Church Life

One Body, Many Denominational Meetings

Our anxiety over church factions should lead us to dependence on Christ.

Christianity Today July 12, 2024
Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Unsplash / AP Images

When I was in seminary 12 years ago, most of my classmates and I were discerning which denomination to join. Since many of us in our nondenominational seminary felt called to church leadership, this was a big decision. It’s one thing to worship somewhere, but it’s another to take ordination vows.

Being a pastor is a bit like being married: We pledge faithfulness to God within a specific family of people. The stakes felt high as we weighed which denominational family we should commit to—theological stances, interpersonal quirks, and structural problems included. Our seminary professors modeled that even the most ecumenically minded church leaders remain deeply impacted by their denominational context.

This is not a bad thing. Belonging to a specific body encourages us to invest in the health and integrity not only of our individual congregations but of our congregational networks. Ordained or not, we should be willing to engage in difficult conversations about the leadership structures and theological convictions and core values that characterize our respective traditions.

This summer, Christians from a variety of denominations (including the Southern Baptist Convention, Presbyterian Church in America, Anglican Church in North America, and Christian Reformed Church) held national meetings to discuss these convictions and values.

Denominational meetings aren’t always comfortable. This year, Baptists debated whether female staff members could be called pastors; Presbyterians disagreed about how to address the political polarization happening in their churches; and Anglicans discussed how to respond to and communicate about clergy misconduct. These conversations are worth our investment and effort.

But they can also create anxiety, especially when they precipitate change. In my own denomination, the Anglican Church in North America, anxiety ran high at times leading up to our national gathering as we anticipated the election of a new denominational leader.

Anxiety is a natural response to concern. It’s a sign that we are invested in the future. But if we operate from anxiety, we are more likely to exacerbate the problems we are hoping to solve. We become more polarized and more embedded in our ideological factions; we caricature those we disagree with or express our opinions in uncharitable ways. As one denominational meeting after another has come and gone this summer, my social media feed has reminded me that this temptation knows no theological boundaries.

But our shared anxiety can also lead us into a shared humility. It can remind us that every denomination has its challenges and uncertainties. All of us are wrestling with hard questions about important issues like child safety, transparency, and qualifications for leadership, to name a few.

It is humbling to realize that no church polity, size, or structure can filter out conflict or corruption entirely. Even nondenominational churches and networks face these realities. No tradition—Protestant or otherwise—is immune to problems. If any of my seminary classmates or I thought we might find a perfect denomination to join, we were mistaken.

But this recognition shouldn’t cause us to replace anxiety with apathy. Acknowledging our universal need for renewal isn’t the same as making peace with our problems. Nor is it an excuse to avoid the hard work of self-reflection about our individual contexts. Rather, it is an invitation to deepen our trust in the one who alone can bring the renewal we seek.

In Matthew 16, Jesus asks his disciples a confrontational question. His ministry was growing, and the crowds had begun to theorize about Jesus’ identity; but in a private moment, he asks his followers, “Who do you say I am?” (v. 15).

Peter’s bold answer and profession of faith—“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God”—distinguishes the disciples from the crowds, and it precipitates the first mention of the church in Matthew’s gospel. Jesus responds to him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah. … I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it” (vv. 16–18).

Whatever else we make of Peter’s profession and his primacy in the early church, we can be encouraged that Jesus’ promise still rings true: The church is God’s project. He is the one who will build us up, who cannot be stopped by any power of hell. Our primary work is to practice allegiance to him in all things—whether we are Baptist or Presbyterian, pastors or congregants, proud of our theological tribe or disillusioned by it. The fact that we don’t know exactly where this will lead us is part of the point. We are not sovereign over Jesus’ plans.

As we seek to be faithful in our respective corners of the church, Peter’s historic confession sets another example for us: It reminds us that whatever influence or leadership we have rests on the understanding that we are not the Christ. No church leader, with his or her opinions, is the Christ. No congregation or denomination or system of governance is the Christ. The church is not made up of people who get everything right. It’s made of people who get one thing right: Jesus is the Christ. Our strength lies in the fact that we are not its source.

The church belongs to Jesus, not to us. And yet, just as he called Peter and the original disciples, he calls us to partner with him in his project. This project is much bigger than any one denomination. But we can offer our small spheres of authority and responsibility to him with confidence that through us, he will continue to build his church.

Rehearsing this truth protects us from both cynicism and burnout as we pursue health and holiness in our denominations. We can and should continue to act on our convictions for the sake of God’s people, even when that leads to disagreement. But we must do so with integrity, knowing to whom we will give an account for our ministry.

Paul models this in his letter to the Corinthians:

Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. … But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. (2 Cor. 4:1–2, 7)

In whatever corner of the global church we’ve been called to serve, our labor is limited but it is not in vain. Jesus has promised to finish what he started. Our short-term gains and losses belong to a larger work that includes all of his children.

Hannah King is a writer and priest at The Vine Anglican Church in Waynesville, North Carolina and is the author of a forthcoming book about living with hope in the presence of pain.

Theology

Our Old Leaders Won’t Walk Away, and That’s About More Than Politics

What the presidential debate and its aftermath should tell us about our culture of geriatric childishness.

People watch the CNN presidential debate between US president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump.

People watch the CNN presidential debate between US president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump.

Christianity Today July 12, 2024
Mario Tama / Staff / Getty / Edits by CT

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

A friend of mine told me that he was at a long-planned gathering of half Republicans and half Democrats for the purpose of talking through partisan polarization. They watched the presidential debate together, and everyone was nervous that the respectful disagreements would devolve into the cheering and booing of team sports. He said it was actually the most unifying two hours of the entire meeting, because everyone was feeling the same thing: embarrassment.

No matter whether Team Red or Team Blue, the viewers recognized that our presidents once said things like, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Two weeks ago, from two 80-year-old men, one of whom is to lead the country for the next four years, we heard instead such lines as “I didn’t have sex with a porn star” and “Anyway … we finally beat … Medicare.” That was before they incoherently bickered about their respective golf handicaps.

When we ask, “Is this the best we can do?” we actually all know the answer. But neither man will step away, and there are no grownups that can make them.

This would be bad enough if it were only about which octogenarian will be occupying the only assisted living center in the world with a press office and a Situation Room. But the fact that our elderly leaders—one struggling to put sentences together, the other ranting with insanities and profanities—won’t leave the scene is about more than an election year. It’s about what it means to live in an era of diminished expectations.

For years, sociologists and philosophers have warned us about the dangers of a cult of youth, that behind all of the Botox treatments and cosmetic Ozempic regimens, there’s a more fundamental denial of death. We want to put aging out of sight because we don’t want to be reminded that it’s the way we will all one day go. That this is, at least when it comes to the presidency, no country for anything but old men, would seem to indicate that we’ve moved past that infatuation with youth. But the opposite is actually the case.

We live in a moment of a paradoxical juvenile gerontocracy. Never have our leaders held on with such stubbornness to the quest for power well after they have the cognitive or physical abilities to do so. And never have our leaders seemed so childish. How can both be true?

Communications theorist Neil Postman warned us that we were entering this era over 40 years ago. Children find their way in the world, he said, through wonderment. Curiosity leads to questions, and questions lead the quest to find answers. “But wonderment happens largely in a situation where the child’s world is separate from the adult world, where children must seek entry, through their questions, into the adult world,” Postman wrote. “As media merge the two worlds, as the tension created by secrets to be unraveled is diminished, the calculus of wonderment changes.”

“Curiosity is replaced by cynicism, or even worse, arrogance,” Postman continues. “We are left with children who rely not on authoritative adults but on news from nowhere. We are left with children who are given answers to questions they never asked. We are left, in short, without children.”

Keep in mind, Postman was worried about television and was writing long before the internet and social media era. At first glance, the digital era would seem to have given us the opposite problem. Jonathan Haidt, for instance, argues compellingly that one reason for the spike in anxiety among children and adolescents is the anxiety of their parents, an anxiety that leads to a smothering, overly protective parenting.

In reality, though, the “helicopter parenting” that Haidt and others describe is precisely the problem about which Postman warned, just from the other end. Parents are anxious, at least in part, because they feel scared and unequipped, with few models for to how to transition themselves into a different phase of life while preparing the next generation to take the helm.

The symbol of our age is less that of the wise old leader, giving the offertory prayer at the Sunday morning service or presenting the trophy to the young winners of the Pinewood Derby, and more that of the Margaritaville-themed retirement home filled with oldsters pretending to be right back in their teenage years, complete with the latest gossip about who has a crush on whom.

Probably every one of us knows the crushing feeling that comes with realizing that a mentor or a role model isn’t who we thought. Most of us have come close-up enough to realize that someone we thought could guide us with wisdom and maturity is actually a slave to temper, pride, ambition, lust, or greed. To some degree, that’s always been the case. T. S. Eliot wrote in the middle of the last century:

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

At this point, though, our culture seems especially riddled through with this realization that those we thought were grownups are old, exhausted, and childish. An obviously declining president refuses to live in a world where “Hail to the Chief” is played for a new generation of leaders. The rest of the country looks to a porn-star-chasing former reality television host who says he wants to terminate the Constitution and put his enemies through televised military tribunals—and the country just laughs and enjoys the show.

We can’t do much about the cultural situation of 2024. We can, though, resolve to see and to embody a different model. The Bible upends the combination of childishness and age denial that we see all around us. Instead, the Scriptures give us the mirror-image paradox: a people who are both childlike and mature.

Jesus said that only those who become as little children will inherit the kingdom of God (Matt. 18:3; Mark 10:15). This is not, though, about childishness. Inheritance is not a pile of stuff but a stewardship, a responsibility, a vocation for grownups who have learned from, as Paul put it, “guardians and managers” (Gal. 4:1–7, ESV throughout).

The Bible gives us a glimpse of the childlike maturity paradigm at the beginning of the life of Solomon. The new king asked God for wisdom, saying, “I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in” (1 Kings 3:7). He knew he was dependent. That wisdom manifested itself in the kind of maturity that knew how to not please himself but to govern a “great people” (v. 9). That didn’t last, of course. Solomon veered off to the immaturity of being governed by his appetites rather than by wisdom, and his kingdom came tumbling down.

We can thank God that Jesus tells us, “Behold, something greater than Solomon is here” (Matt. 12:42). We can walk in that way and embody it in our churches if we reject the kind of childishness that clings to power and the kind of childishness that sees power itself as a game. We can model the sort of maturity that cultivates character and equips the next generation with the hopes that they will outpace us when they do.

Our childish old-culture is embarrassing. We see it not only on a debate stage in our country but in church after church that’s segregated by age, pulpit by pulpit where the options seem to be either staying too long or being replaced by youth for the sake of youth itself. There’s a different way. There are no grownups coming to save us. We were supposed to be them.

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

News

Former UK Evangelical Leader Charged with Sexual Assault

Retired minister Jonathan Fletcher goes to court following major church investigation.

Christianity Today July 11, 2024
Julian Finney / Getty Images

The man at the center of one of England’s most prominent church abuse scandals is now facing criminal charges.

Jonathan Fletcher, the former vicar of Emmanuel Church Wimbledon, has been charged with indecent assault and grievous bodily harm for incidents that occurred 25 to 50 years ago, during his decades of leadership in the Church of England.

The 81-year-old appeared Wednesday in Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court, just a mile from his longtime church in southwest London.

The charges follow several years of allegations against Fletcher and an independent investigation backing the claims. Starting in 2017, dozens of men recounted past instances of bullying, coercion, and inappropriate behavior by Fletcher. Their accounts include naked massages, ice baths, and sauna visits.

Fletcher was a high-profile evangelical voice in the United Kingdom, and the news came as “a kick in the guts,” one Christian wrote in 2021, describing the “disconnect between memories of Fletcher as the erudite preacher and Bible teacher, and Fletcher the predatory abuser.”

Fletcher had already retired when the allegations arose, but his former diocese barred him from further ministry, alerted authorities, and commissioned an investigation in 2019. He responded by saying the behavior was consensual and apologized for any harm he had caused.

Two years ago, a report from UK safeguarding ministry ThirtyOne:Eight found “significant and ongoing safeguarding concerns” related to Fletcher’s mentoring relationships and ministry duties and concluded that his behaviors “constitute an abuse of spiritual authority and power, falling far short of the expectations, obligations and duties of those in Holy Orders.”

Investigators interviewed nearly 100 people from Emmanuel Church, including 27 victims. Fletcher declined to participate.

According to the report, some suggested Fletcher had been aroused by naked massages, and one said Fletcher asked him to perform a sex act, “and when he did not, [Fletcher] performed the act instead.” Participants in a prayer group described “being hit on the naked bottom with a gym shoe, being given a cold bath, or being left outside in the cold” as punishments for personal sin.

In the UK, Fletcher’s case drew more attention to the threat of spiritual abuse in churches.

Fletcher served at Emmanuel Church from 1982 until 2012. Police say the charges against him—eight counts of indecent assault on a man aged 16 or over and one count grievous bodily harm with intent—stem from incidents taking place between 1973 and 1999. He is scheduled to appear in court again on August 7.

The Diocese of Southwark announced the news of the charges in a statement, saying, “The Diocesan Safeguarding team continues to offer support to those affected by this matter and has liaised with the police in the course of their investigations.”

Why We’re Weird for Thinking That Tim Scott Is Weird

The politician’s public commitment to abstinence has made him an outlier in a sex-obsessed culture. But is the church any friendlier to older single men?

Christianity Today July 11, 2024
Scott Olson / Staff / Getty / Edits by CT

Tim Scott entered politics decades ago as a proud 30-year-old virgin. Campaigning at the height of 1990s evangelical “purity culture,” he proclaimed that sex should be reserved for marriage. Years later, chastity was still one of his talking points—even as he seemed to admit that his own commitment to abstinence had faltered.

Now, the South Carolina senator and vice-presidential hopeful is getting married to a “lovely Christian girl,” Mindy Noce. They’re set to tie the knot in early August, between the Republican National Convention and Election Day.

The current status of Tim Scott’s v-card is, of course, none of our business. The fact that it was ever a campaign talking point, in retrospect, is more than a little bizarre.

But the senator’s apologia for both his abstinence and his singleness also makes sense. It’s indicative of our collective suspicion toward older single people, present in both secular and church culture—our tendency to regard those who’ve never been married with pity, concern, and unease. This in spite of trends toward later and fewer marriages, and more writing on singleness in the church.

It’s easy to understand why our sex-obsessed culture regards a 30-year-old virgin (and especially an almost-60-year-old virgin!) with revulsion and confusion. But that same virgin is a pariah in the church for different reasons.

Evangelicals tend to marry young, relatively speaking. I was no exception. Five of the six siblings in my family had married by age 25—one of us at 19. In the church context I grew up in, getting married at 23 made sense . Implicit in the purity culture ideal of “saving yourself for marriage” was the reassurance that abstinence was only temporary. Singleness was a season of white-knuckled resistance to porneia, eyes on the prize of future marital bliss . I know abstinence is hard, books, pastors, parents, and mentors seemed to say. But if you marry young, at least you won’t have to abstain for very long.

But what if there was no spouse to save yourself for? What about those who remained unmarried for years or decades? The church’s insistence on purity rings and pledges didn’t allow for the possibility of single adulthood beyond one’s early 20s—especially for male single adulthood.

That’s because for young Christian men, then and now, marriage is portrayed as solving the problem of out-of-control sexual desire. That view is bolstered by a particular reading of Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 7:9 that it’s better to marry than “to burn” (purousthai). Young men, notorious for their ravenous carnal appetites, “need” an outlet. The provision of a wife is presented as God’s solution to this brute biological fact.

This reading of 1 Corinthians genders and particularizes Paul’s language to men in a way that the apostle himself does not. Paul does not say that post-adolescent males should pursue marriage because they’re especially virile. On the contrary, later in the same chapter (v. 28), he seems to discourage marriage; those who marry “will have worldly troubles,” literally, “tribulation by the flesh.”

As a not-yet-married man in his late 50s, Tim Scott would be an unusual nominee for vice president. Likewise, in the church, it’s exceptionally rare to find a single man (or woman, for that matter) serving as a head pastor or senior leader. One Barna study puts the percentage of married pastors at 96 percent. Meanwhile, Pew Research Center reports the proportion of never-married evangelical adults at 18 percent and rising.

So why are single people underrepresented in church leadership?

I suspect one explanation lies in wrong ideas about sexuality and marriage that make us wary of never-married Christian men in particular—and more so the older they get. We simply cannot imagine a sexually mature adult male without an “outlet” in marriage; we worry (or assume?) that older single men are acting out their sexual desire in ungodly ways.

What’s more, when marriage is equated with emotional, relational, moral, and spiritual maturity, being unmarried implies a corresponding immaturity. I know a man who was once passed over for a ministry position because an elder expressed concern about his singleness at age 30. By this measure, Jesus himself would have been considered a poor candidate.

While evangelicals have been quick to commend marriage to young people as an alternative to hookup culture, we have yet to produce a robust vision for abstinence’s relevance for older people: for virginity in one’s 30s, 40s, and beyond. This is especially alarming given that Christians (including many Christian men) are remaining single well into their adult life. When the promise of an early marriage fails to materialize, the church has alarmingly little vision for ongoing growth in discipleship, much less leadership.

Christians are right to condemn the cresting individualism that’s led to more and more young people delaying marriage and childbearing indefinitely. But too often, rather than rejecting this self-actualization, we merely offer the same idol by another means. An early marriage and lots of kids, we often argue, is the most reliable, respectable path to the good life.

The pursuit of chastity shouldn’t be undertaken to make us more appealing to a potential marriage partner—much less as a guarantee of “mind-blowing” sex or familial bliss. As with all Christian virtues, chastity is lived before God. And it envisions a future reality where the human institution of marriage will end and all of us will be enfolded into Trinitarian love.

Ultimately, we can understand extended or lifelong singleness in light of what’s to come for believers. When Paul says he wants to spare single people the trouble and distraction of married life, he reorients his community toward the kingdom of God. The present order of the world, including (remarkably!) human marriage, is passing away (1 Cor. 7:31); the eschatological order of God’s new world has broken into the present through the death and resurrection of Christ.

This vision of the now-and-future kingdom coheres with what Jesus teaches in the Gospels: that those who leave their family will receive a new one in the kingdom (Mark 10:29–31; Matt. 19:27–30) and that there will be no marriage in the resurrection (Matt. 22:30; Luke 20:34–36).

When Jesus is told that his mother and brothers wish to speak to him, he gestures toward his disciples; these are now his “mother, sisters, and brothers” (Matt. 12:46–50). Paul addresses the recipients of his letters as “brothers [and sisters]” and identifies himself as a father (1 Cor. 4:15). Peter exhorts his readers to love the family (“brotherhood,” 1 Pet. 2:17). The church constitutes a new, dare we say truer family, not merely one that exists alongside our biological relations.

The church-as-family vision of the New Testament is a key part of what makes extended and lifelong singleness possible. For those who don’t have a spouse or children to take care of their everyday needs, the church should (and historically has) filled in the gap.

Tim Scott’s presence on our nation’s political stage as a single Christian man has been unique, as has been his continued adherence (in principle, at least) to a traditional sexual ethic. His story is timely given not only demographic shifts toward singleness but contemporary conversations rethinking what sex is for and how community is constituted. Amid these debates, models of faithful, chaste, single, mature Christians are more radical—and more needed—than ever.

Zachary Wagner is director of programs for the Center for Pastor Theologians and the author of Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality.

Books
Review

Catholic Miracle Stories Should Take Us Outside Our Protestant Comfort Zones

Even when they strain credulity, they can challenge our assumptions about popular piety and the limits of the possible.

Christianity Today July 11, 2024
Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

On May 17, the Roman Catholic commission responsible for correcting errors in church teaching issued a guidance document with “Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena.” While remaining open to genuine manifestations of the Holy Spirit, it addressed “serious critical issues that are detrimental to the faithful. … When considering such events, one should not overlook, for example, the possibility of doctrinal errors, an oversimplification of the Gospel message, or the spread of a sectarian mentality.”

They Flew: A History of the Impossible

They Flew: A History of the Impossible

512 pages

$23.83

The persistence of miracles within Catholicism distinguishes it from other Christian traditions. Belief in miracles represents not simply a concession to popular piety but a fundamentally different teaching about the work of the Holy Spirit and the response of the church.

Such things may seem baffling to most Protestants; in the commission’s words, they (and other doubters) would prefer to frame these phenomena as “believers being misled by an event that is attributed to a divine initiative but is merely the product of someone ’s imagination, desire for novelty, tendency to fabricate falsehoods (mythomania), or inclination toward lying.”

Rather than dismiss these claims outright, the Catholic church has established processes (like the May guidance) for adjudicating them. But this is just a refinement to a tradition of engaging with the supernatural that dates back centuries. And that history is the subject of a new book, Carlos Eire’s They Flew: A History of the Impossible.

Eire, a professor of history and religious studies at Yale University, examines how this process worked in the centuries following the Reformation. He focuses not on healings or apparitions, which are accepted more widely within Christendom, but on two extreme and peculiar supernatural events—levitation and bilocation (appearing in two places at once)—that reportedly touched the lives of several monastics and mystics.

As if that weren’t ambitious enough, They Flew sweeps into its narrative a host of related questions about competing accounts of the supernatural, their inversion in demonology and witchcraft, and their development alongside the Age of Reason. It asks readers to track with Catholic concepts of piety, holiness, monasticism, and bodily mortification, as well as the church’s institutional authority to define and regulate these matters.

By implication, the book probes the disenchantment of the modern age, the certainty of our assumptions about the past, and the limits of modern historical writing. It dares to revise our understanding of early modern Europe where other historians have fallen short.

Paths of investigation

Readers may be somewhat familiar with Eire from earlier works. His National Book Award-winning 2002 memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, recounts his boyhood at the beginning of Castro’s Cuba before he and his brother—and 14,000 other unaccompanied children—were airlifted from the island in 1962. His 2010 follow-up, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy, charts the diaspora of family members in the United States, the fate of his father (who remained in Cuba), and the awakening of Eire’s faith in Christ.

Before publishing these breakout memoirs, however, Eire had distinguished himself as a scholar of early modern history, one skilled in writing critically acclaimed books that regular readers could appreciate. In 2017, on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Eire published a magisterial history of the early modern era called Reformations (emphasis on the plural), which achieves an unparalleled balance between the respective Catholic and Protestant narratives.

In Reformations, Eire previews the argument he expands upon in They Flew:

As the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth, the boundary between the natural and supernatural seemed to shift in Catholicism. From Teresa of Avila in Spain, whose corpse refused to decompose, to Joseph of Cupertino in Italy, who flew through the air and read people’s minds, to Martín de Porres in far-off Peru, who could be in two places at the same time and also communicate with animals, the Catholic world pulsated with the expectation of everything that the Protestants ridiculed as impossible, and with an eagerness to enshrine and venerate the miraculous with more fervor than ever before, thus intensifying the differences between Protestant and Catholic cultures. …

By claiming the power to distinguish between real and fraudulent claims, and to consecrate those that were genuine, the church made clear that all miracles came through it. And miracles had a double edge: they not only confirmed and strengthened the faithful; they also served as polemical weapons in the church’s struggle against Protestantism.

Eire digs deeper in They Flew, asking readers to consider apparent impossibilities. Did certain Catholic saints actually levitate or bilocate? On what grounds could the Christian faithful accept such claims? And if we did, what would they mean for modern-day believers?

Eire understands the difficulty of his task. Miracles, as he observes, “are not just puzzling for historians but also immensely frustrating. The further one goes back in time, the more difficult it becomes not to bump into them, or into their preternatural demonic counterparts. The testimonies are simply there in the historical record, cluttering it up abundantly, and their existence cannot be denied.”

The book proceeds by retelling the lives of six monastics: Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663), the Venerable María de Jesús de Ágreda (1602–1665), and three disgraced nuns who lived between the late 15th and early 17th centuries. Thanks to rich source material, Eire narrates each in considerable detail, citing personal testimony, eyewitness accounts, and, in some cases, reports from officials charged with investigating the miracles in question.

In this short space, I cannot draw out the relevant details. One story stands out, however, because it was left unvalidated by the church. The case of María of Ágreda involves levitations, bilocations, and ecstatic revelations. Only the last of these, not the first two, has complicated her canonization by the Catholic church.

María is perhaps most famously associated with the phenomenon of bilocation. Reportedly, she appeared to indigenous peoples in New Mexico and Texas while physically remaining in Spain. Between 1621 and 1631, she claimed to have made hundreds of such spiritual visits, instructing the indigenous populations in Christianity and encouraging them to seek out missionaries.

As Eire explains, “This was not all. The Indians themselves and Spanish Franciscan missionaries in New Mexico would later corroborate her incredible claim and give rise to the legend of the Lady in Blue, a reference to the blue cloak that was part of María’s Conceptionist Franciscan habit.”

Through visions and “automatic writing” allegedly performed under an external spiritual power, María produced a voluminous account of the life of the Virgin Mary called The Mystical City of God. As Eire writes, it purported to contain “many intimate details not found in the New Testament or other early Christian texts.” This work faced initial resistance and was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition and the Sorbonne for its controversial theological content. Despite this, Eire notes, it “lent an authoritative seamlessness to the narrative of her miraculous missionary feats” and gained considerable attention among clergy and laypersons alike. Published in 1670, five years after her death, it remains a source of inspiration for some Catholic believers.

Adding to the complexity of her case, María ’s influence extended to the Spanish royal court through her extensive correspondence with King Philip IV, to whom she served as spiritual adviser and confidante for many years. Her letters covered a wide range of topics, from spiritual matters to political advice, highlighting her significant influence on the king and his policies.

Since her death, María’s life and works have been the focus of considerable debate between those who wish to canonize her and those who remain deeply skeptical. Less than 10 years after her death, she was elevated to the status of Venerable by Pope Clement X, but the Catholic church remains slow to advance her beatification—and that, as Eire demonstrates, is to its credit.

The case of María presents a focal point for Eire between paths of investigation and the limits of a historian’s ability to follow. He writes:

María’s case allows us to examine the troublesome roles played by interpretation, embellishment, and exaggeration in the forging of narratives as well as in the creation of doubt and suspicion. Conversely, her case also provides a clear glimpse of the ways in which the Catholic Church sought to maintain a delicate balance between popular piety and official theology and between the affirming and questioning of the seemingly impossible. The fundamental questions raised by María’s miracles were immense precisely because of their seemingly outlandish otherworldliness. That excessiveness exposed the fragility of her claims, along with her own vulnerability. Yet, at the very same time, her miracles also reveal the eagerness with which impossible feats could be believed in and embellished, or even suggest the likelihood of pure fabrication.

Our responses to María of Ágreda reveal a lot about our preexisting intellectual and theological frameworks. Contemporary Protestants struggle to accommodate certain expressions of individual piety. And contemporary readers in general struggle to overcome certain entrenched assumptions about the limits of the possible.

Otherworldly holiness

While much of Eire’s material was new to me, especially as someone coming from a Protestant background, I was willing to follow him with an open mind into new territory. I found Eire’s deft handling of these matters wise and inviting. Their strangeness only enhanced their mystery.

Eire confronts gargantuan topics that have roiled culture and religion for centuries—the profound consequences of the Protestant revolution, the disenchantment of the modern age, the relationship between faith and skepticism, the reliability of our mental models of reality, and the continuing action of God in the world. They Flew provides a historical scaffolding for exploring all these issues and more, guided by one of wisest writers I know.

Much more could be said about Eire’s remarkable book. I haven’t even touched on the way he engages with Protestant reactions to the supernatural (almost always dismissed as demonic if not outright fraudulent). That my own tradition should hold these default interpretations could seem to contradict belief in God’s sovereignty.

Unlike Eire ’s previous works, They Flew has an undeniably polemical edge, since the book underscores deep divides between Catholics and Protestants. And it ’s clear throughout that Eire takes the Catholic side, which makes the book all the more compelling. It was impossible not to find myself engrossed in Eire’s meticulous—one might even say loving—handling of these narratives.

As he explains in one revealing passage:

Although a good number of Catholics in North America and Europe no longer pay much attention to [miracles as a] marker of Catholic identity—and some might even express embarrassment and dismay at its robust survival—these core beliefs remain embedded in global Catholicism as well as in the official teaching of the Catholic Church. Because these beliefs are still a cornerstone of the cult of the saints and this cult is itself an essential component of Catholic piety and identity, it is very difficult to imagine them being jettisoned. Simply put: no miracles, no Catholicism.

Eire’s entire investigation seems fueled by a drive to know how these claims drove a wedge between Catholics, who saw these miracles as evidence of God’s providence, and Protestants, who saw them as demonic.

This aspect of Eire’s book strikes me less as a provocation than as a challenge. As a Protestant, how far am I willing to engage these narratives as alternative models for Christian piety? I want to let them complicate my assumptions about what it means to lead a faithful, godly life—and my own knee-jerk rejection of anything miraculous in the post-apostolic age. If Christ has risen from the dead, who am I to judge?

That said, I also found my sympathies stretching only so far. Most of the saints Eire portrays pursued holiness through the mortification of the flesh, to an extent that often made me wince.

Take this detail, for instance: “In addition to fasting constantly and observing a vegan diet, María wore a hair shirt under her habit, along with a girdle studded with spiked rings and a heavy abrasive vest of chain mail. To top off her self-punishment, she also wrapped her body in chains and fetters, scourged herself daily, and wore a crucifix riddled with needles that she could press into her breast when she prayed.” We cannot conceive in our own day and age how these monastics could inflict their own physical suffering in pursuit of the divine. To moderns, such masochism looks like a form of madness.

I also wished that Eire had provided a more thoroughgoing critique of mass delusion as a possible explanation for these miracles. Eyewitness testimony is fraught with many well-observed behaviors and self-deceptions that distort the truth. Eire does not discount this interpretation of events—rooted in the madness of crowds, especially those motivated to see what they want to see—but he stops well short of embracing it.

It is certainly true that Protestants saw the same events and interpreted them very differently. So how do we account for these varying tendencies of the human mind? Eire doesn’t address these concerns directly, instead trusting the admittedly diverse source material more than others might.

Whatever we make of these saints’ lives, they provide a powerful witness to other ways of living out one’s faith. We can learn from their devotion, their call to purity, their denial of self, and even their mortification of the flesh in pursuit of otherworldly holiness.

More than that, we have Eire’s own example to learn from—his life story, his generosity of spirit, and his contributions to our understanding of the early modern period. Watching his delight in recounting these stories of the impossible is an act of faith itself. One might even say that it’s miraculous.

Garrett Brown is a writer and publisher living in Northern Virginia. His Substack page is @noteandquery.

Books

The Precarious Position of India’s Christians—and Its Democracy

Lawyer and author P. I. Jose discusses the growing influence of Hindutva ideology and its threat to India’s constitutional order.

Hindu nationalists wave flags of Lord Ram and raise prayer cries during an event held in India.

Hindu nationalists wave flags of Lord Ram and raise prayer cries during an event held in India.

Christianity Today July 11, 2024
Anindito Mukherjee / Stringer / Getty

During the last decade in India, a Hindu nationalist government has taken the helm, and Hindutva ideology, once considered as fringe, has become firmly entrenched and empowered politically and socially.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi first rose to power in 2014, India has grappled with rising religious nationalism, posing significant challenges to its founding principles of pluralism and equality. Democracy watchdogs have expressed concern about the health of the world’s largest democracy. In 2018, for instance, one group categorized India as an “electoral autocracy.” In 2024, the country was downgraded in status, becoming known as “one of the worst autocratizers.” Both domestic and international observers have raised concerns about potential threats to India’s constitutional framework and minority rights.

Many rejoiced when Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to win an absolute majority last month for the first time in three elections, but concerns about the widespread political and social influence of Hindutva remain.

Against this backdrop, P. I. Jose’s new book, Hindutva Palm-Branches and the Christian Resolve, examines India’s evolving political and religious landscape. Drawing on his extensive experience practicing in front of India’s Supreme Court, Jose examines the growing influence of Hindutva and its impact on India’s constitutional democracy and secular fabric.

CT recently spoke with Jose about what secularism means in a country as religious as India, Hindutva’s effects on constitutional principles, and the precarious position of religious minorities, particularly Christians, in India’s current political climate.

How does India’s constitutional secularism compare to its practical implementation?

Former Indian Supreme Court justice K. M. Joseph once said, “Secularism is a facet of equality. If you treat all religions equally, that is secularism. You are fair, you do not bias or patronize.” However, his subsequent statement reveals the reality: “I am still optimistic that secularism will survive.” If a recently retired Supreme Court judge expresses such concern, one can imagine the actual situation in our country today.

The resolve of the people of India, in crafting the constitution, was to create “a Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic Republic,” according to the current preamble. Interestingly enough, the preamble adopted in 1949 did not originally contain the word secular, as B. R. Ambedkar, the architect of our constitution, said there was no need to include the term. He believed the entire constitution manifested the concept of a secular state, as it codified nondiscrimination on grounds of religion and gave equal rights and status to all citizens.

The words secular and socialist were added in 1976, during the Emergency (a 21-month period from 1975 to 1977 when then–prime minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency across the country, claiming internal and external threats) via a constitutional amendment. And in a 1994 verdict, the Supreme Court of India held that secularism is part of the constitution’s basic structure and is unamendable.

However, Hindu nationalists have always been opposed to the idea of India being secular and, in fact, have made motions in parliament to delete the word from the constitution. As a result of Hindutva, which basically sees secularism as pandering to religious minorities, today we are witnessing widespread attacks against religious minorities, including Christians.

India has become infamous for lynching incidents and for the demolition of churches and other minority religious symbols. Fellow citizens and law enforcement personnel have attacked pastors, disrupted worship services, and engaged in rampant hate speech against religious minorities. Parallel to this, we see the government going all out to not only build huge religious structures for the state-favored religion but to color India in the majoritarian faith language and symbols, which is completely antithetical to secularism as envisioned by our founding mothers and fathers.

You argue that Hindutva opposes constitutional principles. Can you elaborate on this clash of values?

Activist V. D. Savarkar promulgated Hindutva in the 1920s to justify Hindu nationalism and establish Hindu hegemony in India. He defined Hindus as individuals whose “fatherland” and “holy land” were within the Indian subcontinent, thus excluding Muslims and Christians by definition but including Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains as Hindus. Hindutva envisions and strives for a Hindu rashtra (nation) and opposes the principle of equality for all citizens, and even speaks of disenfranchising religious minorities. Even though Savarkar spoke against the caste system, modern Hindutva promotes it—and its foundation is the erasure of religious minority cultures.

Our constitution, in contrast, states that “the State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.” What’s more, the constitution also prescribes equality as a fundamental duty for every citizen “to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture.”

Savarkar was one of the people who supported the two-nation theory that ultimately resulted in the partition of India. Hindutva, I believe, created the pangs of partition and the killing of millions of Indians, including Mahatma Gandhi. In a country that values ahimsa (nonviolence), this ideology has led to a steady growth in violence, as repeatedly recorded by various commissions investigating sectarian violence and violence against religious minorities in India, including Christians.

The Supreme Court of India has equated Hindutva with “Indianization.” Why do you believe this judgment is incorrect and undermines secularism and democracy in India?

In a 1995 Supreme Court ruling on an election appeals case, Justice J. S. Verma wrote, “Hindutva is understood as a synonym of ‘Indianisation,’ i.e., development of uniform culture by obliterating the differences between all the cultures co-existing in the country.”

The court’s ruling led to “Hindutva becoming a mark of nationalism and citizenship” and emboldened a movement that has consistently used violent means to express and enforce their beliefs. Countless lives have been lost since, with the Manipur violence being the latest manifestation.

By defining Hindutva as a way of life and not as a religion, the court disassociated it with the Hindu religion. This meant that Modi’s BJP, for instance, could legally appeal to Hindu sentiments for votes, which they have been doing since then. This dissociation has divided the nation along religious lines, facilitated the spread of hatred against other religions for votes, and portrayed adherents of other faiths as anti-national.

You suggest that Hindutva is more about Brahminical supremacy than authentic Hindu faith. What evidence supports this claim?

Hindutva has two facets. One concerns its treatment of other religions, where discriminatory practices stem from a desire to establish the supremacy of its adherents. At its core, Hindutva aims to establish a Hindu way of life based on the caste system as described in the Manusmriti and the Arthashastra—two Hindu scriptures that uphold the supremacy of the highest caste, Brahmins, who are traditionally priests—but it also advocates untouchability against what it deems as the outcastes.

However, I include in my book several Hindu scholars who cite different Hindu scriptures that suggest that equality is actually at the heart of the faith. From the work of these authorities, we can see that authentic Hinduism does not support caste-based hierarchy.

Your book alleges that Hindutva supporters have infiltrated government institutions. Can you provide examples of this?

As far back as 1982, a government report identified RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu nationalist volunteer paramilitary organization) methodologies for provoking communal violence as “infiltrating into the administration and inducing the members of the civil and police services by adopting and developing communal attitudes.”

Recently, this type of behavior has become obvious and accepted, as seen in the conduct of government nominees to selection boards, including those of religious minority–run educational institutions. If they want their loyalists running such institutions, can we expect them to allow anyone not toeing their line into government positions while they’re in power?

How can India restore the integrity of its electoral process?

Since Modi’s 2019 victory, public opinion has turned against the election process. By 2023, almost every opposition party agreed that the current regime is misusing government power to thwart democratic processes.

A Supreme Court verdict highlighted the need for an impartial election commission and laid down procedural safeguards for its selection. But the Modi government circumvented these new regulations and compromised the independence of the commission.

Further, the Supreme Court rejected the opposition’s demands that the paper receipts of the votes issued from electronic voting machines (EVM) be counted to confirm the authenticity of the votes polled.

The court’s stubborn reasoning on this will remain India’s misfortune until citizens find ways to convince those important wise old men in power. Unless all citizens are free to vote and votes are properly counted, democracy cannot be revived in India.

What is the state of India’s opposition parties?

Despite their calls to save the constitution, most parties refuse to unite and instead work against each other, effectively aiding the ruling party. This division is aggravated by the infiltration of Hindutva forces, weakening their ability to present a cohesive front. Why aren’t these opposition parties insisting on changing EVMs or on 100 percent verification of votes?

Given the challenges you outline, what solutions do you propose for protecting the rights of Christian minorities in India?

When warning signals came after the 1982 Kanyakumari riots, we failed to wake up. Same when, in 1998, the RSS and its affiliated groups attacked tribal Christians in the Dangs district of Gujarat. The 2008 Kandhamal incident shook us slightly, but we failed to respond unitedly.

Four decades later, Hindu extremists are 40 times stronger and more entrenched in the government and society. The whole state machinery and power is under their control. Democracy is on a ventilator, and we can only hope to heal it by working with the majority community to restore and strengthen secular democracy.

News

Evangelical Presbyterians Take on Debate Over Celibate Gay Pastors

As it brings in churches from mainline and conservative Presbyterian denominations, the EPC feels the tension in compromise.

EPC stated clerk Dean Weaver at the 44th General Assembly meeting at Hope Church in Memphis

EPC stated clerk Dean Weaver at the 44th General Assembly meeting at Hope Church in Memphis

Christianity Today July 11, 2024
YouTube screenshot / EPC

A Presbyterian denomination that prides itself on freedom in nonessentials has found its cooperative ministry model strained by the latest discussion of human sexuality.

Presbyterian historian Donald Fortson has been a member of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) since its inception in 1981, and he says he has never seen a more “raucous” General Assembly than this year’s gathering, held last month in Memphis.

Among the topics of debate was whether to admit a congregation whose pastor identifies as homosexual but also says he is celibate and supports a traditional Christian sexual ethic, which falls under what some have called “Side B” Christianity.

Greg Johnson, pastor of Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, led his congregation to leave the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) two years ago after that denomination had a preliminary vote to disqualify from ministerial office “men who describe themselves as homosexual, even those who describe themselves as homosexual and claim to practice celibacy by refraining from homosexual conduct.” (The denomination needed two-thirds of presbyteries to ratify that vote, which failed.)

Johnson has described himself that way, advocating Side B Christianity both at the controversial Revoice conference and in his book Still Time to Care: What We Can Learn from the Church’s Failed Attempt to Cure Homosexuality.

Now his church has inquired about joining the EPC.

“That has stirred up all kinds of controversy,” said Fortson, professor of church history and pastoral theology emeritus at Reformed Theological Seminary, “because we’ve got some in the EPC that appear to be very open to bringing him into the EPC, and we’ve got other groups that are absolutely opposed to him coming into the EPC.”

During its June 18–20 gathering, the EPC voted for a two-year study on “contemporary usage of the sexual self-conception and how such language comports with Scripture and the Westminster Standards.” All the denomination’s local presbyteries have been asked to pause consideration of matters related to the study while it is in progress. That means Johnson’s church would not be admitted until at least 2026.

Time will tell whether a denomination that has, for the sake of ministry cooperation, agreed to disagree on women’s ordination and charismatic practices can maintain the same posture on LGBTQ issues or if it will amend its constitution to address same-sex attracted clergy.

Unity in essentials

The EPC was founded more than four decades ago by a group of about 20 churches concerned with liberal drift in the Northern Presbyterian Church (then officially known as the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America). Three points of concern for EPC founders were growing acceptance of homosexual ordination, questioning by some Northern Presbyterians of Jesus’ deity, and a push to force acceptance of female pastors.

The EPC’s attempted resolution of those concerns was a Presbyterian church where all leaders affirm a list of “essentials,” including the infallibility of Scripture, the deity of Christ, and the necessity of evangelism. The EPC also affirms the Westminster Confession of Faith, but in a looser way that acknowledges “that it contains the system of doctrine taught by the Bible” and allows ministers to disagree on some points.

Both complementarians and egalitarians are welcome in the EPC, as are Presbyterians with differing views on charismatic practices. A range of views on creation (from young-earth creationism to theistic evolution) and the Sabbath (from strict Sabbatarianism to a more permissive take on the Sabbath) also prevail in the EPC.

“The tension exists between those who may stress more the essential tenets of the EPC and those who may stress more the Westminster Confession in the EPC,” said EPC stated clerk Dean Weaver. Some EPC members “are Evangelical with a capital E and reformed with a small r, and there are some who are Reformed with a capital R and perhaps evangelical with a small e.”

So far, the arrangement has succeeded. By 2008, the EPC had grown to 77,794 members. Five years later, it jumped to 134,833. Last year, it reported 125,870 members, making it the third-largest Presbyterian denomination in America, behind the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) with just over 1 million members and the more conservative PCA with nearly 400,000 members.

The EPC’s membership leveled off somewhat in recent years, dropping 15 percent since 2018. The leveling off was due in part, Weaver said, to “unhealthy” congregations that transferred in from the PCUSA between 2008 and 2018 and subsequently closed. Yet “modest growth post-COVID” has included a 7.4 percent increase in adult baptisms and a push for church planting.

Most EPC growth has come through churches transferring from the PCUSA.

“A lot of us are refugees from the PCUSA, including myself, and we have watched the PCUSA swing extremely liberal,” said Carolyn Poteet, lead pastor of Mt. Lebanon Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.

But some growth has come from PCA congregations leaving over women’s roles in ministry.

Among those is Hope Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Columbus, Ohio. After a “discernment period,” Hope has opened deacon nominations to women. It has yet to decide whether it will permit female elders. Pastor Joe Haack says his congregation can thrive in a denomination with the EPC’s vision.

“We want the essentials. We want to have those nailed down,” Haack said. But “for the sake of mission, we think liberty in nonessentials is so key.”

Yet as the two-year study on human sexuality proceeds, EPC observers are asking whether the denomination will continue to agree on what constitutes a nonessential.

An uncertain future

During floor debate at the General Assembly, an Ohio pastor said the sexuality study will not help the EPC advance its agendas of unity or doctrinal fidelity.

“Although this compromise seems reasonable on its face, it’s not a real compromise,” said Joseph Yerger, pastor of Mansfield First Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Mansfield, Ohio. Consequences of approving the study committee “will include and must include, out of a false sense of fairness and charity, an active and positive consideration to support the possibility of the socially influenced, theologically erroneous position commonly called Side B Christianity, as promoted by the Revoice conference.”

An open letter written by Fortson and two EPC elders, Nate Atwood and Rufus Burton, takes a similar line. It argues people who “identify as homosexual,” even if they “claim to practice celibacy in that self-identification,” should be “disqualified from holding office” in the EPC.

In support of its position, the letter cites Scripture, the Westminster Standards, and “lessons from mainline Presbyterian history on the ordination of celibate homosexuals.” To date, more than 370 Evangelical Presbyterians have signed the letter.

Atwood calls the denomination’s discussion of homosexuality “doing theology in real time,” akin to Protestant Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin. He worries that permitting people who identify as homosexual to be ordained may unintentionally deny the Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura, replacing the Bible’s call to repent of sinful desires with cultural accommodation.

“I agree with the critique of the conservative church that we have exhibited a kind of hostility to the LGBTQ community that has really hampered our witness,” said Atwood, pastor of St. Giles Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. “And I think there is some repenting to do with regard to our temperament and our attitude.” But “will we compromise the gospel,” which calls for repentance from sinful actions and “desires of the heart”?

Others say the EPC sexuality study is in keeping with the denomination’s vision. The compromise that led to the study committee was “a beautiful moment” and “what the EPC is all about,” said Poteet, chairman of the EPC committee that recommended the study. “Let’s figure out a way to be thoughtful and nuanced and submitted to Christ and submitted to Scripture and do this together.”

Evangelical Presbyterians agree that “sexual expression needs to be either celibacy outside of marriage or a marriage between a man and a woman,” she said. The question is whether a pastor can say of same-sex attraction, This is part of my experience, but I am living submitted to God.

Burton, stated clerk of the New River Presbytery in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, is optimistic about the study, even though he opposes ordination of celibate homosexuals.

He said during floor debate on the two-year study that it “is an answer to the prayers of the leadership team of the New River Presbytery.” It “will clarify our witness and bring our constitution and documents into greater conformity with the gospel.”

Still, it’s far from certain that studying Side B Christianity for two years will produce the desired result.

“I’ve been in the denomination for 10 years,” Poteet said, “and this is the closest I’ve seen it to not working. That was a little bit scary.”

David Roach is a freelance reporter for CT and pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama.

This article has been updated to correct the location of the New River Presbytery and clarify the PCA vote.

News

Christian Billionaire Found Guilty of Massive Wall Street Fraud

In a case that alluded to the investor’s faith, a federal jury convicted Bill Hwang of market manipulation and defrauding banks.

Bill Hwang arrives at Manhattan federal court on July 10.

Bill Hwang arrives at Manhattan federal court on July 10.

Christianity Today July 10, 2024
Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

Supporters of Christian investor and philanthropist Bill Hwang closed their eyes and prayed in federal court as they waited for a verdict on a case accusing him of massive Wall Street fraud. Hwang himself, serene throughout the proceedings, read a Bible devotional and took notes in the margins—a practice he had done throughout the trial—as he awaited the jury’s ruling.

On Wednesday, a jury found Hwang, at one time one of the wealthiest evangelicals in the US, guilty of manipulating the stock market and defrauding banks. It is one of the biggest cases of Wall Street fraud in terms of dollar amount, with banks losing $10 billion after he and his firm lied to them.

It is the crashing conclusion of a unique institution: Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management, a Christian investment firm that was named for a Greek word used to describe Christ as the “author” of our salvation (Heb. 2:10) and the “prince” of life (Acts 3:15). While Hwang’s defense team had argued that his aggressive trading at Archegos was within the bounds of normal Wall Street practice, the jury found he and his team were guilty of defrauding banks of billions and artificially pumping up stock prices.

The jury found him guilty of 10 of 11 counts. He was guilty of racketeering, securities fraud, market manipulation, and wire fraud. He was found not guilty on one count of market manipulation regarding one particular stock.

When Archegos collapsed in March 2021, the firm lost $36 billion, banks lending to Archegos lost $10 billion, and about $100 billion in market value disappeared.

Hwang’s Christian faith was woven into the long federal trial, featuring witnesses from Hwang’s Christian foundation Grace and Mercy as well as references to his Christian philanthropy. The jury heard the case before a courtroom that was consistently full of Hwang’s Christian supporters in New York—a feat of endurance over eight weeks when no phones were allowed in the courtroom and the technical subject matter was making even the jury sleepy.

Evidence in the trial alluded to the shared faith at the firm.

As the fund’s collapse was beginning in March 2021, Andy Mills, top brass at Archegos and a former president of The King’s College, a Christian college in New York, sent an email to another Archegos leader. “Pray that the markets rise tomorrow,” he wrote, according to documents from the prosecution.

“The point at which your business plan requires divine intervention is the point at which you have a solvency problem,” said prosecutor Andrew Mark Thomas in closing arguments, according to Bloomberg.

The defense initially intended to call Mills as a witness, but he did not end up testifying.

In the trial, the defense tried to refer to Hwang’s faith and his philanthropy as a way of highlighting his humble non–Wall Street ways, but the judge limited references to his personal devotion as irrelevant to a case of market manipulation.

The government’s case was that Archegos borrowed billions from banks on false pretenses and used that money to buy up large positions in a few companies, pumping up the prices artificially. The defense argued that Hwang genuinely believed in the companies he invested billions in, and that he wasn’t trying to defraud the banks but simply pursuing an aggressive trading strategy.

On Wednesday, as the jury members filed into court with their verdict, US Attorney Damian Williams slipped into the back of the courtroom—showing how seriously the Department of Justice took this case.

The jury in this case did not know this, but Hwang’s previous hedge fund, Tiger Asia, had pleaded guilty to a fraud charge in 2012. Tiger Asia was converted to Archegos in 2013.

The government’s case against Hwang centered on testimony from star witnesses Scott Becker and William Tomita, both former Hwang deputies at Archegos who had pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Both Tomita and Becker said that when Archegos collapsed, Hwang offered them roles at his $528 million Grace and Mercy Foundation, which supports Christian ministries around the world.

Archegos and Grace and Mercy shared the same floor of office space—with a conference room to host regular lunchtime public reading of Scripture, a Hwang initiative. Some Archegos employees worked at both entities doing investments.

Grace and Mercy faces a lawsuit related to Archegos’s collapse, but it is not affected by this ruling. It has been operating normally since Archegos closed.

Another witness for the prosecution was Fernanda Piedra, a top Archegos employee who became the compliance officer for Grace and Mercy. The prosecution asked her to testify about the fund’s final days.

Tomita’s testimony undercut the defense’s image of Hwang as a humble Christian investor. He portrayed Hwang as an angry boss, yelling at traders if they took bathroom breaks. He testified that Hwang had lied to the banks that Archegos was borrowing billions from.

Prosecutors showed the jury Bloomberg Terminal messages, recorded phone calls, and charts upon charts depicting the links between Archegos’s buying practices and the movement of particular stock prices. When Archegos was on a buying spree of GSX, a Chinese educational technology company, in 2020 and 2021, the stock reached a price of more than $100 a share. It is now trading at $5 a share.

“Throughout my training at the company, I had been taught by Bill when necessary to give misleading pictures about the fund and its positions,” Tomita testified, according to Bloomberg.

Hwang, 60, faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison and his sentencing is set for October 28. He will be free pending sentencing on a $100 million bond.

Culture

Jesus Will Speak in 100 Tongues, Thanks to Man Who Helped Disney’s Elsa Sing in 41 Languages

Rick Dempsey explains how his decades of localization expertise is being applied to The Chosen.

Rick Dempsey (center)

Rick Dempsey (center)

Christianity Today July 10, 2024
Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: The Chosen / Pinkton / Getty

In 2014, Disney released a video of Elsa singing her hit “Let It Go” in 25 languages. If you didn’t know any better, you might have assumed that Idina Menzel, who sang perhaps the most popular Disney ballad in history, had performed each version.

Significant credit for this House of Mouse magic belongs to Rick Dempsey, who then served as senior vice president of creative for Disney Character Voices International. Dempsey’s team held auditions all over the world, ultimately finding the dozens of singers who brought the music of Frozen alive in their languages.

The goal was “to ensure there is character consistency” and that “the voices are all very similar around the world,” Dempsey said in 2014. “The good news is that we were able to find talent that were able to pull it off.”

This impressive consistency, or “character integrity,” is a concept and practice that The Walt Disney Company embraced and expanded nearly to the point of perfection, thanks to Dempsey’s work. Today, he brings this expertise to The Chosen, the most-translated TV show in history.

CT recently spoke with Dempsey about his transition from Disney, the arduous process of translation and localization, and how The Chosen is connecting with unreached people groups and places where sharing the gospel can cost people their lives.

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

Tell us about your 35-year-long career at Disney.

I started with Disney in 1988 and led character voices for the whole company. My job was to protect character integrity, which means that when the movie characters are adapted to connect with local audiences, they remain consistent across the languages. I think it is a unique responsibility to have in a secular company like Disney, because as believers, that’s similar to what we’re called to do with our own lives, that is, to maintain our Christian integrity wherever we go.

As the company grew internationally, Disney began to translate its work and sought to guarantee consistency and integrity with character voices in theme parks and consumer products, as well as our films, around the world. For the last 20 years of my career there, I led this and was also in charge of running the entire international localization for Disney, including Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and, as I was leaving, the Fox brand as well. I had a great run there.

You mentioned that you are in charge of localization, but not everyone knows what that means. Could you elaborate?

A lot of people would refer to that as translation, but we call it localization because there’s so much more to it than just translating a script. Localization means trying to get the nuances of the dialogue—it’s an idiomatic adaptation of the original content, meaning we are trying to get the local idioms and phrases and colloquialisms of a language into the dialogue, just like we have done in the original language.

How did you connect with The Chosen?

By the time we came back from the pandemic, I realized that my time had run out. Disney, as we all know, has taken a different turn in terms of family entertainment. I realized that my time was up there, so I retired from the company and kind of jumped off without a parachute.

Literally, right after I decided to retire, Come and See (the nonprofit that manages The Chosen’sfunding) was trying to figure out how to get the show out around the world, and someone in a meeting said, “I think I know a guy.” So they texted me and said, “Would you be interested in working on The Chosen and taking it out around the world, as you’ve done with all of Disney’s content?” I said, “Absolutely.” It didn’t take a lot of thought. Soon after, I started my own production company and began consulting on The Chosen.

Lately, numerous media companies have been pushing for more AI-assisted translations. From doing predominantly literal word-for-word translations, AI has come a long way producing more natural translations. Do you think AI will ever be able to do the job of localization?

Right now, for many languages, we are at what I call an 80-20 model that is 80 percent AI, 20 percent human. I think we will get to a point where AI will get a pretty good idea of how to do translation, but we will always need to tweak it with some human touches.

I’m sure someone can churn out an AI script for a film. But it’s gonna be very sterile. There’s something about the human emotion that we will never get from AI—you have to have that human touch to make it resonate and to make it real.

In The Chosen, there are colloquialisms and certain key terms and phrases that AI doesn’t necessarily understand. Because of the scale—we are translating into 600 languages—we will need to implement some type of AI to help along the way. However, there are many underserved markets where we don’t have a lot of data or information on that language within the AI world, so everything there will have to be human effort.

Are there elements or characteristics of The Chosen that make it particularly hard to localize?

Definitely. Every colloquial phrase or idiom used in English is a challenge to ensure a good translation. We also have to figure out how to communicate biblical and Jewish phrases. Even some of the Roman government titles are difficult to translate at times.

Additionally, the casting of the actors who voice Jesus has proven to be quite difficult in some markets. Jonathan Roumie’s voice has a very pure, full tone, with very little texture, yet it is not deep or resonant. The voice needs to be authoritative and commanding while still being compassionate and loving. He doesn’t sound young, and yet he doesn’t sound too old—strong early 30s. Finding all those attributes in one actor is extremely difficult, and we’ve found it can take several rounds of auditions before we can find someone close enough to play this central character.

Gaius is another difficult character. The English actor Kirk Woller has a very textured, mid-to-higher range voice. He is somewhat gentle in his approach to the character and yet he has governmental authority. Most countries start out by making him sound real gruff and forceful. It will often take several auditions to find someone who understands the gentle side of the character.

We understand that the end goal of The Chosen is to share the gospel, and that’s a task Jesus entrusted to his followers. To what extent have you been intentional in trying to find Christian people to do the localization process?

We are working with people who have a heart to get the story of Jesus out around the world in a really significant way. We have countries where the gospel is not allowed, but believers there are passionate to get The Chosen into their country.

We had an instance where someone who loves the show reached out from a country that is religiously oppressed. She would be imprisoned if caught even discussing the show. But now we are working with her to create subtitles in that language. She literally has to leave the country to make any kind of communication with us. This is another tremendous story of someone taking incredible risk to try and use The Chosen as a gospel opportunity to reach an entire people group who have not been exposed to the story of Jesus.

We make sure our translators are Christian believers, but that’s not a requirement for voice actors. And specifically in Muslim communities, we’ve had actors walk out on us once they understand the material and the subject of the show. Dubbing has been a real challenge in parts of the world where they’re very anti-Christian.

But God is in control. In one of those countries, one of our subject matter experts is a converted Muslim who now holds a doctorate degree in Hebrew and Judaic studies. He’s an incredible resource for us.

You mentioned the current goal is to have The Chosen available in 600 languages, and that’s truly a massive challenge. Some languages have hundreds of millions of speakers across entire continents, some far fewer and concentrated in a small region. How are you addressing these differences?

Well, yes. We estimate around 100 will be dubbed and subtitled, and another 500 will only be subtitled.

We are dealing with languages in regions like France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, where they have well-structured dubbing communities: translators, voice actors, recording studios. But we’re just now getting to those languages where we are starting to deal with underserved markets, and it’s proving to be a real challenge.

We’re getting into territory where people have never heard a dub in their own language. Some of those will just be subtitled languages because they just don’t have the infrastructure to put something the size of the media project that is The Chosen into their local language.

And it’s important to say we are doing all the translations and dubbing in the market itself, in the region where the language is spoken. That’s the only way it can be done, in my opinion. That’s the way we did it at Disney, because I believe working locally is the only way it will resonate with local audiences. You need the idioms and colloquialisms of the people of that market.

Theology

Artistic Humility in the Age of ‘Hot AI Jesus’

As digital enticements proliferate, Michelangelo and the apostle Paul teach us to seek humbler, faithful art forms.

Christianity Today July 10, 2024
Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash / WikiMedia Commons

Why pray alone or with your family if you can pray with big-biceped celebrities on the Hallow app? Why limit yourself to reading or hearing the Gospels if you can have a Jesus with all the thrill and appeal of a bingeable Netflix series? Why cultivate the Ignatian prayer skill of active imagination when you can passively experience an immersive exhibit that brings a storm on the Sea of Galilee to life?

Why be satisfied with an ordinary church when you can digitally tour Europe’s greatest cathedrals or listen to famous preachers comfortably at home? Or why settle for traditional depictions of Jesus or figures from the Bible and church history when images of what The Atlantic dubbed “hot AI Jesus” and hot AI saints now proliferate online?

These are but some of the questions posed by our digital era’s dizzying accelerations, and Christians best have an answer. Here, I’ll focus on the artificial intelligence renderings of Jesus and explore how the example of history’s greatest Christian artist, Michelangelo, can help us resist the enticements of artificial devotion.

The easiest response to AI Jesus is to say that the iconoclasts—the Christian icon-breakers who warned against or outright destroyed devotional images in eighth-century Byzantium and sixteenth-century Europe—have been vindicated at last. An AI-generated image like shrimp Jesus is surely enough to cause some to hope that a modern equivalent of Oliver Cromwell’s stained glass–smashing soldiers will soon ride again.

Modern iconoclasts would argue that churches should be clean and imageless, an ever more necessary weekly cleansing of our digitally exhausted visual palette. This is venerable and ancient counsel. “When you are praying,” wrote the fourth-century desert father Evagrius of Pontus, “do not fancy the Divinity like some image formed within yourself. Avoid also allowing your spirit to be impressed with the seal of some particular shape, but rather, free from all matter, draw near to the immaterial Being and you will attain to understanding.” In other words, delete the app.

CT created hot AI Jesus (left) inspired by the social media trend on Facebook (right).AI-Generated Image by CT / Midjourney / Facebook
CT created hot AI Jesus (left) inspired by the social media trend on Facebook (right).

Another answer—from the iconophile, or image-loving one—would embrace these new developments wholeheartedly, channeling them to positive effect. Arguably, this was Michelangelo’s approach. As his career began, visually arresting classical sculptures were being dug up from the ground, prompting in many a crisis of faith: Had Christianity brought such visual splendor to a premature end?

Michelangelo’s early sculptures answered with a resounding no, showing that Christian art could be just as beautiful as that of the classical world, or even more so. Perhaps, we should take a similar approach to the new medium of AI, both embracing and exceeding what the world offers us today.

I tried that strategy myself, spending months using AI trying to resurrect a lost African saint in AI-generated icons. It left me cold. Truth be told, the strategy of total embrace left Michelangelo cold as well. “So the affectionate fantasy, that made art an idol and sovereign to me,” he wrote in a late sonnet in the 1550s, “I now clearly see was laden with error, like all things men want in spite of their best interests.”

The classical statue of Laocoön, unearthed in 1506, and one example of Michelangelo’s alluring Christian responses, Cristo della Minerva (1519–1521).WikiMedia Commons
The classical statue of Laocoön, unearthed in 1506, and one example of Michelangelo’s alluring Christian responses, Cristo della Minerva (1519–1521).

But that disillusion with cultural production doesn’t necessarily mean the iconoclasts win the argument. Michelangelo did not give up art completely. He instead returned with new intensity to a lifelong interest in the simpler and purer aesthetic of ancient Christian icons, which on several occasions he attempted to replicate or echo. One art historian convincingly argues that Michelangelo aimed to “preserve traditions of religious imagery at a time when artistic developments threatened their integrity and dominance,” and that—I believe—should also be our strategy today.

Michelangelo also actively undermined the visual techniques he had mastered. Influenced by Reformation doctrines of grace, Michelangelo’s last works are deliberately impoverished. You can see this shift in the contrast between his first and more famous Pietà, made when he was in his early 20s, and the Rondanini Pietà, executed when he was in his 80s. In the first, a larger than life, impossibly youthful Mary holds Jesus; in the deliberately rough and unfinished second, Jesus—even in his death—appears to be upholding the appropriately aged Mary.

Michelangelo’s Entombment (1500–1501) and the humble ancient icon (1405) that helped inspire it. WikiMedia Commons
Michelangelo’s Entombment (1500–1501) and the humble ancient icon (1405) that helped inspire it.

Michelangelo’s trust in ancient, humbler art forms and his deliberate embrace of visual poverty helped him navigate the tumultuous 16th century, and it can help us navigate our own time as well. Deluged with AI’s slick and sexually suggestive images of Jesus, we can benefit from the wisdom of faithful iconoclasts without abandoning devotional images completely.

Like Michelangelo, we can choose to make and contemplate Christian images that are humble, perhaps unimpressive but deliberately and faithfully so. We can seek art that does not dazzle our earthly senses but defers to heavenly realities. Owing to the fact that the current “data sets these [AI] tools are trained on are biased toward hotness,” the new tools are unlikely to help. We do better to embrace images that pronounce their poverty, images that say, like John the Baptist, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30, KJV).

Michelangelo’s example teaches us to be suspicious of concocted visual greatness. Even if machines can now sculpt as well as he could, the lesson of Michelangelo’s final years remains the same: Christian images, insofar as they deserve the name Christian, should be deliberately restrained, for their purpose is not to attract attention or glory but to turn our eyes toward Christ. The traditional canon of Orthodox icons, more affordable now than ever, still does this remarkably well.

Michelangelo’s early Pietà (1498–99) and his late Rondanini Pietà (1564).WikiMedia Commons
Michelangelo’s early Pietà (1498–99) and his late Rondanini Pietà (1564).

Faced with its own bewildering array of eloquent preachers and visually immersive pagan shrines, the ancient church asked questions like the ones with which I began. The apostle Paul’s answer was candid, even blunt: “I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God,” he wrote to the Corinthian church. “For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness” (1 Cor. 2:1–3).

In this and the testimony of Michelangelo, then, I see a simple rule for sifting this fresh round of visual enchantments: Never trust an image—or a savior—without wounds.

Matthew J. Milliner is a professor of art history at Wheaton College. He is author most recently of Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon.

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