our current twenty-seven books as Athanasius’s Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter, written in 367 CE, and even that was one bishop’s letter, not a churchwide ruling.{18} Formal regional endorsement came later still, at synods in Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397.{19} In the centuries between the apostles’ deaths and that point, the early church argued openly over which books counted. Revelation and 2 Peter were disputed for generations. Meanwhile, some of our oldest surviving complete Bibles, including Codex Sinaiticus, bind in books like the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas as scripture, right alongside the books we still read today, books that later dropped out of the canon entirely.{20} None of that fits inside “the end of the first century.”

2 Timothy 3:16, “All Scripture is God-breathed.”

Read the sentence this verse is actually finishing. The verse before it says these are “the sacred writings” Timothy has known “from childhood,” a description that can only point backward to the Hebrew scriptures Timothy would have learned as a boy, long before Paul wrote him a word and long before anything resembling a New Testament existed to be known.{21} Whatever this verse is certifying, it’s certifying the scriptures a first-century Jewish child already had, not a twenty-seven-book Christian canon that wouldn’t take its final shape for another three centuries. Using it to declare the whole Protestant Bible flawless reads a claim into the verse that the verse, on its own terms, doesn’t make.

Hebrews 4:12, “the word of God is powerful and active.”

Driscoll turns this into a claim about a book. The passage itself doesn’t cooperate. Keep reading one more verse: “no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.”{22} The word of God in verse 12 slides directly into “him” in verse 13, a person, not a text. The whole section is built on a warning quoted three times in the two preceding chapters, from Psalm 95: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”{23} This is about God’s own living address to a listener who might refuse to hear it, not an epistemological claim about the inerrancy of a bound anthology. If anything, reading “the word of God” here as a person rather than a book is the older, more serious theological position. It’s the same identification John makes at the start of his Gospel, and the same one Revelation makes when it names the rider on the white horse “the Word of God.”{24} Driscoll skipped past a Christological reading to get to a bibliological one.

None of this required special expertise to check, though most people watching that video won’t check it. It required opening the passage Driscoll himself cited and reading one verse further, or looking up a date in a reference book any seminary library carries. I don’t know Adam Allred, and I have no reason to defend everything he says. But on the specific claims at issue here, he’s the one working from the actual historical and textual record. Driscoll is the one getting the history, the textual context, and in one case the century, wrong. That leaves two options. Either he doesn’t know this material as well as his tone suggests, or he does and skipped past it anyway because it was inconvenient. I’m not sure which is worse in a man who just called someone else a false teacher and a blasphemer on camera. “Blasphemy” is a serious word. So is “lie.” Before reaching for either, Mark, it might be worth doing a little more than three minutes of real homework first.

Notes

{1} Luke 2:21.

{2} Luke 2:22-24.

{3} Luke 4:16.

{4} Matthew 9:20-22; the same Greek term, kraspedon, appears in Matthew 23:5, where Jesus criticizes Pharisees for lengthening their tassels rather than for wearing them, implying he wore his own at ordinary length. On the term and its background in Numbers 15:38-39, see the entry on tzitzit in any standard Bible dictionary.

{5} Matthew 5:17.

{6} E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).

{7} N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), the second volume of his Christian Origins and the Question of God series.

{8} Acts 11:26; the word also appears at Acts 26:28 and 1 Peter 4:16, and nowhere else in the New Testament.

{9} Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906); E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism; Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). None of these scholars frame the point as Allred does, but all three read Jesus’s own expectation as the imminent arrival of God’s reign, not the founding of a new, lasting religious institution.

{10} Ingrid Hjelm, “The Samaritan and Jewish Versions of the Pentateuch: A Survey,” Religions 11, no. 2 (2020).

{11} Fragments of at least fifteen manuscripts of Jubilees have been recovered from five different Qumran caves, and the Damascus Document cites Jubilees with an authority approaching that of the Torah. Cave 4 also yielded eleven Aramaic manuscripts of parts of 1 Enoch. See James C. VanderKam, The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); “The ‘Other’ Bible from Qumran,” Bible Odyssey (Society of Biblical Literature). Scholars caution against overstating the point: no Qumran text directly states that the community considered 1 Enoch scripture in a formal sense, and the claim remains debated. What isn’t debated is that they kept and used it extensively alongside texts that later became canonical.

{12} Jude 14-15, quoting 1 Enoch 1:9 and introducing it with “Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying...”

{13} Mishnah Yadayim 3:5, recording the dispute over whether Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs “defile the hands,” rabbinic shorthand for canonical status. The dispute is set at Yavneh in the period after 70 CE and continues to be discussed in the Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 7a and Shabbat 30b.

{14} See Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (New York: HarperOne, 2014), and Jesus Interrupted (New York: HarperOne, 2009), for the standard account of anonymous composition and later attribution.

{15} Papias, quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.15: “Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not indeed in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things done or said by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him.”

{16} Luke 1:1-2.

{17} Galatians 1:11-17.

{18} Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

{19} Metzger, Canon of the New Testament; the councils’ decisions ratified rather than originated the list already reflected in Athanasius’s letter.

{20} On Codex Sinaiticus and its contents, including the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas bound after the New Testament, see the manuscript description published by the Codex Sinaiticus Project (British Library, in partnership with the National Library of Russia, Leipzig University Library, and Saint Catherine’s Monastery).

{21} 2 Timothy 3:14-16.

{22} Hebrews 4:12-13.

{23} Psalm 95:7-8, quoted in Hebrews 3:7-11, 3:15, and 4:7.

{24} John 1:1; Revelation 19:13.

That fact alone should embarrass the over-confident version of orthodoxy, the one that insists the church has always taught unending hell and treats any other view as a modern concession to soft feelings and some form of liberalism. It has not always taught that, however. For roughly the first five centuries of Christian history, the restoration of all things to God, apokatastasis, was a real position among serious theologians, not a fringe belief held by mystics at the sketchy margins. It lost the argument. This piece is about how, and about why the side that lost earns a legitimate second look.

What the Word Actually Means

Apokatastasis gets caricatured on both sides, by opponents who need it to mean cheap grace and by casual defenders who let it sound that way. It does not mean everyone walks into paradise regardless of what they did, no questions asked, no reckoning required. Every serious ancient proponent of the doctrine, Origen, Macrina, Gregory, builds it on real judgment and real purification. The disagreement with eternal conscious torment isn’t about whether sin gets dealt with, it’s about whether the dealings are eternal.

Gregory and his sister Macrina keep returning to the same image: sin as sickness, in need of a cure. Fire that purifies is still fire. A soul disordered by sin has to have that disorder burned out of it, and burning hurts. But a doctor amputating a gangrenous limb to save the patient is doing something categorically different from an executioner, even when the outward violence looks similar, and the ancient universalists insisted the difference changes what kind of God is doing the punishing. Punishment aimed at restoration and punishment aimed at retribution can look identical in the moment while assuming opposite things about the one inflicting them.

And the fire itself may not even be a separate substance God applies from outside. Isaac of Nineveh, the seventh-century monk whose homilies Hart leans on heavily, called it “the scourge of love,” the idea that the fire is simply what God’s presence feels like to a soul still turned away from it. Same love, same presence, felt as torment by whatever in a person still resists it and felt as paradise by whatever in a person has turned to face it.

Origen’s Wager

Origen of Alexandria, writing in the early third century, got there first and got there in the most philosophically ambitious way. In De Principiis, he argued that rational creatures, having fallen from an original unity with God, would eventually be drawn back into that unity through a long process of purification and instruction that might span multiple ages. God’s love for what God made does not run out, and a punishment with no terminus would mean evil gets the last word in a universe God supposedly governs. That struck Origen as a worse problem for orthodoxy than universalism ever was.

He was controversial in his own lifetime for reasons the popular version blurs together, conflating several different fights into one. Origen speculated about the preexistence of souls, about a form of subordinationism in his account of the Trinity that later Nicene theology would rule out, and about a cosmology involving successive worlds that made plenty of bishops nervous well before anyone got around to litigating what happens to the damned. Apokatastasis was one live wire among several.

Three centuries after his death, when Justinian’s court went looking for reasons to condemn him, all of those wires got bundled together and treated as a single package of heresy, which made it easy to assume the whole thing stood or fell as a unit. It didn’t. Origen’s speculative cosmology and his account of universal restoration are separable claims, and a theologian could reject one while keeping the other, which is more or less what Gregory of Nyssa did about a century later.¹

The Teacher Behind the Text

Gregory’s most sustained defense of apokatastasis is On the Soul and the Resurrection, written as a dialogue between Gregory and his older sister Macrina, set at her deathbed. The genre choice is deliberate on Gregory’s part. It echoes Plato’s Phaedo, with Macrina cast as the Socrates figure and Gregory recording what she taught him. She does not appear in the standard package of “Cappadocian Fathers,” and her absence from that designation is not a neutral fact about vocabulary. It reflects a pattern that runs through the history of the church, women’s theological authority preserved through male names and eventually reduced to a footnote when it survives at all. Macrina is evidence of how old that pattern is.² Drink Wisely has examined her at greater length elsewhere, in the A Deeper Well installment on her life and thought, for readers who want the fuller portrait.

In Gregory’s dialogue, Macrina argues that a good God cannot be reconciled with a universe where evil persists forever alongside good, since that would mean creation never actually gets healed, only permanently divided against itself. Divine love, in her account, constitutes what God is rather than a mood God might outgrow, and something that is love all the way down cannot rest content losing any part of what it made. Hold onto that argument. It resurfaces almost word for word, seventeen centuries later, in the middle of a very different kind of book. Purification is real, sometimes agonizing, but it has a direction. It moves toward an actual destination and doesn’t just repeat itself forever.

Gregory’s Case

Gregory develops his sister’s argument into the fullest patristic account of apokatastasis that survives, folding it into his broader theology of participation, the idea that creatures are drawn into God’s own life itself, more than merely acquitted by God from a distance. This is theosis language before the word had hardened into a technical term, salvation understood as real union with the divine life rather than a legal verdict handed down from a safe distance. His key move is treating evil as a privation, a falling short of the good with no independent substance or staying power of its own. If evil has no independent existence, it cannot be eternal, because eternity is a property only real, self-subsisting things can have. Given enough time and enough purification, evil simply runs out, the way darkness runs out the instant light reaches it.

He also insists on a version of human freedom that does not get overridden by God’s insistence on restoration. The soul is drawn back to God rather than dragged, its resistance worn down by the sheer persuasive weight of a good it was made to want in the first place, whether or not the soul can currently see that. Whether that account of freedom actually holds up against the alternative, coercion by any other name, is a fair question and one modern defenders of apokatastasis still argue about. Gregory thought it held.

The historically telling part is what happened to Gregory afterward, which was nothing. Why? He held these views openly, in writing, as a bishop, and died a venerated saint. Origen, writing three centuries earlier with a less developed and more entangled version of the same basic claim, became a byword for heresy. The asymmetry is itself evidence that apokatastasis was not, on its own, considered outside the bounds of the faith. Something else explains why one man’s name survived clean and the other’s didn’t.

What Actually Happened in 553

Here is where the popular narrative gets a bit sloppy, and where the real story is significantly more interesting than the one that is usually told.

The common claim is that the Fifth Ecumenical Council, meeting in Constantinople in 553, formally condemned universal restoration as heresy, settling the matter for the entire church going forward. The primary text cited for this is the ninth of fifteen anathemas against Origen, which reads, in translation, that anyone who says the punishment of demons and the wicked will one day end, and that all will be restored, is anathema.³ That text exists. Whether the council that met in 553 actually issued it is a separate question, and historians have spent more than a century arguing about it.

David Bentley Hart has made this case more bluntly than most, going further than the historians he’s building on. Writing in First Things, Hart argues that the fifteen anathemas were never discussed, ratified, or promulgated by the bishops actually assembled at the council, that they were drawn up beforehand at Justinian’s direction and attached to the council’s record only afterward, and that the modern critical edition of the ecumenical councils simply omits them as spurious interpolations.⁴ That’s a strong claim, and not an uncontested one. Critics of Hart’s reading point to a different document entirely: the council’s own authenticated set of fourteen anathemas against the Three Chapters, whose eleventh anathema lists Origen by name among heretics already condemned and anathematized by the church. Even if the fifteen Origen-specific anathemas weren’t debated on the council floor, they argue, that single line in an authenticated canon means the council itself received and endorsed the earlier condemnation.⁵

The honest summary is that serious people who’ve read the same documents disagree about how much daylight actually exists between “never formally condemned” and “condemned by inheritance, without a floor debate.” Nobody disputes that Justinian wanted apokatastasis gone. What’s disputed is whether the council he convened is the body that actually did it.

Two things happened nine years apart, and later tradition folded them into a single event. In 543, Justinian pushed a set of anathemas against Origen through a local synod in Constantinople, aimed primarily at Origenist cosmology as it had been developed by Evagrius Ponticus in the fourth century, a body of teaching well beyond anything Origen himself wrote and far stranger. That local synod was not an ecumenical council and carried no claim to universal authority. Nine years later, the Fifth Ecumenical Council convened, and its actual, official business was resolving the Three Chapters controversy, a Christological dispute involving Theodore of Mopsuestia and two other figures that had nothing directly to do with Origen or universalism.⁶

The fifteen anathemas against Origen, the ones that specifically target apokatastasis, do not appear in the council’s authenticated acts dealing with the Three Chapters. The scholarly reconstruction that has gained the most traction, building on Franz Diekamp’s 1899 study and developed further in Richard Price’s translation and analysis of the council’s acts, holds that Justinian had these anathemas drawn up and presented to the bishops gathered in the city before the council formally opened its sessions, then had them appended to the council’s records as though they carried the same authority as the council’s actual decisions.⁷ Pope Vigilius, who was in Constantinople at the time under heavy political pressure from Justinian, did not attend the council’s sessions and did not sign off on the anathemas against Origen specifically. From the seventh century onward, manuscript tradition simply included the anathemas alongside the council’s actual acts, and centuries of readers who had no reason to interrogate the difference looked at the whole set of issues as a single conciliar decision.

None of this means apokatastasis went uncontested in the sixth century either. Justinian clearly wanted it condemned and worked hard to make that happen. What it means is that the confident claim, repeated in evangelical seminary classrooms and popular apologetics alike, that an ecumenical council formally and deliberately ruled universalism outside the bounds of orthodoxy, does not hold up against the manuscript evidence nearly as closely as the claim wants to assert. What actually happened looks more like an emperor with a theological grudge getting his position stamped with borrowed authority, and later generations mistaking that for a vote.

How Eternal Conscious Torment Actually Won

If 553 isn’t the clean answer, and it isn’t, something else has to explain how a viable patristic option became, within just a few centuries, the position no serious Christian was supposed to question.

Augustine is most of the answer, at least in the Latin West. His reading of Romans 5 committed him to a doctrine of original sin transmitted through the whole human race and, downstream of that, a hell understood as retributive and endless, not medicinal, since a God dispensing strict justice for inherited guilt has less room for the kind of restoration Gregory imagined. Augustine’s influence on Western theology is nearly impossible to overstate, and where Augustine went, the Latin tradition mostly followed in lockstep.

The Greek East, less directly shaped by Augustine and more comfortable with Origen’s intellectual legacy even after his condemnation, held onto space for apokatastasis longer. Basil of Caesarea, whose own personal views on the subject scholars still argue over, once remarked that most Christians he knew in his own time and place didn’t believe hell was everlasting at all, a claim Hart leans on hard as evidence that mid-fourth-century universalism was mainstream rather than fringe.⁸

Even after Justinian’s crackdown, the question didn’t disappear so much as go quiet. Maximus the Confessor, writing a century later and well aware of what had happened to less careful predecessors, kept gesturing toward some version of universal restoration in language guarded enough to survive scrutiny, an entire theological tradition learning to speak in code about the one question it could no longer ask directly.⁹

The doctrine survived longest and most openly in Syriac Christianity, where it remained a minority but respectable position well past the point it had become totally unthinkable in the West.

Justinian’s political campaign against Origenism did a lot of damage too, even if the specific anathema on universalism never carried the conciliar force later tradition assigned it. An emperor spending real political capital to get a dead theologian’s name attached to heresy sends a signal regardless of the technical status of the document that does it. Bishops who wanted to stay on the right side of imperial favor did not need a formally ratified council decision to get the message. The chilling effect did its job whether or not the underlying anathema was ever properly voted on.

And then there’s the simplest mechanism of all, repetition. Once later manuscript tradition folded the anathemas into the council’s official acts, generation after generation of theologians cited the Fifth Council’s supposed condemnation of universalism as established fact, without checking the manuscript history behind it, because nobody had particular reason to. A claim repeated confidently enough, for long enough, stops needing a citation. By the time anyone got around to checking, “the church has always taught eternal conscious torment and this was formally decided in 553” had become common knowledge, in the way common knowledge usually gets made, by being said often rather than by being verified once.

Some things, indeed, never change.

The Recovery

The doctrine did not remain buried. It surfaces periodically, and the current wave of interest is thankfully substantial enough to count as a real theological conversation and not just a niche, scholarly curiosity.

David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved (Yale University Press, 2019) is the loudest and most impactful recent entry, and Hart is characteristically uninterested in being diplomatic about it. His central argument is, in essence, Macrina’s argument from fifteen centuries earlier restated in the language of analytic philosophy: if even one rational creature is lost forever, God’s creative act was, in the most literal sense, a failure, since God would have knowingly brought into being a soul for whom existence turns out to be a permanent catastrophe.

For Hart this is a flat logical contradiction, not some difficult trade-off orthodoxy gets to make peace with. Reception was chilly in exactly the corners of professional theology most invested in the opposite conclusion, and Hart’s willingness to call his opponents’ positions morally grotesque rather than merely mistaken has made it easy for critics to focus on his tone instead of his argument. That’s unfortunate, because the argument earns engagement on its own terms, regardless of how much patience anyone has for the guy making it. Hart doesn’t pull punches, and that, to me, is refreshing whether I happen to agree or disagree.

Ilaria Ramelli’s The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis (Brill, 2013) does the patient historical work Hart’s polemic doesn’t address. Nearly nine hundred pages reconstructing how widespread the doctrine actually was across the first Christian millennium, in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Coptic sources, Ramelli makes the case that apokatastasis was never the fringe position later tradition needed it to have been. Her scholarship is formidable, though it isn’t completely uncontested. Reviewers have pushed back on how consistently she reads universalist commitments into figures whose texts are more ambiguous than her account allows, and on a tendency to treat Origen and Gregory as more theologically identical than the textual record supports.¹⁰ The pushback doesn’t undercut the core historical claim, however, that apokatastasis had serious, sustained advocates for centuries. It’s a reasonable caution against overstating how uniform or how settled that advocacy actually was.

Thomas Talbott’s The Inescapable Love of God (1999, revised 2014) makes the case from a different direction entirely, working the logic instead of the history. Talbott argues that the standard package of Christian claims, God is sovereign, God is love, and some souls are lost forever, is logically inconsistent, and that something in the package has to give. His answer is that the third claim goes. It’s a tighter, more narrowly argued case than Hart’s, built for readers who want the syllogism laid out plainly and without the need for a thesaurus.

Jürgen Moltmann works the question from eschatology, a different angle again. In The Coming of God (1996), he argues that a doctrine of hell as permanent, unending torment makes God’s promised victory over evil incomplete, since evil would retain a permanent foothold in creation forever. A theology of hope, in Moltmann’s account, cannot logically stop short at the grave for some and not others. The last word has to actually be the last word, for everyone, or it isn’t really the last word.

Orthodox, Contested, or Both

None of this confirms whether apokatastasis is true. Gregory’s argument about evil as privation has real philosophical heft, and it also has real critics who think it proves too little about the actual mechanics of a soul’s transformation after death. Hart’s logical argument is sharper than his prose style suggests. Ramelli’s history is meticulous and also, by her own critics’ account, occasionally more confident than the sources strictly support.

What the history does resolve is smaller, and for a lot of readers harder to accept, than any theological argument for or against universal restoration. The claim that eternal conscious torment is simply what Christianity has always taught, with universalism cast as a modern concession, functions as a retroactive standardization of what was, for centuries, one perspective among several, defended by a canonized saint and taught by his sister. It got enforced through a mix of Augustine’s outsized influence, imperial pressure, and centuries of citation nobody bothered to verify, more than through any debated and established council decision. Apokatastasis may be closer to the original position in this argument than the one that eventually crowded it out.

Notes

¹ On Origen’s condemnation and the entanglement of his cosmology with the question of universal restoration, see the historiographical debate discussed below and in notes 4 and 7.

² Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993).

³ “The Anathematisms of the Emperor Justinian Against Origen,” Anathema IX.

⁴ David Bentley Hart, “Saint Origen,” First Things, October 2015.

⁵ The reference is to Anathema XI of the council’s own fourteen anathemas against the Three Chapters, the authenticated document, not the separate fifteen anathemas against Origen discussed above. This is the strongest textual basis for the counter-argument to Hart’s reading.

⁶ Richard Price, trans., The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553: With Related Texts on the Three Chapters Controversy, Translated Texts for Historians 51, 2 vols. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).

⁷ Franz Diekamp, Die origenistischen Streitigkeiten im sechsten Jahrhundert und das fünfte allgemeine Concil (Münster: Aschendorff, 1899); Price, Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553.

⁸ Hart discusses Basil’s remark in That All Shall Be Saved (2019); exact primary citation to be confirmed before publication, since Basil’s own position on apokatastasis is itself disputed among scholars and some pro-universalist material attributed to him is of questionable authenticity.

⁹ On Maximus’s guarded engagement with universal restoration, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, originally published 1941, revised 1962; English translation (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003).

¹⁰ See Mark J. Edwards’s review in the Journal of Theological Studies 65.2 (2014), and the broader critical response noting Ramelli’s tendency to read a more unified universalist tradition into sources whose testimony is more mixed than her synthesis suggests.

What changed it was Reagan, my daughter, whose obsession with horses preceded any decision Erin or I made about the subject. Over three or four years she has developed sustained relationships with several horses, most significantly Freckles, Casper, and now Secret, an eleven-year-old gray mare with a fleabitten coat and enough personality to fill an arena. Secret is the first horse we’ve actually leased specifically for Reagan, and what that relationship has produced in both of them is something I didn’t anticipate and still find difficult to fully account for. Getting close to horses through Reagan has taught me things about God, or at least about the shape of what I believe about God, that more than four decades of church attendance and leadership didn’t manage to produce.

That’s a rather significant claim, I know.

Trust cannot be purchased

You cannot buy a horse’s trust. You can buy the horse and pay for all the feed and equipment, boarding and veterinary care, but none of it purchases what actually matters, which is the relationship, the animal’s willingness to move with you, respond to you, carry you without resistance. That is built through presence, consistency, and time, and it looks almost nothing like any transaction.

A horse trained primarily through fear will comply, after a fashion. It will do what you require as long as the threat is present. But a fear-trained horse is unpredictable in ways that a relationship-trained horse isn’t, because the compliance is always contingent on the coercion. When the coercion weakens, the behavior destabilizes quickly. Experienced horsemen know this well. Fear produces a horse that looks manageable and well trained until it doesn’t.

This is a precise analogy for something my own writing has been examining for some time. The dominant evangelical model of salvation is, at its core, transactional. God’s justice requires payment, Christ’s death constitutes payment, and faith is the mechanism by which the payment gets credited to your account. The emotional corollary of this model is fear, with hell as the threat that motivates compliance. Even the carrot operates the same way: heaven as a reward you earn by correct performance. The structure is transactional in both directions. What it tends to produce in people is what fear produces in horses, behavioral compliance that holds until the coercive structure weakens, at which point you get either a crisis of faith or a faith that has become purely social, a performance for the community rather than a relationship with anything genuine.

The participatory model, the one I find more theologically defensible and experientially real, looks more like what good horsemanship produces. Something built through presence and accumulated trust, something that changes a person at the level of relationship.

Horse sense

Reagan’s trainer Hannah is a believer in groundwork, which means that before Reagan ever asked Secret to carry her weight in a saddle, she spent a significant amount of time — weeks and months, actually — working with Secret from the ground only: leading, lunging, building the basic vocabulary of communication and trust between a rider and a horse who are still learning each other. Reagan found this exceedingly discouraging at first. She wanted to ride, not to walk circles in an arena holding a lead rope. What Hannah understood, and what Reagan has since come to understand, is that the groundwork is the foundation of the relationship. Everything that happens in the saddle is built on what was established at ground level, unglamorously, through repetition and a whole lot of patience. That investment is paying off now in ways that would not have been possible without it.

There is a reason the culture that produced these animals has a phrase for practical wisdom. Horse sense. The kind of knowing that comes from doing, not from reading about doing. From relationship, not from proposition. A horse doesn’t care what you believe about riding. It cares what your body does, what your presence communicates, whether you’ve done the slow foundational work that earns its trust.

This is precisely the 4-H motto made theological, the learn-by-doing principle applied to the life of faith. It’s what the Desert Fathers practiced and what liberation theologians have spent generations defending. You don’t simply think your way into a transformed life. You practice your way into it. The body is the site of formation, not the obstacle to it, a claim Augustine would have disputed at length, and which many of his theological heirs are still disputing.

What makes this more striking, the longer you spend around horses, is the sensitivity of the communication that develops in a real relationship. A horse that knows its rider reads subtle shifts in weight, breath, tension in the legs and intention that the rider isn’t consciously sending. Hannah has watched Reagan and Secret together long enough to say that what passes between them is not simple command-and-response. The horse attends to her. The communication runs in both directions with a subtlety that formal training doesn’t fully account for.

American evangelical Christianity has spent a great deal of energy on propositional belief: the statements you affirm, the doctrines you sign off on, the prayer you’ve prayed in the right sequence. The incarnation keeps interrupting this emphasis, and the tradition mostly absorbs the interruption without changing its fundamental orientation. See, the horse doesn’t let you stay in your head. The horse will tell you immediately whether what you believe about your own calm is actually true.

The harder thing

There is something else, and I want to be really careful about how I say it because I don’t fully know what I’m describing.

The philosopher Martin Buber wrote about a childhood experience with a horse, a broad dapple-gray, stroking its neck and feeling something he could only describe as mutual presence, a real encounter between two beings rather than the experience of a person using an animal as an instrument. He called it an I-Thou moment, distinct from the I-It relationship we have with things we use. When he began thinking analytically about what was happening, when he moved from encounter to observation, the quality of connection diminished. The horse was still there, Buber was still there, but something had been lost.{1}

I didn’t know what to call what I was noticing standing close to Secret before I read Buber’s description, but I recognized it immediately. There is something in the presence of a horse that resists purely instrumental, utilitarian categorization. Other, in a way that doesn’t embarrass the claim to say and registering somewhere that isn’t quite the rational mind.

Indigenous cultures of the Great Plains understood horses in this way before European philosophy had articulated it. The Lakota word for horse, Šúŋka wakȟáŋ, translates roughly as sacred dog, the modifier indicating that the horse was received not merely as a useful animal but as something carrying particular spiritual weight.{2} The horse arrived on the Great Plains through Spanish colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and transformed those cultures almost immediately, and the spiritual significance accompanying that transformation was not at all incidental.

I am an outsider to both that tradition and to horse culture generally, and I want to be clear about that. But proximity has a way of changing what you’re willing to dismiss. The more time I spend close to horses, the less convincing I find the purely instrumental account of what they are.

What the poet knew

The book of Job is almost certainly not history. Historical-critical scholarship is largely settled on this point. Job belongs to the wisdom literature tradition of the ancient Near East, a genre that uses narrative and poetry to explore profound theological questions rather than record actual historical events. The prose prologue and epilogue, with their framing device of a wager between God and a supernatural adversary, function as literary scaffolding for a grand philosophical drama. The poetic dialogues in between, which make up the real substance of the book, are among the finest poetry in the Hebrew Bible. Bart Ehrman’s formulation is useful here: something can be true without having literally happened. Job is true in the way that great literature is true, which is actually a more demanding standard than historical accuracy, not a lesser one.

With that in mind, consider what the poet places in God’s mouth in chapter 39. God is speaking from the whirlwind, responding to Job’s long argument about suffering and justice, and the response is a series of questions about creation: the foundations of the earth, the morning stars, the storehouses of snow. And then, among the creatures God presents as evidence of creative intelligence beyond Job’s comprehension, there is this:

Do you give the horse its might?
Do you clothe its neck with mane?
Do you make it leap like the locust?
Its majestic snorting is terrible.
It paws violently, exults mightily;
it goes out to meet the weapons.
It laughs at fear and is not dismayed.

The horse here is a creature of particular wildness and dignity, presented by God as evidence of a creativity that exceeds human categories. It laughs at fear. It cannot stand still at the sound of the trumpet. The poet is describing a God who made this and finds it extraordinary. Whether this is history or not isn’t the point. It is saying something real about a God who takes the physical world seriously, who regards the horse as a creature of remarkable standing, and who is, in this passage, unmistakably proud of what the horse is. That’s a theological claim to take seriously regardless of the genre of writing that carries it.

What bias costs

My internal map of the world had horse culture in the wrong place. The wrongness came from the same source as several other things I’ve been wrong about. I was working from a narrative I found comfortable rather than from proximity to the actual thing.

The pattern that keeps emerging, in theology and politics and now in this, is that the comfortable narrative confirms what I already believed and flatters the community I already belonged to. Proximity breaks it. Reagan’s love for horses dragged me into proximity with something I had categorized from a distance and the distance was the whole problem.

The church, across more than four decades of my life inside it, had very little horse sense. It had doctrine and ceremony and a great deal of confidence about propositional matters. What it often lacked was the groundwork. The slow, patient, unglamorous work of building the kind of trust and relationship that would make the rest of it mean something. Horses already know this and have been demonstrating it to anyone willing to pay attention for a very long time.

Secret, Freckles, Casper, and the others have been better theologians than they know. The argument they’ve made hasn’t come in propositions but in presence, which is, when you look at how the tradition actually describes the God it’s trying to follow, probably closer to the point.

As it turns out, we could all use more groundwork.

ENDNOTES

{1} Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1948). The horse encounter appears in the opening essay, “Dialogue.” Buber describes the horse as “a broad dapple-gray” and recounts how the quality of presence in the encounter collapsed the moment he turned his attention to the act of stroking itself rather than remaining inside the encounter.

2} The Lakota term Šúŋka Wakȟáŋ and its translation as “sacred dog” is documented across multiple sources, including community scholarship by Oglala Sioux tribal members. See Richard Meyers and Ernest Weston Jr., “What Rez Dogs Mean to the Lakota,” SAPIENS, October 24, 2022, https://www.sapiens.org/culture/rez-dogs/. For the broader history of horses in Lakota culture, see Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

I get asked with some frequency what exactly I believe, and I’ve stopped pretending there’s a short version. There isn’t one, and that’s by design. What I can offer instead is an approximate coordinate on what looks like a lifelong route, along with the names I keep returning to as guideposts along the way. I’m not in total lockstep with any one of them. But if I have to point to the thinker whose sense of God, especially with regard to panentheism, is closest to where I’ve landed, it’s Borg. Among the living, (Peter Enns) is likely the nearest second. Ask me again in six months or a year and that answer may change. It may not.

Heard of, not read

Borg isn’t obscure the way earlier subjects in this series have been. He sold over a million books, co-founded the Jesus Seminar, and spent the final years of his life as canon theologian at an Episcopal cathedral in Portland.² Most people who grew up in or around evangelicalism have heard his name attached to a stern warning: the guy who denies the resurrection, the “liberal” who doesn’t really believe the Bible. That reputation does an awful lot to keep people from reading him, which is a real shame, because plenty of post-evangelicals arrive at Borg’s conclusions on their own, years into deconstruction, without knowing there’s a prominent name associated with where they’ve landed. When they finally read him, the experience isn’t discovery so much as recognition. Someone already largely made the argument. This has been my own experience. Forty-plus years of evangelical training, schooling, and church work never once put Borg’s body of work in front of me. That was, as I recognize now, also by design.

The omission is structural, built into the seminary curriculum itself. Evangelical schools run students through a fairly narrow set of approved reading lists, built around a handful of trusted names. Borg doesn’t make the cut, and the reason has less to do with restricted access than with curated tracks designed to keep students moving toward predetermined conclusions. A thinker who complicates those conclusions gets filed under dangerous or heretical before anyone has to explain why. Most pastors I came up alongside could tell you Borg was suspect. Very few could tell you what he actually argued.

The shape of a life

Borg was born in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, in 1942, and came up through a small-town Lutheran church before his doubts caught up with him in college.³ He did graduate work at Union Seminary in New York, where the theologian W.D. Davies became a formative influence during a season when his faith was genuinely in question, then went on to Oxford, earning his doctorate under G.B. Caird.⁴ He spent three decades at Oregon State as the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture, and late in life took the role of canon theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, where his wife Marianne Wells Borg served as a priest.⁵ He died in January 2015, at seventy-two.⁶ The final chapter of Days of Awe and Wonder, assembled after his death, carries a eulogy delivered by Barbara Brown Taylor at his memorial. It’s one of the more moving tributes I’ve read from inside this tradition.

The detail I don’t want readers to miss, however, isn’t the résumé. It’s who he chose to argue with. Borg co-wrote The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions in 1999 with N.T. Wright, a scholar who reached nearly opposite conclusions on almost every major question about the historical Jesus.⁷ The two of them stayed friends and kept sharing platforms for years afterward. Wright kept recommending Borg’s books even while disagreeing with them.⁸ That’s a model worth emulating. Real disagreement, argued in full, without either party treating the other as beneath engagement or anathema.

Historical, metaphorical, sacramental

Borg’s clearest statement of his own project is The Heart of Christianity, where he draws a line between what he calls the earlier paradigm and the emerging paradigm of Christian faith. The earlier paradigm treats the Bible as a divine product, requiring belief in its factual accuracy, with faith understood mainly as intellectual assent and salvation as a reward collected after death.⁹ The emerging paradigm, which is Borg’s own constructive proposal rather than a description of some existing consensus, treats scripture as the historical product of two ancient communities, ancient Israel and the early Christian movement, read as historical, metaphorical, and sacramental rather than as a set of facts to be affirmed.¹⁰ The corresponding trajectory of the Christian life runs from believing the right things toward a relationship that is relational and transformational, worked out now rather than simply banked for later.¹¹

The word doing the heaviest lifting in that whole scheme is myth, and it’s the word people misread fastest. Borg didn’t use it to mean falsehood or “made up.” He used it to mean a symbolic narrative that can be more-than-factually true even when it isn’t a report of something that actually happened, and he was explicit that the nativity stories fall into that category for him.¹² It’s an old idea in modern clothes. The line usually gets traced to the fourth-century writer Sallustius, who said of myth that these things never happened, but always are.¹³ Borg wasn’t inventing a way to soften the Bible’s claims, although he’s been accused of exactly that. He was reaching for a category the ancient world already had and the modern world had mostly forgotten how to use.

That same approach applies to his account of Jesus. Borg distinguished the pre-Easter Jesus, the figure recoverable through historical method, from the post-Easter Jesus, the figure experienced in the ongoing life of the church after his death.¹⁴ The pre-Easter Jesus, in Borg’s own five-part sketch, was a Jewish mystic, a healer, a wisdom teacher, a social prophet, and a movement founder, killed for the collision between his vision of an inclusive community and the purity-and-domination system running Judea under Roman rule.¹⁵ That’s not a Jesus interested primarily in personal sin management. It’s a Jesus whose life is itself the disclosure of what God is like, which is the seed of Borg’s recurring claim that the passion of God gets revealed in Jesus rather than merely reported by him.

The choice that isn’t one

The illusion Borg spent his career dismantling is the assumption that historical honesty and Christian faith are natural enemies, that once you let go of inerrancy the whole structure has to come down with it. He argued that what actually falls apart under historical-critical scrutiny is a couple-hundred-year-old paradigm, itself a modern response to the Enlightenment, and not Christianity as such.¹⁶ For a lot of people coming out of evangelical or Reformed formation, that distinction arrives too late to prevent real damage. Mine included. But it’s the right distinction, and Borg made the case for it with more patience and less condescension than most of his contemporaries managed.

This is one of the things I appreciate most about his writing and his lectures. He’s gracious. He doesn’t thumb his nose at people who think, or once thought, that they’ve got it all figured out, that they’re somehow the arbiters of biblical truth. I include myself in that group, past and occasionally present.

Where to start

The Heart of Christianity is the cleanest single statement of the whole paradigm and the natural entry point to Borg. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time carries the historical Jesus material in full and is also worth the time. And Days of Awe and Wonder, the posthumous collection Marianne Borg assembled with Barbara Brown Taylor’s eulogy closing it out, holds his late synthesis.¹⁷ Chapters eleven through sixteen are where that synthesis is most concentrated: healing the inherited image of God, following God’s passions, facing contemporary challenges, locating the heart and soul of Christianity, engaging other religious traditions, and listening for the voice of God. It’s in this stretch that Borg leans hardest on Rudolf Otto’s category of the numinous, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, treating mystical experience not as a private extra layered onto belief but as the actual ground of it.¹⁸ Any one of these three books is capable of moving real ground under you, provided you can read them without importing classical Protestant assumptions into the reading itself.

That’s the thread that ties the whole endeavor together, from the earlier-paradigm critique through the pre-Easter Jesus to the late writing on awe. Borg never argued that faith needed to become less than what it was raised to be. He argued it had been sold short from the start, capable of being lived out relationally and transformationally in every facet of life rather than reduced to assent toward a narrow set of doctrines whose origins are more novel and less unanimous than their defenders insist. A deeper well was sitting there the whole time, waiting for someone to lower the bucket.

Endnotes

1. Bart D. Ehrman discusses the idea that biblical narratives can be “true” without being historically factual across several posts on his blog, tracing the application of the term “myth” to gospel narratives to David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835–36); see “True Stories that Didn’t Happen,” The Bart Ehrman Blog, and Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1999).

2. Book sales figure and biographical summary per Marcus Borg’s author biography, cited across multiple publisher sources including AbeBooks and the Marcus J. Borg Foundation.

3. Biographical details on Borg’s upbringing per the Christian Century’s review of Days of Awe and Wonder, which locates the origin of Borg’s lifelong project in his childhood memory of a rigid, authoritarian small-town Lutheran church.

4. Wikipedia, “Marcus Borg,” citing G.B. Caird as doctoral advisor at Mansfield College, Oxford, and W.D. Davies as a profound influence during Borg’s seminary years at Union.

5. Marianne Wells Borg’s role as an Episcopal priest and Borg’s position as canon theologian at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Portland, per the National Catholic Reporter’s 2015 obituary.

6. Borg died January 21, 2015, at age seventy-two. National Catholic Reporter obituary, 2015.

7. Marcus J. Borg and N.T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (HarperSanFrancisco, 1999).

8. National Catholic Reporter obituary, 2015, noting Wright’s continued recommendation of Borg’s work despite disagreement.

9. Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003). Page citations unavailable directly; paraphrase drawn from published excerpts and multiple independent reviews, including the Christian Research Institute’s review and reader-collected passages consistent across sources.

10. Borg, The Heart of Christianity. The “historical, metaphorical, sacramental” description of the emerging paradigm’s view of the Bible is Borg’s own formulation, drawn from excerpted passages of the book.

11. Borg, The Heart of Christianity, on the paired adjectives “relational” and “transformational” describing the emerging paradigm’s vision of the Christian life.

12. Borg’s own definition of myth as capable of being “really true” or “actually true” without being “literally” or “factually” true, applied explicitly to the nativity narratives, is documented in reader-collected excerpts from his writing.

13. Sallustius, On the Gods and the Cosmos, section IV, fourth century CE. The line is widely paraphrased as “myths are things which never happened, but always are.”

14. Borg’s distinction between the pre-Easter and post-Easter Jesus is developed at length in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).

15. Borg’s own five-part description of Jesus as a Jewish mystic, healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement founder appears in his essay “Jesus and Buddhism: A Christian View,” and is summarized consistently across reviews of Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and The Heart of Christianity.

16. Borg, The Heart of Christianity, on the earlier paradigm as itself a product of modernity’s encounter with the Enlightenment rather than historic Christian orthodoxy as such.

17. Days of Awe and Wonder: How to Be a Christian in the Twenty-First Century (HarperOne, 2017), foreword by Marianne Borg, afterword drawn from Barbara Brown Taylor’s eulogy at Borg’s memorial service. Table of contents per Logos Bible Software’s product listing.

18. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917; English translation 1923), on the numinous and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Borg’s reliance on Otto’s framework in his late writing on mysticism and awe is a recurring theme across Days of Awe and Wonder.

Thursday night, the President addressed the nation from the East Room to reveal shocking new evidence of election fraud. The evidence, once declassified, turned out not to say what he said it said. No new fraudulent vote was identified. Several networks were reportedly threatened with the loss of their broadcast licenses for insufficient coverage of this. It was, by all accounts, a lot.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, a raccoon named Jimothy walked out from under a car near a Goodwill in Ballard, and the entire internet lost its ever-loving mind.

Nielsen has not released official figures, but early estimates suggest the average American spent considerably more time with the raccoon Thursday night than with the President, a gap researchers are describing as ‘statistically significant and somewhat embarrassing.

I want to be cautious, because Jimothy earns better than to be a punchline about his own body. He didn’t ask for any of this, after all. He was just a raccoon, minding his business, when his spine did something unusual and a stranger with a phone decided he looked like a Jimothy. What happened next says nothing about Jimothy and everything about the rest of us.

BREAKING: Investigators Cannot Rule Out Deep State Involvement

Sources close to the situation, meaning several people I made up for the purposes of this article, have declined to rule out the possibility that Jimothy is connected to the deep state, antifa, or the Chinese government somehow. “We’re not saying he’s a foreign asset,” one such source did not actually say. “We’re just saying nobody’s proven he isn’t.” At press time, Jimothy had offered no comment, on account of being a raccoon.

This is, I’d point out, a genuinely accurate impression of how a certain kind of accusation works in the current milieu. You don’t have to prove anything. You just have to utter the sentence out loud and often and let the shape of it do the work for you. Jimothy has now been suspected of more than most cabinet nominees.

A note on what happens next

The President has a long, well-documented history of mocking the physical characteristics of people he doesn’t like. It is not a secret. It is not deniable. It is on video, repeatedly, going back at least a decade. Jimothy is clearly a target.

By Friday morning, informal calls were already circulating for Kash Patel to get personally involved. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has, as of this writing, not ruled out reviewing Jimothy’s documentation, on the theory that any creature this suspicious-looking couldn’t possibly be here legally. The Department of Defense (War) is said to be separately reviewing Jimothy’s testosterone levels and total absence of prior military service, both of which reportedly fail to meet current specs.

I don’t know what happens when all of that converges on one raccoon, and I’d rather not find out. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, which I am choosing to read as a mercy rather than an oversight. Jimothy, for his part, appears to be handling minor national infamy better than most sitting nominees would, mostly by refusing to acknowledge any of it and running in the opposite direction whenever approached. Say what you want about that as a strategy, it’s a cleaner evasion than the sitting DNI nominee managed a day earlier, when a Senate committee asked him directly who won the 2020 election and he spent several minutes not answering. Jimothy, at least, ran in a straight-ish line.

POLLING UPDATE: Jimothy Leads Democratic Field for 2028

An unscientific poll of absolutely no one currently shows Jimothy ahead in a Democratic primary field that, as of this writing, does not otherwise exist in any coherent form. An early leaked campaign slogan is already making the rounds despite the election still being a couple of years away. “Jimothy. A Round for the People.” Early messaging testing shows strong numbers on “has never once lied to the American public” and “evidence of body visible without further explanation needed.”

He edges out James Talarico, whose insistence on being both a Democrat and a Christian remains, to the more online precincts of Christian nationalism and MAGA, a logical impossibility on par with a square circle. He edges out Pete Buttigieg for similar reasons, since apparently a candidate who hasn’t yet disclosed his sexual orientation still polls better with some voters than one who’s been open about it for the better part of a decade. Weaknesses include a total absence of any policy positions and being, again, a raccoon. Insiders caution the race remains fluid.

What he actually taught me

Here’s the thing that isn’t a joke. A veterinary professor looked at Jimothy’s footage and said she couldn’t diagnose him without an actual examination, that his appearance suggested a condition but didn’t confirm one, and that the gap between a look and a diagnosis is key. She said that. About a raccoon. On the record. Before drawing a conclusion, she told everyone what she didn’t yet know.

That is one more caveat than the United States government offered last night.

I don’t know what it means that a short-spined raccoon in a Seattle backyard modeled better epistemic honesty than a primetime address to the nation. I don’t think it means Jimothy is necessarily smarter than the President. I think it means the bar was set by a raccoon who didn’t say anything at all, and he still cleared it standing still.

Then again, Jimothy was discovered in Seattle, which means he’s probably harboring Democratic Socialist tendencies of his own. Those will likely surface in the coming days. But a truncated raccoon stealing the spotlight from a sitting president does not, in the opinion of several fabricated experts, make America great, either to start with or again.

Godspeed, Jimothy. Try to stay off the news.

My friend told me about it afterward, laughing, the way you tell a story that’s funny because it’s true and true because nobody rehearsed it. Remember the old line, he said. I’m not a Christian, I’m Catholic.

I’ve heard some version of that sentence my whole life, usually from Catholics themselves, sometimes as a joke and sometimes with serious intent. But the veteran wasn’t making a joke in this case. He was answering a question honestly, using the categories that made sense to him, and the categories put “Christian” and “Catholic” in separate boxes without a hint of contradiction. Nobody in that exchange thought it was strange. The line isn’t a punchline anymore. It’s a working assumption, and it raises a question bigger than the one it seems to be asking. It isn’t really about whether Catholics are Christians. It’s about whether “Christian” still describes anything specific enough to argue about at all.

How the word got co-opted

Ask most Americans what “Christian” means and you’ll get an answer that has almost nothing to do with the Nicene Creed and almost everything to do with a set of cultural benchmarks. Voted a certain way. Watches a certain kind of news. Sends kids to a certain kind of school. Sings a certain kind of music on Sunday, if any Sunday singing happens at all. Somewhere in the last fifty years or so, “Christian” stopped functioning as a theological category and started functioning more as a demographic one, and the demographic in question is white evangelical Protestantism specifically, not Christianity in the aggregate.

You can watch this narrowing happen in real time if you track how the word gets used in political coverage. “Christian voters” in an election story almost never means Armenian Orthodox voters, or Coptic voters, or the Filipino Catholic parish two towns over. It means a fairly specific bloc, evangelical and largely white, whose preferences pollsters have learned to track as a unit because the unit votes as a unit. Kristin Kobes Du Mez has spent a career documenting how that bloc built its identity around a shared set of cultural battles, and how thoroughly the word “Christian” got absorbed into that project along the way. Her central claim is blunt: evangelicalism, whatever it says about itself, functions as “a cultural and political movement rather than a community defined chiefly by its theology.”² The project has a name and a lineage. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979, and the network of organizations, media outlets, and voter guides that followed it, all built on the premise that evangelical Protestantism could speak for American Christianity as a whole. The absorption was strategic. A movement that wants cultural authority benefits enormously from being able to call itself the default setting of an entire religion, one branch of a very large and very old tree mistaking itself for the whole tree.

Once you notice it, it shows up everywhere, and that VA clinic exchange starts to sound different. The veteran was reading his environment accurately. “Christian” has come to mean something specific enough to exclude him, even though the actual claim of the word, going back two thousand years, was never really his to be excluded from in the first place.

The older, larger claim

Here’s what usually gets lost in the American argument. “Catholic” was never a brand competing with “Christian.” It’s older than the split that produced the competition, and it was never meant to describe a denomination. Ignatius of Antioch used the word in the early second century, writing to the church at Smyrna a hundred years before anyone had reason to think of “Catholic” and “Protestant” as opposing camps. “Wherever Jesus Christ is,” he wrote, “there is the Catholic Church.”¹ He meant something closer to universal, the whole church in every place, as opposed to any local faction claiming to be the real one. Robert Barron has made this case for years, and he ties it directly to the goal of the Christian life itself, arguing that believers are called not to moral improvement alone but to “transformation into God.”³ Catholic identity, in that reading, is the wider claim, the one that existed before Rome and Wittenberg had anything to argue about, and Protestantism is the newer, narrower development historically, whatever else it might have gotten right.

That flips the American instinct almost entirely. We treat “Catholic” as the qualified term, the one that needs “Roman” in front of it to distinguish it from the assumed default. But the assumed default is actually the historical latecomer. Five hundred years old, in this case, against two thousand.

None of which settles anything about who’s right on the actual theology, and Alister McGrath’s work is useful here precisely because he doesn’t let Protestants off easy on this point either. In Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, McGrath traces how Protestantism was, from its first moments, built on the premise that “all Christians have the right to interpret the Bible for themselves.”⁴ That was, in his phrase, the dangerous idea, and it was a crisis about authority and identity as much as a doctrinal correction. Once you remove a single interpretive center and hand the text to every believer’s private judgment, history delivers exactly what it delivered: thousands of Protestantisms, each confident it has recovered the true gospel, each defining itself partly or even mostly by what it isn’t. That instability is a structural design, baked in from the start, the natural result of grounding authority in individual conscience rather than a single interpretive center. It produced a permanent argument, and the argument is still alive and well.

So when a Catholic distances himself from the word “Christian,” he’s describing a historical fact quite accurately. The word got claimed by one branch of a five-hundred-year-old argument he was never part of, and that branch has spent the last several decades treating its particular iteration of the faith as the very definition of it.

The tradition nobody in the argument remembers

Here’s what the Catholic/Protestant argument leaves out entirely, and it’s not a minor omission to make. There’s a third major branch of the historic church that predates the entire Western argument and never joined either side of it. Eastern Orthodoxy split from Rome in 1054, a full five centuries before Luther, and has spent the intervening thousand years developing an understanding of salvation that looks almost nothing like the transactional model both Catholics and Protestants have spent their energy arguing over.

Kallistos Ware’s writing is probably the clearest English-language entry point into this understanding, and the central concept is theosis. Rather than salvation as a legal verdict, guilty or acquitted, the Eastern tradition frames it as participation, the process of a human being progressively taking on the divine nature, becoming by grace what God is by nature. The instinct runs deeper than the New Testament. The Wisdom of Solomon, writing a century or so before Christ, already insists that “God created us for incorruption” (Wisdom 2:23, NRSVue).⁷ Second Peter picks up the same thread, promising believers that they “may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4, NRSVue).⁵ Most scholarship treats the letter as pseudepigraphical, written in Peter’s name a generation or two after his death, which places the phrase in the wider stream of early Christian reflection rather than in an eyewitness’s own hand. The theological claim carries the same weight either way. The West mostly read past both texts on its way to arguing about justification. The East built an entire soteriology around them. Ware puts the whole doctrine in a single line, that Christ “became what we are, so as to make us what he is.”⁶

I’ve written before about Macrina the Younger and her brother Gregory of Nyssa, two of the sharpest minds the fourth century produced, and theosis is the very water they swam in. Gregory imagined the Christian life as an endless ascent, a soul continually moving deeper into a God whose depths never run out, a strange and beautiful image to build a theology around, and one almost nobody in the American religious argument has heard of.

Two entire traditions, evangelical Protestantism and its confessional Catholic counterpart, have spent decades arguing about who holds the correct account of the gospel, largely as if the Christian East doesn’t exist. It’s a third of the historic church, holding an account of salvation that overturns the entire transaction both sides have been fighting over. If the aim was ever to define what “Christian” means in full, the argument was incomplete before it even started.

Whether the litmus test is the right instrument

This is the part where I stop being neutral. I no longer think the question of who counts as a Christian gets settled by any of the three traditions’ internal tests, not Rome’s sacramental boundaries, not the Reformation’s confessional statements, not even the ecumenical creeds that all three at least nominally share. I used to think the ecumenical creeds were the floor everyone could stand on regardless of which branch they belonged to. I’ve come to think the creeds are necessary without being sufficient, however. The councils that produced them were clarifying and declaring against specific heresies in their own moment, not handing down a permanent, all-purpose definition of who belongs. Applying them that way turns a fourth-century clarification into a permanent boundary marker, a job the councils who drafted them never intended them to hold.

Every version of the litmus test, Catholic, Protestant, and to a lesser extent Orthodox, still asks some version of the same question. Do you hold the right propositions. Right view of justification. Right view of the sacraments. Right Christology, stated the right way, in the right council’s language. Even theosis, for all it recasts the goal of salvation, still gets institutionally gated behind the right sacramental participation in the right body. What none of the three traditions has fully reckoned with is a possibility sitting right there in their own texts, that transformation was always the point, and correct proposition was only ever meant to serve it. Somewhere along the way, in every branch, the means got promoted to being the whole game.

That’s the real force behind that VA clinic line, more than either the veteran or my friend probably intended. A growing number of people, myself included, aren’t just questioning which tradition holds the correct account of Christian identity. We’re questioning whether “correct account” was ever the right instrument for identity to begin with, whether a life oriented toward participation, toward the kind of transformation Gregory of Nyssa spent his whole life describing, might fit meaningfully inside the actual New Testament vision of faith while sitting outside every institutional test built to measure it. That kind of life exists outside the traditions’ litmus tests without standing opposed to the traditions themselves, because those tests were built for a different question than the one that actually counts most.

What the word is still doing

So does “Christian” still mean anything? I think it means several different, sometimes incompatible things depending on who’s using it and what argument they’re currently losing. For the veteran at the VA clinic, apparently, it meant something narrow enough to answer “Catholic” instead. For the pollsters, it means a voting bloc. For Rome, an institutional communion stretching back to Peter. For the Reformers’ heirs, a confession centered on faith alone. For the East, participation in the divine nature, worked out slowly, sacramentally, over an entire lifetime and beyond it.

The more useful approach in my opinion is noticing that a word doing that much conflicting work has stopped doing any single job particularly well, and the people still assuming it functions as a clean, shared category are the ones most likely to be misunderstood, or worse, weaponized by whoever gets to define it next. My friend’s story stuck with me for weeks, longer than a joke earns on its own, because the veteran’s answer was exactly right, and none of the three traditions arguing loudest about the word would be able to fully agree on why.

. . .

Endnotes

1. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans 8, trans. Roberts-Donaldson, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1.

2. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020).

3. Robert Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith (New York: Image, 2011).

4. Alister E. McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution — A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 2.

5. 2 Peter 1:4, NRSVue.

6. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 74.

7. Wisdom of Solomon 2:23, NRSVue.