This following article was originally published on the Center for Pastor Theologians website.

It’s time for evangelicals to update the way we talk about false teaching and false teachers. Specifically, we need to reevaluate our criteria for labeling false teachers as such.

The recent podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill has evangelicals revisiting the drama (and trauma) of pastor Mark Driscoll’s ministry in Seattle. As a former Driscoll fanboy, this series has given me a lot to process. For instance, I’ve been wondering why some are quick to identify someone like Joel Osteen as a false teacher but hesitant to do so with Mark Driscoll. Some evangelicals are, it seems to me, fairly quick to assign the label “false teacher” to those with whom we disagree. Recently I’ve seen this label casually re-applied to Rachel Held Evans (God rest her), and this in juxtaposition to Mark Driscoll. This grieved me, and not because I feel personally aligned with Evans. In many ways I don’t. But this also made me ask: What are our criteria for assigning the label “false teacher”? Are these criteria “biblical”? Are we applying them consistently?

To put it simply, what makes a false teacher false?

How to spot a false teacher

My theological and church education taught me to identify false teachers by their doctrine. One New Testament passage that clearly teaches this is found in 1 John.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. (1 John 4:1–3)

We may rightly conclude from this passage that an appropriate marker of true gospel teaching is an orthodox confession of the Son’s incarnation. We can also generalize this principle. Other central and historic Christian teachings serve as markers for the authenticity of gospel proclamation. So, teachers who explicitly deny such core tenets as the doctrine of creation, the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, or the bodily resurrection should be labelled as teaching a false gospel.

However, this passage may also be read to imply that any teacher with orthodox Christology is a true prophet. That is to say, true doctrine is the definitive mark of a true teacher. When evaluating the ministries and teaching of pastors, then, doctrine should be primary. Other issues––methodology, personality, even motivation––are secondary. Indeed, we seem to see this way of thinking authorized by the Apostle Paul in Phil 1:15–18.

Is this doctrine-first principle biblical? In a sense, yes. I mean, I quoted bible verses above, right? However, I would argue that this principle in isolation is not representative of the New Testament picture of false teaching and false teachers. Even more importantly, when this emphasis on doctrinal faithfulness is separated from the rest of the New Testament’s teaching, it becomes dangerous.

What does Jesus say?

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns against false teachers. But, in doing so, he says exactly nothing about their doctrine or the content of their teaching. Rather, he says: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” Let’s pause for a moment and consider what might serve as “sheep’s clothing” for false teachers. Is the title “pastor” a type of sheep’s clothing, a false assurance of the divine authorization of a person’s teaching ministry? Can someone’s orthodox theology also serve as a type of sheep’s clothing, creating a smokescreen around a leader’s sinful and abusive behavior? Jesus goes on:

“You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.” (Matt 7:15–20)

Like John, Jesus provides a test for determining who is a false prophet. But, unlike John’s test, Jesus’ test is not doctrinal. Instead, Jesus says that you will know false teachers by their fruit.

What is ministry fruit?

It’s worth taking a moment to clarify what Jesus means by “fruit”. I spent much of my formative years attending megachurches led by prominent celebrity pastors. These men and their ministries enamored me. It was exciting to be part of what felt like a genuine movement of God led by a uniquely gifted and anointed man of God. If you have spent time in these spaces, you know that it is not uncommon for leaders in such ministries to describe growing attendance, meeting budget, baptisms, etc. as “gospel fruit” of the ministry.

I’m not suggesting that there’s no biblical precedent for describing people, new believers as the yield of a minister’s work (e.g. “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few” or “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth… you are God’s field”). However, this is clearly not what Jesus has in view with his use of “fruit” in Matthew 7.

It is important to point this out because it is not uncommon for defenders of influential ministers and ministries to say something like “look at the fruit!” when their institution or leader comes under critique. This logic seems to imply that un-Christlike behavior can be dismissed (or worse, justified) by the growth of the ministry and the addition of new converts.

Let’s be clear. Nowhere in scripture do the biblical authors adopt this logic. Note that John says every spirit who confesses Christ’s coming in the flesh is from God. He does not say every human teacher with orthodox Christology should be viewed as a true shepherd. Similarly, Paul rejoices in the preaching of the gospel, even when it is done for selfish ambition. But this falls far short of authorizing such gospel ministers as such. Indeed, in the same passage Paul goes on to encourage his readers to live a life worthy of the gospel (Phil 1:27).

Now, back to the Sermon on the Mount. Interpreting Matthew 7 as a defense of un-Christlike teachers makes the passage say the opposite of what Jesus intends. This is not about excusing Christian ministries from wrongdoing because of their “good” fruit. This is about warning us to avoid teachers when we they produce bad fruit.

If the fruit of a minister’s life is bad, Jesus tells us very clearly that this means he is a wolf, not a shepherd.

Gospel Teaching and Gospel Living

The fact is that the New Testament shows us two distinct (though not unrelated) ways of identifying a prophet or teacher as “false”. The first has to do with the prophet’s message. The second has to do with the prophet’s life.

We should remember that there’s more than one way to deny the faith. We can deny the gospel through a denial of the true and biblical doctrine authorized by Christ and given to the apostles. But we can also deny the gospel with our lives, even as our theology remains apparently orthodox––even as we continue to wear sheep’s clothing. If someone fails to care for the poor, she has denied the faith (Matt 7:21–23). If someone fails to provide for the needs of his household, he has denied the faith (1 Tim 5:8). If the fruit of someone’s life or ministry is not in keeping with the fruit of the spirit, he has denied the gospel.

Yes, being a heretic makes you a false teacher. But being a jerk also makes you a false teacher.

If there’s anything we can learn from these days of evangelical scandal, we must learn to hold ourselves and our leaders to a higher standard. For all the rigor that many apply to safeguarding doctrine, we would do well to take Jesus’ words seriously and apply this same rigor to our evaluation of would-be Christian leaders’ character.

True shepherds are marked by right doctrine and by the presence of the fruit of the Spirit in their lives. It must be both. This is non-negotiable. This is exactly what Paul says to Timothy when he writes, “keep a close watch on how you live and on your teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim 4:16). Tragically, many hearers have been lost because of the wicked behavior of pastors. This absolutely includes sexual scandals, but it extends far beyond this.

Pastors are to be characterized by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

To put just one example simply: If a man is unkind, he is unfit to be a pastor. And if a characteristically unkind man is a pastor, we should heed Jesus’ warning and label him as a false teacher, a man who has denied the gospel by his way of life.

So… Is Mark Driscoll a False Teacher?

When an unqualified man occupies a pulpit or a position of leadership in a church or ministry, he is a false prophet. The ministry qualifications found in the New Testament should serve to prevent us from placing false teachers in positions of leadership. In the Pastoral Epistles, as just noted, Paul encourages Timothy to keep watch on his way of life and on his teaching. Paul also invites this type of scrutiny for his own life (2 Tim 3:10).

I bring up Mark Driscoll only to illustrate the point I’m trying to make in this article. By the 1 John 4 (doctrinal) test, is Driscoll a false teacher? Many will argue, no. By the Matthew 7 (fruit/character) test is Driscoll a false teacher? In my estimation, the answer is clearly yes.

And we should subject our leaders and teachers to both tests. Evangelicals have all too often prioritized the doctrinal test at the expense of the character test. But character and doctrine are not so easily abstracted from one another.

This is difficult and painful. Indeed, it’s hard for me to face this reality as I think about the way I admired Driscoll and was deeply influenced by his ministry as a young man. I was blinded by his charisma. The apparent orthodoxy of his teaching led me to view many of the extra-biblical and unbiblical aspects of his ministry as gospel truth and blessed by God.

It’s easier to label someone outside our theological tribe as a false teacher because of their doctrine than it is to label someone inside our tribe as a false teacher because of their conduct. But Jesus is clear. We shall know false prophets by the fruit of their lives. This is Jesus’ leading criterion. And it should be ours as well.

The world is watching, and churches are hemorrhaging the converts that were once described as the “fruit” of successful ministries. When un-Christlike leaders are elevated and platformed and allowed to continue in ministry, people are hurt. And many lose their faith. This is the true legacy of all too many “successful,” “fruitful,” ministries.

A good tree cannot produce bad fruit. If we are willing to describe Joel Osteen as a false teacher––as conservative evangelicals regularly do––Jesus calls us to say the same for Mark Driscoll.

A “Meek” Newsletter update:

I’ve been teasing on my Substack notes about a forthcoming article on the work ‘meek’ – Greek: πραϋς/praüs. That piece is still in the pipeline, but it’s taking longer than I thought it would. Turns out reading through 500+ instances of a word’s use in ancient texts is a long and pretty monotonous task. Also, the summer months with three kids home and everything else going on was… a lot. Just wanted to to flag that the meekness writeup is still coming! If you aren’t aware of what I’m talking about, here are a couple notes to give a vibe:

Subscribe if you’d like to see that article when it drops – and thanks for your patience!

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I recently had the privilege of preaching a sermon at the church my family and I attend just outside Chicago. It was week two in a four-week summer series on the book of Ruth. I was slotted to preach chapter 2, which narrates Boaz and Ruth’s meet cute.

This wasn’t my original intention, but Boaz’s introduction as a “worthy man” in verse 1 gave me an opening to structure the sermon around godly masculinity. A “manhood message” was not my vision or the senior pastor’s when he added me to the preaching calendar, nor was timing near the release of my book Men of Virtue. He and I talked about it and simply decided to blame the happenstance on the Holy Spirit.

I hadn’t done any study/reading on Boaz while writing the book, but preparing this sermon made me wish I had! Boaz doesn’t rank especially high on the list of manly men in scripture, but I’m completely convinced after preaching this that he deserves far more good press than he gets.

So, to that end, this article is an adapted version of the sermon I preached earlier this month.

A Worthy Man in a Worthless Generation

If you’ve had the displeasure of reading the book of Judges recently, you’ll know that this is not a happy time in the history of the land. God has given the Law but godlessness and lawlessness prevail, with numerous examples in the book of egregious idolatry, petty warfare, and violence against women. The famous refrain of Judges serves as a summary descriptor for this era: “There was no king in Israel, and everyone did as they pleased.”

The book of Ruth, on the other hand, is a story of how the remarkable faith (of Ruth) and the ordinary faithfulness (of Boaz) prevail in this chaotic moment in history. The contrast with Judges is striking.

This is worth highlighting because, frankly, there are more than a few parallels to our own day: godlessness, chaos, political instability, uncertainty, etc. In times like this, it’s natural even for people of faith to wonder whether God is at work, whether he will live up to his promises to provide for their needs and to bless and reward their obedience.

The book of Ruth is not a guidebook for how to find a godly spouse. Nor is it a handbook for “biblical” femininity or masculinity. That being said, Ruth chapter 2 does direct our attention to the righteousness of a specific man, Boaz, along with his behavior towards a specific woman, Ruth.

At this point in the story, Naomi has just returned to Bethlehem with her Moabite daughter-in-law. Both women became widows in chapter 1 and are now returning to the land of Israel. Chapter 2, verse 1 reads:

Now Naomi had a relative of her husband’s, a worthy man of the clan of Elimelech, whose name was Boaz.

Here we meet the final main character of the book, Boaz, who is introduced as a relative of Naomi’s dead husband, a detail that will become especially relevant as the story goes on.

The phrase used to describe Boaz is ish gibor chayil, which, if you were to translate it literally, could be taken to mean he is a man of great wealth or a mighty warrior. Ish is the generic word for man/husband, and gibor often carries an the implication of being great or a mighty. The third word, chayil, likewise could refer to strength of armies or riches.

However, in the context of the story, Boaz is neither a warrior nor extravagantly wealthy. He’s just a guy who owns a field and has some servants. There are no further military connotations in the immediate context or anywhere here or elsewhere in the book. Nor do we see signs of the hyperbolic wealth attributed to other Old Testament characters like Abraham, Job, or Solomon.

In our culture and many others throughout human history, male greatness is associated with physical prowess, strength in battle, or financial success. And, to be clear, we certainly see examples of all of these in the Old Testament. But Boaz is neither remarkably wealthy, a warrior, nor an impressive physical specimen.

He’s not some great leader or king holding court. He’s the ancient equivalent of a small business owner, cultivating the land and living in a small village in Judea.

Boaz does not conjure up associations with William Wallace, Elon Musk, Bruce Wayne, or even Aragorn Son of Arathorn. What all these men have in common is also precisely what Boaz lacks in this story: something external (wealth, physical strength, intellect, competence in battle) that clearly commends them as “great” men.

Boaz’s greatness is of a different quality. Another possible interpretation of this Hebrew phrase is that it is a reference to Boaz’s excellent and godly character. And that is why I think the ESV gets it right when it renders the phrase ish gibor chayil as “a worthy man.”

In the main section of this article, I’ll note three points (this was originally a sermon, remember?), three ways we see the “worthiness” of Boaz expressed in Ruth 2.

A Worthy Man Obeys God’s Commands

I mentioned in the introduction that the time of the Judges was lawless, characterized by violence, idolatry, and immorality.

But the area around Bethlehem and around Boaz’s field in particular was characterized by obedience to the Law. This is evidenced by the fact that the corners of the fields and the dropped crops are left for the vulnerable, a clear provision of the Torah found in such texts as Leviticus 19 and Deuteronomy 22.

In Leviticus, the commandment reads:

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.

And, wouldn’t you know it? Our protagonist Ruth is both poor and a foreigner. So, for readers/listeners who know Torah, this is the obvious background for what we read in Ruth 2:2 and following:

Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go to the field and glean among the ears of grain after him in whose sight I shall find favor.” And she said to her, “Go, my daughter.” So she set out and went and gleaned in the field after the reapers, and she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz, who was of the clan of Elimelech.

Please note that Ruth is not going out looking for a husband. She’s going out looking for food, hoping that these Israelite farmers will follow the law God has given. Indeed, her well-being is dependent upon their obedience to this law.

Happily, she finds her way into the field of a man who is attentive to the teaching of Israel’s god. Something far from assured in the time of the Judges. We get our first hints of this when Boaz greets the men in his field in v. 4:

And behold, Boaz came from Bethlehem. And he said to the reapers, “The LORD be with you!” And they answered, “The LORD bless you.”

This may seem like a small detail, but the fact that he greets these men invoking the name of Israel’s God – יהוה, all caps “LORD” in our modern English Bibles – signals clearly to us that this man sees his life as lived before Adonai.

But Boaz does more than give lip service to God. He obeys God’s commands, and this to his own financial disadvantage. A quick application here is that a worthy man like Boaz is not a pure capitalist trying to maximize efficiency and the bottom line. When it comes to harvesting fields, at least, this was disallowed under Jewish law. There was a required safety net for the poor, widows, and foreigners – people who would otherwise struggle to make ends meet or even have food to eat.

Boaz’s attentiveness to Torah goes further than this.

In v. 5 we read:

Then Boaz said to his young man who was in charge of the reapers, “Whose young woman is this?” And the servant who was in charge of the reapers answered, “She is the young Moabite woman, who came back with Naomi from the country of Moab.

I mentioned already that Boaz was a relative of Elimelech, Naomi’s late husband and Ruth’s father-in-law. This is relevant because of various laws in the Torah that, taken together, are called the “law of the kinsman redeemer.” The most well-known of these laws teaches that, if a woman is left a widow, it falls to her dead husband’s nearest relative to offer to take the widow as his wife (if he is willing).

The reason for this was twofold: first it gave a legal guarantee that the family name of the man who died could be carried on, and that his possessions couldn’t be swooped in and claimed by the highest bidder feigning affection for his widow. For the woman, it also gave the opportunity for a new start with a man whom she knew and (hopefully) trusted, instead of leaving her vulnerable to the predatory advances of someone who could see her position as a widow as an opportunity for himself.

The circumstances are different, but we actually see this dynamic in Homer’s The Odyssey, which was written in a different part of the Mediterranean basin but at a similar time to the book of Ruth.

When Odysseus is presumed dead after not returning from the Trojan War, his wife Penelope is targeted by numerous “suitors,” the most prominent of whom is Antinous, a very creepy and opportunistic dude.

But these guys are not concerned about Penelope. They just want to take Odysseus’ throne and plunder his estate, which they would become legally entitled to if they marry his widow. This is also made even clearer by the fact that the suitors are plotting to murder Odysseus’ heir, Telemachus.

So, if you find yourself in a movie theater in the near future distressed at the plight of Anne Hathaway’s Penelope and Tom Holland’s Telemachus as they’re being stalked by Robert Pattison’s Antinous – just remember: This all could have been avoided if only they had a law of the kinsman redeemer.

Joking aside, it can be easy for us to think of the Old Testament Torah only as the burdensome and oppressive thing designed to make people miserable with its impossible commands. But this is not how people in Ruth’s day would have thought about laws like this.

Both of these Torah principles, the gleaning in fields and the law of the kinsman redeemer were there to protect the interest of people like Ruth and Naomi. And we see Boaz in this passage going above and beyond in his obedience to these laws (e.g. making sure the men don’t rebuke her, inviting her to drink their water, etc.).

Boaz is not an especially imposing presence by the masculine standards of his day or ours, but his obedience to God sets him apart as a “worthy” man in his day. The application for men and young men today is this: seek godliness, not masculinity. In our moment, there is much confusion and lack of direction for men and boys in particular. The so-called manosphere and manfluencers target young men to great effect, telling them that they need to reclaim their masculine virility.

Boaz shows us something different, which brings me to our next point.

A Worthy Man Uses Power in Service of Others

Immediately after learning of his family connection to this young woman, Boaz does everything in his power to ensure her safety and comfort:

Then Boaz said to Ruth, “Now, listen, my daughter, do not go to glean in another field or leave this one, but keep close to my young women. Let your eyes be on the field that they are reaping, and go after them. Have I not charged the young men not to touch you? And when you are thirsty, go to the vessels and drink what the young men have drawn.”

Let your eyes be on the field that they are reaping, and go after them. Have I not charged the young men not to touch you? And when you are thirsty, go to the vessels and drink what the young men have drawn.”

Some of us might get uneasy when stories or conversations turn towards the unique vulnerabilities of women in this broken and fallen world – and the unique capacities of men to provide and offer help and care for the women in their lives.

In this story, Ruth is three times vulnerable: first as a woman, then a young widow, and finally as a foreigner. Boaz is especially attentive to these vulnerabilities, and he works to ensure that Ruth does not become a victim of violence and harassment, sexual or otherwise. He not only charges his men about this, but also goes out of his way to put Ruth at ease by telling her that he has charged them not to harass her.

In the ancient world, women’s physical and social disadvantages meant they were, generally speaking, more dependent on the provision and protection of the men in their lives than women are today. Indeed, the disparity of strength (physical, cultural, and otherwise) between men and women was far more obvious to them than to us. It might be easy for us in our modern world to look at this story and see these dynamics as patronizing or even patriarchal. But this is precisely the opposite of such Torah provisions’ intended purpose. The legal and cultural circumstances of their day put Boaz in a position where he can use his power and influence, such as it was, to serve and care for two women in need.

In this case, it is a man using his power to serve a woman, but it’s important to remember that the path from strength to vulnerability – from helper to help-ee – does not always run from male to female. We have examples in scripture of women using their power, influence, or savvy to serve and help the men in their lives. Rahab provides assistance to the spies in the land in a vulnerable moment during the Canaanite conquest. Esther uses her power as queen to help the Jewish nation during their time of exile. And it is women in the gospels who give of their financial resources to support the ministry of Jesus.

That being said – for reasons we may not fully understand and because of the mysterious wisdom of God in creation – he has designed our bodies such that there will be a discernible pattern in men and women’s relationships. Men will more often be in a position of strength and able to offer help to others, and women will sometimes, and relatively speaking more often than men, find themselves in a position of vulnerability and in need of help from others. This is not prescriptive in all cases, of course. But the embodied difference between men and women will skew the data set in this direction.

What this means for Christian boys and men (as well as those raising or discipling them) is this: The strength men have been given as individuals and as a group has been given by God as a gift to you so that men can themselves become a gift to others.

Men, whatever power, physical strength, financial resources, social influence, work connections, independence you have been blessed with by God – you have been so blessed so you can be a blessing.

Boaz is a helpful model of this principle because he’s not just on the lookout for battles to fight. He’s on the lookout for people to serve. Ordinary faithfulness looks like making an honest living and then, as God allows, using your resources to bless others.

This also means when we see Christians or professing Christians in power, or even Christian leaders using their influence to take advantage of, oppress, or otherwise mistreat the vulnerable – this is not Christianity. This is neo-paganism. Christian power is not power wielded over others. It is power wielded in service of others. And this is a relevant word for men no matter what you believe about men and women’s roles in the home or in society or in the church. What is clear from scripture is that the call of Christian men, as it is for all Christians, is first and foremost a call to love and to serve others.

And Boaz, the worthy man, models this beautifully.

A Worthy Man Seeks His Reward from God

There is nothing flashy or self-important about Boaz’s behavior here. Note what he says to Ruth in v. 11–12:

All that you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband has been fully told to me, and how you left your father and mother and your native land and came to a people that you did not know before. The LORD repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the LORD, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.

Notice what Boaz doesn’t say: “You’re lucky that you have a big, strong, worthy man like me here to take care of you.” In fact, he doesn’t take any credit at all. Though he is the channel of Ruth’s provision, he says it is under the Lord, the God of Israel, that she has taken refuge.

A worthy man does not serve others simply to curry their favor or to procure some reward from them in return. Knowing how the Book of Ruth ends, a cynical reader may think that Boaz is only doing all this because he wants Ruth to fall in love with him. This would be an incorrect assumption. Boaz does not do what he does in Ruth 2 because of romantic self-interest.

First, when Boaz addresses her in v. 8, he calls her “daughter,” which is, you know, probably not the way you would address someone you were romantically interested in. This highlights the fact that there was likely a significant age gap between Ruth and Boaz. That might make us a little bit uncomfortable or even nervous, but what’s interesting about this story is that there’s clearly nothing predatory about Boaz’s actions. In fact, in Ruth 3, it is Ruth (with some encouragement from Naomi) who makes the first romantic move towards Boaz. When she makes that move, Boaz is surprised and caught off guard. Another detail that suggests he wasn’t secretly hoping she would be interested.

For these and other reasons I won’t get into here, I’m convinced there is no ulterior romantic motive on Boaz’s part in chapter 2. He does what he does for Ruth out of a sincere concern for hers and Naomi’s well-being, as well as a desire to please God and obey Torah. This is further underscored by the unassuming way he deflects attention away from himself and towards God in his words to Ruth.

It is the LORD who he says will repay Ruth for her kindness to Naomi. And we can surmise he would also say it is the LORD who will repay him for his kindness to Ruth. Is it wrong for a man to try to get the attention of a woman he’s romantically interested in? Of course not. But it’s worth noting that this is not what Boaz is doing here. Kindness is worth extending to others regardless of the benefit we may or may not receive back from them. And we can be sure that no good deed done in obedience to God will go unrewarded by God.

Boaz’s actions give us a positive example of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that we should beware of doing our righteous deeds before others in order to be seen by them. Do not aggrandize yourself through your obedience to God.

Conclusion

Ruth 2 gives a worthy example of godly manhood in Boaz. His worthiness is not that of the warrior or the king but of the ordinary faithfulness of everyday men who are looking not for battles to fight but people to serve.

And it is this final reminder that I want to leave us with. Whether you’re a man or a woman – some of us will be in a position at this season in our lives where we, like Boaz, can in our ordinary obedience to God be a source of encouragement and blessing to others.

Others of us will be on the opposite side of that equation. We find ourselves in a season, like Ruth, where we are the one in need, holding on to faith in difficult circumstances.

No matter your circumstance, throw your lot in with God. Let your ordinary obedience be a channel of blessing to those around you. Or, let the faithfulness of worthy men and worthy women around you be a channel of God’s blessing to you.

You can also listen to the sermon here or watch it here.

A little over two years ago, my family bought and moved into a fixer-upper just outside Chicago. We were returning to the States after a four-year stint living in Oxford while I did research for my DPhil in New Testament. As we were still in the-moving-boxes-and-furniture-into-the-house phase, I had my first interactions with our new next-door neighbors. The husband (Jake) and I got to talking and exchanged the normal pleasantries one does when first meeting a neighbor. He told me about his work, and I shared that I was finishing up a research project on early Christianity, which involved some study of Greek language and ancient philosophy.

He asked me if I had studied any of the Stoics. I was a little surprised by the question, to be honest. I responded by saying that yes, as a matter of fact, I had just been studying Seneca’s De Beneficiis (“On Benefits”) for one of the chapters of my dissertation.

Jake replied that he was familiar with and had also read some Seneca. Again, I was shocked. I didn’t say this out loud, but I (somewhat pretentiously) thought, I know why I’m familiar with Seneca.... but why do you know about Seneca?

Jake went on to tell me he was very interested in Stoicism, so much so that he and his wife had given their daughter the middle name ‘Aurelia’ after the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, the most famous Stoic philosopher in history. In the two years I’ve known Jake, Stoicism has become a regular topic of discussion between us.

In those early conversations, Jake filled me in on the fact that Stoicism has had a huge resurgence of interest in recent years. Exhibit A is the wildly popular author Ryan Holiday, whose books on Stoicism have sold something in the range of 10 million copies over the past decade. You can also poke around here on Substack and find pages dedicated to Stoic philosophy with tens-of or even hundreds-of-thousands of subscribers.

What Is Stoicism?

For the uninitiated, I’ll give a (criminally brief) introduction to the philosophy in question. Stoicism is one of the “big three” schools of Hellenistic philosophy1 that emerged in the centuries after the Greek philosophy OGs: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Stoicism, as you might have guessed, advocates a type of emotional detachment from the world (hence our modern word “stoic”) through disciplined governance of the “passions.” Stoics teach that such impulses as anger, greed, lust, or jealousy lead humans to do all sorts of unjust, irrational, and foolish things. The solution to this problem offered by the Stoics is a rationalist approach to life. This involved an inward turn, focusing on your own actions and internal responses (i.e. things you can control) rather than others’ actions or external circumstances (i.e. things you cannot control). Lots more could be said here, but I think this is fair as a summary.

The three most famous Stoic philosophers in history are Seneca, Epictetus, and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. There were, of course, many other Stoics, but these are notable because they are our main historic representatives of the philosophy because their writings are the three examples that have been preserved through history for us to read today.

As a final point of introduction, I’ll note that Stoicism was very popular during the early imperial period of ancient Rome (which is also right around when Christianity first emerged onto the scene of the Mediterranean world).

Again, this is just a quick and dirty, off-the-cuff introduction. For the rest of this article, I want to speculate and theorize a bit as to why this 2000+-year-old philosophy is experiencing a renaissance today. Here are six reasons:

Stoicism is (largely) helpful

First, it’s worth saying directly that Stoicism is attractive as a philosophy for all sorts of reasons. It’s especially rationalist among the Greek philosophical schools, which means it fits especially nicely in the post-Enlightenment, post-Kantian West. But beyond this, it’s also fairly accessible (at least a lot of what’s been preserved is). Marcus’ Meditations are especially easy to read for an ancient document, almost like a 20th century self-help book. Much of this stuff has a punchiness, immediacy, and relevance that is pretty remarkable compared to some of the more abstract and esoteric stuff we find across the ancient Philosophical tradition.2 Stoic arguments intentionally prize and prioritize the common sense that is accessible to all.

More substantively, Stoicism (in my view) rightly diagnoses all sorts of things about human nature, why we struggle, the experience of suffering, and what true happiness entails. This is important to acknowledge because it’s been common among Christians (particularly among those of the evangelical persuasion) to reference Greek philosophy only to dunk on it and say that it sucks compared to Christianity.3 And, to be clear, there are critiques to level against Stoicism from a Christian perspective. However, it is also the case that Stoicism is far and away closest to Christianity among the Greek philosophical traditions. So much so that early Christian apologist Tertullian said of the Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca that he was “often ours,”4 i.e. often in agreement with Christian perspectives.

Stoicism is cool

Second, Stoicism has an undeniable cool-factor appeal. This is at least partially due to the fact that a literal Roman emperor was an adherent to the school and wrote a book reflecting on how the philosophy intersects with everyday life. More immediate to our own time, the box office and cultural success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) has elevated the modern profile of this Roman emperor in particular. This film, of course, is one of the enduring classics of the nineties–aughts manly-movie genre (think Braveheart, Diehard, etc.).

These associations, along with its emphasis on self-discipline and self-betterment, make Stoicism code edgy and masculine, at least to some people. In the ancient world, it was the popular philosophy of the upper class, the educated, and the powerful. Particularly for those of the traditionalist/conservative persuasion, Stoicism provides a connection with the fountainhead of Western civilization.

Stoicism offers the potential for a non-religious moral framework

Third, Stoicism is also unique among ancient philosophies in that it is naturalist/physicalist/materialist. I’m simplifying a bit here, but we tend to think of much of the Greek philosophical tradition as “dualist,” positing a split between a higher, spiritual plane of existence and the physical, created world. Stoicism is an exception to this rule. This can get pretty technical pretty quickly, but the upshot for this article is that the Stoics (contrary to mainstream thought in the ancient world) did not believe in God as a higher being outside of created reality. They instead argued that everything – including God – was part of a single unified physical reality.

Therefore, in the disenchanted, post-Christian world of the 21st century West, Stoicism actually works pretty well as a moral philosophy if you’re already disinclined to believe in a nonphysical reality, gods, or God.5 Christian apologists (perhaps most famously, C.S. Lewis) have often appealed to the necessity of religion to account for moral consistency across cultures or provide a justification for moral absolutes. Against this claim, Stoicism provides a path where one could at least attempt to create a robust moral and ethical framework that doesn’t require appeals to a nonphysical, supreme being. In Stoicism, “God” is the rational principle that animates and gives structure to everything in the world. In that sense, it’s metaphysic is more like a panentheistic physicalism than traditional Abrahamic monotheism.

Stoicism promises mental stability in an age of anxiety

If you didn’t completely follow that last part, don’t worry too much about it. These last few reasons for a Stoic resurgence are more about the everyday world of 21st century felt needs.

The massive rise in mental health issues and anxiety in recent decades has been much publicized and well documented. From a certain perspective, this spike in anxiety can be described as “feelings” or “emotions” run amuck, out-of-control mental spirals that paralyze us or leave us perpetually unsettled.

A central goal of Stoicism is keeping one’s emotions in check through a disciplined re-evaluation of one’s internal judgments and re-assessment of one’s external circumstances. The goal is peace and tranquility through learned detachment from the things that make you anxious. Whether you buy into the effectiveness of this approach or not, it’s striking to me that Stoicism has its proverbial finger on the pulse of our worry-stricken moment.

Medication, talk therapy, and self-care are our culture’s chosen strategies for addressing the epidemic of anxiety in our day. Stoicism, at the very least, offers an alternative to these.

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Stoicism aspires to invulnerability in an age of uncertainty

Starkly stated, the Stoics aspire to be mentally invincible. This invulnerability is funded through disciplined detachment and a determination to have right judgments about external circumstances. This can be illustrated with a few example quotations:

“Remember that the insult does not come from the person who abuses you or hits you, but from your judgement that such people are insulting you. Therefore whenever someone provokes you, be aware that it is your own opinion that provokes you.” –Epictetus6

“It is in your power to live free from all compulsion in the greatest tranquility of mind, even if all the world cry out against you as much as they choose, and even if wild beasts tear in pieces the members of this kneaded matter that has grown around you… What hinders the mind in the midst of all this from maintaining itself in tranquility?”
–Marcus Aurelius7

“Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, ‘I have been harmed.’ Take away the complaint, ‘I have been harmed,’ and the harm is taken away.”
–Marcus Aurelius8

This aspiration to invincibility is, I think, especially appealing to young men. Men as a group have higher risk tolerance and, by extension, a lower awareness of their own fragility and vulnerability. But as physical threats of violence and war have receded into the distant background of men’s everyday experience, they have found themselves beset by more abstract and relational harms: Horrible bosses and teachers, inflation, family tensions, job loss from technology and AI, insults, political upheaval, romantic frustration – these and a thousand other external circumstances beyond their control have harmed or could harm these young men at any time.

The Stoics would tell you not to worry about any of this and instead cultivate and fortify an impenetrable inner sanctuary of mental stability.

Stoicism reclaims control in an age of limited agency

This final reason for Stoicism’s modern popularity is closely related to the previous one. As I’ve already mentioned, the Stoics emphasize a “dichotomy of control,” maximizing attention on the things within one’s power and being intentionally indifferent to the things not within one’s power.

We are living through a time of profound and rapid social change – technological change, political change, ethical change. What is more, these changes feel increasingly beyond our control. Don’t like AI? Too bad. Silicon Valley execs have already decided for you that it’s going to take over the world. Don’t want your country to go to war? Well, this is pretty much just one guy’s decision now. Live in a state where you’re in the political minority? Sorry, your vote pretty much doesn’t count. Want to doom scroll less? The algorithm has engineered content for you that will be especially difficult for you personally to look away from.

You have no control.

Again, Stoicism speaks directly to these experiences. It offers a reframing of the concept of power in a chaotic world where we often feel we have less and less of it. It provides a way to take back a sense of agency, to resist the feeling and reality of being controlled by others.

It may seem bizarre to some that an ancient Greco-Roman philosophy has become such a force in the popular intellectual landscape of the 21st century. But the dots aren’t actually all that hard to connect. Stoicism is trendy right now because it is an accessible and pragmatic philosophy that fits many of our rationalistic presuppositions and speaks directly to the issues that make life challenging in this moment.

As you may have gathered, I wouldn’t identify as a modern Stoic myself. But as a Christian and New Testament scholar, I actually really like Stoicism! I find it insightful, interesting, and historically significant, not least because of its intersection with Christian theology and the world in which Christianity emerged. I’m working on a project where I’ll share more about what I believe Stoicism does and doesn’t get right from a Christian perspective – so stay tuned for more on that in the future!

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In 2026, manhood and masculinity are as contentious as any cultural issue of the day. A key reason is the central role men played in getting President Trump elected twice. The exit polls from those elections have even mainstream outlets like The Atlantic, New York Times, and Washington Post publishing op-eds about American men every few days. Last year’s hit Netflix series Adolescence explored themes related to malformed boyhood culminating in egregious acts violence. Podcasts and YouTube channels targeting male audiences and men’s interests boast audiences of thousands and millions. Masculinity has gone mainstream.

The broader conversation has been running (perhaps better, raging) for years now. If you can believe it, the #MeToo movement was almost a decade ago. In many ways, this movement launched the modern masculinity discourse – and it started the conversation on a deeply critical note. #MeToo, of course, sought to highlight the prevalence of abuse and sexual violence perpetrated by men against women. For Christians, the parallel #churchtoo hashtag highlighted far too many similar stories in churches and Christian organizations.1 Cultural conservatives responded with their own #notallmen counter discourse, and a new front clearly emerged in the broader culture war.

In the years since #MeToo, however, it has become increasingly clear that we shouldn’t and indeed cannot afford to focus our attention only on men’s sins. We must also think together and face the reality of men’s suffering. Because the men and boys are not alright, it turns out. Boys’ educational outcomes are down. Fatherlessness is a generational scourge on our communities (particularly poor communities and those of racial minorities). Depression, unemployment, and so-called deaths of despair have skyrocketed among men in the past couple decades.2

Are men misbehaving because they’re struggling to succeed or are they struggling to succeed because they’re misbehaving? Probably some of both. In any case, when thinking about masculinity, we need to hold together our conversations about how men are failing, on the one hand, with how men are struggling, on the other. Our discourse cannot be reduced only to calling men (and boys) out. The data show it must be every bit as much about lifting men (and boys) up.

The Twin Ditches of Modern Masculinity

Today’s political and algorithmic media landscape heavily disincentivizes such mature and nuanced conversations. We are constantly being pushed into one of two opposing and polarized views. We scroll on our phones and listen to our favorite podcasts, not realizing our entire media environment has become an echo chamber. You’ll always be able to find someone to tell you exactly what you want to hear (or what you already think or what you’ll be inclined to already agree with) about men or Christian masculinity. If we’re not careful, once we’ve been sorted into a given cultural “bucket,” we can then be pushed further towards more extreme viewpoints and ideologies with less and less nuance, compassion, or decency towards those holding different views.

But the way of wisdom is often found in a balance between extremes, and this, it seems to me, is clearly the case when it comes to our attitudes towards maleness and masculinity. In our polarized culture, the Christian tradition uniquely helps us in finding a virtuous balance between these opposing extremes of modern manhood, the twin ditches of masculinity.

Ditch One: Suppression

The first is a ditch of suppression. This is the ditch on the “left” side of the road, if you will. When it comes to men and masculinity, there’s a common approach that denies or downplays the differences between girls and boys, men and women, even going so far as to denigrate the things that make boys and men unique. For people on this side of the road, it feels unhelpful or even scandalous to prescribe that there’s anything different in the first place. If we believe in equality, so the argument goes, we should treat everyone the same.

First, this perspective is reaching toward an important truth. We’re all human. We all have equal dignity (at least in theory) in our society and before God. And it also true that much of what we think about gender is a function of our upbringing and environment. In the evergreen nature-vs.-nurture debate, there’s at least some aspect of our ideas about manhood and masculinity that are “caught” and “taught” from our environment rather than flowing out of our biology.3

But not all the data support this conclusion. Please allows for some generalizations in what follows. To give a slightly silly and cliche example, a meaningful majority of boys will gravitate towards trucks while a meaningful majority of girls will gravitate toward dolls when given the choice. Boys tend to sword fight with sticks, and girls tend to play school. Study after study bears this out.4 To give another example, my six-year-old son recently broke his arm playing outside during recess. This got me wondering: What percentage of kids’ bone breaks are boys v. girls. It turns out boys account for 61%.

Importantly there are exceptions. It’s not as if everything my kids are interested in perfectly correspond to gender stereotypes. And when stereotypes become prescriptive rather than descriptive, we can get into trouble. But if acknowledging this distinct biological and behavioral patterns of boys and men makes you uncomfortable, let me suggest that this is the ditch you lean towards––a tendency to flatten out and suppress the reality of male distinctiveness.

The downstream effect of this flattening out is that there tends to be very little we can concretely commend to men about how they ought to live in the world. The rejection of an overly prescriptive vision for manliness results in there being no vision at all. Is it any wonder then that boys and men are wallowing and wandering?

The suppression of masculinity isn’t merely a philosophical perspective imposed on boys and men from this outside. The ditch is also one we men can fall into ourselves. We can become afraid of or despise our maleness for all sorts of reasons. When we fall into this ditch, everything we associate with masculinity or testosterone must be suppressed and held at bay. We become uncomfortable with and fearful of any aggression or competitiveness. Rather than doing the hard work of learning how to virtuously engage the world as our true selves, we decide to hide our true selves or not engage the world at all. The suppression ditch can manifest in male passivity, something men and women alike often bemoan looking at younger generations of men today. There is, however, an opposite and no less dangerous ditch on the other side of the road.

Ditch Two: Indulgence

The second ditch of polarization in cultural moment is one of masculine indulgence. This one is on the “right” side of the road. If the first ditch can manifest as male passivity, this one manifests as male aggression.

For some guys, if you say masculinity is toxic, they just say “I’m just going to masculine even harder.” Anything that feels manly or strong or dominant is good. Do it. Indulge in your wild side. You are, as a man, “wild at heart,” after all.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with taking a trip to the Northwest and doing some camping or mountain climbing or catching a fish or two. But in a more extreme mode, the call to embrace your bodily drives and urges becomes unhealthy, even dangerous. And an overly narrow vision of what it means to be a man can be profoundly alienating to men who don’t feel that they fit the mold. (A young man once told me he wept after finishing John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart because “I could never see myself being the type of man who enjoyed doing the things he described in that book.”)

Beyond its Christian manifestations, the ditch of indulgence characterizes much of the so-called “manosphere,” including a wide variety of folks from Nick Fuentes to Andrew Tate to Jordan Peterson. True masculinity becomes doubling down on traditionalism for its own sake, a hyper focus on virility and strength and “looksmaxxing,” as the most recent trend puts it. To be male is to be, in some sense untamed, out of control, and dangerous – that’s a good thing. It’s also somehow a matter of being maximally disciplined and putting the world around you (including women) under your power and control.

As I’ve already suggested, some on this side of the road think they’re defending Christian or traditional values when they’re in fact jumping all the way over the Christian tradition to the “Bronze Age” world that preceded it. A vision of masculinity focused on power, authority and domination is not Christian, it’s pagan. But today millions of young men are being sold a vision of masculinity that views both liberal feminism and soft Christianity as scourges on society. So, what does the New Testament and the way of Jesus offer in response to these opposing perspectives?

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Diagonalizing the Ditches

Our conversations around masculinity and manhood have become polarized, forcing us to choose between the extremes of suppression, on the one hand, or indulgence, on the other. Men and adolescent boys are often presented with a false choice: Indulge your supposedly natural urges and risk being labeled “toxic,” “problematic,” or “patriarchal,” or suppress those same urges and be called “passive,” “wimp,” or “soy boy.”

I believe that the Bible, the gospel, and the Christian tradition offer us a way forward that rejects this false binary, and it does so by pushing back on both extremes.

• First, the Christian tradition affirms the goodness of male embodiment. We believe that all people, women and men, are created in the image of God. A clear implication of this is that men and male bodies are good. This created goodness gives us the resources to push back against cultural narratives that wholesale condemn or malign men. The shared dignity (or as Pope Leo has recently put it, magnificence) of humanity means that we should affirm and celebrate men not in spite of their unique maleness but because of it. Maleness is not to be rejected because maleness is a gift. When God created the male body – testosterone and all – he said it was very good. Whatever we say about the challenges or sins or misbehaviors of boys and men, we as Christians should be able to confidently say that maleness is a very good thing and that men are worth supporting and advocating for in our lives, including in public spaces. And by the way, this is not a zero sum game of choosing sides in a culture war or a battle of the sexes. It’s just affirming that men matter, just like women matter.

• Second, the Christian tradition offers men a robust and challenging moral vision for for their lives. The gospel and the teaching of Jesus and the apostles reorient our vision from masculinity away from dominance and leadership toward love and service. Jesus taught his (male) disciples that his kingdom would not be characterized by the Gentile/pagan model of greatness, jockeying for power and dominance while “lording it over” others. This, by the way, was the standard view of maleness and masculinity in the Roman Empire. But in Matthew 20, Jesus tells his followers, “not so with you.” For his disciples, Jesus says, whoever would be first must become a servant, just as he did not come to be served but to serve and give his life for others.
  
  In our world, male power and domination are the norm. These are the natural side effects of the fact that men are, on average, 15% larger stronger and faster than women. But, crucially – which, by the way, has the same Latin root as the word for cross – Jesus shows his followers a new model for the use of power and strength. Philippians 2 says that Jesus did not consider equality with God something to be held onto and used for selfish ends but that he made himself nothing and took on the form of a servant. Ephesians 5 channels this same logic when Paul commands husbands not to lead their wives but to love them, giving of themselves for their good just as Jesus did for his bride, the church. These were and are radical ideas in the Ancient Roman world where male domination was simply assumed as a fact of the universe.

• Third and finally, the Christian tradition reorients our estimation of men away from “manliness” toward their godliness. The highest calling of a Christian boy or man is not to be “manly” according to some cultural definition. It is to be Christlike, to follow Jesus. Manliness and masculinity are, in many ways, external assessments of physical or social value. Whether we see something as manly depends quite a lot on our context, temperament, and culture. But, as scripture teaches, God doesn’t look on the outward appearance but the heart (1 Sam 16:7).
  
  If you’re a boy or a man (or a mother or friend to a boy or a man) who doesn’t feel all that “manly,” the biblical story is good news because Christians are not commanded to attain to some worldly standard of manliness. Nor, by the way, are they forbidden from engaging in or enjoying “manly” activities like playing sports or eating bacon or liking video games or whatever else. When we make Christian virtue the framework, the question of godly masculinity becomes a dialogue between the character traits of Christ-likeness and the values of masculinity taught by our culture (or by the Christian subculture). What is in keeping with the Spirit of God? What practices, habits, and behaviors can we receive as manifestations of the goodness of male embodiment? Which others need to be strongly rejected? How should men live, lead, and love in ways that model Christ-like character?

Where our conversations about Christian masculinity tend to go wrong is when we focus too much on manliness and not enough on godliness. Manliness is a concept that can easily get tied up with all manner of vice, injustice, and “toxic” traits. But the biblical tradition empowers us to push back on the ditch of male indulgence. In Galatians 5, Paul rails against such indulgence when he writes:

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual sin [porneia, from which we get the word “pornography”], sorcery, hatred, strife, jealousy, angry outbursts, hyper-competitiveness, division, factionalism, envy, drunkenness, late-night drinking parties, and things like these. I’m warning you . . . that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. (my translation)

Pause for a moment and ask yourself if you can think of a better definition of so-called “toxic masculinity” than the vice list Paul provides here. Indulgent, toxic masculinity is simply masculinity characterized by the passions and desires of the flesh. What does Paul contrast this to in Galatians 5? He goes on:

But the fruit of the Spirit, God’s Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Is Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control.

Virtuous Christian Masculinity

What does it mean to be a Christian man? Well, fundamentally it means being a man indwelled by the Spirit of God and bearing the fruit that corresponds to that indwelling. Moreover, this distinctly Christian vision of virtue will do more than stop men from misbehaving. It will also open up a path to a life of purpose and joyful flourishing.

The world is forcing us and our boys into a false choice regarding the gift of maleness that God has given them. Different voices are telling them to either abuse the gift or reject it altogether. The Christian tradition helps us instead to receive that gift and use it rightly. To the narrative of suppression it says that men were created very good, and to the narrative of indulgence it tells men to put to death the deeds of the flesh and pursue righteousness.

If the fruit of the Spirit sound kinda girly and un-masculine to us – well, that signals to me that our vision of masculinity hasn’t been crucified yet. And by crucified I mean both killed and interpreted through the lens of the cross and the example of Jesus.

That’s what Men of Virtue is about. It is an attempt to offer a scripturally grounded answer for this moment and this context as to how Christian boys and men ought to live. And the short answer is that they should be men full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

In the lead up to my book release later this month, I’ve been having lots of conversations about it with friends and acquaintances, as well as giving some talks and doing podcast interviews. By far the most common question I get goes something like this: “Why did you write a book for men centered on the fruit of the Spirit when those are supposed to be embodied by all believers, not just men? Is there anything different about these character traits for men than there is for women?”

It’s a good question. And there are a few ways I would answer.

The Biblical Data

First, the fact is that there isn’t that much in the New Testament directed specifically at men about their maleness. Jesus never once teaches on the subject of masculinity or manhood, and almost everything we do have comes from the so-called “household codes” of the Pauline epistles. By my count, there are 19 (Edit: 20) verses of exhortation in the New Testament directed to men as men. These are:

• 1 Corinthians 7:3–4, 11. To husbands, don’t deprive your wife of sex. Don’t get divorced because you think it’s holier to be single.

• 1 Corinthians 11:4, 7. To men, don’t pray with your head covered. (Why some learned/practice the tradition of men removing their hats/caps during prayer.)

• Ephesians 5:25–33. To husbands, love your wives as Christ loved and served the church by giving of himself for her good. (By far the longest passage of the bunch.)

• Colossians 3:19, 21. To husbands, love your wives. To fathers, don’t be harsh with your kids.

• Titus 2:2, 6. To older men, be sober, pious, wise/self-controlled, and healthy in faith, love, and endurance. To younger men, be wise/self-controlled.

• 1 Peter 3:7. To husbands, honor your wives because they are equal heirs of eternal life with you. If you don’t, God will ignore your prayers.

• EDIT: 1 Timothy 2:8. To men, pray without being angry or contentious. ( pointed out that I missed this. Thank you!)

• (Honorable mention: 1 John 2:13–14. This reads to me like encouragement directed in turn at various groups within the community rather than instruction for each group as such.)

That’s everything – literally all the instructions in the entire NT directed specifically at men.

Some may be wondering why I haven’t included the qualifications for overseers in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. I’ve excluded those passages because I’m only thinking about texts directed to all or entire classes of men (husbands/fathers). The elder qualifications include both virtues of godliness and skills such as “managing his household well” and “able to teach.” Surely we wouldn’t say that all men need to be well-organized or teachers of the scriptures.

Others may notice 1 Corinthians 16:13 isn’t on the list. Well, that’s because this verse, rendered in the ESV as “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong,” is not directed specifically at men. Rather, it appears in a list of final exhortations clearly intended for all believers, women and men, in the church. This is not – as many an anon in my X mentions has courageously “well akshually-ied” me – an exhortation for Christian men to be less feminine and more masculine. Rather, it is an exhortation for all believers to be “masculine” in the sense of standing firm and steadfast in their faith. This, of course, has not stopped pastors from publishing books on “biblical manhood” whose titles brazenly pluck this verse out of context.

Now a few observations about the verses actually included in the list above. First, most of them are directed at husbands (and/or fathers). There is almost nothing generically addressed to men about a distinct role or form of godliness particular to them as men.

Second, conspicuously absent is any exhortation about role or calls for men to “lead” their wives or families. The basis of so-called complementarianism for men then comes from texts describing husbands as “the head” (1 Cor 11:3, Eph 5:23) or exhorting women/wives to “submit” (Col 3:18, Eph 5:22), or from God’s post-Fall words to Eve that her husband will “rule over” her (Gen 3:16). Some may think I’m splitting hairs, but for my money it’s pretty significant that nowhere in scripture are husbands commanded to “be better leaders” or “lead their wives.” (I wrote a little bit more on this point in this Substack note.)

On the Similarities and Differences between Godly Manhood and Womanhood

So, what are men commanded to do/be in these verses? Well, you could say mostly the same types of things all Christians are exhorted to do throughout the New Testament: honor the weak(er), love others, be self-controlled, look to others’ interests rather than your own, etc.

This brings me to my second response to the lead question of this article: why focus on the fruit of the Spirit for a book on masculinity? Well, because there is much more that makes the calling on godly men similar to the call on godly women than makes those callings different. We are all called to follow Christ. We are all called to exhibit and grow in Christlike character. We are all called to attain to the divine virtue and imitation of God. In the hundreds upon hundreds of verses of moral exhortation in the NT, virtually nowhere are commands towards godliness gendered in any way.

Now, it would simply be untrue to say that the New Testament contains zero distinct teaching about maleness and femaleness. However, it is true to say that Jesus and the apostles’ teaching contain very little of of this sort of thing. Manliness and masculinity were simply not high priorities on the discipleship curriculum Jesus had for his followers. Now, to offer another caveat, this does not mean those couple handfuls of verses (there are far more directed at women than men, by the way) are unimportant or can simply be jettisoned by those who view the Bible as authoritative. Those passages exist and Christians should take them seriously as spoken by the Spirit of God.

However, it is also true that these handful of verses have been discussed and rediscussed and argued about ad nauseam in books, podcasts, seminary classes, etc. People also tend to be pretty entrenched in their opinaions about the NT teaching on gender “roles,” and their interpretive conclusions are fairly predictable given their pre-existing ideological persuasions. I have my opinions about these issues (family life, women’s ordination, etc.), but I had exactly zero interest in writing another book engaging these questions directly. Speaking for myself, I have become less and less interested over the years in dogmatic proclamations about 1) what I understand to be tertiary theological issues that 2) we have limited or under-determined biblical data to discern. Again, I’m not saying these questions are unimportant or don’t have real bearing on people’s lives (especially women’s lives), but I knew when I set out I was not planning to write another book in this vein of discussion.

The question of what it means to be a godly, “biblical” man is certainly an important and urgent one, especially in this moment where so many men and boys are struggling, aimless, and facing very real challenges. But in answering that question, we have a responsibility to place our emphasis where Jesus and the apostles do: on the character traits commended to all believers, men and women. Which brings me finally to Paul’s most famous virtue list.

The Fruit of the Spirit and Christian Manhood

I wrote a book where I’m trying to shift the conversation about what makes for “biblical” masculinity away from questions of role, headship, leadership, primacy in human mission blah blah blah. The cottage industry of books written to “complementarians,” traditionalists, and Christian patriarchs around this is pretty exhausting, as is the cottage industry of books/podcasts for and by mainliners and progressive evangelicals responding to and seeking to refute their arguments. On both “sides,” some of these books are careful, charitable, and bring real value to these conversations. Others (most?), far less so, unfortunately.

To be honest, I am pretty bored by all of it these days. And I have seen the conversation drift easily into unhelpful and ugly territory where we can miss the forest of the New Testament teaching on godly character formation for focusing on a few trees of gender-related controversy.

If we’re wondering what it looks like to be a godly man, let’s start with a conversation about what it means to be godly, then simply apply this to men and boys.

There are many summary definitions of godliness one could choose from scripture. For this book, I chose the “fruit of the Spirit” from Galatians 5:22–23. What does it mean to be a Christian man? Well, fundamentally it means a man indwelled by the Spirit and bearing the fruit that corresponds to that indwelling. The differences in how the fruit of the Spirit are expressed has to do with a variety of factors, including our culture, personality, and gender/sex.

Yes, both women and men are called to embody the Christian virtue of gentleness, for example. But how that looks will be different for a 5’ 4” cautious, protective mother of two compared to a 6’ 3” competitive, single man in his 20s. They must both cultivate all the virtues of godliness, but we will notice gentleness expressed differently. And, yes, I would say their gender/sex is an important part of that difference.

There’s a unique beauty to the way a man enacts the virtue of kindness, to give another example. We learn something about God and about Jesus by watching a woman be kind, to be sure. But we get another angle on that beauty when we see a man living in kindness. We need both.

Men’s size, strength, and many social advantages compared to women give them unique opportunity to express many of the biblical virtues, which is a theme I return to repeatedly throughout the book. So, male embodiment becomes an important part of the conversation on this refraction of godly virtue.

It is also true that our cultural moment and historical context shapes the messages and values of masculinity that boys and men receive from their communities and media. The question of godly masculinity then becomes a dialogue between these character traits of Christ-likeness and the values of masculinity taught by our culture (or by the Christian subculture). What is in keeping with the Spirit of God? What practices and habits and behaviors can we receive as manifestations of the goodness of male embodiment? Which others need to be strongly rejected? How do men live, lead, and love in ways that model Christ-like character?

That’s what Men of Virtue is about. It is an attempt to offer a scripturally grounded answer for this moment and this context as to how Christian boys and men ought to live. The short answer is that they should be men full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

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I’ve been thinking recently about the similarities and differences between Stoicism and Christianity (in researching a future writing project).

For the uninitiated, Stoicism was the most popular philosophical tradition in the Roman Empire in the first couple centuries of our era. Its teachings shaped much of the intellectual milieu of the world into which Christianity emerged – it is also, incidentally, experiencing something of a renaissance in our own day, particularly among young men.

There are many striking overlaps between Jesus’ and the apostles’ teaching and that of the Stoics, and some of the church fathers explicitly sought to highlight these similarities. There are also some important differences, one of the most notable of which relates to one’s attitude toward death and dying. In the ancient world, both Christians and Stoics were known for their steadiness and courage in the face of death, but the reasons for their courage are quite distinct – almost opposite – to one another.

This difference is powerfully illustrated in an interview that was published this week between conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat and former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. A few months ago, Sasse announced that he had received a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. If you’d like some more context, the first couple minutes of the video below (which also contains the entire interview) give a quick overview of who Sasse is and what’s he’s facing at present.

In the early parts of this conversation, Senator Sasse demonstrates an admirable (and stoic-adjacent) attitude of acceptance towards death. Here, as in other interviews, he notes that he “had already received a death sentence” before his cancer diagnosis. For the Stoic and for Sasse, finding out that you will die younger than expected is no evil. And Fate had predetermined when that day was going to be. You were always going to die; there was nothing you could do to stop it; so, it’s no use feeling sorry for yourself when that day comes.

Sasse is also a thoughtful and theological astute Christian in the Presbyterian tradition. And later in the interview, his attitudes toward death take on a decidedly Christian flavor. Sasse says in no uncertain terms that “death is something that we should hate.” Here he decisively parts ways with the Stoics, who argued that death was no evil since it is part of our “nature” as humans to die.

For the Stoic, death is something inevitable, the great equalizer, a thing to be accepted, not feared. The key to overcoming the fear of death is 1) coming to terms with its inevitability, 2) acknowledging that you are powerless to avoid it, and 3) realizing that Death itself is not an evil to be avoided at all costs.

As Epictetus writes:

“I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it.”

But the Christian says no. Death is evil. As Sasse recently put it elsewhere, “Death is a wicked thief. And the bastard pursues us all.” Death is the great Enemy. The last Enemy (1 Cor 15:26).

Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann puts the contrast this way:

“In essence Christianity is not concerned about coming to terms with death, but rather having victory over it.”

The Christian has the audacity to believe that death can be defeated – indeed, that it has been defeated.

The Stoic says to Death, “You have power over me as has been given to you by nature, but you do not have the power to make me afraid.”

The Christian says to Death, “I do not fear you because you have no power over me. Your ‘victory’ is no victory at all. You have lost your sting because my Lord has already defeated you.”

Indeed, the Christian taunts death. As John Donne penned in his most famous sonnet:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

and finally:

Death, thou shalt die.

Senator Sasse is giving us an example of how to die well. Stoic acceptance of one’s death is certainly impressive, even inspiring. But the Christian’s audacity to believe that Death has been killed by Jesus is something else entirely. On the surface, the courage with which the Stoic and the Christian can face death might look quite similar. But the philosophical and theological substructure supporting that courage could not be more different.

When asked how he processed his diagnosis, Sasse replies with profundity and charm:

Death is terrible. We should never sugarcoat it. It is not how things are meant to be. But it is great that death can be called the final enemy. It’s an enemy, but it’s a final enemy, and there will then be no more tears.

I believe in the Resurrection, and I believe in a restoration of this world. So, I did not feel great fear about my death… I didn’t want to be a pansy ass in the final moments.

Men of Virtue: How the Fruit of the Spirit Forms Male Character in the Modern World

It releases from on May 26.

Honestly, books about godly or “biblical” masculinity are a dime a dozen these days, but not all Christian masculinity books are created equal. Many are far more cultural than they are Christian, or contain more folk-wisdom than biblical wisdom.

So, what makes this book different than what’s already out there? First, a bit of background.

Why another book on Christian Masculinity

For upwards of a century, various politicians, pastors, and pundits have bemoaned a crisis of manhood and masculinity in America / the West. C.S. Lewis even gave a version of the complaint in The Abolition of Man (published in 1943). Decades on, concern for the future of men, boys, and biblical faithfulness became a regular publishing and leadership trope in the American evangelical church. Wayne Grudem and John Piper’s (in)famous book Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (published in 1991) was framed as a response to “evangelical feminism.” A decade later, John Eldridge’s Wild at Heart (published in 2001) became the best-selling Christian masculinity book of all time. Notably, it was filled with almost as many anecdotes from Hollywood films like Braveheart and Gladiator as it was of Bible verses. Within another few years, Mark Driscoll rose to prominence for his successful – and decidedly masculine-feeling – ministry in unchurched Seattle.

I was profoundly shaped as a young man by each of these publications and personalities. However – as I got a little older, studied the scriptures, got married, had kids – I also developed a gnawing sense that something was off in our teaching about Christian or “biblical” manhood.

I, along with other men with a similar background to mine, started to notice a shift in the Christian masculinity conversation when Donald Trump entered the political scene. I watched as many evangelicals (quickly) moved from moral disgust to pragmatic acceptance to enthusiastic support of his candidacy. Some celebrated his “masculine” energy while minimizing his moral shortcomings (including the infamous “grab them by the pussy” Access Hollywood tape).

Around the same time, influential pastors and Christian leaders became embroiled in scandals of sexual sin (e.g. Bill Hybels, Ravi Zacharias, etc.) and domineering leadership (James Macdonald, Mark Driscoll, etc.). Christian male “leaders” were increasingly revealed as unvirtuous and un-Christlike, with the response of evangelicals being, more-or-less, a collective shrug: “we’re all sinners” –– “there but for the grace of God go I” –– “sexual temptation is every man’s battle” –– “this is the lesser of two evils ” –– “at least he got the gospel right” –– “abortion is far more evil than this” –– “actually it was Bill Clinton who started the moral decline of the presidency” –– and on and on.

The overall message was clear: The moral character of male Christian leaders (and of the political leaders Christians support) had become of secondary importance.

We live in a world where ethical consistency, personal holiness, and Christ-like character have become optional add ons. Christian virtues like gentleness, patience, compassion, impartiality, and peace have come to be de-valued, viewed with skepticism and even disdain.

We have lost sight of the North Star of the entire Christian life: becoming partakers in God’s nature, living in imitation of Christ, by the power of the Spirit.

Virtue, excellence, and holiness are not optional parts of being a Christian. They are the telos of being a Christian.

And the telos of being a Christian man is no different. We’ve become bogged down by an over-emphasis on hotly contested “roles” for manhood and replaced “love” and “service” with “leadership” and “authority” as the essence of that vocation. If being a “leader” becomes more central than growing in holiness and living with integrity, we’ve lost the New Testament plot.

But my concern about the discourse around Christian masculinity is not only with the ideological right. On the other side of the road with a different ditch to fall into. Here we often see a (practically) wholesale erasure of gendered difference, distinctions between the sexes, and a denial of unique goodness of male embodiment. In our focus on “equality” and a reaction against overly prescriptive gender roles, we downplay the very real and important differences between men and women. In decrying male violence against women,1 we fail to appreciate the many, many contributions of men and of fathers to our communities. In advocating for women’s rights, we denigrate males and downplay the very real challenges boys and men face in our cultural moment.

Being a man means something. And in the midst of all the churn and uncertainty and challenge facing boys and men today, it is right that we would look to scripture and the Christian tradition for guidance. But the answer that many many mainstream voices have been giving us often amount to little more than “being a man is really not all that different than being a woman.”

Male. Christian. Virtue.

Happily, the two ditches I’ve described above represent only the extremes of opposing ideological persuasions. I believe the strong majority of Christians fall between these. Most Christians believe that Christ-like character is essential to godly manhood. And most Christians also believe that there is a unique calling and goodness to living as a Christian man.

In this space between the extremes is where I hope my new book Men of Virtue might be of some help.

Well-intentioned Christians looking for biblical wisdom deserve better than this. They deserve something robustly Christian that doesn’t kneel or pander to the political and social movements of our day. They deserve something thoughtful and challenging, not dumbed down biblical tropes, prooftexting, baptized folk wisdom, or traditionalism for traditionalism’s sake. The resources for Christian men to meet this moment faithfully are already there in the Bible and our theological heritage. To find them, we just need to be willing dig a little deeper, take off our political blinders, and look beyond or cultural biases.

This is a book about MEN because, in this moment of genuine crisis, we need books for men. The social and cultural upheavals of the industrial, sexual, and technological revolutions have been profoundly disruptive for men and boys in particular. It’s not enough to simply say “be like Jesus” or “grow in love” and hope that a mature, thoughtful, noble Christian masculinity for the 21st century will develop naturally. The imitation of Christ is and ought to be refracted through male embodiment in a way that is distinct from its expression through female embodiment, and men need help, guidance, and community to grow up into that mature expression.

It is a book about VIRTUE because we have lost sight of the importance of the uniquely Christian vision of virtue commended in the New Testament. There was profound contrast between first-century Roman masculine ideals and the new way to be human commended by Jesus and the Apostles. I fear that, in our own day, we are leaving behind a Christian vision of virtue in favor of a neo-pagan one. To address this crisis of character, we must return to the scriptures. But this is not a matter of baptizing cultural stereotypes or zooming in with hyper focus on a few instructional texts for husbands in the New Testament. Rather, it is about situating maleness within the entire narrative of scripture, the gospel, and resurrected humanity

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As an entry point and framing device for this conversation, I chose the longest and most famous virtue list in the New Testament, Paul’s “fruit of the Spirit” found in Galatians 5:

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

These, I argue, are the character traits of a truly Christian masculinity. After a few introductory chapters, I spend the entirety of the book reflecting on how each of these virtues figures in boys’ and men’s character formation towards Christ-likeness. These screenshots of the table of contents will give you a feel:

If you’re looking for a scripturally-grounded vision for Christian masculinity that avoids the ditches of performative bravado, on the one hand, and gender erasure, on the other – this book is for you.

How you can help

Thanks for reading. If you want to support my work and this book, here are few ways you can help:

1. Preorder. As any author will tell you, book preorders are the single most important way to support their work. It creates energy around the launch date and signals to outlets, reviewers, and booksellers that a book is poised to make an impact in the cultural conversation. All of this, in turn, helps more people hear about the book.

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2. Share. Like and share this article (or other articles and posts from me in the coming weeks) to help drive up engagement and get the book in front of more people.

3. Form a group. I strongly believe that questions like “What does it mean to be a godly man?” or “How can I grow in the virtue of patience” or “How can I teach my son self-control?” are best hashed out in community with others. Men especially need such communities and dialog partners. If you know two or three or fourteen others who would be interested in reading and discussing this book together, would you consider reaching out and inviting them to join you?

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The fight for women’s “equality” has been one of the most persistent social and political issues of the past century or more. In American expression, this has been a long, messy, and incomplete process of realizing the Declaration’s promise that “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” “All men,” we have come rightly to insist, must also mean “all women.” This is both a matter of the gender-inclusive use of the word man, as well as a philosophically and theologically necessary implication of the original Lockean ethics enshrined in the Declaration.

Still, many of us feel – now a quarter century into the 21st century and a quarter millennium into the American experiment – that all is not well with our ideas about “equality” between the sexes. I want to suggest in this article, with some help from author and essayist Wendell Berry, that this intuition is correct.

Since reading Berry’s most recent nonfiction book, The Need to Be Whole, there is a single passage1 that has stuck with me more than any other. Though Berry’s wider discussion includes additional categories, this section is particularly relevant for issues related to sex and gender. The text is worth working through at some length, so bear with me as I offer, unpack, and expand upon several long-ish quotes in the first half of this article.

The principle of equality or ‘equality before the law,’ as we have taken it from the Declaration of Independence, and elaborated it in the Constitution and in legislation, is a principle first and last. It is a legal and therefore a general safeguard against prejudice, which is always a generalization. To deny a legally established right to persons or groups because of their category is an offense against the law of the land, and the much older spirit of the law. For those of us kindly disposed toward democracy and our species, the principle of equality, thus far, presents no problem. We approve of it and we accept it.

Equality in this sense is a cherished principle of classical Western liberalism. To Berry’s sense of legal equality we could also add theological equality as an inheritance of the Christian tradition. Though it admittedly took some time for emerging Christianity to shake off the pagan, Aristotelian norms of the day, the church has come (more or less universally) to affirm that men and women are equal before God. Women, like men, are created in the image of God and, in Christ, “there is no longer male nor female” (Gal 3:28). Likewise, wives/women are spoken of in scripture as co-heirs of life with their husbands/men (1 Pet 3:7). This theological principle is the foundation of the Declaration’s legal principle. All humans are endowed by their creator with equal dignity and value as persons.

As it relates to sex and gender, legal justice and divine righteousness require holding this equality ever before our eyes: no woman should be seen as unequal in status to any man by virtue of her being a woman. However, Berry argues, this equality is not the only thing to be kept in mind in human relationships and communities. He goes on:

[W]hen we carry this principle [of equality] home among our families and our neighbors, where ordinarily and fortunately we are beyond the law, we are immediately confronted with a multiplicity of inequalities––of intelligence, appearance, health, age, strength, education, wealth, talent, fate or fortune, and so on.

Berry suggests that, in our everyday lives, away from the abstractions of theology and law, acknowledgement of various types of inequality is also essential to the carrying out of justice and impartiality.

We realize that to treat all persons as equal, ignoring their differences, is at best inconsiderate, at worst foolishness or cruelty. Because people individually are not equal to one another, we need discernment, patience, and good manners: ways of enacting respect or courtesy or kindness or compassion for those we perceive as better off or worse off than ourselves. Our neighbors are not effectively our equals unless we treat them as equally entitled to our regard in spite of the inevitable differences.

As important as equality between men and women – and between any two classes of humans – is as a principle, that principle can be unhelpfully extended to erase important differences in patterns of being, embodiment, and circumstance. Berry continues:

The principle of equality becomes seriously troublesome, I think, when it obscures really significant differences… This blunted egalitarianism, I think, is as troubling in the politics of sex as in the politics of race. Women are as human as men (if I dared, I would say more so), and they ought not to be denied any civil right. They ought to receive equal pay for equal work. But to say that women and men are equally human is not to say that they are the same, or that they are in all ways ‘like’ each other.

Equality, Berry reminds us, does not equal sameness.

He continues by listing some generalized differences ending with, what I think is really the crux of this discussion, namely, that “most women are physically smaller than most men.” Overlooking this clear inequality between women and men, Berry argues, is a serious mistake.

In our self-consciously modernizing and improving way, the combination of the movement for women’s rights with ‘sexual liberation’ has encouraged both women and men to regard these inequalities as insignificant or as virtually nonexistent. We are encouraged to think that these differences are excuses for, if they are not part of, a ‘patriarchal’ oppression of women. As a consequence, the forms of a special respect and regard and helpfulness, that women often expected of men and that men often gave, have fallen into disuse, even as the need for them has fairly demonstrably increased.

[…]

The trouble and the harm occur in situations, very common now, in which the sexes are, in the most insistently practical sense of the term, not equal. A woman at her job, confronting her would-be seducer who is her boss, with her livelihood at stake, is not his equal. Nor is a 120-pound girl the equal of a 200-pound boy in the twilight or darkness of a fraternity party.

Power is a multi-faceted concept and certainly not limited to physical strength. And, frankly, physical size and strength is not the only type of power where men tend to start well ahead of the curve compared to women. However, physical strength is surely the most pervasive and unassailable inequality between the sexes. And this inequality is one that (in certain circles) is unfashionable even to name. But just because this power disparity makes us uneasy does not make it any less a fact of our existence as men and women.

To note that men are (in general) physically larger, stronger, and faster than women is not to adopt some patriarchal or sexist perspective. It’s simply to describe created reality. Sexism and injustice emerge based on the “so what” that comes after this observation. (More on this below.)

Still, the uncomfortable reality is that it is very often within men’s (physical) power to use and abuse women at their whim, to build a world characterized by their absolute rule and domination of the female sex. In many times and places, this is more or less exactly what has happened. Because of their physical power advantages, men often have done (and continue to do) what they want – and there is often little women can do to stop them. This is not to imply that women are power-less, just decidedly less power-ful on this score.2

Despite all the historic and ongoing injustices suffered by women – the utter dystopian, male-dominated world I’ve just described is not the world that we live in. And to the extent that it’s not, it’s important to ask why this is the case.

I want to suggest that a key reason is this: male virtue. Moreover, the extent to which we have neglected the importance of male virtue formation – as Berry points out – we risk slipping toward that dystopian reality.

In Search of a Positive Vision for the Male-Female Power Imbalance

The #MeToo movement shone a light on the pervasiveness of male violence against women, as well as the unequal and unjust application of the law and of social power to these evils. But, as Berry argues, there is an incompleteness to #MeToo as a social movement, and the very need for the movement suggests that something deeper had gone badly wrong in our gender relations in the preceding decades.3 Berry is far from the only voice in recent years to re-highlight the physical power disparity between men and women. For instance, journalist and author Louise Perry argues in her The Case Against the Sexual Revolution that sexual violence is more or less an unavoidable evolutionary instinct of a certain percentage of men. Furthermore, she argues that the cultural technology of monogamous marriage and Christian sexual ethics have done well to curtail this instinct and safeguard women’s well-being and promote their flourishing. Along a similar line, Christian Emba argues in Rethinking Sex that the “consent only” sexual ethic obscures the moral urgency of creating value judgments about the moral goodness of certain sexual desires. It also obscures the relative sexual vulnerability of most women compared to most men. In language even more jarring than Berry’s, she writes:

The majority of men could likely kill a woman with their bare hands. Hence the mental calculus that women face whenever they want to reject a man’s sexual advances: Will he hurt me?4

Surely this inequality extends far beyond the sexual realm. But since most sexual situations arise in private, it is here that we see this power imbalance most starkly.

Again, this is an uncomfortable thing to talk about. What is more, the bare fact of this inequality between men and women cannot be changed by the law or even by social norms. It can only be accounted for. But in accounting for such inequality, laws and social pressure campaigns will only accomplish so much. Additionally and more fundamentally, moral formation is necessary – specifically that of men and boys.

But this is far more than the moral formation of restraint (e.g. “teach men not to rape”), though it certainly includes this as a bare minimum. It is not enough to view male strength as a liability for evil and harm. (And it is here I quibble a bit with Berry’s and others’ framing.) If we affirm the unique goodness of male embodiment – not just human embodiment, male embodiment – then there must be a positive vocation for the unique qualities of physical strength.

And there is. In a word: Service.

Our modernist egalitarian sensibilities might make some of us wary of any type of vocation emerging from the power imbalance between men and women. A male vocation of “service” feels only a hair’s breadth removed from the misogynistic excess and traditionalism for traditionalism’s sake – patronizing at best, patriarchal and oppressive at worst.

But what’s the alternative?

The fact remains that many men have a surplus of strength relative to women. As Berry notes, it won’t do to minimize or deny the existence of this inequality. To do so risks neglect, even cruelty. This is the ideological ditch, it seems to me, cultural progressives are likely to fall into on sex and gender. In decrying the harms perpetrated by men against women (nevermind the even higher cost of injury and death suffered by men and boys from male violence!), there is left no positive vocation for men’s strength surplus. Don’t hit your kids. Don’t intimidate others. Don’t manipulate. Don’t rape. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

On the flip side of the cultural divide, we find the patriarchalists of one form or another. Here there is a positive (or, at least, active) vision for male strength relative to women. Because men are stronger, the explicit or implicit logic goes, men are to lead or otherwise be in charge of human society, communities, families, churches, etc. Power is given to men (by God), so that they can fulfill their “role” as leaders. Or, flipped around the other way, because men have been given physical power, it is right that they exercise this power relative to women.

Surely there is also a ditch we can fall into for those of this ideological persuasion. Namely, I would argue there is an often unstated threat of violence in this patriarchal logic. It goes like this:

• I’m stronger than you, so you need to respect me (or I will hurt you).

• We’re stronger than you, so you need to obey us (or we will make you obey).

• He’s stronger than you, so you need to submit to his leadership (or he will use his strength against you).

As Thucydides famously put it, “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

However, it does not follow that a physical power advantage of men relative to women prescribes male domination, the primacy of male vocation, or even the evangelical/complementarian buzz word “leadership.”5

There is an ocean of difference between noting or acknowledging one’s relative physical strength and then saying, “Therefore, I should be in charge, and you need to submit to me” versus asking, “How can I use what strength I have to serve you?”

On Cruciform Masculinity

This emphasis on service is, of course, modeled by Jesus in the New Testament. In his teaching he draws contrast between two models of power. Greatness in his kingdom is not like greatness in the kingdoms of this world. Among the pagans, rulers “lord it over” and officials “exercise authority” over those weaker than them (Matt 20:25). Not so for Jesus followers. For them, whoever would be great must be a servant––“Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve” (20:28).

A couple decades after Jesus’ resurrection, Paul writes in Philippians 2:

6b [Jesus], being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! (NIV)

In both cases, Jesus shows us how Christians ought to use power: namely, to serve others. Power for the pagans (both in the first century and today) means power over others. Power for the Christian means power for others.

Jesus surely has a surplus of power relative to other humans and relative to the church. But his power is the power of a servant, not of a despot.

The analogy isn’t perfect, but we have biblical warrant for applying the principle of others-serving love to male-female relationships, specifically with husbands and wives (Eph 5:25). What is more, I don’t see a reason why this cannot extend, in principle, as a vocational expression of what to do about/with the male-female power differential.

A vision of masculinity focused on “lording over” and “exercising authority” is much more pagan than it is Christian.

At the same time, the model of using our strength to serve others has implications for how all of us (men and women) use our surplus of power – social, sexual, economic, ecclesial, political, etc. The strength and size advantage that men have over women is so immediate, so pervasive that it serves as a helpful illustration on the properly Christian use of all forms of power. All of us learn something about what it means to be human and what it means to follow Jesus by watching virtuous men use their strength in service of others.

To sum up, we have three choices as it relates to the inequality (such as it is) between men and women.

1. We can minimize or ignore it, arguing there is no distinct vocation for male identity or masculinity flowing out of this power differential.

2. We can double down on it for self-serving or self-aggrandizing ends, reading the male power surplus as a prescription for male rule, domination, or leadership of one kind or another.

3. We can accept it as a good part of God’s creation, an opportunity for men to exercise, in a unique way, the vocation of service and love for others.
   

The High Stakes of Male Virtue Formation

To conclude, let’s go back to Wendell Berry. Surely women and men are (or ought to be) equal in many ways. We often fall short of this ideal. We are confronted regularly with ways that women are unjustly treated unequally, denigrated in their intelligence, dismissed in their opinions, disbelieved when they say they have been wronged, and denied opportunities that should rightly be theirs.

At the same time, there is a pronounced inequality between men and women that is unassailably woven into the fabric of what it means to be human: their disparity in size and physical strength. No matter the qualifiers, no matter the exceptions to the rule, males outclass females as a rule on this most insistent and fundamental form of power. There is no direct value judgment to be made against men or injustice implied in noting this fact.6 It just is.

Berry reminds us that this inequality must be “regarded” and accounted for with “respect” and “courtesy” vis à vis men and women. A failure to do this can – and tragically often does – lead to great suffering for women, told and untold.

A final word then, from Berry, on the insufficiency of legal recourse and of the #MeToo movement:

In the absence apparently of all cultural restraints, women who have been assaulted or raped have no recourse but the courts of law or, by way of scandal, the news. Having been exploited by men, they then must exploit themselves by making their private humiliation public. A woman too poor to pay a lawyer, and so unfortunate as to have been abused by nobody famous, has no recourse at all. In the news and commentary I have read on sexual abuses by men and the Me Too movement, I have seen no suggestion that the abusive men ought to have been taught decent manners and a proper sense of responsibility when they were boys.

What men do with this power has enormous implications for the well-being of others. Will they view this power as right to rule or as a conduit for blessing others? This is why the formation of character is of such importance for boys and for men. Unchaste, unrestrained, unvirtuous men have a great capacity to do harm to others. So we must make it our collective mission to cultivate in ourselves and the boys and men in our lives virtues of restraint: self-control, patience, gentleness, peace, etc. At the same time, godly, selfless, and noble men have a great capacity to bless and serve others. So we must likewise work to grow in them virtues of empathy and action: courage, diligence, kindness, and, above all, love.

This is far more than a matter of good manners. It is a matter of seeing and receiving the goodness of both female and male embodiment, all while imitating Christ by using whatever strength has been given us as a means to serve others.

In case you’re (blissfully) unaware, there’s been a fresh online kerfuffle recently about the phrase “toxic empathy.” This dust up comes from an ongoing debate regarding conservative influencer Allie Beth Stuckey’s NYT-bestselling book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Stuckey is a social commentator and influencer, as well as the host of the successful podcast Relatable, whose listeners are mostly conservative Christian women.

I haven’t read her book, but I think the thesis is right there in the title. Stuckey, if my sense of the argument is correct, thinks that the corruption of "empathy” has led to all sorts of political justification for sinful behavior and wrong-headed policies. If we’re too compassionate or––perhaps better and more charitable to her argument––compassionate in the wrong way, we’ll minimize wrongdoing or make excuses for things we really shouldn’t be excusing.

Lots has already been said about this (for and against) in the year plus since the book came out, but in very recent days the phrase “toxic empathy” was compared to the phrase “toxic masculinity.”

Here’s a representative example from X:

Someone commenting on this post asked me to chime in since the phrase “toxic masculinity” was being debated alongside Stuckey’s. The rest of this article is an adapted and expanded version of how I replied.

When Masculinity Becomes “Toxic”

There’s no single agreed-upon definition of “masculinity.” Maleness is an objective reality (a controversial statement these days, but that’s my view), but it’s refracted in different ways through various historical contexts, cultural/subcultural contexts, family systems, etc. Hence masculinity studies tends to emphasize plural masculinities rather than a singular masculinity.

However, masculinity (and femininity) is not merely descriptive in the scholarly or social-scientific sense. Masculinities are also prescriptive and aspirational. Boys look at the men around them (their fathers most of all) and absorb the abstract category of “masculine” from their context. They then aspire to, or at least imitate, their developing idea of what it means to grow up from boyhood into manhood. This can and should be an intentional process guided by older men (and women) who guide these boys towards maturity. But even without this adult intentionality, it’s a passive process that will proceed nonetheless. Masculinity, then, is a helpful category for describing these ideas and concepts.

Importantly, we should allow ourselves the possibility of saying that some expressions of maleness are not good. Some versions/standards of masculinity can become “toxic” (i.e. poisonous, dehumanizing, etc.) when they are characterized by sin and form men towards vice rather than virtue. For example, a version of masculinity that describes men who are overly aggressive, angry, or sexually unfaithful is a “bad” masculinity. Hence “toxic masculinity” is definitely a thing and I don’t think an entirely unhelpful category.

The potential trouble with the phrase “toxic masculinity” is that when some (most?) people hear it, they hear “masculinity is necessarily toxic.” So, even if people don’t mean to imply that all masculinity is toxic, without qualifiers, using the phrase can be a rhetorically ineffective and distracting.

We should also note that sometimes people actually do use "toxic masculinity” to mean something like “masculinity is toxic” full stop. This use of the phrase is, in my view, especially unhelpful and kinda actually genuinely misandristic. It’s also un-Christian in the sense that Christians believe maleness and femaleness are created goods, and masculinity and femininity are the natural (and potentially good) outworking of that binary.

Masculinity is a morally neutral description of culturally-situated standards of male behavior. These standards, of course, have massive moral implications, and you can make a negative value judgment of a specific masculinity by slapping the word “toxic” on as a modifier. But you can also offer aspirational visions of masculinity when you tack on a different modifier and create a phrase like “virtuous masculinity” or talk about a “Christian” vision for masculinity. Such visions are by their very nature contestable and debatable. Someone could always say such masculinity is not really virtuous or that your vision for “biblical” masculinity is not a faithfully Christian one.

Okay, now on to so-called “toxic empathy.”

The Impossibility of “Toxic Empathy”

Masculinity and empathy are not the same in the sense that masculinity as a descriptive concept is morally neutral. The value judgment begins when you ask whether a particular version of masculinity is good, virtuous, tending towards human flourishing, healthy for boys, safe for women, etc.

Empathy, by contrast, is closer to a skill, emotion, or even a virtue. (People, of course, might mean different things when they use it.) If empathy is a virtue then the same rules I noted above about masculinity don’t quite apply. Virtues by definition are good and un-corruptable.

When virtues are “corrupted,” we don’t slap modifiers on the front of them like we can with the word masculinity. We don’t say “bad courage” or “toxic love” or “corrupt patience.” We call such things vices and have completely different words to denote them. Excessive and imbalanced courage becomes brashness. Smothering love become abuse. Unhealthy patience becomes passivity or indifference. (Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas talk a bunch about this.)

Importantly––and partially in Stuckey’s defense––Virtues do not exist in isolation and must be qualified with the other virtues. The virtues are really only virtues when held in balance with the others. Patience must be governed by love, which must be governed by justice, which must be governed by self-control, etc. etc. (Again, cf. Aristotle, Thomas, and many others.)

It’s not wrong to say that someone shooting for the virtue of empathy may misfire and instead act viciously. To give another example using courage, you try to be brave but do so in a stupid or self-aggrandizing way. Importantly, however, someone acting in this way is no longer said to be courageous. They are instead said to be rash or selfishly ambitious.

Thus––and I think this is Stuckey’s point––if you’re “empathetic” in a way that compromises the virtue of justice, for example, the empathy ceases to be empathy and becomes something else entirely. So, I get what folks like her are implying when they talk about “toxic empathy.” However, this doesn’t change the fact that the phrase itself is a category error.

(I should also point out that Stuckey is far from the first person to express skepticism about empathy. There’s stuff in the Stoics, for instance, that cautions strongly against getting emotionally sucked into others’ problems. The entire Stoic ethical system is hyper-rational (in a way that is distinct from Christian ethics) and expresses skepticism towards supposedly emotional virtues, including love/attachment. Such emotional misjudgments, says the Stoic, can lead to our passions overriding our rationality and cause us to act irrationally, contrary to nature, and thus viciously.)

Rhetorically speaking, there are similar dangers with “toxic empathy” as with “toxic masculinity.” Both invite misunderstandings and can be unhelpfully distracting. But the problems are worse with empathy because where masculinity is morally neutral, empathy is not. From a marketing perspective, Toxic Empathy is a stroke of genius because it’s the book-title equivalent of rage bait. That being said, “toxic empathy” is a category error in a way “toxic masculinity” isn’t necessarily.

Hello friends. I’m conducting a very unscientific poll to see what folks think is the single most important book of the New Testament. I’ve been chewing on some thoughts around this topic, and I’m hoping I can use and reflect on the responses to this poll in a future article.

A few ground rules/preliminary comments.

• Please only vote once! The poll is split into five smaller polls since Substack only lets me give up to five options per.

• The question is intentionally vague and is meant to invite your specific response/interpretation. Feel free to supply your own reason in your mind for why this book is the most important (e.g. has had the greatest impact on history, has shaped NT interpretation the most, balances out the NT in some important way, gives an important summary or overview of some doctrine, includes an important event, has been meaningful to you personally… etc. etc.).

• Anyone can respond! Believers, nonbelievers; Protestants, Catholics; pastors, laypeople; scholars, skeptics. Please feel welcome to chime in.

• I combined a few of the options… honestly I can’t imagine anyone answering Jude or 3 John by itself.

• If you have a moment, please leave a comment explaining your answer (and maybe a little bit about yourself and your background).

• Please also consider sharing / restacking to help me get more responses! The more people answer, the more interesting the data set will gets for everyone.

• If you’re curious about my thoughts on the responses, go ahead and subscribe/follow so you can hear about it when I post them in the coming days.

Conservative. Traditionalist. Orthodox.

Misogynistic. Reactionary. Grievance-based.

In the roughly 1.2 billion think pieces published on the modern men’s movement in the age of Trump, the men who are flocking to online spaces, voting Republican, and (supposedly) returning to church have been called many things.

The explanations for these shifts and realignments are, of course, many and complex. But I sometimes notice that those outside of these spaces or in ideological disagreement with their members struggle to find positive or even value-neutral ways of talking about what is happening with young men.

I confess to being frustrated by the lack of imagination folks have for describing this men’s movement except in terms of Trump or of conservative politics or of misogyny. Lots of guys I know who are caught up in segments of the manosphere––and are even deeply helped by what they find there––have no love for conservative policies or Trump. To give an anecdotal example, I live in an extremely liberal suburb of Chicago. I still find plenty of dudes here who are talking about and reading the stoics, getting together with other men to do outdoor workouts, listening to Joe Rogan, and expressing interest in traditional religious practices. And my sense from talking to them is that just about all these guys voted for Harris.

So what’s the common denominator between them and the louder, more controversial, more conservative men that mainstream outlets can’t stop writing about?

Here’s my proposal: The modern manosphere, broadly construed, can be seen as a populist ad fontes movement.

Let me explain what I mean.

Populist

As best I can tell, there are virtually no establishment media, educational institutions, or centers of cultural power that are widely trusted and affirmed by the men in this movement. (Possible exceptions may be the Catholic Church or Greek Orthodox Church.) Think of Jordan Peterson, who became an early darling of the men’s movement in the late 2010s and was fairly quickly squeezed out of his tenured role at the University of Toronto.

Ryan Holiday is a college dropout. As was Charlie Kirk. Joe Rogan too. The manosphere discourse takes in the less-well-lit spaces of the internet, not in the opinion section of the New York Times or the lecture halls of the Ivy League––those places are where discourse about the manosphere takes place.

There’s a strong anti-establishment, grassroots edge to the contemporary men’s movement.

Ad fontes

The Latin phrase ad fontes translates as “to the sources,” and it was the rallying cry of the humanist renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. It signified a return to the written sources, the primary texts, at the fount (cf. fontes) of Western civilization. This includes the great histories and philosophies of the Greek and Roman tradition, as well as a renewed interest in reading the Christian scriptures in their original languages.

This is an oversimplification, but there was a sense during that time that the literary resources that gave shape to the best parts of the West had been lost, or at least that the West had lost touch with them. A retrieval of these ideas and texts led to a time of renewal (i.e. Renaissance, ‘rebirth’) and Reformation.

For the modern men’s movement, we see a similar itch for return and retrieval, a sense that something has been lost or that some wrong turn has been taken in the “progress” of the 20th/21st century world. Yes, this impulse could be read as simply reactionary, and in many ways it is. It can also be seen as traditionalist in the not so helpful sense of an uncritical bias towards the old and assumed skepticism towards the new.

But an ad fontes impulse is different than mere conservatism or traditionalism––although it certainly has significant overlaps with both. It’s less about trying to protect a way of life that you see as being under threat (i.e. to conserve something). An ad fontes impulse comes from a sense of being lost, a realization that you’re off the path of flourishing and that you need to turn back and look at the map that was posted at the beginning of the hike.

The ad fontes move seeks to reclaim something from the past that has been lost. It may include a rejection of modern progress, but not necessarily so. The renaissance humanists and the Protestant Reformers could certainly be seen as the “progressives” of their day.

But I don’t want this post to descend into finger pointing about who is actually conservative or who is actually liberal/progressive.

Why Return to the Sources?

Let’s stick with the image of being lost––because this is, I think, a promising angle for a sympathetic read of the modern men’s movement.

The past 150 or so years have been profoundly disruptive for traditional sources of meaning for men and boys. The industrial revolution devalued the unique contributions of male embodiment and temperament to human work. The sexual revolution severed the connection between male sexuality and fatherhood. The industrial revolution has left men whose biological adaptations favor physical activity confined to typing away at computers.

Add to all this the complicated dynamics of various waves of feminism, the anti-male edge of the #MeToo movement in particular, and the defensive #notallmen reaction against it.

And, to cap it all off, men and boys are in a bad way. Their academic achievement is slipping (badly). Fatherlessness is a scourge (downstream from the sexual revolution), particularly in poorer and minority communities. Deaths of despair among men––from drugs, alcohol, and suicide––are way up. It’s simply more complicated and confusing and even dangerous to be male in the modern world than at many other times and places in human history.

Why are some men returning to the sources? Because men are lost. They’re looking for a map out of the woods. Many have a deep, even visceral sense that something about the modern world has gone badly wrong, and that this wrongness is borne in an especially pronounced and unique way by men.

The modern “establishment” has swung so far away from taking the suffering of men seriously, that men no longer trust in that establishment. But this raises the question, who can men trust? Who sees them and believes in them and wants better for them? Surely, their surprisingly vulnerable position has made many men susceptible to populist and authoritarian political figures and influencers like Tate, Fuentes, or Bronze Age Pervert. But there is also a more inquisitive, thoughtful, open-hearted, open-minded wing of the manosphere.

And this is not to say that there’s nothing––as the kids say––“problematic” about the Church Fathers, the Hellenistic philosophical tradition, or the histories of Bronze Age warlords. Whether it’s Aristotle or Augustine, you can find plenty to object to as a post-enlightenment modernist (or feminist, or abolitionist, or anti-racist) if you’re looking for it. But it’s undeniably true that the map provided by these ancient traditions has stood the test of time and served generations of men––yes, men in particular––well. For literal millennia, these traditions have given men ideals of virtue to strive towards, a sense of meaning and vocation, a call to responsibility and conviction.

For all of its misreadings and misappropriations of the sources themselves, the ad fontes wing of the men’s movement has offered something to the lost men of the modern world: hope that maybe there’s something that might get them, and the world that they live in, to a better future.

The promise of viewing the manosphere (or at least part of it) as an ad fontes movement is that it is invitational. In a world of superficial learning and speed scrolling and AI slop and media bias and all the rest––do we dare to be upset that there are a bunch of dudes reading Seneca? SENECA? I say, let their tribe increase.

Let’s “take up and read” together the words of scripture, the words of the ancients, and meet together on the contested battlegrounds of ancient ideas––not deciding ahead of time that the only things to be found there are rank misogyny and racism. You may find some (even a lot) of that. But you will also find much more.

One of the main differences between the OG ad fontes movement of the Renaissance and the modern men’s movement is that, as I’ve already said, the contemporary one is populist. The former was top down, the latter is bottom up. As best I can tell, it’s not as if young men are showing up on college campuses for their freshman year and declaring a major in Classics to be taught by male sages and conservative philosophy professors (again, note Jordan Peterson as the counter example). But maybe they should! One of the things that Donna Zuckerberg and others have noted about the use of classical texts and philosophy within the manosphere is that it is often a superficial misunderstanding or a cherry-picking surface reading of those texts. Fair enough.

And again, there’s a lot in ancient sources of wisdom that are contestable and controversial. This is of course also true of modern critical accounts from Nietzsche to Marx to Butler to Derrida.

Instead of simply criticizing these men and boys for their “trad” impulses, we would do well to better understand the context in which these impulses grow––a context that extends far beyond the simplistic narrative of politicized outrage. Maybe the path to dialogue and engagement with young men involves joining them among those sources and “reasoning together” towards a better future that has reclaimed the wisdom of the past.

Some recommended reading:

Tom Holland. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

Carole Hooven. T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us.

C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

Richard Reeves. Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.

Donna Zuckerberg. Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age.

I think it’s fair to say that we’re past the peak of the ex-vangelical/deconstruction movement. New theological, social, and political coalitions are still solidifying, but I suspect that the majority of folks who will have “conversions” of one kind or another have already had them. My own season of angst (from 2020–2023ish) didn’t result in any drastic changes of ideological conviction; I still hold more or less traditional views on all sorts of theological and social issues. I would still identify (with some grumpy and persnickety qualifiers) as an evangelical. It’s the world I grew up in, and it is the ecclesial-cultural world in which I intend to stay, hoping I can be of some help along the way.

The purpose of this post is not to adjudicate or debate any single evangelical/post-evangelical hot button issue (gender roles, LGBT inclusion, immigration policy, Trumpism, spiritual abuse, etc.). I’d also like to suspend any judgment on whether the stayers or the go-ers made the “right” decision as it relates to the evangelical church. Instead, I want to talk about how we contend for and carry our beliefs, whether they align with “traditional” evangelicalism or with a new “progressive” post-evangelicalism.

First, some qualifiers.

What about Truth, Bro?

What we believe matters––matters quite a lot, actually. If you affirm some version of biblical authority––infallibility, inerrancy, whatever––how you interpret scripture matters quite a lot. If you think Christians are called to contend for the way of Jesus in the public square, which political causes you support matters quite a lot. If you think the way people live and believe has eternal implications beyond this life, it’s important that you get those right to the best of your ability.

But some will (in a sense, rightly) critique an overly-rationalistic emphasis on doctrinal precision at the expense of love. It’s a well-worn cliché that love is all that really matters. But this is not quite right. Surely truth matters as well.

In Exodus, YHWH describes himself to Moses as abounding in “hesed and emet” (Exodus 34:6) a phrase that could be translated as “abounding love/graciousness and truth.” Similarly, Jesus is described in John’s Gospel as “full of grace (χάριτος, charitos) and truth (ἀληθείας, alētheias)” (John 1:14).

This is also a bit of an evangelical cliché, one that I’ve heard many preachers, small group leaders, and friends emphasize over the years. We need to contend for the truth, but we need to make sure we do it in a loving and gracious way. Why? Because this reflects the very character of God.

Still, in multiple early Christian texts, there’s a special privileging of love. Paul writes in Galatians 5 that, in Christ, “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (v. 6b). He goes on to echo Jesus’ own teaching that the sum of the entire law is the command to love (Gal 5:14, cf. Matt 22:40).

So, having the “right” or “true” view––on x doctrinal topic or y social issue or z philosophical question––really does matter. However, early Christian instructions rank love as the highest value of all.

Now, back to virtue.

The Unvirtuous Intellectual Legacy of American Evangelicalism

There are a whole slew of sins common in the activist wing of evangelicalism (the portion of the church that tends to spend the most time online and be the most vocal in the public square). These include but are not limited to: partisanship (i.e. partiality), anti-intellectualism, arrogance, pride, slander, hatred of enemies, hypocrisy, and keeping records of wrongs.

In a time of ideological churn and shifts like our own, we may feel tempted to pat ourselves on the back for the rightness of our ideology without asking deeper and harder questions––questions about the progress or stagnation of growth in our character. So, the thing to ask yourself––the question I try to ask myself––is this: Independent of any ideological shifts or lack thereof, am I growing in the virtues of love and charity towards those with whom I disagree on theological, political, and social questions?

If you’re someone who is critical of conservative evangelicals for their partisanship, have you adopted a similar partisanship in the other direction? Are you as willing to point out the shortcomings of your own “side” as you wish the other “side” was willing to note their own?

And in our polarized ideological moment, we can also be tempted to think ideological, theological, or political alignment are all that really matter. But if you’ve changed political allegiances, this alone doesn’t make you a better, godlier person. Maybe all you’ve changed is who you show partiality towards.

You can change your ideological position without changing your disposition towards those who think differently than you.

During and after my own “deconstruction” phase (not that I ever called it that myself), I was disappointed to see these immaturities and vices often reflected in my own behavior. I had turned the uncharitable, unvirtuous disposition that I used to direct at “liberals” back at the evangelical church that had reared me. How’s that for progress? Again, this is not to trivialize any of the points of controversy that currently swirl inside and around the perimeter of evangelical and post-evangelical identity.

And, full disclosure, this beef is mostly directed at my newly-socially progressive ex-evangelicals brothers and sisters, though the complaint certainly extends far beyond them. Plenty of folks who maintain “traditional” evangelical views are jerks and hypocrites. Still, I think there’s something uniquely unsavory about someone who leaves a subculture spewing accusations of hypocrisy, uncharity, or partisanship only to continue to be characterized by these same vices––just with a new slate of ideological commitments.

Many folks will critique conservative Christians for being in the Republican Party’s back pocket while more or less slipping into the back pocket of the Democratic Party. They go from quoting out-of-context verses that superficially seem to support conservative policies to quoting out-of-context verses that superficially seem to support progressive policies. Or, perhaps they spent a previous era of their life condemning professing Christians who affirmed same-sex relationships (or LGBT folks themselves), but now that their view on the issue has changed, they use the same energy condemning professing Christians who do not affirm same-sex relationships.

Remember, it is very possible to change your position on x, y, or z social or theological issue without any meaningful growth in wisdom or insight, much less godliness. This is exactly the sort of thing Paul is warning about in 1 Corinthians 13, and Galatians 5. Love is the sine qua non of the Christian life, the sum and summary of Christian virtue.

To paraphrase “The Dude” of Big Lebowski fame: you can be right and still an a**hole. But this is not merely a matter of being kinda mean. It’s a matter of arrogance, viewing yourself as right in your own eyes, a lack of humility and generous disposition towards others, making bad faith assumptions, failing to do to others as you would have them do to you. These intellectual vices are all to often characteristic of evangelicals, and it should be no surprise that they commonly show up among ex-evangelicals.

Surely loving your enemies includes loving your family members who you think are politically misguided. Surely it also includes loving the Christian brothers and sisters you think are badly mistaken about third-tier theological issues.

In our contending for what we believe to be true, our virtue does matter every bit as much as the truth itself. “Correct” ideological alignment is no guarantee of growth in godly virtue. As the apostle Paul puts it: You may be able to fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, but if you don’t have love––you’re nothing.

I’ve heard many a pastor over the years commend fatherhood as more or less the essence of the Christian masculinity.

On one level, this is a bit overstated. Both Jesus and Paul were single and celibate. What is more Jesus seemed (rhetorically, at least) to downplay, even denigrate, the centrality of what we today call the nuclear family in favor of the new “family” of his followers and disciples (Matt 8:18–22, 12:46–50, 19:10–12; Luke 14:26, 20:34–36). Paul also expresses a pretty strong preference for singleness, though he explicitly stops short of saying it is wrong to marry (1 Cor 7:8, 7:25–40). At the same time, Jesus welcomes children (Mark 10:13–16) and affirms the divine origin/regulation of marriage (Matt 19:1–9). The Pauline literature also holds marriage in high regard and offers instructions for both husband and wives (e.g. Eph 5:21–33), as well as specific references to the rearing of children (Eph 6:4; Col 3:21).

So, as an important proviso, I would caution against the American Christian (and Protestant) tendency to fixate on marriage and family, making them more central to Christian discipleship than they actually are, at least in the New Testament.

This being said, I struggle to think of a better context for men in particular to grow into genuine, fulsome Christian virtue than the daily engagement in the calling and task of fatherhood.

I often tell young(er) men that getting married will reveal to them just how selfish they are. Then, after that first layer has been revealed, having a child will really show them how selfish they are. Responsibility for and commitment to the well-being of others (whether a spouse or children) is a radically transformative process of virtue formation for those willing to receive it. Ancient philosophers (e.g. the Stoics, whose height of influence was roughly contemporary with the early Christians) would often identify virtue as the highest good, the thing most worth pursuing and cultivating in oneself. Similarly, the New Testament commends a vision of life-long conforming to God’s excellence (Gk: ἀρετή, arete, ‘virtue’) by the power of the Spirit.

Perhaps no Christian virtue list is more famous than the one given by Paul in Galatians chapter 5, commonly known as the Fruit of the Spirit. And in a moment where men of upstanding, unassailable character seem so lacking, a reorientation towards virtue seems necessary in our collective consciousness. So, to round out this post, let’s take a quick walk through these virtues and note how being a dad offers ample opportunity to grow in them.

The Fruits of Fatherhood

St. Thomas Aquinas famously defined love as willing the good of the other. And what calling is there more clear than fatherhood that models one’s obligation to seek the good of another’s well being? Even spousal love lacks the clarity of self-giving on display in fatherhood/motherhood. Husband-wife relationships are much more competitive by nature, and the relative level of independence from one another creates more opportunities, of a sort, for love to be mutual––you scratch my back; I scratch yours. Love for children, by contrast, is distilled, filtered out. We love and serve our children because they need us to love and serve them, and they are often uniquely unable to give us anything in return. Oftentimes, this is precisely the type of love that the Christian faith calls us to live out.

Children also afford their fathers an exposure to the exuberance of joy that dwells only in the heart and body of a child. From the simple pleasure of “Daddy, throw me up in the air” (a request from my three year old just this afternoon), to reliving with your kids the “first-time” experience of your own childhood favorite films, to a child’s awe and wonder at the world, to the uncontrollable giggle of a little boy in a wrestling match with his dad––children give us a renewed experience of joy that many men are sorely lacking in their adult life.

One of the most publicized symptoms of the male crisis in our culture is the sharp increase in depression among men––tragically ending far too often in so-called “deaths of despair” from suicide or substance abuse. The joylessness of many men has become a matter of life and death. Now I’m not suggesting that simply having a child is some sort of panacea for or foolproof inoculation against depression. Still, the joy that children bring to their fathers is good medicine in a world that often conspires to steal men’s joy.

Children also need the stability and structure––the peace––that a good father must learn to provide. Becoming a father, then, ideally incentivizes a man to mature out of the more wild (and at times chaotic) existence of young male adulthood. If you’re regularly staying up until 2am gaming or drinking with your buddies as a single man in your 20s, you can maintain the illusion that this behavior will not have negative consequences. But if you try this as a father of three kids, your wife and children will immediately suffer.

It is of course intuitive that fathering requires patience. But my younger self couldn’t have anticipated just how much patience is required to be a non-reactive, non-explosive dad to a gaggle of kids under 10. Your kids will provoke you to anger like you’ve never been provoked, and patience is the virtue required to not let that anger get the better of you.

Kindness in scripture is often closely related to mercy, and being a dad takes the wisdom of knowing when to be firm, structured, and unbending, as well as when to extend mercy, grace, and kindness. Kindness also signifies that warmth of relationship required for cultivating deep connections with your kids as they grow older. A kind father is a constant source of comfort for his kids; the opposite a constant source of pain.

The apparently all-encompassing virtue of goodness (Gk: ἀγαθωσύνη, agathosyne) is actually closely related to generosity and beneficence. Being “good” to your kids means being willing to part with your abundance, such as it may be, and provide for them generously, even extravagantly. Goodness means a ready to divest yourself of what might be technically “yours” and freely give from your self and your means to bless others. One of the most simple ways fatherhood constantly requires generosity of me is in relation to my time. Kids are nothing if not a source of constant interruption and neediness. Good and generous fatherhood implies a willingness to allow for, even welcome those interruptions.

Perhaps nowhere in life are the stakes higher for faithfulness than in a father’s relationship to his kids. Study after study has been showing us that fatherlessness and father absence are an absolute scourge on our culture and society. You would struggle to name a greater and more pervasive predictor of negative life outcomes for kids than father absence. Love demands that men stay. And the promise to stay––to remain faithful to your kids and to their mother––is the greatest test of faithfulness that many men will face.

Also, for men to be good stewards of their larger and stronger bodies, it is often of the utmost importance that they learn the habit and virtue of gentleness. And perhaps nothing can serve as a better crash course in gentleness than being one of the adults responsible for a tiny, impossibly vulnerable, seven-pound newborn. Likewise––in caring for their kids, tending to their needs, giving discipline––a father must learn quickly, and more and more, to be gentle with those with whom he shares a home.

Finally, the cultivation of any virtue requires self-mastery, the control of one’s vicious impulses––be they of anger, lust, impatience, gluttony, substance abuse. A man who is not in the lifelong process of learning to control himself in this regard, will be constantly hampered in his ability to be a good father to his children.

Higher Reward, Higher Risk

As you may have noticed, the intersection of these virtues (or their mirrored vices) and fatherhood is high stakes. For some, being a father affords more opportunities to form these habits, which can create a rewarding and life-giving circle of growth both for the father and the child. However, a failure to cultivate any one of these virtues can prove disastrous. Surely virtue formation is a lifelong project, one that begins long before a man becomes a father. And, importantly, children are not guinea pigs on which an aspiring but not yet virtuous man can spend his worst immature impulses on the way towards a stronger character. Still, I struggle to think of a better proving ground for the male character, the Christian virtue, we are sorely lacking in this moment.

For this reason alone––and of course a thousand others beside––fatherhood is much to be commended to men. A single, uncommitted, life can very easily become a life characterized by laziness, irresponsibility, and vice. The path towards virtue is often charted through fatherhood. And the path to becoming a good father requires constant growth in virtue.

People would also us the Forum Wall to engage in idle theological sparring and musings. For example, I remember someone once posting a short reflection on whether it was theologically coherent to pray for someone in the past. “If God is outside of time,” the poster asked, “shouldn’t he be able to hear our ‘future’ prayers for things that are happening in our past?” In addition to quirky questioning like this, students of course engaged the usual suspects of theological controversy: predestination, political affiliation, gender roles, gifts of the Spirit, LGBT inclusion, and the like.

Though announcements and for sale notices were common, most of the airtime on the Forum Wall was reserved for jokes and debate of one kind or another. Students regularly wrote notes on others’ posts, correcting their grammar, offering scriptural counterpoints, expressing agreement or displeasure. It wasn’t uncommon for an especially funny or controversial piece of paper to solicit a dozen or more comments. The most common comment of all?

“Is this biblical?”

Sometimes this was meant sincerely. But the writing of this simple question had years ago also become the single most famous campus meme. Someone would post a picture of their friend in a silly hat. “Is this biblical?” An add for selling a collection of DVDs. “Is this biblical?” A poster for someone’s piano recital. “Is this biblical?”

This campus tradition illustrates just how flexible-to-the-point-of-uselessness evangelical employment of the word ‘biblical’ has become.

You Keep on Using That Word…

‘Biblical’ has come to be one of my least favorite words in the evangelical dialect of Christian-ese. This is for two main reasons, one less serious and one more serious.

The first (and less serious) issue with the way we use ‘biblical’ has to do with imprecision. Quite simply, we use the word ‘biblical’ so loosely and to describe so many things that it’s often difficult to discern what is even meant by it. We can speak of biblical arguments, biblical staff structures, biblical manhood/womanhood, a biblical view of abortion, democracy as a biblical form of government, how the Republican/Democratic platform is more biblical than Democrats’/Republicans’, biblical theology, biblical friendship, etc. etc.

Surely biblical-ness can’t mean the same thing in all these cases. What does it mean for democracy to be biblical? Our form of government is never mentioned, much less modeled in the Bible. Surely the claim that democracy is biblical comes from its application of scriptural principles like human dignity, impartiality, and the transcendence of social hierarchies in the Christ.

And if we’re talking about gender roles as biblical, do we mean the model of manhood lived by Jesus (single, celibate, homeless) or by David (adulterer, murderer) or by Abraham (polygamous)? More likely, ‘biblical’ means conforming to the Bible’s prescriptive teaching on sex and gender, yes? But this, of course, implies that one has rightly interpreted the Bible’s teaching on this or on any other topic, issue, or doctrine (more on this below).

What if someone were to say that the Trinity is a biblical doctrine. Well, this claim can’t mean that the actual word ‘trinity’ appears in scripture; it doesn’t. So, when we say the doctrine of the Trinity is biblical we likely mean something like ‘an orthodox theology implicit in scripture or taught by scripture when rightly interpreted.’

My personal (least) favorite is when endorsers or marketing teams slap the word onto a blurb for a book, declaring once and for all that its contents are biblical™ and therefore approved for faithful Christian consumption.1 But when someone describes a book as ‘biblical’ do they mean it’s theologically orthodox? Quotes the Bible a lot? Aligns with their tradition’s/community’s view on X issue?

If we aren’t careful, ‘biblical’ becomes simply a stand in for ‘something I agree with’ or ‘a perspective I like’ or ‘something that feels Bible-y whether or not it’s actually drawn from the biblical text itself.’

This brings me to my second and more serious concern with the way we use the word ‘biblical’.

Thou Shalt Not Appeal to the Lord’s Book in Vain

The second (and far more serious) issue with everyday use of the word ‘biblical’ is that the term is often used in such a way as to borrow divine authority as a tool of human persuasion.

In the first instance, this happens when Christians use the word to describe their theological position over and against the position of other sincere, Bible-believing Christians who disagree with them. A classic example of this is when the credobaptist describes believer’s baptism as the “biblical” position at the expense of paedobaptists. I get appealing to scripture to defend your position, but simply slapping the word ‘biblical’ on your view slanders the other believer’s conscience and interpretive tradition. Bible-believing Presbyterians and Anglicans surely love and respect scripture’s authority every bit as much as their Baptist brethren, right? And many thoughtful folks on both sides of this hotly-contested, centuries-debated question could marshal strong scriptural evidence in favor of their view.

The fact is that there are some many things––mode of baptism, church governance, the tithe, sabbatarianism, the nature of free will, women’s ordination, etc.––over which sincere and faithful Christians have sincere disagreements. However, their trust in scripture’s authority is often not the issue. In cases like these, we shouldn’t slap the word ‘biblical’ on our view as a bullying tactic to belittle others. Instead of begging the question of a view’s biblical-ness, make the actual argument from scripture.

Far more egregious than this, though, is when we use the word ‘biblical’ for more culturally situated and idiosyncratic preferences. This could include describing someone as the ‘biblical’ candidate for office. Or (again) describing a book as ‘biblical’ because it’s written by a professing Christian with whom we agree. Or when we praise a woman who meticulously folds laundry saying she’s acting like a ‘biblical’ wife.

In many such cases, we are (perhaps subconsciously) trying to borrow God’s authority for that which we have no business borrowing it. This is something God takes very seriously, and we should too. The Third Commandment, after all, forbids us ‘taking’/’using’/’bearing’/’carrying’ YHWH’s name in vain. In the Ancient Near Eastern context in which this command was given this meant the Israelites were forbidden from using God’s name as a type of magical incantation for their selfish or merely human ends. Likewise, this command implies that in whatever the people do or claim to do on God’s behalf must be done with utmost reverence and humility. We don’t get to willy-nilly say that God is on our side in any war or conflict or even intellectual disagreement. That’s using the Lord’s name in vain.

We are not to borrow God’s authority for our own pet projects and preferences. Nor should we claim that authority it when stating our position about things about which we could be wrong or that humility would require us to be open to correction. I believe this is exactly what we do when we use the word ‘biblical’ in a haphazard way. We are implying that the co-eternal Spirit of God who inspired the Holy Scriptures agrees with what we are going to say next. You better be pretty darn sure you got that right, and if you aren’t sure, maybe find a different word than ‘biblical’ to describe your position.

As a marketing ploy, the word ‘biblical’ is also used as a buzzword to signal to a Bible-loving audience that they should buy and read it. “God approves of this book,” the ‘biblical’ label claims. “You can give me/us your money in confidence because our teaching is aligned with God’s Spirit in a way that those other no-so-biblical books aren’t.”

To sum up: We aren’t nearly careful enough with our use of the word biblical. At best it can be sloppy and imprecise. At worst it can be blasphemous––a clear and serious violation of the Third Commandment.

What I Say Instead

As you might have guessed by now, I actually try to avoid using the word ‘biblical’ whenever I can. If I do use it, I try to clarify what exactly I mean or what I’m claiming. Oftentimes I will swap out ‘biblical’ for ‘Christian’ if I’m trying to make a claim about what I believe is distinctive about Christ-follower belief on a given topic. I also sometimes (as I have once or twice in this article) use the word ‘scriptural’ as a less rhetorically loaded substitute. Or, I might say, “What I understand to be the biblical teaching…” as a way of creating distance between my view of what scripture says and what God has said. In any case, if I claim that language, thinking, or a perspective is “biblical” I try to point very closely and immediately to the evidence in support of that claim, e.g. a scriptural text where the language is used.

However, as I’ve already suggested, I mostly find the word unhelpful and for that reason don’t use it very often. In my experience there is almost always a better, more precise, more humble way of expressing what I mean when my Christian-ese brain reaches for the word ‘biblical’.

I invite you to join me in erring on the safe side and think of other words that are more respectful to brothers and sisters (or even pagans) with whom you disagree. I also caution you against careless use of your words, particularly if they use God’s name and authority like some sort of cultural trump card. We are commanded not to use God’s name in vain, and we will give an account for every idle word that escapes our mouth (Matt 12:36)––even if that word is ‘biblical’.

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