Paul had been dropped off in the city, waiting on Silas and Timothy to catch up with him, and, like most of us would do when we arrive someplace new, he’s getting the lay of the land.

Athens is lousy with divinity. Zeus for the weather, Ares for war, Aphrodite for love, Artemis for the hunt and for childbirth, Athena for wisdom and for the city herself. You could not throw a rock without hitting another rock shaped to represent some god. Temple. Statue. Idol. Everywhere you look. And, just to cover all bases, the Athenians had even erected an altar to an unknown god. Almost like an insurance policy. Just in case they overlooked an important temple and pissed off the wrong divinity. Please don’t smite us!

Houses of worship were as ubiquitous in Athens as Starbucks is in any American city today. Or actual houses of worship in any southern American city. Or ATMs anywhere in the world except when you need cash. Maybe these edifices were like AGMs—automatic god machines.

Paul, observing the glut of divinity on display, has a visceral reaction. Not surprised. Disgusted.

Paul is a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish sect known for its strict adherence to Torah and its absolute commitment to Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. His commitment is so total that earlier in Acts we find him holding the coats of the men who are stoning Stephen.

Paul becomes a Christian because he encounters Jesus and sees in him the fullest expression of the God he has been worshiping all along. He does not abandon his commitment to Yahweh. He recognizes that Yahweh has come in flesh and blood. Jesus is God’s complete self-revelation. Paul goes all in on Jesus because he was already all in on Yahweh, and he recognizes them as the same.

So when Paul walks through Athens and sees idol after idol, he can’t keep quiet. He starts arguing in the synagogue, in the marketplace, with anyone who will listen. People get annoyed enough that eventually they haul him over to the Areopagus, the philosophical court on Mars Hill. They want to hear something new, and they want him to defend it.

This is not a low-stakes setting. Athens is the city that executed Socrates for “corrupting the youth.” The Areopagus is a place where ideas have consequences. Paul is standing in front of every philosopher and thinker in the city, and he has a choice to make.

He could come in both barrels blazing. You filthy heathen pagan sinners. You disgust me. And you’re all going to hell!That option is on the table. He could thunder against the idols, condemn the people for worshiping them, and let the chips fall. Plenty of preachers since have made that exact move.

Paul does not make it.

Instead, Paul does his best to understand why there are so many pagan idols in Athens. He identifies himself with the Athenians in their desire to encounter the divine. He begins by saying, Athenians, I see how religious you are. I noticed your altar to an unknown god, and I have good news. I know who that God is.

He doesn’t quote scripture. He doesn’t condemn them for their existing beliefs. He quotes their own poets back to them. In him we live and move and have our being. For indeed we are all his offspring.

The God they have been worshiping as unknown, Paul tells them, is actually the substance of all being, the fabric of being. The one in whom we all take our breath. Our entire existence exists within the creative will of God. Everything we are is within the imagination of God. God is the one who said let it be and it was.

This is Paul’s missionary masterpiece. Some might point out that he’s not overly successful. After all, there is no letter to the Athenians in the New Testament because Paul didn’t found a church there. But there are believers. Seeds get planted. Even the skeptics walk away with something to chew on.

And, not to get overly pedantic, but the mother church of the East is the Greek Orthodox Church.

None of us is likely to get hauled in front of a philosophical court and told to defend our faith before a panel of scholars. But every one of us has occasion, in our lives, to bear witness to who Jesus is. And every one of us has a choice in how we do it.

For a long time, the church chose Paul’s first option.

You can wag your finger. You can call people rotten sinners. You can tell them they’re going to hell. Shape up or ship down. It’s an effective motivator. Fear works. It packs altar calls and stacks decisions. How many of us heard, sitting in a pew somewhere on a Sunday night, the closing question: What if tonight on the way home you have a fatal car accident? Do you know for certain that you would go to heaven?

No 12-year-old in history has paid closer attention to his father’s driving abilities than I did on those fearful car rides home.

Fearmongering is not the gospel. It’s a sales pitch for fire insurance. That’s like saying, Nice soul you got there. Be a shame if it burned in hell for all eternity. It’s a sanctified shakedown.

And it doesn’t work long-term either. You probably know how that story ends. When people get fear-mongered into the church, they end up exhausted. They get tired of trying to figure out exactly what God wants from them so that God won’t send them to hell for all eternity. At some point they say, I don’t know what to do anymore. I can’t figure out what God wants. I’m done. Some leave. Some stay, and they’re exhausted too.

That is what they were told God was like: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A spider on a web, one millimeter from eternal destruction. That is what they were told the gospel was.

Paul does not do this. Not one time, in any of his writings, does Paul consign anyone to hell. He says things like God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to the knowledge of the truth. Paul’s primary move, again and again, is to tell people that what they are looking for is right here, waiting for them. There is a God who loves them, and that God has a name.

Why does that God love them? Paul says it through the Athenian poets: In him we live and move and have our being. For indeed, we are all his offspring. You are God’s offspring. You are God’s children. The God you suspected might exist somewhere, the God you erected an altar to just in case, has been here the whole time.

This is what it’s like to look for a light switch in a dark room. You feel along the wall. You don’t know exactly where it is. And when you find it, the switch clicks and the room floods with light. Light that was there all along, just waiting to be found. Augustine got at the same thing centuries later. You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

Salvation is not, for Paul, an item on a divine to-do list. The redemption of the cosmos, the restoration of all that is, is not something God decided to do because he was bored on a Thursday. This is God’s project. This is the only thing on God’s agenda. The God who said let there be light is the same God who says let all things be new. In the Psalmist’s words: Send forth your word, and we shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.

There is a moment in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem for the final week of his life. He looks out over the city and he mourns. Oh, Jerusalem. How I longed to gather you to me as a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings.

That is God’s default posture. Not a fist. Open arms.

It’s really hard to shake your fist when it’s nailed to a cross. God proves God’s love for us in this: while we were still sinners, while we were still weak, while we were still shaking our fist at God, Christ died for us. That is not me talking. That is Paul, in Romans 5. The cross is not about God being finally satisfied that he had killed somebody. The cross is about a God who, while we were still shaking our fist, was already opening his arms.

Christ did not die so that God could be finally satisfied that God had killed somebody. I have heard the gospel presented that way too many times. God is mad at you, but Jesus took your punishment for you. That is not what Paul says. That is not what the cross says. Jesus did not bleed and die to take a punishment on our behalf. He bled and died to make a relationship between God and God’s creation. He came to restore it, to renew it. Not to satisfy God’s wrath. Not to assuage God’s anger. To prove God’s love.

Unless God has a split personality, God is not angry. God loves us. God desires us. God longs for us. God will go to every length to gather us in.

God is not in the punishing-sins business. God is in the restoring-lives business. God is in the renewing-all-things business. God is in the making-it-right business.

The Athenians erected an altar to an unknown god because they suspected there was something they were missing. Some divinity unaccounted for. Some piece of the puzzle they couldn’t quite see. They were right.

We are not so different. We have our own pantheon: power, money, sex, endless pursuits of things we can’t name and don’t understand. We serve them with a devotion the Athenians would have recognized. Like them, we are looking for the next thing.

As we grope in the dark, looking for that thing we can’t name, we will all find that what we longed for was there all along. Wanting us. Desiring us.

That’s the gospel.

Accept no substitutes.

The Greek Fathers, reading the Greek directly, took it the other way: death spread to all, because of which all sinned. Not in whom. Because of death. What we inherit from Adam isn’t guilt but mortality. I’ve argued in Patient or Defendant? that Theodore of Mopsuestia makes this anthropology explicit: Adam’s sin introduced mortality and mutability into human nature, and we sin because we are dying creatures.

The problem is ontological before it is moral. We are sick before we are guilty.

That anthropology leaves a question I haven’t answered yet. What does a dying creature do with its mortality?

In the Western theological tradition, from Augustine to Aquinas to Calvin and even John Milton, the creature rebels. Puffs itself up. Shakes its fist at God. Satan in Paradise Lost says it out loud: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. The root of sin, in this tradition, is pride, because pride is what a guilty defendant does in the courtroom.

But some of the West’s best poets knew that diagnosis was wrong. Shelley (expelled from Oxford at eighteen for publishing The Necessity of Atheism, a lifelong adversary of everything Milton’s theology held sacred) still wrote Mutability. Nought may endure but Mutability. The creature of Shelley’s imagination is not a guilty rebel deserving hell. The creature is, in his images, a cloud that veils the midnight moon, or a lyre whose strings give different sound with every passing wind. A thing whose whole condition is change and loss. Shelley would have refused every label Theodore of Mopsuestia claimed. But on the question of what a creature is, the Romantic poet and the Antiochene bishop are saying the same thing.

The Fathers say it with more precision. If the creature isn’t a guilty defendant (if the creature is a sick patient, a dying thing that knows it’s dying), then rebellion isn’t the instinct you’d expect. Pride isn’t the first move.

Fear is.

Consider Genesis 3. The first human emotion recorded after the fall is not pride and not shame. When God walks in the garden in the cool of the day and calls out to Adam, Adam’s answer is this: I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. Fear first. Then hiding.

A creature that knows, in its bones, that everything it has is on loan will organize its entire life around not losing the thing. It grasps at fig leaves. It hoards and hides. It builds cities and cultures to facilitate the hoarding and hiding.

The scriptures name it plainly: Mammon.

The Reframe

Everyone reads Mammon as greed: the desire for more. But Mammon is the desperate clinging. Greed is at least an appetite, moving toward something. Fear of loss just builds fortifications.

Mammon is not a category error committed by the especially covetous. Mammon is exactly what a dying creature builds when it doesn’t yet know it’s loved. The gated suburb, the retirement portfolio curated to the dollar, the political philosophy built entirely around “don’t take my stuff”: all of it is just an expression of the same creaturely instinct, the fear of loss.

The Corporate Temple

Mammon is most recognizable when the fear is institutionalized. When we fearful creatures manage to amass some capital, our first instinct is exactly what the rich fool does in Luke 12: tear down the barns and build bigger ones.

Once large sums of money are involved, the fear sets in. And the larger the enterprise, the greater the fear. The further money travels from the person who earned it to its actual purpose, the more layers of emotional insulation get installed.

When the rich fool decides to “build bigger” (οἰκοδομήσω, oikodomēsō), Luke is using the Greek verb that gives us, through Latin, the word “edifice.” That is exactly what we do in service of Mammon. We build edifices, both physical and philosophical, to sometimes display but always secure the thing we are most scared of losing. The corporate temple rises and casts its shadow everywhere.

The Shelf Life of an Urn

The most trenchant critique of Mammon isn’t in a theological text or an economics tome. It’s the Romantics.

As the First Industrial Revolution was remaking Europe, William Wordsworth lamented: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers... We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”Wordsworth looks at his environment and concludes that society is actively trading away its soul in the name of “progress.” He intuits that there is bait and switch at the heart of our relationship with Mammon. It promises relief from the fear of loss. Instead it amplifies the anxiety.

John Keats’s poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, makes the same diagnosis. The lovers on the vase cannot grow old. The musicians cannot fall silent. Cold Pastoral, Keats calls it. Permanence at the price of the living encounter. The same trade Mammon offers in every one of its forms: you can keep the thing you love safe from time, but only if you trade away the living version of it.

But the thing Keats says by not saying is that even the urn has a shelf life.

He is writing in 1819. His brother Tom died of tuberculosis the previous December. Keats trained as an apothecary-surgeon at Guy’s Hospital; he nursed Tom through the disease; he knows what it does to a body. Within two years he himself will be dead of it, at twenty-five.

Keats understands that the urn where the lovers are suspended in permanent anticipation is made of clay. And the Christian tradition says, so are the hands that made it.

Clay breaks. It erodes. It eventually decomposes and returns to dust. So does humanity. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return (Genesis 3:19).

Keats’s poem is written by a clay vessel trying, with all the beauty a clay vessel can muster, to make a permanence out of clay. It cannot be done. The permanence the urn offers is not permanence. It is only a very long delay.

The Slavery Has a Name

The author of the letter to the Hebrews names this thing exactly. Writing in Greek, writing to a community trying to hold its nerve under pressure, the author explains in Hebrews 2:14-15 why Christ had to become flesh and blood in the first place. Not to make a legal transaction. Not to satisfy an angry father. To free slaves.

Through death, the author writes, Christ renders inoperative the one who holds the power of death. And the purpose clause names the slavery itself: to set free those who, through fear of death (φόβῳ θανάτου, phobō thanatou), were all their lives held in slavery.

The whole of a human life lived under the weight of mortality is called, in that sentence, slavery. Yes, we are enslaved to sin and death. But the overseer is fear. Fear keeps us in chains.

What the Cross Actually Did

In Patient or Defendant? I argued that the cross is medicine, not payment. Somewhere between Augustine and Anselm, Luther and Calvin, the hospital became a courtroom, and we’ve been trying to pay for the medicine ever since. Hebrews 2 is the same argument in an older key. Christ came to liberate slaves. The mechanism is κατάργησις (katargēsis): the decommissioning, the rendering inoperative, of the one who held the power of death.

In Original Hope I put it more plainly: when sin killed Jesus, Jesus killed sin right back. And when death tried to claim Jesus, when the grave tried to claim Jesus, Jesus said all right, fine and then destroyed them both.

That is what Hebrews means by ἀπαλλάξῃ (apallaxē): set free.

John says it plainly in his first letter: perfect love casts out fear. What John calls perfect love is what Hebrews calls being set free. They are the same event described twice. The creature is still dying, still mutable. What’s evacuated is the terror. The walls can come down — the thing they were built against has already been defeated.

We read it as a self-accusation, an admission of guilt. An invitation for the weight of this innocent man’s life to be an accusing albatross placed, in perpetuity, on an entire race. This verse has been weaponized for centuries as an excuse for anti-Semitic behavior, scriptural cover for the persecution, harassment, and even the murder of Jewish people throughout history.

To the church’s everlasting shame, there is almost no Christian sect that hasn’t participated in the unjust and demonic assignation of guilt for the crucifixion. From the extravagantly racist passion plays and blood libel of the Middle Ages, to Luther’s irredeemable commentary on Judaism, to the church-sanctioned early 20th century pogroms, expulsions, and other atrocities that paved the way for the Holocaust, ecclesial history is riddled with the disastrous effects of sloppy and unimaginative exegesis.

That sloppiness extends to the predominant way we talk about atonement in the modern western church. The specific words may change, but the framework is always the same: God is angry and won’t be happy until you’re dead. But even your death couldn’t actually be enough to satisfy God’s wrath. So God sent Jesus so he could die and his perfect blood would be enough to meet the demands of justice and slake the wrath that burns furious in the heart of God.

Which is exactly as nonsensical as it sounds. Now put that in the context of perpetual racial guilt and watch the absurdity grow.

The cries of the crowd in Pilate’s courtyard impute the guilt of Jesus’s death to an entire race of people, for all of time, without exception. It’s an unforgivable crime, that somehow also is exactly what God demands in order to forgive the sins of humanity, except of course for that one thing where a particular ethnic group will never be free of the guilt of the crime of executing the one God wanted dead so that God could forgive sins.

But that’s not the only way to understand the cross, and it’s not the oldest way. And, frankly, it’s not the right way. The earliest Christians didn’t ask, “How is God’s justice satisfied?” They asked, “How is broken humanity healed and restored?” The cross isn’t payment. It’s participation. Christ enters fully into human existence, all of it, even death, and transforms it from within.

But when it came to Matthew 27:25, it all went out the window. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, was the first to use the word “deicide” and apply it collectively to Jewish people. His sermons became the theological headwaters for centuries of persecution. The crowd’s shout was read as a self-imposed curse, an inheritance of guilt passed from generation to generation.

It’s baffling. The very theologians who championed this punitive reading had the tools to see it differently. The early church fathers understood the cross not as a transaction but as a rescue mission. Irenaeus taught that Jesus recapitulates the entire human story. Gregory of Nazianzus insisted that what Christ did not assume, he did not redeem, which is to say, he is a full participant in humanity and therefore a universal savior. Origen himself held out hope for the apokatastasis(ἀποκατάστασις), the restoration of all things. And yet when these same theologians arrived at Matthew 27:25, their imaginations failed them. They had a theology capacious enough to envision the redemption of the entire cosmos but somehow still so narrow as to exclude the very group that Paul insists Gentile Christians are grafted into.

It took until 1965, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, for the Roman Catholic Church to formally repudiate the idea of collective Jewish guilt in the declaration Nostra Aetate. That was an important correction. But even Nostra Aetate only got as far as “not guilty.” It stopped the weaponization, but it didn’t complete the reframe. The verse isn’t just not a curse.It’s the gospel. And the key to seeing that is understanding what the blood of Jesus actually is.

I live and work and pastor in East Tennessee, a place steeped in the old-timey gospel song tradition—and it doesn’t get much more blood-soaked than that.

Are you washed in the blood? Have you been plunged in the cleansing flood that flows from Emmanuel’s veins? There’s power in the blood!

His blood be on us and on our children. Praise God! Let it be so!

The blood of Jesus isn’t a symbol of crime and punishment. It’s not a spiritual fire extinguisher that quenches God’s wrath. It isn’t payment. It’s medicine. The blood of Jesus undoes sin, frees us, marks us for eternity, unites us to Jesus. May his blood be on us, and our children, and all the world, because the blood of Jesus is the only thing that can free us from slavery to sin and death.

I’m not the first to read the verse this way. The Catholic writer Randall Smith arrived at a similar place in 2017. When readers across time and denomination start converging on the same reframe independently, it might be a sign the tradition had the raw material all along and kept choosing the wrong reading.

Little did I know that as I got older that psalm would become my favorite for reasons I couldn’t have anticipated.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. O Lord, give ear to the voice of my supplication.

Out of the depths. What kind of depths? The depths of despair? The depths of sin? Perhaps even the depths of the grave itself? The Latin liturgical title for Psalm 130 is De Profundis, which is taken from the first words of the Psalm: “Out of the depths.”

Profundis is the Latin word that roots our English word “profound.” We’ve mostly siloed “profound” off to the realm of philosophy and metaphysics — where it can’t bother anybody. But profound itself is a deeper word than we’ve allowed it to be. More than deep thoughts, profound relates to the depth of feeling, the deep wounds of suffering, the immeasurable impact of loss. These are the depths from which Psalm 130 is written.

The Hebrew word used here for “depths” is ma’amakim (מַעֲמַקִּים), and it means more than sadness. Ma’amakim is the word for the primordial deep in Genesis 1, the formless chaos before God spoke light into existence. It’s where Jonah went when he ran from God and the sea swallowed him whole. It’s deeper than the grave. This is the place of un-creation, the void where nothing is.

The psalmist isn’t praying from a bad day. The psalmist is praying from the abyss.

I have written about this psalm before, and I keep coming back to it. I think that’s because “the depths” seems to be the default setting for much of life. And we’re not alone in the depths, even when it feels like we’ve been utterly abandoned.

Take the story of Lazarus, for example.

If you had been here

Martha says it first. She goes out to meet Jesus on the road before he even reaches the house. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Then Mary says it. She falls at his feet and says the same words. Identical. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

I know this prayer. I’ve prayed it. Most people who’ve lost someone they love have prayed it, whether they used those exact words or not. Where were you? I believed you could have stopped this. You didn’t. And I still, somehow, can’t stop believing in you.

Real death, real mourners

One of the things that sticks out to me about the Lazarus story is how much John insists on the reality of what happened. This isn’t a private miracle. This isn’t behind closed doors. John is specific: “many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary, to console them concerning their brother.” A whole community has turned out. Lazarus was beloved. This is public grief.

And then there’s the detail that matters more than it first appears. They’re about to unseal the tomb as Jesus instructs, and Martha says, “Hold up. It’s been four days. Decay will have set in.” There was no embalming. Anointing the body for burial was the best they could do to buy a few days for people to grieve and say goodbye. But after three or four days, it was game over.

Which means, to use the nomenclature of The Princess Bride, Lazarus was no longer mostly dead. He was all the way dead. We can’t chalk this up to maybe he was in a coma. Everyone knew. Enough time had passed since Lazarus breathed his last that there was no hope.

No hope, that is, unless you’re dealing with someone who refuses to let death have the last word.

The memes

The internet has taken the Lazarus story and turned it into a bit. You’ve probably seen it. The premise: Lazarus is up in heaven, having the time of his life. Bad knee healed. Mansion decorated. Everything is perfect. And then Jesus ruins it by dragging him back to earth.

The comedian John Crist does a whole routine from Lazarus’s point of view. Lazarus is walking around heaven, feeling great, finally free from his ailments, and someone taps him on the shoulder: “Excuse me, is Lazarus here? Yeah, listen, we don’t normally do this, but we’ve got to send you back. Back to the Middle East with no air conditioning. Sorry!”

It’s funny. But the joke depends on a theology that has caused real harm to real people.

The premise of the joke is that coming back to life is the bad outcome. That being alive in this world, in a body, is worse than being dead. That the best thing that can happen to a person is to die and leave this place behind.

Said gently in Bible studies, this sounds like comfort: “He’s in a better place.” Said brutally in internet culture, it becomes the punchline: Jesus is the villain for making Lazarus come back.

If the best thing that can happen is death, then grief is irrational. If your loved one is in a better place, if they’ve graduated to glory, if they’re finally home, then what exactly are you crying about? You should be celebrating. Right?

Nobody does. Nobody actually does that. And the reason nobody does it is because somewhere underneath all the pious language, everybody knows: death is wrong. Death is not how it’s supposed to be. Something in us recognizes that death is an intruder, not a friend.

The theology behind the meme creates a double bind for grieving people. You’re mourning something you’ve been told you should celebrate. Your tears feel like a failure of faith. You’ve been handed a framework that makes your grief irrational, and when the grief comes anyway (because it always comes), you’re left not only heartbroken but ashamed of being heartbroken.

We put tissues in the pews and then tell people not to cry at funerals.

What Jesus actually does at the tomb

But you know who cried at a funeral? Jesus.

Not once, but twice, John tells us that Jesus, standing among the gathered mourners, two heartbroken sisters and a community of people reeling from the death of a beloved man, was deeply disturbed and troubled in spirit. The briefest verse in scripture is also the most evocative.

Jesus wept.

He knew what he was about to do. He was about to call Lazarus out of that tomb. And still he weeps. Why?

Because death sucks.

Death is not a friend to be welcomed, a release to be embraced, nor is it a monster to be frightened of. It is an enemy. The very enemy Jesus came to defeat.

And so Jesus, standing at the opening to Lazarus’s tomb, begins his full assault on death, hell, and the grave.

To imply that Jesus is sad to bring Lazarus back from some heavenly vacation makes a dangerous mistake. It says: heaven good, earth bad. Spirit good, body bad. Escape good, creation bad. And if that’s the framework, then the entire mission of Jesus collapses. Jesus didn’t come to evacuate people from creation and leave everything the way he found it. His mission is to reorder the cosmos under the banner of the kingdom of God. Or, as Handel puts it so dramatically in the pinnacle of his most famous oratorio, the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. And he shall reign for ever and ever.

John has been building to this moment from the very first verse of his Gospel. In the beginning was the Word. That’s creation language. The Word through whom all things were made is now exercising creation power over death itself. Water into wine. Forgiveness of sins. Bread for the multitudes. Sight to the blind. And now: life to the dead. Lazarus is not an interruption of the mission. Lazarus is the final movement of the salvation story before Jesus takes up the cross.

Jesus is the resurrection and the life. His most primal enemy is death.

Jesus weeps, because Jesus hates death. But the sequence matters. Weeping first, then resurrection. Jesus doesn’t skip over the grief to get to the good part. He doesn’t rush Mary and Martha to the punchline. He enters the depths with them before he brings Lazarus out.

Dry bones

God takes Ezekiel by the hand and sets him down in the middle of a valley. And the valley is full of bones. God walks him around, makes him look. There are bones everywhere, scattered across the ground, and they are completely dried out. Then God asks him a question: “Can these bones live?”

And Ezekiel doesn’t try to answer. He says, “Lord God, you alone know.”

The first thing that comes to mind when I read this is: this must be a battlefield. Not necessarily complete skeletons. Dismembered. Slain. This isn’t merely the site of some mass burial. This is a scene of utter devastation. Defeat was so absolute that there wasn’t anybody left to bury the dead, and the victors didn’t bother to.

Most of us have probably visited a battlefield at some point. And when you visit them, they’re kind of like parks, right? Green fields, historical markers, the occasional cannon. But imagine if we could see the carnage that covered those places. Imagine what Ezekiel saw.

The aftermath. Nothing left but dry bones.

And it’s in that valley that God shows his power. It would be impressive enough if the bones knit themselves back together and you got a skeleton army. But God doesn’t stop at skeletons. He puts muscles back on. He puts the tendons in. He makes these things fully functional. What was just a valley of bones has become a living, breathing army of those whom God has called into life out of death.

Paul picks up the same thread in Romans. One of the central ideas running through the entirety of that letter is life in the midst of death. Because of sin, we human beings have found ourselves enslaved and subject to death. What are we going to do about that?

Paul’s answer: we’re not going to do anything about that, because God has already taken care of it. The same God that raised Jesus Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also (Romans 8:11).

The harrowing

In John’s gospel, Lazarus is the last miracle before the story shifts to the plot to kill Jesus, his farewell discourse, betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion. Shortly after Jesus raises his friend from the dead, he will go to the cross. Allow humanity to live up to its worst instincts. All of the hatred, all of the rage, all of the brutality humanity can muster, unleashed on him. He’s going to let it happen. And then he’s going to enter the gaping maw of the grave.

But he’s not stopping there. He’s going all the way to hell.

And thanks be to God, he’s not going there to stay. He’s not even going there for a visit. He’s going there to destroy it.

I love that line in the Apostles’ Creed, right after “he was crucified, dead, and buried.” The creed declares, “he descended into hell.”

Jesus doesn’t just go to the cross, go to the grave, and come back to life. He goes to the cross. Goes to the grave. Descends into hell. Then he comes back.

What does he do while he’s in hell? He walks into hell and he knocks the devil’s teeth in and kicks the gate open from the inside.

There is an incredible Orthodox icon commonly known as the “Harrowing of Hell.” There are many, many artistic depictions of this scene. Jesus stands in the foreground. Behind him, the gates of hell stand wide open, broken, kicked out from the inside, as if Jesus has just come through action-hero style and knocked them off their hinges.

And then Jesus has his arms stretched out. On one side, he’s yanking Eve out of her grave. On the other side, he’s yanking Adam out of his.

Because there is nowhere we can go where Jesus won’t come get us. We can’t do it. We can’t get far enough away that God won’t rescue us, won’t come find us in the worst of our situations, won’t go diving into a pile of dry bones to pull life out of death.

That’s what Jesus does for Lazarus. But this story isn’t just about Lazarus. It isn’t one man getting real lucky. Jesus does that to show us what he will do for all of us, for the entire world, for the whole cosmos. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead because Jesus is raising you from the dead.

The city that comes down

And here’s where the meme theology finally falls apart completely.

Heaven is not the destination. Heaven is the layover.

We have been so steeped in the language of “die and go to heaven” that we can’t think of anything beyond the heaven part. But the Bible can. The last book of Scripture doesn’t end with souls floating in the sky. It ends with a city coming down.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the dwelling of God is with mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:1-4)

Heaven comes to earth. Not the other way around. God moves in with us.

At the end of everything, our resurrected bodies (not disembodied spirits, but our resurrected bodies) will be restored in a restored creation. Death and sorrow and pain are no more. Not because we’ve escaped creation, but because creation itself has been made new.

This world, this life that we’re given, is good and important and matters. The bodies we inhabit matter. The people we love matter. The ground we walk on matters. God’s goal is not to yank us out of it but to restore it completely.

Death is an invasion of something God made and called good. And Jesus didn’t come to surrender creation to the invader. He came to take it back.

All shall be well

This year, Holy Week is a strange conflation of joy and grief for my family.

Yesterday, Palm Sunday, we celebrated my wife’s birthday.

Tomorrow, Tuesday in Holy Week, our beloved son Titus would have turned five years old. Would have.

Titus died at 19 months, leaving a wound in our family that will never heal. Near the anniversary of his death my wife gave birth to our second son, Augustine. On Tuesday, the same day we will go to Titus’s grave with cake and decorations, we have an ultrasound of our third son, who will be born later this year.

The liturgical calendar didn’t ask my permission to hold all of this in one week. But that is part of what makes Holy Week such an important part of the Church Year. It holds joy and grief together because they are inevitable when you love. Palm Sunday knows this. Every parent who has buried a child and then dared to have another one knows this. The parade and the passion are not two different stories. They are one story, told from two directions.

I stood in my churches yesterday and told both stories, the way I always do. The palms and the passion. Hosanna and Crucify Him in the same service. Because the church has always insisted on telling both stories in the same breath. You don’t get to wave palm branches and skip straight to Easter. You have to walk through the whole week: from acclamation to condemnation, the supper and the betrayal, the King of Kings wearing the crown of thorns.

First the tomb. And then, only then, the morning.

The same Spirit of God that raised Jesus Christ from the dead gives life to our mortal bodies.

No matter what happens. No matter what we endure. No matter what we suffer. No matter how far we descend. There is no darkness dark enough, no valley steep enough, no ocean deep enough. There is no bone so dry that God will not breathe it back to life.

In the fourteenth century, an anchorite named Julian sat in a cell attached to a church in Norwich, England. Outside her window, the Black Death was killing a third of Europe. She had watched mass death. She may well have survived the plague herself. She had received sixteen visions from God, and she spent the next twenty years writing them down.

From that cell, having seen what she had seen, Julian wrote this: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

All shall be well. Words that echo the cry of a psalmist millennia before:

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.

More than watchmen wait for the morning.

More than watchmen wait for the morning.

When he turned his hand to theology, the legal training he received at Orléans and Bourges saturated his every thought. Perhaps nowhere more obviously than in his Romans commentary. The forensic examination of evidence. Sin as a criminal charge. Justification as a legal declaration that merely sets aside God’s irrevocable, sovereign judgement of guilt that no one escapes.

And for years in my Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Evangelical upbringing, it was the way I thought it was supposed to work. The traditions that formed my early spiritual experience knew nothing of the relational, participatory, therapeutic theology that shaped the early Church before it fractured, that survives to this day in the East. A tradition that understands sin as disease and God as physician. I never heard about Chrysostom’s God, the God who defaults to grace. I only knew the stern God of the Reformation and holiness movements. The God who was always prosecuting his righteous case against us worthless, guilty sinners.

Romans is one of the most life-giving and grace-filled Pauline letters. Paul is often disparaged for his polemical style, hatred of women, and intractable insistence that he is right. I’m not here to be his lawyer, but I do think that, like so much of the Bible, Paul has been read mostly backward through history. When you strip away our Enlightenment and postmodern presuppositions, the text reads as the testament of one who has experienced immeasurable grace himself, and who believes that God’s love will indeed overcome all evil and put everything right in the end.

He also had a lot of female friends.

The central chapters of Romans (roughly chapters 4-12) are an extended meditation on the human condition, the law’s role in restraining the worst effects of sin, and the reality of what God has done in Jesus Christ to do what the law was incapable of doing: undoing sin at its root and setting God’s creation free from its bondage to death.

And, if John Calvin is to be believed, none of that matters.

I don’t want to be unfair to a man who, I must admit, has been a tremendous influence on the lives of many Christians. To be sure, one of my theological heroes, Karl Barth, stands firmly in the Swiss Reformed, Calvinist tradition.

There is fruit to show for the man’s labors. However, Calvin and too many of his theological descendants fundamentally misunderstand Paul’s message, particularly in Romans. The result has been a toxic fatalism that reduces the human experience to a meaningless trudge through one’s providential foreordination and transmogrifies grace into a personality-consuming parasitic entity.

In Romans 5:3-5, Paul lays out a progression: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope. Calvin calls it a “remarkable gradation,” and he’s right. But he can’t leave it alone. Almost immediately he inserts a disclaimer: tribulation doesn’t naturally produce patience. Most people, he notes, respond to suffering with bitterness and cursing. The chain only works when the Spirit’s “inward meekness” replaces our stubbornness.

This is a passage about lived, embodied human experience: you suffer, you endure, that endurance shapes you, and that shape becomes hope. Calvin’s theology turns it into a spectator sport. None of it counts unless God swaps out your stubbornness first. Participatory sanctification becomes something you watch happen to you.

Calvin isn’t entirely wrong that the chain doesn’t work on human power alone. But the reason it works isn’t that the Spirit replaces your agency. It’s that the whole progression is grounded in what Christ has already done. “At the right time, while we were still weak, Christ died for the ungodly.” That’s the foundation. Your endurance is real because it participates in his.

And, by the way, what’s wrong with bitterness and cursing? The Psalms are full of cursing. Job curses the day he was born. Lamentations is bitterness set to poetry. The biblical witness is absolutely clear that rage and grief and bitterness are part of the process, not evidence of its failure. Calvin’s exegesis tells every grieving person that their bitterness is proof the Spirit hasn’t shown up yet. That their cursing disqualifies them from the chain. That if suffering isn’t producing patience in you, it’s because you’re too stubborn for grace to work. That’s monstrous pastoral theology.

St. Augustine, Calvin’s theological ancestor, offers a corrective. Reading the same passage in On the Spirit and the Letter, he arrives at Romans 5:5, “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit,” and treats it as the hinge of everything. For Augustine, grace isn’t a legal status. It’s the Holy Spirit forming delight and love in the human heart. He’s blunt about the will on its own: it “avails for nothing except to sin.” But here’s the difference. Grace doesn’t bypass the will. It ignites it. God’s love is poured into us so that we desire the good. The wanting is real. The participation is real.

Calvin inherited the diagnosis and dropped the cure. Where Augustine says grace ignites the will, Calvin says grace replaces it. And if you’ve ever sat in a pew and been told that your suffering is just something God is doing to you, that your endurance doesn’t really count, that the character you’ve built through the worst season of your life is just the Spirit doing a swap, you’ve felt the difference.

Paul uses the word δοκιμή (dokimē) in verse 4 (most English translations render it “character”) and the word choice matters. It’s not the test. It’s the result of having been tested. Proven character. The gold that remains after the fire has burned away the dross. It’s your experience, your character, your gold. God doesn’t engineer suffering as a sanctification exercise, some kind of divine obstacle course designed to toughen you up. The suffering is real. It comes from living in a broken world. But Christ is present in it, not as an impartial observer, but as one who has himself suffered, who knows suffering and pain and death, and who by his endurance won for all a hope that will never disappoint.

Calvin reads bitterness as the opposite of patience. Paul doesn’t. δοκιμή (dokimē) includes the cursing. It includes the rage. Refining fire is still fire. It still burns.

And then Paul does something extraordinary in verses 6 through 10. He stacks three words in ascending order: ἀσεβής (asebēs), ungodly. ἁμαρτωλός (hamartōlos), sinner. ἐχθρός (echthros), enemy. Christ died for the ungodly. Christ died for sinners. Christ died for enemies. It’s a three-tier escalation, and the western Christian tradition, almost without exception, reads it downward: look how unworthy you are. Look how far you’ve fallen. Look how much you needed saving.

Read it upward.

Look how relentless the love is.

Paul’s point here isn’t anthropology. It isn’t a case for total depravity. It’s Christology. He isn’t building a case for how terrible we are. He’s building a case for how unflinching the love is. Each step up the ladder doesn’t reveal more about our wretchedness. It reveals more about God’s refusal to stop.

And notice: the enmity between God and humanity in this passage is entirely one-sided. God never becomes the enemy of the ἐχθρός (echthros). The hostility is ours. God’s posture never changes. God continues to behold his beloved with love even when she scorns and rejects him. Which means reconciliation in verse 10 isn’t God being talked out of his wrath. It isn’t a judge being persuaded to set aside the sentence. It’s us turning around and discovering that the love was there the whole time.

The Physician’s Knife

The careful reader objects here, and they should. Because I’ve been arguing that the enmity is one-sided, that God’s posture never shifts, that reconciliation is us turning around and finding the love already there. And the careful reader has Romans 1:18 in one hand and Romans 5:9 in the other, and they are waving both of them at me. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven. Wrath. And then, right here in the same passage we’re working through: we will be saved from the wrath of God through him. I’m not pretending that word isn’t there. So let me deal with it.

The Greek word is ὀργή (orgē). What it is not is θυμός (thumos), the hot flash of passion, the outburst, the rage that rises and falls. Paul knows the difference between these words and uses both precisely. θυμός (thumos) is in the fire. ὀργή (orgē) is not. When Paul talks about the wrath of God in Romans, he uses ὀργή (orgē) every time, and the lexical entry does something interesting before it gets to anger: it gives as its primary definition “impulse, propensity, disposition.” And when it comes to ὀργή (orgē) as applied to God, the lexicographers are careful. They describe it as “that reaction of the divine nature against sin which in anthropomorphic language is called anger.” In anthropomorphic language. The word is doing something more careful than simply attributing human fury to God. It names an orientation, a settled relation of the holy to the unholy, before it names an emotion.

But to understand what that orientation actually is, you have to get the anthropology right first. Because how you understand the wrath depends entirely on what you think we are.

Theodore of Mopsuestia, bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia from 392 until his death in 428, the greatest biblical scholar the patristic era produced, preserved and honored as mpaššqānā (the Interpreter) by the Church of the East that kept his work alive when an emperor’s council tried to bury it: Theodore hands us the key. For Theodore, Adam’s sin introduced into human nature something specific: mortality and mutability. We became creatures who die, and who change. And because we are mortal and mutable, we sin. Not the reverse. That which was the consequence of sin in the case of Adam is in his descendants its cause. We don’t die because we sin; we sin because we are dying. The problem is ontological before it is moral. We are sick before we are guilty.

If the human condition is fundamentally mortality and mutability, if what we are is creatures oriented away from the life for which we were made, creatures whose very nature is bent toward dissolution, then the “wrath of God” is not God switching into prosecutorial mode. It is what the holy love of God feels like when it makes contact with a creature disoriented from its own proper end. The ὀργή (orgē) is dispositional. Not God’s disposition. Ours. It names an experience from within a broken orientation. And if that is true, then “saved from the wrath” in verse 9 is not rescue from an angry God. It is the restoration of the proper orientation, the turning around, so that the same love which was experienced as consuming is experienced as the warmth we were made for.

The Letter to the Hebrews gives us two images that hold this together, and both of them collapse if you read them with Calvin’s categories. Read them with Theodore’s, and they lock into place.

The first is the sword. “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (4:12) The Greek word is μάχαιρα (machaira), not ῥομφαία (rhomphaia) the large broad sword, not ξίφος (xiphos) the thrusting blade. The short blade. The cutting instrument. The Greeks used this same word for the physician’s knife. The author of Hebrews had options and chose precisely. What immediately follows is verse 13: before God “no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.” This sounds like prosecution. Read it as prosecution and it is terrifying. But read it as medicine, the physician who cannot treat what he cannot see, and it becomes something else entirely. Full exposure is not the prelude to sentencing. It is the condition for healing.

Of course, that’s the hard part. Enduring the exposure. Take the Samaritan woman at the well. She has had five husbands and there’s a man she lives with now who is not her husband and she has learned to carry this like a stone in her chest. Jesus asks about her husband. She does what any of us would do. She says something true. “I have no husband.” Technically accurate. Perfectly evasive. Not a lie; not the truth. She offers the minimum, the version of herself that can walk away without being defined by what she most wants to hide.

Jesus already knows. He has always already known. The Word that is sharper than any two-edged sword has already divided to the joints and marrow of her actual life. And the thing she is most afraid of, the total exposure, the being seen all the way through, turns out to be the thing that sets her free. What she felt when Jesus said you have had five husbandsis exactly what Theodore means by ὀργή (orgē): the experience of divine love by a creature disoriented from its proper end. The μάχαιρα (machaira) going in. She experienced it as exposure, as judgment, as the thing she was afraid of. It was the wound being opened so the healing could begin. She leaves her water jar and goes back to the city. Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done.

She leads with the thing she had been hiding.

I know something about this from my own experience. A few years ago an ultrasound revealed a nodule on my thyroid. I couldn’t get in to see a specialist for several weeks, and in that interval I endured a particular kind of dread, the kind that lives in the gap between what you know and what you don’t know yet. I told no one except Kristin. We didn’t want to worry anyone. So I carried it, held it close, kept it out of sight.

And then the day came to see the doctor. He looked at the images. He knew immediately what he was looking at. He understood my condition completely, far better than I did, far better than I could from the inside of my own anxiety. It was not cancer. He knew exactly what needed to be done.

I cannot fully describe the relief of that moment. Not because the news was good, though it was. But because I was finally known. The thing I had been carrying alone, hidden, was now fully visible to the one with the authority to name it and the capacity to treat it. The exposure wasn’t the threat. The exposure was the end of the threat.

The second image from Hebrews is fire. “Our God is a consuming fire.” (12:29) The author is quoting Deuteronomy 4:24, and the context there is not punishment but jealousy, the burning intensity of a love that cannot coexist with rivals. The fire consumes. But what it consumes is what is incompatible with the beloved’s presence in it. Not the beloved. What does not belong.

And Hebrews 12 has already told us what this fire feels like from inside a proper relationship with it. The παιδεία (paideia), the discipline, the formation. “The Lord disciplines the one he loves.” The word παιδεία (paideia) is the word for the formation of a child. Education. Shaping. The pressure that produces something that was not there before. This is the consuming fire experienced as formation rather than destruction. A physician again, not a prosecutor.

Gregory of Nyssa, writing in the fourth century, extends this with characteristic precision. His God’s love “draws pure souls easily and without pain to itself,” but “becomes a purifying fire to all who cleave to the earthly, till the impure element is driven off.” The fire is constant. What varies is the condition of the one who encounters it. In The Great Catechism, Gregory is specific: those who have not yet been cleansed “must needs be purified by fire,” the vice in them “being melted away after long succeeding ages” until their nature is “restored pure again to God.” Not sentenced. Not punished into nonexistence. Healed, by the fire that is love operating on what love cannot coexist with.

Maximus the Confessor follows the same thread. Those who come to judgment, he writes, “are scorched as by a fire by the comparison of their good and evil deeds.” Scorched by comparison, not by an external force applied from outside, but by the interior experience of being measured against the good they failed to become. The fire is not God applying torment. It is the encounter with love, experienced as burning by the one not yet oriented toward it.

Isaac of Nineveh, writing from the Syriac tradition that Theodore’s theology had largely formed, arrives at what may be the most precise statement of all. The sufferings of Gehenna, for Isaac, are the pangs of love: the experience of divine love by those still turned away from it. Not a different God for the saved and the damned. The same God. Not different love dispensed in different quantities. The same love, the same fire, the same consuming presence. What makes the difference is entirely the orientation of the one who encounters it.

George MacDonald, who recovered this Eastern insight in the nineteenth century, put it most starkly: hell and heaven may be the same fire experienced differently, based on the condition of the one in it. He was not being a Victorian eccentric. He was reading his Fathers. He was part of a river that ran through Gregory and Isaac and the tradition that Theodore’s anthropology had made possible, a tradition the imperial church tried to bury and the Church of the East kept alive.

None of this is evasion of the ὀργή (orgē). It is the most serious possible account of it. The wrath is real. The fire is real. The scalpel is real. But what the western tradition, particularly in its Calvinist form, made of them, an angry God who must be placated, a legal sentence that must be commuted, a punishment that must be transferred from the guilty to the innocent, is not what Paul is doing in Romans 5, and it is not what the ante-Nicene and Eastern fathers understood him to be doing.

The enmity is one-sided because the hostility is ours, not even primarily a moral hostility, but an ontological one. We are mortal and mutable creatures, oriented by our very condition away from the life for which we were made, experiencing the love of God as judgment because we are not yet able to receive it as gift. Theodore’s anthropology and Chrysostom’s asymmetry and Gregory’s purifying fire and Isaac’s pangs of love are all saying the same thing from different angles: reconciliation in verse 10 is not God being argued out of wrath. It is the creature being turned around. Reoriented. Begun on the transfer, as Theodore’s baptismal theology names it, from mortality toward the immortality that Christ accomplished in the resurrection.

God’s regard never shifted. The beloved was always the beloved.

How Much More

Hans Urs von Balthasar extends the argument into its most extreme register. In Mysterium Paschale, his meditation on Holy Saturday, Balthasar argues that Christ’s descent into hell is not a footnote to the atonement but its furthest reach. God in Christ does not merely love us from afar while we remain enemies. He descends. He takes God’s presence into the most God-hostile environment imaginable. The zone of ἐχθρός (echthros) at its most acute. The place where the ὀργή (orgē) is felt most completely, where the disorientation from God is most total. Jesus fulfills the psalm, if I descend to the depths, you are there, and ensures that no place in the cosmos can ever truly be God-forsaken.

This is where Chrysostom enters the room. Writing in the fourth century, a thousand years before Calvin picked up a law book, John Chrysostom reads Romans 5:9-10 and catches something the Reformers will later flatten. Paul’s phrase is πολλῷ μᾶλλον (pollō mallon), “how much more.” Chrysostom’s argument is devastatingly simple: if one man’s disobedience condemned all — the harder, less reasonable thing — how much more can one man’s righteousness save all? The easier, more reasonable thing. And then he says something that should be carved somewhere permanent: it suits God better to save than to punish. The asymmetry always tilts toward grace. Always.

Karl Barth, writing from within the very Reformed tradition Calvin founded, makes the reversal structurally unavoidable. In the Church Dogmatics he argues that election is prior to creation, that Christ is the elected human and the electing God before anything else exists. Which means grace isn’t God’s response to sin. Grace is the ground of being itself. Sin is parasitic. While we all experience its effects, it has no independent existence outside the good it corrupts, no ontological weight of its own. The asymmetry of the πολλῷ μᾶλλον (pollō mallon) is therefore not rhetorical. It’s structural. Grace outweighs sin not because God compensates harder but because grace is more fundamental to the fabric of reality than sin ever was or ever could be. Adam is only intelligible from Christ, not the other way around. You don’t start with the fall and work your way to redemption. You start with Christ, and only then can you look backward and understand what Adam means.

James Cone takes the πολλῷ μᾶλλον (pollō mallon) and refuses to let it remain a philosophical principle. In The Cross and the Lynching Tree he argues that the cross only becomes theologically legible in America when you place it alongside the lynching tree, that the God executed outside the city wall is the same God present in the specific, unabstracted terror of racial violence. God’s preferential presence in the place where the suffering is worst is not a general claim about divine sympathy. It is a claim about where God is right now. The ἐχθρός (echthros) in Cone’s reading is not a theological abstraction. It is a body hanging from a tree. And God is not at a safe distance from it. The “how much more” has a location, the most forsaken place, the most acute enmity, and that is precisely where you find the love that refuses to stop.

And this isn’t episodic. Cone is pointing to a specific tree, but the theology underneath it is older than America. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, not a past event God recovered from, but an eternal reality the cross makes visible in history. He ever lives to make intercession, always presenting the wounds at the heavenly altar, always standing in the posture of self-offering for the ἐχθρός (echthros). Moltmann argued in The Crucified God that the cross doesn’t tell us what God did once. It tells us who God permanently is. Divine immanence isn’t God occasionally descending into the depths. God is always in the depths. Always on the cross. Always at the place where the enmity is most acute, before anyone turns around to find it.

And this is where the whole argument arrives at its destination. Chrysostom sees the asymmetry from the cosmic end: grace outweighs sin because grace is more real. Augustine sees it from the interior: the Holy Spirit pours love into the heart, and that love is itself the judgment, because once you’ve been loved like that, sin becomes intolerable. Not because you’re afraid of punishment. Because you’ve tasted something better.

John says it plainly: perfect love casts out fear.

That doesn’t mean judgment disappears. It means judgment is completed in love. Fear is the immature response to judgment. Love is what judgment looks like when it arrives at its destination. They aren’t two different things. They’re the same thing at different stages of maturity.

Calvin broke the circuit. He kept judgment and love as separate operations, judgment for the sinner, love for the elect, and in doing so he made fear permanent for anyone who couldn’t be sure which category they fell into. That’s the anxiety engine so many of us grew up inside. We were taught that love and judgment are opposed, and you’d better hope you end up on the right side.

But John says no. Perfect love doesn’t negotiate with fear. It casts it out. And the tradition Calvin ignored, Augustine’s own tradition, ironically, understood why. Sin has no independent existence. It’s a privation, an absence. It’s what’s there when love isn’t. Darkness doesn’t get fought. It gets displaced. You turn on the light and it’s gone.

Which means sin matters. It matters precisely because it’s the thing that keeps you from love. It matters the way a disease matters to a physician. You take it with absolute seriousness. But you don’t put the disease on trial. You heal it. That’s the therapeutic model the East never lost. The cross is medicine, not payment. But somewhere between Augustine and Anselm, Luther and Calvin, the hospital became a courtroom and we’ve been trying to pay for the medicine ever since.

He was standing behind the seal of the Department of Defense. American flags behind him. And he reached for a warrior psalm to consecrate a bombing campaign.

Let’s take the text seriously.

The Psalm Hegseth Didn’t Quote

Hegseth quoted Psalm 144 over a Pentagon podium. Fine. He used the Psalter. So do I. But more important than either of us, Jesus used the Psalter. A lot.

And how he used it matters for this conversation.

The Psalms, in the Jewish tradition, exist to do two things. They internalize the Torah, the prayers and songs that form God’s people around God’s law. And they announce, revere, and praise the King and his descendant, the Messiah.

If you’re a Christian, both of those purposes are fulfilled in Jesus. He is the Torah embodied. The Word made flesh. And he is the King, the Messiah the whole Psalter has been pointing toward.

So let’s look at what Jesus actually did with the Psalms. Not what we do with them. What he did. Because every time he reaches for the Psalter, he’s doing three things at once: claiming to be the Messiah the Psalms announce, redefining what that Messiah looks like, and showing his followers how the one the scriptures are about will behave.

From the cross, he quotes Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s a messianic psalm. The Gospel writers knew it. They framed the entire crucifixion around it: the soldiers dividing garments (Psalm 22:18), the crowd mocking and shaking their heads (22:7), the bystanders sneering “he trusts in God; let God deliver him” (22:8). John flags it explicitly: “that the scripture might be fulfilled.” The crucifixion narrative is Psalm 22 being enacted. Jesus is claiming it. And the claim sounds like abandonment.

Then he quotes Psalm 31: “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”

This deserves more than a passing glance. This is not just surrender. This is trust. This is Psalm 23 enacted: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” Jesus is in the valley of the shadow of death. He is being killed. And he does not reach for a weapon, does not call down fire, does not invoke the warrior God of Psalm 144. He commits his spirit into the Father’s hands. That is how the one the scriptures are about behaves when he is being murdered.

In his teaching, he quotes Psalm 110, “The Lord said to my Lord,” and turns it into a question the Pharisees can’t answer. If David calls the Messiah “Lord,” then the Messiah is bigger than David’s throne. Jesus is claiming the title. And in the same breath, he’s exploding the category. The kingship is real. But it’s something David himself couldn’t contain.

He quotes Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” He’s identifying himself as the cornerstone. That’s a messianic claim. But the cornerstone was rejected. That’s how God builds. He quotes 118 again in his lament over Jerusalem: “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. You will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” The Messiah is claiming the title. And the way he describes his own posture toward the city that will kill him is a mother hen covering her young with her body. That’s how this King behaves.

And the posture of crucifixion itself tells the same story. Arms stretched out. Open. Covering. Drawing close. As the BCP’s morning collect for mission puts it: “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace.” The hen gathering her chicks. The crucified body absorbing the blow. The Messiah’s body becomes the shelter.

When challenged about children praising him in the temple, he reaches for Psalm 8: “From the lips of children you have ordained praise.” He accepts the praise, the messianic acclamation from the mouths of babes, not from the halls of power.

About Judas, he quotes Psalm 41: “He who shared my bread has turned against me.” He’s the anointed one, the King, and the King is being betrayed by his own table companion. About the world’s hatred, Psalm 69: “They hated me without reason.” The Messiah is here. And the world’s response is hatred.

He quotes Psalm 82: “I said, you are gods.” Defending his divine claim. And he defends it not with thunder but with Torah. Not with force but with argument.

Every single time, all three things are happening. Jesus claims the psalms. The psalms he claims are about suffering, rejection, and self-giving love. And by claiming them, he’s establishing how messianic power operates. This is who the Messiah is. This is what happens to the Messiah. And this is how the Messiah acts, how the one the whole story is about will behave in the world. The identity, the shape, and the ethic are inseparable. You cannot have the Christ without the cross.

He had 150 psalms to choose from (151 if ya nasty). He never once reached for military victory, conquest, or divine violence. The pattern is so consistent it cannot be accidental.

And, yes. Psalm 144 is in the Bible. So are Psalm 137 and Psalm 109. If I am going to claim the Psalter is about Jesus, that means Psalm 144 and the other warmaking psalms are about Jesus too. So what does it look like when this Messiah, the Messiah I claim, makes war?

It looks like the Harrowing of Hell. The ancient tradition, affirmed in the Apostles’ Creed, confesses that Jesus “descended to hell.” The warrior King goes to battle in the depths. He kicks the gates of hell open from the inside. He storms the stronghold of death not with an army at his back but with his own broken body. And he doesn’t come to destroy. He comes to rescue every soul claimed by the devil.

This is Psalm 144 fulfilled. The hands trained for war are the hands with nail holes in them. If that’s not what this psalm is about, I don’t know what is.

You Have Heard It Said

When Jesus opens the scriptures to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24, he shows them how every word points toward his saving work of death and resurrection. Paul does something similar in 1 Corinthians 10, reading the Exodus story through Christ: “The rock that followed them was Christ.” The entire book of Hebrews is a sustained Christological rereading of the Old Testament: the priesthood, the sacrificial code, the covenant promises, everything fulfilled and transformed. The apostles didn’t invent this method. They learned it from Jesus on that road.

Augustine took it further. In his commentary on the Psalms, he argued that Christ speaks in the Psalter in three ways: sometimes as the Head (Christ himself speaking), sometimes as the Body (the Church crying out through him), and sometimes as both together. That means every psalm, even the violent ones, has to be read through this question: whose voice is this, and what does it sound like coming from the mouth of the crucified and risen Messiah? Augustine didn’t skip the hard psalms. He read them harder.

This is not a progressive invention. It is the oldest hermeneutic the Church has.

And Jesus is explicit about what it looks like in practice. The Sermon on the Mount is not a suggestion. It is Jesus standing in front of the Torah and saying, “You have heard it said... but I tell you.” You have heard an eye for an eye. But I tell you, do not resist an evildoer. You have heard, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

What Happens When You Skip the Messiah

I need to make something clear before I go on. Praying for those in danger is a profoundly Christian act. That includes our military personnel. In my pastoral ministry I have had the privilege of ministering to active duty military service members and veterans, some of whom bear deep physical and emotional scars. I pray for them.

But Hegseth’s prayer, sincere as it may have been, appropriates Psalm 144 in order to baptize warmaking, to consecrate the carnage. And he’s able to do this, and do it without even trying, because of the hermeneutical move that defines modern American evangelicalism.

It shifts the main character.

Evangelicalism, in its popular American expression, invites you to read scripture as though it is primarily about you. About what God does for you. About your life, your calling, your nation. Jeremiah 29:11 becomes a personal promise about your career. Psalm 144 becomes a blessing over your war. The “my” in “trains my hands for battle” gets read as Pete Hegseth. As America. As whoever holds the book.

But the main character of the Bible is Jesus. It is God acting through Christ. The whole narrative bends toward him. And if we displace him from the center — if we slide ourselves or our nation into the subject position of the text — we have made a presuppositional error so deep that everything built on top of it comes out wrong. We are not reading scripture incorrectly. We are reading a different book.

Hegseth can quote Psalm 144 over a bombing campaign because he has already, at the level of presupposition, replaced the Messiah with himself. Or with the nation he serves. The “my” doesn’t belong to Jesus anymore. It belongs to the Pentagon.

Peter drew a sword in the garden and Jesus told him to put it away. Same impulse. Same mistake.

There’s an irony buried in all this.

The Psalter already contains the critique. Psalm 20:7: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.” The Psalms themselves are suspicious of military power. The tradition Hegseth is quoting has its own built-in warning against exactly what he’s doing with it.

And the Psalms of lament, the ones Jesus chose from the cross, are not weakness. Psalm 22 begins in abandonment and ends in praise. Psalm 31 begins in distress and ends in trust. The shape of the Psalter is the shape of the gospel: suffering that opens into glory. Death that becomes resurrection. The cross before the empty tomb.

We often find ourselves looking for a God who trains hands for war. The God who comes among us in the person of Jesus Christ trained his own hands to be nailed open.

Since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been flooded with complaints — over 110 of them, from more than 40 units, spread across at least 30 military installations, and every branch of the armed forces. The complaints are about commanders telling their troops that the Iran war is part of God’s divine plan. That it will trigger Armageddon. That Donald Trump was, in the words of one commander, “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

According to the complaint, he had a big grin on his face when he said it.

Let me say the first thing plainly: this is heresy.

Not in the sloppy way people use that word to mean “stuff I disagree with.” I mean heresy in the formal, classical sense: a teaching that contradicts the core logic of the faith it claims to represent.

What makes this heresy? It’s an inversion of the center. A perversion of the Church’s most ancient confession — Jesus is Lord — that makes Jesus not Lord at all, but a power to be summoned. A weapon to be wielded.

The same Jesus who is the Word, through whom all things were made, becomes a word we speak in order to compel him to appear. The same eschatological promise, that no one knows the day or the hour, not even the Son of Man, becomes something tied to the whim and will of political and military forces. The powers that be.

If the return of Jesus is something that can be manipulated like a cheat code, then what does that make Jesus?

Nothing. It makes him nothing.

This is paganism.

1 Kings 18. Elijah on Mount Carmel, facing off against the 450 prophets of Baal. And what are those prophets doing? They’re not just praying. They’re performing a sequence. Cry louder. Cut yourself. Dance the pattern correctly. Execute the ritual in the right order. If you perform the correct actions in the correct sequence, the god must respond. The god is a mechanism.

Elijah mocks them. Explicitly. “Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe he’s on a journey. Maybe he’s taking a shit.”

There is an eerie similarity between the prophets of Baal and the command briefings Larsen reports: a secret sequence. Israel plus Iran plus the right military action equals Armageddon. If the chosen actors execute the sequence correctly, Jesus must return.

But the God of Scripture is not Baal. God is not a mechanism.

Blood-and-soil paganism couched in the language of Christendom has given theological cover to some of the worst actors in history. The framework is not new, and it maps with uncomfortable precision onto the premillennial dispensationalist eschatology that requires a bloody Middle East conflict for the completion of history.

At the risk of running headlong into Godwin’s Law, I have to name this framework’s most well-known practitioner. The Third Reich justified cruelty in the name of destiny. A sacred historical sequence. A chosen vanguard appointed to enact it. A cosmic omelette requiring a few million broken eggs.

The United States is not Nazi Germany, and these military commanders are not SS goons. But the spirit of the age is at work in the language they are using to justify and even celebrate an armed conflict that will certainly have unintended consequences and collateral damage, and will almost certainly NOT hasten the day of our blessed hope.

When you tell soldiers that a war must be bloody in order to fulfill the cosmic script, and commanders greet that prospect with a grin, you have removed moral accountability from everyone giving orders. Dissent becomes not just wrong but illegible. You’re either one of the ones who can see the truth, or you’re not.

And if you are among the initiated who can read the signs, then the people who will bleed are not people with lives and families and futures. They are variables in an eschatological equation. Their deaths have been pre-authorized by God.

But here’s the deeper problem with this logic of eschatological inevitability. A problem that exposes the framework as having nothing to do with the will of God expressed in the Biblical witness and fully revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

A God who requires death to complete history is not a God who can enter death with us. Those are two different Gods. And only one of them can find you in the dark.

Three years ago, I buried my son Titus. I know what it is to sit in the dark and need God to actually be there, not as a concept, not as a historical force, but as the one who holds you close. And I am telling you: the god those commanders are preaching cannot find you in that room — that room with nothing but your son’s coffin and a box of used tissues.

Titus wasn’t — isn’t — a pawn in Bergman’s eternal chess match. There is no secret providence that required his death so the sequence could complete. The same is true of the six U.S. soldiers who have died so far as I write this. The same is true of the 175 civilians killed when bombs fell on an Iranian girls’ elementary school. The same is true of the countless tragedies unfolding every day that we know nothing about.

If Jesus is fully God and fully human, if Jesus is the fullest expression of God’s self-giving love, the fullest expression of God’s ideal for humanity, the place where the divine and the human are united in a single person, the place where God and humanity are reconciled, as the old Christmas hymn says, then how could that same God require the blood of children to consummate the kingdom?

There is a monstrosity to that which defies every Christian virtue, defies everything we understand about the God of the Bible revealed in the Word made flesh. All of this death, all this destruction, all these foreclosed futures — all of it is somehow pleasing to God because it is necessary for Jesus to return? Does God really expect me — us — to believe that the peaceable kingdom requires immeasurable violence before it can come into being?

No. The true God could not. The true God would not. Which means the god this theology of Armageddon teaches is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

This is not the faith once delivered to the saints.

This is what happens when the faith gets hollowed out and filled with power. What’s being preached at those briefings is a functional atheism. It doesn’t believe in a God who acts freely, who grieves with those who grieve, who meets us in our suffering, who raised Jesus in a way that broke the logic of empire rather than fulfilling it. It believes in a mechanism that responds to the right inputs. It disguises that mechanism in Christian vocabulary, but the god hiding underneath is Baal.

The actual tradition, the one that runs from the garden to the Abrahamic promise to the Hebrew prophets, through the apostles and the patristic writers, through Augustine through the Reformers through Wesley, through Barth and Cone and you and me, has always insisted that God is sovereign, not compellable. That history is not a script we perform. That the return of Christ is not an event we can engineer.

A god that is an instrument of history cannot be the ground of history. Creator ex nihilo means prior to all contingency. Outside all sequences. The God who becomes human in the person of Jesus Christ refused to call down legions of angels. He went to the cross. Went into the darkness. Came out the other side in a way nobody predicted.

That God I know. That God I have met in the worst rooms of my life.

My God isn’t Baal. It’s Jesus.

Jonathan Larsen’s full reporting, including the NCO’s email and the complete MRFF statement, is at jonathanlarsen.substack.com. He is an independent journalist and former executive producer at MSNBC. His work is reader-supported.

For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, there is a deliberate pattern to the story that shows Jesus revisiting events from the Old Testament and redeeming them. There’s a theological word for this: recapitulation. It comes from the Greek word Paul uses, and it was developed most fully by the early church father Irenaeus in the second century. The idea is that Jesus doesn’t just save us from sin in some abstract, legal transaction. Jesus retraces the steps of Israel’s story, and humanity’s story, and wherever the story went wrong, Jesus sets it right.

A few examples from Matthew’s Gospel:

The Holy Family flees to Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre of the innocents. Why Egypt? Because the Israelites went to Egypt. And just as they eventually returned to the promised land, Jesus returns from Egypt. The pattern is being replayed. The old defeat is being rewritten.

Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River. Israel passed through the waters of the Red Sea to begin the Exodus. Israel crossed the Jordan to enter the promised land. Now Jesus passes through the waters of the Jordan to begin his ministry. Water, passage, new beginning — the pattern repeats.

Jesus begins his public ministry in Zebulun and Naphtali. Why there, of all places? Because those were the first territories to fall to the Assyrian empire. The place where Israel’s darkness began is the place where Jesus brings the light.

In Matthew chapter five, Jesus goes up a mountain and teaches the law. It’s the Sermon on the Mount, not the Sermon on the Plain (that’s Luke). And it’s on a mount because Moses received the law on Mount Sinai. Jesus is recapitulating the Sinai moment. And later, on the Mount of Transfiguration, it happens again. Jesus’ face shining, flanked by Moses and Elijah, the voice of God speaking. It’s Sinai replayed, but this time God isn’t handing down stone tablets. God is saying “This is my Son.”

Jesus feeds five thousand people with bread in a desolate place. Moses gave Israel manna in the wilderness. New Moses, new provision, same God.

Every time, the same principle: go to the site of the wound. Replay the story. Get it right this time.

Back to the Garden

The moment of recapitulation I want to focus on here is another story in Matthew 4. Jesus goes into the wilderness to fast and pray for 40 days and 40 nights. While he’s there, he is visited by the tempter, the Old Testament’s Satan, the accuser. We call him the devil. The first thing that comes to mind as we encounter this wilderness scene is probably the Israelites’ 40 year wilderness expedition, as they wandered and wended their way to the promised land.

But there’s another Old Testament story that this event in Jesus’s life revisits. Another ancient temptation: Adam and Eve’s failure in the Garden of Eden.

The temptation of Jesus takes place in a wilderness, not a garden. Why? Because Adam and Eve’s failure destroyed the garden. The wilderness is what’s left of God’s good creation after sin has done its work. But this is where Jesus meets the tempter. And where Adam and Eve failed, Jesus succeeds.

The tempter comes to Jesus with three temptations. Turn stones to bread. Throw yourself off the temple. Worship me and I’ll give you all the kingdoms of the world. And at every turn, Jesus says no. Finally: “Go away, Satan. We don’t live on bread alone. I am not going to tempt God. I am only going to worship God. You and I are done.”

The Serpent’s Sales Pitch

In the western Church, most of us have been told a version of the Eden story that doesn’t quite match the biblical text. The version most of us inherited goes something like this: Adam and Eve were arrogant, rebellious, ungrateful. They wanted to be God. They shook their fists at their Creator and grabbed the forbidden fruit out of defiant pride.

That’s not what the text says.

The real story of the serpent’s forbidden fruit sales pitch has more in common with the things we say to get our toddlers to eat their peas. “It’s so yummy! It will make you smart. It will make you strong.”

Adam and Eve — who had no prior experience with deception, who had never encountered a lie before in their lives — heard all of that and thought: Delicious? Strong? Smart? God couldn’t possibly have a problem with this. This is good for us.

And they took it and ate it. And it turned out to be poisonous.

Adam and Eve don’t reach out and take the fruit because they’re selfish or irredeemably rebellious. They reach out and take the fruit because they’re naive. Easily duped. The same way children have to be constantly warned away from danger. You tell a three-year-old not to touch the stove, not because the three-year-old is evil, but because they don’t yet understand the danger. They don’t know how to interact with a hot stove safely.

The fall isn’t a rebellious act of arrogance, but a naive act of helplessness. Two people who don’t know any better, falling for a good sales pitch.

This also reframes how we hear God’s warning in Genesis 2: “in the day that you eat of it, you shall die.” We’ve been taught to hear that as a threat. But it’s not. It’s a warning. Don’t touch that, it’ll burn you. God is naming the danger, not issuing a sentence. One reading gives you a God who is furious and looking for an excuse to punish. The other gives you a God who is parenting, protecting, warning.

Helpless, Not Worthless

In the western Church, the fall story is a noxious marmalade that fills every theological nook and cranny. From Augustine to Aquinas, Martin Luther to Jonathan Edwards, the message has been consistent: human beings are worthless sinners. Absolute garbage. Completely unlovable and irredeemable.

And many of us internalized this as God’s personal rage directed at us. God is mad at me. God would like to kill me, but thank God, God killed Jesus instead.

Can someone explain to me how that’s good news?

That theology has done immeasurable harm. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve talked to who say some version of: I want nothing to do with God because God sounds like an abusive father. They’re not wrong to reject that. Divine child abuse isn’t the gospel.

Here is the truth: human beings are not worthless. Human beings are helpless.

The story of the fall doesn’t show us arrogant rebels shaking their fists at God. It shows us naive creatures who don’t know what they’re doing, falling for a trick they were never equipped to resist. Not rebellious. Naive. Not arrogant. Uninformed. And when they fall for it, they discover that the oven was hot, that the tree really was dangerous.

And I know that might sound like a low view of humanity. Like I think humans are kind of dumb. But actually, this is the only way I’m able to continue loving people in the face of all the terrible things people do. People do terrible things because they’re weak and incapable of making the right decision on their own. Because we all need Jesus. We all need grace.

And nobody needs grace more than me.

That should probably be where we all start when we think about other people. Nobody needs grace more than me. In a world where you can “unfriend” someone with a click, it becomes very easy to dismiss them with a thought. But if we can’t start from a grounding of love, we’re only going to keep repeating the same mistakes going all the way back to Eden.

How We Got the Wrong Story

So if the text shows us helpless humans rather than depraved rebels, where did the other version come from? It has a name, and it has an author.

The doctrine of original sin comes largely from one man: Augustine of Hippo. The idea that every human being inherits not just Adam’s mortality but Adam’s guilt, that we are born condemned before we ever draw breath, is largely his construction. And I need to say up front that Augustine is one of my theological heroes. His understanding of grace, the divided will, the restless heart that can only find peace in God represent some of the most profound theological thought the church has ever produced. I challenge him here out of love, not anger.

He was brilliant. But Augustine couldn’t read Greek.

That matters more than you’d think. In Romans 5:12, the Greek text says eph’ hō pantes hēmarton. Most modern scholars translate this as “because all sinned.” But the Latin translation Augustine relied on rendered it in quo omnes peccaverunt— “in whom all sinned.” As in, inside Adam. As if every human being who would ever live was somehow present in Adam’s body when he ate the fruit, and therefore guilty of his act.

That’s a mistranslation. And it gets worse. As the theologian John Meyendorff documented in Byzantine Theology, most Greek-speaking Church Fathers read eph’ hō as referring back to death itself: “because of death, all sinned.” In their reading, what Adam passed on wasn’t guilt. It was mortality. Death entered the world through Adam, and death is what makes us vulnerable to sin. We sin because we are dying creatures, not because we are guilty ones.

Augustine built his entire theology of inherited guilt on the basis of a mistranslation. The massa damnata, the “mass of perdition,” the idea that humanity is so fundamentally corrupted that only God’s arbitrary election could rescue anyone at all, comes down to a poorly diagrammed sentence.

And this mistake is the headwaters of everything that flowed downstream: total depravity, limited atonement, a God whose wrath must be satisfied before love can begin.

The Eastern church never went there. The Orthodox tradition reads that same passage in the original Greek and arrives at a different doctrine entirely: ancestral sin. In this framework, what we inherit from Adam isn’t guilt. It’s mortality. Weakness. Vulnerability to temptation. Sound familiar? We’re not born condemned. We’re born helpless. Which is exactly what the Genesis text has been saying all along.

Before the Fall, the Blessing

Here’s something the inherited guilt framework buries: God’s first word over creation isn’t a warning. It’s a blessing. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. That’s Genesis 1:31. Before the serpent, before the fruit, before any of it — God looks at what God has made, including us, and calls it good.

That’s the baseline. Not wrath. Not suspicion. Not a God pacing the garden waiting for us to screw up so He can finally punish someone. The original state of the relationship between God and humanity is blessing.

This is why, in the sacramental tradition, we don’t repeat baptism. You don’t get re-baptized every time you sin. You don’t need to, because baptism isn’t a transaction that failure can void. It’s God’s claim on you — and God doesn’t need to be corrected. The grace that was spoken over you in those waters remains, even when you fall. Especially when you fall.

So if Adam and Eve’s failure undoes the blessing God speaks over creation at the beginning, it also undoes the very concept of grace itself. The prevenience of God’s grace proceeds from this original blessing.

What Recapitulation Actually Means

This is Paul’s entire argument in Romans 5. Just as by one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. And then the kicker: where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.

Paul believes God saves the world through Christ recapitulating the whole story. Everywhere Adam failed, Jesus succeeds. Everywhere Israel failed, Jesus succeeds. Everywhere I fail, over and over again in my own life, Jesus succeeds.

If that sounds Lutheran to you, it should. Luther built his theology on Paul through Augustine, and his central claim — that we are saved by Christ’s work, not our own — is exactly right. The irony is that it doesn’t require the inherited guilt framework Luther also imports into his theology. Recapitulation gets you there without the massa damnata.

And the mechanism isn’t punishment transferred to an innocent victim. The mechanism is a God who enters the story as one of us in order to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

We can’t save ourselves by willpower. We can’t white-knuckle our way through life. We can’t do it. If we could do it, there’d be no need for Jesus at all.

I have a tattoo on my arm. A broken shield and a broken sword, and the inscription says “Power is made perfect in weakness.” That’s a direct quote from Paul. I have it on my arm because it’s my mission statement. I know my own weakness. I know exactly how incapable I am of helping myself. But in that incapability, Jesus by the grace of God enters in and is the power of God, even in my deep and abiding weakness.

The Actual Good News

God’s not mad at you. God doesn’t want to kill you. And God didn’t kill Jesus because He needed to vent his wrath on someone.

Sin killed Jesus. But the joke’s on sin, because when sin killed Jesus, Jesus killed sin right back. And when death tried to claim Jesus, when the grave tried to claim Jesus, Jesus said “all right, fine” and then destroyed them both.

That’s the good news. Not that God is angry and you’d better get in line before He smites you. The good news is that though we are weak, in God we are made strong. Without him we can do nothing. But through Christ we can overcome. As Paul says in Romans, we are now more than conquerors in Christ Jesus. Not because we’ve figured it out or gotten spiritually buff. Because we have surrendered our weakness and allowed it to become a space for the power of God.

And if that’s true, if grace really does outpace sin, if Jesus really does go to every site of the wound to set things right, then we have to at least ask how far that project goes. If the fall is helplessness and not depravity, if God’s first (and last) word is blessing and not wrath, if the mechanism of salvation is a God who does for us what we cannot do for ourselves — is there a point where God gives up on that? Is there a line past which grace stops? The early church didn’t think so. Irenaeus didn’t. Gregory of Nyssa didn’t. And I don’t.

Some may call it wishful thinking, but Paul and the earliest Christians used a different word.

Hope.

It’s a tidy story. It’s also wrong.

Genesis 3:6. Read it carefully.

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”

Her husband. Who was with her.

Adam was there the whole time. He could have spoken up at any point. He could have punched the serpent. He could have slapped the fruit out of Eve’s hand. But no. What did Adam do? Nothing. He just went along with everything and took the fruit and ate it, just like Eve did.

Eve has been framed. I ain’t having it anymore.

Centuries of theology have been built on blaming Eve. Whole systems of gender hierarchy erected on the foundation of Eve’s supposed singular guilt. Women silenced, sidelined, and subordinated because of a reading of Genesis 3 that the text itself doesn’t support.

The text says Adam was with her. He was with her. Those four words undo an entire tradition of misogynistic theology. And here’s a question worth sitting with: who is more to blame? The one who takes the fruit? Or the one who stands right there, watches it all happen, says nothing, does nothing, and then eats it too?

I’m not going to answer that. The point isn’t the answer. It’s the asking.

Even the apostle Paul, the famously “misogynistic” writer of half the New Testament, doesn’t play the blame game. Romans 5 is Paul’s extended theological treatment of the fall and its undoing in Christ. And in the entire passage, Paul doesn’t mention Eve once as being responsible. Paul says Adam sinned. Adam, Adam, Adam. Even Paul is not blaming Eve for the fall of humanity.

So what’s the deal with this frame job? “Her husband who was there with her” wasn’t written in invisible ink. So how did Adam’s silent complicity get erased from the story?

The easy answer is (as it so often is in these matters), the #patriarchy.

The more complex answer is that retrofitting the blame for the fall of creation onto Eve gives a sort of retroactive permission for dismissing and even subjugating women within Christian society, not to mention barring them from leadership positions that they historically held within the church.

Eve was never the problem. Women are not innately weaker than men, more easily deceived, and certainly are not morally inferior. That theology was never in the text, it was layered on by centuries of corrupt power structures. The actual story is about two human beings who are complementary and equal, working together, eating together, failing together, falling together.

So the next time someone tries to blame the entire state of the universe, the fall of humankind, on Eve — you just look at them and say Genesis 3:6. Look it up. Read it with your eyeballs. Internalize it.

Adam was there too.

I gave the band a dismissive listen a few years ago as I was rediscovering heavy music as part of my grieving process after my son’s death. I have always had broad, eclectic music tastes that included hard rock, but the aggression, rage, and release of extreme music became more important to me as I experienced deeply personal loss, first my father and then my son. So when I first heard Sleep Token, I was primed for an unrelenting assault on my senses. The layered, nuanced compositions they offered were surprising and, at first, underwhelming.

Then the band kept creeping into my playlists. I started to see the genre-bending genius and the baroque compositional qualities that transform a metal track into a chamber suite. Then I started paying attention to the lyrics. And the lore. And it clicked. The story Vessel and company were telling resonated with me on every level: as a writer, a theologian, and, most importantly, as a man who has experienced the most profound loss possible.

I own like 17 Sleep Token t-shirts now. I’m actually wearing one as I write this.

I didn’t discover something new when I found Sleep Token. I recognized something. I’m a pastor. I’ve spent years thinking about how liturgy works, how narrative arcs carry a congregation through a worship service, how the rhythm of call and response and silence and crescendo can hold a room. I call my preaching style “liturgical jazz”: conversational, improvisational, interactive, but always within a structure that knows where it’s going.

When I encountered Sleep Token, I wasn’t learning the language of ritual for the first time. I was hearing someone else speak it fluently.

The Art, Seen Clearly

Vessel and the band know exactly what they are doing. They understand the music, the aesthetic, the lore as art. Vessel in particular has a very well-defined understanding of narrative, composition, and aesthetic. The “Ritual” framing they use for concerts isn’t accidental; it’s literary. The genre instability across songs, the masked personas, the mythology built across their discography, live performances, and even a graphic novel. All of it intentional, composed, and narratively coherent. Sleep Token is a literary band. The music rewards close reading. That’s a significant reason they’ve found such a diverse and devoted audience.

And this is also the music business. Let’s not be naive about that. The mystique is part of the package, and it works.

Many fans, like me, see it for what it is and engage the lore, the themes, and the art at that level. I’ve been to two Sleep Token shows now. The first was the Teeth of God tour in Asheville. The second was the Even in Arcadia tour in Atlanta. I was in the pit, and that was very cool. The show was amazing, with theatrics that went hard.

But as a show, the Teeth of God tour was better.

There was a completeness to it. A narrative arc that just worked at every level. Playing the trilogy in order made it narrative, not just setlist. The difference between a show that hits hard and a show that tells a complete story. If you think in terms of structure and flow and arc (and I do, professionally) you clock that difference immediately.

Sleep Token calls their concerts “Rituals.” The fan community has picked that up. For many, it’s affectionate shorthand. For some, it’s something more. And that “something more” is where this gets interesting.

Play vs. Ritual

There’s a difference between a ritual and entertainment.

Entertainment is something you witness. Let’s call it a play. The story is performed for you. You’re an audience receiving a narrative. You can be profoundly moved by a play. You can leave transformed. But you are receiving, not participating.

A ritual asks something of you. You speak. You move. You eat. You respond. The assembly does something together. In the Christian tradition, when we gather for real, liturgical worship, the congregation isn’t an audience. They are participants in something that requires their presence and their voices and their bodies to function.

Vessel isn’t a priest leading worship. He’s an actor performing a character arc. And he does it brilliantly. The Sleep Token concert is a devastatingly effective play. The “Ritual” branding is evocative and fitting because the shows carry the weightof ritual, the seriousness of it. But structurally, the narrative belongs to Vessel and the band. You receive it.

Except, and I have to be honest about this, for some fans, it doesn’t feel like receiving. It feels like participating. And Sleep Token has leaned into that. They drop confetti throughout the concert, small physical tokens of the experience. At the Atlanta show, there was a woman in the concourse afterward offering pieces of confetti to people who hadn’t been able to grab any during the show. Like a eucharistic minister distributing the elements to those who couldn’t make it to the rail.

I don’t think she would have used that language. But I’m a pastor, and I watched it happen, and that’s exactly what I saw. People wanted a piece of what happened in that room. Something tangible. Something to carry with them. And someone appointed herself to make sure nobody left without one.

That’s the impulse toward communion, the fundamental human longing for tangible connection to a transcendent experience. And the fact that people are finding it at a metal show should tell the church something.

The Descent

People, in my observation of fellow fans online and at rituals, really are having what can only be described as a religious experience with Sleep Token’s music. I’m not here to judge that. But I am here to notice what it reveals.

All scripture is literature, but not all literature is scripture. I know it’s stating the obvious, but categories matter. Scripture is lived, returned to, applied, shapes your experience. Literature is art that can deeply move us, but the relationship between reader and text is different.

Sleep Token’s music, especially the “Eden” trilogy, is extraordinary literature. And some fans are finding scripture within the literature, just as they are finding worship within the concert experience.

And here’s where the tension between sacred ritual and excellent entertainment gets interesting. The reason “ritual” language fits a Sleep Token concert isn’t merely because fans have elevated a concert to sacred status. It’s because the evangelical worship “experience” already collapsed the categories between ritual and entertainment. Between sacred worship and secular fandom. Between scripture and literature. When the church stopped caring about the difference, there ceased to be one.

Look at the megachurch model. Fog machines. Lighting rigs. Professional musicians on a stage. The congregation standing in the dark, singing along — or not. Passive reception of a produced experience. “Participation” reduced to showing up and feeling things.

By that standard? Yeah. Sleep Token qualifies as worship. Arguably better. At least Vessel commits to the narrative and the story has internal coherence.

The Sleep Token fandom accidentally exposes the poverty of what “worship” has come to mean in large swaths of American Christianity. When your Sunday morning already looks like a concert, same production values, same audience-performer dynamic, same darkened room, same emotional manipulation through sound and light, then a rock concert that takes itself seriously is worship by the only metrics you’ve taught people to use. The fans aren’t confused. They’re applying the categories they were given. And the categories fit.

The Gaping Hole

This is the part that should keep church leaders up at night.

The hunger for ritual, for mystery, for embodied communal experience, for transcendence doesn’t disappear when someone leaves the church. It just finds somewhere else to land. Sleep Token happens to be an extraordinarily well-crafted vessel (no pun intended) for that need, precisely because the people making the music understand the mechanics of sacred space so well.

But the reason there’s a hole to fill is because the church’s social witness has become, for millions of people, repulsive. The church didn’t lose people because they stopped being hungry for the sacred. It lost them because it made the sacred feel unsafe. Abusive. Politically weaponized. Hypocritical on a scale that would embarrass a Roman emperor.

And now a masked frontman in a metal band is offering something that feels more like authentic worship than what many experienced on Sunday mornings. That’s not an indictment of Sleep Token. That’s an indictment of the church.

I say this as a pastor. I say it about my own tradition. We did this to ourselves.

What Liturgy Actually Offers

So what now?

If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’re someone who left, or perhaps someone who stays and stays uncomfortable, perhaps even angry. You’ve become weary of a church that feels more like a concert than a community, more like a brand than a body, more like a product to consume than a table to gather around. And maybe you found something in music, in Sleep Token or somewhere else, that gave you back a piece of what you lost. Or a piece of what you never actually had but always wanted.

I’m not going to tell you that’s wrong. The incarnation settled the question of whether God can show up in unexpected places. God showed up in flesh, eating and drinking and attending parties. The material world isn’t a distraction from the sacred. It’s the medium through which the sacred is encountered. If something in a Sleep Token show put you in contact with grief you’d been carrying, or wonder you’d forgotten you could feel, or a sense of being held inside a story larger than yourself. I’m not interested in telling you that doesn’t count.

But I will tell you what you’re missing if you stop there.

Real liturgy asks something of you. It asks your voice, your body, your presence, your response. It puts bread in your hand and wine on your tongue and says this is for you. Not as a spectator, but as someone called forward by name. It places you in a room full of other people who are not performing for you and not being performed at, but doing something together that none of you could do alone. It tells you that you are not an audience. You are the body.

That’s what the church was supposed to be. That’s what it can still be. And recovering that, not by condemning what people found on the outside, but by becoming the kind of community people don’t have to leave to find meaning. That’s the work.

Sleep Token wrote a trilogy about a god who tries to become flesh using Vessel’s body and soul, and discovers the attempt destroys them both without achieving union. There’s a sermon in that, if we’re honest enough to hear it. The church tried to become relevant and discovered the attempt destroyed what made it sacred in the first place.

I get asked this every year, and every year I give more or less the same answer. I tell my congregations: we always talk about giving something up for Lent. What I actually want us to do is just give up.

That usually gets a laugh. But I mean it. And I want to explain what I mean, because I think buried inside that joke is actually the whole theology of fasting, which is something the church has managed to mostly forget.

The problem with how we talk about fasting

There’s a parable Jesus tells about two men praying in the temple. One is a Pharisee. The other is a tax collector. The Pharisee stands up and prays: God, I thank you that I am not like other people. I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of all I get.

Here’s the thing about the Pharisee. He’s a good guy. Fasting twice a week. Tithing ten percent of his income. This is not a bad person. By every visible measure, this is exactly the kind of person you’d want in your community.

And his fast means absolutely nothing.

It means nothing because his fasting has become a line on his spiritual resume. It’s a performance of righteousness, not for God’s benefit: for his own. God doesn’t need his stuff. God never needed his stuff. And the Pharisee is so busy justifying himself that there’s no room left for grace to work.

This is a classic trap for religious people. The bait is that it feels damn good to be so confident in your spiritual attainment. The trap is the discovery that you can’t keep it up forever, and being responsible for your own salvation is exhausting. In fact, it’s deadly.

There’s a traditional version of this trap. You fast because it proves something about you. The details vary by tradition, but the logic underneath is transactional. Do the thing, demonstrate your seriousness, add it to the list of reasons God should be impressed with you.

There’s a progressive version too: fast in solidarity with those who don’t have enough. Skip your latte, donate the money. The impulse is good. Justice matters, and the prophetic tradition is clear that God cares about what we do with our resources. But as a theology of fasting, this still makes the practice about you. It turns fasting into a performance. It lets comfortable people feel like they’ve understood something about poverty that a week without coffee didn’t actually teach them. And it relocates the spiritual work from the self to the gesture.

Both versions give fasting a job to do outside of itself. Both make it instrumental. And both of them, if you look closely, are species of the same disease: self-righteousness. The compulsion to be responsible for your own spiritual life. To manage your own righteousness. To stay in control.

That’s the Pharisee’s real problem. He’s standing in the temple trying to be his own god.

What you’re actually reaching for

The tax collector in the same parable can’t even lift his eyes. He beats his breast and says one thing: God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

He goes home justified. The Pharisee doesn’t. Why? Because the tax collector is the one who asks. He comes with open hands. He comes with nothing to present.

When you fast, when you step back from whatever you habitually reach for, something like that happens. The reaching stops. And the ache underneath becomes visible.

Most of the time we are reaching without asking why. We reach for food. For distraction. For comfort. For noise. For the feeling of being in charge of something. Some of it is genuine hunger. Some of it is habit so deep we’ve forgotten it’s a choice. Some of it is anxiety we haven’t named yet. The reaching is constant, and because it’s constant, we don’t have to look at what’s driving it.

Fasting interrupts the reflex. It creates a gap. And in that gap, you have to sit with whatever was underneath the reach in the first place.

I think about this in terms of open and closed hands. If you’re trying to give me a gift and I’m clutching everything I own against my chest, where are you going to put it? There’s no room. The only way to receive anything is to let go of what you’re gripping so tightly.

That’s what fasting does. It pries the fingers open. And the discomfort of letting go is real. It should be. But the discomfort isn’t the point. The point is honesty. You are becoming present to your own need in a way that’s impossible when you’re constantly filling it. Constantly managing it. Constantly performing competence at your own salvation.

Grace doesn’t work on the performed version of you. It works on the real one. The one in the gap. The one holding the ache. The one who has stopped pretending to have it together.

Fasting is how we cooperate with the Holy Spirit to make room for God’s grace. We clear the noise. We stop the reaching. We open the hands. And we let ourselves be found.

The ancient move

Early Christians had a framework for what I’ve been describing here: apophasis.

The apophatic tradition, sometimes called negative theology, is one of the oldest and most profound streams in Christian spirituality. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian fathers (and mothers—we mustn’t forget his sister) understood something that a lot of modern Christianity has lost: God exceeds our categories. Every image we construct, every description we offer, every conceptual handle we try to grab falls short.

It’s ontologically impossible to appropriately describe what God is. God is more than our language can contain.

In his Life of Moses, Gregory describes the spiritual journey as a progression from light into cloud into darkness. Moses goes up the mountain and enters what Gregory calls the divine darkness, but not a darkness you get lost in. God’s presence is so full, so overwhelming, that existing categories can’t process what you’re encountering. Because it’s impossible to name, we can only say what it is not. Or to put it another way: God can only be described on God’s own terms.

The apophatic move, then, is a practice. A discipline of unknowing. Of letting go of false images. Of clearing away every substitute we’ve placed between ourselves and the God who exceeds them.

Fasting, practiced in the apophatic key, is a way of saying: this is not God. The thing I’m reaching for, whether it’s food or comfort or distraction or my own sense of righteousness, is not the thing that satisfies the deepest need. Every time the reflex fires and you don’t follow it, you are doing apophatic theology with your whole body.

The Lenten discipline is clearing away every false god you’ve erected, including the most persistent false god of all: the one you see in the mirror, the one who whispers that if you just try hard enough, you can save yourself.

A word about grief

I want to name something carefully here, because it matters pastorally and it matters theologically. Some of us don’t choose the fast.

Grief does what fasting is supposed to do, except grief does it without asking permission. No one volunteers for it. When you lose someone, the world reorganizes itself around an absence you didn’t consent to. You are already holding something that nothing you can reach for will fill.

In this circumstance, the move, the only honest move, isn’t to try to spiritually leverage the grief. It’s to name it as a form of involuntary fast. To recognize that the gap you’re sitting in is a place where grace can work. Not because you’ve earned it or chosen it or done it right, but because grace works even in the most difficult places. Perhaps especially there.

The emptiness you didn’t choose is holy.

Just give up

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Maybe that isn’t only a memento mori. Maybe it’s also an invitation. An invitation to stop carrying the weight of your own salvation. To stop performing. To stop managing. To let go of the righteousness you’ve been assembling for yourself, the one that was never going to hold up anyway.

The burdens we put on ourselves are killing us. Jesus said so: Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

So for these forty days, just give up. Not in despair. In relief. Unclench the fists. Open the hands. Let the fast create the space. Sit in the ache. Don’t immediately fill it with something else, not even something spiritual and impressive.

Just be in the gap.

That’s where Gregory was heading when he talked about Moses entering the darkness. That’s where the apophatic tradition has always known that God meets us. Where the pretending stops. Where we come with nothing to offer but our actual need.

Come empty. Come honest. Come without your resume, without your performance, without the version of yourself you’ve been managing for other people.

That’s enough. It has always been enough.

The church calendar assigns the Transfiguration readings on the last Sunday before Lent begins. Before we enter forty days of fasting and reflection, before we walk with Jesus toward Jerusalem and the cross, God gives us this: a concentrated vision of who Jesus actually is and what he came to do.

What struck me this time through Matthew 17 is something I hadn’t noticed before. The Transfiguration isn’t a single moment. It’s a sequence with its own internal logic that moves through four distinct phases. And each phase strips away another layer of distance between God and humanity until there’s nothing left but skin on skin.

Phase One: The Law and the Prophets Show Up

Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up the mountain. He’s transfigured before them. Face shining like the sun, clothes bright as pure light. And then Moses and Elijah appear, talking with him.

Moses and Elijah aren’t random figures. They represent the Law and the Prophets, the entirety of the Hebrew Bible summed up in two people.

The Law is a gift. God gave it to Moses as a manual for living in right relationship with God and with each other. It ordered the life of God’s people, set them apart from the pagan nations around them, and (this matters) gave them exact instructions for how to interact with God safely. If you read through the detailed passages in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy about how priests enter the holy of holies, about how people approach the tabernacle, all of that is God saying: here is how you can experience my presence and remain a living person.

The Law was given as a blueprint for living in right relationship with God and neighbor, a school teacher, as Paul puts it. The Law creates an environment where righteousness flourishes.

But the Law wasn’t enough. I can prove it to you because most of the Old Testament is made up of the prophets. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, all the minor prophets. Your Habakkuks, your Micahs, your Zephaniahs. And what are the prophets saying? Constantly? Over and over?

“You are not keeping the law. You keep not welcoming the immigrants. You keep exploiting the oppressed. You keep hoarding what should be used for widows and orphans. Would you please stop it?”

You can sum up the prophets in two words: “Stop it.”

If the Law were capable of forming us completely, of making us perfectly just and merciful and righteous, most of the Old Testament wouldn’t need to exist. The prophets wouldn’t have a job. Paul makes the point directly: if the Law were adequate, Jesus wouldn’t have been necessary.

So Phase One of the Transfiguration gives us this: Jesus, shining with glory, flanked by the Law and the Prophets. God’s good gifts. God’s real gifts. But not God’s final word.

Phase Two: Peter Has a Great Idea

Here’s what’s interesting. The appearance of Moses and Elijah does not overwhelm Peter. He can still think. He can still strategize.

Peter sees the glory of the Law and the Prophets alongside Jesus and his immediate response is a building project. “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”

Something great happens and the first thought is: we need a building.

Peter wants to monumentalize the moment. Stick it in a booth. Sell tickets. He’s not wrong about the significance of what he’s seeing. He understands that Jesus is the fulfillment of everything the Law and the Prophets pointed toward. But his response to that revelation is to reach for a hammer.

The Law and the Prophets don’t overwhelm him. They give him ideas.

This is the human condition in miniature. We receive the good gifts of God and we immediately start building systems around them. Checklists. Monuments. Institutions designed to contain the revelation so we can manage it on our terms.

Phase Three: God Interrupts the PowerPoint

Before Peter can get through the first slide of his Mt. Transfiguration Monument Pitch, a bright cloud overshadows them and a voice from the cloud says: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him.”

And now the disciples are no longer brainstorming.

They fall on their faces. They are terrified. Overwhelmed by the presence of God in a way that the Law and the Prophets never accomplished.

This is the theophany, the same kind of encounter Moses had on Sinai when the glory of God was like a devouring fire on the mountaintop. The same cloud. The same overwhelming, almost unbearable presence.

Why almost unbearable? Because God is not wrathful. God is not trigger-happy. God is not crouching behind a rock waiting to smite the absolute daylights out of you. The problem is simpler and more terrifying than that: God is fully God, and we are not. That’s the gap. That’s the problem the Law couldn’t solve and the prophets couldn’t yell away.

Phase Four: The Touch

The disciples are face-down in the dirt. They’ve been flattened by the voice of God. They’re waiting for the smiting they’re certain is coming.

And then they feel something. A hand.

“But Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid.’”

This is unique to Matthew’s account. Mark doesn’t have it. Luke doesn’t have it. Only Matthew records this moment where the same God whose voice just thundered from the cloud now kneels down, puts a hand on terrified people lying in the dirt, and says: get up.

When they open their eyes, they see no one except Jesus himself alone.

Moses is gone. Elijah is gone. The cloud has lifted. The overwhelming glory has receded. And there’s just Jesus. Fully God — the same God whose presence was unbearable — but now present as touch. As a hand on the back of someone who’s afraid.

The Whole Gospel in a Sequence

God shows. The human tries to contain. God speaks. God touches.

That’s the arc. And it’s the gospel.

The Law and the Prophets are God’s invitation, mediated through history, through figures, through instruction. They’re real gifts. Good gifts. But they come to us at a distance, through tablets of stone and the words of people long dead, and we can receive them without being undone. We can hear the message and still reach for the hammer.

Then God speaks directly and we’re on our faces because we realize everything we thought we could build is worthless. The gap between us and God isn’t an infrastructure problem. We don’t need to build better institutions to make sure everyone follows the rules.

The gap is ontological. It’s fundamental to our broken human condition. We’re not equipped for the unmediated presence of God.

And then the invitation comes back around, but now it’s been through the fire. The first invitation was mediated. The second is immediate. A hand on your back while you’re face-down in the dirt. Get up. Don’t be afraid.

When the disciples look up, they see only Jesus. And that’s the point. That has always been the point.

If we keep our eyes on Jesus, the Law and the Prophets take care of themselves. We will welcome the immigrant. We will be kind to the stranger. We will lift up the poor and the oppressed and the vulnerable. Not because we’ve checked every box on the checklist, but because those things are the fruit of keeping close to the one who is the righteousness of God.

It’s not Jesus and my opinions. It’s not Jesus and this particular interpretation. It’s not Jesus and anything else.

It’s just Jesus. It always has been Jesus. It always will be Jesus.

And that’s good news.

2000 had Y2K. 2012 had the Mayan calendar. 2020 had the pandemic. 2024 had the eclipse and recycled blood moon predictions. And now 2026 has all of it at once: Baba Vanga trending, dispensationalist math converging on this year as the start of the tribulation, people placing actual bets on the Second Coming, and a “Doomsday Equation” from 1960 that pegged November 13, 2026 as the day the human race runs out of room. Last May, when Pope Leo XIV was elected, the “Prophecy of the Popes” made its predictable comeback, with AI deepfakes attributing apocalyptic statements to a man who’d been in office for less than a week.

The algorithm loves this stuff. Anxiety drives engagement, and nothing generates anxiety quite like the promise that the world is ending and you might not be ready.

We do this every time something changes. Every crisis and transition and round number on the calendar gets fed into the prophecy grinder. The same people make the same confident predictions with the same breathless urgency. It’s exhausting. And it’s not remotely Christian.

The forgery and the formula

Take two of 2026’s biggest apocalyptic exports.

The “Prophecy of the Popes” is attributed to Saint Malachy, a 12th-century Irish archbishop. The list supposedly predicts 112 popes from Celestine II (1143) to the end of Rome itself. Dramatic stuff. One problem: the list almost certainly didn’t exist until 1590, when it was conveniently “discovered” right before the election of Pope Clement VIII. The prophecies for popes before 1590 are remarkably specific and accurate. After 1590? Vague enough to fit basically anyone. Renaissance clickbait, a forgery designed to influence a papal election that somehow became a permanent fixture of apocalyptic grifting four centuries later.

Then there’s the dispensationalist math currently making the rounds: Jesus was crucified in 33 CE. Add 2,000 years and you get 2033 as the return of Christ. Subtract 7 years for the tribulation and you land on 2026. Clean. Precise. Confident.

And wrong on nearly every variable.

Scholarly consensus puts Jesus’ birth around 6-4 BCE, which means the Christian calendar itself is off by half a decade before anyone starts calculating. The crucifixion? Somewhere between 30 and 33 CE, depending on which scholar you ask. So you’ve got a multi-year margin of error on both ends, and from that someone is confidently subtracting exactly 7 years to land on a specific date for the start of the tribulation. The precision is totally unjustified by the evidence.

These are just the latest iterations, though. The “Prophecy of the Popes” and the dispensationalist calculator are facets of a much larger problem: the eschatology of fear that has hijacked American Christianity.

The real innovation: dispensationalism

The end-times theology most American Christians assume is “what the Bible clearly teaches” is actually younger than the steam engine.

The early church had chiliasts: Christians like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Papias who believed Christ would return to establish a material kingdom on earth. And the church had voices like Augustine, whose City of God argued that the Kingdom was already present, growing through the life of the church in history. These two camps disagreed about mechanism and timing. But they shared a conviction underneath: God’s redemptive purposes include the material world. The Kingdom has earthly expression. “On earth as it is in heaven” wasn’t a metaphor for either side.

By the fifth century, Augustine’s reading had become dominant. The Augsburg Confession in 1530 formally rejected chiliasm. Calvin called it “too puerile to need or deserve refutation.” But this was an in-house argument among people who all believed the Kingdom was real and the earth mattered.

Dispensationalism left the building entirely.

In the 1830s, a British preacher named John Nelson Darby developed a theological system that didn’t just pick a side in the old debate. He built something neither the chiliasts nor Augustine would have recognized: a “secret rapture” in which Jesus would return invisibly to snatch believers away before a seven-year tribulation, then return again visibly to establish his kingdom. He added a sharp distinction between Israel and the Church. He turned Daniel and Revelation into a decodable prophetic timeline.

That’s the innovation. The early chiliasts had an intuition about a material kingdom. Darby built a Rube Goldberg machine around it. And once the goal of salvation became evacuation rather than redemption, every earthly thing became a threat rather than a site of God’s work.

The real accelerant was the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909. Cyrus Scofield embedded dispensationalist interpretations directly into the footnotes of Scripture, and for millions of readers, those footnotes became as authoritative as the text itself. Suddenly Daniel and Revelation weren’t complex apocalyptic literature requiring careful interpretation. They were roadmaps. Newspaper headlines became prophecy fulfillment. Every war and earthquake and pope became a sign that the end was near.

Then there’s Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which became the bestselling nonfiction book of the decade. Then the Left Behind series, which sold over 80 million copies. Then blood moons, eclipses, world events as fodder for prophecy conferences, and an endless parade of failed predictions repackaged as “we just had the timeline slightly wrong.”

A veritable rapture industrial complex propelled by a 200-year-old theology claiming to be the eternal truth.

What the early church actually shared

The chiliasts and the Augustinians disagreed about when and how the Kingdom comes. They did not disagree about whether it comes here. Both held that God’s redemptive purposes include the material world. Both believed the eschaton meant completion, fulfillment, the renewal of creation. The Cappadocian Fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa) articulated a vision of the eschaton as telos: the drawing of all things into Christ. Origen spoke of apokatastasis, the restoration of all things. Even voices that disagreed sharply about the millennium shared this underlying hope.

The early Christians participated in the Kingdom breaking into the present. The eschaton was something to anticipate with joy, the perfection of what God was already doing in their midst. They didn’t obsess over escape. They lived inside the promise.

We have been taught to fear the end. The early church, across its internal disagreements, hoped for it. And what happened in between was a footnoted Bible and a publishing empire.

The political poison: warmongers for the Prince of Peace

Fear-based eschatology doesn’t just create anxious Christians. It creates dangerous politics.

Dispensationalist theology has taught for generations that the Antichrist will come as a man of peace. He’ll promise harmony between nations. He’ll broker deals in the Middle East. He’ll seem like exactly what the world needs.

Think about what that does to a person’s political imagination.

When you’ve been conditioned to believe that the ultimate deceiver will appear as a peacemaker, peace itself becomes suspect. Every diplomat is potentially the beast. Every treaty is potentially the setup for tribulation. Every act of international cooperation inches us one step closer to one-world government, which inches us one step closer to the mark of the beast.

This theological framework has produced Christians who are more supportive of war and more suspicious of diplomacy than their secular neighbors. “Peace through strength” resonates because peace through peace has been made theologically dangerous.

The irony would be funny if it weren’t so catastrophic. Followers of the Prince of Peace have become warmongers. Matthew 5:9 says the peacemakers will be called children of God. Dispensationalism says the peacemakers might be working for the Antichrist. So, those who worship the one who said “blessed are the peacemakers” have learned to view peacemakers with suspicion thanks to a nineteenth-century innovation that baptized violence in the name of biblical inerrancy.

Readiness, not rapture

Let’s go back to the text that launched a thousand Left Behind books.

In Matthew 24, Jesus says “one will be taken and one will be left.” For generations now, this has been preached as a rapture text: the saved snatched away, the damned left behind for tribulation.

But Jesus doesn’t actually tell us which one is which. And in context, he’s making a point about readiness. Right up until the flood came, Noah’s neighbors were going about ordinary life, eating and drinking and marrying. Noah wasn’t helicoptered out of the disaster. Noah was prepared.

Jesus’ point is simple: stay ready. Faithfulness is its own reward, and none of us knows what tomorrow holds.

And here’s the part the apocalypse industry doesn’t want to talk about: most of us aren’t going to witness the Second Coming. We’re going to meet Jesus the way humans always have, through death. That’s not morbid. That’s just true. Every generation has had Christians who were certain they were living in the final days. Every generation has been wrong so far. Meanwhile, every generation has had Christians who died and met their Lord face to face.

The question of readiness is whether we’re living today as if Jesus is already Lord. Because he is.

Why how you live still matters

So if readiness isn’t about decoding the timeline, what is it? It’s participation. Embodied life matters because God entered it, is redeeming it, and invites us to participate in that redemption now. Both the chiliasts and Augustine would have agreed on this. The Kingdom is material. The earth matters. Your body matters. What you do in the flesh matters because the flesh is where God chose to show up.

How you live matters because living as if Jesus is Lord means you participate in his ongoing redemptive work. You become part of the answer to the prayer “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The Kingdom is a present reality you can inhabit or ignore.

There are two ways to get this wrong, and both are gnostic. The first instrumentalizes your entire existence — your relationships, your work, your suffering, your joy, all reduced to points on a cosmic scorecard. The only reason to follow Jesus is to pass a test. The only motivation for faithfulness is avoiding punishment. Embodied life is just an exam room, and your choices are just answers that determine your eternal GPA.

The second is the mirror image: the idea that what you do in the body doesn’t touch the soul. That grace means your choices are spiritually irrelevant. That’s cheap grace, an antinomian escape hatch that makes embodied life meaningless. Why not just do whatever you want?

The incarnational truth holds both. You don’t pass a test to get into the afterlife. You participate in the life of God now, imperfectly and incompletely, in anticipation of the perfect fulfillment of that promise in the eschaton. None of us get it perfectly right. All of us are seduced by the trappings of the world. But we keep turning around, coming back to the way of Jesus. That’s what repentance means, after all.

Theosis is happening. We are being drawn into the divine life. The world is being healed through the Body of Christ acting in history. That’s worth living for regardless of what happens when you die.

Reclaiming hope

The eschatology of fear is the innovation, not the tradition.

The early church argued about eschatology. Of course they did. But even their sharpest disagreements were arguments between people who believed the Kingdom was real, the earth mattered, and the end of the story was good. The same God who entered our suffering in Christ will bring all things to completion.

Fear sells. It fills conference halls and moves books and drives engagement. It gives you something to decode and something to feel superior about because you understand the signs of the times and those poor fools don’t.

Hope transforms. It frees you from the anxiety of prediction and the arrogance of certainty. It roots you in the present work of God. It lets you be a peacemaker without wondering if you’re accidentally working for the Antichrist.

The world probably isn’t ending this year. And even if it were, what good would it do us to know?

What we have instead is better than foreknowledge of the end of days, better than prophecy charts. We have this promise: the God who raised Jesus from the dead is still at work, drawing all things toward their completion. We get to participate in that. Today. Right now.

And that is a reason to hope.

“Let your light shine” has fared about the same. When I was young, I heard it almost exclusively as a behavior management tool. My dad would say it and what I heard was: stop doing the thing that’s making me angry, or there will be consequences. In youth group it meant something slightly different but equally thin. Go tell somebody about Jesus. Be a good witness. Don’t embarrass the faith.

Both of these are fine, as far as they go. Nobody’s against honesty or good behavior. But somewhere along the way, we took two of Jesus’s most potent metaphors and turned them into Hallmark cards.

What Salt Actually Does

Salt preserves. Salt seasons. Those are the two functions we tend to remember. But salt is a powerful chemical compound. It melts ice. Dissolve it in water and it conducts electricity. It disinfects. Before Neosporin, if you got a wound, you packed it with salt. Nobody likes rubbing salt in a wound, but it works. It accelerates healing and kills infection.

Salt changes the fundamental properties of whatever it touches. Ice becomes water. Raw meat becomes preserved. A bland dish becomes worth eating. An open wound becomes hostile to bacteria. Salt is an agent of transformation, not decoration.

So when Jesus tells his followers “you are the salt of the earth,” he is not handing out a compliment about their character. He is describing their function. In a world wounded by sin, infected by the reality of death, scarred by human brokenness: you are the compound God is using to heal it. You are how God preserves what is good and purifies what has been corrupted. That is a far cry from “my constituents are good, hardworking Americans.”

What Light Actually Does

We have a phrase: “shed light on the matter.” It means to make something clear, understandable. Light causes hidden things to come into the open. It clarifies what has been obscured.

But light does more than clarify. Where light is, darkness cannot remain. Period. Light doesn’t negotiate with darkness or politely ask it to leave. It displaces it by existing. And in displacing it, light exposes what was hidden in it. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says those who do evil prefer darkness because light reveals what they’re doing. There’s a reason we associate crime with darkness and react with shock when someone does something terrible in broad daylight. The audacity. You’re supposed to do shady things under cover of shadow.

And light finds. People left in dark corners because they weren’t considered important enough to illuminate. The ones nobody bothers to look at. When light enters a room, it touches everything, and the people who have been shoved to the margins suddenly become visible. That visibility is itself an act of justice.

So when Jesus says “let your light shine before others” and talks about putting a lamp on a stand so it lights the whole house, he is issuing a mission. Illuminate the darkest places. Expose what the powers would prefer to keep hidden. Find the people left in the dark. Reducing this to “be a good example” is like saying a searchlight’s purpose is to look nice on top of the building.

The Reduction Problem

Here’s what concerns me. For a long time, the Christian life has been described as a choice between two paths: the path of life and the path of destruction, the way of Jesus and the way of the world. The earliest Christians called their practice simply the Way. Jesus himself said the road to destruction is wide and many travel it, while the road to life is narrow.

That framework is good and true. The problem is what we’ve done with it. We’ve reduced the straight and narrow to a behavioral checklist. “Stay on the straight and narrow” has become English for “keep your nose clean.” The two paths become a question of personal morality: are you being good, or are you being bad?

And once we make that move, the whole gospel collapses into self-improvement. Follow Jesus’s example. Try harder. Be better. Set a good example so others will be good too. A tidy moral ecosystem that requires absolutely nothing from God except maybe an encouraging word now and then.

If that’s all the gospel is, if the point is simply to make us all into good, honest, hardworking people, then the cross was unnecessary. You can achieve basic decency without a crucifixion. But we keep making the reduction anyway, because a gospel graded on a curve we understand is a gospel we can manage, a gospel that doesn’t terrify us.

The Foolishness of God

The Corinthian church had the same instinct, just a different grading rubric. They weren’t reducing the gospel to moralism. They were reducing it to rhetoric, measuring it by whether it impressed people. And Paul told them plainly: I didn’t come to you with a slick presentation. No lofty rhetoric, no impressive program. I came determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. The source of your faith, Paul said, is not human wisdom. It is the power of God.

And Paul knew why this mattered, because he’d watched what happens when people try to process the gospel through conventional wisdom. The rulers of this age had done exactly that. They looked at Jesus and ran him through every category they had. And every category said: fool, threat, disposable. So they killed him. If the people running the world had actually understood what they were looking at, if they had grasped that this man was the wisdom of God walking among them, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory. But worldly wisdom is one-dimensional. It can only recognize power it already understands.

God’s wisdom runs so counter to the way of the world that we can’t even recognize it as wisdom. We see foolishness. A crucified Messiah. A kingdom that comes through suffering. Power made perfect in weakness. The whole thing looks absurd from the vantage point of reason.

But the foolishness of God outdoes the wisdom of humanity. Every time.

The Real Invitation

God’s kingdom runs on foolishness. A logic that counters every worldly instinct. If we are to be agents of that kingdom, if we are to bring the purifying, wound-healing power of salt into a world infected by sin and carry light into places that have been kept deliberately dark, we need to become utterly foolish, consumed by the sheer madness of who Jesus is.

But, if we’re on the path that leads to life, the straight and narrow way, how can we do all these foolish things that Jesus invites us to do?

Consider the road. We tend to picture those two paths, the way of life and the way of destruction, separated by a wide margin. The narrow way over here, the wide way far over there. Two lanes with a giant median between them. But maybe they’re closer than we think. Maybe they run parallel, close enough that they have no secrets. And maybe the light we carry as we walk the path of life is bright enough to illuminate the other road too. Bright enough to show the people walking it exactly what is so destructive about where they’re headed. Bright enough that they can see, for the first time, that there’s another way.

That changes what we’re doing out here. We aren’t walking in isolation, keeping our heads down, trying to stay morally clean until we reach the finish line. We are walking with a light that bleeds across the boundary. A light that, if we actually let it shine, makes the darkness on that other road intolerable.

God so loved the world that God took the most foolish step imaginable and came into it. Showed us the path that leads to life. And even though we killed him for it, he rose. Victorious. Overcoming the power of sin completely so the light of life could shine here, in the valley of the shadow of death.

So let your light shine. Get a little salty. The invitation was never to become better-behaved. It was to become bearers of a light that darkness cannot overcome.

I have heard people justify anger and resentment and violence in the name of Jesus. I have heard arguments made against empathy itself—that the scourge of Western civilization is this idea that we ought to give a damn about anybody else. I’m not building a straw man here. I have seen these things on social media, on the TV talking heads show, in the news app on my phone, in all the places people go to display how little they know and how much they’re willing to share it.

Over the last fifty or so years, the church has been developing justifications for excusing ourselves of the responsibility to love those who are different from us. There is in the gospel a clear mandate to act in charity—not charity as in giving things out, but charity as the virtue. Somewhere along the way, we started giving ourselves permission to ignore what Jesus clearly said so we could maintain our own structures of power.

And the structures are always the same. Power over others. Scarcity mentality. Us versus them. Violence to achieve our goals. We have enough food in this country. We throw away staggering amounts of it while people starve. There are twenty-eight empty homes for every person sleeping on the street in America. The problem has never been scarcity. The problem is hoarding. And we have baptized the hoarding as divine favor.

Vice President JD Vance claimed recently that Jesus taught a hierarchy of love. His exact words: “There’s this old school—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” He then added: “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders.”

Jesus didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything close to that. What Jesus said was, “You have heard it said, love your friend and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemy.” Paul reiterates it. Love those who persecute you and treat you badly. There is no hierarchy. There is no ordering system. The whole point is that the love of God extends precisely to the person you’d rather it didn’t.

Last September, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade suggested on air that we deal with homeless people who refuse government services by giving them “involuntary lethal injection.” His exact words: “Just kill ’em.” When the clip went viral and the backlash came, he apologized. But listen to what he apologized for. He called it “an extremely callous remark.” He was sorry for being rude. Not for being wrong about human beings. For being impolite about it.

That’s the tell. The dehumanization wasn’t the scandal. The rudeness was. We have so thoroughly normalized the idea that some people don’t count that a man on national television can suggest executing the homeless and the only real offense is his tone.

This is a practicing Catholic who professes to follow Jesus. The Jesus who said, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.”

The instrumentalized Christ

The church didn’t get here overnight. But at some point we stopped looking to Jesus as the one through whom, as Paul writes to the Colossians, all things were made and in whom all things hold together. We stopped seeing him as the site where God and humanity are reconciled. We stopped looking to him as the author and finisher of our faith. And we started treating him as a means to an end.

We instrumentalized Jesus. The one who holds all of creation together—we made him a tool. “I will deploy Jesus when it suits me to achieve the goal I have for my own benefit.” And that goal, almost always, is power, wealth, and privilege. Think about the scale of that category error. This is not a prophet we’ve misread or a teacher we’ve selectively quoted. This is the Logos, the Word through whom everything that exists was spoken into being, and we have reduced him to a mascot.

The Jesus who clears the temple, who calls the Pharisees whitewashed tombs, who tells a rich young ruler to sell everything—that Jesus is inconvenient. That Jesus disrupts the power structures we’re trying to protect. So we’ve tamed him. We tell the story of Jesus in a way that always, conveniently, ends up confirming whatever we already wanted to do.

And the people we know—the ones we recognize as good people, who nevertheless say things or hold positions that run counter to the Word of God—they have been formed this way. I want to be precise about that word. Formed. Not just influenced. Not just misled. Formed, the way you’d use the word in spiritual formation. They have been catechized—slowly, over years, through sermons and talk radio and Bible studies and political rallies that opened with prayer—into a faith where Jesus is not the center but the instrument. They were formed by leaders of movements. They were formed by faith leaders within their own communities. They were formed, in some cases, by people they trusted with their souls. And what they were formed into is a Christianity where Jesus exists to serve their purposes rather than the other way around. Some of them were trained by eschatologies that taught them to suspect peacemakers and celebrate military might in the name of the Prince of Peace. Some of them were trained by prosperity gospels that told them their wealth was God’s blessing and poverty was God’s judgment. The pipelines are different, but they all arrive at the same destination: a Christianity that has the form of godliness but denies its power.

Helpless creatures

Human beings are helpless creatures. We are selfish. We are also capable of being kind and generous and overwhelmingly good. That tension lives within the heart of every human person.

There’s a debate in theology about original sin. Is humanity fundamentally good or fundamentally evil? Some people say we can’t call human beings cursed because God created everything and called it good. Others insist on total depravity. I think we have to hold those ideas together, because both are obviously true. Left to our own devices, human beings will do incredibly destructive things if they benefit us personally. Also true: left to our own devices, human beings will do incredible acts of courage and grace.

There is within us a war. Paul talks about it when he says, “The thing I want to do, I don’t do, and the thing I don’t want to do, I do.”

That’s why I keep using the word “helpless.” Too often we go all-or-nothing on this. “Utterly depraved.” Or, “How dare you, human beings are just fine.” But helpless is something different. Helpless doesn’t mean weak. It doesn’t mean worthless. It means I cannot referee my own internal war. I cannot, by sheer force of will, make myself stop reaching for the thing that destroys me. The pull toward the immediate desire, the immediate need, the path of least resistance—it’s inexorable. And the only one who can break its grip is not me.

This is, incidentally, what God has been responding to since the beginning. When Adam and Eve grasp at what wasn’t given to them, God doesn’t destroy them. He clothes them. When Cain murders Abel, God doesn’t kill Cain. He marks him for protection. The whole arc of Scripture is God encountering human helplessness and responding not with punishment but with presence. Not by fixing us from a distance but by moving closer. Always closer. Until, in Jesus, there is no distance left at all.

Augustine put it better than I ever could, at the very beginning of his Confessions: “O Lord, you made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

That is the crux of the matter. We are made in God’s image, but we are corrupted by the brokenness of the world around us and by our participation in that brokenness. We always feel the cognitive dissonance. We know we’re built for something better. And yet the restlessness drives us. It drives us to accumulate, to dominate, to build walls. Every act of instrumentalized faith I described above is a symptom of restlessness. The politician constructing a hierarchy of love so he doesn’t have to love his enemy. The television host reaching for the easiest solution—just kill them. The prosperity preacher baptizing greed as blessing. Hearts that haven’t found their rest will grab at power, because they don’t know what else to do with the ache.

The escape ramp

The only salve for that ache is Jesus. He is the escape ramp from this headlong, hurtling dive into the abyss of self-destruction. And he works in two ways.

First, Jesus demonstrates the better way. His teachings throughout the Gospels show us the path of righteousness, the way of life that is in sync with the kingdom of God. And what we discover most of the time is that living that life is incredibly difficult because of the moral completeness it embodies. The Beatitudes aren’t a checklist for getting God to like you. They’re a portrait of what humans look like when they’ve been so formed by the kingdom that the world’s allure has lost its grip on them. You will be poor and lack for nothing. You will be hungry and always full. You will be a peacemaker and always strong. It’s a vision of life so opposed to the way the world works that the same words we use to describe “the way things are” don’t even have meaning within the kingdom of God.

Second, Jesus is the gate. He says in John 10, “I am the door for the sheep.” The only way to enter the kingdom of God is through the person of Jesus Christ. Not around him. Not by approximating his ideas. Through him.

We fail in both directions. We fail by trying to follow the path Jesus lays out without actually trusting in Jesus. And we fail by ignoring that path because it’s too damn hard, taking the path of least resistance that creates destruction for ourselves and everyone around us.

What we see playing out in the world right now—all of it—is that internal struggle written large across how the world works.

And here’s where I have to be honest: this critique cuts both ways.

You can level it against the right by pointing to the support of clearly uncharitable ideologies, the desire to revoke the most basic aid to meet the needs of the poor and the homeless. But if you’re reading this, you probably already know that critique. You’ve already left those churches. You’ve already seen the contradiction.

The harder word is for us.

Because the temptation on our side isn’t to domesticate Jesus into a mascot for power. It’s to reduce him to a mascot for our causes. To strip him down to a first-century social activist and then wonder why we’re so tired.

I’ve watched it happen. I’ve felt it happen in myself. You pour everything into the right fight—the protest, the mutual aid network, the advocacy campaign, the angry tweet thread—and at some point you realize you’re running on fumes. Not because the work isn’t good. It is good. But because somewhere along the way the work became the thing you trust instead of Jesus. The activism became the yoke, and it is heavy, because you’re carrying the entire weight of the outcome on your own back.

And it burns people out. I’ve seen it burn people out of ministry. I’ve seen it burn people out of faith entirely. They leave the church they grew up in because the theology was bad, and then they leave the progressive church they found because the activism was exhausting, and then they leave Jesus altogether because nobody ever told them the point wasn’t to win. The point was to follow.

Just one more march and we’ll get there. Just one more election. Just one more viral post that finally makes people see. That expectation is its own form of restlessness—a restless activism that mistakes movement for transformation. It’s the same ache, the same grasping, just dressed in better theology. And if the source of your hope is your own effort, then your hope has an expiration date.

There is no practical solution that fixes this. We can staunch the bleeding. We can dam up the river. We can try to make things better. But at the end of the day, the only path to peace is Jesus.

And I’m not saying that as permission to give up. We still persuade. We still persist. We still vote. We still protest when necessary. But we do all of it leaning on the strength of Jesus, not expecting anything to happen because our efforts finally crack the code. They won’t.

The daily walk

The bad news—and there’s good news wrapped around it, so stay with me—is that what I’m describing, this laser focus on Jesus, is not a one-and-done thing.

It’s a daily struggle. That’s why there are so many examples throughout history of people who created rules of life and spiritual exercises, because they found things that worked for them and shared them with others. Everything from reading your Bible every day to saying a rosary. These are all things people do in order to make that connection with Jesus, every day. This is what Jesus means when he says, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

You don’t have a little talk with Jesus and then it’s over. You don’t go down to the altar rail, sign your contract, receive your get-out-of-hell-free card, and go about your business. Every day is a renewed struggle between how I want to be and how I know I should be.

There are really only two modes. Self-worship, self-direction. Or following Jesus, leaning on Jesus, trusting in Jesus.

God’s kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven every single day, in every single heart, as we conform ourselves to Jesus. And in that ongoing formation we become more and more truly complete image bearers of God. That’s what Wesleyans call sanctification. The Eastern Church calls it theosis. I like to talk about it as union with God.

It doesn’t happen overnight. Can’t happen overnight.

And here’s the thing I keep learning: sanctification is release, not achievement. The burden is light because you’ve stopped carrying the weight of winning. The world’s wisdom—striving, defending, dominating, calculating, always on guard—that’s the heavy yoke. That’s the millstone. And we’ve been told it’s just how life works. Jesus says otherwise.

But continuing to think this way can help us have hope in the middle of these moral crises we see around us. It can also help us develop love and kindness for those whom we want to hate. Because I want to hate some people. I do hate some people. I want some people dead. Let’s just say it. I think if we’re being honest, all of us can identify someone we think the world would be better without.

I can't let that be the last word. Because if that's the last word, then perhaps somebody wants me dead. Maybe they have as good a reason as me. So I have to keep the focus on what I can do in this day, in this hour, in this moment—not following my own desires, but keeping my eyes on Jesus—that’s the walk.

You can get it wrong. I get it wrong most days. That’s not the point. The point is we keep going. And as we keep going, as imperceptible as it may be sometimes, we are being transformed. We are becoming the people Jesus intends us to be.

Because as Paul says, the one who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it on the day of Christ Jesus.

If we don’t start with our own hearts—with our own daily, grinding, unglamorous refocusing on Jesus—then everything else we do is just performance. The form of godliness without the power. We can maintain all the external religious practices, preach all the right sermons, march in all the right marches, and still be living as if God doesn’t exist.

So start with your own heart. It’s restless. But there is rest.

I’ve been sitting with that this week. Because I think there’s a connection we miss.

Suspicious of Peace

There’s something strange happening in American Christianity. Somewhere along the way, peace became a suspicious word. Not peace through strength—that we understand. Peace as what the strong impose on the weak. Pax Romana. You can have peace as long as it’s on my terms.

But peacemaking? That sounds like weakness. Compromise. Maybe even nefarious subterfuge. What are they up to? What are they going to take away from me in order to get peace?

We’ve been so formed by the way of the world that operates, so influenced by the assumption that power is the only thing that matters, that the idea of peacemaking doesn’t even register for us anymore.

The Foolishness of God

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul addresses an audience surprisingly similar to our modern context. Greek culture prized above all things wisdom and philosophy—reason, explanation, a framework for navigating the world in a way that was virtuous and fruitful. Western civilization comes out of this Greco-Roman world. We’re steeped in it. So when Paul writes to Corinth, he’s speaking directly to us.

And what he says is: all of the things you think you know about how the world works? They’re wrong. Not only are they wrong—I’m going to eliminate the categories altogether. What you think is foolish is actually wiser than any wisdom you could ever understand. What you think is weakness is more powerful than the strongest strength you can imagine.

That’s hard to get our minds around. God actually works and moves and is most present and active in weakness? Who ever heard of someone winning by losing?

And yet that is what the cross is.

The cross is God becoming so weak, so vulnerable, submitting even to death. Not just death, but a shameful death, an agonizingly painful death, a death that makes us shudder more than any horror movie ever could.

Paul says that the weakness and vulnerability and seeming defeat on display at the cross is how God has demonstrated God’s incredible strength. Through this weakness, through this foolishness, through this event of utter shame and pain and agony and vulnerability, God is bringing about the salvation of the whole world.

The categories that we think define the way life is—those have no place in the kingdom of God. Those have no bearing on the way the kingdom of God is structured. The kingdom of God is so diametrically opposed to the kingdom of this world that the same words we use to describe “the way things are” don’t even have meaning within the context of the kingdom of God.

The Visceral Portrait

That’s Paul’s theological framework. But he isn’t starting from zero as he develops his thesis. He’s giving philosophical language—the lingua franca of Greece—to describe what Jesus says with more visceral images in the Beatitudes.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus isn’t giving us a checklist of things we need to do in order for God to like us. He’s showing us what life in the kingdom of God looks like.

You could almost hear it as if Jesus is saying: you will mourn, you will be poor, you will be meek and hungry, you will be a peacemaker in the kingdom of God. And all of those things that sound either uncomfortable or dangerous or exceedingly difficult—all of those things, Jesus says, are marks of blessing.

In the kingdom of God, we will inhabit these qualities and yet be blessed. You will be poor and lack for nothing. You will be hungry and always full. You will be thirsty and always slaked. You will be a peacemaker and always strong.

Stepping Out of the Game

This is where we have to be careful.

It’s tempting to turn the Beatitudes into a strategy—to hear “blessed are the peacemakers” and immediately start calculating which peaceful actions will produce which righteous outcomes. That’s exactly the mistake Jesus’s disciples make over and over during their three years with the Messiah. They keep asking when the strategy is going to show some results. When do we get to sit at your right hand? When are you going to overthrow Rome? When does the meekness pay off?

Jesus isn’t offering a better strategy for the same game. He’s describing people who have stepped out of the game entirely. The Beatitudes aren’t tactics. They’re a portrait of humans who have been so formed by the kingdom that they no longer make sense by any worldly metric.

You can’t do peacemaking as a strategy. You can only be the kind of person from whom peace emanates—because you’ve stopped believing that the power game is real.

The foolishness of God isn’t a clever tactic that turns out to work. It’s genuinely foolish by every measure the world has. And it’s still true.

The Scandal

This is a tough sell. Because Jesus and Paul don’t offer us a win. They don’t even offer a moral high ground to stand on. The invitation is to lose—by every metric we’ve been taught—and trust that the foolishness of God is actually where life is.

That’s the scandal. That’s why it got Jesus killed and Paul beaten and why the church almost immediately started looking for ways to make it make sense within empire logic.

The gospel isn’t “you can do this.” The gospel is “you can’t, and he did, and somehow that’s enough.”

Being and Doing

But that doesn’t make our actions irrelevant.

The Beatitudes aren’t commands. They’re a portrait. Jesus isn’t saying “do these things and you’ll be blessed.” He’s saying “here’s what humans look like when they’ve been so formed by the kingdom that the world’s game has lost its grip on them.”

The doing flows from the being. The actions are fruit, not achievement.

You can’t manufacture this. You can’t strategize your way into peacemaking that isn’t just another power play. But you can be formed. You can be inhabited. You can stay close to Jesus long enough that his foolishness starts to make more sense than the world’s wisdom.

The actions aren’t irrelevant—they’re the evidence that something real has happened. But they’re not the point. The point is the formation. The abiding. The slow, stumbling process of letting go of the game.

Sanctification as release rather than achievement.

The Light Burden

Which brings me back to where I started.

The burden is light because you’ve stopped carrying the weight of winning.

The game is exhausting. Keeping score is exhausting. Constant vigilance against enemies is exhausting. The armor we put on to survive the culture war is heavy as hell.

Peacemaking isn’t another burden on top of everything else. It’s what happens when you set the weight down.

The world’s wisdom is the heavy yoke. Striving. Defending. Dominating. Calculating. Always on guard. That’s the millstone. And we’ve been told it’s just how life works.

Jesus says: I have a different yoke. You’ll still work. You’ll still act. But it will feel like rest, because you’re no longer carrying the impossible weight of making yourself safe through power.

The Unburdened Life

The Beatitudes set an impossible standard. If your goal is to measure up, you’ll be endlessly disappointed.

But the Beatitudes aren’t a checklist for righteousness. They are a portrait of the unburdened life. A life free from the exhausting illusion that violence, or wealth, or power could ever save us from the brutal realities of life in a world that has been scarred by the effects of sin.

That’s why, as the culmination of everything he teaches, Jesus goes to the cross, meek as a lamb, to make peace between God and God’s creation.

Foolish as it seems, that’s what power looks like.

Read that again. It sounds like a riddle—the kind where you squint at the words trying to figure out the trick. Someone comes after but is ahead because he was before?

But this isn’t wordplay. It’s one of the most important theological claims in the entire New Testament. And if we get it wrong, we misread the whole story.

The Bifurcation Problem

Here’s something I’ve noticed in how many of us—myself included, at times—unconsciously read the Bible: we split it in half.

Old Testament: Plan A.

New Testament: Plan B.

It’s right there in the titles we’ve given these collections. “Old” and “New.” And we know what new usually means. New and improved. Updated formula. Version 2.0 after the bugs in 1.0 got too embarrassing.

We read the Old Testament as God’s first attempt—working with Israel, giving the law, sending prophets—and the New Testament as what happens when that didn’t quite pan out. Jesus shows up as the pivot, the course correction, the backup plan when the original strategy failed. I don’t think we do this consciously. But the framework is there, lurking beneath the surface of how we tell the story.

And it’s wrong.

Before the Foundation of the World

John the Baptist’s riddle points to something the early church understood but we’ve often forgotten: Jesus didn’t show up because something went wrong. Jesus has always been the plan.

The Son—the second person of the Trinity—is eternally begotten of the Father. Not created. Not made. Not an afterthought. The creeds use careful language here: “begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father.” There has never been a moment when the Son was not. This isn’t just metaphysical speculation. It matters for how we understand salvation.

In Revelation, Jesus is called “the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.” Before creation. Before the fall. Before Israel. Before the law. The saving work of Christ wasn’t a reaction to human failure—it was God’s intention from eternity.

The prophet Isaiah puts it this way: the servant of the Lord was commissioned “before I was formed in my mother’s womb” to be “a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Not just Israel. The whole cosmos.

What This Changes

If Jesus is Plan B, then salvation is fundamentally reactive. God makes something, it breaks, and God scrambles to fix it. We’re an accident that required emergency intervention.

But if Jesus has always been the plan—if the world was, as John’s prologue suggests, created through the Son in order to be redeemed by the Son—then something else is true.

God has always intended union.

Not rescue as damage control. Union as the goal from the beginning.

The early church fathers had a phrase for this: theosis. Divinization. The idea that salvation isn’t merely forgiveness of sins (though it includes that) but transformation into the likeness of God. Athanasius put it most famously: “God became what we are so that we might become what God is.”

This is what John the Baptist sees when Jesus walks toward him at the Jordan River. Not a backup plan. Not a course correction. The eternal Son, stepping from eternity into history, to complete what was always intended.

“Behold,” John says, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

Not the sin of Israel. Not the sin of a preordained few. The world.

The Good News in This

There’s profound comfort here, if we let it sink in.

If Jesus is Plan B, then our redemption depends on us being broken enough to warrant emergency measures. We matter because we’re a problem to be solved. But if Jesus has always been the plan, then our redemption flows from who God is, not from how badly we’ve failed. God didn’t decide to save us because we hit rock bottom. God has always desired union with creation. That’s simply who God is.

Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian, wrote a small book called The Humanity of God in which he argues that Jesus Christ was elected before the foundation of the world to be the Redeemer. In Jesus, Barth says, we see the completeness of God’s desire for everything God has made.

Not because we earned it. Not because we’re special. Because God is God.

The Riddle Solved

So what does John’s strange phrase actually mean?

“After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me, because he was before me.”

Jesus comes after John chronologically—born later, baptized by John, beginning his ministry after John’s. But Jesus ranks ahead because he was before—eternally existent, the Word through whom all things were made, the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. The riddle contains the whole gospel: The eternal God has entered time to unite creation to himself. Not as a fallback. As the fulfillment of everything God has always wanted.

There has never been a moment when Jesus was not.

And because there has never been a moment when Jesus was not, there has never been a moment when the world was without a Savior.

That’s the good news.

I think this passage from the prophet Isaiah contains some of the most life-giving words in the entire Bible. And I’ll tell you why.

There are many days when I would be happy to be a bruised reed. Many days when “dimly burning” would be an exaggeration for my wick. If I’m being honest—and we should be honest about these things—the days when I feel bent over, nearly broken, shuffling along under heavy burdens vastly outnumber the days when I feel like a flaming torch or a mighty oak tree.

Anyone else?

The reality of life is that we are often bruised. Bent. Buckled over by cares and concerns, by worries and fears that consume so much of our days. And oftentimes the light we know should be burning within us feels like it’s almost gone.

To hear these ancient words—thousands of years old—proclaiming hope for people exactly like us? That’s a gift.

But here’s what makes it remarkable: the prophet Isaiah isn’t just describing a generic deity who tolerates weakness. He’s announcing the Messiah. The one who will bring God’s vision of peace and justice to the earth. And the way Isaiah characterizes this coming Savior is striking:

A bruised reed he will not break. A dimly burning wick he will not snuff out.

Power Breaks Things

Here’s the thing about power as the world understands it: it breaks bent twigs. It blows out dimly burning candles.

We see it constantly. In business, if something isn’t working, you cut it off. If someone isn’t working out, you let them go. Move on. Next.

We do it in our personal lives too. Something isn’t quite right? Give up on it. Let it go.

(I want to be careful here—there are times when, for our own safety and well-being, we must keep distance from what’s harmful. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about our instinct to retreat from darkness, to protect ourselves from anything that frightens or disturbs us.)

We tend to move away from the hurt. Away from the vulnerability. Away from the mess.

But God doesn’t operate that way.

God Moves Toward

Rather than keeping distance, rather than eradicating the “problem” of bent reeds and smoldering wicks, God moves toward those things. Those people. Those situations.

God moves toward the places where hurt, brokenness, and even despair are most pronounced.

In the Gospel of John, when John describes the coming of Jesus, he calls him “the light that shines in the darkness.” Notice: he doesn’t say the light that shines in the light and makes everything brighter. You don’t walk into a fully lit room and turn on a flashlight. That would be—let’s say—unnecessary.

You shine a light where it’s dark.

God in Jesus Christ doesn’t shy away from the darkness. Doesn’t keep a safe distance from the smoldering wicks. Doesn’t avoid the bruises and brokenness we carry within our lives and our being.

God moves toward all of it. That has been God’s move all along.

Standing in Line with Sinners

This is exactly why the baptism of Jesus matters so much.

Jesus was perfect. That’s a pretty central doctrine, right? In his one person, he carried two natures: fully human as the son of Mary, fully divine as the Son of God. He had no sin to repent of. No corruption to wash away.

Jesus did not need baptism.

And yet. Where does he go at the very beginning of his public ministry? What’s his first move? To go where all the sinners are—the ones lining up at the Jordan River to confess their sins and be baptized by John. Jesus gets in line right next to them. He doesn’t launch his ministry with a rousing speech. No big rally. No finger-wagging from a pedestal, telling people what’s what and who’s who. He starts by standing alongside those who need saving.

What a scene. Jesus walks up to John, and John recognizes him immediately. “Cuz,” he says (they were cousins, after all), “I know you. I’ve known you since we were both in our mothers’ bellies. You do not need to be baptized. That’s not how this works.”

But Jesus insists: “We need to do this. We need to do this to fulfill all righteousness.”

Paving the Way

What Jesus is doing in that moment—what he does through every moment of his life—is paving the way of salvation.

He unites himself to us. First, through the incarnation itself: God and humanity joined together in one person, never to be separated. Son of God, son of Mary. Then, through baptism, he unites himself to us further—identifying with our need for repentance, our need for reconciliation with God. Jesus doesn’t need the bath. But he takes it anyway, because we do.

And in that moment, something extraordinary happens.

As Jesus comes up out of the water, the Holy Spirit descends upon him like a dove. And a voice booms out from heaven:

This is my beloved Son. In him, I am well pleased.

Beloved Children

Here’s what we can hear echoing in that declaration: as we also pass through the waters of baptism, we become sons and daughters of God. And God is pleased with us.

Everyone is already beloved of God—but we are estranged. Out of whack in our relationship with the divine. Jesus provides the way for reconciliation, so that we who are estranged can be brought back into the loving embrace of a Father who declares over each and every one of us:

This is my beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.

The baptism of the Lord is not just marking a historical event. It’s celebrating a pivotal moment in salvation history—the moment when God in Jesus Christ makes it unmistakably clear that God’s place is among those who need God.

The Fullness of the Gospel

The gospel is so much more than “be saved from your sins and go to heaven when you die.” That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. The tip of the tip of the iceberg.

The fullness of the gospel message is this: we are destined for complete union with God. Human nature and divine nature are meant to be eternally united, never to be separated. Jesus comes into the world and identifies with us. He becomes what we are so we can become what he is.

God Isn’t Afraid of the Dark

The Song of Zechariah puts it beautifully: we who dwell in darkness, in the shadow of death—a light from on high breaks upon us to set us free from bondage.

That’s what Jesus comes to do. He doesn’t come to set himself apart, to avoid mingling with the riffraff. God in Jesus Christ comes to mix it up with the riffraff. To identify fully with we who are in such desperate need of help. Jesus comes alongside us. Identifies with us. Makes a way for us to be reconciled to God and to take our rightful place as God’s beloved children.

When the Light Is Low

So here’s the word for those of you—for those of us—who feel like bruised reeds today. For those whose light just ain’t burning very bright. God isn’t coming along to blow us out. Rather, God comes alongside us. Gently fans the flame. Brings light. Shows us the way.

A bruised reed he will not break.

A dimly burning wick he will not snuff out.

Thanks be to God.

It’s a good story. A great story, actually. There’s palace intrigue, a paranoid tyrant, mysterious foreigners following celestial signs, and the delicious irony of a royal entourage marching past the marble halls of power straight to the manure pile where a toddler sits with his teenage mother.

But here’s the thing about Epiphany that I think we miss when we get caught up in the drama of the Magi: this story isn’t really about them.

It’s about you.

You’re Part of a Cosmic Story

We have a tendency to think about our lives in a vacuum. Things happen to us and around us, we walk through our days, and on we go. Our faith—if we still have one—can feel similarly isolated. A private arrangement between us and God, untethered from anything larger.

The Epiphany invites us to see differently.

When those Magi knelt before Jesus, they were—without knowing it—fulfilling a promise made a thousand years before they were born. God had told Abraham on a starry desert night that his descendants would become a great nation, and that through them, all the families of the earth would be blessed. Not some families. Not the right families. All of them.

The Magi were the first fruits of that promise coming to harvest. Gentiles—outsiders to the covenant, foreigners to the faith—drawn by a sign in the heavens to worship the Jewish Messiah. In that moment, the door that had been cracked open in Genesis 12 swung wide.

And you walked through it.

Every one of us who isn’t ethnically Jewish, who wasn’t born into the covenant community of Israel, who came to faith in Jesus from somewhere else—we’re here because of what happened in that barn. The Epiphany is our entry point into the story of salvation.

Which means your life isn’t isolated at all. You’re connected to something ancient and ongoing—a thread that runs from Abraham’s desert vision through a Bethlehem stable to wherever you’re sitting right now. The cosmic story of God reconciling the world to himself includes you. Not as an afterthought. Not as a concession. As the plan all along.

God Doesn’t Do Velvet Ropes

Here’s where this gets pointed.

If the Epiphany reveals anything about how God operates, it’s this: God consistently chooses inclusion over exclusion. God isn’t into velvet ropes and divine bouncers keeping the riffraff out of the kingdom.

Think about what God could have done. God could have reserved salvation for Abraham’s biological descendants only. Born into the right family? You’re in. Everyone else? Tough luck. That would have been tidy. Controllable. Exclusive in the way humans love to be exclusive.

But God chose differently. God chose to blow the doors off the covenant and invite the whole world in. The Magi—pagan astrologers from who-knows-where—become the first Gentile worshippers. Not despite their outsider status, but as a declaration that outsider status no longer exists.

And yet, we who have become heirs by grace are too often eager to place limits. To make belonging conditional on anything other than trusting in Jesus. To install velvet ropes where God left open doors.

What right have we to put limits on the gospel if God does not? If God chooses to include, then we who have been included have no business excluding others. We cannot gatekeep the kingdom of God because—and this is the crucial part—Jesus is the gate. Not us. Not our institutions. Not our theological boundary markers. Jesus.

And Jesus keeps opening the door wider than we’re comfortable with.

The Only Entry Requirement

The Magi brought expensive gifts, sure. But that’s not what got them in the door. They didn’t pass a theology exam. They didn’t demonstrate proper covenant credentials. They didn’t even have the right religion—they were almost certainly Zoroastrian astrologers, reading signs in the stars that their own tradition taught them to read.

What they had was this: they saw something that pointed beyond themselves, and they followed it.

That’s it. That’s the entry requirement. Not pedigree. Not perfection. Not proper beliefs about the proper things in the proper order. Just a willingness to follow the light wherever it leads—even if it leads somewhere unexpected, even if it leads you to kneel in a barn before a peasant child.

The Epiphany reveals a God who isn’t checking credentials at the door. There’s no bouncer asking if your name is on the list. There’s just an open invitation and a light to follow.

For those of us who’ve been told we don’t belong, or who’ve walked away from communities that made belonging conditional on things God never required—this is genuinely good news.

You’re not an afterthought to God’s plan. You’re not sneaking in through a loophole. You’re not a second-class citizen in the kingdom.

You’re exactly who God had in mind from the beginning, when he told an old man to count the stars and promised that blessing would flow through his family to every family on earth.

The Magi found their way to Jesus by following a star. You found your way here by whatever strange path brought you. And the scandal of the Epiphany is that both journeys count. Both arrivals are welcomed. Both of us—ancient Persian mystics and 21st-century wanderers—are included in the same promise.

No velvet ropes. No bouncers. Just an open door and a God who is, it turns out, nowhere near as exclusive as his fan club.

Barth’s response came in his commentary on Romans, where he wrote: “The Gospel dissolves the Church, and the Church dissolves the Gospel.”

His fiery rhetoric in the Römerbrief wasn’t an attack on the Church. It was a prophetic call to the Body of Christ, begging the Bride to return to her first love. To accept the Word of God as a treasure held in trust, not a commodity to be deployed in service to earthly kingdoms. Barth was raging against the most persistent and pernicious sin of Christendom: the errant belief that the Church possesses the Word and is free to do with it what she will.

The Gospel calls the Church into being. And then it judges every version of the Church that shows up. Every institution. Every theology. Every confident system that claims to have captured the Word of God in a net of propositions.

Suffering or Triumph

In 1968, James Cone—son of Bearden, Arkansas, who watched his father nearly get lynched for filing a school integration lawsuit—declared his “liberation from the bondage of white theology.” Just as liberal Protestants a half-century earlier had rubber stamped the most destructive war to that point in history, the white, southern Church enabled the unspeakable violence and oppression of the Jim Crow era. Cone was just as vocal and provocative in his denunciation as Barth had been in the Römerbrief.

I can’t think of a single cultural artifact Barth and Cone would have shared. And yet they circle the same truth from different directions.

Barth characterizes the Church as a community participating in Christ’s victory, Cone as a community participating in Christ’s suffering—and these two seemingly opposing claims are the heart of the Church’s story.

In the incarnation of Jesus Christ, suffering and triumph converge. The cross and the resurrection are not sequential events that cancel each other out. They’re held together in the ongoing life of God. And the Church—if it is the Church at all—must hold them together too.

A False Choice

Every claim about God emerges from a particular body, a particular history, a particular set of wounds and hopes. And yet every claim must also submit itself to the universality of the Gospel, the final authority of the Word of God. The particularity of our perspective doesn’t get the final word.

So we have a choice to make. Is theology irreducibly contextual—always emerging from a particular body, a particular history, a particular set of wounds? Or does it answer to a transcendent standard that exceeds all contexts? Is the Black experience the hermeneutical key, or is the revelation of God in Christ?

But this is a false choice, and its falseness is borne out by how easy it makes things seem. The truth for anyone who has attempted to live and proclaim the Gospel is this: You don’t get the luxury of resolved contradictions because your lived experience is the contradiction.

You preach resurrection to a congregation that knows death intimately. You proclaim the goodness of God to people whose bodies and histories testify to abandonment. You hold onto hope with hands that have learned what it means to have everything slip through their fingers.

We pray “give us our daily bread” when we’ve never known what it’s like to miss a meal. We hear “blessed are the poor” and go out to dinner. We hear Jesus say “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” and go home to a king size mattress.

We can’t resolve these tensions. We can only let them do their work on us.

Submitting the Gospel to the Gospel

The work of theology is not to build a system you can learn and apply. It is to submit all things to the Gospel of Jesus Christ—including your understanding of the Gospel. We don’t theologize in order to possess God. We theologize in order to be possessed. We don’t study the Word in order to master it. We study so that we might be mastered, broken open, reconstituted into something more like the image we were always meant to bear.

To be confronted by the Gospel is to enter a hall of mirrors. The Gospel that tells me God is love also tells me I don’t yet know what love means. The Gospel that tells me Christ has overcome also tells me I will participate in his suffering. The Gospel that promises resurrection also hands me a cross. At every turn I see myself, and yet, not myself. Through a glass darkly, waiting to be known so I can finally know.

This sounds like infinite regress. But it’s not, because the Gospel is a living Word, not a set of propositions. It confronts me, calls me into being, and then judges every version of myself that shows up to respond.

The destination is real. The eschaton is not a metaphor. Resurrection is not a symbol for the dialectical process—it’s the actual end toward which all our suffering and all our hoping points. But we likely won’t arrive in this life, so the journey matters. The process of sanctification—real movement toward a real end—is itself the shape of faithfulness.

Theology is the science that seeks its own destruction—not annihilation, but the constant breaking open of every settled thing we thought we knew. Until at last we come to the fullness of the Gospel, and every proposition dissolves into praise.