Do I Have to Go to Church with My Folks?

Beth Moore, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

CT advice columnists also weigh in cringing at Christianese and the importance of attraction.

Illustrations by Marcos Montiel

Q: After I moved away, my parents joined a church in a different denomination from the church of my childhood. If I’m visiting at Christmas or Easter, am I obliged to attend with them? I’d much rather go to a local congregation in my church’s tradition, but I know my parents want me to come meet their new friends and pastor. —Troubled in Texas

Beth Moore: God alone knows how many people are struggling with the same question amid culture wars, divisions, and honest differences in generational perspectives.

Your family is a step ahead if you’re planning holidays together, and you should be free of obligation to attend your parents’ church. No one in my four family groups attends the same denomination; I’m just glad they like their churches!

I’d advise grappling prayerfully with three questions, though: Would your parents be offended if you didn’t attend? How offended? And if your answers are yes and very, is it worth it?

On the other hand, if you already know their church would bring out the worst in you (a danger to your parents’ hearts) or bring out your fight-or-flight response (a danger to your own heart), it’s wisest and most loving to attend different churches.

But keep in mind that, often, it’s not just what we do but how we do it. Might you be willing to say some version of this? “I love you dearly, and I love that you love your church, but I’d like your blessing to attend my own tradition this holiday.”

You’re a full-grown adult. You don’t need your parents’ permission to follow your convictions! But asking their blessing might soothe the sting. And if they give it, their blessing this time may free you up to bless them another time.

Beth Moore and her husband, Keith, reside outside Houston. She has two daughters and an armful of grandchildren. Beth leads Living Proof Ministries, helping women know and love Jesus through Scripture.

Q: My church is leaning into cringey “Christianese” to the point that church life drastically differs from normal human interactions. Sermon points are forced into rhyme; women’s events center on flowers and men’s on grilling; and we were told to be intimate “prayer sisters” with people we’d just met. Am I wrong to be uncomfortable? —Muddled in Michigan

Kevin Antlitz: I believe I was born again with an allergy to Christianese. Not long after my conversion in high school, I had the chance to share about a church retreat I’d attended. I said I felt “on fire for Jesus” then added—with a straight face—that I was excited to go light my friends on fire. I’m not sure if my hearers knew I was being cheeky.

Why do Christians talk and act like this? The same reason most groups develop shared habits: Common language and practices bind us together and foster belonging.

Theologians have likened conversion to becoming fluent in a new language. We learn the stories, symbols, and habits of Christianity the way we acquire a new tongue. Much of this is inevitable and good.

But groups also tend to drift toward jargon and cliché. This is not so good, and it ultimately makes the church less hospitable. It excludes people unnecessarily and makes belonging more difficult.

From the outside looking in, there’s already enough about Christianity that can seem foreign and hard to understand (2 Pet. 3:16). We needn’t make it less accessible by peddling cringe or reinforcing stereotypes. You’re not wrong to feel uncomfortable.

To riff on Marilyn McEntyre’s Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, I encourage you to care for words in a subculture of cringe. Call your church to the missionary task of translating the gospel into language that resonates with your neighbors. And who knows? Maybe one day you and your prayer sisters can meet over steaks.

Kevin Antlitz is an Anglican priest at a Pittsburgh church positively overflowing with kids. He and his wife have three children under ten, whom they pray will never know a day apart from Jesus.

Q: I’m in my early 30s and want to get married. I’ve been seeing a Christian guy I really respect, but I’m not sure I find him attractive or feel like we have a connection. How important is this when our values and lifestyles align? Would I be settling if I made it work? Would I be letting a good match go if I stopped seeing him? —Doubtful in Delaware

Kiara John-Charles: I empathize with your urgency to marry in your early 30s. And I’m sure you’ve heard advice like, “Don’t be too picky.” “At least he’s Christian.” “Don’t make marriage an idol.”

This guidance is based in some truth—sometimes we are too picky, shared faith is important, and nothing should rival our worship of God—but it isn’t always enough. Shared values and lifestyle are foundational to marriage, but they don’t guarantee compatibility. After all, there are likely multiple people in your church who fit these criteria.

You should genuinely enjoy the person with whom you plan to spend the rest of your life. Our society can reduce attraction to superficial concerns, but personality, presence, and temperament matter. So does the sense that your spouse values and cares for you.

Consider how you’d feel if the Christian guy you’ve been seeing said of you, “I respect her, but I’m not sure I find her attractive or feel like we have a connection.” Would you want your future husband to think of you this way?

Marriage is a covenant that reflects God’s love (Eph. 5:25–33), and we should enter into it with reverence, not halfheartedly. “Settling” is in the eye of the beholder, and perhaps your connection will grow if you make it work with this person. But you deserve to marry someone whom your heart loves (Song 3:4), and so does he.

Kiara John-Charles is an LA native with Caribbean roots and a love for travel and food. She works as a pediatric occupational therapist and serves at her local church in Long Beach, California.

Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Qualms & Proverbs".

Qualms & Proverbs: Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Theology

The Consolation of Providence

Brad East

Contributor

The doctrine of God’s wise and sovereign governance doesn’t make history easy to interpret. It makes living through it endurable.

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Christians believe in providence, which holds that God is the wise and sovereign governor of all creation. But what is providence for?

Unlike some doctrines, this one refuses to stay in the study or pulpit. Providence makes public claims—about the public, the shared space and time in which we all live together. It gets called in to do work whenever something momentous happens.

Not just Christians, but most people look at an event and point and wonder, Is this the work of God? And if so—or at least, if it unfolded in accordance with God’s purposes—does that give the event a stamp of divine approval?

That’s what many of us are after, if we would admit it: confidence that God is with us, with our tribe, or with our country. Though often bent into a too-narrow shape, this longing is the right one; it’s an instinctive search for Immanuel. It’s a question, therefore, that we should keep asking, but we should do so while on guard against easy answers or convenient solutions.

Claims and counterclaims of providential affirmation invariably intensify during election seasons and the interregnum period that follows. And this political year has been especially rocky. A presidential candidate was nearly assassinated—more than once. The sitting president announced he would not run for reelection. November was heralded, as it is every cycle, as the most important vote of our lifetime, its stakes existential.

I’m writing these words before that vote is counted, and you’ll likely read them after the winner—and whatever else awaits us between Election Day and the Inauguration (not to say Judgment Day)—is revealed. But the very point of the doctrine of providence is that I don’t need to know that outcome to trust that God will be with us in the weeks to come.

In fact, the doctrine of providence has a number of roles to perform, and one of them is to turn down the volume on the frantic speculation to which we are prone in such moments. Providence isn’t a decoder ring for history, and it certainly isn’t for the present. To switch metaphors, it’s got bigger fish to fry.

But that’s not to downplay its power. Providence is a lifeline for Christians in a fallen world where chaos threatens to overwhelm us. But we need to understand what it is and what it teaches before we can receive the consolation it is meant to offer.

Providence begins and ends with God, his identity and activity. God alone is maker, sustainer, and savior. “For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens” (Ps. 96:5). Loving what he has made, God rules wisely over his creation. As part of his rule, he orders all things to their final end in himself.

Providence is the word Christians use for this hidden, ordered provision guiding history to its appointed terminus. Every book of the Bible testifies to this divine prudence, though one could construct a theology of providence out of nothing but the Psalms, perhaps even Psalm 104 alone. There we learn of God’s universal creative power, his unrivaled sovereignty, and his immediate, active care:

These all look to thee,
to give them their food in due season.
When thou givest to them, they gather it up;
when thou openest thy hand, they are filled with good things.
When thou hidest thy face, they are dismayed;
when thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created;
and thou renewest the face of the ground. (vv. 27–30, RSV)

Absent the Lord’s hand, the history of not only humanity but the whole universe would be meaningless. Lacking all order, it would have no
rationale or goal.

Thankfully, the universe is not meaningless. God’s providential care is boundless. “All things are subject to divine providence,” writes medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae, “not only in general, but even in their own individual selves.” Or take Augustine in the fifth century, in a more elaborate passage from his treatise On the Trinity:

The whole of creation is governed by its creator, from whom and by whom and in whom (Rom 11:36) it was founded and established. And thus God’s will is the first and highest cause of all [creatures and events]. For nothing happens visibly and in a manner perceptible to the senses which does not issue either as a command or as a permission from the inmost invisible and intelligible court of the supreme emperor, according to his unfathomable justice of rewards and punishments, favors and retributions, in what we may call this vast and all-embracing republic of the whole creation.

Let me unpack these claims, because although they are dense, they are universal across Christian tradition. Three are paramount, and simply stated.

First, God’s providence is comprehensive; nothing is excluded from it. Second, God wills some things actively, and these are “incontrovertibly good,” as the seventh-century monk John of Damascus puts it in Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Third, God permits other things, and these are defects, errors, sufferings, or evils, including those of the political variety.

At this point, differences arise between theologians and denominations—the position of sin in relation to God’s plan, the reason he allows evil, and the role and character of fallen human will—but agreement is firm on this point: Nothing falls outside the sovereign power of God. Nothing is outside his providential grasp. If anything were, then some things would exceed his reach. And if that were true, God would be unable to save us. Either providence is all-encompassing or our redemption is in jeopardy.

That’s not to say the world is as it should be. If it were, Jesus wouldn’t command us to pray that God’s kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). Such a prayer would be redundant if the status quo left nothing to be desired. In that case, earth would already be heaven.

But providence holds together two truths in a single mystery: Regarding God, “everything that he wills comes to pass,” John of Damascus says. If that weren’t true, God wouldn’t be God. God is good and does good; he abhors sin; he cannot be an author of evil.

Regarding us, we do what is wrong: We sin, transgress, and turn away from God’s love. And because of our first sin, this world is sunk in evil and death—the two very enemies opposed to life that God sent his Son to defeat.

Taken together, it appears that the horizon of God’s will overlooks or permits—with patience but never resignation—rebellion and defection from his manifest purposes for our good. But he never causes, desires, or blesses those evils.

Hence, providence does not mean that evil does not happen. Providence means that evil is not ultimate, that it does not and will not have the last word. It means, further, that in spite of the evils we witness and suffer, God has not abandoned us; the story is not without a plot; the author has not lost control of his narrative.

As theologian John Webster puts it in an essay on the doctrine, “Providence is not asserted on the basis of the insignificance of evil but on the basis of the belief that God outbids any and all evil.”

Indeed, in his famous treatise on The Bondage of the Will, Reformer Martin Luther once observed that if all we had to go on was the evidence of the world, we would conclude that God is evil or must not exist.

Providence, therefore, is not an empirical doctrine; it’s not a reasonable guess based on the way our lives go. Rather, it’s a confession of faith in God incarnate, the God of Calvary, whose death on a cross seemed to almost every onlooker to refute his message.

Providence, in short, makes a promise. It says that human history may sometimes seem like one long crucifixion, but at the end of it lies an empty tomb. Confidence in providence thus begets perseverance. It takes God at his word no matter how dark life becomes.

According to each of the theologians I’ve cited, the truth of providence has great theological stakes because it is rooted in the nature of God, both his goodness and his power. His goodness, because the evils of the world seem to belie it; his power, because none but God can bring good out of evil. The watchword for providence in all ages is Joseph’s response to his brothers: You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good (Gen. 50:20).

John of Damascus saw two sides to providence: a practical charge and a theoretical danger. On one hand, with a view to the life of faith, he writes that “when they are accepted with thanksgiving, all the vexatious things that happen to us are laid upon us for our salvation and most certainly become occasions of benefit for us.” On the other hand, he warns that “the ways of God’s providence are many and can neither be explained in words nor grasped by the mind.”

Put these together, and you come to see that providence is a call not for speculation but for action. It is a gospel truth built on the rock of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, meant for our consolation and hope in the face of trials, sufferings, and calamities. Providence names a mystery deep in the heart of the church’s life, one that explains her courage, her boldness, her stubborn refusal to shrink back from faith. Providence is a secret whispered from one martyr to another until the end of time.

We’re now far afield from contemporary political turmoil, and rightly so. The church’s teaching about providence preexists American and modern politics. It stands wholly independent of the day’s news.

In the summer of 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power and the Nazis’ intrusion into church affairs, Swiss theologian Karl Barth composed a plea for Christians to stay faithful to the gospel. He asserted that, for his part, he would carry on with theology as if nothing had happened.

This bald claim has scandalized many of his readers over the past century, even as it did at the time. But Barth didn’t mean that Christ-ians should remain aloof from the events of their era. This is the same man, after all, who the following year helped draft the Barmen Declaration against Nazi influence in the German churches. By saying he would carry on as if nothing had happened, then, Barth meant that the gospel stands or falls on its own terms, not the world’s.

The axis of history turns on the resurrection of Jesus. If Hitler or Stalin could bend the arc of history to their will—if theology had to “change” in light of later events—then God would not be sovereign. A rival would sit on the throne, and our trust in his promise would be called into question.

Providence, therefore, is not affected by the news. But neither is it rendered inert by current events. True, we’re not meant to speculate; that would mean looking at providence rather than using it, properly, as a lens to view our lives. Looking through providence, we see a fallen creation governed by its loving Lord, not random atoms colliding aimlessly or human happenings devoid of meaning and, often, full of terror.

This is why it is perfectly reasonable for people to wonder about God’s involvement in shocking, significant, unexpected, or improbable events. The conversion of Constantine, the fall of Rome, the battle of Tours, the rout of the Spanish Armada, the evacuation of Dunkirk—many Christians, rightly or wrongly, believed they could discern the Lord’s hand in these events.

The trick is to avoid cherry-picking. Vulgar providentialism sees the smile of heaven in any happy occurrence and its absence whenever things—whether in reality or from our own perspective—go wrong. Worse, such convenient providentialism can become confirmation bias projected onto history: When my guy wins, when my policy passes, when my promotion goes through, I know that I was right because God is telling me so. Of course, when my guy loses or my policy fails or my promotion stalls, I don’t assume I was wrong all along. I know that life’s not that simple.

Here’s the difficult truth: The sheer fact that something has happened—that God willed or allowed it to happen—tells us nothing whatsoever about the thing itself. It may be a cause for celebration or lament or, more likely, a mixture of both. On their own, events are illegible. We may never know in the moment what God is up to, much less how God might work good out of some bewildering or shocking occurrence.

Wise discernment and faithful response are a long game, so long that you and I may not live to know the answer. Sifting history for the work of God is thus a task for a community, not an individual, over a span of centuries, not weeks or months or the few moments it takes to post on social media. At any given time, what seems like a very good thing may turn out for ill, just as a very bad thing may turn out for blessing. The people of God must be patient. Spiritual hindsight is the prerogative of the church, and even then it’s touch and go.

For these reasons, providence is an ill-shapen tool for imprinting Christ-ian approval on current events, and this realization should help believers turn popular recourse to providence inside out. Far from a means of explaining why something has happened, it should instead become an occasion for humility: We simply do not know. Our trust in God remains unshaken, but rarely if ever can we predict or unveil his purposes with confidence. We know the final outcome—each of our graves vacant in a flash (1 Cor. 15:52)—not the twists and turns by which it will arrive.

Scripture supplies many examples of this fundamental ambiguity of providence. Foreign empires appear on Israel’s borders. Is this from God? Yes, it is. They threaten to attack God’s people. Is this too from God? Yes—though repentance could change their fate. Soldiers lay waste to the temple and perpetrate injustice against the innocent. Could this also be from God? Well, the answer is complicated. Isaiah 47 reveals that God did employ the Babylonians to punish Israel but they went too far; now he will raise up another empire to punish them for their transgressions.

Or consider ancient Israel’s monarchy. A line of kings is a key component of God’s purposes for Jacob’s children, for it will culminate in Jesus. Yet when the people beg for a king, it is an act of mistrust on their part; they spurn the Lord in order to be like the other nations (1 Sam. 8:4–9). And as it turns out, Saul, David, and many of David’s descendants often prove disastrous for Israel. The lesson for us: Be careful what you wish for. And perhaps also: Be cautious in divining the Lord’s will. In the moment, it may seem clear what he is doing and why. In the long run, though, you may live to regret your rush to judgment.

And yet: Out of the long disaster of the Davidic kingship God brought Jesus, the Son of David and the final king of Israel. It only took a thousand years. Perhaps it will likewise take a millennium for keen-eyed observers to gain true clarity on our own political trials and conflicts.

In any case, the rule stands: For all Christians, whether Calvinist or Methodist, Catholic or Baptist, providence is by nature ambiguous. God permits things; God wills things; God does things. We do not always know which is which, and we very rarely know why—and never without a long backward glance. Even when we are sure God’s hand was at work in an event, his purposes are likely to be obscure, especially to contemporaries.

We must remember to root the doctrine of providence in the good news of Christ—his cross and resurrection, his love and promises for his people, his pledge to be with us to the end. Recast in that light, providence doesn’t make history easy to interpret. It makes living through it endurable.

Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Our Strength and Consolation".

- More from Brad East

Books

Review

What to Salvage from Fundamentalism

Matt Reynolds

Like Richard Mouw, I’m reluctant to discard everything about this flawed heritage.

Illustration by Tara Anand

In a fallen world, reform efforts never perfectly hit their marks. They address one problem only to sow the seeds of others. Or they so aggressively attack an infection that they weaken or destroy what’s healthy and vital.

Blunders in this delicate dance between correction and overcorrection are familiar in the political arena. Yet the same pattern is found in matters of religion, as Reformation people can readily understand.

Around a quarter century ago, theologian Richard Mouw wrote a short book surveying the evangelical landscape of that time. He had much to celebrate. But he worried that evangelicalism had too thoroughly eclipsed the fundamentalism that preceded it. His reflection, titled The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage (2000), models a healthy approach to reckoning with a flawed past that still tugs on your heartstrings.

In one sense, evangelicalism has existed ever since Jesus first gave us the Good News to share with the world. As a contemporary movement, however, it emerged in the 20th century as a correction to the fundamentalist overcorrection.

As I never tire of reminding those who casually deploy fundamentalist as a slur, the term is no mere synonym for Bible-thumping zealot. Fundamentalism responded to the late 19th-century advent of “modernist” Christianity, which reengineered supernatural elements—like Jesus’ virgin birth or bodily resurrection—that offended science-loving contemporaries.

Fundamentalists drew essential lines in the sand. (The name derives from The Fundamentals, an essay collection defending core Christian doctrines.) But over time, they turned quarrelsome and insular, growing preoccupied with moral-purity tests and esoteric threads of Bible prophecy. Rattled by cultural rejection, they devoted more energy to speculating about the world’s demise than to shining the light of Christ within it.

The Smell of Sawdust asked evangelicals at the turn of this century: Are you flirting with overcorrection?

For Mouw, the subject is deeply personal. Born in 1940, he grew up immersed in a tight-knit fundamentalist world. He learned dispensational theology at its Bible conferences, staffed kitchens at its summer camps, and inhaled the aroma of its revival tents, which his title evokes.

Like many believers of his generation, however, Mouw ended up charting a different course. Anxious to avoid modernist heresies and fundamentalist habits of cultural retreat, he took the “neo-evangelical” path that launched leaders like Billy Graham, publications like Christianity Today, and institutions like Fuller Theological Seminary (where Mouw served 20 years as president).

Mouw doesn’t regret that journey. In fact, much of the book champions evangelical achievements. But for all this, he retains a sense of “indebtedness to . . . the fundamentalism that nurtured me in my early years.”

My own childhood had few, if any, fundamentalist hallmarks. Still, The Smell of Sawdust moved me to ask which features of that inheritance may be worth salvaging. I can’t cover everything here, but 25 years after Mouw’s book, I’ll propose three areas where the pendulum might be swinging too far toward overcorrection.

The first concerns personal piety and morality. Fundamentalists weren’t shy about setting behavioral boundaries. That often led to legalistic dead ends and petty judgmentalism about drinking, dancing, cards, and other presumed gateways to naughtiness. But they weren’t wrong to guard against a sinful world’s enticements.

My wife and I sometimes joke about evangelical writers enlisting the Incarnation as a versatile moral permission slip. Jesus lived on earth, you see, which means the world is good, not tainted. Presto! A handy rationale for tasting its fruits with an untroubled conscience.

That’s a caricature, of course. Rightly understood, evangelicalism rejects antinomian license and follows Jesus in looking at the heart’s posture. I don’t want evangelicals to be known primarily for the priggish hang-ups of yesteryear. But when I think of how I’ve reassured irreligious friends with my conspicuous lack of hang-ups, I worry I’m failing to seek the set-apartness that God commands of his people.

Second, I’ve come to value fundamentalist warnings about the pitfalls of intellectualism. Contrary to the lunkhead stereotype, Mouw notes that fundamentalists often brought prodigious intellectual energy to their pursuits. At their worst, they also cultivated an unhealthy suspicion of secular knowledge as a distraction, an irrelevance, or a rival to biblical authority.

That mindset clashes with my dearest convictions about the inherent goodness of reading and learning. Mouw has little patience for it either. But he shows where the fundamentalist caution is worth heeding: Theology can lodge in the head without transforming the heart, and some strains of Enlightenment rationalism do rule out religious belief.

I’d add another danger of intellectualism, one that rises as we evangelicals ponder our place in America’s social hierarchy. Evangelicals should always obey God’s call to renew the mind. But when braininess functions as a status symbol, intellectual ambitions can devolve into quests for esteem from secular peers or distance from fellow evangelicals.

Finally, I think we could stand to recover something of the fundamentalist emphasis on the eternal fate of individual souls.

Mouw writes of revivalistic altar calls “where people were encouraged to make deep and abiding commitments.” He knows, of course, that emotional appeals can yield ephemeral professions of faith. He knows, too, that cathartic moments of conversion can’t substitute for regular church fellowship and patient discipleship. But he helpfully stresses the high stakes involved. It matters whether people get saved!

Obviously, evangelicals believe this. But in recent years, evangelical leaders have taken great pains to portray the cosmic scope of God’s redemption. God isn’t just gathering lost souls and depositing them in paradise. He’s renewing creation itself and reigning as King forevermore.

I want pulpits to ring out with this glorious message. But I cringe at the thought of dismissing a perennial source of existential dread—What happens after I die?—as selfish or unimportant. The gospel promises abundantly more than “going to heaven,” but surely not less.

I give thanks for the evangelical tradition, warts and all. But like Mouw, I remain grateful for the fundamentalist streams still nourishing it. Yes, you’ll find some corroded junk in those waters. But also some precious gems.

Matt Reynolds is senior books editor at CT.

The Beckoning Nightstand

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Culture

The Light of the World Is for Everyone

Malcolm Guite

Those who do not yet share our faith can share our wonder at the beauty and comfort of light in the darkness.

Illustration by Stephen Procopio

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.” This luminous verse in Isaiah 9 is traditionally read at Advent as we look forward to the coming light of Christ.

For those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, this passage is especially apt, as the whole celebration of Christmas in midwinter has an extra layer of meaning, a kind of parable from nature to underline and emphasize the prophecy of Isaiah.

Isaiah is speaking of the darkness of exile, the darkness of our fall, and—at the root of it all—the thick, clotted darkness of sin. This is the darkness that Christ comes to dispel, and John, perhaps remembering this verse in Isaiah, tells us that the light shines in darkness and the darkness has never overcome it (John 1:5).

To hear these readings in the dark time of the year, when the nights draw in and help us see the light more brightly, reminds us of the final triumph of the inextinguishable light of Christ—not just in our heads, but in our hearts; not just by reason, but by a kindled imagination.

When a child comes up in church to light an Advent candle, the gospel is known not only with the mind but with the body as well. And that is especially important as we celebrate the Incarnation, the astonishing truth that God became one of us, that he who is the Light of the World was once as young and vulnerable as the child who lights the candle.

As a poet, I have found myself drawn again and again to “the light within the light by which I see,” as I put it in one of my Advent sonnets. The light that shines in darkness is also an image, a living symbol, to which everyone responds.

Some time ago, I wrote a winter blessing. I wanted to frame my blessing in such a way that it could be shared, perhaps at a candlelit dinner table, with those who do not yet share our faith. I wanted to invite conversation about who the “winter child” really is. Those who do not yet share our faith can share our wonder at the beauty and comfort of light in the darkness, from the stars in the heavens to the candlelight at a service or over a shared meal.

Winter Benediction

When winter comes and winds are cold and keen,
When nights are darkest, though the stars shine bright,
When life shrinks to its roots, or sleeps unseen,
Then may he bless and bring you to his light.
For he has come at last, and can be seen,
God’s love made vulnerable, tightly curled:
The Winter Child, The Saviour of The World.

Malcolm Guite is a former chaplain and life fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. He teaches and lectures widely on theology and literature.

“Winter Benediction” was originally commissioned for Cultivating magazine and published by Cultivating Oaks Press. Used with permission.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Winter Child".

- More from Malcolm Guite

Culture

Illustrating the Incarnation

Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

How art testifies to the incredible truth of Christ with us.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: The Met, Julia Hendrickson

In my art history classroom, I dim the lights and turn on the projector. The image pools on the screen at the front of the room. The heaviness of another news cycle, along with my own family’s fragile health, weighs on me like the thick, damp fog blanketing the college campus where I work. But along with my students, I begin searching the picture on the screen.

We are not looking for a hidden Da Vinci Code cipher or a proof of artistic genius. As we study images of crisp frescoes and architectural ruins, we are seeking out the ripples of Christ’s incarnation.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,” the apostle John writes (John 1:14). Jesus, the eternal God, born of a woman, settles in our material, temporal existence. The Incarnation dignifies and reaffirms God’s commitment to the world that he made and that he promises to make whole again. He does not abandon us to our despair but enters into it. Humans’ ability to make art—to materialize meaning—is an echo of not only a creator God but also an incarnate God.

As I leave the classroom, the day’s weightiness still hovers, but it is also pierced. Again and again, art renews and expands my wonder over the miraculous reality of the Incarnation: God with us, a light shining in the darkness. The art I love best invites me to hold things in paradox.

As theologian William Dyrness writes, “[Art] shows us something we can learn in no other way.” Two very different artworks that reference “God with us,” made hundreds of years apart, suggest both the challenge and possibility of this endeavor.

Learning from art in this way might not come easily to us. Our limited expectations of how works of art function might also truncate our understanding of the Incarnation.

Take, for example, the Annunciation Triptych, a 15th-century altarpiece made for a Flemish home by the workshop of Robert Campin. The center panel of the small devotional object depicts Gabriel’s announcement to Mary. The archangel kneels on the left side of the composition and addresses a seated Mary. We can almost hear Gabriel speaking the words from Luke’s gospel: “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus” (1:31).

Meanwhile, Jesus himself—represented as a miniscule alabaster-white infant carrying a tiny wooden cross—bursts through a window above Gabriel’s head and zips through the air on a sharp, downward diagonal. If we trace the implied line of his descent, we find that he is heading straight for Mary’s womb. To our 21st-century eyes, it is an incredibly strange, even humorous, image.

We might think that the artists of the Annunciation Triptych are offering us an extremely literal illustration. It’s as if they thought, Well, the Incarnation is God with us, so here’s a picture of God on his way to be with us. Very little imagination is required; the painting’s meaning appears to sit on the surface.

The Met

Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece) by Robert Campin circa 1427–32

We may interpret the painting in this way because we are familiar with pictures that directly tell us something: Advertisements and explainer graphics constantly announce what we should buy, who we should desire, and how we should think. If that is what we expect of images, then that is all we will see in the Annunciation Triptych. And thus, Incarnation becomes limited to a specific narrative moment rather than functioning as a cosmic folding of time and eternity. Wonder trickles away, absorbed by a dogmatic diagram.

There is much more to see in the Annunciation Triptych. But first we need a better way of seeing. Visual artworks do not merely tell us things; they can also form us.

The work of California-based contemporary artist Julia Hendrickson also invites us into the wonder of the Incarnation. Hendrickson is a Christian, and her practice emerges from her faith commitments.

In Hendrickson’s abstract watercolor paintings, feathery tendrils spread like frost across indigo fields. Nets of light pierce midnight clouds. Stars shimmer on a dark pond. We are looking, it seems, at both the entire universe and the tiniest sliver of reality, something that is simultaneously a magnificent galaxy and a magnified drop of water. Our imaginations prickle. What else are we looking at? What artistic alchemy made this possible?

Affection (from the What Lies Beneath series), Julia Hendrickson, watercolor and salt on paper, 22″ x 30″, 2023.

The first paradox of Hendrickson’s work is how she mines seemingly endless variation from a limited process and set of materials. Much of Hendrickson’s daily work follows a rhythm that she frequently documents and shares online. She soaks her thick white paper with wide brushstrokes of water. Then, she repetitively brushes, dabs, or splatters a single hue of watercolor: the warm blue of Payne’s grey.

Finally, while the surface is still wet, Hendrickson sprinkles salt on the pooling paint. The salt crystals both repel the pigment and absorb excess water, resulting in strange and varied starbursts that often reveal the underlying gestural marks of Hendrickson’s initial brush.

As the paint dries, forms shift and fractal patterns emerge. Though the process is purposefully repeated, the results vary in myriad, surprising ways.

This may seem counterintuitive. We tend to despise limitations, especially those in our own bodies. But in his incarnation, the Creator accepts the good boundaries he placed upon his creation. Theologian Kelly Kapic writes that “God is not embarrassed by the limitations of our bodies … but fully approves of them in and through the Son’s incarnation.” I struggle to accept this truth. But when I stand in front of a long gallery wall, covered edge to edge with dozens of Hendrickson’s Droplet paintings, each one different from the others, I marvel at how the God who enters into our humanity continues to multiply unimagined possibilities within its bounds.

A second mystery Hendrickson embraces is the entanglement of the material and the spiritual. Hendrickson began making these process-based paintings while she was in seminary. During that time, one of her friends was about to undergo a serious medical procedure. Anxious and scattered, Hendrickson struggled to pray with words. She turned to paint and paper, ordering her breath and her brush marks as an “integrated prayer.”

Hendrickson calls her practice opera Divina, or “holy work.” The term she coined builds on the Benedictine order’s motto of Ora et labora—“pray and work”—by asserting that our work itself can be a prayer. The movement of her hands across the paper, the slow swirl of paint, the sprinkling of salt, and the quiet waiting are themselves, she writes, “an intentional initiation of a conversation with the Divine.” Invisible offerings of praise, lament, confession, and petition take on material form.

Third, Hendrickson teaches us to anticipate transformation. John tells us that the Incarnation is the light shining in the present darkness (John 1:5). Hendrickson’s time-lapse videos of her painting process begin with the deep blue-gray pigment bleeding across the white paper. But then, when the salt crystals land on the wet surface, the midnight expanse is split open by glimmering light. The darkness is shattered. We wait, and we watch.

More recently, Hendrickson has begun tearing her paintings. She folds the large sheet of paper into 16ths, then unfolds it again and carefully tears along the horizontal creases. She stops three-quarters of the way across the paper then moves to the next row and tears in the opposite direction. Finally, she folds the entire sheet in a meander fold, resulting in an accordion-like booklet. Hendrickson thus transforms her two-dimensional paintings into three-dimensional objects.

Prayer Book, Julia Hendrickson, watercolor and salt on paper, dimensions variable, 2024.

She does so while maintaining the paintings’ integrity. They are not torn into separate pieces, nor is anything added to them. They are still paintings, and they have now become—as Hendrickson names them—prayer books.

When I watched her do this for the first time, my heart stuttered. What a strange sight, to see an artist ripping a beloved work. But she did not destroy it; she remade it.

The paradoxes of Hendrickson’s work stretch my own theological imagination. The Incarnation is not God momentarily slipping into a human skin. Perhaps it is more—yet not completely—akin to the way that the salt and pigment and water all remain themselves yet are utterly and mutually transformed. Perhaps it is more—yet not completely—akin to a painting that has been broken and resurrected.

I cannot claim to understand the doctrine of the Incarnation more rationally or thoroughly after spending time with Hendrickson’s work. But these paintings do expand my capacity for awe. I can more joyfully yield to this mystery: “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness” (Col. 2:9–10).

We now return to the 15th-century Annunciation Triptych.

Using delicate brushes and luminous oil paint, the artists pack this small three-panel painting full of detail. Instead of locating the Annunciation scene against a sacred gold background, as many medieval mosaics do, the altarpiece artists depict Mary and Gabriel in a recognizable 15th-century Flemish home. We see an oval table in the center of the room and a long wooden bench against a large fireplace.

In the right-hand panel, we glimpse Joseph in his carpenter’s workshop, with a city visible through the window. The left-hand panel depicts a walled garden with a Flemish couple in contemporary dress kneeling just outside the door to Mary’s home. The sacred is brought into the mundane.

In addition to the homunculus—the miniature representation of an infant Christ flying through the room—the artists pepper the scene with symbols that would have been familiar to a 15th-century audience. The lilies in a vase on the table are not just decorative; they represent Mary’s purity. A wisp of smoke curls up from a recently extinguished candle. In other artworks from the period, a lit candle represents the presence of the invisible God. But in this painting, that symbol is no longer needed since God himself is now incarnate and physically present.

While the altarpiece ostensibly depicts a particular moment from Luke’s gospel, it actually shows us, as philosopher James K. A. Smith writes, how the Incarnation is “the collision of time and eternity in Christ.” For instance, the mousetraps in Joseph’s workshop point to the end of Jesus’ life on earth. The little wooden contraptions reference Augustine of Hippo’s declaration that “the Lord’s cross was the devil’s mousetrap.” The painters thus present us simultaneously with Christ’s conception and his death.

But the artists also stretch the intimacy of this pivotal moment into their own present. The couple in the left-hand panel are presumably the work’s owners. They are painted with startling particularity: The man has a small wart near the corner of his mouth, and we can see individual stitches on the woman’s wimple. They kneel reverently on Mary’s doorstep, bearing witness to a historical moment with eternal significance. The painting bends time around the Incarnation, folding these worshipers into a present mystery.

Finally, the Annunciation extends its invitation to our own time as well. When we first look at the room in the central panel, we might think that we’ve found a clumsy mistake. Despite the high level of detail, the space does not recede convincingly. The artists do not follow the principles of linear perspective, resulting in a strangely shallow room that appears to be tipping forward. But the effect, when we’re bending down in front of the altarpiece to get a closer look, is that the space begins to enfold us.

Thousands of years after Gabriel’s greeting to Mary and hundreds of years after a Flemish couple bought this devotional object, the painting spills into our present. Incarnation promises to meet us again and again.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” These works of art, among others, can translate John’s text into knowledge that reshapes how we engage our present reality.

Both contemporary process-based abstractions and detailed early-modern altarpieces evoke the mystery of the Incarnation; their own strange paradoxes of material and meaning keep us from complacency.

Art helps me be more tender toward all I can’t see in the dark, to believe—even if I can’t comprehend—that the infinite could become an infant and settle here, with me. Art renews my wonder at the wildness of this reality: Christ has come, and Christ will come again.

Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt is associate professor of art and art history at Covenant College and the author of Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art.

This article appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Made in Human Likeness".

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Ideas

In Daniel, the ‘Writing on the Wall’ Is Both Clear and Mysterious

Andrew Wilson

Columnist; Contributor

The four-word warning is outwardly simple. But layers of meaning lurk under the surface.

Detail from Belshazzar's Feast by Rembrandt.

Wikimedia Commons / Edits by CT

One of the most well-known stories in Scripture is also one of the most baffling. Nearly everyone in the Western world has heard the phrase “the writing on the wall,” whether or not they have ever read Daniel 5.

Many people use the phrase in ordinary speech. Visitors to the National Gallery of London can view the Rembrandt painting “Belshazzar’s Feast,” with its depiction of a terrified king and miraculous handwriting. Plenty will have heard Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall,” the title song for a recent James Bond film, or the Destiny’s Child album with a nearly identical name. I have seen the words “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin” (Dan. 5:25) quoted in all sorts of odd places, including a bestselling marketing paperback.

On the surface, the story is fairly simple. Four enigmatic words of divine handwriting appear while the Babylonian king Belshazzar is feasting with vessels stolen from the Jerusalem temple, and Daniel explains what the words mean: Belshazzar is about to be deposed by the Medes and Persians.

Yet the meaning of the handwriting—like the Book of Daniel as a whole—is multilayered and mysterious, full of puns, wordplays, numbers, and changes of language. Interpreting it requires a combination of understanding and spirituality, as the queen points out in this chapter (v. 11). We might call it Danielic hermeneutics.

We can start at the most literal level. Each individual word is a term of weight and measurement in Aramaic. Teqel is a shekel, a silver coin weighing around ten grams, that served as Israel’s basic unit of currency. Mene is a mina, familiar to readers of Luke’s Gospel and worth 60 shekels in Babylon. And peres (“half”) is probably a half mina, weighing 30 shekels. If we read these words as nouns, we get measurements of weight, adding up to 91 shekels.

Unsurprisingly, Belshazzar is both terrified by the writing and perplexed by what it might mean. What on earth is the significance of the numerical figures spelled out by the words? (We will come back to that in a moment.)

Daniel, however, interprets the words not just as nouns but as verbs. “Mene: God has numbered [menah] the days of your reign and brought it to an end. Tekel: You have been weighed [teqal] on the scales and found wanting. Peres: Your kingdom is divided [peras] and given to the Medes and Persians [paras]” (vv. 26–28).

The first two words have a double meaning: a numerical weight and a warning of judgment. The final word has a triple meaning: a weight, a warning, and a specific prediction that the Medes and Persians (paras) will inherit the kingdom (which they promptly do). A fourth meaning to this final word—that the kingdom of the Persians (paras) will itself be divided (peras) with the Medes—is hovering in the background.

After moving from nouns to verbs, the next element to consider is numbers. We recall that the combined weight of the measurements is 91 shekels, for whatever reason. Well, there are 91 Aramaic words in Daniel’s interpretation. And based on the Hebrew custom of assigning numerical values to letters, Elohim, the Hebrew word for God, yields a figure of 91.

This is unlikely to be a coincidence. It suggests that there is number play happening alongside wordplay in the passage. In Daniel as a whole, numbers like 3½, 7, 70, and 2,300 play significant roles in the book’s enigmatic prophecies. Given these symbolic patterns, we might also ponder a possible connection between a shekel, two minas, and a half mina and “a time, times and a half-time,” a mysterious phrase appearing twice in Daniel’s later chapters (7:25; 12:7).

One further layer to the riddle may be a piece of ancient Aramaic snark, aimed squarely at Belshazzar himself. In the dream of Daniel 2, Nebuchadnezzar was the great king of Babylon, represented by a head of gold, and Cyrus the Great was the great king of Persia, represented by a head of silver. But there was no mention of Belshazzar, who came between these giants and was a very minor figure by comparison.

The handwriting on the wall tells the same story. There is a weighty “mina” king (60-shekel Nebuchadnezzar), and a fairly weighty “half-mina” king (30-shekel Cyrus). But sandwiched in between them is a one-shekel featherweight who will be dead by the end of the evening. As Daniel declares to Belshazzar, “you … have not humbled yourself … Instead, you have set yourself up against the Lord of heaven” (5:22–23). We all know what happens to kings who do that.

Sometimes, reading Scripture is like watching a Christopher Nolan film. When you first see The Prestige or read the Book of Daniel, you get the main idea, but the finer details and triple meanings pass you by. When you keep looking, however, you find all sorts of wisdom and creativity lurking beneath the surface, which reinforce the main point and illuminate its significance. Daniel 5 asks readers the searching question at the heart of Danielic hermeneutics: Are you watching closely?

Andrew Wilson is teaching pastor at King’s Church London and the author of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West.

Spirited Life: Spirited Life is a collision between biblical reflection and charismatic practice, aiming to make people happier in God.

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Ideas

Advent Begins in the Dark

Joy Allmond

We bear the tension of both joy and sorrow.

Illustration by Abigail Erickson / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

This edition of Christianity Today is likely in your hands as you finalize plans for the holidays and anticipate all they hold—both their blessings and their burdens. Results of political elections may stoke polarization and unrest, and you may gather around a Thanksgiving table with empty chairs this year; it may be hard to shift gears toward Christmas, with its cheery lights and traditions. But in the Christian year, Advent doesn’t rush in. In her book Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, theologian Fleming Rutledge writes of this season we’re entering:

In the church, this is the season of Advent. It’s superficially understood as a time to get ready for Christmas, but in truth it’s the season for contemplating the judgment of God. Advent is the season that, when properly understood, does not flinch from the darkness that stalks us all in this world. Advent begins in the dark and moves toward the light—but the season should not move too quickly or too glibly, lest we fail to acknowledge the depth of the darkness.

We are an Advent people, bearing the tension of joy and sorrow, of light and darkness. As you journey through this last issue of 2024, you’ll encounter stories and ideas that carry the gravity of our fallen world Rutledge describes.

We share an up-close reflection from Carrie McKean on family estrangement and how the church can care for people who find themselves estranged (p. 52). We report on how the gospel shines a light into the darkness of addiction, galvanizing the church to work among people who are in the grip of drug addiction, both domestically and abroad (pp. 30, 42). And we present the testimony of a man lured into the pornography industry but rescued from its captivity by the light of Christ (p. 16).

Darkness envelops relationships and systems and even all of creation, as Paul reminds us in Romans 8:22. You’ll also read of the pollution of a watershed running through one creek in West Michigan and the hope for its renewal in a first-person essay by Sara Kyoungah White (p. 74). You’ll read of artists wrestling with the challenge and burden of limitations (p. 62).

As we wrestle with the darkness, we have a sure and certain hope in the person of Christ. In an essay on the doctrine of providence, Brad East reminds us that “the axis of history turns on the resurrection of Jesus” (p. 82). While Advent begins in the dark, the darkness has not overcome the light (John 1:5).

When we were planning this issue, our editor in chief, Russell Moore, reminded me of some lines from “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:

Yet in that dark street shineth
The everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

As sons and daughters—image bearers—of the King, our aim through these pages is to shine that everlasting light in the dark streets where evil, hardship, and suffering travel among us. We do this because we were once walking in darkness and “have seen a great light” (Isa. 9:2).

Take heart, there is a second advent of our King. He’s coming soon. And when he does, he’ll eradicate addictions, mend brokenness in our families, restore the dignity of the oppressed, shatter the yokes that burden us, and make all things new.

Joy Allmond is executive editor at Christianity Today.

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News

When a Stanford Bible Study Led to an AI Startup

Emily Belz

Two young Christians made a college counseling tool, saying AI should serve those on the margins—not just the rich and powerful.

Hadassah Betapudi and Elijah Kim met at a Stanford Bible study.

Courtesy of Hadassah Betapudi

Bible studies at Stanford University sometimes lead to an outbreak of datasets.

Hadassah Betapudi and Elijah Kim met at a Christian fellowship at Stanford in 2022 and got to know each other by leading a Bible study together. Soon the duo—with their backgrounds in data organizing and computer science—was building an artificial intelligence startup.

The two sought to solve a problem: They had heard from students needing a lot of guidance on the essay-writing part of college applications. That mentoring wasn’t available to many because of their financial or cultural backgrounds.

“I see education as a super critical way to directly bless people in a way that closes opportunity gaps,” said Kim.

Neither Betapudi nor Kim felt that they had entered the application process with a lot of guidance themselves; Betapudi was the first in her family to go to college in the US, and Kim was homeschooled his whole life before college.

“Applying to college was a little scary because I lacked a lot of the insight and guidance that I think a lot of students take for granted,” said Betapudi, who was born in Memphis to Indian immigrant parents. “It’s not just about your test scores or your GPA but about presenting who you are holistically to a college admissions committee, which is very different than the way things are done in India.”

This year the duo launched their startup: an AI tool that provides college admissions essay feedback. The founders see it as more like a guidance counselor and editor, not a content producer like ChatGPT. It doesn’t write essays for students.

Called Esslo (a mashup of essay and Elo, the chess rating system that influenced their proprietary algorithm), the AI engine was born after Betapudi and Kim trained it on good and bad essays from students who were admitted to top schools like Stanford. They taught the AI how to generate feedback on those essays. They beta-tested the tool this spring and launched it this summer.

Now Esslo is growing. The founders say the tool has been pulling in 100 new sign-ups a day.

Dustin Nguyen is one, a senior at Bronx Science, a STEM-focused public high school in New York City. He’s planning to apply to 22 colleges, and he’s already applied to 6 to meet early-action deadlines. But he must write essays for all of the applications. His public school counselors don’t have time to help him refine his essays.

Nguyen found Esslo this fall. To use Esslo, students feed their own essays into the model and get detailed feedback on the quality and suggestions for improvement. Sometimes, Esslo can tailor feedback to specific schools or admissions standards.

The tool gives line-by-line comments and scores the essay on traits like “detail” and “curiosity.” Then it gives overall feedback on the essay, followed by “brutally honest thoughts,” which might say something like “The writing in this essay is mediocre.”

After using their scientific knowledge to build the AI engine, the founders incorporated their own writing knowledge into the algorithm. For example, Betapudi edited a Christian journal while at Stanford. The machine tells students to have a “hook,” or a strong opening line, and to “show, don’t tell.” The creators recognized that a winning college essay is different from a typical writing assignment a student might do in high school.

“Technology with humans is always stronger than technology that’s existing in a vacuum,” Betapudi said. “It’s the beauty of a conversation with someone else that’s able to unlock thoughts about yourself or insights that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. I mean, that’s why people love therapy or coaching.”

When Nguyen fed Esslo an essay he wrote about being Vietnamese, the tool highlighted one anecdote in his essay and told him to elaborate on it and make it feel more personal.

“It’s helped me refine my writing,” he said.

Nguyen grew up in a low-income family. Most students can pay a monthly fee to use the tool, but Betapudi and Kim have enough paying customers to be able to give Esslo access to high schoolers who meet certain financial criteria, like being on free or reduced lunch or being at a Title I school.

“It levels out the playing field, especially since I can’t afford private counselors or special programs,” Nguyen said. “Esslo is a really good example of using AI to the benefit of a lot of people, especially underrepresented and underprivileged people and communities.”

That was part of the faith-based motivation for Betapudi and Kim.

“The truly dystopian outcome of introducing AI into education or into the world is that these oppressive regimes or governments will have access or will develop better AI than the good guys—those who fight for the widow, the orphan, the poor, or the lame,” Betapudi said. “I have been gifted through grace the ability to go to Stanford. … As a believer, my charge is then to build tools that not just benefit the top richest 1 percent who is already using this sort of thing but making it equitable and making it easy to access.”

Kim sees helping students as an “extension of discipleship. …… Jesus discipled a few, and then those disciples went out and discipled others.” He has seen the impact of personal mentorship and guidance in his family. His grandfather didn’t know anyone when he came to the United States from Korea, but Kim said someone came alongside him, “poured a lot into him,” and helped set him up to care for his family.

“That is very motivating to me personally,” he said. Education “sets people up in a way that they’re able to not just help themselves in the future but … help others.”

One college counselor sees potential for Esslo to serve those without counseling resources in Mongolia. Khongorzul Bat-Ireedui used to run a private school in the large central Asian country, where she counseled students going to college. She still does this but now from California, where she is in graduate school. She has been using Esslo to analyze her own counseling feedback on student essays and said it helps her see things she might have overlooked or observations from a different perspective.

Bat-Ireedui has a substantial following on Facebook in Mongolia, and she shared the tool on her page. She thinks Esslo will be helpful there because Mongolian public schools don’t have counselors.

“Essay writing itself is hard for an [American] student,” she said. She thinks about Esslo for the Mongolian public school students she knows who have worked hard to learn English and have good test scores but may not have money for a private counselor. “We don’t have schools that teach these things.”

Another college counselor, David Heinemann, has also used it to analyze student essays.

“I was skeptical in the beginning. … I don’t like the use of AI in the college process: the way colleges are using it, the way students are using it, and even the way counselors are using it,” said Heinemann, who works at Vail Mountain School in Colorado. “But … I was blown away. The specificity with which Esslo gives feedback was almost scary. … It just did a good job of doing what I do.”

Heinemann said the machine doesn’t give generic feedback but offers ideas for different directions the student could take the essay. Given the 650-word restriction on a typical essay, he said the feedback sometimes almost gives students too many options. But he thinks that is good for students: they must make decisions about what advice to listen to.

“It’s not like cheating—it’s not giving you the answers or rewriting the essay,” Bat-Ireedui agreed. “It’s giving you the feedback a human counselor would, but it’s picking up stuff that a human counselor might have missed.”

Heinemann thinks the founders could make “a ton of money” off their AI model, but it seemed to him like they were developing it to help people rather than cash in.

Both Betapudi and Kim think about their creative work with AI as reflecting God’s creative work.

Kim works in a lab at Stanford now studying energy efficiency in new computing technologies, and it puts him in awe of the human brain that can do tasks using 20 watts of power when the same task might require an entire data center for AI. Kim can’t build a brain, but he’s always loved building new things and understanding how they work.

“God is the ultimate designer, the ultimate engineer,” Kim said.

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Books

Excerpt

When Deities Promise Answers to Dating and Money Woes

Tony Chuang

Until the gospel starts explicitly addressing daily needs, most Taiwanese non-Christians will likely remain uninterested.

People pay their respects to the sea goddess, Mazu, at a temple in Taiwan during the first day of the 2023 Dajia Mazu Pilgrimage.

Chris McGrath / Getty

As a first grader, I had the same daily after-school routine. I had a five-minute walk past bustling skyscrapers and scooters crowding the streets of downtown Taipei, Taiwan, to my family’s apartment, where my grandparents would greet me. My grandma would remind me to greet the ancestors before I could play with my Transformer robots. I’d pick up a stick of incense, clamp my palms together, and pray a simple prayer to the ancestral shrine in the middle of the living room.

I asked for health, wealth, and good grades. Then I’d snack on the crackers that had been offered to the ancestors and deities in the shrine. Life was good. My hardworking parents provided for me, my grandparents watched me, and my ancestors blessed and protected me.

At the time, I had never heard the gospel, and what I did hear about Christianity from my grandparents was negative: Christians were out to get my money, and Christianity simply was “not our way.” Our way was Chinese folk religion, which mixed elements of Confucianism and Daoism (Taoism) with a plethora of deities, ancestors, and shamanistic rituals.

My mother always taught me about the efficacy of prayer to a deity called Jesus, so I prayed to him along with the others. It was not until high school that a classmate told me the gospel and I gave my life to this Christian God.

About 30 years later, I wrote Religiosity and Gospel Transmission: Insights from Folk Religion in Taipei to explore how folk religion shapes the worldview of Taiwanese people so that Christians can share the gospel effectively. Today, Christians only make up 6 percent of Taiwan’s population, while adherents to folk religion compose 44 percent, according to Pew Research Center. Taiwan has the third-highest percentage of folk religion followers in the world.

While my research focused on my home of Taiwan, Chinese folk religion is a widely held belief system among ethnic Han Chinese around the world. The specific practices may differ across geographic contexts, but the ideas and religiosity, such as feng shui or the unseen realm, of the people are quite similar.

Through interviews with 25 people in the streets and temples of Taipei on their thoughts on religiosity, I began to see two key questions that Christianity needed to answer for Taiwanese people enmeshed in the world of folk religion, whether they believe it deeply or not. How does Christianity engage with the spiritual realm? And how does it help the everyday life of the Taiwanese?

The gospel to believers in the spirit world

Chinese American sociologist C. K. Yang noted that Chinese folk religion is a diffused religion—meaning that it pervades everyday life, intruding secular spaces in a way that institutional religion does not often do. For instance, in ethnic Chinese communities around the world, it is common practice for stores to offer up food and incense to certain deities at their grand openings to ask for blessing and prosperity.

This means that instead of disenchanting folk religion like it has the rest of the world, modernity has had a vastly different effect on Chinese religiosity. Folk religion ensures that secular institutions and social groups are “imbued with a rich folklore of a supernatural character,” Yang wrote in Religion in Chinese Society. “The social environment as a whole had a sacred atmosphere which inspired the feeling that the gods and spirits, as well as man, participated in molding the established ways of life in the traditional world.”

The pervasiveness of folk religion in everyday life and social institutions—including government offices and schools—has made it a key part of Taiwanese consciousness, as much so as modern-day politics. This does not mean that all Taiwanese are still “enchanted by the supernatural,” as philosopher Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age, but that the “supernatural” has become part of an accepted experience of the people.

In this context, a presentation of the gospel should directly address the forces of ghosts, spirits, local deities, and ancestors that make up Taiwanese people’s lived realities.

For instance, on certain days of the year, the streets of Taipei are crowded as people carrying statues of local deities parade from one temple to the next. Mao-Hsien Lin, a leading expert on folk religion in Taiwan, explained that the parades are spiritually analogous to the patrol of police officers, as their purpose is to “get rid of evil [spirits] and calm the people’s hearts.”

If the gospel fails to do the same, it would be perceived as useless in Taiwan. Based on the interviews I did, demons and evil spirits are a real concern today in many parts of Taiwan. So the church needs a better theology and practice of exorcism. The gospel must be seen not just as insurance for the afterlife but as protection in this life against real or perceived spiritual forces.

One practical example is telling non-Christians about the power of Jesus’s name to drive back demons that may be attacking one’s house or the power of prayer to do things that no spirits or deities could do.

Taiwan’s charismatic churches are already known for doing this. Because the unseen realm is normal in Taiwan, most churches in Taiwan “have always understood the supernatural aspect of faith as recorded in the Scripture in a literal sense—which can be tasted and seen in the present day,” according to Judith C. P. Lin in The Charismatic Movement in Taiwan from 1945 to 1995. It’s what led the charismatic movement to grow so successfully on the island, she argued, noting that an estimated one-third of Taiwanese Christians have lean charismatic.

In both charismatic and noncharismatic groups, Taiwanese Christians regularly pray for deliverance, miraculous healings, and protection amid demonic warfare. These gospel practices reveal to Taiwanese people the power of God, ways to pray, the danger of spirit-mediums, and other issues are related to their everyday life.

This approach has been taught in churches, especially since the 1980s. Yet in my interviews, few people mentioned Christians speaking to them about the unseen realm. Perhaps this approach could be used more frequently for initial gospel encounters, as a gospel that adequately addresses the spiritual realm will see more responses in Taiwan.

The gospel’s implications on daily life

Another important aspect to consider when reaching Taiwanese nonbelievers is what they are seeking when they approach the gods and deities of folk religion. While gospel presentations in the West focus on more abstract concepts like how Christianity provides forgiveness of sins, new life, and hope for eternity, Taiwanese people are more interested in practical, everyday concerns.

For instance, they ask the god Guan Sheng DI Jun to help them get promoted. They ask the earth God to protect their home from thieves. They beseech Yue Lao to bring them a romantic partner.

Gospel presentations to Taiwanese people need to address how or if the gospel can help them in these practical ways. Today, many Christian teachers exhort us to gospel living—how we as Christians can live according to the grace and responsibilities given to us—but what about the gospel in daily life?

When your business is not doing well, what is the gospel’s answer to that? When you live in a crime-ridden neighborhood, how does the gospel protect you? When you are 38 years old and unable to find a spouse, where does the gospel come in? The easy answers of “have more faith” and “turn to Jesus” are not concrete enough to address the real concerns that people have.

Some Christians who have attended church for a while start to understand how the gospel can apply in specific situations. But non-Christians are not aware of this. In my interviews, I found that many Taiwanese non-Christians viewed the abstract gospel as “irrelevant,” “stupid,” or “arrogant.” Some even mistook it for another mystic chant. Until the gospel starts explicitly addressing situations in daily life, most Taiwanese non-Christians will likely remain uninterested and unconvinced.

Folk religion provides answers and concrete rituals for situations that people encounter in everyday life. Through customs, rituals, and special holidays like Tomb Sweeping Festival, folk religion in Taiwan provides a sense of security and situation-specific assurances. It does not have complicated doctrines for people to grasp—all they need to do is visit the temple and pray to the deity.

Therefore, an abstract gospel does little for most Taiwanese. What many Taiwanese need is a more down-to-earth gospel that addresses the same things that folk religion deities address: daily lives and felt needs. These needs are not a side project for the deities but their sole purpose.

A contextual approach to gospel presentations in Taiwan should frame the Lord as better than the goddess Mazu in her protection of fishermen, better than the earth God in his protection of land, better than Guanyin in her compassion for people, better than Lord Superior Wen Chang in his concern for academia, and better than Yue Lao in his understanding of love.

That doesn’t mean Christians should water down the gospel or make it only about fulfilling daily needs. The gospel has eternal significance and brings a person into a relationship with the Lord. The gospel is also not about fulfilling one’s desires; rather, it is about fulfilling the desires of God. Taken to the extreme, this kind of prosperity gospel robs Jesus’ focus on the kingdom, John’s call to love, and Paul’s admonition to live a life worthy of the calling we have received.

In Jesus’ ministry, he encountered people and provided for both their external and spiritual needs. Jesus spoke about how to deal with a Roman soldier asking a civilian to carry luggage or other items (Matt. 5:41). He spoke about paying taxes (Mark 12:17) and how often to forgive people (Matt. 18:21–22). Abstract truth sometimes came with the fulfillment of daily needs and sometimes did not. Even in large-scale public meetings like the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught people how to act in daily life.

When evangelizing to Taiwanese people, it is important to discuss the challenging issues they are facing. Christians could ask adherents of folk religion about the last deity they visited and what they were seeking. Knowing the answers to these questions can help Christians explain how the gospel speaks directly to their concerns, how God can solve their problems, and how God can do more than any deity.

Sometimes God does not fulfill every felt need. But that does not mean the gospel does not speak on a given subject. For instance, the gospel teaches people not to worry about money or promotions but to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33). On the question of protection, the gospel teaches that God “will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways” (Ps. 91:11). For someone seeking a romantic partner, the gospel teaches us about love itself (1 Cor. 13).

To show that the gospel of Jesus Christ is necessary and vital amid a culture seeped in folk religion, Christians need to show that God is more powerful than the spirits and deities that threaten the Taiwanese people and that he is a better answer to the daily needs of their lives.

The result is a gospel that is truly “good news” for Taiwanese people and an appeal that can take root in this culture.

Tony Chuang is a pastor, conference speaker, adjunct lecturer, and business director from Taiwan who is currently living in Penang, Malaysia. He received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

This excerpt was adapted from Religiosity and Gospel Transmission: Insights from Folk Religion in Taipei by Tony Chuang. Copyright © 2024 Langham Academic. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

- More from Tony Chuang

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Vets in Ministry Won’t Retreat from the Military’s Suicide Crisis

Maria Baer

Christians say the epidemic is about more than PTSD.

Veterans Day

Jewel Samad / AFP via Getty Images

Pastor Josh Holler says his US Marine Corps regiment had a saying: Suffer in silence.

Holler, who deployed twice to Iraq, served with men who had the phrase tattooed into their skin. It was a useful aphorism in battle, where soldiers stake their lives on each other’s strength and perseverance.

But suffering in silence once they return home can be disastrous.

“If you take that idea with you when you leave the military … It’s not too long to plot out a time period where that person’s going to take their life,” Holler said.

The US veteran community has suffered a suicide epidemic for decades, and it’s getting worse. According to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, 6,392 veterans took their lives in 2021 (the most recent year that data is available)—which comes to about 17 veteran suicides every day. The veteran suicide rate is about twice that of the non-veteran US adult population.

Of the roughly 2,100 members of the 7th Marine Regiment—Holler’s unit—11 have died by suicide since his return from Iraq in 2013.

For Christian civilians, including pastors, the prospect of ministering to military vets can seem daunting. Leaders who’ve never experienced war may feel ill-equipped to tackle veterans’ unique pain and challenges. Asking about their experience in the service could seem invasive or accusatory; not asking could seem neglectful or ungrateful.

Expressing public support for the US military has also become politically loaded. Holler says a friend and fellow vet was frustrated when his Colorado Springs church moved into a new building and chose to take down the American flag inside the sanctuary, which Holler’s friend took as a personal slight.

A recent Pew Research poll found that while 60 percent of all US adults have a positive view of the military, a majority of those between ages 18 and 29 believe the military “has a negative effect” on the country.

But as the suicide crisis among US veterans worsens, particularly among younger men, some Christians are calling for more support—and not just for veterans suffering from clinical PTSD after war.

In fact, the connection between combat-induced PTSD and veteran suicide may not be as strong as previously believed. A 2014 study found that the veteran suicide rate is actually higher among those who were never deployed; and veteran suicides have continued to rise even as US involvement in foreign wars has diminished.

Holler says his regiment witnessed some harrowing violence in Iraq but “comparatively little” to veterans’ experiences in Vietnam or World War II. He was grieved and confused when so many men he’d served alongside died by suicide after returning home.

A few years ago, he started interviewing their family members and conducting his own research, which he turned into a book in 2020. He writes that veteran suicide “is not primarily a problem born out of exposure to combat and PTSD but out of a broken relationship between people and God.”

The US Department of Veterans Affairs has long dedicated the vast majority of its mental health resources toward treating PTSD, according to The Heritage Foundation. But the overall veteran suicide rate has steadily increased since 2001 and exponentially in the last ten years among veterans aged 18–34.

Holler attended seminary after leaving the military and pastors a Baptist church in St. Louis. He says faith is a necessary component of veterans’ healing after war. Damon Friedman, a Christian and special operations combat veteran, agrees.

Friedman survived multiple violent deployments with the Marine Corps and then the US Air Force and struggled with suicidal thoughts when he returned home. He spent a full year receiving treatment from medical doctors (for his mild traumatic brain injury), from psychologists (for his PTSD), and, ultimately, from pastors.

Friedman says it was this spiritual component, along with the physical and psychological treatment he received, that saved him. “My mind, it was so dark and so black,” he says, “and God radically changed and transformed me.”

That’s why in 2011 he started Shield of Faith (SOF) Missions to offer a “one-stop shop” of comprehensive care—including a strong emphasis on the gospel—to veterans struggling with their mental health.

The Florida-based SOF Missions invites veterans from around the country to weeklong Be Resilient Clinics, where they have access to 20–30 health care practitioners, including psychologists, medical doctors, physical therapists, acupuncturists, massage therapists, nutritionists, sleep specialists, and mental health counselors.

The practitioners spend the week getting to know the vets individually and developing each one’s treatment plan for the next year.

It’s all done at a Florida resort—“That’s our hospital,” Friedman says—at SOF Missions’ expense. Ten vets are invited to each clinic, after which they receive free follow-up care for a full year.

The vets also meet with pastors and study the Bible at the clinics. “We spend just as much time on the spiritual component as we do on the physical pillar, the social pillar, and the psychological pillar,” Friedman says. “I would say eight out of ten that come through our program will walk away literally confessing Jesus as Lord and Savior of their life.”

The organization’s name, Shield of Faith, is a reference to Paul’s exhortation to Ephesians 6 to “put on the whole armor of God” (Eph. 6:11).

“Many people associate the shield as a defensive measure,” Friedman said. “It’s true, but it’s also used offensively. When the enemy would get close, a thrust, a blow would literally shatter the ankles and the wrist … it is also a symbol that God is your shield.”

Like Holler, Friedman is convinced that what plagues suicidal veterans is more than the psychological residue of wartime violence.

He says most of the veterans who seek help from SOF Missions are also suffering from what he calls “moral injury.” He’s seen vets struggling with the knowledge that they’ve killed others. Some struggle to find meaning and purpose back at home after spending a year or more performing high-stakes jobs amid life-or-death circumstances.

At SOF Missions’ female-only Be Resilient Clinics, Friedman says almost every woman who signs up is dealing with another kind of moral injury: sexual assault by fellow service members.

For these vets, treating just their psychological and physical symptoms won’t be enough. “Moral injuries are spiritual in nature,” Friedman says.

Holler says he found the same connection between veterans’ spiritual and mental health as he researched the deaths of his fellow servicemen.

“The military is such an honor/shame culture,” Holler says, but with inverted virtues—many habits that are “shamed” back home are “honored” on deployment, such as excessive drinking and porn use.

He found that men he knew who’d died by suicide after deployment had often struggled to kick one or more of those habits upon returning home, thereby alienating friends and family, sinking deeper into isolation, and losing a broader sense of purpose.

But there’s an even deeper kind of moral injury. Along with the entreaty to “suffer in silence,” Holler says his fellow Marines were taught another saying: “Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

“It was drilled into you,” Holler said. “It’s not meant to look at people in a demeaning way. … There was restraint there. But it was an essential part of the combat mindset, meant in both a defensive and offensive sense.”

It’s a dark paradox of active duty: The military needs men to think like machines when they’re overseas but return home as people. Holler says mentally preparing to kill others in combat can bring soldiers across a threshold into dangerous ideation.

“If you have considered killing another person as part of your job … I firmly believe that lowers the threshold to then translate to killing yourself,” he said.

Holler and Friedman have different ideas about how the church can best serve veterans more broadly. Friedman says he wishes more churches included specific ministries and support groups for vets, while Holler says what the vets really need is deep, durable relationships with fellow believers.

Serving vets can get awkward. Holler has a sore spot for half-hearted shows of support, like “free meals for vets” or a Memorial Day sale at a mattress company. For his part, Friedman can’t stand when someone approaches him just to share that they “almost served in the military.”

Nevertheless, Friedman and Holler agree the worst way to minister to veterans—even those struggling with clinical PTSD, who may need more intervention besides friendship and community—is to ignore them.

- More from Maria Baer

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