The Church Is the World’s Greatest Love Story

Formal membership figures might rise and fall. But God’s desire for his people never wavers.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

People do crazy things for love.

In the ancient world, Jacob worked for Laban seven years to marry his daughter Rachel—and then another seven after Laban duped him into marrying Leah first. In the modern world, people go on The Bachelor.

God’s love is not crazy. (Since the Greek term for Word in John 1 also translates as reason, his love is actually as sane as it gets.) But his love is jealous: It is passionately and faithfully devoted to one people from beginning to end. That people is called Israel.

This unwavering love of God for Israel is the guiding light of theologian Brad East’s new book The Church: A Guide to the People of God. From the opening lines to the closing benediction, East shows us that the church belongs to God because it belongs to the family of Abraham. As our children sing in the VBS song, he recalls: “Father Abraham had many sons / Many sons had father Abraham / I am one of them and so are you.”

Israel has 12 tribes, Jesus calls 12 apostles, and East tells the story in 12 bite-sized chapters. Covering all manner of theological topics, he sketches a thorough yet accessible portrait of who God is, what he is up to, and how his people are at the heart of it all. It is the story of Paul’s great mystery in Ephesians: Christ loving the church as a bridegroom loves his bride (5:32).

All of this makes East’s book a much-needed tonic for our times. As you may have heard lately about Americans and the church, there has been plenty of love lost. In their own book The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis and Michael Graham document how 40 million Americans said sayonara to the church in the last quarter century—the biggest and fastest religious transformation in our country’s history. If there was ever a time to answer the question “Why church?” that time is now.

And yet, there is no sign of anxiety in East’s answer. Far above the fray, he begins with the transcendent mystery of the church and moves deftly to the church’s mother: Mary. By divine adoption, he writes, we became brothers and sisters of Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, we are Mary’s children, which makes us children of the church. To those who have lost touch with the church in our day, East gives time-honored advice: “Call your mother.”

The Church is bookended by reflections on Mary, some of them quite stunning. God’s people have long recognized her as the “mother of God,” and Jesus’ human flesh comes entirely from her. “No human being ever knew Christ with greater intimacy than Mary,” East says of the woman whose womb enveloped our Lord. It is striking for a Protestant to write about Mary with such depth, devotion, and insight.

Still, in true Protestant fashion, The Church is laser-focused on the Good Book. It is fitting that East—who wrote his dissertation on the relationship of church and Scripture—has saturated his book on the church with Scripture. Biblical citations carbonate nearly every page in parenthetical bubbles. A back-of-the-napkin tally of the book’s Scripture index shows references to 46 of the Bible’s 66 books.

But this is no mere box-checking exercise: It amounts to a substantive claim about the relationship of God’s Word to Israel, for “the business of the Bible is the calling of a people.” They go hand in hand, and to its credit, The Church will not let us forget it.

Nor will East let us forget that Scripture’s story is our story too. As Karl Barth once observed in his Church Dogmatics, “All humanity, whether it is aware of it or not, does actually stand in the Bible.” If the love story of God and his people is the central plot of the cosmos, each of us has a vested interest in how it all shakes out. Fortunately, Israel’s life leads straight to Jesus, and Jesus invites us into Israel’s life. “God created the world for the sake of Christ, and in that sense created it for the sake of Israel,” East writes. “Just so, God created the world for the sake of the church, which is Christ’s body.” In a world that often feels like it has lost the thread, the body of Christ points us back to the script.

And because Israel’s story includes the church, the church can be found on every page of Scripture. This may be why East feels no rush to reach the Acts of the Apostles. Much like the Bible itself, The Church doesn’t reach Pentecost until it is over 80 percent through. Since thinking about the church often starts with its birthday, this move is purposefully counterintuitive. Fresh thinking needs a fresh word, and East is ready to speak it: “We are not beginning at the end. We are beginning at the beginning.”

Jolted awake from stale thought patterns, we are better able to see the fullness of the truth. In an era when many want Christ without church, Jesus without Mary, Abraham’s God without the family of Abraham, East exposes these as false choices. The Church is his manifesto for why each of these pairs go hand in hand or nowhere at all. To paraphrase Fleming Rutledge in a passage from her book The Crucifixion, it is like trying to have a ham and cheese sandwich without one of the two titular ingredients. Either it all hangs together, or we are left hanging out to dry. In which case, Paul says, “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19).

The final chapter (before a short benediction) elegantly leads us home. Here, East sharpens his outline of the church’s present character and activity. The church is the harbinger of Christ and his salvation; it speaks the gospel; it is catholic (as in universal) and apostolic; it teaches truth and administers sacraments; it is a people committed to justice and mercy but prone to failure; its life is a mission of worship and prayer—love and adoration for God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. All of this has been assumed and anticipated in the preceding pages, but having ascended to this doctrinal summit, the signature notes ring louder.

East has given us a worthy addition to Christian Essentials, a well-crafted series from Lexham Press. Each book in the series is friendly both to clergy in pulpits and to Christians in pews. The Church is not the pastoral vignettes of Wesley Hill’s The Lord’s Prayer, nor the fast-paced feast of Ben Myers’s The Apostle’s Creed, but it manages to find its own groove in good company. At the risk of sounding grandiose, it is something of a thumbnail sketch of The City of God: a compact and colorful rendition of the whole story of God and his people—the symphonic sweep of Augustine in a Brian Wilson single.

So we ask, once again, “Why church?” From God’s perspective, the answer is simple: love. Deuteronomy 7:8 says that God chose Israel not because its people were the greatest but simply because he loves them. The logic underpinning all space and time is the love of God in Christ. When we bathe in the church’s waters and eat at its table, we order our lives around the secret of the universe. That secret is the triune God’s love for his people, and it doesn’t get any more foundational than that. As East makes clear, “Love is its own explanation. It is rock bottom.”

When I tuck my children into bed at night, the last thing I do is sing. On many nights, the song I choose is a lullaby based on Song of Solomon 6:3: “I am my Beloved’s and He is mine—His banner over me is love.” East ends the first chapter of The Church by quoting this verse, adding a comment, and extending an invitation: “This one verse is the mystery of the entire story of the Bible,” he writes. “Come and see.”

Brett Vanderzee is music and preaching minister at The Springs Church of Christ in Edmond, Oklahoma.

- More from Brett Vanderzee

Culture

‘Conclave’ Takes Power—and the Papacy—Seriously

Kate Lucky

Starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci, the new film follows the process of choosing a leader of the Catholic church.

Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave

Political thrillers are studies in power. Macbeth and All the President’s Men and House of Cards pose similar questions. Who wants power, and why? What will they do to attain it? And which machinations will they come to regret?

The new film Conclave, directed by Edward Berger and based on the novel by Robert Harris, has all the hallmarks of this genre: whispers, sidelong glances, shifting allegiances, dialogue as sharp as the whetted edge of a knife. Its setting, however, is not Washington but Vatican City.

The pope has suddenly died, and the College of Cardinals has gathered to elect his successor. Sequestered in the Vatican, they politick over meals and cigarettes in impassioned speeches and secret meetings before gathering each day in the Sistine Chapel to vote by secret ballot, praying their preferred candidate will secure a two-thirds supermajority.

This election process is real. Happily for Berger, it’s also made for the movies, all gilded vestments and towering frescos and pomp and circumstance. Cigarettes burn. Nuns hand-pinch ravioli. Plumes of smoke issue into the sky when each round of ballots is burned.

Conclave is a gorgeous film. It’s also a riveting one. The pope serves as the religious authority for nearly 18 percent of the world’s population. A papal election, it turns out, is the perfect place to apply those timeless questions about power.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and that fear has entered the hearts of some of the cardinals, particularly Cardinal Lawrence, manager of the conclave, brilliantly portrayed by Ralph Fiennes. Though Lawrence is undergoing a crisis of faith—in fact, he’d hoped to leave the college and join a monastic order—he takes extremely seriously the responsibility with which he’s been entrusted.

Lawrence’s own doubt, he insists, disqualifies him to serve as pope. Or does his reticence make him just right for the position? As one of his colleagues puts it, “The men who are dangerous are the ones who do want it.”

That maxim is certainly true in more profane politics. People who want to be president are rightly assumed suspect. Absolute power, we know, corrupts absolutely. But what about power grasped in service of a higher authority? What about power for God’s sake?

That question makes Conclave an especially compelling movie, and different from others of its kind. In this setting, such struggles aren’t only about selfish striving; they’re about love for the church and deeply held desires for its future. Some of the cardinals are obviously craven. But most are more complicated. It’s difficult to tell where ambition ends and where conviction—about the return of the Latin Mass, or women in leadership, or sexuality, or radical Islam, or social justice—begins.

Conclave offers an apt portrayal of the Catholic church’s factions, as well as how those factions muddle American political categories. The candidate who would be the first Black pope (Lucian Msamati) has traditional views on sexuality. The mysterious Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is a reformer, concerned for the plight of the poor. But he’s also very much religious, with a history of missions work in dangerous places. He wants to do his work within the church.

And though the film subtly advances progressive convictions, it gives cardinals of all ideological persuasions equal opportunity to fall short. Both the conservatives (Msamati, Sergio Castellitto) and the liberals (John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci) give in to their egos. They succumb to sin; they weep; they seek forgiveness. As Lawrence puts it, “We are mortal men; we serve an ideal. We cannot always be ideal.” Electing a pope, oftentimes, is a matter of choosing “the least bad option.”

Still, the “least bad option” has that 18 percent of the world under his leadership. He’s responsible for preserving Catholic fidelity and orthodoxy. He’s not merely accountable to voters or the rule of law but to God. Conclave takes this seriously. Even when one cardinal quips that the former pope had his doubts—“never about God,” but about “the church,” with all its bureaucracy and abuse and corruption—there’s a sense that the loss of that church would be grievous. The answer isn’t to abolish but to reform.

By the end of its twisty plot, Conclave shows its cards about what that reform might look like—with an election (and a subsequent revelation) that feels extremely unlikely even for a thriller as dramatic as this one.

It’s a rather didactic ending for a film so nuanced, so humanizing, and so accommodating of difference. At the conclave’s opening Mass, Cardinal Lawrence begs his brothers for unity, citing Ephesians 5:21. “God’s gift to the church is its variety,” he pleads. “There is one sin I have come to fear above all others: certainty. … Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt.”

Different viewers might conclude that more certainty on any number of these issues—Islam, women in leadership, the church’s obligation to the poor—is precisely what’s needed to keep that faith alive. Nevertheless, it’s moving to see a varied group of men, doubts and all, muddling their way forward amid the clouds of cigarette smoke and plates of ravioli. Their attempt, Conclave recognizes, is worthy of being made: for the power and the glory of the One on the throne.

Kate Lucky is the senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

- More from Kate Lucky

Theology

Election Day Can Help Break Our Addiction to Hope

Russell Moore

Editor in Chief

Real hope is not an argument, an opioid, or a sunnier form of despair. It’s a person named Jesus.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Whatever our political views, those of us who care about America are apprehensive about Election Day. We face the specter of an ever-widening divide, with even the possibility of violence on the horizon.

A friend of mine, a public policy expert, recently talked about the anxiety that comes with constantly hearing the predictions, constantly watching often-contradictory polling numbers. “I guess I should just look for the ‘hopium’ that people are talking about,” she said. I could relate to that.

By “hopium,” she means the tongue-in-cheek label for curating news that offers reassurance of how everything is going to turn out all right. The metaphor works—especially in the context of a country plagued with opiate addiction—because there’s a kind of “hope” that is meant to numb us, to distract us from thinking about what could be a bleak future.

And Election Day is, in some ways, just a stand-in for even deeper fears and misgivings about what might be lurking around the corner—pandemics, world wars, ecological disaster, artificial intelligence catastrophes, who knows?

With the election and other things, I tend to default to convincing myself of the worst possible outcome—say, a 269–269 electoral tie that takes an already angry and exhausted public to the brink. But that’s kind of a counter-label hopium too, trying to forestall bad things by imagining them so that anything better is a welcome surprise.

Many Christians, when asking me about the aftermath of the election (however it turns out), say, “Can you give us some hope?” Often, what these Christians actually want is hopium—a way of saying, after all the division and scandal of the past decade, that something will happen that will put everything back together again. In their churches or families or in the country, they want things to return to the way it was in 2010 or 2015.

In one sense, then, perhaps the most hopeful thing I could say in the lead-up to Election Day is to encourage you to lose hope.

Many are familiar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s concept of “cheap grace.” The first thing we must recognize if we understand what he meant is that cheap grace is not “too much grace.” Grace is inexhaustible and unquantifiable. Cheap grace is no grace at all.

The kind of grace that calls for no repentance or transformation doesn’t ultimately work, even for the purposes of reassurance. Our consciences know—however deeply we bury that awareness—that we need something more than the superficial. We need the kind of grace that really knows us, in all our transgression, and says anyway, “You are forgiven.”

“Cheap hope” works the same way. It’s actually not hope. It’s a hopioid.

Søren Kierkegaard warned that introducing Christianity to a culture where everyone is a “Christian” will feel, at first, like taking Christianity away. Similarly, introducing hope as just a sunnier form of despair will feel, at first, like losing hope.

Hope is, of course, a Christian virtue (1 Cor. 13:13). But, as with grace, the Bible defines hope by contrasting it with what it is not. The apostle Paul wrote, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:24–25, ESV throughout). In calling us to “rejoice in hope of the glory of God,” Paul wrote that hope comes about in ways few of us define as “hopeful”—through suffering that produces endurance, which produces character, which produces hope (5:2–4).

There’s a certain kind of Christian who drinks coffee from a mug with Jeremiah 29:11 on it: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope”—and that’s good. There’s another kind of Christian who often quotes a few verses before that: “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (v. 7)—and that’s good too.

And yet neither of those verses—one giving hope to our faith, the other to our work—can be understood without the chapter before it. There, we see two prophets dueling it out. Hananiah is the messenger of “hope.” Within two years, he said, God will break the rule of the Babylonian invaders and will restore all the stolen vessels back to the temple. Jeremiah seems to be the “hopeless” one. He says:

Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord make the words that you have prophesied come true, and bring back to this place from Babylon the vessels of the house of the Lord, and all the exiles. Yet hear now this word that I speak in your hearing and in the hearing of all the people. The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes to pass, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet. (28:6–9)

Hananiah offered hopium. Jeremiah offered the only kind of hope God gives—the kind that goes the long way around, through the valley of the shadow of death, through the way of the cross. Hananiah’s kind of hope would be, “Hold on; this is almost over, and you can go back to normal.” Jeremiah offers a different kind of “a future and a hope”: “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord” (29:13–14).

That kind of hope is what enables us to exhale and trust and even rejoice—because it tells us the truth. Our situation, in every era from Eden to now, is even worse than it appears. But Jesus. And that’s what’s most important about a Christian view of the future, a Christian kind of hope. “The future” has a name: Jesus of Nazareth. Hope is not an argument but a person.

Real hope often finds us pointing right in front of us, saying, “I don’t exactly know where we’re going, but God does, and I’m with him.” Left to ourselves, the kind of faith we want is just sight. The kind of love we want is just affirmation. And the kind of hope we want is whatever we think best working itself out somehow.

Hopium, however we curate it for ourselves, is really just another kind of despair. Let’s let go of it. We don’t need it.

We can see backward—to the cloud of witnesses and martyrs who told us the truth. We can see way, way forward—to the wiping away of all tears. We just can’t see right ahead of us. But we know that whatever happens, just like in the far past and in the far future, underneath are the everlasting arms.

Those who would save their lives must lose it, Jesus told us. And those who would find hope must lose that too. That’s true on Election Day and on Judgment Day, and on every day in between.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

Culture

A Boy, A Heron, and A Grief Befriended

Isabel Ong

The celebrated film depicts the weird (and occasionally wonderful) world after loss.

Lady Himi and Mahito in The Boy and The Heron

When Japanese animation auteur Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron was first released last December, I was in the thick of grief and never made it to the cinema. Another opportunity to watch the movie arose when Netflix released it globally this October (Max is distributing it in the US).

Just as loss has played a role in my life as of late, so it takes center stage in this Oscar-winning film for Best Animated Feature. Set in World War II–era Japan, the opening scene depicts the hospital where young protagonist Mahito Maki’s mother works. The hospital is on fire. “Three years into the war, my mother died,” Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki in Japanese and Luca Padovan in English) says as the scene ends.

One year after this tragedy, Mahito and his father leave Tokyo and move to the countryside, which remains unspoiled by the ravages of war. There Mahito encounters a talking gray heron who tells him that his mother is not, in fact, dead. Although Mahito doesn’t believe what the bird says, he decides to venture into a mysterious world to see for himself—and to locate his pregnant stepmother, Natsuko, whom Mahito suspects has been kidnapped into the alternate universe.

As are many of Miyazaki’s films, The Boy and the Heron is at times confusing. Storylines feel disconnected from one another, characters’ motivations are hard to discern, and the film concludes rather abruptly, with Mahito and his family heading back to Tokyo.

But this inscrutability might be just the point the animator wants to make. Mahito’s world has turned upside down and inside out. Nothing makes sense: not his father’s new relationship with his mother’s sister, the baby growing in her belly, or Mahito’s fight with a school bully.

Loss is always incomprehensible, and our experiences of grief can feel as alien as the magical reality that Mahito encounters. Days go on, but they now feel strange, uncomfortable, wearisome—and baffling. As I read Scripture during a Sunday service a few months ago, I suddenly felt as if I had been transported out of myself. My mouth was forming and speaking all the right words, but they suddenly and completely lost all meaning.

In the psalms of lament, David articulates his questions to God out of painful confusion, slings them from Goliath-sized despair. “My soul is in deep anguish,” he groans. “How long, Lord, how long?” (Ps. 6:3). In another entry, the psalmist says, “Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (10:1).

David bemoans God’s apparent remoteness as much as he yearns for a reminder of his nearness. And he’s audacious enough to question the Lord about what he has and has not done.

The Boy and the Heron allows us to wonder: What might we gain when we embrace loss as the psalmist did rather than trying to hide from it, overcome it, or reject it outright? Through twisting narratives and events that defy explanation, The Boy and the Heron insists that grief might open us up to weird and wonderful things. It might even become an unexpected companion along our way.

As my counselor helpfully invited me to consider, can you invite your grief to journey with you?

While Mahito searches for his stepmom, he befriends a few unlikely characters. One of them is the gray heron (Masaki Suda/Robert Pattinson), eventually revealed to be a balding man with a bulbous nose.

Though the gray heron is positioned as Mahito’s guide, he often appears more the deceitful antagonist than a benevolent helper. Still, he rescues Mahito from a fleet of carnivorous parakeets and helps him to save another character, Lady Himi (Aimyon/Karen Fukuhara), who Mahito comes to realize is a younger version of his mom.

Mahito also meets Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki/Florence Pugh), an old maidservant in the real world who’s a young fisherwoman in this one. “This world is full of the dead,” says Kiriko as the two watch phantom ships rowed by ghostly boatmen. Yet Kiriko herself defies that somber judgment. In this world, she appears full of life; she’s fiercely protective of the warawara, little white blobs with tiny hands who jump, twirl, and float. As the warawara fly toward the sky, Kiriko tells Mahito that they are going to be born as people “in the world you came from.”

Striking up a friendship with Kiriko makes no sense; their relationship doesn’t seem to bring Mahito any nearer to rescuing Natsuko. But these encounters do allow Mahito to meet extraordinary creatures—and encourage him to experience awe.

I’m learning that even as it disorients us, loss amplifies our wonder. We marvel at what still endures, against all odds, in the chaos that consumes us. We experience a deepened awareness of God’s faithfulness, a recognition that we have not survived on our own.

This fall, I’m noticing the changing color of leaves, the squeals of children playing tag, and the comforting aroma of banana bread baking in the oven. I’m finding that my loss makes new connections possible—like a recent conversation at a bakery with a fellow shopper who had also lost a loved one. In that brief moment, we felt less like strangers and more like kin, speaking a bizarre language that no one else around heard.

The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus offers an example of loss’s greatest surprise (Luke 24:13–35). The travelers are in shock, grieving Jesus’ crucifixion and baffled by the empty tomb—that is, until Jesus walks with them, explains what Scripture testifies about himself, and, as they break bread together, opens their eyes to who exactly is across the table. His presence has accompanied them in their sorrow, matching their pace.

These disciples become witnesses to Christ’s resurrection and his power over death, returning to Jerusalem to declare to the other disciples, “It is true! The Lord has risen” (Luke 24:34).

There’s Good News. But first, there’s Good Friday.

In one poignant final scene, Mahito and Lady Himi stand before doors that will bring them back to their own worlds as the fantastical landscape crumbles into oblivion.

“But if you go back there, you’re going to die in the hospital,” says Mahito desperately. “Please don’t; you’ve got to live, Himi.”

“I have to go back there, as I’m going to become your mother,” Himi says.

I watched this scene angrily. Why didn’t things turn out differently for mother and son? Why did they have to return without any hope for change, without accomplishing a happy ending?

Herein lies Miyazaki’s keen penchant for telling the truth as it is: We don’t get to choose how life unfolds. Not knowing why we lose far too early the ones we love will always be a torture.

And that’s what Miyazaki misses: Death can’t kill our Christian hope.

Befriending loss is a commitment to keep on living, however arduous and meaningless the interminable days ahead might seem. It is a commitment to a sure and certain hope that we will meet our loved ones again in the new heaven and new earth, where “the dead in Christ will rise first,” and we who are still alive will be caught up with them, and “we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thess. 4:16–17).

And when forever is hard to grasp, living into our loss gives us room to explore, imagine, and even embrace eternity. I dream of being reunited with my loved ones in a field full of flowers or along a sandy beach. Who knows? My contemplation might seem fanciful or futile—but for me, it’s a form of anticipation, even joy.

Like Mahito’s intrepid adventures in the dreamscape, grief takes us on a bewildering journey. We chart its confounding contours, venturing into dark caves and weathering rocky waves, all so we can find ourselves again—different, and maybe unrecognizable, but still shaped and formed through relationships with Jesus and with other believers in Christ.

For now, my experiences of devastating losses have stained my sight; life still seems dark, gray, and one-dimensional. Hope is as fleeting as the film’s enigmatic gray heron, rather than that thing with feathers that perches in my soul.

And yet, though my senses are dulled, they’re still alive. I hear, taste, and touch elements of God’s presence around me every day. As The Boy and the Heron’s Japanese-language title goes: How Do You Live? The film answers this by showing how we can live with grief as a friend rather than an unwelcome visitor, allowing it to open us up to the peculiar and valuable gifts it may offer along the way.

Isabel Ong is the Associate Asia editor for Christianity Today.

- More from Isabel Ong

Ideas

‘Thou Setter Up and Plucker Down of Kings’

Philip Yancey

Columnist; Contributor

William Shakespeare’s honest tragedies and bold assumption of God’s providence offer insight in our contentious election season.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Wikimedia Commons, Unsplash

In 2016, the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, I wrote a blog about the playwright and the election. Donald Trump, then a political newcomer, was running against Hillary Clinton, the first female nominee from a major political party. We all know how that turned out. Now, eight years later, I revisit the prescient bard, wondering what insights we might gain on our current political scene.

I once made a New Year’s resolution to read all 38 of Shakespeare’s plays in one year. Although I missed the deadline, eventually I got them all read. Even after four centuries, the plays seemed oddly up-to-date—especially in an election year.

With the news playing softly in the background, I reflect on the poet from the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon.

“Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father.” Those words from King Lear sound like cable commentators describing the modern world. Too bleak for most generations’ taste, Lear was performed for centuries in a happy-ending version. Now that modern realism has caught up with its dark vision, it has become Shakespeare’s most revered play.

“Each new morn / New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face”—is that Macbeth or a contemporary political ad? Shakespeare’s depictions of crime, injustice, war, treachery, and greed demonstrate that, no matter what either political party says, these problems are not inventions of modern America; they have been around since Eden. As Richard III’s Queen Elizabeth says, “All-seeing heaven, what a world is this!”

Some major differences between the Elizabethan view of the world and our own stand out as well. Listening to politicians from both parties, I get the distinct notion that if we could just get the economy rolling and create prosperity—either through trickle-down economics or income equalization—why, then a golden age would return. Social problems (the closest modern equivalent to “evil”) stem from poverty and lack of education.

Shakespeare would disagree. “They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing,” observes an heiress’s maid in The Merchant of Venice. The bard’s plays show genuine respect for the decency of the lower classes. The real villains are the rich and powerful, such as Macbeth and Richard III, who have every advantage of education, wealth, and fine breeding. Beware, political megadonors: Along with other literary giants—Tolstoy, Balzac, Dickens—Shakespeare sees the rich, not the poor, as the most susceptible to injustice and corruption.

King Lear states the danger well: “Through tattered clothes small vices do appear / Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold.” Lear learns this lesson the hard way. Cast out of his own castle by his greedy daughters, he wanders alone through a pounding rainstorm, finally taking shelter in a cave with a refugee. For the first time he sees up close the plight of the poor and homeless:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’r you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this.

Shylock, in Merchant of Venice, pleads for an understanding of his minority status:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

I recently reread his words substituting undocumented immigrant for Jew. (There were no legally practicing Jews in England during Shakespeare’s time. King Edward I had expelled all Jews from the country in 1290, an edict not reversed until after Shakespeare’s death.)

A belief in Providence underlies all of Shakespeare’s plays, which makes apparent injustice all the more grievous. “Wilt thou, O God, fly from such gentle lambs / And throw them in the entrails of the wolf? / When didst thou sleep when such a deed was done?” cries one character in Richard III after a murderous crime. “O God, seest Thou this, and bearest so long?” laments another in Henry VI, Part 2.

We heard similarly eloquent moral appeals from Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement, but no longer. You only rail against God if you still believe God is active in history, and the mainstream media now eschew God talk as politically incorrect.

In Shakespeare’s time, people still lived out their days under the shadow of divine reward and punishment. Lady Macbeth hopes otherwise. “A little water clears us of this deed,” she says as she and her husband rinse their hands of blood. How wrong she was.

Our leaders could use a dose of the humility of Edward, the Earl of March, who prays, “Ere my knee rise from the earth’s cold face / I throw my hands, mine eyes, my heart to Thee / Thou setter-up and plucker-down of kings.”

King Lear knew what it was to be set up and plucked down, and only in his reduced state did he taste the wonder of grace. Shakespeare often echoes what theologians call “the theology of reversal,” as expressed in the Beatitudes.

In the paradox of grace, he describes in As You Like It, “Sweet are the uses of adversity / Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” Dogberry, the comical constable in Much Ado About Nothing, gets his words mixed up in a deeply ironic way when he says to a wrongdoer, “O, villain! Thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption.”

I wish our politics showed more of the wisdom and profundity of William Shakespeare. Alas, I hold out little hope. If the mudslinging in media ads is any indication, even more gutter talk awaits.

But I do have one proposed solution. Shakespeare was a master of insults, and websites have compiled some of his best in a glossary of offense. Rather than falling back on pedestrian words such as stupid and liar and bully, why can’t candidates elevate their rhetoric if not their character?

Think of the TV ratings we’d see if politicians would learn to mimic Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, who defends herself against “a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen.” Or this from King Lear: “[Thou art] a knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave.” Democracy thrives on disagreement; I just wish for more poetry in the contest.

Alternatively, I suggest an even more audacious option. What if our leaders showed a bit more civility? “How shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?” asks the duke in The Merchant of Venice.

Portia adds:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. …
It is an attribute to God Himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.

Four centuries after William Shakespeare, we’re still waiting.

Philip Yancey is the author of many books including, most recently, the memoir Where the Light Fell.

A version of this article originally appeared on Philip Yancey’s website.

- More from Philip Yancey

News

Indonesian Chinese Evangelist Receives Calvin’s Kuyper Prize

Angela Lu Fulton

Stephen Tong introduced the Chinese-speaking world to Reformed theology.

Stephen Tong

Edits by CT / Source Image: Aquilaa1 / WikiMedia Commons

Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary will award Jakarta-based evangelist and pastor Stephen Tong the 2025 Kuyper Prize.

The award, named for Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper, is given to scholars or community leaders whose contribution reflects “the ideas and values characteristic of Kuyper’s Neo-Calvinist vision of religious engagement in matters of social, political, and cultural significance.”

Based in Indonesia, the 84-year-old Tong is well-known in the Chinese-speaking world for his large evangelistic crusades and for introducing many to Reformed theology. According to his website, he has preached to 37 million people around the world in his 66 years of ministry. He founded Stephen Tong Evangelistic Ministries International (STEMI) in 1978, opening offices around the world to support his evangelism efforts.

“I am deeply honored and humbled to receive this recognition,” Tong said in a statement. “My only desire has been to serve God and spread His truth to the nations.”

Tong was born in Xiamen, China, but his family escaped to Indonesia during the Chinese Communist revolution. In 1989 he founded the Reformed Evangelical Church of Indonesia, which he still pastors today. The megachurch compound, which Tong designed himself, sits in the bustling city of Jakarta, where 84 percent of the population is Muslim. It includes sanctuaries that can seat 6,500 people, a concert hall, an art gallery, a seminary, and a K-12 Christian school. Tong has also composed more than 200 hymns.

In his evangelistic crusades in Asia and around the world, Tong often incorporates Chinese history, Western philosophy, and Reformed theology into his sermons and takes questions from the audience. He’s also a vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party. Although China has banned him from entering the country, his messages have spread among Christians in China, initially through taped recordings and more recently on the internet.

“Reverend Stephen Tong’s lifelong dedication to evangelism has had a profound impact on millions around the world,” said Greg Elzinga, the interim president of Calvin University, who was just announced as the school’s 13th president. “His unwavering commitment to spreading the gospel, especially in regions where Christianity is often challenged, is a remarkable testament to his faith and vision.”

Previous recipients of the Kuyper Prize include businessman Sid Jansma Jr., artist Makoto Fujimura, Colombian theologian Ruth Padilla DeBorst, attorney Rachel Denhollander, columnist David Brooks, pastor and civil rights activist John Perkins, and Daniel Bourdanné, past general secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES), who died in September.

In 2017, Princeton Theological Seminary reversed its decision to award the Kuyper Prize to Tim Keller following controversy over his views on women in pastoral leadership and LGBT clergy. Since then, the prize has been hosted by Calvin.

Keller and Tong both spoke at a conference for Chinese church leaders held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2020. The talks focused on how the gospel relates to culture, especially perseverance amid persecution. Later, five Chinese Christians were arrested for attending the conference.

Past Kuyper Prize winner Richard Mouw noted the global spread of Kuyper’s theology.

“The Kuyperian movement, once confined primarily to pockets of Dutch Calvinism in North America and the Netherlands, is growing internationally,” said the Fuller Seminary president emeritus. “Serious work on Kuyper’s thought is happening, for example, in mainland China.”

- More from Angela Lu Fulton

News

Died: Carlos Payan, Charismatic Pastor Who Loved Catholics and Christian Unity

Léo Lehmann

The child of Spanish Civil War refugees brought together French people longing for healing in Christ.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Photography by Yannick Billioux

Carlos Payan, a French charismatic pastor whose passion for seeing people healed drove him to unite Christians across denominations, died of a heart attack on October 12, at age 61.

Much of his ministry occurred through Paris Tout Est Possible (“Paris, Everything Is Possible”), a ministry he cofounded in 2003 with friends from Protestant, Catholic, and Messianic Jewish communities.

“During my many travels, I see the same immense desires everywhere, the same unfulfilled aspirations, particularly among young people: to be consoled, healed, and loved by Christ,” Payan stated in 2013. “France cries out its thirst for God; it is to quench this thirst that I would like to dedicate the rest of my life.”

Born in 1963 in the small town of Lons-le-Saunier in eastern France, Payan was the eighth child of Spanish Republican Communists who had fought against Franco’s regime and then fled across the border. His parents’ political convictions were sharply at odds with those of the Spanish Catholic Church, and the church’s extremely close relationship with the Franco dictatorship did not foster an environment where religion was well-regarded.

One day in 1981, Payan was selling Communist newspapers in the nearby city of Mâcon, when evangelical Christians offered him a copy of the New Testament. A few months later, he dedicated his life to Christ.

Payan would later say that he went “from the Mitterrand generation to the Jesus generation,” a reference to the socialist French president François Mitterrand, elected that same year. Despite his joy in finding Jesus, “For some of my family members, my conversion was a betrayal.”

Though Payan first began attending church at a Frères Larges (Plymouth Brethren) congregation, in 1983 he attended a meeting with the Canadian Catholic priest Emiliano Tardif, who was known for miraculous healings. The experience caused him to aspire to a similar ministry. Two years later, he married his wife, Agnès, in a Protestant church in Mâcon, with an evangelical deacon as officiant and performances by Catholic singers.

Payan’s interest in ministry led him to become an assistant pastor at Mâcon in 1991 while he also worked as a custodian, cleaning local government buildings.

Payan later shared that he encountered the Holy Spirit over a period of several weeks while employed at those two jobs.

“I thank the Lord for having given me this experience, which could have made me arrogant, at a time when my job, which consisted in polishing the toilets of my comrades, kept me humble,” he said.

While continuing pastoral ministry and advancing in a secular career that would eventually lead him to significant public-service work in the French government, Payan also became connected with the Catholic charismatic renewal, which started in the United States in 1967. In 1997, he joined the charismatic association Embrase Nos Coeurs (“Ignite Our Hearts”), which gathered Protestants and Catholics together.

In 1999, after divisions at Payan’s local church triggered a crisis at his ministry and in his faith, he visited the Taizé ecumenical French community. There he encountered Brother Roger, the founder of the community, who asked Payan to pray for him.

“I was stunned. This great spiritual leader was asking me to intercede for him!” said Payan. “I prayed for him, and I was healed. That day, I understood that the Lord wanted me to love his whole church.”

The following year, the French government transferred Payan to Paris for his work, a move that offered him even further opportunities to build relationships across the Christian spectrum. In 2003, he co-founded Paris Tout Est Possible, focusing primarily on organizing events and offering healing prayers to an ever-growing number of attendees, the vast majority (75%) of whom were Catholic.

Observing this impact, French evangelical sociologist Sébastien Fath noted that Payan had helped create “a truly transversal charismatic subculture, driven by meetings and conferences where thousands of Christians of all labels converge.”

Still, this exposure to a vast diversity of Catholics, beyond those connected to the charismatic movement with whom he had previously built relationships, challenged Payan.

“The Lord asked me to love my Catholic brothers. I replied, ‘You want me dead!’” he recalled this year while serving as a judge at La Nuit des Influenceurs Chrétiens, a competition for Christian influencers of all denominational backgrounds. “Well, yes, God wanted me to die to myself, to my complacency, to what I knew, in order to discover everything else.”

Payan was also deeply convicted by Jesus’ words to his followers that “everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). As part of this journey, Payan found he had much to appreciate about the Catholic tradition. It was welcoming, offered space for diversity (especially in forms of worship), placed value on liturgy, contemplation, and silence, and had a more relaxed relationship with time, he stated in 2023.

Once in Paris, Payan attracted the attention of the renowned French newspaper Le Monde. In its profile of the “evangelical healer,” they wrote, “He jumps up and down, waves his hands and sings. Pastor Payan is an artist before he is a healer. He preaches, he mimes, he tells stories.”

Convinced that “Voltaire’s language can go hand in hand with an unabashed gospel,” he was led to build relationships with numerous healing ministries in French-speaking countries, especially in the context of the International Association of Healing Ministries (IAHM).

Payan also ministered to people outside the Francophone world. At a meeting in the United States with the IAHM, Belgian pastor Nathanaël Beumier, who served as Payan’s translator, recalled that despite his own exhaustion, Payan continued to pray tirelessly for the many people who approached him, demonstrating “compassion and love that went even beyond his physical limits.”

Even as Payan boldly affirmed the possibility of miraculous healing, he tried to remain modest about the outcomes of his prayers. “Of the people who come to see me, 5 to 10 percent are cured,” he told Le Monde. In his 2009 book dedicated to the topic, La guérison divine (“Divine Healing”), he wrote, “We are not God and we do not know his will. Let us pray, let us intercede, let us beg … but let us promise nothing to those who suffer lest we add a heavy disappointment to their suffering.”

In 2017, Payan retired from his job in the French public service to devote himself fully to his ministry. That same year, during a Pentecost celebration for the 50th anniversary of the Catholic charismatic renewal, he was one of 120 charismatic leaders unexpectedly invited by Pope Francis to join him on stage in front of the 50,000 Catholic pilgrims gathered for the event.

“I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t even had time to grab my jacket. The Pope just wanted us to be there, and of course, we said yes,” he explained.

Payan’s open embrace of Catholics created some distance between him and evangelicals (charismatic or not) who couldn’t follow him that far on ecumenism. His strong emphasis on physical healing, meanwhile, prompted criticisms from both Catholic and more traditional evangelical quarters.

“He paid a high price for his desire for unity, from both sides,” said Grégory Turpin, associate founder of Première Partie, Payan’s publisher, commenting on some of the polemics that arose along the way.

Though he built many connections between charismatic Catholics and charismatic evangelicals, Payan remained quite estranged from many non-charismatic evangelicals. Yet Romain Choisnet, head of communication for the National Council of French Evangelicals, remembered him as someone who “has meant a great deal to many people, churches, and movements in the evangelical world. A man of passion, a man of unity, a man of heart.”

French Assemblies of God pastor and entrepreneur Éric Célérier recalled how Payan had been instrumental in his own discovery of the spirituality of Catholics and other evangelicals and had softened his heart towards other Christians.

As Turpin saw it, Payan’s ministry centered first on a “charismatic unity,” bringing together those who shared a belief in the work of the Spirit, especially in the realm of healing. This unity helped to create spaces for a broader “kerygmatic unity” that centered on the sharing of the gospel and could embrace Christians even beyond charismatic circles.

Payan’s six books touched on healing but also specifically explored human vulnerability and compassion for those who suffer. His final book, Nos corps, son temple (“Our Bodies, His Temple”), was published a few weeks before his death. The book includes contributions by both Catholics and evangelicals on what the human body reveals about God’s plan for humanity.

As worship lovers, Payan and his wife also collaborated with Christian singer and songwriter Samuel Olivier to produce several worship albums.

“His affection was wholehearted, fierce, radical, but he was also a man of profound humility, quick to inflame, but also quick to forgive and ask forgiveness,” Olivier wrote on Facebook.

Payan leaves behind his wife Agnès and their four children. His funeral was held on October 18 at a Catholic church in Mâcon.

- More from Léo Lehmann

News

Louisiana’s Ten Commandments Law Goes to Court

Kate Shellnutt

Shall thou display them in thy classrooms? A federal judge could block the new requirement on First Amendment grounds.

The Ten Commandments on display in Atlanta.

John Bazemore / AP

Louisiana public schools and universities will know in the next few weeks if they must comply with a new law requiring each classroom to display the Ten Commandments.

On Monday, a federal judge heard arguments over whether to block the mandate—the only one of its kind in the country—while the state faces a lawsuit from parents who claim it violates the First Amendment, The Baton Rouge Advocate reported.

The parents, backed by groups advocating for civil rights and church-state separation, sued shortly after Louisiana passed the law in June. They argued that the Ten Commandments posters would infringe on students’ religious freedom. The state countered that the legal challenge doesn’t hold because the posters haven’t gone up in classrooms and could be displayed in a way that doesn’t violate the Constitution.

“We think it’s premature,” Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill said in The Advocate. “What the posters say, where they are posted, when they are posted—all of that matters for legal purposes.”

State lawmakers have defended the Ten Commandments mandate, arguing that the biblical directives belong in public education because of their influence on the country’s founding documents. They note that the commandments are depicted in other government settings, such as the US Supreme Court.

In Louisiana, 84 percent of the population is Christian, 1 in 7 of whom are Southern Baptist. Murrill, a Republican and longtime member of University Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, said her faith has “guided and informed” her decisions in office.

The Ten Commandments law was proposed by State Rep. Dodie Horton, also a Southern Baptist. According to World magazine, Horton was inspired by an email from WallBuilders, the Christian organization founded by David Barton that sets out to “restore America’s biblical foundation.”

Steve Green, a law professor specializing in First Amendment issues, was called by the plaintiffs and testified on Monday that the Ten Commandments’ influence on the country’s historic documents had been overstated. Green is the former legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has also sided with the parents opposing the law.

Judge John deGravelles, who heard the case this week in US district court in Baton Rouge, said he will decide on the law by November 15. If the mandate stays, Louisiana schools would be expected to comply starting January 1, 2025.

The law requires each public elementary, secondary, and postsecondary school to display the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” on posters that measure at least 11 by 14 inches. The posters should be paid for using donor funds.

The state designated the wording of the Ten Commandments, based mostly on the list given in Exodus 20 in the King James Version. The state’s text starts with “I AM the LORD thy God” but also includes the line “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images,” which isn’t word-for-word from any major translation.

The posters must also contain a provided context statement, which notes that the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”

Sample posters shared by state officials in August varied widely: One displayed the commandments flanked by Moses and US house speaker Mike Johnson, another depicted and quoted Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and one put the Ten Commandments side by side with the “Ten Duel Commandments” song from the musical Hamilton.

As the Supreme Court has recognized, the Ten Commandments have historical significance as one of the foundations of our legal system. Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law is constitutional. Here are just two possible illustrations with RBG and @SpeakerJohnson from a brief we will… pic.twitter.com/b3CekoKRl5
— Attorney General Liz Murrill (@AGLizMurrill) August 5, 2024

Advocates for public displays of the Ten Commandments cite their significance for the country and educational purpose in the history of law, but courts have often viewed such displays as primarily religious and subject to the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court ruled against Kentucky’s mandate to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms in Stone v. Graham in 1980. The court later ruled in 2005 against a public display of the Ten Commandments in a county courthouse in Kentucky, while approving another Ten Commandments monument in Texas that was privately funded.

Mat Staver, the founder of the Christian legal group Liberty Counsel, argued the Kentucky courthouse case and is hopeful about the Louisiana law.

“Because of recent legal precedent and our nation’s moral foundation and religious mooring, I am confident the Ten Commandments will remain on classroom walls in Louisiana from January 2025 onward, as the law states, and hopefully set historic legal precedent,” he wrote.

The people who crafted the Louisiana law tried to craft it in a way that could withstand the legal backlash that previous attempts have faced.

“We prepared for the challenge, because our goal wasn’t a legislative success. It was to set precedent that if heard in the U.S. Supreme Court, under scrutiny, would prevail,” Gene Mills of the Louisiana Family Forum told World.

Christians who support the law, including lawmakers on both sides of the aisle in Louisiana, cite slipping morality and shifting values as reasons the Ten Commandments need to return to classrooms.

“Let’s just note that for a matter of centuries, indeed for over a millennium, that would’ve been something of basically no controversy at all,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler said while discussing the Louisiana law on his podcast. “It’s because the law of God was assumed to be at the very center of civil law.”

In June, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump celebrated the Louisiana law in an all-caps post on Truth Social, saying he loves the Ten Commandments displayed in schools “and many other places, for that matter” and the move may be “the first major step in the revival of religion, which is desperately needed, in our country.”

Some evangelicals don’t see requiring public displays of the Ten Commandments as an effective or meaningful form of influence. Old Testament scholar Carmen Joy Imes said that the commandments are meant for God’s covenant people and that perhaps the example of Daniel in Babylon is a better model for American Christians than Moses with the tablets at Sinai.

My talk for the @CenPasTheo conference was on Bearing God's Name in the Public Square. I considered a case study: the bill requiring every public school classroom in Louisiana to post the Ten Commandments. Is this legislation a victory? Or misguided? 1/ pic.twitter.com/GmnmJhOp1C
— Carmen Joy Imes (@carmenjoyimes) October 3, 2024

“I’m wondering what is this actually saying to children from a wide range of religious and nonreligious backgrounds to have the Ten Commandments on the wall,” she said on the Center for Pastor Theologians podcast. “What is our goal in the public square?”

If the court upholds the law in November, it’s not clear how Louisiana will monitor or enforce it, should teachers refuse to hang up the posters or should donor funding fall short of covering the costs.

The Bayou State has over 1,300 public schools, the Associated Press reported, plus nearly 1,000 classrooms at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge alone.

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Ideas

What Campaign Signs Taught Me About Being a Good Neighbor

Karen Swallow Prior

Community relationships make politics less abstract and more complex.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty

Years ago, my father taught me something about neighborliness that took a long time to take root in my own life.

When I was a teenager, the father of one of my classmates (who lived nearby) was running for local office on the ticket of the party my family never voted for. So I was surprised one day to come home and see a campaign sign for my friend’s father in our yard. But it turned out that my friend’s father simply had asked my father if he could place one of his signs in our yard, and my father had said yes. Being a hospitable neighbor was more important to my father than partisan politics or a campaign sign.

Now, all these years later, this particular lesson in neighborliness is something I’ve come to apply in my own life in a slightly different way.

Often, when we talk about loving our neighbors, we are thinking in the abstract. Perhaps we are thinking about loving neighbors on a global scale—those who live far from us, whom we encounter on short-term mission trips and exotic vacations, or fill shoe boxes for at Christmas time, or learn about on missions Sunday when we put money into a special offering. And loving our neighbors can be all these things. But just as “all politics is local,” so, in a sense, is all neighborliness local, too.

I inherited my father’s keen interest in politics. Over the course of my life, I have attended campaign rallies, canvassed door-to-door for a candidate, slapped bumper stickers on my car, worn buttons, and even run for office myself. And as soon as I became a homeowner, I also put up campaign signs on my property.

When my husband and I moved to our current home 25 years ago, each fall still found me putting up those signs on our front lawn. It took me a long time to notice that our immediate neighbors did not.

Almost all of our half dozen or more immediate neighbors were already living here when we moved in. They are all still here. That’s a lot of history, a lot of tradition, a lot of heritage.

And our neighborhood is anything but homogenous. Our house is the oldest in the neighborhood. Other houses of various sizes and styles have popped up here and there over the past century, some built decades ago, others still being built. Our neighborhood has large new homes, small doublewides, and lots of modest brick ranches. Like their homes, the people who live in them represent just about every demographic box one might be asked to check. Indeed, the diversity of our little rural corner of the country could rival the hippest of urban neighborhoods.

Back then, politics seemed black and white to me—I really believed one party was all about law and order and morality, and the other one was not. Then, I didn’t think twice about putting my campaign sign in the yard with its face peering over at my neighbors, whose very lives—as I would slowly learn over the years—had been harmed and hurt in measurable and lasting ways by some of that party’s policies.

But I would eventually learn these things as our neighbors let us into their lives more and more and we let them into ours. We didn’t have much in common with any of our neighbors at first, other than living in the same neighborhood. We all had our own schedules and were in different stages of life.

But over the years, chats at the mailbox led to invitations to family celebrations and shared holiday meals. After I admired one neighbor’s climbing vine on her mailbox, she planted a similar one next to ours. Another neighbor loved my lilies, so I invited her to come over and dig some up for her yard. When one neighbor grew sick, the rest of us checked in with his spouse. When another neighbor died, my husband took over mowing the lawn of his widow. When another neighbor died, someone else in the neighborhood took over their mowing. When we lose an old tree, we call another neighbor, who cuts up the wood to burn in his family’s woodstove.

Over the years, through all these exchanges of neighborliness, I gradually learned more about my neighbors’ histories and their ancestors’ histories. I learned the history of our neighborhood—how some people faced injustice and evil, and how others overcame evil with good.

I wondered if any of those campaign signs felt like a slap in the face to my neighbors. If so, they never let on.

Let me be clear: I am not making any argument here about putting up or not putting up campaign signs. Travel to either end of our long country road, and you will find some. (Here in my neck of the woods, only one party tends to be represented. And that’s okay, too.) There is nothing wrong or inherently unneighborly in advertising one’s favored candidates for office.

Rather, my reflections are about how I learned over a long time to be a better neighbor in my own particular neighborhood, among a handful of particular families with whom I have (or had) little in common besides sharing this space, seeing each other day by day as we collect mail, wash cars, weed the flower beds, feel alarm at the occasional sight of an ambulance in the drive, or share reports of the latest bear sighting or stray dog.

Every neighborhood has a different character. Every neighbor has a different story and set of experiences. When I finally learned more of those things about my community, and observed more about how they live and have lived, I wanted to be a better neighbor to them in this small way of not creating a barrier with a sign.

And hopefully I am a better neighbor in much bigger ways, too—as they are to me.

A campaign sign can signify so much and yet so little in comparison to the ordinary exchanges and camaraderie between neighbors. It took me a long time, but I came to realize that I don’t want a printed piece of polypropylene to come between me and these people I’ve grown to know better and love more just in being neighbors. I’m grateful my father taught me that lesson so long ago.

Karen Swallow Prior, author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, is a columnist at Religion News Service and writes regularly on Substack at The Priory.

Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.

Theology

Does Jesus Tell Us to Prioritize Caring for Our Own?

Carmen Joy Imes

The story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman is provocative, but for different reasons than we might think.

Christ and the Canaanite Woman painted by Annibale Carracci in the 1590s

WikiMedia Commons

It’s election season, so naturally immigration is among the hot-topic issues taking center stage in public discourse—from discussions about the border crisis to comments about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. But it has also become a subject of conversation among Christians on both sides of the aisle, especially as recent studies show that more evangelicals see immigrants as a threat and an economic drain.

As a Bible scholar, one thing that gets my attention is how believers interpret (or misinterpret) Scripture to support their political views. And lately, I’ve noticed several posts on social media arguing that Jesus himself encourages his followers to focus on caring for “their own” (i.e., fellow Christians) instead of marginalized groups like the poor and immigrants.

One particular claim references the passage where Jesus tells a Canaanite woman, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs” (Matt. 15:26), alleging that Jesus is prioritizing the “house of Israel” (v. 24) over foreign nations. This becomes the basis for the claim that US federal resources should be spent on helping “our own” at the expense of immigrants.

But is this a faithful way to understand Jesus’ words? Was Jesus as ethnocentric as these arguments makes him sound? The short answer is no, of course not. But to better understand this verse in its context, we’ll explore the background of the Matthew passage and consider the longer version of this story from another Gospel (Mark 7).

To state the obvious, Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew. His people had suffered for centuries under oppressive Greek and Roman rule. His mission was to help the Jews recognize the reign of God despite their less-than-ideal political situation.

Growing up in Galilee put Jesus on the margins of Jewish life. Far from Jerusalem, his family had to travel quite a distance for religious festivals. He lived at the confluence of Jewish, Greek, Samaritan, and Roman cultures along with their languages: Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin.

During his earthly ministry, Jesus focused primarily on his own people—the Jews. Yet his prioritization of the Jews served a wider purpose. The Jews were the descendants of Abraham, through whom God intended to bless the whole world. God had promised Abraham, “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12:1–3). And in many ways, Jesus prepared his followers to bring that blessing to non-Jews.

But if we see this plan for vicarious blessing as the Jewish “elite” offering handouts to their non-Jewish marginalized neighbors, we have it backward. The Jews were the oppressed minority in this equation. In fact, for the Jews to eventually reach non-Jewish people with the gospel, the Jews would have to forgive their oppressors, who made it difficult for them to make ends meet.

On one occasion, Jesus traveled with his disciples outside Israel into bordering Gentile regions, offering a rare glimpse of his posture toward outsiders to the Jewish faith. It’s no accident that Mark writes about this trip right after relaying a discussion with Jewish leaders about defilement (7:1–23). Jesus had just insisted, “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them” (v. 15).

Back then, food was often an obvious delineator between ethnic groups. Jewish food laws that designated between clean and unclean foods (including pork, shrimp, and other meat with blood) led Jewish people to consider anyone who ate “unclean” foods to be “unclean.” By insisting that eating could not defile a person, Jesus undermined the assumption that Gentiles were unclean and effectively tore down the cultural barrier between Jew and Gentile.

Then, as if to prove his point, Jesus brought his disciples straight into Gentile territory, where he would undoubtedly encounter people who ate nonkosher food. He started in “the vicinity of Tyre” (v. 24), then headed “through Sidon” and “into the region of the Decapolis” (v. 31). Now, Jesus wasn’t ordering bacon cheeseburgers for his disciples at this point—the kosher laws hadn’t expired yet—but he clearly wanted them to start rethinking their relationship with food because it had implications for their relationship with Gentiles.

Tyre was the capital of Phoenicia, a coastal region devoted to the worship of Baal, Melqart, and other gods. While Jesus was there, a second-generation immigrant approached him. The woman was Greek by ethnicity but “born in Syrian Phoenicia” (v. 26). Word had spread even outside Israel about the miracle worker from Galilee (3:7–8). This woman in Tyre “came and fell at his feet. … She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter” (7:25–26). Mark calls the demon “an impure spirit,” connecting this incident to Jesus’ previous teaching on impurity (v. 25).

But what happened next is jarring. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was awfully harsh with her: “‘First let the children eat all they want,’ he told her, ‘for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs’” (v. 27).

As readers, we rightly cringe at this interaction because Jesus seems to insult the woman, comparing her to a dog. In New Testament times, Jews commonly used the dog epithet for Gentiles, who were stigmatized because they did not follow Jewish law and were thus “impure.” This is why we must not lose sight of the literary context. Jesus had just challenged the notion of Jewish purity, which was at the heart of their ethnocentrism and which set up firm boundaries around sacred space to protect “us”from “them.” Jesus seemed intent on demonstrating to his disciples that he was not afraid to go outside the land of Israel or to engage with Gentiles.

WikiMedia Commons

Christ and the Canaanite Woman painted by Annibale Carracci in the 1590s

However, traveling to Gentile territory did not mean Jesus was attempting to launch a Gentile-focused ministry—it wasn’t time yet. Later, he would commission his disciples to take the news far and wide, but first, he needed to lay the groundwork by helping his own people rethink who’s in and who’s out. After all, we cannot effectively reach those we despise or consider unclean.

Jesus’ seemingly callous response to the woman served a dual purpose: He was voicing what his disciples surely believed. Matthew 15:23 reports the disciples’ dismissive attitude: “Send her away!” At the same time, he was presenting the woman with an opportunity to test her faith.

Would she recognize his identity and press past the apparent insult that an ethnocentric and prejudiced Jew would have delivered? Would she agree with him that her access to God’s blessing would need to come through the Jews, who were themselves a marginalized people? In essence, Jesus engaged in a form of street theater to drive his point home.

Yet the Syrophoenician woman spotted the loophole right away, perceiving his invitation to persist—as Jesus likely knew she would. After all, Jesus used the word first to imply there would come a day when Gentiles could directly benefit from his ministry. So why not now?

“‘Lord,’ she replied, ‘even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs’” (Mark 7:28).

This woman passed Jesus’ test with flying colors! She cleverly exploited his parable to reiterate her request. She discerned what his disciples could not at the time—that Gentiles had a place even now in Jesus’ kingdom.

In his version of the story, Matthew calls the woman a “Canaanite” to highlight how Jesus’ interaction with her resurrects the age-old prejudicial animosity between the Israelites and the Canaanites before putting it to death (Matt. 15:22). For attentive readers, this is not the first mention of a Canaanite woman. Two others appear in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus—Tamar and Rahab—an early hint about how we should regard this living Canaanite woman (1:3, 5).

Of course, the disciples didn’t have Matthew’s or Mark’s Gospels yet. They were watching Jesus’ actions and words unfold in real time. But I’m willing to bet Matthew’s experience with Jesus in Tyre influenced his decision to mention Canaanite women in his genealogy—he wants us to know in no uncertain terms that these women belong in the story of Jesus.

We must keep in mind that this tour of Gentile territory was meant as a teaching illustration for Jesus’ disciples, who failed to understand his teaching on impurity (Mark 7:17–18). He took them on a field trip to trace out the implications of what he had said and to expose the ill-informed thinking in his disciples that must change.

In his book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, Kenneth Bailey summarizes the point of this story powerfully:

Jesus is irritated by the disciples’ attitudes regarding women and Gentiles. The woman’s love for her daughter and her confidence in him impress Jesus. He decides to use the occasion to help her and challenge the deeply rooted prejudices in the hearts of his disciples. In the process he gives the woman a chance to expose the depth of her courage and faith.

A refugee and Galilean, Jesus modeled for his disciples how to think about other outsiders moving forward. By engaging this Greek immigrant in conversation, he offered her something no Jewish rabbi would have: the dignity of debate. Rabbis loved to debate the finer points of theology, but Jewish men did not interact at this level with women, least of all foreign women.

By making a provocative statement, he invited her to speak rather than silencing her. And what may have seemed like an insult was in fact a respectful offer to engage in meaningful conversation. Together, they negotiated a solution that honored Jesus’ calling to the house of Israel while meeting her request. Having made his point to the disciples, Jesus healed the woman’s daughter, setting her free from the demon (7:29–30).

In short, it doesn’t work to generalize Jesus’ statement about his calling to the house of Israel as a charge to “care for our own.” To do so is to miss his irony and ignore the rest of the story. Likewise, if we use this story to advocate for open borders, we have misunderstood the story of the Canaanite woman in the other direction.

In any case, the United States is not the kingdom of God. So, whatever our policies, we should be careful not to co-opt biblical stories uncritically to support our political agendas.

But if there’s one thing we can learn from this seemingly confusing passage, it’s that Jesus’ kingdom is one in which all who trust in him are ultimately seated together at the same table to share bread. Everyone who places their faith in him is welcomed as equal—for “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and author of Bearing God’s Name, Being God’s Image, and the forthcoming Becoming God’s Family (IVP).

- More from Carmen Joy Imes

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Share

Share

Related

Share

In this series

Share

Share

Share

Related