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I’ve Preached the Gospel Countless Times. The Love of the Amish Preached It to Me.

An excerpt on grief, forgiveness, and the gospel from Beechdale Road: Where Mercy Is More Powerful Than Murder.

Christianity Today June 7, 2024
Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

On Sunday, June 21, 2020, 18-year-old Linda Stoltzfoos of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, was kidnapped and later murdered by Justo Smoker—my brother-in-law.

Beechdale Road: Where Mercy Is More Powerful Than Murder. A True Story.

Beechdale Road: Where Mercy Is More Powerful Than Murder. A True Story.

152 pages

$12.99

As you might expect, my family journeyed through tremendous grief, anger, and pain. But as you might not expect, we also journeyed through the challenge of receiving unexplainable grace, kindness, and mercy at the hands of the Amish community, of which Linda Stoltzfoos was a part.

The story to be told is not just another story of grief and healing but a story about the gospel. It’s a gospel story embedded in the very tangible way the Amish community poured out grace and mercy on my family—and our struggle to receive it. As a pastor for over 20 years, I have preached the gospel countless times, but through my encounters with the Amish community, it was preached to me in a way that was deeper and more personal than anything I’ve ever encountered before.

Many years ago, I memorized Paul’s words in Ephesians 2:8–9: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” But in the last four years, for the first time in my life, I’ve had to wrestle with what it really means to receive unmerited grace when there is absolutely nothing you can do to make things better on your own. My family experienced what it’s like when undeserved mercy confronts undeniable evil, when kindness upends condemnation, when heaven engages hell.

This experience began with a knock on the door that I had no interest in answering. I was in no mood to talk to anyone just a few hours after it became public that Justo was charged with Linda’s kidnapping. My shoulders dropped and I thought to myself, “Oh, come on. I don’t have energy to interact with anyone right now.” Sitting there at the kitchen table, I just wanted them to go away.

What got me up from the kitchen table was fear. I was afraid it might be the FBI or police looking for more information or needing something else. Also, I realized I probably should take responsibility to face whoever was there, because the alternative was to wait long enough that my daughter would feel compelled to get the door. As good as avoidance sounded, I didn’t want to put her in that position. I found the energy to get up and drag myself to the door.

I peeked through the side windows next to the door and took a breath. It looked like a young Amish family standing outside. I was immediately relieved—it’s so much more welcoming to see an Amish family than uniformed officers at your door. Then, immediately, before I reached for the door handle, other feelings came over me that I’d never felt when interacting with the Amish until this moment: guilt and shame. I felt more vulnerable than I’ve ever felt opening my front door.

With the door opened, my eyes at once met our neighbor, Mary (name changed for privacy). We’d never really interacted before. She had her four children with her, all very young and all basically unaware of the situation their mom had chosen to enter. Their eyes were full of youthful exuberance, wonder, and interest at coming to our home. Her eyes were full of compassion. I saw no pity there, and certainly no anger—nothing close to that. There was an immediate sensation that she knew what was going on here in a way that few did. Her presence was a gift, and it immediately displaced my guilt and shame.

“I’m Mary, your neighbor,” she said. “And you may not know this, but I was the teacher at Nickel Mines.”

The tears barely stayed in her eyes. As I stood there, I knew she didn’t have to say more. She knew. She knew everything—everything that was about to come our way over the coming season, and everything we would uncover in ourselves, in our community, and in our personal faith in God.

My oldest daughter, Megan, was in kindergarten when Nickel Mines happened. On October 2, 2006, Charles Roberts entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, just 15 minutes from our home. He forced the teacher, the aides, and all the boys outside. Inside, he shot ten girls—killing five—then killed himself. Mary was that teacher. She was only in her late teens when this happened.

And here she stood, 14 years later, at our front door. In a way, it seemed like she’d just come from running out the back door of that schoolhouse. The pain was fresh, the wound was deep. But her presence wasn’t only about recognizing that. Mary was doing what so many in her Amish community did right on the heels of Nickel Mines: They forgave. Immediately. And as completely as they could. This posture of forgiveness took on various forms, and, in this moment, what it meant for Mary was that in her right hand she held a handpicked bouquet of flowers and in her left hand a small bag of homegrown cucumbers.

I hate cucumbers. But in that moment, I felt like I loved them. I almost cried over cucumbers. The cucumbers represented to me the manifestation of her deep desire to provide comfort and love to our family. What could really be said or done or offered at this point, given the gravity of the moment? Love could be expressed verbally, but the cucumbers represented to me a grace of someone trying something tangible rather than just being satisfied with words.

And when you’re overwhelmed, even the smallest grace can touch the deepest part of you.

“I brought you some flowers and some cucumbers,” she said. “I hope you like cucumbers.”

“Thank you so much,” I lied. “I really do.”

I took the gifts while she remained standing on our front porch. I learned the kids’ names and thanked her for coming. Then she took a breath, and with glassy eyes said to me, “There is hope. God will take care of you.”

I nodded. To this day, I’m not sure what I said in response. What she said and what she did in that moment were far more important. Mary gave us a gift of grace with her nonjudgmental presence, just hours after learning it was her neighbor’s family that had inflicted this Nickel Mines–like pain on the Amish community once again.

That early visit was a preview of what was to come, though I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that in our two-minute interaction, she had changed the narrative without realizing it.

In the first narrative that we were living, we felt great shame and guilt over the pain inflicted on our community by our family member, whom we love. It would make sense if people around us were angry, particularly the Amish community, and most certainly Linda’s family. We expected to play the role of the ones asking for forgiveness, being silent in the background, having to figure out how to grieve while also absorbing the brunt of pent-up anger in our community for the long weeks between Linda’s disappearance and Justo’s arrest. That was a narrative that made sense, and that we anticipated—though we couldn’t fully verbalize it.

Mary and her cucumbers opened up our hearts to another possible narrative, one that acknowledged the need we all had for healing. We all were wounded. We all deeply needed love, grace, and the gift of personal presence to chase away shame and guilt.

This narrative included the possibility of hope—hope for a future that might not be as dark as the current moment felt. Her narrative acknowledged the pain that would come, but it didn’t leave us there. In eating these cucumbers, it was as if we could taste and see that love is good. It was the kind of love that might just be able to heal.

Mary’s visit made me think that Paul’s words in Romans 8:38–39 might be even grittier than I had experienced in my life to date: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Neither death nor life can separate us from the love of Christ? Even if your brother-in-law takes someone’s life? Christ’s love is present in that space?

When I closed the door, I was holding back tears as I held the bag of cucumbers and the vase of flowers in my hands. I was holding love, and I didn’t want to put it down. These gifts weren’t enough to chase away all the pain and hurt—there was still much more of that to come. But in the moment, they gave life and breath and hope and kindness.

That’s what personal visits and cucumbers do. They raise our vision, encourage our soul, give us honest hope that this current sadness might not be forever sadness. Love lifts, lightens, and stabilizes—which was good, because the journey we were starting had plenty more to show us. We would need as much love and grace as we could find.

Tim Rogers has served as lead pastor at Grace Point Church of Paradise, Pennsylvania, for more than 20 years and is active in various community roles.

Coauthor Megan Shertzer works as an adult advocate at The Factory Ministries in Paradise, Pennsylvania. Megan is Justo’s niece.

Adapted from Beechdale Road by Megan Shertzer andTim Rogers. ©2024 by Megan Shertzer and Tim Rogers. Used by permission. www.beechdaleroad.com for more information.

News

Southern Baptist Digital Hymnal Gets Saved

Worship leaders convince curriculum company of the value of lifewayworship.com.

Christianity Today June 7, 2024
Vlad Shalaginov / Unsplash

Lifeway no longer plans to shut down its online music ministry resource lifewayworship.com .

In July 2023, the company announced its plan to retire the platform—a “digital hymnal” that provides users with chord charts, vocal arrangements, and orchestrations—then paused those plans a week later after a strong response from customers. After a year of reevaluation and interviews with worship leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) who use the site, Lifeway has changed course and decided to continue maintaining and updating the resource.

“Lifeway is a curriculum company,” Lifeway Worship director Brian Brown said. “These worship leaders reminded us that music is their curriculum. It ministers to the whole body.”

Lifeway arranged panel discussions with more than 200 worship leaders between July 2023 and May 2024. The ministry was surprised to learn how many of these leaders—who served in churches of many different sizes and with a wide range of musical styles—relied on lifewayworship.com .

“We undervalued some of the unique things we provided, and we didn’t see how much support we were giving these churches. Much more than we realized,” said Brown.

Will Bishop, associate professor of church music and worship at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said that when Lifeway announced the end of lifewayworship.com a year ago, he didn’t think it would be controversial.

“I sort of thought, Who’s going to ever miss this?” he said.

But six months ago, Bishop began leading worship at a small SBC church in Louisville, Kentucky, and says the experience has completely changed his mind; the resource is invaluable to his ministry.

“I have spent many years in bigger ministries with bigger budgets, but now I’m leading a church with a choir of about 18 people, a piano, organ, flute, violin, and trombone. I would absolutely miss it.”

Bishop says that lifewayworship.com is unique because he can find quality arrangements à la carte. Instead of purchasing a full orchestration of a hymn for $70, he can buy individual parts for his team of musicians for about $8 total. And for small and medium-sized churches on limited budgets, that makes a big difference.

“The majority of Southern Baptist churches are small ministries with maybe 15 people in the choir and 3–4 instrumentalists,” said Bishop.

Services like MultiTracks, PraiseCharts, and SongSelect offer tools that allow big churches to replicate the recorded versions of new worship songs. Bishop says that for larger churches with the teams and budget, those resources are ideal. But it’s not what most smaller churches need.

“Lifeway doesn’t have to be everything. No one tool can be everybody’s tool. It’s a wonderful thing to be focused on small and medium-sized churches.”

Brown says that in addition to hearing from users that lifewayworship.com provides a unique set of musical tools, his team found that many of the worship leaders look to Lifeway not only for resources but also for theological guidance—something they can’t get from other non-SBC resources.

“One of their key concerns was the theological vetting of the lyrics of songs,” Brown said. “They wanted to make sure that the songs have been theologically vetted from a Southern Baptist perspective.”

Lifewayworship.com was originally envisioned as a digital SBC hymnal. Launched in 2008 under the direction of Mike Harland, the site started out with the 674 songs in the Baptist Hymnal and gradually expanded its offerings over time. But it wasn’t designed to be a groundbreaking tech resource; it was designed to make it easier for congregations to have access to new, approved music.

“We were a music company first, we weren’t a computer company,” Harland told CT last year. “There were certainly other companies that had more user-friendly platforms, but we aspired for our content to be the very best.”

SBC congregations don’t have to utilize music approved by Lifeway, but some church musicians said they are overwhelmed by the amount of new worship music they have to choose from, according to Brown. For them, trusted curation is welcome.

“Ultimately, worship leaders and senior pastors are going to make decisions about music in their local context. But these leaders rely on us to add some guardrails,” Brown said.

Lifewayworship.com also offers orchestrations with simplified, readable rhythms and emphasizes congregation-friendly arrangements and key selection. Those services are crucial for time-strapped worship leaders or those with limited formal musical training. Some worship leaders told the ministry they do not feel well-equipped to rearrange songs or select singable keys.

Moving forward, lifewayworship.com will continue to provide arrangements of new music but will also seek to provide guidance and create community among worship leaders across the denomination.

“We want this to be the beginning of more regular communication with our churches, and we’re looking to continue talking more intentionally and more regularly with our worship leaders,” said Brown. “This is just a starting point for us.

News

Indian Christians Relieved as Election Results Limit Hindu Nationalists

With Modi’s BJP denied an outright majority in parliament, church leaders credit prayer movements and hope the restoration of coalition politics will protect religious minorities.

Christianity Today June 6, 2024
Ritesh Shukla / Stringer / Getty

The world’s largest democracy underwent a significant political shift in its 2024 general election, as Indian voters upended the previously unshakable dominance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) remains the largest coalition and will form the next federal government, likely making Modi the first Indian head of state to serve three terms since Jawaharlal Nehru led the subcontinent’s initial post-independence government. But as the official vote counting stretched past midnight on June 4, results indicated that voters rejected Modi’s aspirations for an overwhelming majority that many feared would have empowered him to reshape India’s secular and democratic foundations.

Christians and other religious minorities in India rallied for the cause of pluralism.

“The people have spoken clearly for a return to the founding ideals of India,” said Vijayesh Lal, general secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI), which represents more than 65,000 Protestant churches. “They prefer harmony over narrow sectarianism and divisive politics.”

Running a populist campaign of Hindu nationalism, in 2014, Modi led the BJP to a landslide victory, securing 282 of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament—the first outright majority for a single party in 30 years. His mandate was strengthened in 2019 when the BJP increased its tally to 303 seats.

Having won political control over the federal legislature and many of India’s 28 states, Modi seemed invincible heading into 2024. Many critics worried that the nation’s multiparty democracy was sliding toward authoritarianism.

Instead, opposition leaders now claim the results of the 2024 election “shattered Modi’s aura of invincibility.” While the BJP-led coalition still secured a slim parliamentary majority with 286 seats, the BJP itself won only 240 seats—63 fewer than in 2019 and well short of the 272 seats it needed in order to govern alone.

Modi had publicly stated that he would win 370 seats and that his coalition would win over 400. In such a scenario, Christians and many other Indians suspected Modi would move the nation closer to the vision of the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP.

John Dayal, spokesperson for the All India Catholic Union, said an overwhelming mandate could have empowered Modi to reshape India into a Hindu nation, disenfranchising religious minorities and indigenous communities from their rights and resources.

Founded in 1925, the RSS is considered one of the largest far-right volunteer movements in the world. One of its founding leaders, M. S. Golwalkar, wrote that India’s religious minorities must be “wholly subordinate to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment, not even citizen’s rights.”

Such rhetoric has become embedded in the BJP narrative, resulting in an increase of hate crimes against Christians. However, data from the Pew Research Center indicates that the party’s polarizing brand of nationalism has fewer takers in large swaths of India, especially in the south. The backlash among traditionally tolerant Hindus, combined with frustration over rural distress, inflation, and unemployment, has now led to a more fragmented political scene.

Many Indian Christians see this as a blessing.

“The result is like breathing fresh air after a long time of suffocation,” said C. B. Samuel, former head of EFI’s disaster relief and development commission.

Despite the setback, Modi still called the result the “victory of the world’s biggest democracy,” as he announced his intention to form the next government in negotiation with coalition allies. This development, sources told CT, signals a return to a more pluralistic democratic reality.

Samuel interpreted the opposition surge as a movement to support marginalized communities, to avoid favoritism of any religion, and to promote a sense of hope.

A. C. Michael, coordinator of the United Christian Forum, a human rights group that tracks data on Christian persecution, predicted a coalition government will “put Modi on a leash” and ensure greater accountability.

The BJP’s main challenger was the newly formed Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), a broad coalition of regional and ideological rivals of the BJP brought together by Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress party.

Gandhi, the great grandson of Nehru and heir to India’s preeminent political dynasty, embarked on a grassroots campaign of unprecedented scale—including two marches of 2,000 miles and 4,200 miles across India over two years. Alongside allies such as the Samajwadi Party and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Gandhi highlighted issues including Modi’s Hindu nationalism, alleged cronyism, and the erosion of civil liberties during his terms in office.

An aggressive social media offensive helped the INDIA coalition challenge the perception of Modi’s inevitable success. And in heartland states such as Uttar Pradesh—India’s most populous, with 241 million people—significant discontent was evident within the party’s traditional support base as the BJP lost roughly half its seats.

“The BJP grew increasingly authoritarian and instilled a climate of fear,” said an attorney in Uttar Pradesh, granted anonymity due to his close work with the persecuted church. “This verdict should alleviate those concerns.”

But persecution is prevalent in other states as well, stated award-winning human rights and peace activist Cedric Prakash, a Gujarat-based Jesuit priest. He called the Modi government “particularly hostile” to all religious minorities but noted that other adversely affected communities included small farmers, indigenous coastal people, migrant workers, casual laborers, tribals, Dalits, and other vulnerable sections of society.

Civil society groups rallied on behalf of such communities to swell the opposition’s ranks, and Prakash said Christians should join them to pursue the “gospel values” of justice, liberty, and equality.

Alongside their vote, Indian Christians also mobilized in prayer. EFI members, which represent more than 50 denominations and 150 ministries, as well as other denominations came together in marathon prayer sessions and interchurch prayer chains.

“People cried out to God, humbling themselves, to ‘heal their land’ and reaffirm democracy and freedom during the elections,” said Paul Dhinakaran, chancellor of Karunya University and chairman of Jesus Calls Ministry.

Across the nation, hundreds of such groups, including Dhinakaran’s National Prayer and Ministry Alliance, fervently sought divine intervention as the tense vote counting unfolded—underscoring the significance of the electoral outcome for India’s religious minorities.

“Many shed tears of joy,” said Samuel. “Now is the time for gratitude, to step back to see God at work.”

Yet Prakash said while this “second-best” election scenario was still an answer to prayer, it was now up to Modi’s coalition partners to ensure the new government does not tamper with the constitution.

“India has proved to the world that democracy, social justice, and constitutional laws must prevail over all other considerations,” said Dhinakaran.

The INDIA coalition will also have to work hard to become a functional opposition, as the diverse alliance united to defeat Modi without a shared ideological vision. While Gandhi’s Congress Party is the largest in the coalition, more than half of INDIA’s seats came from regional parties.

Yet the outcome still inspired hope among Christians.

“Indeed, we were expecting this kind of result,” said Jacob Ninan, pastor of Trinity Highland Tabernacle Church in the southeast state of Kerala, where Christians comprise 18 percent of the population. “There was intercession throughout the nation for a restoration to democracy.”

Nonetheless, for the first time, the BJP was able to secure one of Kerala’s 20 parliamentary seats after years of failing. Paradoxically, this came through direct appeals to Christians through local churches, notwithstanding the party’s rhetoric elsewhere in India. (The Congress Party still claimed majority support of local citizens, securing 14 seats.)

Ninan attributed the BJP’s new seat in Kerala to its local candidate’s charisma, citing his fame as an actor, his assistance to the poor, and his neutral stance on religion as he avoided the Hindutva line.

Prakash was more concerned in his analysis. “Voting for the BJP in Kerala is a troubling signal for secular democracy,” he said. “If Christians voted for the BJP, they would soon learn it is an anti-Christian party.”

Despite the positive turn in election results overall, however, Lal warned that social polarization and Christian persecution in India are unlikely to disappear immediately. Decades are needed, he said, to form the societal will necessary to reject sectarian hate and to restore fraternity. The outlook, in fact, “remains grim,” he said.

Nonetheless, the current political balm is welcome.

“The 2024 Indian elections defied expectations,” Lal said. “The BJP’s hollow victory and the opposition’s triumphant loss reaffirmed democracy’s power to change the course of a nation, against all odds.”

Books

Doubting Thomas: Why the Evangelical Crush on Aquinas Needs to Mature

Thomism is experiencing a renaissance in theology, but there’s a reason it’s controversial.

Christianity Today June 6, 2024
Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Wikimedia Commons

To engage with the medieval Italian priest Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) is to approach one of history’s greatest theological giants. Aquinas is second only to Augustine in his influence on Western Christianity—and his legacy of Thomism is a vast ocean. Academic discussions in theology and philosophy demand Aquinas and Thomism as conversation partners.

Yet evangelicals, in particular, have had an unresolved relationship with Aquinas over the years. The pendulum of 20th-century evangelical scholarship on Aquinas has swung between strongly negative appraisals (from Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til, for example) and, since the 1980s, more appreciative receptions (such as from Norman Geisler and Arvin Vos). Yet in the last decade or so, there has been a Thomist renaissance within evangelical circles.

Evangelical apologists were first attracted to his epistemology, especially his defense of an evidentialist view of the relationship between faith and reason, which assumes that reason can ascertain the existence of God. Evangelical theologians then began retrieving his “classical” doctrine of God’s oneness in the face of modern Christological and Trinitarian trends, which they perceived as slippery slopes to unorthodox views—which promote a social trinity and a hierarchical subordination of Jesus to the Father, for instance.

In the face of pressures from secularization and the identity crisis felt in some evangelical quarters, Aquinas can be perceived as a bulwark of a “traditional” theology that needs to be urgently recovered—and is thus in danger of being idealized in an uncritically positive retrieval.

Previous generations of Protestant scholars could not avoid Aquinas, given his stature and importance for theology, but he was always read with selective eyes. Today, however, there is an increasing tendency to think that you cannot be properly orthodox (in the “catholic” sense) if you don’t embrace the fundamental tenets of Thomism.

What is often overlooked by these evangelical retrievers is the controversial history of Aquinas. From the Reformation and beyond, Roman Catholicism has considered Aquinas as its chief champion in its anti-Reformation stance and resulting antibiblical developments, such as the 1950 Marian dogma of the bodily ascension of Mary.

What are we to make of this divide over Aquinas? What are the strengths and weaknesses, if not dangers, in retrieving Aquinas for theology today? The point is not to avoid Aquinas, nor to study him uncritically, but to provide the theological map with which evangelicals might approach him.

As an evangelical theologian who has been working on Roman Catholic theology for 25 years—and, more recently, working toward an evangelical appreciation of pre-Reformation theology, including Aquinas—I’d like to offer five principles that can be useful in affirming the evangelical interest in Aquinas without veering into heterodox territory.

1. Scripture alone is ultimate, and tradition (Aquinas included) is always second.

In reading Aquinas, evangelical theology must always practice the sola Scriptura principle (the Bible alone is the inspired written Word of God and the ultimate authority in all matters of life), the tota Scriptura principle (the whole Bible is inspired by God and needs to be received as a whole), and the Scriptura sui ipsius interpres principle (the Bible is its own interpreter).

At the end of his letter to Sadoleto, John Calvin wrote, “We hold that the Word of God alone lies beyond the sphere of our judgment, and that Fathers and Councils are of authority only in so far as they accord with the rule of the Word, [but] we still give to Councils and Fathers such rank and honor as it is meet for them to hold, under Christ.”

This leads to a theologically sober and realistic view of tradition, including Aquinas’s substantial legacy. In J. I. Packer’s words, “Tradition, after all, is the fruit of the Spirit’s teaching activity from the ages as God’s people have sought understanding of Scripture. It is not infallible, but neither is it negligible, and we impoverish ourselves if we disregard it.”

That is all to say that Aquinas is important but not decisive; he can be useful but never definitive—especially where he is distorting or deviant from God’s Word. In other words, Aquinas can be enriching, but only to the extent that he is faithful to Scripture.

2. Aquinas is a giant of church history whose teachings need to be appropriated eclectically.

All Protestant theologians have studied Aquinas as the primary exponent of medieval theology. But the best readers of Aquinas have had neither reverential fears nor inferiority complexes—they have faced Aquinas head-on with an evangelical boldness undergirded by the biblical principle of “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thess. 5:21, KJV).

Responsible retrievers of Aquinas—such as Peter Martyr Vermigli and Herman Bavinck, through Francis Turretin—have exercised a theological discernment allowing them to appreciate the aspects of Aquinas’s teachings that are in line with biblical faith and to reject those that conflict with Scripture.

In other words, they did not embrace the Thomist system as such but broke it down into its parts—as far as possible while maintaining their integrity—and used them eclectically. That said, eclecticism has its own risks, and we must not lose sight of the fact that Aquinas is a “worldview” thinker and that any analysis of the Thomist system must be done as a whole.

Evangelical scholarship can neither reject Aquinas as a hopelessly compromised theologian (the anti-Aquinas temptation) nor elevate him as the chief parameter of Christian orthodoxy (the Roman Catholic temptation). Rather, it should treat Aquinas as an unavoidable conversation partner in the history of Christian thought. And like anyone else from Christian tradition, Aquinas is to be read generously yet critically in light of the “Scripture alone” principle—which the Protestant Reformation recovered for the whole church.

3. There are many ambivalences and serious problems in the Thomist system.

Aquinas’s thought has a myriad of brilliant insights, but the Thomist system, which includes his metaphysics and epistemology, contains tendencies and trajectories that can lead to structural theological flaws.

In The Cambridge Companion to the Summa Theologiae, Christoph Schwöbel points to Adolf von Harnack’s insights that “Thomas’s account of grace remains constantly ambivalent. On the one hand it looks back to Augustine, on the other hand, it points forward to the dissolution which Augustinianism would undergo in the fourteenth century. … Thomas intends to insist on the sole efficacy of divine grace; but the way in which he develops this theme already points in the opposite direction.”

Aquinas’s thought is pervaded with an ontological optimism that translates into epistemological optimism (stressing the positive role of reason), moral optimism (underlining the role of virtues as human habits), and, in the post–Vatican II interpretation, soteriological optimism (all humanity participates in one way or another in the mystery of salvation).

From this point of view, one cannot easily separate Aquinas’s classical theism (and its implications for Trinitarian theology and Christology) from his soteriology, ecclesiology, sacramentology, Mariology, and devotional life. The latter components of his thought are all argued in terms of the former, so it is incongruous to consider the latter flawed and the former sound. All of Aquinas’s theological constructs are formed and shaped around the same parameters, which incorporate Scripture but are not ultimately submitted to it.

In other words, Aquinas’s thought is part of a larger integrated system that needs to be appreciated as such and appropriated eclectically, but not unquestioningly.

4. Roman Catholicism is the full outcome of Aquinas’s theology and legacy.

The Roman Catholic Church has long held Aquinas as its vital intellectual champion, the most thoughtful, profound, and comprehensive voice of Roman Catholic thought. The Church of Rome has long appropriated Aquinas as the Catholic theologian par excellence.

Canonized by Pope John XXII in 1323, only 50 years after his death, Aquinas was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church by Pius V in 1567 for being the Roman theologian whose thought was seen to have defeated the Protestant Reformation.

In the 20th century, the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) established that Aquinas should be the supreme guide in theological studies leading to the ordination of priests. Pope Paul VI (Lumen Ecclesiae, 1974) and then John Paul II (Fides et Ratio, 1998) expressed a deferential appreciation by identifying Aquinas “as a master of thought and a model of the right way to do theology.”

Aquinas laid the foundations for the theological framework typical of Roman Catholicism, including their belief in a fundamental interdependence between nature and grace (sometimes referred to as “natural theology”), which most Protestants find highly problematic from a biblical perspective. Evangelical theology has always been grounded in the historical-redemptive motif found in Scripture: creation, sin, and redemption, however formulated.

Aquinas is acknowledged as the authority behind many nonbiblical developments in medieval and modern Roman Catholicism, from the Council of Trent to Vatican I and II. These distorting departures from the biblical faith exist in critical areas of Catholic soteriology, ecclesiology, sacramentology, and devotions. While Aquinas has a high view of the Bible, it falls far short of the scriptural standards reinstated by the Protestant Reformation.

When engaging with Aquinas, it would be foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yet evangelical Thomists cannot ignore the fact that Rome regards him as the quintessential founder of Roman Catholic theology, in all its divergence from Protestant thought.

5. Evangelicals should neither be infatuated with Aquinas nor disparaging of him, but exercise maturity.

Today’s renewed evangelical appeal to Aquinas’s metaphysics and epistemology is not occurring in a vacuum. In our current cultural climate, Aquinas primarily symbolizes a return to the “great tradition” of premodern Western philosophy, a retrenching of evangelical modernity in Christian antiquity.

In some sectors of evangelical theology, the thought of keeping classic thinkers like Plato and Aristotle integrated into our biblical worldview produces an anxiety-relieving effect. In a world that is suspicious of metanarratives, Aquinas’s theology holds apologetic appeal for its claim to harmoniously combine faith and reason and to challenge skepticism with the rationality of faith.

However, the remedy may be worse than the problem, especially if it leads to an infatuation with Aquinas and an uncritical idealization of his thought.

For one, there has been a recent trend of evangelicals converting to Roman Catholicism, in part because of an attraction to Aquinas’s intellectual density and spiritual depth. In many cases, conversion begins with an affirmation of his metaphysics and ethics, which eventually leads to a full embrace of his theology. Upon further study, such individuals become convinced that Aquinas’s thought could not be split into disconnected pieces, and their conversion to Roman Catholicism follows.

Perhaps, as Barrett points out, it is unfair to see this potential for conversion as a universal caution—that it is untrue to say that Aquinas is “the gateway to Roman Catholicism.” But, at the same time, one should not be naive about the attraction many find in Aquinas’s theological vision and how it can often be an appetizer for the “full package” of Roman Catholicism.

Yet a disparaging attitude toward Aquinas is equally problematic. Aquinas belongs to a pre-Reformation age when the Western church had not yet committed itself to what Rome would officially endorse at the Council of Trent and later. Although he is behind much of what Roman Catholicism would transform into an anti-Protestant stance, he is still part of a more “fluid” time in church history that requires reading with both spiritual empathy and critical discernment.

We should read Aquinas like Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and other medieval theologians, who benefited from Aquinas’s insights and lessons yet raised issues wherever his system departed from Scripture.

We must neither fear Aquinas nor elevate him as an absolute standard for Christian orthodoxy—neither dismissively rejecting nor naively embracing his system of thought. Evangelical theology must seek a realistic reading of Aquinas, submitted to Scripture’s supreme authority and in the service of the gospel.

This piece has been adapted from Engaging with Thomas Aquinas: An Evangelical Approach at the permission of Inter-Varsity Press.

Leonardo De Chirico is the director of the Reformanda Initiative in Rome, pastor of Breccia di Roma, lecturer in historical theology at Istituto di Formazione Evangelica e Documentazione (Padua) and the author of several books including Same Words, Different Worlds: Do Roman Catholics and Evangelicals Believe the Same Gospel? and the newly published Engaging with Thomas Aquinas: An Evangelical Approach.

Ideas

Ban the Mob, Not the Bible

Christians are the victims of hate in some places and the targets of hate speech laws in others. How can believers advocate for nations to address both threats in a consistent, principled way?

Christianity Today June 6, 2024
Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty / Unsplash / Wikimedia Commons

Hate speech is a thorny problem in many countries of the world. Nations such as Pakistan and Sri Lanka, for example, regularly demonstrate how it can be used to incite violence against Christian minorities. But even Western nations that highly value freedom of expression have experienced demonstrations on college campuses that have turned into physical attacks.

Furthermore, evangelicals have expressed grave concern about the misuse of hate speech laws to censor and punish reasonable expression of traditional Christian beliefs. Trials in Finland and proposed legislation in Canada, for example, threaten to criminalize the view that homosexuality is contrary to the will of God, even when limited to quoting Scripture.

Attacks against Christians vary in different parts of the world, and to protect against all of them requires a carefully nuanced, principled argument. Fortunately, United Nations documents provide good guidance. Unfortunately, many politicians find it easier to score points with heavy-handed national legislation.

What is hate speech?

Article 20 in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), first proposed in 1966 and ratified by 173 nations, prohibits “any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred” that involves “incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.” But in a careful attempt to balance Article 20 with freedom of speech, the 2012 Rabat Plan of Action permits restrictions on an exceptional basis and only when “narrowly defined” by law.

Taken together, it is clear that hate speech pertains to intense emotions of detestation or vilification, which create an imminent risk for persons belonging to these targeted groups. It does not, however, imply a demand for “safe spaces,” where people are protected from any expression that makes them uncomfortable.

Hate speech restrictions we should support

Many countries have laws prohibiting hate speech that meet the ICCPR requirement. First developed as an antidote to anti-Jewish rhetoric that preceded the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, properly crafted laws would assist suffering Christian minority communities around the world.

Last August in Pakistan, what started as a family conflict turned into a violent rampage when Muslims were incited to destroy churches and homes based on flimsy evidence that two men had defaced pages of the Quran. A similar attack happened again on May 25 of this year, and two Christians were reported killed. In the local context, it is not difficult to whip up such mobs, because there is an environment of regular hate speech directed against Christians.

In Sri Lanka, social media often fuels such promotion of hatred. The National Christian Evangelical Alliance tracks hate speech, and, in the first three months of 2024, it identified 15 incidents, two of which included advocacy to violence.

In many parts of the world, Christian minorities live within a climate of hostility that goes beyond religious differences. When social rejection crosses the line into incitement, we can all agree that it should be prohibited.

Restrictive actions we must oppose

Western nations, however, have witnessed an increasing use of hate speech laws to target Christian expression, particularly on controversial matters of sexuality.

In 2021, Finnish politician Päivi Räsänen was prosecuted after tweeting a picture of Romans 1:24–27 and expanding on those views in a brochure and radio interview. Her pastor, Juhana Pohjola, was also prosecuted for distributing the brochure. Both have been charged with disseminating a message that “threatened, defamed, or insulted” a group of people based on their sexual orientation. Acquitted twice, these figures now face a third trial at the supreme court. The particularly troubling part of this case is that the “speech” is the text of the Bible.

Even more alarmingly, here in Canada, there is now an effort to silence people before they even say anything. The Online Harms Act, a bill currently debated in parliament, primarily deals with protecting children from online exploitation. But one key provision would allow a person who fears that someone might engage in offensive speech to get a “keep the peace” order to restrict that individual. Secular voices have joined believers to criticize this bill that the British magazine The Spectator describes as “Orwellian.”

Canadian Christians are worried that they might face prosecutions similar to what Räsänen and Pohjola have endured. The national Criminal Code already prohibits willful promotion of hatred against an identifiable group. But this proposed legislation also seeks to revive a section of the Canadian Human Rights Act, repealed in 2013, which permits people to file anonymous complaints alleging hate speech, a move harshly criticized by the former chair of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.

A principled path on freedom of expression

Free expression is vital for a functioning society. We need to be able to express deeply held beliefs on issues even when it is uncomfortable. But its suppression, as stated by Freedom House, “can allow unseen problems to fester and erupt in far more dangerous forms.” Furthermore, the leading human rights advocacy organization described the protection of free speech as the “lifeblood of democracy,” which facilitates the necessary debate over diverse interests and policy decisions. Consensus is not possible without it.

Hate speech is a global problem that requires global solutions. As in many such cases, a thoughtful balancing of rights is needed—in this case, to protect legitimate free expression while also protecting vulnerable communities from the threat of violence.

It is vital to have a clear definition of hate speech and criteria when it could be restricted. The Rabat Plan suggests a six-part threshold test, all of which should be fulfilled in order for a statement to be considered a criminal offence: (1) the context of the speech; (2) the status of the speaker; (3) the intent of the speaker; (4) the content and form of the speech; (5) the extent of the speech act; and (6) the likelihood of the speech inciting imminent action.

The blasphemy provisions of the Pakistan Penal Code, however, are an example of a law that is far too broad and vague. It outlaws “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings … by insulting … religion or religious beliefs” (italics mine). What is defined as criminal hate speech must go beyond insults to include incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, limited to a context where such reactions are judged to be likely.

The Rabat Plan further notes two troubling tendencies: “non-prosecution of ‘real’ incitement cases” and “persecution of minorities under the guise of domestic incitement laws.” Laws are only effective if they are implemented in a fair and just manner with an independent and unbiased judiciary.

Finally, we need to recognize that there are limits to the effectiveness of passing laws against hatred. Hate starts in the heart and mind. We should foster interfaith dialogue and a culture of peacemaking, both amid domestic groups and at the international level. We must also seek educational reform to ensure that schoolchildren are not taught to hate people who are different from them.

Sadly, many political leaders seem inclined to exacerbate divisions as a means to increase their popularity or to impose dominant cultural views on minority groups. As Christian peacemakers called to love all our neighbors, we should support carefully crafted limits on hate speech intended to foment violence or to stifle the rights of minorities. But we must also oppose any laws restricting speech, regardless of their intention, that could be used to marginalize and silence public discussion and debate, even when the issues are unpopular.

Hate speech that incites violence leads to violence. It is as simple as that. When we have the opportunity to prevent such violence through a combination of legislation and dialogue, we should do so. But we should not cast a net so broadly that legitimate discussion becomes a criminal act.

Janet Epp Buckingham is the director of global advocacy for the World Evangelical Alliance and the executive editor of the International Journal for Religious Freedom.

News

Many Southern Baptist Women Care More About Calling Than What They’re Called

As the SBC debates restrictions around titles and roles, female leaders continue their work in women’s ministry in their local churches.

Christianity Today June 6, 2024
Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash

When women’s ministry began dominating her schedule, taking too much time from her responsibilities at work and at home, Jacqueline Heider submitted a letter of resignation.

Her pastor responded by offering her a paid position.

That was 18 years ago. Since then, Heider has led women’s ministry at Warren Baptist Church. She serves on the lead team, working alongside fellow ministry heads at the church, which spans four locations in the Augusta, Georgia, area.

Heider developed Bible studies and discipleship programs. She launched a special needs ministry, carrying over what she learned from caring for her own daughter with special needs. She became the executive director of the church’s crisis pregnancy center.

There was a time when Heider considered whether the title of “minister to women” would be a better fit than “director,” but she realized that it wouldn’t really change anything. She was getting to do the work she loved, with the support she needed, and that’s what mattered to her.

“I’m not saying it’s not valid and I don’t think it’s necessary. … It’s just not ever been a hill that I want to die on,” said Heider. “If you start getting concerned about your title and what you can’t do, it takes away from the work you are called to do.”

Women’s ministry titles have been the most talked-about issue going into next week’s Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting, when around 11,000 messengers will vote on whether to amend their constitution to state that only men can serve as “any kind of pastor.”

Supporters see the change as a necessary stance for biblical roles for men and women in the church amid society’s confusion around gender. Critics worry it’s redundant or not the best way to enforce a complementarian position—male eldership is already part of the SBC’s statement of faith and the convention has a mechanism to disfellowship churches led by female pastors.

Just under a third of annual meeting attendees are women, many of them pastors’ wives or ministry leaders themselves.

In the SBC, some women are glad for the amendment’s clarification. Others agree about the biblical principle but worry that the move could target women who serve outside of lead or preaching pastor roles. A majority of “female pastors” listed online last year as evidence of the need for such an amendment were leading women’s, children’s, or music ministries.

But many Southern Baptist women are like Heider: too busy with the work before them to pay much attention to the debate.

“There’s so much to do here, so many opportunities to be in ministry here, that I don’t concern myself with what I don’t feel is my calling,” she said. She can’t see the vote affecting her work at Warren.

Southern Baptist churches are autonomous, so the 4 million Americans who attend each Sunday are more directly affected by the decisions made in their buildings than anything voted on in huge convention halls. Leaders emphasize that local church is “the headquarters of the SBC” and its primary vehicle for evangelism and missions.

For women who already feel empowered and encouraged to lead in various areas of church life, it’s easy to focus on their own contexts. But setups vary from congregation to congregation, and there are clear patterns of ministry by and for women going under-resourced.

A survey conducted last year by Lifeway Research, part of the Southern Baptist publishing arm, found that 83 percent of women’s ministry leaders are volunteers or unpaid. Only 5 percent plan women’s programming alongside church staff.

“They often serve without recognition, without compensation, and without resources. They do so with joy and with little to no expectation of these earthly benefits,” wrote Jen Wilkin—a longtime staff member at The Village Church in Texas and an advocate for training women in the Word—in a column for CT.

Kira Nelson, a master’s student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and host of a podcast for Christian moms, is grateful for the investment and encouragement she’s received at Southern Baptist churches.

The instinct to share the gospel came naturally to Nelson, who remembers putting on a Bible study for kids when she was 12 years old. But it was a pastor at her former church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who trained her and other women to lead small groups. While her husband was in law school, she began a Bible study to minister among fellow law school wives.

Pastors at her current church, Del Ray Baptist in Northern Virginia, have continued to recognize and help her use her gifts. The church has covered the cost of some of her theological training and solicits her input through a women’s advisory board.

It also offers childcare for the Bible study she teaches on Wednesday mornings, where about 30 to 50 women show up each week. They just finished Behold and Believe, a study on the “I am” statements in the Gospel of John.

Nelson doesn’t have the SBC annual meeting on her calendar for June. Instead, the mother of four is getting plans together to travel to Indianapolis a couple weeks later for The Gospel Coalition’s women’s conference, bringing her newborn son along.

She’s excited to spend time with a handful of other women from her church and to hear from the lineup of speakers, including the authors of their recent study and several leaders who serve at Southern Baptist churches and entities.

Nelson doesn’t disagree with the proposed amendment on male pastors, but she also doesn’t see the vote affecting the ministry and calling that she has enjoyed at Del Ray. “Right now, I have more teaching opportunities than I can handle,” Nelson told CT.

About as many men as women identify as Southern Baptist, but Southern Baptist women—like American women overall—are much more devout. In Pew Research Center surveys, they’re more likely than men to attend church, belong to a small group, pray regularly, and consider their faith as an important part of their life.

Being involved in church was “never a question” for Lorin Scott, whose Southern Baptist legacy in Texas goes back generations. Growing up, she attended SBC annual meetings with her family during summer vacations. For the past nine years, Scott has served in women’s ministry at North Fort Worth Baptist Church, which is pastored by her uncle.

Last year, Scott launched a support group for women facing unplanned pregnancies and new moms through the ministry Embrace Grace. The church’s chapter has already hosted two baby showers for single moms, clearing out their registries on Amazon as a way to bless them and demonstrate God’s love.

Scott has seen women around her step up to serve and use their giftings at church, like the Sunday School teacher who went to nearby Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary later in life “just out of a thirst for the Word.”

“For me and for a lot of women, this issue isn’t meant to be divisive,” said Scott, who worries that the debate over women’s titles plays into a broader skepticism over women’s voices and involvement in church life. “Women want to be able to use our skills and use our gifts God’s given us. We don’t want to replace men. We want to serve beside them.”

A fellow Texan, Robin Marriott serves alongside her husband—not as a copastor but in her role as a proud, extroverted pastor’s wife. Marriott tries to make it to multiple services at First Baptist Burleson each Sunday. The church outside Fort Worth worships with traditional hymns, contemporary praise music, and in Spanish.

First Burleson has been growing fast, and she wants to be there to meet visitors and greet church members. She believes being a pastor’s wife is a place for her to use her giftings in spiritual discernment and hospitality. Marriott also works as a professional etiquette expert, a skill refined over 37 years of ministry and navigating plenty of awkward church drama (she and husband, Ronny, wrote a book about it).

Across several SBC congregations in Texas, Marriott encountered richer, Christ-centered community when churches intentionally welcomed newcomers and encouraged leaders through the inevitable highs and lows of ministry life. “The main thing is we need to support our staff, male and female, as a church,” she told CT. “Not belittle them, but affirm their calling.”

Nelson from Del Ray Baptist recognizes how frustrating it can be for women in churches that don’t offer a place for them to use their gifts and passions: They could burn out and give up trying to serve altogether.

Despite their shared theological convictions, women in complementarian churches still risk being viewed as “feminist” or unbiblical for pursuing opportunities to lead. “Sometimes, we feel as if we have a huge target on our backs,” writes author and speaker Dena Dyer. Plus, they have to deal with practical burdens from mental load and other family responsibilities.

Work-life balance can be a challenge, but anyone serving in the church is prone to feeling that tension, said Heider, who recently completed a doctoral dissertation on ministry resilience.

Over nearly two decades at Warren Baptist, Heider has lived her version of 1 Peter 5:10. There were difficult seasons, especially in the wake of her daughter’s special needs diagnosis, but ultimately, she has learned to set boundaries, has stayed rooted in Scripture, and has been made “strong, firm, and steadfast” in the Lord.

Heider, now in her 50s, coaches female colleagues on navigating challenges and new chapters of life—one is preparing to go on maternity leave to welcome her first child—and she helps train the staff as a whole on proactively avoiding burnout.

Summer remains a busy season in many SBC churches. Women help put on vacation Bible schools and backyard Bible clubs. They work on curricula for upcoming studies, Sunday school sessions, and workshops. They reach out to visitors, gather for morning prayer, sing in worship bands, and organize meal trains for new babies and hospital recoveries.

After the SBC passed the first of two votes on the male pastors amendment last year, Nelson wrote an op-ed for Baptist Press calling on pastors to live up to their complementarian convictions by investing in the gifted women in their churches.

“In many churches, only men are offered robust theological training. But in Paul’s ministry, women are described as colaborers,” she wrote. “Although women ought not to teach men, a woman with sound theological training will profoundly affect her entire congregation as she teaches, trains, and equips other women; as she encourages, exhorts, and spurs on her elders; and as she holds the needs of her church family before God in prayer.”

To neglect this area, she told CT, would be “ministry malpractice.”

Lifeway found that the top reason women pursue leadership is out of obedience to what they feel God has called them to do. Nearly all the respondents—over 90 percent—said that they have sensed God’s confirmation and guidance in their roles, even if they come with sacrifice.

“I’ve never wanted to be a professional in ministry,” Nelson said. “I just wanted to share the gospel.”

Books
Review

Inside the ‘Secret World’ of Global Evangelism to Muslims

While reporting from conflict zones in Africa and the Middle East, Adriana Carranca met evangelical missionaries sent from surprising places.

Christianity Today June 5, 2024
Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

In a 2007 article, CT described British church historian Andrew Walls (1928–2021) as “the most important person you don’t know.” Among his greatest achievements was helping turn the attention of Western scholars to the remarkable growth of Christianity in the Global South. Walls’s work on what he then called “non-Western Christianity” was amplified by the efforts of David B. Barrett (1927–2011), whose groundbreaking research on global religious statistics produced the World Christian Encyclopedia, coedited by Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo.

Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims

We now know that the demographic center of Christianity shifted to the Global South during the 20th century in dramatic fashion, and we also know a lot more about how it actually happened. Evangelicalism, as one of the fastest-growing demographic blocs within global Christianity, has contributed significantly to these transformations.

Today, more than 77 percent of the world’s evangelicals are Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Even if a significant number of American evangelicals may favor some form of Christian nationalism (though the numbers are likely exaggerated), and even if a majority of white American evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, what often goes unstated is that the vast majority of the world’s evangelicals are neither white nor American. Evangelicals around the world are not united on matters of politics and race, but they lay great stress on the Bible, the central message of the Cross, and man’s need for conversion.

Evangelicalism, then, is plainly not an American movement. The vast majority of the world’s evangelicals live in the Global South, and they are actively engaged in sending missionaries to the ends of the earth. The World Council of Churches began using the language of “witness in six continents” in the early 1960s to describe how new mission centers were now established on every continent in the world.

When evangelicals gathered in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974, for the First International Congress on World Evangelization, they observed that the dominant role of Western missions was fast disappearing. In the 1980s, Luis Bush, an unassuming evangelical from Argentina who became an influential mission leader, coined the expression “the 10/40 Window.” The name referred to the regions of North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, concentrated in a single geographic rectangle between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator.

Bush was hoping to mobilize evangelical missionary movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into places Western missionaries found it harder to reach. He made it clear throughout the 1990s that these missionary efforts would be led not by Americans but by Christian leaders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Americans popularized “10/40 Window” language in mission circles, but Bush was holding massive gatherings in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to mobilize missionaries from the Global South. Today, nearly half of the world’s full-time cross-cultural missionaries are being sent out from the Global South, with countries like Brazil, South Korea, and India figuring among the top senders.

Rare access

Adriana Carranca describes some of these global transformations in her new book Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims. Carranca is a Brazilian writer who has worked as a war correspondent and investigative journalist in some of the most difficult places in the world.

Educated at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, she has traveled widely in Africa and the Middle East, covering events like the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Peshawar church bombing in Pakistan, the Lord’s Resistance Army uprising in northern Uganda, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the Arab Spring in Egypt. While Carranca was working in conflict zones and refugee camps, she began meeting evangelicals looking to reach Muslims with the gospel.

As a secular journalist who had spent time in American contexts, Carranca knew something about American evangelicalism. But what she discovered while working in Africa and the Middle East surprised her. Most of the evangelical missionaries she met were not from the United States. Instead, they were being sent out to the Muslim world from places like Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, South Africa, China, and South Korea. The evangelical mission to Muslims, she learned, was emanating from the Global South.

In 2008, Carranca was in Kabul covering the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Here, she first heard about significant numbers of Muslims who were converting to Christianity. This evangelistic endeavor, she discovered, was being led by an evangelical, Luiz, who hailed from her home country of Brazil. He was part of a network of other evangelicals from the Global South.

Eventually, Carranca convinced Luiz and his wife, Gis, to share their personal stories and to introduce her to other evangelical missionaries working in different parts of the Muslim world. To better understand the growing number of evangelicals she was meeting in Africa and the Middle East, she began reading works on global Christianity by historians like Philip Jenkins, Mark Noll, Dana Robert, Lamin Sanneh, Brian Stanley, and the aforementioned Andrew Walls.

Through her friendship with Luiz and Gis, Carranca grew more familiar with the world of evangelical missionaries who were serving on the ground in places like Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria. She met the occasional American or European, but the vast majority of missionaries she encountered were from Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, China, Romania, and South Korea.

During her travels, Carranca gained rare access to what she called the “secret world” of Christian missionaries evangelizing Muslims. She also learned about the influence of Luis Bush and traveled to meet him in Indonesia, where he was mobilizing thousands of missionaries from Asia to preach the gospel to Muslims.

Carranca’s long-form journalism is serious, intimate, and gripping. Though not a believer, she confesses that she came to admire the evangelicals who became her friends. The book introduces readers to Luiz and Gis and their coworkers from South Africa, Brazil, China, and South Korea, and talks about their daily lives, their love for soccer, and the joy they find in spending time with Muslim friends.

Carranca’s narrative includes riveting eyewitness accounts of terrorist attacks, drone strikes, police inquiries, church bombings, and the martyrdom of local Christians in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In one powerful anecdote, she talks about the murder of a missionary family she befriended in Afghanistan, killed by the Taliban in a brutal shooting. She flew to Pretoria, in South Africa, to attend their funeral services, where their graves were marked with a popular refrain echoing Tertullian’s words about the blood of martyrs: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

Polycentric Christianity

Soul by Soul introduces readers to some of the new faces of evangelicalism—and they are almost nothing like Barbara Kingsolver’s unflattering caricature of a failed missionary to the Congo in her popular novel The Poisonwood Bible. Rather than fictional white Southern Baptists from Georgia who are more misanthropes than missionaries, Carranca gives us real people, unmarked by what she calls the “arrogance and triumphalism” that has sometimes been associated with Western missionaries.

Her book does have some potentially misleading aspects. It begins with a concise history of Christian missions, which is largely confined to the history of American evangelical missions. This tends to give an impression of an American-led movement that runs counter to the book’s broader thrust.

Relatedly, Carranca seems to hold the view, sometimes stated subtly, that Americans are still somehow clandestinely leading the new missionary efforts now rising in the Global South. This is a highly contested interpretation. It misunderstands the polycentric nature of Christianity and it diminishes the important new role being played by rapidly growing evangelical movements outside the West. American evangelicals continue to support global missions from everywhere to everyone, but evangelicals in the Global South are often the ones leading the way.

Carranca’s work concludes by observing that American evangelicals have been among the strongest supporters of military intervention in the Middle East, even though these wars often complicate the lives of Christians in Africa and Asia and hamper the work of evangelical missionaries there. She also points out the tension between American evangelical support of Trump’s efforts to suppress migration from certain Muslim-majority nations and a simultaneous support of efforts to evangelize Muslims.

In these and other ways, Soul by Soul offers a prophetic challenge for American evangelicals who are enamored of an “America first” mindset. “Ultimately,” she writes, “American Protestant evangelicals will need to choose whether to be citizens of a nation or part of the global, diverse, and borderless kingdom of God.”

F. Lionel Young III is a senior research associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. He is the author of World Christianity and the Unfinished Task: A Very Short Introduction.

Theology

This Is the Way: How the Dao Helps Chinese People Understand Christ

Ancient philosopher Zhuangzi’s teachings can be a means of evangelism.

One of Zhuangzi's most famous parables: the butterfly dream

One of Zhuangzi's most famous parables: the butterfly dream

Christianity Today June 5, 2024
WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

In the opening lines of the Gospel of John, God’s eternal presence is rendered as “the Word,” a translation of the Greek word logos. In many translations of the Chinese Bible, including the popular Chinese Union Version, you will find this concept rendered as “the Dao (Tao).”

In English, Dao is commonly translated as “the Way.” In Chinese, the word (道) indicates a teaching or way of living that aligns with the heavens. It can also refer to the omnipresent essence of all creation in Daoism, a tradition of thought and religious practice that encourages its followers to seek immortality and achieve wisdom for discerning right responses to circumstances.

What does the Dao, or Word, of God have to do with the Dao of Daoism?

When I lived and taught in China, I encountered many sensitive hearts and inquisitive minds that were open to spiritual matters. Yet these seekers would often turn to the traditions of their ancestors for answers before considering the Christian gospel. My lack of familiarity with Chinese religion and philosophy hindered my witness, and so I decided to become a serious student of Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions.

Now, as a scholar of Chinese Christianity and religions, I have a much better sense of the ways that Chinese philosophy and religion can both converge with and diverge from Christian thought. I have a clearer sense of how people of Chinese descent connect their cultural heritage to their Christian faith.

Christian missionaries and scholars have a long-standing tradition of sincere dialogue with other religious and philosophical traditions. In Acts 17, Paul observes the inscription to an unknown God in Athens, Greece, and proclaims Christ as an expression and fulfillment of some of their traditions. Later, early church fathers like Origen and Augustine utilized Greco-Roman philosophies like Neoplatonism to deepen their understanding of the gospel and extend its reach across pagan Europe.

This pattern of using culture as a bridge for revealing the fullness of the gospel extends to China. Monks from the Assyrian Church of the East preached Christ in Chinese philosophical parlance during the Tang Dynasty in the 6th century. And Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci adopted Confucian modes of thought and discourse to impress the imperial courts of the Ming Dynasty in the 16th century.

Alongside Confucianism, Daoism has shaped Chinese spirituality for centuries, and one of its greatest and most influential figures was the philosopher Zhuangzi.

Little is known about Zhuangzi besides the fact that he was a minor official in Meng (now Shangqiu), China, and was likely a contemporary of the Confucian scholar Mencius. Nevertheless, he is regarded as a famed Daoist thinker who rigorously rejected political power and social influence in favor of a life led by “free and easy” contemplation and simplicity.

In my view, a serious consideration of Zhuangzi’s teachings on the Dao are vital to understanding the gospel in and for Chinese culture. Zhuangzi is not a divine figure to be equated with Jesus Christ, nor are his teachings sacred like Scripture—but his sayings can be stepping stones for Chinese seekers to understand the New Testament and see Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

How Buddhism spread across China

One of Zhuangzi’s most enduring ideas is what a “true person” (真人) looks like. To him, this is one who lives in perfect unity with the Dao and rightly discerns every situation. Zhuangzi characterizes this individual as exhibiting “inward holiness and outward kingship” (内圣外王), in that their spiritual power gives them a majesty unmatched by those who govern by force.

When the Han Dynasty disintegrated in A.D. 220, scholars felt disenchanted with Confucianism, as it failed to hold the kingdom together. They began a new intellectual movement known as neo-Daoism or “mysterious learning” (玄学), mixing Confucian and Daoist teachings that emphasized the importance of cultivating Zhuangzi’s concept of the true person.

Leaders of this new school of thought turned to Buddhist ideas to flesh out their neo-Daoist thinking. Buddhism entered China during the Han Dynasty but failed to grow because it taught that followers should renounce family and society in favor of monastic life, which was antithetical to Chinese sensibilities at the time.

Zhuangzi’s ideas made Buddhism more appealing to the Chinese elite. For instance, he encouraged his followers to practice “fasting of the heart and mind” (心斋), language that resonated with Buddhist meditation practices. In this way, Zhuangzi’s teachings served as a link between Daoism and Buddhism, allowing the latter to flourish across China.

If scholars once used Zhuangzi’s teachings to introduce Buddhist thought to Chinese culture, can Christians use Zhuangzi to do the same for our faith? How might Chinese seekers who are steeped in Daoist influences view Jesus according to this lens? To answer this question, I’d like to compare three of Zhuangzi’s most famous sayings with three New Testament passages.

Born of the Spirit

In Zhuangzi’s worldview, transformation occurs beyond human reason. One of his most famous teachings is from a dream in which he becomes a butterfly, leading him to question if he could potentially be the opposite: a butterfly dreaming that it is a man.

Through the butterfly dream, Zhuangzi implies that there may be much more to nature than we typically perceive. There are mysteries beyond our present reality that we cannot fully fathom. The dynamic experience of waking up from one reality into another suggests that a “higher” level of consciousness can come about without warning, absent of our own effort.

When speaking to a Chinese person whose worldview is influenced by Daoism, Zhuangzi’s perspective on the mystery of transformation may help them understand how becoming a believer is not a self-driven but Spirit-initiated endeavor.

As John 3 relays, Jesus talks with Nicodemus about eternal matters, saying, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” For Nicodemus, being “born again” seems illogical and impossible. But this birth is not one of body but of Spirit, Jesus responds.

The power of the Holy Spirit is far beyond that of the natural birth that Nicodemus was thinking about. The Spirit is like wind, blowing wherever it pleases (v. 8), and his work is not something we can manufacture by our own strength and intellect.

Cultivating spiritual fruit

To Zhuangzi, actions can become almost effortless when a person is connected to the Dao. In “The Secret to Caring for Life,” he writes about a master butcher who wields his knife instinctively. “After three years I no longer saw the whole ox,” the butcher says. “And now I go at it by Spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop, and Spirit moves where it wants.”

For Zhuangzi, what begins with effort slowly becomes as natural as breathing. The result is a seemingly supernatural capacity to do whatever it is one’s sense of vocation requires.

When introducing the gospel to Chinese seekers, Zhuangzi’s concept of effortless action (无为) may provide a deeper understanding of Paul’s teaching on the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–25. We are to be rooted in the Spirit of God as opposed to the flesh, Paul writes, and since we live by the Spirit, we are to “keep in step” with the Spirit.

How do we contextualize this in the Chinese worldview?

Keeping in step with the Spirit refers to allowing the Holy Spirit to work in us daily as we abide in Christ and dwell on his Word. As we do so, there may be times in which displaying love, joy, peace, patience, and other fruit in our lives can become as effortless as Zhuangzi described, no matter how challenging our circumstances are.

Appraising worth

For Zhuangzi, seemingly insignificant things can be bearers of great worth. In a tale from “Free and Easy Wandering,” a critic complains about an ugly tree and compares it to Zhuangzi’s teachings: “Your words, too, are big and useless, and so everyone alike spurns them!"

“Why don’t you plant [the tree] in the Not-Even-Anything Village or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? … If there’s no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?” Zhuangzi responds wittily.

To Zhuangzi, the beauty of that “useless” tree is its natural capacity to stretch out and provide good in the world. He critiques humanity’s inclination to only attach value to things that are self-beneficial and asserts that there is inherent worth in all of creation.

When sharing about Christianity in Chinese culture, Zhuangzi’s story on finding worth in seemingly pointless items can serve as a springboard toward understanding Jesus’ description of the kingdom of God.

In the parable about the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31–32, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed which, when fully grown, becomes a great tree, “the largest of garden plants … so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

To Jesus, the beauty of a tiny mustard seed is its ability to grow into a great tree that provides a home for the birds. Here, the mustard seed reflects how the kingdom of God may seem to have humble beginnings but is unstoppable in its growth.

Encountering the Dao become flesh

In examining Zhuangzi’s teachings and how they can help seekers in Chinese culture understand the Christian faith, we see instances of how his teachings can point toward Christ—one who is fully human and fully divine, and the fulfillment of Zhuangzi’s idea of the true person.

Jesus is himself the Way, or the Dao: “In the beginning was the Dao, and the Dao was with God, and the Dao was God. … The Dao became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1, 14; CUV).

Nevertheless, bearing witness to Christ through the language and values of another worldview does more than just communicate the gospel to a different culture. It also provides new ways for understanding the gospel in our own culture. In this way, Zhuangzi’s sayings may also provide non-Chinese Christians with a new perspective on God’s Word, like how early Christian leaders used Greco-Roman philosophies to illustrate their theological articulations.

As Augustine said, and Aquinas later agreed, “all truth is God’s truth”—since, wherever truth is found, God is the source (John 16:13). And every signpost of God’s truth, embedded in any culture, points toward Jesus as the hope of all nations (Matt. 12:21).

Easten Law is the assistant director of academic programs at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Overseas Ministries Study Center.

Previous versions of this piece were published on ChinaSource.

Church Life

How to Make Friends at Church

Contributor

It’s tough to plunge into a new congregation. Here’s how to get your head above water.

Christianity Today June 5, 2024
Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Pexels

Once, a man decided to attend religious services while visiting a new town. He went to the meeting location and made a bunch of new friends, just like that.

The man in question was the apostle Paul, and we learn this story of his visit to Philippi, including that friendly Sabbath, from Acts 16. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t like Paul in multiple key respects, so perhaps the story should be accompanied by a warning: results not typical. For most of us, making friends in a new church is hard.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past year because, last July, my family moved from Georgia to Ohio for my husband’s job. It was a difficult move; we have way too many books, it turns out, and they’re heavy. But far worse than shifting the books was leaving behind so many people we’ve known and loved for years—friends at church chief among them.

Leaving is only part of the trouble, however, and finding a new church isn’t the end of it either. Once you’ve settled on a local congregation, just how do you make friends?

It’s important to mention at this point that my husband and I, both socially awkward academics, are not as bold as Paul and have zero skill in small talk. I’m plenty familiar with the lives and writings of people who’ve been dead for two millennia or longer but often find living people rather harder to understand. And yet, being in community with them is a requirement of our faith (Heb. 10:25). God created us for community with himself and other believers, and church community is both a scene and source of spiritual growth. It’s also—eventually—lots of fun, even for the awkward like us.

The question, then, is how you get past that “eventually.” It isn’t easy. If you haven’t been that new person in a while, I want to remind you that it can be scary and uncomfortable. Feeling like the outsider was hard in kindergarten and third grade. It’s still hard, it turns out, when you’re a full-fledged grownup. And hard as it is for a family like mine to get settled in a new community, sitting in church alone, as theologian Dani Treweek eloquently reminds us, adds yet another layer of discomfort.

But this isn’t just a matter of hurt feelings. Not making friends at church can easily become a spiritual problem. I’ve encountered too many stories of people leaving churches (or quitting church altogether) because they struggled to make friends—because after weeks or even months of attendance, no one tried to get to know them or invited them for a meal.

In one case, a family attended a large church for about a year. They never formally joined, but they were there most Sundays. Then the dad got very sick. They missed church for a month and a half, but no one ever checked in. It seemed, they thought, as if no one even noticed they were gone.

It would be easy to blame congregations in stories like these for being too cliquish—or perhaps not attentive enough to people’s needs or insufficiently welcoming to newcomers. Sometimes the villain in these stories really is a communal callousness or lack of pastoral care.

Often, though, I think the situation is far more innocent. My example above involves a large church with multiple services. It’s easy for people to get lost in the crowd. Maybe someone noticed this family wasn’t there for a few weeks and simply assumed they had switched to another service. But also, remember that the family never became members, even after attending for a year. It’d be reasonable to think they’d just decided to go elsewhere, especially if they weren’t involved in church activities outside of Sunday mornings.

I tell this story as I turn to talking solutions because it points us to the most important thing to remember when you’re trying to make friends at church: In almost every case, everyone wants to make this happen—it’s just that it takes effort and commitment on all sides. Just as the old guard must remember how difficult it is to come into a new community, so newcomers must remember that initiation is their responsibility too. As we so easily tell children, be the friend that you want someone else to be to you.

And that’s really the only solution I have to offer, because it’s the only solution there is: You make friends at church by being a friend at church.

It’s what my husband, Dan, and I have tried to do here in Ohio, however imperfectly. We started getting to know others in the congregation not only on Sundays but outside church walls. We invited people over for meals at our house and to join us at activities like local concerts. We invited ourselves over to visit friends who were housebound for a time (e.g., while recovering from surgery).

And you know what? It turns out it can be just as intimidating for established church members to connect with newcomers as it is the other way around. By being willing to take the first step sometimes, we were able to jumpstart wonderful friendships with people who have warmly opened their hearts and homes to us in the months since.

Now, within this advice, I do have two more specific tips. First, for newcomers: Often, the easiest people to befriend in a church are retirees. Why? Because their schedules are a little less hectic than those of people in my life stage—busy working and raising children. They may also have a little (or a lot) more emotional bandwidth for playing and talking with energetic children, should you have some of those. While my concern each time we invite people into our home is that the children might not behave, our new friends whose kids are grown embrace the chaos with glee.

And second, for the old guard: Your church can make it easier for everyone to get to know each other by making plans during the week. Our new church has Wednesday night classes for kids and adults during much of the school year, and our old church fostered small groups that met throughout the week. For those who make it a point to be involved, these ministries are opportunities to make new friendships as much as they’re opportunities for discipleship.

Yet, ultimately, even with that institutional help, friendships take time and effort. You reap what you sow. But take heart: Beautiful friendships that will span decades may start at any moment—even with that simple lunch of tacos after church, right there in your messy dining room, strewn with art supplies from last night’s finger-painting adventures.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and the forthcoming Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity (IVP Academic, 2024).

News

Died: Jürgen Moltmann, Theologian of Hope

A German soldier found by Christ in a prisoner of war camp, he became a renowned Christian scholar who taught that “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”

Christianity Today June 4, 2024
Bernd Weissbrod/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images / edits by Rick Szuecs

Jürgen Moltmann, a theologian who taught that Christian faith is founded in the hope of the resurrection of the crucified Christ and that the coming kingdom of God acts upon human history out of the eschatological future, died on June 3 in Tübingen, Germany. He was 98.

Moltmann is widely regarded as one of the most important theologians since World War II. According to theologian Miroslav Volf, his work was “existential and academic, pastoral and political, innovative and traditional, readable and demanding, contextual and universal,” as he showed how the central themes of Christian faith spoke to the “fundamental human experiences” of suffering.

The World Council of Churches reports that Moltmann is “the most widely read Christian theologian” of the last 80 years. Religion scholar Martin Marty said his writings “inspire an uncertain Church” and “free people from the dead hands of dead pasts.”

Moltmann was not an evangelical, but many evangelicals engaged deeply with his work. The popular Christian author Philip Yancey called Moltmann one of his heroes and said in 2005 that he had “plowed through” nearly a dozen of his books.

Editors at Christianity Today were critical of Moltmann’s theology when they first grappled with it in the 1960s but still found themselves commending his work.

“We are brought up short,” G. C. Berkouwer wrote, “and reminded to think and to preach about the future in a biblical perspective. If this happens, all the theological talks have borne good fruit.”

Today, evangelicals who are ultimately critical of Moltmann’s views—disagreeing strongly with one aspect or another—have still found much to value and frequently encourage others to read him.

“Moltmann was a constant reference point for me,” Fred Sanders, a systematic theologian at Biola University, wrote on the social platform X. “Last year I taught a little bit from his book The Crucified God, and was struck by how powerful his voice still is for students. … And even for me, on the far side of abiding disagreements, re-reading Moltmann means encountering line after line of arresting ways of putting things.”

New Testament professor Wesley Hill said he disagreed with Moltmann “on what feels like every major Christian doctrine.” And yet “few theologians have moved and provoked and inspired me in the way he has. His work is all about the crucified and risen Jesus.”

Moltmann was born into a nonreligious family on April 8, 1926. His parents, he wrote in his autobiography, were adherents of a “simple life” movement that was committed to “plain living and high thinking.” They made their home in a settlement of like-minded people in a rural area outside Hamburg. Instead of going to church, the Moltmanns worked in their garden on Sunday mornings.

The family nonetheless sent their son to confirmation classes at the local state church when he was old enough. It was seen as a rite of passage. Moltmann recalled learning very little about Jesus, the Bible, or the Christian life. The pastor focused his lessons on trying to prove that Jesus wasn’t Jewish but actually Phoenician, and therefore Aryan, teaching the children the antisemitic theology promoted by the Nazis.

“It was complete nonsense,” Moltmann said.

At about the same time, in another rite of passage, Moltmann was sent to the Hitler Youth. While the uniforms and anthems made him feel very patriotic, he later recalled, he was bad at marching and hated the military drills. On one camping trip, he was crammed into a tent with ten boys. The experience left him with the strong sense that he enjoyed being alone.

Despite the rampant antisemitism of the time, Moltmann’s childhood hero was Albert Einstein, who was Jewish. Moltmann wanted to go to university and study math. That dream was interrupted by World War II.

At 16, Moltmann was drafted into the air force and assigned to defend Hamburg with an 88 mm anti-aircraft flak gun. He and a schoolmate named Gerhard Schopper were stationed on a platform set up on stilts in a lake. At night, they looked at the stars and learned the constellations.

Then the British attacked. They sent 1,000 planes in July 1943 to drop explosives and incendiaries on the city, starting a firestorm that melted metal, asphalt, and glass. Anything organic—wood, fabric, flesh—was consumed by a sea of fire. Temperatures rising above 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit sucked the air out of the streets so the city sounded, according to one survivor, “like an old church organ when someone is playing all the notes at once.”

The operation—which didn’t target military installations or munitions factories but “the morale of the enemy civil population”—was codenamed “Gomorrah,” after the biblical city destroyed by God in Genesis 19. Around 40,000 people were killed.

When the attack was over, Moltmann was floating in the lake, clinging to a shattered piece of wood from his exploded gun platform. His friend Schopper was dead.

He would later describe this as his first religious experience.

“As thousands of people died in the firestorm around me,” Moltmann said, “I cried out to God for the first time: Where are you?

He didn’t get an answer that day. But two years later, he was captured on the frontlines and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Scotland. A chaplain gave him a New Testament with Psalms and he started reading Psalm 39 every night:

Hear my prayer, Lord,

listen to my cry for help;

do not be deaf to my weeping.

He read the Gospel of Mark and found himself deeply drawn to Jesus. The crucifixion undid him.

“I didn’t find Christ. He found me,” Moltmann later said. “There, in the Scottish prisoner of war camp, in the dark pit of my soul, Jesus sought me and found me. ‘He came to seek that which was lost’ (Luke 19:10), and so he came to me.”

When he returned to Germany at 22—the country in ruins—he went to school to study theology. The Nazis were pushed out of the universities during the American-led reconstruction, including the University of Göttingen theologian Emanuel Hirsch, who would hum the Nazi national anthem between classes and once claimed that Adolf Hitler was the greatest Christian statesman in the history of the world.

At Göttingen, Moltmann studied under people who aligned with the Confessing Church and taught the theology of Karl Barth. He wrote a dissertation about a 17th-century French Calvinist, focusing on the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.

While at school, Moltmann fell in love with another theology student, Elisabeth Wendel. They earned their doctorates together and got married in a civil ceremony in Switzerland in 1952.

After graduating, Moltmann was sent to pastor a church in a remote village in North Rhine-Westphalia. He taught a confirmation class of “50 wild boys,” and in the winter made house calls on skis. People asked him to bring herring, margarine, and other food from the store when he came.

“The first question I was asked everywhere was whether I believed in the Devil,” Moltmann later recalled. He taught people they could drive the Devil away by reciting the Nicene Creed. He wasn’t convinced they listened.

Moltmann’s second church was a challenge too. He was sent to a small village in the north of the country, near Bremen. There were rats in the basement of the parsonage, mice in the kitchen, and bats and owls in the attic. About 100 people attended church—but not all at once, and not regularly. On Sunday mornings, the young minister would wait at the window, wondering if anyone was going to be there.

He earned some respect from the farmers for his skill playing the card game Skat, though, and he learned to preach sermons that connected to people. If the older farmers rolled their eyes while he was talking, Moltmann learned, his theology had gotten too detached from their real-life concerns.

“Unless academic theology continually turns back to this theology of the people, it becomes abstract and irrelevant,” he later wrote. “l was not totally suited to be a pastor, but l was happy to have experienced the entire height and depth of human life: children and aged, men and women, healthy and sick, birth and death, etc. l would have been happy to have remained a theologian/pastor.”

In 1957, Moltmann left pastoral ministry to teach theology. He lectured on a range of topics but grew especially interested in the history of Christian hope for the kingdom of God.

At the same time, he started to engage with the work of a Marxist philosopher named Ernst Bloch. Moltmann wrote several critical reviews of Bloch’s books but found his ideas stimulating. Bloch argued life was moving dialectically toward a final utopia. In his three-volume magnum opus, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope), he made the case for revolutionary hope, claiming that Marxism was guided by a mystical impulse of anticipation for an ultimate fulfillment.

Though he was an atheist, Bloch frequently quoted Scripture. He said he was attempting to articulate the “eschatological conscience that came into the world through the Bible.”

Moltmann noted that while many theologians had written about faith and love, there was little in the Protestant tradition about hope. Theology had “let go of its own theme,” he said, and he decided to take up the task.

He started teaching on the topic first at the University of Bonn and then at the University of Tübingen, where he would spend the remainder of his career.

Moltmann published Theologie der Hoffnung (Theology of Hope) in 1964. It was met with intense interest. The book went through six printings in two years and was translated into multiple foreign languages. It appeared in English for the first time in 1967 and earned enough attention from theologians to attract the notice of The New York Times.

In a front page story in March 1968, the newspaper reported that debates over the trendy “death of God” theology had been replaced by a discussion of the 41-year-old Moltmann’s idea that God “acts upon history out of the future.” Moltmann was quoted as saying that “from first to last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology.”

The newspaper marveled that this “theology of hope” was founded on belief in the resurrection, “which many other theologians now regard as a myth.”

Some critics at the time, however, worried this emphasis on eschatology overshadowed the work of Christ on the cross. They said Moltmann’s focus on final things ignored or even downplayed the importance of the crucifixion.

Moltmann came to think there was something to that criticism during a symposium on Theology of Hope at Duke University in April 1968. During one of the sessions, the theologian Harvey Cox ran into the room and shouted, “Martin Luther King has been shot.”

The gathering quickly disbanded as theologians scrambled to get home amid reports of riots across the country. But the students at Duke—who hadn’t seemed to care at all about the theology of hope—gathered for a spontaneous vigil in the school’s quad. They mourned King’s death for six days. On the last day, the white students were joined by Black students from other schools, and together they sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

Moltmann, moved by the transformative power of suffering, started to work on his second book, Der gekreuzigte Gott (The Crucified God). It was published in 1972 and came out in English two years later.

“Christian identity can be understood only as an act of identification with the crucified Christ,” Moltmann wrote. “The ‘religion of the cross’ … does not elevate and edify in the usual sense, but scandalizes; and most of all it scandalizes one’s ‘co-religionists’ in one’s own circle. But by this scandal, it brings liberation into a world which is not free.”

Moltmann united the two ideas—Christ’s suffering and Christians’ hope—and that became the core of his theology. He taught that people should “believe in the resurrection of the crucified Christ and live in the light of his reality and future.”

Or more simply: “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”

Moltmann retired in 1994 but continued to work with graduate students for many years after. When his wife died in 2016, he wrote a final book on death and resurrection.

Moltmann is survived by four daughters.

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