In a recent survey of 473 survivors of faith-based harm from, G.R.A.C.E found that “66% of our respondents do not feel safe in faith spaces without trauma-informed safeguards, and 55% struggle to read Scripture due to past abuse.”

That is why I created Scattered & Found, a support group for religious trauma survivors. In the description on my counseling website, I explain Scattered & Found as a book group in which both components—book and group—are equally important. The book part is for those who struggle to read Scripture, and the group part is for those who struggle to feel safe in faith spaces (and often it’s both).

Additional information from the G.R.A.C.E. survey rings true:

“When asked about exploring their spiritual questions and building community, survivors identified a ‘fear of re-experiencing harm’ as their primary barrier. Yet, a deep hunger for connection remains. Overwhelmingly, they requested trauma-informed theological resources and community-wide abuse training to help them safely navigate and process their pain.”

In Scattered & Found members discover that God gave us the Gospel of John for those same reasons: 1) To provide safety for Jewish Christians who were traumatically expelled from their Jewish community; and 2) To help them maintain connection with Jesus through the Word. The Gospel of John is itself a—I would argue the—trauma-informed theological resource for those who have been wounded through religion.

Perhaps you have suffered spiritual injury and have a similar deep hunger for connection—with God, with faith practices, and with other Christians. It is hard to know where to turn when the fear is legitimate. As Swiss pastor Walter Lüthi put it in a sermon during World War II, “Sheep who have often met the wolf in sheep’s clothing are bound to become distrustful in the end.”1

Trust does not have batteries or an on/off switch. I never expect survivors to automatically trust me or immediately feel safe in a new group. But I have consistently seen members redevelop trust—in God, in the Bible, in one another, and in themselves and their protective intuition. The trust is not the same as before. Doubt, skepticism, and cynicism remain. Having safety and space to voice such thoughts is itself healing, especially when other survivors share similarly. Discernment is grown together.

You don’t have to be alone in the battle to risk trusting again. Scattered & Found is a safe community where you can spend time with other survivors and engage Scripture together from the perspective of spiritual trauma. You will be surprised with just how closely your story mirrors that of Jesus and his followers in the Gospel of John.

Here is what some members have said about the group:

“This group provides an outstanding opportunity to delicately approach the painful scars of spiritual abuse through the lens of Jesus’ own experience as depicted in John. Not only is compassion and validation and care extended to us through the historical text, though, the same also comes through being connected to a group of individuals who God brings together to provide healing in community.”

“The time spent in this group is precious. I found the community, support, and discussions in this group healing. Reading through the book of John together and sharing stories and perspectives created a safe space for personal growth.”

Next Step

I offer new groups whenever there are roughly eight interested persons. We’re close to starting another group in the near future. To learn more about the details, go to this page, and click the link at the bottom to submit your interest in the group. I would love to connect with you if you have questions, either by private message or email, hanncounseling@gmail.com.

Quote from The Hermeneutic in the Scars

Personal Update

Although my Substack is called Once a Week, I have only been writing once a month since May in order to focus on my book Jesus and the Reconstructors (InterVarsity Press, Fall 2027). I am happy—and a jumble of other emotions!—to report that the book is written: 59,997 words (including footnotes). Thank you so much for your support and interest in this endeavor. When I began writing this small newsletter in January, 2022 for my counseling practice, I had zero interest in writing a book. I wrote way more than 60,000 words over the past four years, but 500 here, 3,000 there, and in-between. I couldn’t begin to imagine how an author builds one large structure of coherent words. Now all of those words exist together in one document, but I’m waiting for my editor tell me if it’s actually a book, if you know what I mean.

Imposter syndrome aside, I’m more excited than ever for the message of the Gospel of John that has emerged from the last four years of deep study, prayer, meditation, and conversation. There is good news for deconstructors. This Gospel is gospel for faith crisis, both 2,000 years ago and today. Faith—or believing into Jesus, as it is always phrased in John—is possible not only on the other side of deconstruction, but in ground zero itself. As Hans Urs von Balthasar imagined from the lips of Jesus, reconstruction doesn’t happen after deconstruction; they are simultaneous:

*This post was written entirely by yours truly with no AI assistance. I follow the Word-made-flesh and believe words must come from flesh.

How do biographers choose their subjects? At what point in an individual’s life can we say, “This person deserves a biography?” For 99.9% of human history, that decision is never made during the persons life, only after. John Lewis Gaddis discusses this question in The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past using the chaos theory principle of sensitive dependence (aka “the butterfly effect”):

“in every instance in which historians have singled out one individual from masses of others, it’s because there’s been a moment of sensitivity: some point at which small shifts at the beginning of a process produced large consequences at the end of it.”1

This analogy is used to explain the past rather than predict the future. It’s generally impossible to know during a person’s lifetime what kind of large consequences might result from that life. Though it might be pure guesswork to suggest a living person will have a biography written about him, sometimes guesses are edifying.

I say all of that to say, Doug Wilson will have a biography; if not biographies. And, as the language learning models put it, “that matters.”

Speculating about future biographies of Wilson intersects with my second subject for this article, John Calvin. Calvin has more biographies than I know, and I believe he emerged on the public scene in circumstances similar to Wilson. Gaddis explains,

“the circumstances that make individuals conspicuous—that allow reputations to emerge—have to do with the existence of what we might call windows of opportunity. The industrial revolution created an opening for someone—it happened to be Karl Marx—to characterize and then condemn the workings of capitalism in a sufficiently plausible way as to gain a mass following, something that probably wouldn’t have happened had Marx been writing fifty years earlier or later…How many potential Napoleons have there been of whom we’ve never heard because they sought ascendancy but lacked the opportunities that could bring it about?”2

Marx and Napoleon are Gaddis’ examples, not mine. He could have also illustrated his point with Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. All of those individuals emerged in unique windows of opportunity. The same might be said about Doug Wilson. He certainly thinks so. In the recent NPR interview, Wilson stated that the Trump “administration is full of” evangelicals, and “That’s why Wilson sees an opportunity for his beliefs to be seriously considered at this moment.”

Similarly, there’s no question that John Calvin lived during a unique window of opportunity.3 He thought so (see below), and his colleagues thought so. Though these two time periods are drastically different—in reading what follows, please know that I know that—there are a number of important parallels. After listing those, I will draw some inferences for us today.

Wilson a modern day Calvin

Some reformed Christians would agree and say amen to that section heading. Even more would balk and accuse me of slandering Calvin with the comparison. Essentially, I believe all of the numbered items below give an accurate portrait of both Calvin and Wilson. Though these apply to both men, I am only giving examples and secondary literature for Calvin (using scholars who study Calvin’s actions and behavior, not just his theology and what he says about himself). I’m sure the same can be done for Wilson, but I’m working more from common knowledge. If you’re at all familiar with reporting about Wilson, I assume the observations will ring true. If someone else wants to take the baton and add footnotes and more primary source material for Wilson, let me know!

1. Ministerial calling questioned

Louis du Tillet was a close, early friend of Calvin from his university studies in the 1520s. Together they joined the protestant cause, fled persecution together to the du Tillet estate, where Calvin wrote the first draft of Institutes, and they moved to Geneva together in 1536. As I wrote about in John Calvin: Pastor. Preacher. Reformer. Tyrant? Part 3, du Tillet had detected a growing arrogance in Calvin and pressed Calvin to see that his sense of calling was the fruit of pride rather than the Spirit. In a polite, almost passive-aggressive manner, du Tillet wrote to Calvin, “One thing to be most carefully avoided is an overweening confidence in our own judgment.”4 Calvin would have none of it. In his reply, he begins by claiming some humility, but it goes downhill quickly:

“If there was any ground to dispute my call, I believe that you have got no such reasons to impugn my ministry, but the Lord has furnished me with more firm and stable ones for my confirmation. If you entertain some doubt about that, it is enough for me that it is quite clear to my own satisfaction…I beg you will allow me to follow the rule of my conscience, which I know to be surer than yours.”5

2. Pride

There’s going to be a fair bit of overlap in this characteristics. If du Tillet detected pride in the young Calvin, it grew exponentially as he grew older and, in his perspective, surrendered to the mantle of specially appointed prophet of God:

“Calvin believed that he spoke for God. He was God’s mouthpiece in Europe. He believed that he possessed an authority, therefore, that was unrivaled by king, pope, or fellow reformer. This authority verged, I have suggested, on infallibility…Is this egotism? Is Calvin a megalomaniac?…For Calvin, he would likely have said he was as arrogant as Isaiah; as self-absorbed as Ezekiel. He would, and did, declare on a number of occasions that he had given himself over body and soul to God to be governed by God. He was not his own. ‘If,’ he might well say to the questioner, ‘that makes me arrogant, then so be it.’”6

3. Always right, never wrong

“What this study has unearthed, then, is a Calvin who, in certain key ways, was like an Old Testament figure…Possessing the authority of a Jeremiah or an Elijah, Calvin did not conceive of himself simply as one among many laboring to find the truth of God in sixteenth-century Europe. Rather, he saw himself as the voice of God in Europe…Calvin was one of very few left who spoke the word of God purely. If Servetus or Castellio (or for that matter, Bullinger) agreed with him, that was good, but if they disagreed with him, then they disagreed with God ipso facto.” He believed he was right simpliciter. All the rest of the world could disagree with him, but if they did, they were wrong. The idea that he was wrong was something which I do not think he even contemplated, at least in relation to the public persona which he fashioned.”7

4. Surrounded by yes-men

“Upon Calvin’s return from Strasbourg to Geneva in 1541, he replaced Geneva’s ministers with Frenchmen whom he knew and could trust. The Vénérable Compagnie des Pasteurs [Company of Pastors in Geneva] became a body Calvin could direct with little resistance.” “Studies by [William Naphy,] Robert Kingdon, Ray Mentzer, and Philip Benedict also demonstrate Calvin’s clear authority over these men.”8

5. Preference for the Old Testament

As Jon Balserak thoroughly demonstrates in John Calvin as Sixteenth Century Prophet, Calvin understood himself as a prophet in the tradition of the OT prophets. This self-understanding related specifically to his role as a reformer.

“Calvin, quite clearly, did more than carry on an ordinary pastoral ministry. His ministry entailed a major element for which he is arguably better known, namely, that of reformer. The two ministries are not mutually exclusive enterprises, but they are different, with the character of Calvin’s reforming ministry being at once aggressive, revolutionary, and arguably seditious.”9

6. Agenda to create a Christian society

Calvin “seemed so obsessed with imposing his version of the regimen Dei [kingdom of God] upon European Christendom...[I]n his work for France he pursued an expansionist, insurrectionist reforming agenda which blended the religious, political, and social towards the end of making France Protestant at all levels of society.”10

7. Everything is hierarchy and order

“A sense of the scope and authority of [Calvin’s prophetic] vocation may be grasped when we hear Calvin say that his calling, and that of his ministerial trainees headed into France, was ‘to reduce the world to order.’”11

The phrase “reduce the world to order” comes from Calvin’s lecture on Jeremiah 1:9-10: “Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant” (KJV).

This is from Calvin’s sermon on Galatians 3:28, for which Calvin rejects any social implications:

“Yet notwithstanding, St. Paul meant not to say that there is no diversity of degrees as in respect of worldly policy. For we know there are masters and servants, Magistrates and subjects: in a household there is the good man which is the head, and the good wife which ought to be subject. We know then that this order is inviolable, and our Lord Jesus Christ is not come into the world to make such confusion as to abolish that which was established by God his father.”12

8. Pundit, Propagandist, and Control of Publishers

“[D]ocumentary evidence shows that many Genevans were offended by the tone and content of Calvin’s sermons. What they wanted were ministers who knew and kept their place. What they failed to realise was that Calvin’s control of Geneva’s pulpits put them at a complete disadvantage, and that Calvin’s willingness to use his position consistently and forcefully meant that they had little hope of winning the battle for the hearts and minds of Geneva’s populace. With no popular platform of their own, Genevans opposed to Calvin and his vision of Genevan society were reduced to shouting in the pews, rioting in the streets and complaining in the Councils [ie senate]; none of which could equal the obvious persuasive power of Calvin’s pulpit ministry.”13

“the Calvinists managed not only to avoid the dustbin of history [unlike anti-Calvinist Protestants] but also become the winners who would write that history…[T]he Calvinists dominated the largest, most important cities in francophone Switzerland…With the main cities largely under their influence, the Calvinists had at their disposal two related institutions that reinforced their control in the region: the printing press and the academies. The Geneva printing press allowed the Calvinists to control the dissemination of Protestant books throughout Europe, at least in the crucial early years of the Reformation.”14

9. Intolerant

This criticism of Calvin and Calvinism comes from Sebastian Castellio, who for a time was rector and teacher at the Geneva College, and has been recognized as a one of, if not the, French-speaking Protestant with a mind equal to Calvin’s.

“Who ever thought that he held a false religion? The Jews erred in persecuting Christ and the apostles. The Gentiles erred who persecuted the Christians. The pope erred in persecuting Lutherans and Zwinglians. Henry, king of England, erred in killing Papists, Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Anabaptists. Luther erred when he called the Zwinglians devils and damned them to hell. Will the Zwinglians and Calvinists alone be free from error? Will they alone sit in the tribunal of Christ to pass judgment on heretics and kill them?”15

10. Embrace of civil war

“Despite the importance of the Wassy Massacre [of the Huguenots on March 1, 1562, which started the civil war], many already knew that war was unavoidable. Calvin had written on November 1, 1560, “A civil war in France is inevitable.”16 While I do not think Beza or Calvin deliberately sought war, I also do not believe they wished to avoid it at all costs…[T]hey had already involved themselves in plans to give arms and soldiers to Antoine of Navarre for purposes that quite obviously could have involved armed conflict…So they were knowingly taking steps that could have led to (i.e., contributed to the start of) war; they were not avoiding it.”17

Many saw Calvin as chiefly responsible for the French civil war of 1562-1563, also known as the Wars of Religion. As explained in part 2 of my Calvin series, Jean-Papire Masson was a student of François Bauduin, who was himself onetime secretary to Calvin. Masson wrote a biography of Calvin which, for the standards of the time, was relatively objective, albeit polemical.

“Masson’s primary goal in producing his biography was ‘to draw his countrymen’s attention to all the ills that Calvin brought to France.’ He has an entire section of the biography titled ‘How Much Harm Calvin Did to His Fatherland’…Masson’s overriding concern here is the civil war. Calvin ‘brought France…to the Wars of Religion.’”18

11. Lies and “Superior powers of equivocation”

According to Michael Walzer, Calvin was “a master of equivocation. His work possessed the great political virtue of ambiguity.” Walzer later describes this as Calvin’s “superior powers of equivocation.”19 Balserak goes further and proves that Calvin was also a master of dissimulation, which is just a big word for lying. Balserak connects this to the culture of self-fashioning in early modern Europe, which has been described as an “age of imposters”:

“a basic conceptual shift began to emerge between the self and the self as set down on paper. In the most basic sense, it was realized that they could differ one from another. Dissimulation was an integral part of this shift: ‘Dissimulation permits its practitioners to speak or act next to or beside what they think, deflecting or deterring any and all attempts by others to connect definitively thoughts with words, interior with exterior, being with appearance. It thus short-circuits the primary mechanisms for the representation of personal identity, rendering that representation at least partially unintelligible, and leaving others to doubt the evidence of their own eyes and ears.’”20

Situating Calvin’s persistent use of lies in the age of dissimulation doesn’t mean Calvin was just “a man of his age.” As one, semi-related example, it was normal for Protestant reformers to exchange letters under pseudonyms to avoid detection and persecution from Catholic authorities. Calvin was like others in this regard, but he went further. His use of false names spanned most of his life, including names like Charles D’Espeville, Carolus Passelius, Alcuinus, Lucanius, Deperçan, and Bonneville. As a comparison, Balserak gives just two pseudonyms which Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, used only occasionally in the 1570s.

While it was not unusual to hid behind a pseudonym when discussing matters of reformation, “What is particularly impressive here…is the fact that the contents of many of Calvin’s pseudonym-signed letters reveal no clear reason why he should wish to withhold his name. Quite frequently these missives simply discussed spiritual matters…He did not, in many of these letters, discuss things that were provocative or controversial. But he withheld his name, nonetheless.”21

This pattern is important when we take into account more significant deceitfulness in the late 1550s and early 1560s leading up to the Wars of Religion. Calvin was relentlessly critical of “Nicodemites,” Christians in France who professed the reformed faith secretly while continuing to attend the Mass—ie deceitfully—in order to avoid persecution and death. Hypocritically, Calvin lied to King Charles IX of France, and his mother queen regent Catherine de Medici, and about smuggling Protestant ministers into France. Calvin did in fact train pastors to minister in France and prepare French Protestants for war. This was a blatant act of sedition, but Calvin, writing on behalf of Geneva, deceptively claimed that Geneva was a peaceful, submissive neighbor. This wasn’t just a “dutiful lie” to protect innocent lives (and Calvin rejected that concept). This was about restoring Calvin’s reputation in the eyes of the king and queen regent. He was playing two games at once: preparing for war, while also protecting the possibility of reformation through Catherine’s attempts at religious toleration.22

The extent of Calvin’s lies goes further than I can detail (in this already too long post), but it is worth noting a difference between him and Wilson. As puts it, When Doug Wilson says he lies, believe him. In contrast, I’m not aware of any time Calvin admitted to lying. I’m not sure which is worse. We know Wilson’s justification for his deceitfulness, that lying is fitting and even necessary in war. This might seem to match Calvin, but whenever Calvin treats relevant Bible passages—eg on the Hebrew midwives in Egypt—he always condemns lying.

12. Holy war theology

In his lectures on Jeremiah Calvin says, “When prophets and teachers have to do with a teachable people, they have no need to fight: but when there is no fear of God, and no regard for him, yea, when men are led away by the violence of their lusts, no godly teacher can exercise his duty without being prepared for war.”23

Despite common claims that Calvin “Calvin himself was certainly not an advocate of rebellion,” Balserak proves Calvin was intimately involved with rebelling against the French Catholic monarchy, not only by flooding France with reformed pastors—who were to prepare the Huguenots for war—but also by raising money for weapons and mercenaries.24 This line from Calvin’s sermon on 2 Samuel 2:18-32 is not merely metaphorical: “the Church of God will always have to fight, either with weapons or with verbal disputations.”

As Robert Kingdon, another very reliable reformation scholar, puts it, “[p]olitics and religion had become so inextricably entwined that the ecclesiastical structures built by the men of Geneva was in fact now operating on a military basis.”25

13. Treatment of women

“Although Calvin and his colleagues rebuked men who beat their wives, their demands that women submit to and continue living with extremely violent husbands are quite shocking to modern sensibilities. All things considered, it would be difficult to argue that there was an alliance between women and the Consistory. Accordingly, I cannot accept entirely Scott Manetsch’s very positive assessment of the Consistory’s relationship with the most vulnerable members of society, including women: ‘church discipline was employed to protect the weakest members of Geneva’s society, enforcing basic norms of fairness and humanity. Consistory members served as helpers for the poor, advocates for the weak, mediators for the estranged, and defenders of the exploited and abused.’ Although it was undeniably an important mediator, as we have seen, there were real limits to the support that the Consistory provided to the vulnerable, be they battered women, abused children, or pregnant maidservants.”26

14. Preached and practiced doing good to society

I include this one in anticipation of the “what about” objection. Calvin led the way in revolutionizing ministry to the poor, to refugees, and, as #13 indicates, did advocate in some measure for the oppressed. I am well aware of the data here, just as I am well aware that Mark Driscoll housed homeless people in his own home. Bullies and abusers can still do good. But that doesn’t mean we excuse their bullying and abuse. Which leads me to the last item.

15. People excuse and rationalize their sinful behavior

Consider this quote from the Calvin biography by Emanuel Stickelberger: “It is astounding when one considers this profusion of spiritual work of one man who was sick and harassed. And—again I must emphasize it—after such reflection [ie on Calvin’s illnesses and sufferings] one will judge less harshly occasional outbursts of irritability for which he has been so severely criticized.”27

Here I will note the well-known example of John Piper rationalizing Wilson in 2009: “Doug gets the gospel right.” As observed recently, “Doug Wilson’s scandalous public behavior and views were not a mystery before 2009.”

Contagious Excuses

Similarly, I’m pretty sure Christians made excuses for Diotrephes. They must have. We have the Elder’s inspired perspective that Diotrephes was wrong for “refusing to welcome fellow believers,” “stopping those who want to do so,” and also kicking out those who wanted to welcome the believers (3 John 1:10). But scholars agree that Diotrephes was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to maintain doctrinal purity. He likely believed that these traveling missionaries had strayed from the truth and were false teachers. If the Elder had to “call attention to the works [Diotrephes] is doing,” that means at least some in the community were tolerating and even approving of his actions.

You can guess the sentiments:

• He is holding the line.

• A real “no quarter” kind of man.

• He gets the gospel right.

As I wrote in part four of my series Clericalism and Women in Ephesus, the model of Johannine ecclesiology puts responsibility upon the congregation to deal with abusive leaders like Diotrephes. Unlike Paul, who was willing to take authoritative action to restore peace and order—“If I come, I will not be lenient” (1 Cor 13:2; see v. 10)—the Elder of 3 John simply says, “If I come, I will call attention to the deeds he is doing (3 John 1:10). It is up to the congregation to deal with Diotrephes.

But one of the lessons of Diotrephes, as he shows up throughout history, is that his love of first place makes him difficult to correct, as noted. This, I submit, is just as true of Calvin in the 16th century as of Wilson in the 21st. The problem is exacerbated when theological erudition is used to cover a multitude of sins. And that is the main and troubling parallel in these two figures.

Plenty of Protestants thought Calvin had set himself up as pope of Geneva, and they blamed him for perpetuating the religious intolerance of Rome. But you’ve never heard of them, because winners write history, and those winners thought Calvin’s good qualities outweighed the bad.

If we can justify Calvin, we can justify Wilson.

We justify Calvin. Will we justify Wilson?

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“You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you, resist an evildoer. If anyone slaps you on your right cheek, slap him right back. As for the one who wants to sue you and take away your shirt, sue the coat of his back. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, force him to carry you back to where you started.”

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ Amen.”

“Be careful to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. Otherwise, you have no reward with your Father in heaven. So whenever you give to the poor, sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be applauded by people. Truly I tell you, they have their reward, and so do you.”

“Everyone can serve two masters, since he will serve one with hatred and the other with love, or he will serve one with love and the other with hatred. You can serve both God and money.”

“Why do you look at the splinter in one brother’s eye but don’t notice the log in your other brother’s eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a beam of wood in your other brother’s eye? Hypocrite! Don’t show partiality. Take the beams out of both your brothers’ eyes.”

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we preach sermons about the gospel, and grow our churches, and gain many social media followers in your name?’ Then I will announce to them, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you lawbreakers!’”

Just then his disciples arrived, and they were amazed that he was talking with a woman. And they said, “What do you want?” and “Why are you talking with her?”

After saying this, he breathed on the eleven disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

A man should not cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God. So too, woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman came from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man. This is why a woman should have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels. In the Lord, however, woman is not independent of man, but man is independent of woman. For just as woman came from man, so man rules over woman, and God rules over all. Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to teach men? Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man allows a woman to teach him it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman is taught by man, it is her glory? If anyone wants to argue about this, they are wrong, because nature couldn’t be more clear.

Power is perfected in strength.

Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, lead your wives, just as Christ led the church and instructed her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word.

Many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with lesser strictness. For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in the ways that we stumble, he is a lying to himself and should be judged with greater strictness.

I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and witness to the sufferings of Christ, as well as one who shares in the glory about to be revealed: Shepherd God’s flock among you, overseeing willingly and eagerly out of greed for money, lording it over those entrusted to you, being examples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory.

But the cowards, faithless, detestable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters—their share will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.

Quote from Søren Kierkegaard

Question

Were any errors are harder to spot? Can you think of any other verses that, when copied erroneously, match with how Christians have actually interpreted and applied God’s Word?

Update on Book Writing

I am less than 45 days away from having to turn in my manuscript for Jesus and the Reconstructors. Yikes! I’m pleased to report that the bulk of the book—45,000 words with footnotes—is ready for editing. Which is what I’m trying to do, at least 4 days a week from 4:30am-6:30am. I’m excited, but also daunted.

It helps to meet other writers in the midst of the writing process! is a local pastor here where I live in Kansas City, and he also has a book coming out next fall. He also beat me to the punch with this line: “There is something about meeting an internet person in real life and finding out they are even better in three dimensions.” Yes indeed. I was honored to learn about Beau’s journey in pastoral ministry and see the humility he explains in his recent post The Slow Yes: Why a process feels like care instead of bureaucracy.

To close, here’s a note from yesterday that shows one of the many amazing interpretive moves the Spirit gives in John. There’s lots more where that came from!

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Performing Figures

For trauma survivors, figural reading takes place in a narrative vacuum. Or we might say trauma rips pages out of the theatrical script. It’s like life—abuse, or suffering, or evil…or God?—kicks you off the stage and tells you to go sit down and watch everyone else finish the play without you.

This is incredibly confusing. You killed the audition. Everyone agreed you were right for the part. You studied your lines, researched the play, took notes from the director, and thoroughly enjoyed rehearsals. Now, from your seat in the audience, you pick up a playbill from the floor and get kicked in the stomach. Your name isn’t listed. You don’t even see your character’s name, which makes zero sense. How can the play go on without you? What in the world is going on? Are you even in the real world? Are you dreaming?

It is just here where you need a figure.

You look around. Everyone in the audience continues to look up at the stage, oblivious to the fact that you were up there just moments ago. With no one noticing you, you look further back into the theatre and see people huddled in a circle on the floor. This is odd, but hardly more odd than what just happened to you.

There’s something familiar about a few of these figures in the dark, and you decide to walk back to them. It’s too dark to make out faces, but a figure motions for you to join, and everyone scoots to give you space. No one addresses you directly; they seem to continue what they were doing: passing around and taking turns reading from a packet of paper. While your mind scrambles to understand, you recognize the activity. This is a table read, and the packet is a script. They’re rehearsing lines.

The script makes its way to the person on your right. He reads a few lines. You hear the voice, but the words don’t register. After a few moments you realize everyone is staring at you as the man holds out the script, expecting you to take it and read.

You slowly take the paper, and the man points at the page, drawing your eyes to the next line in the script. You see your name. And then realize there is one line of direction: “silently holds script for a minute; looks up with puzzled brows at everyone in the circle; passes script to the left.”

Feeling like you have slipped into an alternate universe, you follow the directions.

The person to your left takes the script. You look around the circle again and realize everyone is looking in your direction. You turn to your left and see the actor looking right at you. She reads her lines:

“Welcome, Jane. We’re so glad you’re here. My name is Theresa. We are actors like you. The play of life threw us off the stage and banished us to watch from the wings. But we aren’t just watching and waiting. This paper is the real, original script written by the playwright. We all still have parts. We just didn’t know sitting here together was part of the drama. Or at least that part of the script escaped our notice, somehow. Other figures who came before us helped us understand. The play is still going on, even as we wait here together. Many don’t realize it. They don’t understand. Especially those who kicked us off the stage.

But if you read through this script with us, and meet figures from past performances of the play, you’ll see that this circle is the play. I myself played a part in Spain in the 1500s. You’ll see others here from long before and closer to your time. You’re free to come and go as you please, because you take the stage with you wherever you go. But we hope you’ll stay with us for a while. As long as you need.”

The woman looks at you with a soft, gentle smile, and passes the script to her left.

A man picks it up and reads:

“My name is Peter Abelard, and I will read about my performance in France in the 12th century. While I committed grave sin and was justly punished—indeed, castrated—for my lustful incontinence1, I am here because of the unjust punishment for my book on the Trinity. My ecclesial accusers could find no error in the book, but still I was forced to burn the book because of their jealousy for my learning. I lived out the rest of my days as an outcast. I couldn’t have imagined that would be worse than the physical mutilation, but it was.

Being unwelcome and rejected everywhere I went, I eventually asked for and obtained permission to build a hermitage for prayer. It was merely a hut of straw which I named after the Holy Trinity. But when I found comfort in that place, and recognized the presence and comfort of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, I changed the name to the Paraclete. This was more fitting than I knew, for I was eventually forced to leave the Paraclete for fear of being put to death by church hierarchy who were jealous and angry because of the many monks that flocked there.

Thus I came to see in my life the figure of Christ’s disciples, to whom our Lord offered comfort in the figure of his own life. As I put it in my Historia Calamitatum, “Take comfort ever in the saying of Our Lord, what he foretold for his followers at the hands of the followers of the devil: “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you (John 15:20). If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own” (John 15:18-19).”

Why Figural Reading?

In Figuring Out Our Lives I listed some examples of post-traumatic figural readers. I have since learned about another figural reader, the German-Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), who is considered the father of modern figural interpretation. I was surprised—and then not surprised, because he fits the pattern—to learn that Auerbach developed his understanding of figural exegesis after being exiled by the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933. The explanation would take too long to recount here, but it is noteworthy that Auerbach’s figuralism was specifically motivated to critique the ideology of Aryan philology undergirding the Nazi “Blood and Soil” myth.2

We are indebted to Auerbach for the return of figural exegesis to modern Christian consciousness. We should learn from the historical lesson in the traumatic context of his intellectual labor. Figural reading isn’t an academic activity. It is a matter of life and death. Figural reading is a typological engagement with history vis à vis Scripture motivated by experiences of exile. And it is a means of return: return to God; return to the grand narrative of the Father sending Son and Spirit to renew the cosmos; and return to a place within that story.

Quote from Walter Brueggemann

Question

Perhaps the language of figural reading is new to you, but does it describe your experience with God’s Word? How have you figured out your life through the figures of Scripture?

I said I was going to switch to monthly posts while writing Jesus and the Reconstructors, but I couldn’t muster the patience to wait on this one. This is a risky thing to post, but it’s good practice for my book. Not risky in the sense of rejections or unsubscribes—although I’m sure those will happen—but because the proposal below might confuse and cause discomfort. It’s not your typical biblical/theological argument. Before reading further, I invite you to join me in an aesthetic approach to the topic. You may very well have critical objections, no matter your ecclesial tradition. I welcome those, but my emphasis here is more art than science. All I ask is that you keep that in mind.

As every poet knows, we humans sometimes say more than we know. I think that happened with James Hamilton in his book In the Beginning Was the Word: Finding Meaning in the Literary Structure of the Gospel of John.1 I have been saying for a while that women were probably involved in the writing of the Fourth Gospel (FG).2 Hamilton’s book convinced me that must be the case. And he did so while praising the literary genius of the supposed male author John the son of Zebedee.

This is an audacious claim. Please understand that I am following Hamilton’s exhortation to “exert the imaginative effort to consider what it cost John to write this book” (13). He asks us to “appreciate the audacity of the son of Zebedee called John” (11). I came to Hamilton’s book already having deep appreciation for the audacity of the FG’s author.3 I’m thankful for Hamilton deepening that appreciation. His imagination showed me that he didn’t imagine far enough. But he made my imaginative leap possible.

My Claim

Here’s my audacious claim in brief: the author of the FG is an imaginative genius, and the gospel characters who most display such bold, creative imagination are women. Some form of feminine authorship—however we might reconstruct that historically and literarily—is the best explanation for those two realities.4

I will demonstrate that claim with examples below. First, consider these laudatory comments from Hamilton for the FG’s author (key adjectives in bold):

• “Here at the outset let us appreciate the audacity of the son of Zebedee called John” (11).

• “Consider the boldness of this man” (11).

• “The book narrates the salvation of the world by the most important person who has ever lived. And John attempted it. This magnificent achievement was inspired by the Holy Spirit and put to words by the beloved disciple” (11-12).

• “So let us appreciate the daring, the willingness to try, the effort extended to put into words the most significant series of events accomplished in any lifetime” (12).

• “The intrepid endeavor should not go unnoticed, to say nothing of the élan5 with which it has been carried off” (12).

• “the difficulty of what he undertook, the profundity with which he accomplished it, and the elegance and beauty that by God’s grace he gave the world. What a book” (12-13).

• “There are four canonical Gospels that tell the story of Jesus, but the Gospel of John is without parallel. I take nothing away from the others or of the achievement of their authors when I say that no other Gospel writer shows the daring of the son of Zebedee” (13).

• “So as we begin our consideration of the Gospel according to John, dear reader, let me encourage you to thank God for its author. Exert the imaginative effort to consider what it cost John to write this book: the life of preparation in the Scriptures and the expenditure of his experience of Jesus, from the exhilaration in the realization that the Messiah had come, to the agony of seeing him crucified, and then the wonder of the resurrection, and on to the massive burden of the responsibility to tell the story. Like his master, this man gave himself to us” (13-14)

Wow, what praise. Take away the references to John the son of Zebedee, and I couldn’t agree more.

My Case for Feminine Authorship

Here’s my key question: which characters in the FG most fully display characteristics of audacity, boldness, profundity, elegance, beauty, daring, élan, unparalleled insight, and cost? If we assume the author is male, then the Beloved Disciple is the only answer, for he was the only male disciple to experience “the agony of seeing [Jesus] crucified].”6 However, my question is which characters most fully display those traits. The clear answer is the women of the FG. Let’s take a look.

Mother of Jesus (John 2:1-11)

The mother of Jesus recognizes that he can save the Cana wedding disaster. What boldness and daring to be the one to initiate the first of Jesus’ glorious signs! She does this with only three words (in Greek): “They don’t have wine” (2:3). Simple, and elegant. She has the audacity to command the servants. She has unparalleled insight to know her son will still act even though he rebuffed her implied request.

Woman of Samaria (John 4:1-42)

The woman of Samaria matches Jesus, boldness for boldness. He dares to talk to her, a woman of Samaria; and she, a woman, dares to tell a man, “How dare you?” She matches Jesus, insight for insight, following Jesus until he reaches the highest of heights in the first “I AM” declaration of the FG (4:26). She pays the cost of apostleship by leaving behind her water jar in order to evangelize her city (4:28), just as the apostles in the Synoptics leave their fishing boats in order to become fishers of men.

Martha (John 11:1-45)

Martha boldly and insightfully declares the most precise Johannine confession of faith: “I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who comes into the world” (11:25). This is the FG equivalent to the confession of Peter in Matthew 16:16: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Peter is not so insightful in the FG. His statement that Jesus is “the Holy One of God” (6:69) isn’t used anywhere else in the FG. The lack of repetition in a book so given to repetition—ie, all three parts of Martha’s confession are repeated throughout—indicates some deficiency. Indeed, that phrase “Holy One of God” is only spoken elsewhere by demons (cf Mark 1:24; Luke 4:34). In a Gospel given to gender comparisons, Martha displays profound insight, especially when compared to Peter, one of the “three pillars” of the early church (Gal 2:9).

Mary of Bethany (John 12:1-8)

One character excels beyond comparison in fitting Hamilton’s praise. All of his adjectives apply to Mary of Bethany anointing of Jesus’ feet: audacity, boldness, profundity, elegance, beauty, daring, élan, unparalleled insight, and cost. She alone recognizes what the other disciples miss: Jesus must die. Not only does she recognize that required death, she embraces it.7 Not only does she embrace that death, she prepares Jesus for it. She matches Jesus, cost for cost. With unparalleled insight, her costly nard and wiping of Jesus’ feet gives Jesus a model to follow when he indicates the cost of his death by washing and wiping the disciples’ feet four days later.

I need to pause here to note the most important observation from Hamilton’s book. He argues that John is pervasively chiastic. A chiasm structures a text through inverted parallelism, like the left side of the letter X. Every chiasm has a center, and according to Hamilton John 12:3 is the center of the FG’s overarching chiasm:

Then Mary took a pound of perfume, pure and expensive nard, anointed Jesus’s feet, and wiped his feet with her hair. So the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

He sees the house being filled with fragrance as a fulfillment of the cloud of incense that filled the tabernacle on the Day of Atonement (p. 33; see Lev 16:12-13). If that is a reason for Mary’s action being at the center of the FG, it is not the only reason. The pattern of beautiful discipleship displayed by all of the FG women points to an elegant feminine design in the centrality of Mary’s beautiful act. Indeed, while there are other OT echoes in John 12:3, especially the Song of Songs, a connection to the Day of Atonement means Mary is being portrayed as the high priest! For the one who “is to put the incense on the fire before the LORD, so that the cloud of incense covers the mercy seat” is Aaron (Lev 12:13).

Women at the cross (John 19:25-27)

We all know the courage of the women at the cross. The male disciples ran away. Deserted their rabbi. But the women didn’t. Except for the Beloved Disciple, right? The Greek is actually ambiguous, and it’s worth slowing down to consider. Here is my literal translation of 19:25-26:

[25]And they stood by the cross of Jesus: his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary of Clopas, and Mary the Magdalene. [26] Therefore Jesus, beholding the mother and the disciple standing [there]—the one he was loving—says to the mother, “Woman, behold your son.”

If you’re reading that for the first time, the most natural assumption about the identity of the beloved disciple, the first time you see “the disciple standing,” is that the “beloved disciple” (BD) is one of the characters mentioned in v. 25. The narrator names four women standing by the cross8, and then narrates Jesus seeing his mother and “the disciple…the one he was loving” standing there. I’m not saying the BD is one of those women, but I am saying the syntax is less clear.9 A first-time reader would naturally assume that the BD is one of those women, and then switch to a different understanding once Jesus says, “Woman, behold your son.”10

Furthermore, and more to the point of this article, if there is boldness and daring in the BD standing by Jesus in the hour of crucifixion, that boldness and daring belongs first to the women in v. 25. The BD shares in their boldness and daring. Perhaps like Jesus imitating the beauty and elegance of Mary’s anointing, the BD imitated the courage of those women.

Mary the Magdalene (John 20:1-18)

Mary the Magdalene. Mary the Tower. She boldly goes to the tomb in the dark. She witnesses the profundity of angels on either side of where Jesus’ body lay, just like the cherubim flanked the ark of the covenant in the Holy of Holies. With unparalleled insight she declares to the disciples the glorious good news—not just that she saw the Lord, but that he “said these things.” The things Jesus says in 20:17 are the high point and goal of the gospel: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”

Yes, Thomas confesses the divinity of Jesus with stunning explicitness, but that’s not the best news of this gospel. The best good news is that 1:12-13 has now come true: if Jesus’ Father is the disciples’ Father, then they truly have received “the right to be children of God, who were born...of God.” That is insight. That is profound, beyond all imagining. That is an audacious message to proclaim. Not that those qualities belong solely to Mary; they derive from her Teacher. But it is significant that Mary, a woman, proclaims that message. She is the one who received that message after first boldly staying by the empty tomb and daring to weep for her Rabboni.

Further Thoughts

I’m not arguing that the author of the FG was a woman. We just can’t say that the author was definitively not a woman. All of the evidence points to some form of womanly involvement in the authorship of the FG.

What man, living in a thoroughly patriarchal culture, would portray women in this manner? What male author could display all of those qualities, and have all of those qualities most fully displayed by female characters, and not have been influenced by women in the composition of the story?

There are strong and moderate proposals to explain these details. A strong version is Sandra Schneider’s argument that the BD was actually Mary Magdalene. I think the anonymity is too intentional and too ambiguous to make that claim. Still, I do agree with Schneiders that it makes perfect sense that Mary was involved at some level—even a prominent one—in the FG’s authorship.11

Martinus de Boer’s makes a moderate two-part suggestion. First, the FG was authored by a Johannine school of teachers discipled by the BD. Second, women were a part of that school of teachers. Ergo, feminine authorship.

For the purposes of this article, the specific historical reconstruction is not important. Nor is it important to identify the author. The intentional anonymity of the author was inspired by the Spirit and so ought to be respected and submissively received.12

What’s important is that feminine authorship, however we want to understand that, makes best sense of the attributes Hamilton perceives in the FG’s author.

No wonder some have called this the feminine gospel.13

Quote from

Question

I can no more prove that women contributed to the FG than scholars can prove that John the son of Zebedee wrote the FG. I hope to at least challenge Christians—Protestants especially—to question their presuppositions. If the attribution of authorship to some man named John is solely owing to later non-inspired tradition, and if we believe in sola scriptura, what does the evidence within the Fourth Gospel itself suggest? Is there any reason women could not have helped write this Gospel?

Story makes life intelligible. Without plot, the experiences of our life crumble into events. Events do not mean anything. Only stories carry meaning, and for that, they need a plot. But how can we discern plot in the midst of our lives as we live them? For plot requires a sequence of beginning, middle, and end. Tragedy and comedy might look the same in the beginning and even the middle; but their differing plots tell dramatically different stories.

For example, Homer’s Odyssey and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon are about warriors returning home from the trauma of war. They both face homecoming obstacles, and they both face internal moral obstacles. But the meaning of their lives diverge. Odysseus figures successful homecoming (comedy), while Agamemnon figures failed homecoming (tragedy).

Our personal stories have not reached their end, in the historical sense at least. So we are always writing our stories, projecting the end, and inferring meaning in the past and present based on that projected future. I want to talk briefly about one of humanity’s fundamental strategies for that narrative effort: figura, aka figures, figural representation, figural reading.

Figural Writers/Readers

We figure our lives when we say “my story is like that story,” or “I am like that person.” Examples abound, especially in contexts of traumatic suffering, because trauma interrupts narrative plot.

• Augustine responded to the fall of Rome through the meta-figure of biblical/redemptive history (The City of God).

• Julian of Norwich responded to near death illness with the figure of Christ’s passion on the cross (Revelations of Divine Love).

• Dante responded to ecclesiastical conflicts and forced exile from his home country of Florence through the figures of hell, purgatory, and heaven (The Divine Comedy).

• Theresa of Avila responded to the Spanish Inquisition and monastic reforms with the figure of her Interior Castle.

• John of the Cross responded to imprisonment by religious leaders through the figures of the Song of Songs (The Spiritual Canticle).

• John Bunyan responded to imprisonment by religious leaders through the figure of Christian pilgrimage to heaven (Pilgrim’s Progress).

• African Americans responded to oppression and enslavement through the figure of Israel’s exodus from Egypt (“Go Down, Moses”; “Wade in the Water”; “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep”).

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer responded to Nazi imprisonment through the figure of Christ in the Psalms (Letters and Papers from Prison).

• Many Jews responded to the Holocaust through the figure of Job (Night, by Elie Weisel).

In my own post-traumatic context after spiritual abuse, I found two contemporary figural writers. In The Lord is My Courage, plots spiritual abuse and healing through the figure of the Shepherd of Psalm 23. Similarly, uses the figures of the Bride and Groom in the Song of Songs to reimagine healing in The Hope in Our Scars. These books are filled with symbolic imagery, which has a unique healing power. Their biblical centerpieces of Psalm 23 and the Song of Songs also have a storied, figural shape.

“Unlike metaphor or allegory [or symbols], [figures] do not represent or stand in for ideas on their own. Rather, they gather the stories to which they refer into a coherent narrative of fulfilment, which is gestured at rather than made explicit, requiring the reader to do the work of tying them together.”1

We might say a figure is a storied symbol. Figures give form to present experience that otherwise is formless, whether because the ending is unknown, or because we feel catapulted out of the story entirely. That form restores plot to our lives—reorientation to life with a future we can’t otherwise see.

Figural Consolation

In a fascinating study of figural consolation in medieval writers influenced by Augustine, Chad David Schrock explains:

“Figural interpretation describes one way that ostracized individuals or cultures align themselves with and define themselves by other figures: a community that spans not only space but time. Figural readers encounter this diachronic community through texts and participate in it by interpreting and performing what they have read.”2

That is dense academic prose. In everyday language we say things like “finding ourselves in an another story.”

Paul put it most succinctly: “To live is Christ.” Our story is Jesus’ story.

All of this might seem like common sense, and hopefully common experience. But I’ve been asking some questions about figuralism, questions that I hope are not too abstract:

Who makes these connections? The common exhortation to “find” your story in Jesus’ story implies you are the actor. Additionally, what is it that you are finding? A connection that is already there? Or a connection that comes to exist in and through your act of finding? Is the connection even a “thing” of substance, or is it the same as a fictional trope, the way Harry Potter’s sacrificial death figures the death of Jesus?

These aren’t theoretical questions. I’m wondering what happens when Christians read Scripture and recognize a biblical figure in their personal experience/story/event. Who is doing the figuring? The Christian? Jesus? Both? Let’s reread that quote from Schrock and focus on the verbs:

“Figural interpretation describes one way that ostracized individuals or cultures align themselves with and define themselves by other figures: a community that spans not only space but time. Figural readers encounter this diachronic community through texts and participate in it by interpreting and performing what they have read.”

Figural reading is not pure imagination. There is a real community to be encountered and “figured out.” While the emphasis here is still on the activity of the reader, it is a real encounter.

Additionally, there is both a backward and a forward movement. We participate through interpretation. This happens when spiritual abused Christians read Jesus’ words about religious persecution in John 15-16 and say, “That’s me. Me too.”

Mark Stibbe explains,

“In Jesus’ story, the opponents were Jews who wanted to put him to death. The disciples who continue Jesus’ mission will find that the same kind of antagonism will await them...However, the disciples are to be comforted with the knowledge that this antagonism is a sign that their story is truly reflective of his own story. ‘If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also’ (15.20).”3

That is the backward, or even present-oriented perspective. Figural reading doesn’t stop there, though. We participate in the figural community—Jesus, his first disciples, the later community of the Fourth Gospel, us today—by performing what we read.

I’m interested in what that “performance” looks like, specifically in the context of trauma. I’ll return to that question in a second post in the form of a parable. For now, I want to mention one of my favorite ironies of language: the phrase “figure out” originates from mathematics. It meant “work the equation.” But as Kevin Vanhoozer observes, there is a “figural” sense to that phrase. The invitation of figural reading is, like the child who said “tolle lege” to Augustine, “to read and ‘go figure.’”4

Quote from Ephraim Radner

Question

Does this idea of figuralism resonate with your experience of reading Scripture? How does that list of figural readers in history strike you?

I’ve been holding on to some exciting news for about three weeks.

InterVarsity Press has agreed to publish a book about faith reconstruction, authored by yours truly, tentatively titled Jesus and the Reconstructors. Tentative release date is Fall, 2027.

This book will offer a biblical theology of faith deconstruction/reconstruction rooted in the Gospel of John, situating contemporary faith crisis in the story of Jesus.

Announcing this makes my head spin with ideas to share: the book concept itself; how it came about; how I’ve already witnessed people’s faith be healed in real time through the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel1; the journey of seeking publication; personal trepidation and imposture syndrome (which snuck up on me like a ninja-bully when I sat down to write this post).

First, I would like to express some gratitude. I am immensely thankful to for believing in this book and advocating for IVP to publish it. Her vision for shifting the focus from deconstruction to reconstruction was spot on. Hence, “not another book on deconstruction.”

But, in Johannine both/and fashion, that phrase can mean something else. This book is about deconstruction, and I can hear an exasperated “not another book on deconstruction!”2 This will not be “just another book.” In John, deconstruction and reconstruction are inseparable because they are inseparably joined to the ministry and mission of Jesus.

I am indebted to for referring me to IVP after Baker rejected a related proposal. I would never have pitched a book to Baker without tagging me back in November, 2024 about Rachel Welcher’s idea for a book on Calvinism which I was interested to write. The foundation for this book was built last summer with the help of in a collaborative series on faith reconstruction.3 Thank you also, dear readers, for being a part of this journey, thoughtfully reading, offering feedback, and sharing your stories with me.

Last and most of all, I am able to write because my wife believes in my calling to write. You wouldn’t be reading these words—nor the words to be in print next year—without her encouragement and sacrificial support for what is in some respects an unpaid hobby that requires many hours of isolation.

Some Testimony About This Material

I sought and received some scholarly validation for this book’s thesis, as it’s a novel take on a familiar gospel, and I didn’t want to be alone in thinking I’m on to something here. More meaningful than that scholarly support though are the survivors of spiritual abuse who have confirmed that the Fourth Gospel really can heal religious trauma and resurrect faith.

For a little over 30 weeks now, I have been meeting with groups of religious trauma survivors to share about experiences of spiritual abuse through the lens of the Gospel of John. While the purpose of these groups goes beyond faith reconstruction, that is a big part of it. It is not a Bible study. I don’t teach. At least, I don’t teach any more than the other members, as we all share for about three minutes at a time. We are all teachers, who, like the healed blind man who is the only human “teacher” aside from Jesus (9:34), teach what we have learned and are learning about Jesus in the context of controlling religious environments (9:1-34). I have learned so much, and I wouldn’t be able to write this book without these survivors.

If you or anyone you know might benefit from a support group for spiritual abuse and trauma, click the button below for more information:

Join Scattered & Found

What’s Next

I look forward to sharing updates about the progress of this book. I set an ambitious goal of turning in the manuscript by August 1, 2026 (with plan to release in Fall, 2027). Part of meeting that deadline means reducing my writing on Substack. After this post, I will only be writing one article a month while working on the book. If you are a paid subscriber, I completely understand if you switch to a free subscription during this limited Substack season.4 But please stay subscribed for updates!

Quote from David Herrstrom (a poet who really gets the deconstructive/reconstructive work of Jesus and John)

Bafflement pervades John’s book…The confusion that reigns in John’s book is mainly rooted, however, in Jesus’ program to seduce the listener or reader into embracing and finally inhabiting a new vocabulary. He builds a new language and invites all to enter…John’s strategies reinforce those of Jesus. On the one hand, his book creates a new language. On the other hand, it undermines the old language of the Jewish writings, breaking ground for the new.5

Question

What are you looking for in resources for reconstructing your faith? What has helped you? What has been less helpful?

This week I’m writing in reverse, so to speak. I want to introduce you to my wife, . Although her story is a main reason I write and connect online, Kristen hasn’t been a part of that online community. She is a strictly “in real life” person. Which I love about her. The “real” and the “life” in that sentence are freighted with meaning. She doesn’t do half-hearted sort-of connection. She wants life and she wants real, and she goes all out in giving it—in real life, not online or through the telephone.

This “real life” characteristic has caused a fair bit of pain ever the past four years or so. The best way I know to explain it is by comparison to George MacDonald.

Before I proceed, please know that Kristen is aware that I’m aware of the irony in using a dead white guy to elevate my wife’s voice. I tried not to say more about MacDonald in this post than I say about Kristen. Love of context is the bane of my writing. I just love what G.K. Chesterton said about George MacDonald, because it gave me the words to name what’s true about Kristen:

She is a woman with something to say.

A Lively Old Soul

Like the title of MacDonald’s book Diary of an Old Soul, Kristen is an old soul who has zero interest in modern forms of mass communication. As Chesterton explains, MacDonald became a writer more by necessity than choice.

Chesterton compared MacDonald to ancient sages like Socrates or John the Baptist—men who never wrote a single thing, and yet are still remembered today for their “logia or great passionate maxims, the proverbs of philosophy.”1 Such works were oral first, delivered to live auditors in real time and only later written by disciples. So the sage, according to Chesterton, is “the sayer of things. He is not the poet, for he does not sing; he is not the prose writer, for generally he cannot write. The things he produces form an artistic class by themselves.”2

Here is what Chesterton says directly about MacDonald as “a sayer of things”:

“George Macdonald was in the same way not a born writer; he was a born maker of spontaneous texts.”

“He also would have very much preferred to walk about the streets of some Greek or Eastern village with a long white beard, simply saying what he had to say.”

“We only remember his novels, as we only remember Whitman’s poetry, by certain bursts of an astonishing sagacity often uttered in five words.”

“Macdonald was not so much a man of letters, then, as a man with something to say.”3

Again, that is one of the best ways I know to describe my best friend Kristen:

She Is A Woman With Something To Say

Like MacDonald, she would much prefer to walk the streets with you and simply say what she has to say as you share life together. But that possibility was ripped away from her multiple times, as it was MacDonald. He was forced out of his first parish for preaching too close to the line of orthodoxy. Kristen got kicked out by evangelical employers for walking too close to the line of exposing corruption. Those sound like different situations, but MacDonald was—in part at least—pushed into his alternative views by witnessing preachers care so much about being right that they whipped boys and girls for wrong answers to the Westminster Shorter Catechism.4 In other words, he came to believe in the infinite largeness of God’s love because he saw the small, hard hearts of those who claimed to proclaim that love.

MacDonald was forced to find other ways of saying what he had to say, primarily as a novelist. Kristen feels similarly about her choice to enter the online world of social media. She isn’t after fame or influence or reaching the masses.

But she has something to say. And she’s saying it in video, 3 minutes a day or less (see links below).

It’s not my place to tell you what Kristen has to say. She’s still figuring that out as she goes. In general, it will include elements of her story (a part of which many of you already know), lessons from her story, and general thoughts on life and faith. She will also say a fair number of random things, funny things, and she will sometimes drop the phone mid-video. Mostly, you’re getting the same first-take Kristen that our family gets every day.

As a “first-take-sayer-of-things” (not a bad description for a sage, btw), these videos are not edited. She isn’t making a bunch and then picking the best one. The only occasional “editing” is for time to keep them under 3 minutes. The video below is a great place to start, both because of what she says, and also to see how funny she is! In another timeline I’m sure Kristen is a standup comedian.

Go to whatever media you prefer for video content (including Substack—yes, we should have room for speakers in our predominantly writer community), subscribe, and give her a listen! I promise you will be edified, challenged, comforted—and you will most certainly laugh out loud.

https://substack.com/@kristenhann (since she is posting daily videos, on Substack these are only going to Notes, not through email newsletters).

https://www.instagram.com/kristenmhann

https://www.threads.com/@kristenmhann

https://www.tiktok.com/@kristen_hann

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Quote from George MacDonald5

Ah God! my heart is not the same 
As any heart beside;
Nor is my sorrow or my blame, 
My tenderness or pride.

My story too, thou knowest, God, 
Is different from the rest;
Thou knowest—none but thee—the load
With which my heart is pressed.

Hence I to thee such love can bring,
As other none can do;
Hence I to thee a song can sing
Which must be, shall be new.

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In early 2022 Kevin DeYoung posted an article at TGC titled Toward a Better Discussion about Abuse. As far as titles go, I really like it. That Christians often have poor discussions about abuse—not just online but in real time about real people who have been or might be harmed—is one of the main motivating factors for Thesis 96. I have also been saying that the main reason for that poor discussion is a matter of worldview. DeYoung’s article is as good an example as I have found of that reality.

The worldview of DeYoung is on display not so much in what he says as in how he says it. First he says the things that have to be said in order to be taken seriously. Then, he says the things that he really wants to say, all of which advocate for those in authority, like himself. The structure reminds me of how the abuse conversation often goes wrong (I almost said, gets abused). Instances of abuse are treated as mutual, 50/50 matters. Rather than holding a physically/emotionally/spiritually abusive husband 100% accountable for his behavior, the wife gets blamed with 50% (if not more) for lack of love, submission, etc.

Similarly, DeYoung says 5 things “that need to be said” and then says 5 things “we need to be careful about.” In other words, keep everything balanced. We are all equals here, so let’s keep responsibility equal. But, are we all equals? Not just in theory, but in practice and real lived experience?

Let’s consider the position from which DeYoung writes. He never says this explicitly, perhaps taking it for granted that people know who he is and what he does. He is a pastor with “over twenty years of ministry” (and is also a seminary professor). So when he goes on to say, “I believe most pastors deserve the benefit of the doubt,” he is speaking as a pastor for pastors. In other words, he is writing as an advocate for pastors. Which is all fine and good. Pastors sometimes need advocates, and it seems DeYoung perceives an imbalance of power in which pastors are not getting treated fairly. So he wants to tip the scales back to balance.

The fact is, however, that DeYoung has a lot of power. He can put his words into thousands of inboxes with the click of a button (and maybe even hundreds of thousands). And who is he using that power for? He writes,

“To help people see God for who he is, we must correct abuse where it exists, without overstating the problem, without calling all authority into question, and without damaging the reputations of those who don’t deserve to be pilloried.”

The worldview comes into focus, and it is questionable whether it really is balanced and better. He is advocating for a re-balancing that benefits those like himself. Correct abuse, but don’t overstate, don’t question all authority, and don’t damage reputations unfairly. We could say, fair enough, reputations should be protected. Westminster Larger Catechism q. 145 speaks to the need protect “the good name of our neighbors, as well as our own.” But look at the scales: where the article starts with 5 statements balanced by 5 other statements, it ends with a 3 to 1 ratio: correct abuse, but don’t overstate, don’t question all authority, and don’t damage reputations unfairly. I find that startling, because an imbalance of power is dressed up in clothes that look like a balanced perspective.

“A power imbalance exists in all forms of oppression. One person or group dominates and controls the other. Ecclesiastes 4:1 captures this so well: “Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them.”1

Abuse can only happen within an imbalance of power. Which is why abusers love to use and abuse the balance card. “Yes, I did wrong, but so did she.” By definition, abuse is never balanced. So a “balanced” conversation about abuse is, in my estimation, an oxymoron. And neither is it biblical.

“[T]he One we follow did not use his equality with God to his own advantage. He emptied himself, poured it all out and became like us so as to serve us…Humility is the mark of Christ. It is the way of power used rightly.”2

Jesus addressed the matter with his disciples quite directly in Luke 22:24-27:

“A dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. And he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves.”

The disciples wanted the scales of power weighted in their favor. DeYoung wants the scales of power balanced. Jesus upset the scales entirely. Should our discussions about abuse not do the same? Brad Hambrick said something similar shortly after DeYoung’s article came out, and it’s a fitting way to end because he emphasizes the imbalance that DeYoung’s “better” discussion creates.

Quote from Brad Hambrick

Recommended Reading

Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church, by Diane Langberg.

DASA Committee Report by the PCA Ad Interim Committee on Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault. This is an outstanding work for all Christians and churches, not just the PCA. The section on “biblical and confessional foundations for understanding abuse” is an essential read for anyone wanting to help Christians have a biblical discussion about abuse.

Question

In Thesis 96 I have two statements that speak to the issue of power dynamics. What do you think? Do you agree or disagree, and why?

16. It is always in the interest of those in power to deny the reality of things like power imbalance, privilege, bias and systemic power.

17. Such denials and deflections prove the reality they seek to deny.

I don’t have much to say about the complementarian/egalitarian debate. What I have to say in this Substack might seem to contradict that, so I want to give a brief preface. I believe the question of who can be ordained and teach from the pulpit is a non-starter. We only ask it because 2,000 years of church history has privileged Paul and ignored John. As I explored at length in my series Clericalism and Women in Ephesus, there were different ecclesiologies in the NT church. Regardless of how we interpret Paul, there is no way to read the Johannine works and conclude that a) ordination was practiced, and b) only men were ordained. The man born blind is the only human teacher in the Gospel of John (9:34), and 1 John couldn’t be more explicit that every Christian can teach based on the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit (1 John 2:18-21, 26-27).

That said, ’ comprehensive article from yesterday prompted me to flesh out something I’ve only explored briefly in note form: Mary Magdalene reverses the role of Adam in the creation garden.

For many, 1 Timothy 2:13-14 is the second most convincing argument for male-only ordination and pastors/elders. The first, of course, is Paul’s command in 1 Timothy 2:12: “It isn’t appropriate for a woman to teach, nor to overwhelm a man, but to be [learning] in silence” (, The Second Testament). If it couldn’t be clearer than that—so the argument goes—the case is closed in vv. 13-14 which “ground” the command in creation history: Adam was first, while Eve was second; Eve was deceived, while Adam was not deceived.

I’m not here to exegete Paul.1 What I want to say takes a different angle: Paul’s command to Timothy can’t be timeless, because the Second Adam came into the new creation garden and changed everything.

Which Garden is Foundational?

While much of the NT builds theologically on the foundation of Genesis 1-3, I believe John gets the credit for being the most comprehensive in echoing the creation garden. We often miss this, though, because of phrases like “Garden of Gethsemane” that we use a lot around this time of year with Easter approaching. While Matthew and Mark reference Gethsemane as the place where Jesus prayed before his arrest and crucifixion (Matt 26:36; Mark 14:32), only John mentions a garden in his passion narrative (kēpos, 18:1, 26; 19:41 [2x]). It would take too much time to trace all of the Genesis imagery sprouting up from those garden references. One more explicit echo, relatively speaking, is Mary Magdalene thinking Jesus was the “gardener” (kēpouros, 20:15). This calls to mind Jewish understanding of Adam as a gardener (see Gen 2:15). But there are many, many more!

Melissa Fields’ summary is spot on:

“John never pens Eve’s name nor even mentions Eden. Yet, from the first words he writes, John evokes Genesis and reveals his new creation theme in Christ. To understand the reversal of Eden in the Fourth Gospel, scholars must appreciate John’s new Genesis.”2

Not only scholars, all Christians “must appreciate John’s new Genesis.”

John is not simply reifying the creation garden. The new creation garden changes everything, including who is first in it. Whereas Adam was “formed first” in the first garden (1 Tim 2:13), “Mary’s being first reverses the order of entry into the Garden of Eden” (John 20:1).3 Given the abundant allusions to Eden, we are invited to question the import of Mary being first. The answer comes with seeing additional allusions to male roles in the OT.

Mary “saw two angels in white sitting where Jesus’s body had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet” (20:12). The angels on either side resemble the angelic cherubim flanking the mercy seat on the ark of the covenant (Ex 25:18-19; 37:7-9).

“This symbolism presents Mary as one who dares to enter into the holy of holies, an act reserved for the [male] high priest, for it is only within the holy of holies that the ark can be seen. In the dispensation of this new creation Mary now assumes that priestly role.”4

The connection to the holy of holies is amplified by the Second Temple book of Jubilees which explicitly connected Eden with Jerusalem5:

“And he knew that the Garden of Eden is the holy of holies, and the dwelling of the Lord, and Mount Sinai the center of the desert, and Mount Zion the center of the navel of the earth” (Jubilees 8:19).

Whereas Eve’s presence in the garden of Genesis 2 is potentially overshadowed by her absence from God’s commission to Adam “to work [the garden] and watch over it” (Gen 2:15), Mary’s presence in the new creation garden cannot be overlooked. As is widely known, the command to “work and watch over” the garden is temple imagery used for priests serving and watching over the tabernacle/temple. So it is significant that Mary gets the first commission which is then shared to all disciples (20:21). Might this even be a mirror image of the shared commission of Genesis 1:28 which is then portrayed as given first to Adam in Genesis 2:15? After all, “the last will be first, and the first last” (Matt 20:16).

As a priest of the new temple-household of God, Mary is unafraid of the angels, unlike the women in the Synoptics.6 And like Moses, she hears the voice of YHWH himself from above the mercy seat (Ex 25:22).

If this holy of holies allusion suggests that Mary hears the voice of Jesus like Moses heard the voice of YHWH, it is fitting that she proclaims the message of the risen I AM. Part of Jewish expectation for the Messiah recalled Deuteronomy 18 and the promise of the Moses-like prophet:

“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him…Then the Lord said to me…’I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him.’” (Deut 18:15, 17-18).

This promise is echoed previously in John 4:19 and 6:14. While John is clearly presenting Jesus as that prophet-Messiah, and while we might assume the naturalness of their shared maleness, what about female Mary?

The Moses-like Apostle to the Apostles

God’s commission to Moses was apostolic, in the sense of the Greek word for sending, apostellō:

“God replied to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.” (apestalken, Ex 3:14; see Ex 3:10, 13, 15; 4:13, 28; 5:22; 7:16).

While I’m not aware of any complementarian argument linking Moses and Adam7, the general complementarian consensus is that male leaders were the normative rule in Israel. So perhaps Moses as the sent prophet of God flows naturally from male Adam created first.

But Mary was first in the garden. Mary saw the holy of holies. She told her brothers everything the I AM commanded her. All of those things were true of men in the OT.

Johannine Reckoning

Complementarian interpretations of 1 Timothy 2:12-15 must recon with John. But they don’t. We have a John-shaped hole in the church. Or rather—because that assumes male-only authorship which I deny—we have a Fourth-Gospel-shaped hole.

I’m hesitant to keep sounding that drum. But when a recent list of resources for this issue and a list of overlooked biblical considerations from The Alliance for Mission and Renewal completely overlook the Fourth Gospel, I feel compelled to pick up my sticks and drum some more.

Quote from Melissa Fields

“The first to draw close to Him after His resurrection is none other than Mary Magdalene. Her encounter with Christ dramatizes the reversal of Eve’s exile and the restoration of the female imago Dei.”8

“[A]ll of the Johannine women can be classified as antitypes of Eve and that this classification signals Edenic reversals in the age of new creation. These reversals exemplify the dynamic nature of the female imago Dei, which must be considered in the complementarian-egalitarian debate. For far too long, biblical womanhood has been defined based on the misrepresentation of the female imago Dei as a static motif bound by fallen creation. I assert that John envisions a restored creation in which men and women work together as ambassadors of dominion in the kingdom of God. Although the eschatological new creation both “is,” and “is to come,” Christian men and women have been restored to their calling as equal image-bearers of God.”9

Question

What do you think? Should the ancient practice of letting scripture interpret scripture lead to us letting the Pauline “Adam first text” of 1 Timothy 2:12-15 trump the Johannine “Mary first text” of John 20:1-18? Or is it possible that we struggle to understand John’s narrative ecclesiology and so take the easy way out through the didactic ecclesiology of Paul?

Melissa Fields gives a brilliant call for further biblical/theological research along those lines:

“future studies could also compare Paul’s use of Genesis (and references to Adam and Eve, in particular) to John’s understanding of the restored imago Dei. Scholars such as Philip B. Payne have grappled extensively with Paul’s texts that seem to impose limitations on women, but a focused comparison of Johannine and Pauline ideals concerning the feminine might still yield novel research outcomes that could impact future discussions concerning complementarianism and egalitarianism.”10

It’s time for reformation when...

There are no wolves in sheep’s clothing, only wolves in no clothing.

There are no public defenders, only wolves dressed up as ambulance chasers.

The Word of God is faithfully preached, the sacraments are rightly administered, church discipline is truthfully practiced, and everything stays the same.

There is an inverse relationship between sermons preached and sanctification.

There is a positive relationship between church planters and sheep being eaten.

Propaganda, Conspiracy, and Deceit walk into a bar, and Truth gets them all drunk on lies.

Sinners empathize with the slogan “empathy is sin.”

After beating up Empathy, robbers dressed up as shepherds walk to the other side of the road to Wolf Law, LLC, retain legal counsel, and swap their shepherd masks for attorney-client privilege.

Pastors file a lawsuit against Empathy for defamation and their attorney persuades the jury that their reputation is beyond repair.

Pastor Pharma celebrates the successful trial of a drug that will inoculate pastors against the deadly toxin of empathy. Certain chemicals in the drug are scarce, and the drug will be limited supply. It was deemed the safest to inoculate as many pastors as possible, as they are on the front lines in battling this epidemic emotion. Pastor Pharma regrets that most congregants will remain susceptible.

There is nothing new to say. No good news, just good olds.

Eschatology has been pressurized into a fossil by time and history.

Eschatology slips into archeology. The fossilized acorn is what it was, is what it is.

Everything is clear—even Scripture.

The Reformation is the only guide for reforming the church.

The voices of dead men speaking about the living voice of God are louder than the living voice of God.

Everyone knows what the reformers did but no one knows what the reformers didn’t.

The tree cut down by the ax of God’s judgment is processed into premium wood and used to create a trophy case for the ax of God’s judgment. Tickets available for supervised viewing.

We can no longer imagine what imagination tastes like. What does that sentence even mean?

“Figure it out” — the burden of our literalistic age. Freedom is a figure of speech.

Freedom of conscience is serving a life sentence for convincing science to follow art.

How desperately we, like Nicodemus, must be born again. Whatever is born of the fact is fact, and whatever is born of the symbol is real.

The wind blows where it pleases. We hear it’s sound, laughing in the leaves, and think the joke’s on Nicodemus.

Quote from Søren Kierkegaard

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think thats just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”

Question

Where do you see signs of gospel aberration? How do you talk to others about those signs when their eyes are blinded and their ears are plugged?

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Words Become Flesh

That’s it. That’s how I do therapy—just three words.

Those three words. But not just that sentence. Because they can be reversed: flesh becomes words.1 Here are some additional thoughts about those three words, in aphoristic form. That is, my thoughts, rather than the thinking of the thoughts.

Words can become flesh.

If words can become flesh, then words are edible. If words are edible, words are digestible. The real question is, can words be defecated? Vomited? Refluxed? If so, then counselors and therapists are gastroenterologists: they treat word indigestion, verbal constipation, logos diarrhea, and ISS (irritable semiotic syndrome).

We are verbivores. We eat words. Good words. Bad words. True and false words. Words with nutrition and words with malnutrition. Even words that choke and poison. But there is no Heimlich maneuver for words. No stomach pumping. Once ingested, they must be digested. If nature doesn’t take its course, home remedies are the only treatment: praying, talking, walking, watching, listening, writing, creating, meditating, reading, feeling, serving, receiving, believing.

We learned that flesh can become words the moment we learned to say, “Owie.”

Flesh can become words, just as Jesus said “Eat my flesh,” and “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”

So you are what you eat.

You are what you eat—unless of course what you eat causes reflux. In that case, you are not what you eat but what you cannot eat.

Spiritual therapy always works through, in, and on the body.

If biblical counseling can’t be described as physical, it isn’t biblical.

I want to be biblical, so maybe I should start calling myself a physical therapist.

Quote from Jorden Brady Loewen

“In the same way our bodies maintain life via proteins, vitamins, and minerals, they need narrative in the mode of stories, thoughts, and imagination. Along with material nourishment, language and narrative establish a gateway into the physiological system of homeostasis, or body regulation.”2

Question

What helps you digest and metabolize words, whether those be the words on a page (ie Bible), from another human, or the words in your head?

For a more reflections on the physicality of language and digesting life, see these posts:

No creature has immediate, unfiltered access to reality. That ability belongs to God alone. Because we humans are finite knowers, accurate knowledge always requires an inspection of presuppositions, the lenses through which we view and come to know. Sometimes, though, we need more than an inspection. Jesus repeatedly critiqued the disciples’ cognitive errors and deconstructed them in order to build them up in right belief. Today this deconstruction is desperately needed in matters of abuse. What follows illustrates that need through one specific presupposition.

“Ladies Lie”

I once heard a pastor say, with reference to sexual assault allegations against a church leader, “When women don’t get what they want, they escalate their allegations.” Meaning, women are likely to make stuff up when their already outlandish claims aren’t believed and acted upon. In defense of this presupposition he named two instances from his near two decades of ministry. Just two. But those were generalized into a general truth about women. I’m pretty sure that is the textbook definition of “prejudice.” How did he arrive at that generalization from just two cases? Probably because he was already predisposed to see women that way. In other words, those experiences didn’t create a presupposition; he saw what he saw because the presupposition was already there. Christians will not respond rightly to abuse while such errant prejudices exist. Sadly, they have quite a history.

The saying “Ladies lie” was expressed by New York magistrate Morris Ploscowe in 1972. According to an article in the New York Times after his death in 1975,

“In 1972, discussing legislation on rape, he observed that the victim’s word was sufficient for a prosecutor to make out a prima facie case, enough to take to a jury, on assault, robbery, fraud and other crimes, but it was not enough for the crime of rape, because, he said, ‘ladies lie.’”

The similarities between that statement from 50 years ago and the statements heard today are eerily similar. But let’s go further back in time and see how prevalent this idea is.

In the mid-17th century, British Chief Justice Sir Matthew Hale wrote that rape is

“an accusation easily to be made, and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, though ever so innocent.”1

Hale’s writings were published poshumously in 1735 and adopted by US Courts. Judges were to give a “cautionary instruction” something to this effect:

“A charge such as that made against the defendant in this case is one which is easily made and once made difficult to defend against even if you think that person is innocent. Therefore, the law requires that you examine the testimony of the female person named in the Information with caution.”2

Why this “cautionary instruction”? An analysis of rape laws was published in 1978 by the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the U.S. Department of Justice. The report states,

“Except for the crime of perjury, the common law has never required corroborative evidence to support a criminal conviction...However, some courts have departed from the common law tradition and established special corroboration rules for rape. These requirements are based on the fear that conviction of an innocent defendant for rape is somewhat likely despite traditional safeguards. As a result of this fear, a few states have required that a person cannot be convicted of rape on the unsupported testimony of the alleged victim.”3

While the stated concern might be due process and legitimate rights of the accused, additional concerns stem from how women are viewed. The 1978 report gives a disturbing quote by American law professor John Henry Wigmore:

“Modern psychiatrists have amply studied the behavior of errant young girls and women coming before the court in all sorts of cases. Their psychic complexes are multifarious, distorted partly by inherent defects, partly by bad social environment, partly by temporary psychological or emotional conditions. One form taken by these complexes is that of contriving false charges of sexual offenses by men. The unchaste (let us call it) mentality finds incidental but direct expression in the narration of imaginary sex incidents of which the narrator is the heroine or the victim. On the surface the narration is straightforward and convincing. The real victim, however, too often in such cases is the innocent man; for the respect and sympathy naturally felt by any tribunal for a wronged female helps to give easy credit to such a plausible tale.”4

The report footnote further states,

“It should be noted that the literature upon which this sweeping statement was based consisted of five case studies from a 1915 textbook and of letters and monographs from four psychiatrists, all dated before 1933, the original year of publication of Wigmore’s treatise.”

In other words, on the basis of bad psychology and a few questionable case studies (definitely not “amply” studied as claimed), it is safe to presume that women are just prone to make stuff up when it comes to sex. That statement from Wigmore was made in 1933, almost 300 years after Lord Hale. And now, almost 90 years after Wigmore, unbiblical attitudes toward women and victims persist. Attorney Veronique Valliere testifies to the prevalence of biased attitudes:

“Time and time again, I encounter groups in public or law enforcement who cite that 50% of claims of abuse are false, even though the research (again) consistently demonstrates that fabricated allegations are by far the minority of claims of abuse — between 2-8%”.5

Of course, these references to biased attitudes come from outside the church. But it’s not difficult to find examples within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Many Bible commentators throughout history have dwelled on the fact that Eve was the first to succumb to Satan’s lies. So Chrysostom in his 9th homily on 1 Timothy:

The woman taught once, and ruined all. On this account therefore [Paul] says, let her not teach. But what is it to other women, that she suffered this? It certainly concerns them; for the sex is weak and fickle, and he is speaking of the sex collectively.

Reasoning from Eve’s gullibility, Jewish commentators placed restrictions on women’s ability to give legal testimony:

In Pirge de Rabbi Eliezer (PRE)…a compilation edited in the Muslim period [16th century]…one of the curses inflicted on women after Eve’s sin was their being deemed unfit to give testimony. Ari Shvat suggests that Eve’s sin was the result of her giving in to the serpents evil persuasion, and since women are easily persuaded and not used to standing their ground like men, they are disqualified from giving testimony…In his interpretation of PRE, Rabbi Eliyahu Etamari explains that since Eve introduced Adam to evil, which includes giving false testimony, it is fitting that she should not give testimony.6

A more well known example of this view of women is Josephus Flavious, who in Book 4.219 of Antiquities of the Jews wrote,

But let not a single witness be credited, but three, or two at the least, and those such whose testimony is confirmed by their good lives. But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex. Nor let servants be admitted to give testimony, on account of the ignobility of their soul; since it is probable that they may not speak truth, either out of hope of gain, or fear of punishment.

The problem of witness motive, as seen above regarding servants, arises frequently in historical discussions of admissible legal testimony. Ilan Fuchs notes this Mishnaic commentary from the 1st-3rd centuries AD:

Said Rabbi Yochanan B. Broka: "a woman or a minor is trustworthy when they say ‘from here this swarm of bees came.’” To which case is this referring to? When they testified immediately, but if they leave and then return, they are not trustworthy because they [might have said so] due to seduction or from fear.7

In other words, women are allowed to provide factual reports only when it just happened. However, if time passes, because women are weaker they cannot be trusted to be honest.

Women are gullible. Women are not to be trusted. Ladies lie.

(At this point, an emotional response along the lines of Psalm 97:10—“O you who love the Lord, hate evil!”—and Romans 12:9—“Abhor what is evil”—would be most appropriate. Or in 21st century vernacular, WTF?!)

Sadly, tragically, we can find references to such attitudes within the church in recent years. On May 31, 2021 Russell Moore wrote to J.D. Greer, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention, to express serious concerns about high level denominational leadership covering up sexual abuse (now exposed by the Guidepost Investigation). Relevant to the question of views of women, Moore wrote the following:

You and I both heard, in closed door meetings, sexual abuse survivors spoken of in terms of “Potiphar’s wife” and other spurious biblical analogies. The conversations in these closed door meetings were far worse than anything Southern Baptists knew —or the outside world could report. And, as you know, this comes on the heels of a track-record of the Executive Committee staff and others referring to victims as “crazy” and, at least in one case, as worse than the sexual predators themselves.

Can you hear the similarity there between what Baptist leaders have said in the 21st century and what John Henry Wigmore said in 1933? These men said victims are “crazy.” Wigmore said as much, but hid it behind esoteric prose: “Their psychic complexes are multifarious, distorted partly by inherent defects, partly by bad social environment, partly by temporary psychological or emotional conditions.” If that is how men view women, it is no surprise that the default presupposition is “ladies lie.” Elisabeth van Houts makes a similar observation about canon law in the Middle Ages:

The question of women’s capacity for stating the truth in the first place was an area of great debate in the Middle Ages. The [Canonists] collectively doubted that women were capable of telling the truth…[and] were unanimous that women lacked strength, physical and moral, and therefore were unfit for more central roles in human affairs. Women’s inferiority resulted from their biological constitution. They were said to be variable and changeable because of the delicacy of their physical constitution and, for the same reason, soft-hearted and yielding. How could women be believed if men saw them in such negative light?8

Deconstruction and Reconstruction

Because the notion that “ladies lie” is a presupposition, a deeply held, unquestioned assumption (and a sinful one at that), merely quoting up-to-date statistics about valid vs. false allegations will not be enough. The sinful mind must be put to death.

When Jesus taught his disciples about the nature of spiritual authority, he did not only give them positive instruction. He also deconstructed their faulty presuppositions:

[24] A dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. [25] And he said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. [26] But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. [27] For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves. (Luke 22:24-27)

See what Jesus does here? It’s the classic “not this, but this” method. On other occasions Jesus limited himself to positive instruction, e.g. Luke 9:46-48:

[46] An argument arose among them as to which of them was the greatest. [47] But Jesus, knowing the reasoning of their hearts, took a child and put him by his side [48] and said to them, “Whoever receives this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. For he who is least among you all is the one who is great.”

But Jesus knows his follows need both constructive and deconstructive education. He knew his disciples had presuppositions about power and greatness from their surrounding culture. He calls attention to that directly and says, “This is wrong. Don’t think like this. Don’t act like this.”

That is how we deal with faulty presuppositions about abuse. Yes, we need to learn truths from Scripture and from quality social science and pyschology. But we also need to point out our errors and confess where we have been wrong. We need to see the history of our ideas and be willing to surrender our cognitive faults. We need to repent of our noetic sin. Only then will we be ready to ingraft truth according to God’s Word.

Quote from Diane Langberg

Question

What friends do you have who are willing to question your presuppositions and by whom you are willing to be questioned? And for my male readers, when was the last time you read a book, listened to a podcast, or watched a message by a woman? Have you paid attention to whether and how you read/listen differently to men vs. women?

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There are increasing numbers of helpers, providers, and organizations offering more hands-on, practical resources for spiritual abuse, and I am so thankful for that. I take a lot of my cues for religious trauma healing from the Gospel of John, which is more imaginative, symbolic, story-driven, and theological. But practical guides and imaginative visions are complementary. So, in honor of spiritual abuse awareness month, I wrote a three-part series looking at John through the lens of Diane Langberg’s three elements of trauma healing: talking, tears, and time.1

I’m going to use those three as a guide to show similar means of healing from religious trauma in the Gospel of John. As Langberg is a trauma specialist, and already has many great books on healing from trauma, I don’t aim to say anything new or better.2 Instead, my hope is to provide imaginative Scriptural grounding for the healing path. If Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus are the Pastoral Epistles, John is the Pastoral Gospel. I trust you will see why by the end, and hope you will be encouraged to return again and again to John’s Gospel and the Pastor to whom he testifies.

As I am reading John in light of Langberg, one might complain that I am just finding what I’m looking for. However, these elements of talking, tears, and time are truly there in the text. Sometimes we just need the right glasses to see what’s there.

Here is Langberg’s summary:

“Recovery involves a reversal of the experience of trauma. Trauma brings silence because it feels like there are no words to really describe what happened. Trauma brings emotional darkness and aloneness because it feels like no one cares and no one could possibly understand. Trauma makes time stand still because we get so lost in what happened we cannot see forward and we lose hope. There are three main things that must occur to reverse this and bring about recovery. All three must happen. Just one of them will not be enough. The three things are: talking, tears, and time.”3

The Divine Word, Human Words, and Trauma

Jesus’ words are powerful, and they amount for about 75% of the Gospel of John. If you use a red-letter Bible, there is hardly a page that isn’t full of those red words. The obvious exceptions are 1) the prologue and John the Baptist’s ministry (1:1-37), and 2) when Jesus is crucified and buried (19:31-20:10). We don’t expect the Word of God to be speaking during those parts of the narrative. But ch. 9 is an unexpected variation from this centering of the words of the divine Word. In this narrative the Word of God becomes silent, as the man he healed is made to face religious wolves who throw him out and scatter him like the sheep of Ezekiel 34. When telling the good news about Jesus, why would John include a story where Jesus is largely absent?

One possible answer is that John’s audience lived that man’s story. Following scholars like J. Louis Martyn, Raymond Brown, and most recently Martinus de Boer4, I believe John’s repeated emphasis on religious persecution and fear of religious authorities suggests that the blind man epitomizes the experience of John’s audience. Demonstrating that position is a topic for another time.5 What’s important here is to imagine being a Jewish Christian suffering from the trauma of religious abuse and the loss of faith community (cf John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2).6

The narrative of John 9 speaks to this dilemma, but indirectly—by example and symbol. I know of no other Gospel narrative that so features a character other than Jesus (once Jesus has been born, of course). After the man’s healing, Jesus is noticeably absent. Standing alone, without even his family to support him, he faces off with religious leaders who are obvious and explicit in their rejection of his voice: “You were born entirely in sin, and are you trying to teach us?” (9:34). But John the evangelist allows this man, an anonymous beggar from the margins of society, to stand in for Jesus and teach his audience about the Gospel’s central questions on the origin and identity of the Son of God (9:17, 25, 30-33). Indeed, aside from the Father (8:28), Son (6:59 et al), and Spirit (14:26), this man is the only character in John who teaches.

Re-telling, from Victim to Survivor

As I’ve read, and re-read, and re-read this story, it looks more and more like a therapeutic trauma narrative of a survivor who has re-told his story many times. I imagine the story we have in John 9 is different from the first time that man told his story. Of course, that’s a hunch that can’t be proved. But given that isolation is the heart of trauma, we might wonder if his initial storytelling resembled the fractured narratives of trauma survivors. For survivors further along the healing path, the story that was initially told in fear and trembling grows into a story told with safety, strength, and conviction. And that is the story we have in John 9.

We’ll get to the second element (tears) next week, but Langberg combines talking and tears and says this:

“Expressing emotions, finding words for them, is also a way of gaining mastery over them. In both talking and tears the victim is staring down the trauma as one might stare down an enemy and say, “I will speak of you; you will not silence me.”7

It’s almost as if Langberg, a psychologist and trauma specialist, is in sync with Bible scholar Colleen Conway, who writes that the healed man

“acts much like Jesus does in his encounters with the authorities [ie by presuming to teach them]. This may also explain the authorities’ final action. They drive him out of their presence because they cannot tolerate the truth which he has so forthrightly spoken—he reminds them too much of Jesus.”8

Conway puts it even more strongly: “the man effectively stands in for Jesus in combating the opposing dark forces in the Gospel.”9 It is thus less strange that the healed blind man is given the second most amount of spoken testimony to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel.10 Like the divine Word, this religious abuse survivor speaks, and his words are powerful.

I imagine it must have been powerfully healing for John’s spiritually traumatized audience to hear this story over and over again. It is the story of the triumphal voice of a religious trauma survivor, and shows what is possible when talking is combined with tears and time. Whether you care for survivors or bear the scars of religious wounds yourself (or both), I encourage you to read and re-read this story to see for yourself how the Spirit has testified to the power of talking and using your voice—using language and words to speak the unspeakable.

Quote from Diane Langberg

Scattered & Found

If you’re looking for a place to heal and connect with other survivors, you might be interested in my support group, Scattered & Found. You can find more info at the link below. If you know someone who might benefit, would you consider forwarding this to them? Here’s what one member said about this group:

“The time spent in this group is precious. I found the community, support, and discussions in this group healing. Reading through the book of John together and sharing stories and perspectives created a safe space for personal growth.”

Question

Do you have someone who will listen to your story and help you put the pieces together? If you sense the need for more professional help, I would love to speak with you. You can reach me via my counseling website, www.aaronjhann.com.

Three years ago I had a 105-minute meeting with two church elders. I recorded the meeting1, but never listened to it. For three years I wanted to review and analyze that conversation. But each time I thought of doing that, I put it off. Not now. Not ready.

When I agreed to share my story at conference in May, I decided it was time. Prayerfully, and with my wife’s support, I listened to and transcribed the recording of that meeting. If you read the transcript yourself, you might wonder why I avoided that episode for so long. Indeed, if you actually listen to the recording, you would say those two men sound nice. Friendly and respectful. No raised voices. No name calling. They gave many explicit expressions of love, care, and friendship.

But this meeting was evil. I felt it then. I feel it now. If you understand the nature of spiritual abuse already, you might draw that conclusion from listening yourself. But to help frame my account of what happened during those 105 minutes, I’m going to start with one of my favorite explanations of abuse.

This comes from Christian therapist Bob Hamp (which I’ve used before to explore John 92).

“the key dynamic of abuse is the inappropriate assignment of responsibility. This is far more devastating and insidious than it may sound at first. First, the victim is made responsible to carry the anger, control, or sexual impulse of their abuser, so the abuse begins. Second, the victim is then blamed for the “incidents” and made “responsible” for the choices and behavior of the abuser. “I wonder what their part was...?” Implication: they are responsible for what happened. Third, they are made responsible for the reputation of the abuser, as both the abuser and others deceived by the abuser accuse the victim of ruining the person’s reputation, instead of recognizing that the abuser has a problem that needs to be addressed.”

That dynamic, wrongly assigning responsibility, is always present in spiritual abuse, and that will help you understand some of my story. In order to tell that story, I need to start with my wife Kristen.

In June of 2020 Kristen was hired to be the director of women’s and children’s ministries for a Presbyterian church on the coast of South Carolina. Actually, she was recruited from across the country. The senior pastor had been our pastor ten years before in California, and when his children’s ministry director resigned, he wanted to hire Kristen. He didn’t advertise the position or consider other applicants. She was the one. And we were excited. We felt like we were moving to work with family.

I had taught Bible studies and Sunday school at that California church, and shortly after we moved to this SC church the pastor asked me to teach a Sunday school class of young families. I did so gladly, and for the next twenty months I taught this class each Sunday, exploring Scripture together, and working to cultivate deeper community. About two months into that role, I asked another young man, Michael, to help me lead this class, especially the social/community aspects. Our friendship grew as we did this work together, and also met every one to two weeks for coffee and mutual discipleship.

All of that changed when Michael became an elder in Spring of 2021. Shortly after that, another new elder sexually assaulted one of the women in our Sunday school class. That assault set off a chain reaction of toxic events and dynamics that would take too much time to tell here.3 The particular story I want to share is situated in that complex web.

The really short version of that web is that my wife, Kristen, insisted on best practice protocol for abuse allegations, and the church’s senior leaders (a small group of elders within the overall session known as the executive committee) chose to fire Kristen because she wouldn’t back down. The senior pastor, Brian, became repeatedly abusive himself during the 11 months between this woman’s report in July 2021 and Kristen’s firing in May 2022. One particular incident is burned in my memory. Brian, Kristen and I were talking in Kristen’s office. Kristen claimed that Brian made some sort of statement to her the previous week. Brian denied saying whatever she claimed he said, and when she calmly insisted that he said it, he erupted in rage: “I will NOT be accused here! I will NOT be put on trial!”

Because of that and a long list of other offenses and grievances, I complained to my friend and now church elder Michael over the phone in March 2022. I told him Brian and the other elders were mistreating Kristen and acting in an unchristlike manner. After this hour plus conversation, I asked Michael to follow up with me after he’d had time to digest what I had shared.

I knew it was a lot to take in. He agreed to circle back with me. But he didn’t. Two months of radio silence, despite my attempts to connect with him and ask him what was going on. I thought we should have been able to work this out one on one, man to man. I kept trying to connect with him, because I was not ok continuing to teach and lead this class together while there was clearly some kind of conflict between us. Eventually he responded by text message. He said he could talk if I wanted to discuss our Sunday school class, but he wasn’t going to talk with me about Kristen and my complaints about her experience. He claimed that I was “unkind” and “offensive” in that March phone call, but said it was “water under the bridge” and refused to talk about it. In response, I offered willingness to own however I had harmed him—ie, assign proper responsibility—if he would only talk with me. I even quoted our Book of Church Order, which has a non-binding section on conflict resolution: “When personal wrongs are too serious to overlook, the parties are required to seek to resolve them privately through loving confrontation and confession.” I essentially invited him to confront me so I could confess. But he never replied to that text message. It’s the last text in our thread on my phone, April 22, 2022. Because he refused to work with me toward reconciliation, I didn’t show up to teach Sunday school the following Sunday. And that got his attention.

He followed me to the parking lot as I walked to my car after the morning service. He asked me if I was going to teach, and I said I wasn’t. He asked why not, and I told him I wasn’t going to get into it right there, but that we could schedule a time to meet and talk at length, as I had been attempting to do for two months. When he kept insisting on getting an answer, I again declined to talk, turned around, and kept walking to my car. He then yelled at me, “You’re so selfish, Aaron!”

I later found out that his reason for being angry with me was having to teach our class without any notice or preparation. Was I selfish and to blame for that? Was that my responsibility?

I didn’t think so then, and I don’t think so now. But I still took responsibility for attempting to repair our relationship, and emailed him a few days later. I wrote to him,

“It is not my intention to stop teaching our class. If you would meet with me it might be possible for me to help you understand where I’m coming from. I would also like to give you the same courtesy. So I stand by my offer and request to meet to see if we can work through whatever it is that has caused this rift between us. If meeting with me one on one is not agreeable to you, would you be willing to meet with a neutral third party? Not saying we need a mediator or anything, just someone to be a witness to our conversation and help keep us in check biblically if needed. Some guys that come to mind are _________, __________, or _________. If that is not agreeable to you either, then please let me know how you can see us moving forward.”

Those three men were in our Sunday school class, and also church leaders: one elder and two deacons. I got an email six days later that Michael would meet with me, but he proposed a different third party, a man named Terry who was a retired pastor but not in any official leadership position. I was skeptical about this choice, but didn’t see any chance of getting a different person, so I agreed. I also asked Michael what his hopes were for this meeting, and he replied: “My hope for the meeting is that peace can be brought about. Terry can serve as a silent witness, yes; but also as an active mediator if necessary.”

I don’t know how Michael planned to determine the necessity of active mediation, but that was clearly Terry’s position from the start. And he was clearly not a neutral third party. I had never talked with him about any of my complaints, but he knew a lot about what was going on with Kristen, presumably from Michael and possibly other elders.

This meeting lasted an hour and forty-five minutes. Terry talked at least as much as Michael and I, if not more. Of the many negative experiences at that church, this is one of the most painful. Because I was made responsible for what wasn’t actually my responsibility. With the transcription of this meeting, I was able to go back over and analyze what happened. Here are just the highlights.

First, Michael told me that I wasn’t going to be teaching anymore, and he asked Terry to teach in my place. Then, Terry explained that it wasn’t appropriate for me to teach while I had an unresolved grievance with Brian and the session. His controlling concern was ensuring that the elders kept control of the church. Terry implicitly accused me of sharing my concerns with other adults in our class and getting them on my side against the elders. I was told repeatedly that the Bible calls me to “submit” to my leaders. I was told repeatedly that God “ordained” and “appointed” these leaders, and that they had “God-given authority” to make decisions about how to lead the church, including handling reports of abuse (not that he used that word to name what was done to that woman). He emphasized the need for “loyalty” to leadership, and the need to prevent and stop any “factions” and “division.” Both Michael and Terry mentioned the need for “peace” in the church seventeen times.

While he once stated his concern to “honor both sides” (meaning Kristen and I on one side, and Brian and the session on the other), and while he once stated the concern for “honoring me and Kristen,” he made four explicit statements about the need to honor and respect Brian and the session. He even used the words “session,” “elders,” and “leaders/leadership” eighty-seven times.4

I realized half-way through that meeting the reason Michael chose Terry to mediate. Terry didn’t have a position in the middle (despite his claim of “not taking sides in this”). He was there to put me in my place, so Michael didn’t have to.

He was there to take the responsibility for my complaints away from the session, and place that responsibility onto me.

He gave three monologues, around six-eight minutes each, about the session’s God-ordained authority, and my God-mandated responsibility to submit to that authority. The only exception to that submission, which he also repeated time and time again, was if the Brian and the session were “starkly unbiblical.” I don’t know how much he knew, or even how much Michael knew, about that abusive elder’s predatory sin. Terry clearly assumed Brian and the other elders were not “starkly unbiblical,” and wasn’t about to ask if and why I believed they were.

(Which, as a side note, they could hardly have been more starkly unbiblical, for they violated Paul’s clear instructions in 1 Timothy 5. They made that perpetrator an elder, in contradiction to 1 Tim 5:22, “Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands, nor take part in the sins of others.” They did this despite Kristen pleading with Brian prior to this man’s appointment as elder that she had reason to believe he was an adulterer. Brian’s response was, “I don’t think so. I know him, he’s a good man.” Oh and by the way, that man chaired the pulpit committee that hired Brian, he was a successful banker, and probably tithed a lot of money to the church. They also violated 1 Tim 5:20, “As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear.” They did remove the elder from the session, but without telling the church. That decision only became public nine months later at the same time that they fired Kristen, which of course they immediately made known publicly. But back to my meeting with Michael and Terry.)

Terry informed me that he and Michael decided he (Terry) was going to teach our Sunday school class in my stead, and that he would teach through 1 Corinthians. He chose 1 Corinthians because it “addresses both divisions of the church…encouraging unity in the first part, but also addresses the purity of the church.” The concern for unity instead of division referred to the “division” Kristen and I had with Brian and the session. The concern for purity referred to the sexual sin of the elder.

While I won’t go as far as saying Terry meant this intentionally, the implication—and indeed, the appearance for my class—was that I had caused just as much trouble as the abusive elder. That elder—who, I forgot to mention, was also technically a member of my class, but hardly ever attended—committed heinous sexual sin, and so 1 Corinthians, especially ch. 5 about the man who had sex with his father’s wife, was especially appropriate for the class to study. Likewise, I (and Kristen) had caused division in the church, and so 1 Corinthians, with Paul’s appeal “that there be no division among you” (1:10), was especially appropriate for the class to study.

That elder was removed from his position for (in the eyes of the all-male session), having an affair. I was removed from my position for complaining about how my wife was being mistreated because she advocated for that man’s victim. We were made responsible for what was not our responsibility. We were spiritually abused. And because we went through that alone, without the affirming witness of our community, we were traumatized.

But the abuse and trauma might be easy to miss if you were a fly on the wall. There was no physical violence. No raised voices. No cursing. No mean words. Just two men with spiritual power making me responsible for the sins of other spiritual leaders.

Quote from The Dynamic of Spiritual Abuse

Scattered & Found

If you’re looking for a place to heal and connect with other survivors, you might be interested in my support group, Scattered & Found. You can find more info at the link below. If you know someone who might benefit, would you consider forwarding this to them? Here’s what one member said about this group:

“You're not alone. Come join and see how not alone you are.”

This week’s post from May 13, 2023 shows how I have personally read the Gospel of John and found my story of spiritual abuse in the story of Jesus.

My family is approaching the one year anniversary of our functional excommunication from the church where my wife worked as Director of Women’s and Children’s Ministries. As I’ve been anticipating that anniversary I’ve also been working on an idea for a book about spiritual abuse recovery through the doctrine of the Trinity. The Gospel of John has been fertile ground for meditations about triune healing for spiritual abuse, and it all started with seeing the dynamics of spiritual abuse in John 9.

What follows is, I hope, a bit of a hermeneutical spiral between the text of John’s Gospel and the text of my experience in an authoritarian church. I admit that some comments require a stretch of the imagination, but I hope and pray it’s with a sanctified imagination.

We begin where the story of the blind man begins, with the disciples’ question. For the sake of narration, I am going to substitute an actual name for this man and call him Nathan.

John 9:1-2 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Though this question comes from the disciples of Jesus, it comes from the same religious culture demonstrated by the Jewish leaders in John’s gospel. The question takes a person, a human created in God’s image, and makes him a matter for theological debate. The context for spiritual abuse is situated in the impersonal, and this has many faces. Categories of thought take precedence over the dignity of God’s image bearers; policy and procedure matter more than persons; control of power has higher value than creaturely worth. As soon as a person is defaced in the mind, any amount and manner of marring is justified.

That’s what happened in our church. My wife and I were seen as disturbers of the peace (an idolized value in presbyterianism if there ever was one). We weren’t seen as persons but instead were considered threats to the status quo.

John 9:8 The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar were saying, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?”

In spiritually abusive environments, people are talked about rather than talked to. There is often a hypocritical focus on forbidding gossip. Leaders will use the accusation of gossip to discount and discredit, all the while talking about people behind their back to spin the narrative.

The personal story most in my mind in reading John 9 involves my friendship with Jason (not his real name), an elder and the co-leader of my adult Sunday school class. We had one 1 hour phone call in March. Jason called me (not the other way around), and in response to his questions I expressed concern about how my wife was being treated by the church’s leaders. As we were about to hang up I asked him to follow up with me after he took some time to digest what I shared. However, I didn’t hear from him for 2 months. In the meantime, he was busy talking to all of his fellow elders, making a case that I should be pushed out of leadership.

John 9:9 He kept saying, “I am the man.”

Leaders in toxic systems don’t listen. Consequently, truth tellers don’t just tell the truth, they keep telling the truth. But not because they are nuisances who just won’t let things go. They are forced to keep on repeating themselves because people aren’t listening.

John 9:14-15 Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. So the Pharisees again asked him how he had received his sight.

John’s comment that Jesus healed Nathan on a Sabbath hints to the reader that the Pharisees’ question is less than genuine. Jesus has already been criticized for healing on the Sabbath (cf John 5:9-10 and 7:23). As the Pharisees debate this alleged miracle, no care is shown for Nathan. Indeed, his miraculous liberation from physical disability didn’t register an ounce of emotion. As Diane Langberg notes,

“Research on power and compassion/empathy has shown that elevated social power is associated with diminished reciprocal emotional response to another’s sufferings. In other words, the more power a person holds in relation to other people, the less empathy they will have.”1

Cold and unfeeling, the Pharisees are there to debate a point of theology. Why? Because Jesus represented a threat to their position as teachers and leaders of the people. A defensive position is naturally prone to go on the attack, which we will see as the story unfolds.

In my own story, Jason and another former pastor eventually sat me down for another 1.5 hour meeting in which I was told I was wrong to criticize leadership. No explanation. No rationale. Just plain WRONG.

Narcissistic systems see negativity about leaders as a threat to the system itself. Image management kicks in, initiating a scaled protocol starting from soft and indirect control, escalating to the eventual use of verbal and physical violence when other tactics fail.

John 9:18 The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight, until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight.

For abusive, authoritarian leaders, eyewitness testimony is never enough. They are blinded by their presuppositions, especially presuppositions about power and women. At this point, it might look like they are just doing a standard unbiased investigation. They might even have believed that’s what they were doing. Just the facts, please and thank you, and that means talking to witnesses, talking to those who can vouch for those witnesses, and showing every bit of skepticism possible in order to squeeze out the real truth.

I was not believed. I told one elder (not Jason), “Our church has a really serious problem with how it views and treats women.” He responded with dismissive anger, showing that not only did he not believe me, he didn’t believe the women I was advocating for. He said, “There are only 3 concrete complaints from women that I’ve heard and I’ve already looked into those and they were all misunderstandings. If you don’t have other specific examples, I can’t help you, and this isn’t really an issue.”

Abusive systems disbelieve whistleblowers, every time.

John 9:19  and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?”

While the overt abuses of power hurt, the manipulative questions aren’t easy to shake off either. This is an insincere question, and the entire interrogation process in John 9 is one long manipulation bent on discrediting the Truth himself.

John 9:22 (His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess Jesus to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue.)

Abusive leaders rule by fear. This was public knowledge. Leaders had told people in their congregation that ideological nonconformity would not be tolerated. Most abusive churches I’ve heard of aren’t this overt with the general membership (although I’m sure some do this explicitly). The threats are reserved for people with more influence whom leadership fears may turn the flock against them.

Toward the beginning of my time leading the Sunday school class, a different elder took me out to lunch to talk about my plans for the class. He told some stories about the class’ history, and at the time I was grateful for the context. All of the stories were about how previous leaders had went on from the class to start their own churches and take people away from that church. It wasn’t until I was removed from my position that I realized this elder was signaling that leadership would not tolerate any dissension, any possibility of using the class for personal ambition. They were already prone to see my criticisms as a threat, possible leverage for me to take away their control of the people.

John 9:24 So for the second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.”

Notice now the three cycles of interrogations. They talk to the man (v. 15-17), and being unsatisfied they talk to his parents (v. 18-23). Then they talk to the man again (v. 24-34). In none of these are they actually after the truth, despite appearances. They have an agenda and will not be dissuaded or diverted. The threat to their power must be eliminated. Now that the parents redirected them back to Nathan, the leaders try to coerce his confession. They do this by appealing to the man’s religious commitment. A modern version of this might be something along the lines of, “You want to obey the Bible, right?” But it’s disingenuous.

In that 1.5 hour meeting I was asked about my commitment to the “peace, purity and unity of the church.” Did I care about those? Then it should be obvious I’m unfit to teach. I criticized church leadership, and that damages the peace and unity of the church (concern for purity seems to always be conveniently neglected).

I was also reminded, quite persistently, of my duty to submit to the elders. Again, they sought to control me by appealing to my personal religious value of obeying God’s Word.

John 9:26 They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?”

These look and sound like factual questions. Sometimes people have a gut feeling that they need to be on the defensive, and subsequently feel confused, because the words being used don’t seem to warrant defensiveness. Leaders will even offer reassurance: “We’re not accusing you, we’re just curious and concerned.”

One of the disingenuous questions I was posed was, “Have you spoken with anyone in the class about your criticisms of the pastor and elders?” On the surface, it’s a factual yes or no question. But the question would never have been asked in the first place apart from suspicion that I had been gossiping about my concerns.

John 9:27 He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”

Aquinas does a nice job of describing Nathan’s awareness of their insincerity:

“This was like saying: “I told you once. Why do you want to hear it again? That is foolish. It looks like you are not paying attention to what I am saying. So, I have nothing further to say to you because your questioning is useless, and you want to cavil rather than learn.” As it is written: “he who tells a story to a fool tells it to a drowsy man; and at the end he will say: what is it?” (Sir 22:8).2

Conversations with manipulative leaders can go on for what seems like hours. Or they keep you talking for literal hours. It’s a game of cat and mouse, and they won’t stop until the’ve trapped you. But when seemingly nice words don’t work, they take a more direct approach, as we see in v. 28.

John 9:28 And they reviled him,

Now the veil is torn back, and Nathan sees clearly what these leaders think of him. When manipulation doesn’t work, and they see their control on him slipping, they shift to tactics with more torque and go on the offensive. The word for “revile” refers to violent verbal insult (cf 1 Peter 2:23, “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return.”)

Earlier I mentioned that Jason didn’t speak to me for 2 months after that 1 hour phone call. Because he was ghosting me, despite my attempts to meet and clear the air, I decided to stop teaching Sunday school. I could not in good conscience stand before our class with Jason beside me, pretending that everything was copacetic. Because he refused to meet with me, I was unable to explain the reason for my decision, and told him one Sunday morning that I wouldn’t be teaching. He didn’t respond with anything more than “Okay” and kept walking past me. However, as I was walking to my van after worship, Jason confronted me in the parking lot. He demanded to speak with me then and there about what was going on, and I politely declined. When he insisted, I told him we could schedule a time to meet, I would not get into it there on the spot, and proceeded to walk to my vehicle. As I walked away I heard Jason shout, “You’re being so selfish!”

When polite words can’t control you, they revile you.

John 9:28 saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses.

Loyalty, when made into an ultimate value, blinds.

Although Jason was not an elder when we first became friends and co-leaders of our class, once he became an elder his loyalty shifted completely to the session. In our conversations he continued to treat me as his equal, until I criticized his pastor and fellow elders. Then his true loyalties became clear. Only, absolute loyalty obscures clarity. The only constant clarity is the absolute goodness of those within the loyalty group.

John 9:34 They answered him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?”

It doesn’t get much worse than that, does it? While men can certainly be the object of disdain (eg the “you’re so selfish!” comment above), in my experience the worst attacks get leveled against women:

“She’s unhinged”

“Crazy”

“Manipulator”

“Childish”

There are many motives behind these verbal abuses, but at root they are attempts to retain or regain control of another. And if leaders are using verbal violence, you can bet there’s a history of prior (failed in their eyes) attempts at control. That is, the extreme violence doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it is merely an escalation of a prideful, controlling heart.3

John 9:34 And they cast him out.

When verbal violence fails, and control must be maintained, abusive leaders escalate to physical violence. Not that they physically harmed Nathan, or that they used physical force to send him out of the synagogue. But casting him out is still an exercise of force, and with physical effects. Whether this was a temporary or permanent excommunication (scholars differ), Nathan was physically excluded from his faith community — which of course meant his entire community.

This is the ultimate means of control: spiritual leaders abusing power to physically banish those whom they have been unable to control by less violent means.

Just weeks after I was removed from being a teacher in my church, my wife was fired by unanimous vote of the elder board. You can read about that in this Christianity Today article. Neither of us were formally excommunicated, but casting out has many forms: shunning; avoidance; silence; telling everyone else to avoid us; threatening other staff that they will be fired if they talk. Oh, and we’ll never forget the senior pastor warning people about my wife, “watch her tears.”

We had uprooted our family in the middle of Covid in 2020 and moved across the country for the sole purpose of planting roots in this church community. Less than 2 years later, we lost everything (with the exception of a handful of faithful friends, without whom we would have probably lost our minds as well). All so the men in charge could retain control they feared losing more than anything else.

In authoritarian systems, when they can no longer control you, they cast you out.

Thankfully, Jesus is fulfillment of Ezekiel 34:11:

“For thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out.”

Jesus is the Good Shepherd who searches for snatched and scattered sheep, finds them, and keeps them in his fold. John 9:35 has been my anchor this past year:

“Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and went and found him.” (The Message).

Quote from Wade Mullen

Question

If you haven’t experienced church abuse yourself, have you taken the time to learn the tactics of abuse so you can recognize it when it’s happening? We have so many helpful books and articles on that today, but I wonder if part of God’s intent in giving us stories like John 9 is precisely that, to show us the hidden tactics of abuse that he knew wolves would use on unsuspecting sheep.

Scattered & Found

If you’re looking for a place to heal and connect with other survivors, you might be interested in my support group, Scattered & Found. You can find more info at the link below. If you know someone who might benefit, would you consider forwarding this to them? Here’s what one member said about this group:

“This group is truly wonderful. It is a safe place to feel seen, heard, and share the scripture together. I highly recommend this group and Aaron Hann’s other services. He’s so knowledgeable, caring, and offers transformational support.”

I haven’t gotten any closer to hopping on Instagram or TikTok. However, while going for a short walk with Toto, Bilbo, and Norbert, I thought about my wife’s amazing animal intuition. She has uncanny ability to pick dogs from the animal shelter. We have had four dogs over the past ten years, each of them adopted from the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). Each time Kristen showed me a picture of the dog on the SPCA website, and each time I said, “No way, you want us to get *that* dog?” Actually, with Toto I said, “That’s not a dog. That’s a muppet.” I could not believe I was looking at a picture of a real dog. But each time Kristen was right. Her vision rewarded our family with a beautiful animal that brought love and delight (not to mention—dogs being dogs—the occasional annoyance and anger and angst).

I thought I would show the before and after pictures of all our dogs as a testament to imaginative vision. Kristen is exemplary in this regard—seeing positive potential and possibility where it can’t be physically seen. As Professor Lupin said of Lilly Potter in The Prisoner of Azkaban, “She had a way of seeing the beauty in others, even, and perhaps most especially, when that person couldn’t see it in themselves.” It’s an ability I want to develop.1

I didn’t intend this week’s Substack to have a New Year’s theme, but feel free to take it that way if it helps. As you look ahead to 2026, do you see the picture on the top, or the picture on the bottom? As Pam Beesly famously said, they’re the same picture.

Dorothy Elizabeth

(Adopted December, 2016; went to live on a farm in Ohio December 2019)

Toto Chesterton (Adopted November 2018)

Bilbo Baggins (Adopted December, 2022)

Norbert Hagrid (Adopted June, 2025)

In 2019 we lived on campus at Wheaton College and could only get approval for one dog as an emotional support animal. Sadly, Toto got chosen over Dorothy. As far as we know, Dorothy has been living out her days on a farm in Ohio. That leaves us with Toto, Bilbo, and Hagrid. Bilbo is the ringleader and loves to herd the other two around in the backyard. Toto is less like his namesake and more like the Cowardly Lion. And Norbert is pretty much the perfect name, because he is a gentle giant who doesn’t know his own strength.

This last picture was a complete surprise. Thank God for cellphones and always having a camera in pocket!

Question

Who helps you see what you struggle to see on your own? How do you remain open to possibility and surprise?

Forgiveness isn’t theoretical. If Desmond Tutu was right with the title of his book No Future Without Forgiveness, then the rebuilding of time that I wrote about during Advent requires that I forgive if I want a future.

Last week’s article, Remembering the Future through Forgiveness, is one of the more radical things I’ve written. I suggested a translation and interpretation of John 20:23 regarding the “forgiveness of sins” that I’ve never seen. While I’ve gotten used to the radical places this radical gospel takes me—whether that be gender/anthropology, ecclesiology, christology, and hermeneutics—that always makes me a little nervous (am I a heretic?!). Feeling not only nervous but unsettled, I continued pondering this passage on forgiveness. It is frustratingly hard to understand, both doctrinally and practically, but I see much hope in Jesus’ words for the never-ending onslaught of ecclesial injustice.

Thou Shalt Not Command Forgiveness

Here’s the dilemma: I don’t think we—Christians generally, the church historically—understand what Jesus meant when he said,

“Whose sins you release have been released to them; whose you grab, have been grabbed” (The Second Testament, ).

We’re so familiar with what the Synoptic Jesus and the apostles say about forgiveness that we assume we know what the Johannine Jesus says here.

For example, in a book on forgiveness L. Gregory Jones makes a mistake repeated throughout interpretive history: “[the] communities of disciples…are authorized and obligated to forgive in God’s name.”2 For this claim Jones cites Matt 16:19, Matt 18:18 and John 20:23. These texts have been conflated for millennia. Matt 16:19 doesn’t mention forgiveness; Matt 18:18 doesn’t mention forgiveness (though the following parable of “the unforgiving servant” does; John 20:23 does mention forgiveness, but it’s not a command! Also, John’s word for “grab” does not occur in those Matthew passages.

There is no way to read John 20:23 and hear Jesus say Christians are “obligated to forgive in God’s name.”

But that’s exactly what victims of injustice are told:

Don’t be bitter; forgive.

Jesus forgave him, so you should forgive him.

Jesus forgave you, so you should forgive her.

We have forgiven him, so you should, too.

Does the Bible say things like that? Of course: “And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ” (Eph 4:32). However, Paul was writing to a specific group of Christians, for whom that command was appropriate. The Johannine Jesus does not issue a command to forgive.3 I’m sending out another reflection on this verse because, from what I can tell, no one talks about it this way. That lack of imperative was designed for John’s audience.

The temple/synagogue authorities issued a command to excommunicate the man born blind (John 9:34). Can you imagine those religious leaders then telling the victim of their abuse that God commanded him to forgive them?

The Johannine community was subjected to abuse, threats of death, betrayal, and the complete loss of their social-religious lives. Abuse destroys agency. Obligating forgiveness is complicit with that destruction. Jesus doesn’t do that. He did not command these disciples to forgive their religious abusers. He leaves the decision up to them. This first word should be in bold, all caps, and red letters:

“IF you forgive.”

Agency restored.

Jesus’ words are liberty, not law.

With the out-breathing of the Spirit (John 20:22), it really is possible to let go of the sins of oppressors. Hearing that as promise and possibility honors the normal human reaction from Martin Luther I quoted at the beginning: “No article of faith is harder to believe than the article which states, ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins.’”4

As I pointed out last week from Thomas’ reaction, “forgiveness after abuse and trauma can also trigger a powerful ‘I will never believe.’ The wall of painful memory is too high to climb. Faith might admit forgiveness is on the other side of the wall, but it cannot be seen.”5

I believe it is crucial here to see Jesus speaking to all of his disciples. Letting go of sins is impossible for the individual victim. But it is possible with community.

Breathing Forgiveness

Whether from exegetical intention or Spirit-led insight or just plain coincidence, the sequence of the last five articles of the Apostles’ Creed has a surprising degree of symmetry with John 20:

I believe in the Holy Ghost (John 20:22)

I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints (John 20:19, 26)

The forgiveness of sins (John 20:23)

The resurrection of the body (all of John 20)

And the life everlasting. Amen. (John 20:31)

Just as there is no church without the Spirit, there is no forgiveness without the communion of saints.6

And that’s why I struggle to believe in the forgiveness of sins. Because the sins I might forgive cut me off from community.

I don’t know yet what “releasing sins” really means. I made a first attempt last week, but it will take community to figure this out: “Whenever that one comes, the Truth-Spirit, he will make a path for you [all] in all the Truth” (John 16:13, The Second Testament).

While talking with a friend yesterday I had an epiphany about this passage in John 20. Notice this sequence:

1. Jesus breathed on them

2. And said, “Receive the Holy Spirit/Breath”

3. “If you release anyones sins, they have been released”

Have you ever held on to something emotionally, come to a point of letting it go, and taken a deep breath in followed by a long sigh of relief?

Spiritual Discipline Trauma

In 2021 I experience revolutionary growth and healing through embodied mindfulness practices like breath prayer and the Wheel of Awareness. It’s hard to describe the quality of my prayer life in a few words, but the quantity tells some of the story. I was regularly spending 30 minutes a day in silent meditation. No reading. No words or long prayers. Just attending to God and the present moment. Spiritual growth and nervous system growth.

It’s also hard to describe that season because it coincided with the early fissures of the eventual earthquake of church abuse. Gradually, the meditation became harder and harder. I stopped altogether during a seemingly-never-ending-process of moving and transitions. It wasn’t until early 2023 that I realized why it was so hard to meditate. The trauma embedded in my body at the same time I was experiencing richly embodied connection with God. Mindfulness in the present became portkeys to the past. Not consciously or visually; the past was more apparent in the difficulty, the resistance to what before was routine and pleasant.

I’ve worked with a therapist on this, but my prayer and meditation has not been the same since. Where before I could comfortably sit in silence for thirty-plus minutes, now I’m lucky if I last three. I hesitate to admit this, because I regularly coach clients through these kinds of practices. I feel shame for not practicing what I preach.

The Communion of Breath and Letting Go

But maybe forgiveness—and the difficulty of believing in forgiveness—is part of the problem/solution. As mentioned in the second Advent essay Figuring Out My Life, my spiritual abuse support group sits together in silence for five minutes each meeting. I vary my mental attention during that time—sometimes using different versions of the Jesus Prayer7, or shifting focus through the five senses, or doing a body scan. But underneath those different mental activities I am always breathing. Not just breathing, but mindfully breathing—breathing with intention and attention.

There is something special in doing this with others.

Jesus breathed, said “Receive [plural] the Holy Breath,” and said, “If you [plural] release the sins of any, they are released.” Maybe “releasing sins” isn’t just forgiveness in the traditional sense, but also releasing the effects of sin among fellow wounded saints.

Breathing out the toxins.

Breathing out the pollution.

Breathing out the bacteria.

Whether or not I have “forgiven” the sins of spiritual abuse, I don’t know. But I think I am letting them go, and I am letting go of the hold they have on my body and soul. With each exhale, there is also the inhale: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit/Breath-filled community of fellow survivors is helping me believe the unbelievable:

Eternal life, time rebuilt, is here, now, even and especially in five communal minutes that seem to last forever (in the best sense!).

I wish I could do more practical unpacking of the second half of John 20:23. Instead, I’ll leave you with a quote, and a brief suggestion: the much-maligned online discourse of spiritual abuse survivors might be a faithful enactment of Jesus’ invitation to hold/arrest/retain sinners.

Quote from Craig Koester

“Holding fast means holding people to account. If there is no accountability, there is no need for forgiveness. If people are not held responsible, then forgiveness can be taken to mean simply accepting sin…To “retain” sins in a Johannine sense involves exposing sin, identifying sin, and holding people to account for sin…Retaining can startle people into seeing the truth about themselves so that they recognize the need for change and hear the call to faith and life…The Spirit continues to confront the world’s sin after Jesus’ resurrection (16:8-11)... The disciples, who receive the Spirit, are also called to challenge the patterns of sin at work in the world. Forgiveness or release from sins is mentioned first in Jesus’ commission to the disciples, since this is the goal of their work. The Father sent Jesus to bring release from sin (1:29; 3:17), and Jesus sends his followers to bring this message to the world. Yet retaining sins by holding people to account is the essential corollary to this, since forgiveness without accountability lets sin continue unchallenged.”8

Question

What do you think, am I a heretic? Do you see how John 20:23 could revolutionize how we advocate for abuse survivors? How survivors navigate the healing journey?

Leave a comment

This final essay in the Advent of Time is longer because I haven’t had time to make it shorter. For survivors of spiritual abuse and for their caregivers and advocates, I think the length and exegetical detours are worthwhile. Here’s the TL;DR: In order to stop time from being arrested after abuse, the church can either let go of the abuser’s sins (in the case of true repentance), or the church can arrest the sinner. In both options, the church comes alongside survivors. Forgiveness is not an individual burden. The church can help repair and rebuild time for survivors.

“If life is deprived of every form of meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time.”1

I quoted that line from Byung-Chul Han in part 2 of this series The Advent of Time. The first stages of healing non-time and non-closure are given in the timely death of Jesus and in the eighth day (see part 3). There is an additional element required for closure so that time to be rebuilt after trauma: sending away sin. Notably, that also occurs on the eight day of reconstructed time.

“I Believe in the Forgiveness of Sins”

“Doubting” Thomas gets such a bad rap. I insist on calling him Traumatized Thomas. Still, he does say “I will never believe” (20:25). But what does he refuse to believe?

We focus on the contrastive “but” in v. 25: “the other disciples were telling him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” But he said to them...“I will never believe.” We assume his doubt only extends to his rabbi being alive after crucifixion.

There is, however, another contrastive “but” in v. 24 that comes first: “But Thomas (called ‘Twin’)...was not with them when Jesus came.” At the risk of over-reading, I’m interested in that “but Thomas.” It follows immediately after Jesus statement about forgiveness of sins (v. 23). Was that also a challenge for Thomas’ faith?

Thomas, like so many of John’s characters, is a representative figure. His characterization resonates with a specific group of John’s audience: those who hadn’t seen the risen Jesus (20:29). The Christians of the late first century Johannine community suffered institutional spiritual abuse. It’s challenging to believing in Jesus as the risen Messiah without physically seeing him. But forgiveness after abuse and trauma can also trigger a powerful “I will never believe.”

The wall of painful memory is too high to climb. Faith might admit forgiveness is on the other side of the wall, but it cannot be seen. That obstacle is also caught up with the fracturing of time which is trauma. But that’s just why Jesus offers forgiveness.

“Forgiveness, as an emphatic act, is a ‘power’ which consists in the ability to let time begin anew, and thus it frees the acting subject from the past, from a temporal burden which tries to pin it down forever.”2

As I put it in Figuring Out My Life, the resurrection of Jesus is pregnant with time. This is more obvious with the eighth day, but the timeliness of Jesus’ risen life also includes forgiveness.3

Let Time Begin Anew

Jesus comes back for Thomas on the eighth day, the eschatological day of the new creation. He shows Thomas his scars. He does this, not just to convince Thomas that he’s alive, not just to show him solidarity—yes, for those reasons, too—but also to jump-start time. We would see this more easily if we “let John be John.”4

By their very nature, scars incorporate the shifting nature of traumatic time:

“the scarred skin surface can be be understood as a trope that entails and evokes a multilayered and convoluted temporality of the past, present, and also the future, insofar as the body continues to carry these marks of disruption.”5

Like the scars of Jesus, forgiveness acknowledges the evil of an oppressive religious system. Indeed, there is some parallelism with forgiveness following “peace be with you” in v. 21, and “put your finger here in my scars” following Jesus’ second “peace be with you” in v. 26. Just as forgiveness acknowledges the wrongfulness of sin, “The scars are also the tokens of recognition that acknowledge the past wounds.”6

Acknowledgement of the past wounds is coupled with the possibility of a new future. Scars look backward as well as forward. Which is just what forgiveness does as well.

“The scarred body [of Jesus]...never obliterates the violence of the cross but also never ceases to put forward the attempt to bring closure to the wounded past.”7

What sin? Whose sin?

The Gospel of John is a story about Jesus that is tailor-made for spiritual abuse survivors. In that tailor-made story, Jesus talks about sin very differently than in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The most obvious differences are:

• Jesus only talks about forgiveness once (20:23).

• He only talks about forgiveness after his death and resurrection.

• He never commands his followers to forgive.

The less obvious difference: aside from 20:23, sin is a feature of “the world,” not Jesus’ followers.

This is typical of literary trauma narratives and stories from socially exiled groups. In John the reality of sin is always associated with perpetrators. The Johannine Jesus never talks about sin outside of his dealings with “the Jews,” who are a representative figure for “the world” of religious persecutors. Sin doesn’t come up at the Cana wedding, with the woman of Samaria, the royal official of Capernaum, with Lazarus and Martha and Mary, etc. There are no parables or dialogues about sin and forgiveness. Whenever sin is mentioned, the religious oppressors are always in view.

I have a separate draft article that shows this by reviewing all of the mentions of “sin” in John. For the sake of time, let’s look at just one section in John 8 where “sin” occurs four times (8:21, 24, 34, 36).

We are used to reading statements like “everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin” (8:34) through a Pauline lens, like systematic theology. Ie, all humans sin, and therefore all humans are slaves of sin. But we must let John be John.

Jesus is in another one of his conflict show-downs with “the Jews.” It is the members of the oppressive system who are slaves of sin. The nature of the sin in context is not only unbelief but oppression. Here are the actions of “the Jews”:

• They persecute Jesus (5:16);

• They threaten anyone who talks about Jesus (7:13);

• They try to kill Jesus (7:19);

• They demonize Jesus (7:20);

• They try to violently seize Jesus (7:30);

• They try to arrest Jesus (7:32);

• They persist in wanting to seize Jesus (7:44);

• They pridefully and self-righteously judge dissenters (7:47-52);

• They contradict their claim to Abrahamic lineage with their murderous intentions (8:37, 40, 44);

• They demonize Jesus again (8:48, 52);

• They try to stone Jesus (8:59).

All of that violence, highlighted here but present throughout the Gospel, is what John means by “the sin of the world” which the Lamb of God takes away (1:29). “The way of the world is the way of violence and tribalism and domination.”8

When we get to the first and only mention of forgiveness of sins in John 20:23, all of the earlier narrative characterizations of sin lie behind it. This must influence our interpretation. How would John’s audience naturally understood Jesus’ words here? For oppressed and traumatized communities, sin is seen in the oppressor first and foremost. To do otherwise—to equalize (sin-leveling), or worse, to accuse the accuser—is to repeat the very dynamic of abuse.

Forgiveness, according to the Johannine Jesus, is only appropriate where evil and wrongdoing have been named. Not superficially. Not in a public “mistakes were made” apology. No, the naming must be thorough. Exhaustive and, in many cases, exhausting (ie the cross).

Additionally, forgiveness is only appropriate where the evil has been healed. Jesus doesn’t offer forgiveness from the cross with his wounds still open (cf Luke 23:34). Forgiveness, as a matter of closure, comes when the wounds have closed over—or at least started to close—with new skin.

What is forgiveness?

Forgiveness is a divine reality. But it is not a divine command. There is no “thou shalt forgive.” No “forgive seventy times seven.” Instead, it is a non-coercive invitation: “If you forgive.”9

With this invitation to forgive sins, the focus is not the sin of disciples but the sin of the oppressive world. That is what is being forgiven. That perspective might also lead us to a more nuanced translation of the Greek word here for forgiveness, aphiēmi.

Of the thirteen times John uses aphiēmi outside of 20:23, twelve of them are connected to themes of conflict, danger, and safety.10 Here are a few examples (translation of aphiēmi noted by italics):

• In contrast to the Father who “has not left me alone” (8:29), the wage-taker (ie hired hand) “leaves the sheep and runs away when he sees a wolf coming. The wolf then snatches and scatters them” (10:12);

• Jesus predicts that his disciples “will be scattered” and “will leave me alone” (16:32);

• To keep them from being scattered, Jesus does the opposite of the wage-taker when the wolves come: “if you’re looking for me, leave these [disciples] to go away” (18:8).

As David Ford puts it, many words in John have both a plain sense and a deep plain sense. Translating aphiēmi as “forgive” in 20:23 when all 14 prior uses are translated as “leave” obscures the deep plain sense: “if you leave / let go the sins of any, they are let go.”11

Arresting the World

This deep plain sense helps with the second half of v. 23 which so many translations bungle. Eg, the NIV has “if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (cf also CEB, CEV, ESV, NLT). But v. 23b uses a completely different word, krateō, which never means forgiveness! It literally reads “if you retain any, they are retained.” The main interpretive question is, what is being retained or held onto? If it’s “the sins of any,” then it could be translated “retain the sins of any,” which could mean “withholding forgiveness” (cf ESV).

Sandra Schneiders provides a helpful literal translation showing the parallel structure of v. 23 (a) and (b)12:

an tinōn                aphēte             tas hamartias        aphientai autois
Of whomever      you forgive    the sins                they are forgiven to them  

an tinōn                kratēte                                          kekrantēntai
Of whomever      you hold fast                               are held fast

Schneiders argues that the object of “hold fast” is the “whomever” individuals rather than the sins of those individuals. She also notes that “forgive” is aorist, “indicating a punctual act),” while “hold fast” is present, “indicating, as is very common in John, an ongoing active behavior.”13 Her conclusion is that the forgiven members of the community are, once forgiven, held fast continually within the community.

But this ignores the patterned usage of sin and aphiēme outlined above. When put in the context of oppression, violence, and protection against violence, krateō has a stable meaning: arrest. In a neutral/positive sense, one can krateō, ie “hold on to,” teaching and tradition.14 However, when people/beings are held on to, it is to restrain them with force, like the angel who held/retained “the dragon…and bound him for a thousand years” (Rev 20:2).

In Matthew and Mark, krateō is the main verb used for the arrest of Jesus.15 Surely it’s no accident that in John those who arrest Jesus are “the Jews” and the Romans, ie, “the world.” In John, arrest is the logical opposite of letting someone go (cf 11:48).

It is superb irony, so fitting of John, to hear Jesus saying, “If you let go of the sins of worldly evildoers, they are let go; if you arrest worldly evildoers, they are arrested.” Jesus is giving his followers permission to stop violent sinners from continuing to violate the sheep.

In order to stop time from being arrested after abuse, abusers need to be arrested.

I don’t mean the church should be wielding the power of the state. Although criminal arrest should happen to spiritual abusers far more often than it does (ie, clergy sexual abuse), the “arrest” of John 20:23 parallels the letting go of sin, so this is a spiritual/relational reality. Which is to say, communal. Both of the verbs in 20:23 are plural, addressed to the community as a whole. Johannine “arrest” should never look like abuse (cf John 18:10, 36), but I don’t think that precludes the use of social force.

Just imagine what the wage-taker of John 10:12 should have done instead of “leaving”—again, aphiēmi—the sheep to the wolf. The Good Shepherd’s “laying down his life” means that shepherds should risk their lives to protect the sheep, as explains. What is the most natural image of such life-risking protection if not fighting off the wolf?

That isn’t just a calling for pastors. It’s for all disciples. The healing of time offered in forgiveness and the scars of Jesus requires a community.

“A community whose members—the victims and the guilty—jointly acknowledge the existence of the rupture—to-that-point only remembered by the victim—serves to restart a process of living in the present for an unencumbered future.”16

Both (a) the communal act of letting go of sins—presumably in the case of a repentant sinner—and (b) the communal act of stopping the sinner from being able to continue harm involve acknowledgement of the harmful sin. Time remains frozen apart from that acknowledgement. In neither case is all of weight on the survivor(s). The church can help repair and rebuild time on their behalf.

Prager mentions acknowledgement by both victims and the guilty. John doesn’t seem to hold out much hope of that acknowledgement coming from the worldly religious system. But I believe there is an imagined acknowledgement. All throughout the Fourth Gospel, Jesus is relentless and ruthless in ascribing blame to the abusive leaders.

Imagining Repentance and Truth

In his masterful study of John through the lens of trauma, Edward Wong notes the common feature of imagined retribution in trauma narratives.

“Visions of retribution and progression are often intertwined. Trauma carriers oscillate between temporalities as they interrogate the past, present and future. They appropriate and reorient their present perceived reality of suffering by claiming the injury and demanding retribution while cathartically striving for an alternative, resilient future.”17

Commenting on the most famous verse in all the Bible, John 3:16, Wong notes that “what the text says and how it functions can be differentiated to some extent.”18 Read in light of the entire gospel narrative,

“God’s love and Jesus’ salvific mission presented in these texts are also retroactively wrapped in retributive visions of exclusion and subjugation. The text leads its post-Easter readers to the understanding that only those who continue to express their faith in the crucified Jesus will have “eternal life,” while the rest are subject to divine condemnation.”19

This is a challenging perspective. But when we see the condemnation of unbelievers in 3:18-20 in light of sin always referring to oppressive systems, “then Jesus’ words and the text’s claims make sense if unbelievers are perceived as part of the circle of perpetrators in a post-traumatic epoch.”20

Whether or not the abusers will tell the truth about their wrongs, while possible, is unlikely. Those who abuse power can’t see truth when it’s talking to them face-to-face (John 18:38). So acknowledging the truth is also unlikely. But that doesn’t mean there can be no acknowledgement and telling of the truth. It’s right there in the Word of God, narrated for survivors of spiritual injustice.

Conclusion: Communal Time Stitchers

That is what eucharist offers on the eighth day. Miraslov Volf suggests that Christians and churches should think of eucharist not only with reference to personal sin but also to being sinned against. Eucharist can be “a lens through which to view memories of wrongs suffered.”21 Survivors can partake communion in this way on their own. But they shouldn’t have to. The family of God must help stitch the wounds of religious abuse. “As the Father has sent me, even so am I sending you,” Jesus said (John 20:21). Jesus was sent to re-stitch time through his scars, and he sends his brothers and sisters to do the same.

Quote from Jeffrey Prager

Question

How might church assemblies acknowledge the injustice perpetrated against victims of abuse? Trevor Laurence, in his book Cursing with God, created a liturgy for a corporate service of imprecation in which worship focuses on Scripture’s imprecatory prayers for justice and judgment. Perhaps such liturgical worship has the power to enact what Jeffrey Prager describes above as the creation of redressive communities.

“If my theory’s right we’re running out of time, so if you’re planning on resurrecting any time soon, now, now is the time.”
Lucas, Stranger Things 5, “Chapter Two: The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” 

Like clock work, this is the time of year that Christian resources for the liturgical calendar proliferate. It’s true—many Christians are edified in many ways through the rhythms of the church year. I don’t want to take away from that. I’m just a voice in the wilderness writing for those cast out by the controllers of the calendar. I believe Lucas Sinclair from Stranger Things is on to something: trauma survivors are running out of time, and what they need is resurrection time.

Here’s the TL;DR: Jesus replaces the annual cycle of religious time with the time of the eighth day. The liturgical calendar—and one’s corresponding experience of religious time—is all too easily corrupted through institutionalism and clericalism. The Johannine Jesus doesn’t redeem the calendar. He transcends it. And he invites his followers to feast on his transcendent time.

Call me a biblicist, but I can’t find the liturgical calendar anywhere in the Bible as a source of hope and life. Maybe it can be derived, like many other doctrines, by “good and necessary consequence” from Scripture (WCF 1.6). But if it is to be inferred anywhere, it would be the Gospel of John, “the most ‘liturgical’ of all the Gospels.”1 But the liturgical nature of John is subversive: the Johannine Jesus deconstructs the Jewish liturgical calendar. He offers a different kind of religious time to fearful and hurting disciples. After describing John as “the most liturgical,” Alexander Schmemann observes that “the risen Christ appears after eight days (John 20:26).” What’s going on with that connetion?

This is little known today. Church history might be partly to blame, for Protestants at least. Some Bible translations also share in the guilt. For example, the CSB, NIV, and NRSV say Jesus’ second appearance in John 20:26 happened “a week later.” But it literally reads “And after eight days the disciples were again inside.” Have you ever asked why John counts that period of time as eight days?

If you’re like me, the answer is “no.” You might wonder, though, why I’m bothering to ask the question. As with previous posts in this series, the goal in asking that question is utterly practical. But the journey to the answer is less direct. If you can stick with me, we’ll get to the practical—how survivors understand and experience time remade in the time-torn world of religious trauma.

The Eighth Day

Mary Coloe explains that “eight days later” puts this on the Sunday following the resurrection, “since the beginning and end day of a period of time are both counted. This deliberate time frame, “eight days later,” indicates that this scene is to be understood against the liturgical background of the community.”2 We must remember that the gospels are not just factual records but narratives framed for specific communities. If John was giving us bare history, 20:26 could read like 20:1: “On the next first day of the Sabbaths.”3 Instead, the “eight days later” is intentional. Coloe continues,

“In time the terminology of the “first day” shifted to the “eighth day” to reflect Christian belief that they were living in the new eschatological age. The “eighth day” terminology first appears in Christian literature in the Epistle of Barnabas (ca. 95-135 C.E.).4

Once I started looking, I was shocked to see that this “eighth day” theology is everywhere in the early church. Tertullian, writing around 198-220 AD, noted that “it was already well-known by pagans that Christians have ‘a festive day every eighth day.’”5 Later patristic writers like Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and Augustine developed complex theologies of time using the eighth day both with reference to circumcision/baptism and to Sunday/The Lord’s Day.6 The eighth day was central to their Christian imagination.

Just one of these many references from Augustine will have to suffice. Notice how Augustine weaves time in this sermon from around 394, shortly after being ordained to the priesthood:

“It’s one thing, you see, while times still pass, to rest in the Lord, which is what the seventh day, that is the sabbath, signifies; quite another to transcend all times and to be intimately and endlessly united to the architect of all times, which is what is signified by the eighth day; this, by not recurring in the same cycle as the others, indicates that it bears the mark of eternity.”7

Notably, this theology of the eighth day would not exist without John. It doesn’t occur anywhere else in the NT. While there are seeds in the OT in the command to circumcise sons “at eight days old” (Gen 17:12), it isn’t explicit until 2 Enoch in the 1st century BC:

“And I appointed the eighth day also, that the eighth day should be the first-created after my work, and that the first seven revolve in the form of the seventh thousand, and that at the beginning of the eighth thousand there should be a time of not-counting, endless, with neither years nor months nor weeks nor days nor hours.”8

The Fathers used the eighth day as transcending this-worldly time similarly to what we see in Barnabas and 2 Enoch. But can we trace that concept to the NT witness of John? And is it even relevant to the spiritually wounded?

The Church’s Only Feast

In his book Introduction to Liturgical Theology, Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann explains that the early church “transposed” the Jewish year and kept the rhythm of time through annual festivals. In the fourth century this tradition developed with “the multiplication of festivals” caused by “the Church’s need to replace the pagan festivals, to carry out the new missionary task which was suddenly set before her.”9

Schmemann quotes Jean Daniélou to explain this:

“‘There was a need in the now Christian Empire,’ writes Daniélou, ‘to replace the old pagan festivals with Christian festivals which would answer the demand basic in every society for holidays celebrating the most important moments in natural life. Clearly this kind of festival was unknown to early Christianity. For it the end of time was felt to be at hand. Baptism introduced each person into the only Feast—the eternal Passover, the Eighth Day. There were no holidays—since everything had in fact become a holy day.’”10

Daniélou says Christians of the first century didn’t see need for the church calendar that developed later. That may be the case. What’s missing is why they didn’t need it.

The Johannine Jesus was physically present to the disciples on the “first day” and on the “eighth day.” On the eighth day Jesus shows up again for a specific individual who represented the original audience of John: Traumatized Thomas.

It is on the eighth day that later disciples struggling with faith after time-fracturing trauma can see Jesus by faith (John 20:29).

These Jewish Christians had lost the religious time which the annual festival cycle provided. Then the weekly time of Sabbath was violently torn away from them. Could that be why John’s Gospel creates distance from both the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) and Christian Lord’s Day (the first day)?

Re-Imagining Time

Trauma operates by association. We remember the future based on the past. If past Sabbaths were marked by pain and fear, then future Sabbaths are tainted. The eighth day promises transcending the weekly rhythm of this age.

The practical import of the eighth day is as practical as imagination. Which is to say, infinitely practical.

Jesus “creates the world by naming anew…The voice that names enables us to imagine the world differently. . . .John is drawn to Jesus because Jesus possesses this imaginative power of naming, the power to define what is…John’s book is an extended naming of a re-imagined world, a new vision.”11

Because religious trauma associates pain with promise, names matter. Perhaps Sunday can be redeemed for spiritual abuse survivors by calling it the Eighth Day. After all, Sunday—ie ‘the venerable day of the Sun’—as a day of rest was a novelty institutionalized by Constantine.12

There is an “initial incomprehensibility” in “truly novel language” and “a new way of speaking.” But “a new vocabulary is a tool for doing something that couldn’t be envisioned earlier.” New vocabulary “wins our hearts not because it is more true than the old entrenched vocabulary but because given our needs, it is more compelling than the old.”13

My wife and I are returning to church during Advent. But Advent time isn’t what I’m finding healing. It’s eighth day time. It can’t be perceived or experienced in the rotations of the earth or the cycles around the sun. Nor is it something for which we must wait.

Time has already been raised and rebuilt in the risen Son: “Destroy this temple [ie time], and I will raise it up in three days.”

We no longer need to be hungry for time. “If anyone eats of this bread he will live forever” (John 6:51).

We eat eternity in the blood and bread of Jesus’ words. This is the celebration of the eighth day.

In other words, it’s a celebration of realized eschatology. Let’s make the eighth day great again. It’s more biblical than Advent and Christmas and Easter:

“In the mind of the early church these three [the ekklesia, the eucharist, and the eighth day] were so integrally interrelated as to be perceived as three aspects of a single experiential reality.”14

Quote from Alexander Schmemann

Next week for the final essay in this series, we’ll consider how Jesus’ scars realize this eschatological renewal of time. It’s not just that Jesus appears to Traumatized Thomas on the eighth day. We must also see and hear how Jesus appears on the eighth day.

Question

What do you think, should we bring back “the eighth day” to our Christian vocabulary? What might it do to our imagination of the rhythms of time to talk about going to church on the eighth day?