Spanish Evangelical Party Makes a Bid for European Union Parliament Seat

Long-shot campaign needs 15,000 signatures for the chance to get on the ballot.

Voters in Spain cast their ballots. The European Parliament elections will take place in June.

Zowy Voeten/Getty Images

Eye-catching election placards are popping up across the European Union. They appear overnight in public squares and in front of train stations, along the Autobahn and the Champs-Élysées and many lesser-known rues, strassen, and calles.

With bright colors and bold slogans, each promises to make a difference in the European Parliament, if only passersby will vote for their party in the upcoming election.

“Make Europe strong,” says one.

“Make it happen,” urges another.

And there’s a new slogan for a new party in Spain: “United in values, guided by faith.”

The sign asks people to vote for Fe, Infancia, Educación, y Libertad (Faith, Childhood, Education, and Liberty) or FIEL, a new, explicitly evangelical Christian party. The party’s candidate for the European Parliament may not actually appear on ballots in June, though. Before Juan José Cortés can stand for election, FIEL needs 15,000 signatures by May 12.

“We are at a crucial moment,” party president Salvador Martí wrote in a recent campaign letter. “Your signature is essential so that we can continue in the battle, and so that together we can work for a better future for all.”

Martí acknowledges this is an uphill battle. Many experts say it’s basically impossible to build a new party from scratch out of a tiny religious minority. Evangelicals make up about 2 percent of the Spanish population. There are fewer than 5,000 evangelical congregations in the whole country, even with the recent increase in evangelical immigrants.

“We do not want to settle for the obstacles that say that it is not possible to build a party built by citizens like you and me in Spain,” Martí wrote in April.

The once-every-five-year election presents a strategic opportunity for evangelicals seeking to have more influence on European politics.

The European Union’s 447 million citizens in 27 countries have the chance to vote from June 6 to 9, electing 720 politicians to the parliament in Brussels. Those leaders, sitting in the EU’s only directly elected legislative body, will provide democratic oversight to the European government. They will pass laws and approve budgets, together with the council of appointed representatives of member countries, and steer the EU into the future.

Evangelical parties like FIEL may have a chance in 2024 to make some gains, due to general discontent with the long-established ruling parties. But they will have to cut through disinformation, reach generally disinterested voters, and jockey for position amid a range of parties hoping to capitalize on that discontent.

At the moment, polls suggest Europe’s far-right parties—including Alternative for Germany in Germany, National Rally in France, and Vox in Spain—are winning over voters dissatisfied with the status quo.

The center-left and center-right parties that have historically dominated since World War II will probably win enough seats to form a governing coalition. But the current president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen of Germany, said her party in Brussels might have to consider working with these far-right groups. Left-leaning members of the current coalition say that would be unacceptable.

Amid the fray, Christian candidates—evangelicals among them—are trying to join multi-party groups and to win seats so that they can have an impact. In the last election in 2019, for example, three members of the European Christian Political Movement (ECPM) won seats: Bert-Jan Ruissen, from a conservative Calvinist party in the Netherlands; Peter van Dalen from the centrist Christian Union in the Netherlands; and Helmut Geuking, a Greek Catholic, who is part of the social conservative Family Party of Germany. Cristian Terjeș, from the Christian Democratic National Peasants’ Party in Romania, became the ECPM’s fourth representative in the European Parliament the following year.

The ECPM’s general director, Maarten van de Fliert, said the 22 separate parties that make up the ECPM all want to promote their Christian values in EU politics. What that looks like, though, can vary a lot from country to country, party to party, and denomination to denomination.

“All these different denominations and all the different interpretations of doing Christian politics also reflects the colorful diversity of the Christian faith and of the Lord God,” Van de Fliert told CT. “How the parties want to implement those Christian views varies very much, along the line of church denominations.”

Van de Fliert could not say whether any of the ECPM politicians are evangelicals, though. The distinction did not make sense to him.

“It does not work like that in Europe,” he said.

Arie de Pater, who represents the European Evangelical Alliance (EEA) in Brussels, said there are about 20 million evangelicals in Europe, but they don’t have a single political identity and aren’t unified, in all their different political contexts, around any one-party program.

The EEA is non-partisan but lobbies to advance biblical beliefs and values at the European level. De Pater said the organization has traditionally focused on freedom of belief, freedom of expression, policies that strengthen families, and politics that protect life by limiting abortion and assisted suicide. In this election, de Pater said, many evangelicals represented by the EEA have also expressed concerns about humanitarian aid for asylum seekers and the possible future dangers of artificial intelligence.

The EEA also does a lot of work encouraging evangelical involvement in EU politics.

“We want to show people the importance of the parliament and the upcoming elections,” de Pater said. “The parliament will shape the future of the European Union for the next five years, if not longer. It’s important we engage the debate.”

In other words, de Pater said the EEA wants to “draw people into Europe.”

FIEL, however, wants to change the way Europe works. Similar to other populist parties, FIEL hopes to draw support from Spaniards frustrated with politics as usual in Brussels.

“Europe is at a key moment in a fierce battle where policies based on lies are confronted with policies based on truth,” Martí told CT, “and where attempts are being made to bury the Christian principles of Europe.”

Martí is a police officer in the northern city of Logroño who achieved some media notoriety a few years ago as a result of his educational project, “Alexia Enséñanos,” which seeks to protect children from possible abuses, and the other leaders of FIEL have gathered educators, lawyers, political scientists, social workers, and pastors with deep Christian convictions, who all share common concerns. Some of the concerns are familiar evangelical issues, like protecting the sanctity of human life and religious freedom. But the leaders are also talking about “uncontrolled immigration, poverty, and social disintegration,” according to a FIEL party statement.

The issue that galvanized Martí and others to found the party is public schools. FIEL proposes granting parents “the ability to set limits to schools” and guaranteeing them the right to be “informed and consulted on the activities in which their children will participate.” They would also like to eliminate “the promotion of inclusive language in school material” and to change sex education so that it “does not destroy innocence.”

FIEL shares some agenda items with the rising right-wing party Vox, which supports “traditional values” and opposes what it calls Spain’s “progressive dictatorship.” Vox wants parents to be able to opt their children out of mandatory classes if the instruction goes against their values.

Martí said he agrees with some of what Vox wants and that there are evangelical brothers in that party “doing their bit to bring change to Spain,” but he also said FIEL is different. It’s distinctly religious and distinctly evangelical.

“Our first responsibility is to be faithful to God and to the principles of the Bible, not to partisan interests, not even our own,” Martí said.

As of mid-May, however, the party only had about half the signatures necessary to get on the ballot. And some of the nation’s evangelicals haven’t even heard of FIEL and its slogan, “United in values, guided by faith.”

Diego Huelva, a 41-year-old evangelical living on the outskirts of Seville, said he was surprised to hear that a Spanish evangelical party would even attempt to stand for elections. Huelva said evangelicals in Spain have generally not been interested in working in politics because of their experience of repression under the Francisco Franco dictatorship.

Recently, however, Huelva has seen an increase in more outspoken evangelicals from Latin America who are interested in joining the political fray.

“They come with different perspectives on politics, and feel called to participate more actively,” he said. “The more they become integrated here in Europe, the more they will try and shape European politics.”

That’s the future, though. In 2024, the prospects for an explicitly evangelical party in Spain seem very thin.

“Getting those signatures would be a huge success,” Huelva said. “Getting someone elected to parliament would be a miracle.”

- More from Ken Chitwood

Church Life

Bringing the City of God to the Cities of Earth

Rabekah Henderson

Christian urban designers and developers explain how their faith affects their work—and how their work affects your faith.

Arto Marttinen / Unsplash

The design of our communities shapes how we interact with one another, love one another, and grow with one another. But who shapes those communities?

In a broad sense, we all do. Our choices of where and how to live, learn, work, and worship collectively influence the market, ministry decisions, and what feels “right” and “normal.” But some professions—city planners, urban designers, architects, and real estate developers—take a larger and more direct role in creating our cities and neighborhoods. And for many Christians in these industries, faith guides their construction of spaces for community flourishing.

Where we live can echo both the creation and redemption yet to come (Rom. 8:18–25). These places can foster deep, lasting community in a fragmented world, four Christians in these industries told me, and the local church can be a model of inviting, appealing design.

The pillars of good urban design—beauty, function, community building, accessibility—are more than fads or human preferences. They’re a foretaste of the redeemed earth, a signpost pointing us toward a better way of living. And it shouldn’t be lost on us, said Chris Elisara, chair of the Congress for New Urbanism Members Christian Caucus, that the world to come isn’t described as a garden or a quaint village but as a city (Rev. 22:3). “As we participate in kingdom building,” he told me, “it culminates with [that] city description in Revelation. And that’s where God dwells with his people again.”

Accordingly, more mundane “kingdom building” through city planning and urban design shouldn’t be thoughtless, out of touch, or chaotic. It must be carefully considered in line with how we’re called to live together in Scripture. “We all fit together in creation in a way that’s particularly designed,” Elisara continued. “And so when we do our planning, our architecture, we need to bring an understanding of how to do those in such a way that they are commensurate with God’s vision of humanity.”

In A Theology of Cities, the late Tim Keller described that vision as “marked by God-shalom (Jeru-shalom)—his peace,” one concrete outworking of which is accessibility and the neighborliness it facilitates. Resilient community flourishes when the built environment encourages incidental encountering, easy gathering, and casual strolling—what architect and urban designer Mel McGowan called facilitating “horizontal connection.”

“When I look at the instructions Christ gave us to love God and to love our neighbor, they’re both relational,” urban designer and architect Michael Watkins agreed. “And I’m certain we can design a built environment that allows us to be more relational.” In Watkins’s work, this means creating neighborhoods and developments that encourage mixed uses, multigenerational living, and walkability.

It’s easier to get to know your neighbor when you see them in their front yard or in line at the nearby shop each day. It’s easier to befriend a nearby family when you see them at the park a few times each week. It’s easier for a church community group to live life together when members are literally—not only spiritually and emotionally—close.

But vertical connection matters too, McGowan said. Sara Joy Proppe, a former real estate developer and founder of Proximity Project, similarly told me that she believes the built environment is a crucial part “of what shapes us as human beings—God created it as a setting for our stories.”

Part of Proppe’s work is helping churches use their property well. With her guidance, congregations have turned unused acreage into community gardens, dog parks, walking paths, and other small-scale public spaces for organic neighborhood life. “I really care about strengthening the church to be very active stewards and have their place” in a community, Proppe said. “The built environment is such a conduit for living out the gospel. And I think that’s a piece that churches don’t see very clearly.”

Church design itself can have an important—if often unnoticed—impact on the life of a city too. Historically, churches in denser, more urban neighborhoods were often built to be the anchor of a block or a neighborhood, sitting in a prominent spot like a street corner or in front of a small public square. Neighborhood life, both secular and sacred, would revolve around and within the church. Physically orienting local life around the church was a safe bet because, as Elisara wrote with geography professor Chris Ives, churches tend to be “stubbornly committed” to their communities and places.

McGowan has studied how churches and other houses of worship fit into the design of cities in centuries past, and he’s learned firsthand that modern, secular substitutes—big-box stores and massive movie theater complexes—simply do not have the same effect. “We were literally trying to recreate this feeling of human-scale, European urbanity, but it was always sacred space that was the center point” of those older communities, he explained. A Target or a theater might fill the space, but it won’t give local life the same long-term anchor and transcendent meaning.

Of course, post-war America embraced a different approach to home and church design—one that was car-centric and suburb-oriented—and, today, relatively few of us live in a neighborhood built around church life. Our churches tend to have large parking lots on even larger plots of land, and the massive spaces that are useful on Sunday morning often sit empty (or barely used) the other six days of the week.

Those of us who aren’t in an urban planning field can think about how to put such spaces to good use. All Christians are called to “cultivate and keep” our world (Gen. 2:15, NASB), and that includes our houses of worship and the spaces around them. Whether urban, suburban, or rural, how can we make our church properties more beautiful and useful? How can we make them places that reflect, in Elisara’s phrase, “what it means to be fully human as God made us to be”?

Greater density of people and uses is often a good place to begin. Denser spaces designed to be relational allow us to encounter both the joys of community and its more “sanctifying” elements: annoyances, selfishness, and sin. Churches with acreage or rooms that are empty more often than not can explore using those spaces for child care, education, affordable housing, or even an entire “urban village.”

And beyond church property lines, Elisara advises Christians to actively “advocate for policies in [their] cities, towns, and neighborhoods that are best for that city,” including safer streets, greater freedom in housing construction, and better non-car transportation options. Advocating for these things will look different for Christians who live in more suburban or rural environments, but our built environments shape our lives at any density—and even if we fail to notice, they shape our faith too.

Rabekah Henderson is a writer covering faith, architecture, and the built world around us. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has been featured in Mere Orthodoxy, Common Good, and Dwell.

- More from Rabekah Henderson

Theology

Digital Lectors for a Postliterate Age

Brad East

Postliterate people still need God’s Word, and online Bible ventures have found eager listeners.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty / Lightstock

Suppose you agree that ours is an increasingly postliterate age. The average person, including the average Christian, is reading less, and Christians of all ages, especially the young, lack the basics of biblical literacy. Is that all there is to say? Is hunger for Scripture simply dying out?

By no means. Of all tech pessimists I may be chief, yet few things excite me more than what’s happening online with the Bible. What we see is not declining interest in Scripture but an explosion of it. The question is not, therefore, whether people still need and actively seek nourishment from God’s Word but how best to get it to them.

Let me share a snapshot of some promising attempts to give an answer—to meet the world’s deep hunger with the pleasures, depths, and inexhaustible beauties of the Word of God. Call them “digital lectors.” In the preliterate era, most believers never read the Bible for themselves but heard it read aloud in the gathered assembly of worship. Those who read the Word were called lectors, which is Latin for “readers” and a term still used in liturgical traditions.

Online, new lectors are meeting the moment, presenting the Bible in fresh and creative ways. Sometimes, in a lovely closing of the ancient circle, they aren’t explaining or expounding the text, just reading it aloud. Either way, people are listening.

Let me begin with three overarching themes before turning to specific examples. The first and happiest thing to say about these online Bible ventures is that they are ecumenical. Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox are all rising to the occasion, using a mix of audio, video, and animation. So far as I can tell, there is little but mutual support and blessing between producers as well as listeners, and occasionally they feature crossovers and shared platforms.

It would be a marvelous irony of providence if the culprit for so much division and polarization today—namely, the internet and our digital devices—became an instrument of Christian unity. Lord, hear our prayer!

Second, I see an enormous range of audience scale and composition. Some lectors speak to millions, others to dozens. Often, audience size is determined by a given project’s targeting: Is it for women or men, Black or white, seekers or old-timers, deconstructed or reconstructed, liturgical or charismatic, or all of the above? Does it presume massive background knowledge or nothing but curiosity? Does it expect hours of leisure time for lengthy videos or nothing beyond 15 minutes a day for a quick listen in the car?

Third, alongside broad ecumenical convergence is a clear gender divergence. Outside of the most generic and massively popular programs, there are clearly demarcated male and female spaces for online Bible engagement. The latter consist primarily of authors and speakers who leverage their social media followings into Bible studies, online collectives, and theological reflection—by women, for women. Think of Beth Moore, Priscilla Shirer, Jen Wilkin, Jen Pollock Michel, Haley Stewart, and Phylicia Masonheimer, as well as organizations like She Reads Truth and Well-Watered Women.

The lectors I’ll review below are either reading for a broad audience or, in one case, geared toward men. Of the lectors speaking to women, I’ll only say: Keep it up. So long as the functional effect isn’t a Jefferson’s Bible for the sexes—separate, expurgated editions for male and female—this gender divergence isn’t a problem. It’s an asset. What we see online is what we see in church: believers wrestling with Scripture as men and women.

That said, the first resource I’ll name is widely popular, including across the gender divide. BibleProject is the brainchild of Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, who made their first video together a decade ago. The result, in their words, is “a nonprofit, crowdfunded organization that makes free resources like videos, podcasts, articles, and classes to help people experience the Bible in a way that is approachable and transformative. We do this by showcasing the literary art of the Scriptures and tracing key biblical themes from Genesis to Revelation.”

“Videos,” “approachable,” and “literary art” are the key words there. Their YouTube channel has more than 400 videos and more than 4 million followers. Dozens of videos have between 1 and 4 million views. The videos are typically 4–7 minutes long and consist of a voiceover unpacking the major through-lines and connections both within a biblical book and between it and the rest of Scripture. The commentary avoids jargon and “Christian-ese” while distilling historical and exegetical insights for an audience that may never have read the text in question.

For my money, no one does it better. Over the years, their videos have been a mainstay in my college classroom, and they always land with students. BibleProject can unlock even the most esoteric or foreign text—Leviticus, say, or Ezekiel. It seeks the spirit of the sacred page through careful and loving attention to the letter. God is revealed in the words of the Word.

In the podcast world, The Bible in a Year is the heavyweight. Launched by Ascension Presents in 2021, it publishes one episode daily and has repeatedly ranked as the most downloaded podcast in the nation.

The show is hosted by Father Mike, a Catholic priest at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Father Mike is young, telegenic, and extremely personable. On his YouTube channel, he speaks straight to the camera and explains Catholic teaching and practice in a simple, direct, and unapologetic style. On the podcast, he takes 15–25 minutes to read the biblical text aloud before offering modest context and commentary. Episodes are surely planned but feel unscripted, like a spontaneous homily delivered by a wise pastor who loves the Bible and knows it from the inside out. It’s not surprising that believers of all kinds have flocked to this resource, numberless Protestants among them.

A very different resource comes from Jonathan Pageau, a French-Canadian artist, icon carver, and convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. Over the last seven years, Pageau has developed something of a cult following online. In addition to his art, writing, and public speaking, he founded Orthodox Arts Journal; began a podcast called The Symbolic World; started a YouTube channel and a publishing press by the same name; and now has turned the entire enterprise into a website and online community that, early in April, held a World Summit. Well-known Pageau fans include Bishop Robert Barron, Rod Dreher, and Jordan Peterson.

By his own description, Pageau explores “the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world.” He argues that creation—in itself and in our experience of it—is intrinsically symbolic, and that the symbols we find across all times and cultures (such as contrasts of light and dark, above and below, within and without, male and female) are written into the world by God himself. They are God’s language, his special vernacular, and modern humanity is suffering from a mass symbolic amnesia. We are no longer conversant with God as we once were.

The result, Pageau contends, is a civilizational crisis. Even Christians are now post-symbolic people: We struggle to engage symbol-laden Scriptures and to interpret the world via biblical symbolism.

Pageau’s followers—many of them young men who feel alienated or adrift—flock to him for symbolic exposition of Scripture and nature alike. For the first time, maybe even after a lifetime in church, they find that the Bible is not boring but beautiful, a peerless cultural artifact, a book with bottomless depths. Like Jesus’s kingdom, the Bible is not of this world. Its voice, though never less than human, is somehow more than human. It is a means of grace.

For all their theological and stylistic differences, BibleProject and The Bible in a Year are Pageau’s single-minded comrades in this sense: Their task as lectors for a new age is to make the Bible interesting again. Or to put it the other way—they refuse to let the Bible be boring.

How many churches, pastors, and well-meaning teachers have assumed their job was to explain the Bible away, to apologize for it, to shave off the hard edges, to gloss over the wacky, the wild, the spooky? But these elements are exactly what draw so many people to the Bible in the first place. We must not try to tame Scripture any more than we try to tame God. Even in a postliterate age, Scripture untamed will continue to fascinate and transform us.

There are more examples I could give—many more. Alastair Roberts, of the Theopolis Institute and the Davenant Institute, comes to mind. Roberts is a co-host of Mere Fidelity and, on his own, has recorded a running podcast seriescommenting on every chapter of the Bible (as well as a crossover conversation with Pageau). Other ventures worth mentioning include Holy Ghost Stories, Truth Unites, Pints with Aquinas, Practicing the Way, and Word on Fire. But my aim here is not to be exhaustive; far from it. The point is that something is happening.

Shrewd lovers of God’s Word are using the internet to introduce or reintroduce an entire generation of drifting believers to the Bible. This generation may never become readers in the traditional mode: book in hand, turning pages. But they are encountering Scripture. Digital lectors are making sure of it.

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

- More from Brad East

Books

Review

Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis Without Anxiety

Matthew Mullins

Unperturbed by debates over the book’s relationship to modern thought, she helps us appreciate its marriage of literary structure and theological claims.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Wikimedia Commons

In her latest book, Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson insists that modern readers have largely misunderstood the literary and theological significance of the Bible.

Reading Genesis

Marilynne Robinson (Author)

352 pages

$21.09

Among the most salient causes of this misunderstanding, she argues, is our tendency to read ancient texts through modern categories—history, myth, fiction, nonfiction—that do not map neatly onto ancient literature. The result is a never-ending and mostly unnecessary debate between those who approach Genesis as a catalog of events and those who read it as mythic pastiche, pieced together from various ancient sources.

We get a feel for Robinson’s impatience with this debate in her characterization of the factions warring over Noah’s flood: “One side in the controversy is rebuilding the ark to demonstrate its seaworthiness, or tramping up Ararat looking for its wreckage. The other sees the story as cribbed and fraudulent.” Both sides, Robinson concludes, are led astray by the same impulse to judge the veracity of Genesis on the basis of how closely it conforms to historical events.

In fact, as she argues at the outset, “the Bible is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based.” The implication for modern readers of Genesis is that when we focus primarily on the historicity of the Flood account, for example, we tend to ignore the arrangement of Genesis as a work of literature designed to grapple with theological questions.

Arranged with artistry

This is not to say that Robinson doubts whether all the events represented in Genesis took place or that she fails to consider its compositional history. The goal of Genesis, in her estimation, is not to offer a play-by-play of primeval events but to give a theological account of who God is, who we are, and how we should live together in light of that theology. In Robinson’s estimation, then, the book’s literary structure is of utmost importance to its interpretation.

By literary, I do not mean that she treats the Bible as somehow comparable to a novel or any other contemporary form of literature. I mean that she is interested in the composition and final form of the biblical text, in the way it has been arranged with artistry to communicate theological truths about God, humans, and the world.

This literary approach makes sense given Robinson’s status as a modern master of the novel and the essay. Her novels have earned numerous honors, including a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her erudite essays on subjects ranging from theology and science to politics and history have made her a stalwart contributor to some of the nation’s most storied periodicals, religious and otherwise. Literary structure is her craft, and she is deeply attuned to how the arrangement of Genesis asks us to read it in certain ways to the exclusion of others.

While Robinson’s emphasis on literary craft might seem to place her in the camp of those who regard Genesis as merely human in its authorship, she harbors no compunction about the fact that Genesis is, at least in part, a more-than-human text.

The accounts we find in the Bible “are really far too tough-minded to be the products of ordinary this-worldly calculation,” she points out. “I am content to believe,” she notes, “that certain early Hebrews, under the influence of Moses and still pondering the faithfulness of God that they saw in the liberation from bondage, were inspired with a true insight into His nature.”

For Robinson, the fact that the Scriptures are shaped by both divine and human hands presents no contradiction. As she observes, “the Bible itself indicates no anxiety about association with human minds, words, lives, and passions.” This lack of anxiety—palpable in her prose—is among the most important dispositions of Robinson’s reading that Christians might seek to emulate. She is not apologetic about the things that many modern readers find threatening to the Bible’s relevance, reliability, and authority.

Perhaps the most potent of these perceived threats is scholarly inquiry into the provenance and composition of Genesis.

Whether engaging the Documentary Hypothesis (the theory that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible are stitched together from disparate traditions) or comparisons between Genesis and other ancient Near Eastern texts, Robinson maintains that Genesis is a unique and ingenious literary creation composed by humans, inspired by God, and designed to convey the truth about God and his world. Far from being fearful of comparisons with other ancient texts, Robinson contends that Genesis is most obviously unique at these points of contact.

Robinson argues that resonances between Genesis and ancient Near Eastern stories such as the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh or Enuma Elish constitute the best proofs of the Bible’s—and its God’s—exceptional nature. This claim is central to her reading and repeated throughout the book: “The Genesis stories, rather than adopting or appropriating them, instead engage the literatures to which they are often compared, accepting an image or a term but transforming its meaning within a shared language of thought.”

Comparing Genesis with other ancient creation accounts, she maintains that “the biblical way of telling the story of Creation differs from ambient narratives precisely at the points of their likeness.” Contrasting Noah’s flood with Gilgamesh’s, she insists that “these two stories differ crucially at their points of similarity.”

Again and again, Robinson demonstrates how theological insights into God’s character are clearest at these points of comparison. The Babylonian notion that humans exist to make offerings to Marduk, for instance, makes the Hebrew God so radically unique. As Robinson states, God is distinct “in His having not a use” for human beings, “but instead a mysterious, benign intention for them.”

Unlike the Babylonian gods, who are revealed to be numerous, capricious, and needy, Genesis gives us a God who is one, purposeful, and infinitely gracious. This graciousness, in Robinson’s reading, turns out to be central to the theology of Genesis. The book’s literary structure brings us back to it repeatedly, from God’s forgiveness of Cain to the second chance extended to humans after the Flood to the many redemptions of Abraham and his descendants.

Along the way, God’s image-bearers pick up on this divine predilection for compassion and learn to forgive one another. Esau absolves his brother Jacob. Joseph pardons his brothers. Genesis shows that God’s graciousness to us and our need to be gracious to one another cannot be overstated. It establishes mercy as foundational to Israel’s way of life as the people come up out of Egypt and build their own society.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it turns out, is not like any of the other ancient gods at all—which means that those who would follow him will be set apart from the rest of the world as well.

Robinson’s reading of the ancestral history that begins with Abraham in Genesis 12 and ends with the death of Joseph in Genesis 50 traces the purposes of this God in the lives of Abraham’s descendants and, notably, in the lives of those not descended from the first patriarch. The book’s theological emphasis on mercy and forgiveness thus extends to all people. God calls to himself a chosen people, but he also rescues Hagar and Ishmael and works through Melchizedek, Abimelech, and others who come from outside the line of Abraham.

God is repeatedly shown to be the God of all people, and Robinson’s focus on the literary arrangement of Genesis reveals that God has had a plan for all people from the beginning.

Purposeful answers

The great strength of Robinson’s literary approach to the Bible is that it focuses our attention on how a book like Genesis invites us into lifelong reflection on the nature of God and his plans for us. It may seem, occasionally, that Robinson sidesteps concerns raised by biblical scholars, but her approach fits the design of the text, which was careful and purposeful in answering the questions of ancient readers.

Modern Christians will benefit from spending a few hours with a book that does not treat the Bible as a “primitive attempt to explain things that reason and science would in the course of time make a true and sufficient account of.” And we might especially learn something from Robinson’s characterization of Genesis as an attempt to give a true account of God’s people in light of their convictions about who God is.

Unlike many histories that seek to romanticize and vilify their subjects, Genesis offers unsparing portrayals of some of its most celebrated heroes and generous portrayals of some of its most dastardly villains. It suggests that we might be better prepared to know God if we take seriously the psalmist’s plea for God to search our own hearts and to see ourselves as he sees us. Genesis, in this respect, is truly incomparable.

Matthew Mullins is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures and Postmodernism in Pieces: Materializing the Social in U.S. Fiction.

- More from Matthew Mullins

News

Arizona Pro-Life Groups Pray Against Abortion Ballot Measure

Harvest Prude

A dozen states could vote on the issue come November.

Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

Rosie Villegas-Smith was spending a Saturday handing out flyers with volunteers from Voces Unidas, a pro-life nonprofit, when she noticed a group gathering signatures.

The woman who approached her never mentioned the word abortion, only referring to women’s rights, but she quickly realized what they were campaigning for: a ballot measure on expanding abortion access in Arizona in the November elections.

The southwestern state is one of up to a dozen across the country that will vote on abortion later this year, part of the continued reshaping of the legal landscape following the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Arizona’s measure would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution, overriding its current 15-week ban and allowing the procedure at any point in a pregnancy if a health care provider determines it is necessary to protect either the life or the physical and mental health of the mother.

The state has been in a back-and-forth over abortion policies for weeks, with pro-life groups ramping up efforts to reach out to women who may be considering abortions and to voters who may consider supporting expanding abortion access.

Last month, Arizona’s top court ruled that an 1864 law prohibiting abortion could go into effect as a result of the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The controversial ruling came under fire nationally; even former president Donald Trump and other high-profile Republicans suggested it went too far. Vice President Kamala Harris slammed the law as putting women in a “state of chaos and cruelty caused by Donald Trump.”

A legislative repeal narrowly passed the state Senate 16–14 after two Republicans crossed the aisle to side with Democrats. One of the GOP lawmakers who voted for the repeal, Sen. Shawnna Bolick, said that repealing the strict 1864 law, and leaving a more moderate abortion bill in place, may dampen efforts by abortion rights groups to put more expansive abortion measures on the ballot. “I am here to protect more babies,” she said.

Gov. Katie Hobbs signed the repeal last week, which is slated to take effect 90 days after the legislative session ends this summer. There are legal efforts underway by the abortion rights groups asking the state supreme court to block the 1864 law from going into effect in the interim.

A 2022 state law allows abortion until 15 weeks of pregnancy in Arizona, with an exception beyond that point if necessary to save the mother’s life. The 1864 law prohibited abortion at any stage in a pregnancy, with an exception for the life of the mother.

“It’s imperative for pro-life citizens in Arizona to educate themselves and their neighbors about this extreme constitutional amendment,” March for Life president Jeanne Mancini told CT. The measure, she said, would “open the floodgates to painful abortion up until birth, ending precious, innocent life and stripping women of the health and safety protections they need and deserve.”

Arizona for Abortion Access, which is campaigning in support of the new measure to solidify abortion protections in the state constitution, says it has met the signature threshold to get the ballot. It’s now up to the secretary of state to verify the signatures.

“They’re not even happy with [15 weeks],” Villegas-Smith said. Pro-life groups like hers are addressing the implications of the proposed amendment and appealing to voters to protect life.

Villegas-Smith, who is originally from Mexico, became interested in pro-life advocacy as a result of watching friends suffer in the physical and emotional aftermath of their abortions. Her group also seeks to reach out to minorities.

The largest group of women receiving abortions in the state are Hispanic—in 2021, 43.8 percent according to the Arizona Department of Health Services—and Voces Unidas seeks to reach minority women with information as well as through support groups, baby showers, and in some cases, safe housing.

“We know that it’s very important to give a message for hope, that the baby is a gift from God, and so we organize baby showers for them and give them a basket and a cake and a full celebration,” Villegas-Smith said, “especially for women who don’t have family support.”

The nonprofit is not explicitly religious, but Villegas-Smith said they often work with religious groups, and that many of the volunteers and employees identify as Christian or Catholic. Voces Unidas makes a practice of “praying for life,” praying outside of abortion centers and at the capital before the vote over repealing the 1864 law.

Abortion policies may be on the ballot in nearly a dozen states come November. In addition to Arizona, there are ballot measures in Florida and Maryland. Other states, such as Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, and South Dakota, are either in the signature-gathering process or have submitted signatures and are waiting for approval. New York’s ballot measure is facing blowback in the courts, making the fate of the effort uncertain.

Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision reversing Roe, voters in a handful of states, including California, Michigan, Ohio, and Vermont, chose to protect and in some cases expand abortion access via ballot measures. Other states, like Kentucky and Kansas, voted down measures that would have restricted abortion.

“It’s kind of a wake-up call to us, to I think Arizonans and Americans, that a 15-week abortion law is not enough,” said Kelsey Pritchard, state public affairs director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. The group has a field team in Arizona canvassing ahead of the election.

“They’re on the ground not only making the pro-lifers aware of what’s at stake here, but people kind of in the middle as well. Because when you’re talking about health and safety, it’s not just a Republican pro-life thing. That’s something even pro-choice people care about,” Pritchard said. “That’s really something for all Arizonians to care about.”

- More from Harvest Prude

News

Died: Ferdie Cabiling, Philippines’ ‘Running Pastor’

Caleb Maglaya Galaraga

One of the founding leaders of Victory megachurch, he never stopped running to share the gospel.

Facebook/Victory Ortigas / Edits by CT

Ferdinand “Ferdie” Cabiling, a bishop at one of the Philippines’ largest megachurches who ran across the Philippines to raise money for disadvantaged students, died April 1, the day after Easter. He was 58 years old.

Dubbed “the Running Pastor,” the moniker describes not only Cabiling’s epic race but how he lived his life and served as an evangelist. For 38 years, he was a vocational minister of Victory Christian Fellowship of the Philippines, which has nearly 150 locations in the country. The branch he led, Victory Metro Manila, averaged more than 75,000 people each Sunday. [Note: The author is a member of Victory Church and was a part of the late pastor's small group in 2014.]

In the past two years, his focus was on teaching evangelism to Victory leaders. Every time he received a teaching invitation, his answer was always yes, said his assistant, Faye Bonifacio.

“He was a maximizer,” Bonifacio said, noting that Cabiling developed a habit of taking short naps while parked at a gas station between long drives. “Because he liked to drive, he did a lot in a day.”

Hours before his death, Cabiling had visited a church member at a hospital an hour away from his hometown of Cuyapo before parking his car at a gas station, likely for a break before heading to his next destination. It was there that an attendant found his lifeless body and rushed him to the hospital he had just visited. Cabiling had died of a heart attack.

“He was a serious man of passion, action, and conviction,” wrote Steve Murrell, the founding pastor of Victory, the flagship church for the charismatic-leaning Every Nation Churches and Ministries, which has churches and campus ministries in 82 countries, in an Instagram post. “For 40 years, he was a part of every major decision made by Victory leaders.”

Born on September 8, 1965, Cabiling lived in the rice-producing Central Luzon. His father was a farmer and his mother was a school teacher. One of six siblings, Cabiling grew up a “nominal” Seventh-day Adventist due to the influence of his mother’s faith, according to his autobiography, Run: Endure the Pain, Keep the Faith, Finish Your Race. After graduating from a Catholic high school, he moved 100 miles south to Manila to attend Adamson University, where his close relatives provided for his tuition and allowance. The plan was for him to become a civil engineer, work abroad, and support his parents.

Yet those plans changed during his sophomore year in 1984, a year marked by civil unrest against the first Marcos presidency, when he attended an evangelistic crusade by the US-based Maranatha Campus Ministries led by Rice Broocks. That night, Broocks highlighted John 3, noting that unless a person is born again, they cannot enter the kingdom of God. “If you died tonight, where would you spend eternity?” Broocks asked the students.

“I felt like I was standing in front of a torrent of truth as he preached the gospel of Jesus Christ with unreserved passion and conviction,” Cabiling recalled in his book. He decided to give his life to Christ during that meeting.

Afterward, one of the American missionaries invited him to be baptized at a pool in the hotel near where they were staying. Cabiling agreed, and the Americans lent shorts too big for him. He remembers “holding on for dear life to my shorts, lest I lose them in the waters of baptism.”

Days after, he was introduced to Murrell, who taught new believers biblical foundations. When the short-term mission trip that had brought them to the Philippines ended, Murrell and his wife had decided to stay behind. Together with Cabiling and other college-aged new believers, they started a church in 1984, initially called Maranatha Christian Fellowship. In 1991, they changed their name to Victory Christian Fellowship to emphasize Christ’s victory over death.

Arnie Suson, one of the early Victory members who later became one of the church’s pastors, said Cabiling was always assigned to do the altar call. Murrell would preach, and then the engineering student would be called to deliver a short gospel presentation. “There was an evangelist inside of him,” said Murrell.

After receiving his engineering degree, Cabiling decided to become a pastor at Victory. In 1991, he married another early Victory member, Judy Pena, who became a campus minister. Together, they helped establish new branches of Victory church.

“When we were starting, Ferdie was a diamond in the rough,” wrote Jun Escosar, a missiologist and Victory’s first paid staff member. “But you could see the steady growth and the passion to learn—not out of selfish ambition or to seek a name for himself.” Victory’s former leadership pastor, Neil Perion, said it took years for the church to convince Cabiling to be ordained a bishop at Victory, as he hated titles.

Victory grew quickly as the church focused on reaching Filipino students on the campus, with small group discipleship a crucial component in their outreach strategy. These young Christians would invite other students, their siblings, and parents, adding to the church’s numbers until thousands were gathering each Sunday in churches around the country.

Rico Ricafort met Cabiling as a sophomore in college. “You may have a lot of guides but not many fathers,” Ricafort said during a memorial service for Cabiling.

Ricafort later became a Victory pastor and, together with Cabiling and several student leaders, founded the campus ministry Youth on Fire in 1994, which spread to many colleges and universities across the Philippines. The late pastor was also instrumental in sharing the gospel to Ricafort’s parents and siblings.

Ria Llanto-Martin, a former campus minister who also met Cabiling when she was in college, described him as a “relational disciple-maker.” She remembers him spending a lot of time with the students, obliging their requests to preach the gospel in their classes and being there for them during times of need.

“I was in my 20s when my dad passed away,” said Llanto-Martin. “He was one of the first people to be in the hospital with us in the ICU. And then he prayed for my dad.”

In 2015, Cabiling, who was an avid ultramarathon runner, decided to run 1,350 miles across all three major islands in the Philippine archipelago to raise around $36,000 for Real LIFE Foundation, an organization he chaired that helps disadvantaged students. He aimed to run 31 miles a day for 44 days in celebration of his 50th birthday. Judy attributed his new obsession to a midlife crisis.

At 2 a.m. on September 5, 2015, Cabiling started his run in the town of Maasim at the southernmost tip of Mindanao. He ran through dangerous areas on the island, including what is now known as Davao de Oro, where insurgents have an active presence. He ran even as his left ankle and foot began to swell to the point that he “could feel bursts of extreme pain with every step.” He said that on the ninth day, “I couldn’t force myself to get up and continue.”

“Nonetheless, I never entertained the thought of quitting,” he wrote in his book. Cabiling’s solo race drew national headlines, as only six others had made the journey. When he arrived in Manila, a little past the halfway point, two prominent Philippine broadcast journalists joined him as he covered the stretch of the historic Roxas Boulevard along Manila Bay. He became known as Philippines’ “Running Pastor.”

On October 26, 2015, he completed the last leg of his race in Aparri, a town on the northernmost edge of Luzon island. In total, he exceeded his goal and raised $55,000, providing scholarships for more than 200 students.

That single-minded focus could sometimes affect interpersonal relationships. Murrell described Cabiling as having “humble boldness,” emphasizing that most who knew him have experienced that boldness “where he would say things we all wanted to say but we were afraid to say them. He’s legendary for speaking the truth in love to very powerful people that aren’t used to hearing correction.“

Several Victory leaders noted the late evangelist could be intense. Ricafort said that unlike those who correct others using the sandwich principle—sandwiching critiques with positive affirmations—his mentor served it “all pure meat.”

Serving the growing church and the campus ministry and equipping pastors and leaders on evangelism took up much of Cabiling’s time. He would preach at two events in two different provinces on the same day while still making time to minister over the phone and even virtually.

Judy said that, at times, she and her husband would have “loving fellowship” (translation: conflicts) over his jam-packed schedule. “He always had to do everything within one day,” she said.

Now, looking back, she sees why: “God allotted only 58 years for him to live, so he didn’t waste any time.”

Cabiling is survived by Judy, his wife of 33 years; a daughter and a son; and two grandchildren.

- More from Caleb Maglaya Galaraga

News

Online Witch Doctors Lure South African Christians

Nyasha Bhobo

Churches are combating syncretism among millennials and Gen Z amid a rise of social media healers who call on ancestral spirits.

Gogo Kamo, a sangoma in Kempton Park, South Africa, uses bones, herbs, and the Bible to interpret a reading with an online client.

Guillem Sartorio / AFP via Getty Images

Millions of Black South Africans seek guidance from sangomas, traditional healers or so-called witch doctors who use their spiritual gifts to connect with ancestors, prescribe herbs to heal illnesses, and throw dry bones to predict the future.

It’s a centuries-old tradition that has continued in the majority-Christian country and has adapted for the internet age: A new breed of influencer sangomas are positioning themselves on social media as digital-entrepreneurial-spiritual seers.

Church leaders across several major denominations in South Africa have long decried the practice as involving “evil, devilish, and unclean spirits.” But as the online sagomas draw in a mass audience of millennial Christians—a generation eager to “decolonize” their lives and reconnect to indigenous African roots—church leaders have new concerns around syncretism as well as internet scams.

Condemnation of sangomas and African ancestral worship is the strongest cog uniting European-legacy churches like Anglicans, Baptists, and Catholics as well as African-initiated churches like the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), said Tendai Muchatuta, a cleric with All Nations Church in Johannesburg.

Both kinds of churches say the practice, despite its popularity, is not compatible with Christianity.

The ZCC is the largest African-initiated church in Southern Africa, with about 12 million churchgoers, including some 9 million in South Africa. Bauleni Moloi, a ZCC pastor in Johannesburg, called sangomas “dubious agents of darkness out to sway Christians from the true focus on the gospel of the cross.”

But younger Christians are more likely to disagree. Many millennial and Gen Z South Africans embrace burning incense, joining initiation ceremonies for sagomas (called ukuthwasa), donning ancestral bangles, and reciting ancestral idioms, all with Bible in hand.

As an Africanist awakening sweeps young Black South Africans, many have been calling for the decolonization of their society and institutions, including Christianity.

“They are Christian, they are under 30 years of age, they make the majority of South Africa’s population demographics. They are unlike their parents who grew up under a strict dogma of obeying Lutheran, Catholic, or Presbyterian missionaries,” said one online sangoma, who goes by the handle luthandolove00.

Another sangoma, Gogo Khanyakude, offers online “dream interpretation” and “crossover meditation” for a millennial clientele. “I grew up in a Christian home,” Khanyakude said, “and there’s no conflict in mixing my Christian faith with the sangoma calling work.”

Many online sangomas say they and fellow healers grew up serving in church, singing in the choir, or leading Sunday Bible school, but they couldn’t resist the pull of ancestral calling, which they say they experienced through dreams, possession, or illness that couldn’t be prayed away by their pastors.

Some churches in the area don’t see sangoma rituals as a contradiction to the gospel. Shembe Church in South Africa—the oldest denomination blending ancestor worship and Christianity in the country—welcomes the use of sangomas and attending their initiation ceremonies.

“African spiritualism is a noble way to tame the relentless influence of European Christianism in South Africa,” said bishop Bulawayo Dhoro of Shembe Church. “We don’t see a contradiction but a wonderful blend of two faiths to make them one. In fact, a dozen of our pastors are sangomas too.”

Other Christians see a much greater risk to adding other sources of healing and guidance beyond Christ and his Word. Christian sangomas will damage the integrity of the Christian faith in South Africa if they are tolerated in mainstream churches, said pastor Ezikiel Mamokethe, a retired Presbyterian cleric.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C17NH4VIOM-/

Actor Thabiso Mokhethi quit being a sangoma to pursue ministry and now advises that those who say they can do both are deceived.

“When it comes to God, he has no equal. He cannot share his glory,” he said on the Street Talk podcast earlier this year. “People are lost. … As long as you are submitting to the ancestorial world, you are out of the kingdom of God.

In April, actress Brenda Ngxoli also announced that she “left sangomahood for motherhood and Christianity.”

Some dodgy sangomas in South Africa use voice apps to create fake online sessions where cloned “voices of ancestors” are relayed to gullible clients on WhatsApp or Facebook.

Syndicates of these fake sangomas have fleeced unsuspecting victims of millions of dollars using a combination of hallucinogenic drugs, romance scams, and promises of spiritual encounters with departed ancestors, the South Africa Police Service warned recently.

“They are swaying many souls from the gospel of truth,” said Mamokethe. “Churches must have the courage to excommunicate believers who dabble as sangomas. It’s a scam.”

According to the pastor, “only gullible churches would welcome Christian sangomas.”

- More from Nyasha Bhobo

News

SBC Membership Falls to 47-Year Low, But Church Involvement Is Up

Kate Shellnutt

Amid the continued declines, Southern Baptists are celebrating back-to-back years of growth in worship attendance and baptism.

Kevin Gonzalez / Unsplash

Despite years of record-setting declines shrinking the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to its lowest membership in nearly half a century, Southern Baptists have begun to see some signs of life within their 46,906 churches.

Worship attendance, small group attendance, and baptisms were up last year in the SBC’s annual statistical report, released Tuesday, while membership fell below 13 million.

2023 marks 17 straight years of decline for the country’s biggest Protestant denomination. It’s down 3.3 million from its peak, with the steepest drops coming during the pandemic. The SBC lost 1.3 million members between 2020 and 2022 alone.

Beyond COVID-19 disruptions, Southern Baptists have recently confronted some contentious issues within their convention, responding to sexual abuse and clamping down on female preachers, which have led some congregations to leave the SBC (including prominent megachurch Saddleback Church).

But statistics indicate that church departures aren’t a significant driver of membership decline; the SBC was down 292 churches last year, just 0.63 percent of its total.

In 2023, membership fell by 241,000, its smallest decrease since 2018. Yet attendance at SBC churches increased 6.5 percent, reaching above 4 million a week for the first time since the pandemic.

Attendance at small groups and Bible studies ticked up 4 percent to 2.4 million.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/dJPlk

With fewer Americans than ever attending church and religious disaffiliation on the rise, leaders see even small increases in engagement and discipleship as worth celebrating.

It’s the first time in over a decade that SBC worship attendance has grown two years in a row, though it still lags behind pre-pandemic numbers. Back in 2019, SBC churches saw over 5 million show up each Sunday.

“Outreach and discipleship are difficult today. They require time and commitment when our culture offers numerous distractions and alternatives. The pandemic was discouraging as fewer people engaged in these activities,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, which releases the annual report.

“But as people have re-engaged and new people are participating, there is much to celebrate in Southern Baptist churches today while we invite more to join.”

Baptisms, the key metric for Southern Baptists, also grew for the second year in a row.

“God has been stirring the waters, and an upswing in baptisms has solidly begun,” wrote SBC president Bart Barber, a pastor in Texas.

“Not only have we experienced a second year of increased baptisms, but we have also witnessed a year-over-year gain—25.94 percent more baptisms than in 2022—that leaves no room for doubt about what God is doing among our churches.”

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/LxtPX

Kevin Ezell, president of the North American Mission Board, said the baptism trend is widespread across regions. Out of 41 state conventions, 35 reported more baptisms in 2023 than 2022.

“Pastors are the difference makers here,” he said in a statement. “Despite all the distractions and challenges out there, they are keeping the focus on evangelism and encouraging new believers to follow up with baptism.”

The report’s release falls about a month before the SBC’s annual meeting, which gathers over 10,000 messengers in Indianapolis in June. They are slated to address new mechanisms for overseeing abuse reform and reporting as well as clarifications to cooperation agreements and guidance around women in ministry.

The SBC’s current membership of 12,982,090 is the lowest since 1976. The membership size peaked at 16.3 million in 2006.

One bright spot, leaders say, is the generosity of members and churches, who spent nearly $800 million on missions last year, up 9 percent.

“We are sharing the gospel with more people, gathering for worship and Bible study in increasing numbers, giving billions to support churches serving communities across our country, and sending millions to support mission enterprises around the world,” said Jeff Iorg, the SBC Executive Committee president-elect.

“Southern Baptists are not a perfect people,” he added. “But we are a movement making a positive difference in our world, and our most recent statistical report underscores this reality and motivates us to press forward.”

- More from Kate Shellnutt

Books

Excerpt

Duke Ellington Read His Bible in the Bath

Larry Tye

An excerpt from Larry Tye’s The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Lightstock

“Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” asked a 1921 Ladies Home Journal article. Whimsical wordplay aside, the question would become a serious one for mid-century America, as parsons and priests blamed jazz for soaring juvenile crime rates, drugs, and extramarital sex. A 1960 poll found that, among Black preachers, just 1 in 5 wanted to let jazz or blues into their services. Decades before, a religion editor at the Pittsburgh Courier had denounced Louis Armstrong’s “sacrilegious desecration of Spirituals.” Duke Ellington’s music was “considered worldly,” counseled the Rev. John D. Bussey, explaining why the local 1966 Baptist Ministers Conference had unanimously passed his resolution opposing a performance.

The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America

Larry Tye (Author)

416 pages

$26.00

But whatever commandments they were breaking—and there were plenty, from slighting the Sabbath to serial adultery—Duke, Louis, and king of swing Count Basie all seemed to take the Christian faith they’d been raised in seriously. And that faith found its way into their music.

For Louis Armstrong, the connection was there from the very beginning, when he learned to sing in his mother’s Sanctified church. “The ‘whole ‘Congregation would be “Wailing—‘Singing like ‘mad and ‘sound so ‘beautiful,” he wrote with his characteristic expressive, idiosyncratic punctuation. “I’d have myself a ‘Ball in ‘Church, especially when those ‘Sisters ‘would get ‘So ‘Carried away while ‘Rev’ would be ‘right in the ‘Middle of his ‘Sermon. ‘Man those ‘Church ‘Sisters would ‘begin ‘Shouting ‘So—until their ‘petticoats would ‘fall off. … My heart went into every hymn I sang,” he added. “I am still a great believer and I go to church whenever I get the chance.”

With Saturday night performances that stretched into Sundays, that wasn’t often. But nearly half a century later, Armstrong released an album the church sisters would have loved, Louis and the Good Book, with gassed-up versions of spirituals including “Go Down Moses” and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” He recorded “When the Saints,” the anthem of the Big Easy, more than 100 times.

Count Basie was raised in the Black church too. Two of his uncles were ministers; his father was a founder and pillar of Pilgrim Baptist Church in Red Bank, New Jersey. In oral histories and writings, fellow musicians and friends use the word spiritual to describe what Basie brought to the band. Sideman Harry “Sweets” Edison compared their group to church organists and singers who inspire congregants to “get up to shout.” Basie was a spiritual presence offstage too. “Prior to eating, he would do this elaborate silent prayer,” recalls tenor saxophonist Eric Schneider. If the food came before he was finished, “it was understood that we should go ahead and eat.”

Duke Ellington was perhaps the most pious of the three maestros. Growing up, he attended two services each Sunday: African Methodist Episcopal Zion with his father, Baptist with his mother. As a young man, he consulted the Bible twice a day, sometimes taking the book into the bathtub and reading until the water got cold. Though he shunned most jewelry, he wore a gold crucifix around his neck and carried a St. Christopher medal in his hip pocket. His Christmas card bore a simple message in gold lettering: LOVE GOD.

In the last ten years of his life, Ellington devoted himself to a series of sacred concerts, performances that brought together jazz and classical music, spirituals, gospel, and the blues. Suddenly, he was getting more invitations to play in churches than in dance halls. Synagogues too. “These are things people don’t know about him,” said singer-songwriter Herb Jeffries. “He had a great ministry. It was hidden in his music. … He was practicing his ministry moving about here and there, making people happy!” When a reporter asked how he, “as a religious man,” could “play in dark, dingy places where depravity and drunkenness reign,” Ellington whispered, “Isn’t that exactly what Christ did—went into the places where people were, bringing light into darkness?”

He also pushed back against preachers who accused him of defiling their churches with his concerts. “Some people ask me what prompted me to write the music for the sacred concerts. I have done so not as a matter of career, but in response to a growing understanding of my own vocation,” Ellington wrote in his memoir. “I think of myself as a messenger boy, one who tries to bring messages to people, not people who have never heard of God, but those who were more or less raised with the guidance of the church.” The sacred concerts, this most accomplished of composers and bandleaders added, were “the most important thing I have ever done.” They were important to audiences too. Take the girl who approached Ellington after one performance, telling him, “You know, Duke, you made me put my cross back on!”

Sacrilegious, then, isn’t the word to describe these jazzmen. Yes, their faith was unorthodox, and imperfect. But it also was warmly ecumenical and personally sustaining. You can hear it not just in their Christmas tunes but in all of their jazz, music rooted in the gospels and Negro spirituals they grew up with. Their abiding belief in God, all three maestros made clear, is what emboldened and empowered them to write the soundtrack to the Civil Rights revolution, to shape the soul of America.

According to his son Mercer, Duke Ellington “was quite taken with the story of the ‘Juggler of Notre Dame.’” It’s a parable that applies to Armstrong and Basie too. “The man was a great juggler, who would sneak into the church and juggle before the altar. As the story goes, the priests found out about it and kicked him out. God intervened and told the priests to leave him alone. The man was celebrating His presence, by using the gifts that He gave him.”

Larry Tye is a former medical reporter at The Boston Globe, and now runs a Boston-based fellowship program for health journalists. The Jazzmen is his ninth book.

- More from Larry Tye

Theology

Yes, Paul Really Taught Mutual Submission

Murray Vasser

Why Wayne Grudem’s interpretation of Ephesians 5:21 is untenable.

WikiMedia Commons / Edits by CT

In Ephesians 5:21, Paul instructs Christians to “submit to one another.” These words have traditionally been understood to require mutual submission, even among family members. The reformer John Calvin, for example, acknowledged that the notion of a father submitting to his child or a husband submitting to his wife might seem “strange at first glance,” but he never questioned that such submission is indeed what Paul prescribes.

In more recent years, however, this reading of Ephesians 5:21 has been called into question—ironically, in the name of theological conservatism. Many evangelical scholars now assert that the submission in this verse is not mutual submission (everyone submits to everyone) but one-directional submission to those in authority (some submit to others). The most outspoken proponent of this view is Wayne Grudem, a prominent theologian who helped establish the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

Grudem, who recently announced his retirement from teaching, has argued for more than three decades that Ephesians 5:21 could be paraphrased as follows: “Those who are under authority should be subject to others among you who have authority over them.” On Grudem’s reading, this verse requires a wife to submit to her husband, but it does not in any sense require a husband to submit to his wife.

In defense of this interpretation, Grudem appeals to the meaning of hypotassō, the Greek verb translated “to submit” or “to be subject.” Grudem claims that this verb “always means to be subject to someone else’s authority, in all Greek literature, Christian and non-Christian.”

“In every example we can find,” Grudem contends, “when person A is said to ‘be subject to’ person B, person B has a unique authority which person A does not have. In other words, hypotassō always implies a one-directional submission to someone in authority.”

The problem with this argument is that the claims about hypotassō are simply not true. Consider the following eight ancient passages containing the verb hypotassō. Each decisively refutes Grudem’s claim that hypotassō “always implies one-direction submission to someone in authority.” In several, hypotassō is used to describe submission that is explicitly mutual, not one-directional. And in all eight passages, hypotassō is used to describe submission to people who are not in positions of authority. (All translations are my own. An extended discussion of these and other relevant texts will appear in my forthcoming article in the Lexington Theological Quarterly.)

The seventh-century monk Antiochus of Palestine gives the following advice to the one seeking humility: “Let him submit to his neighbor, and let him be a slave to him, remembering the Lord, who did not disdain to wash the feet of his disciples” (Pandectes 70.75–77).
The fourth-century bishop Gregory of Nyssa explains that every member of a monastic community should consider himself “a slave of Christ who has been purchased for the common need of the brothers” and should thus “submit to all” (De instituto Christiano 8.1:67.13–68.12).
In a personal letter, the fourth-century bishop Basil of Caesarea speaks of one “who in accordance with love submits to his neighbor” (Letters 65.1.10–11).
In a treatise regulating life in a monastic community, Basil cites Paul’s exhortation in 1 Corinthians 10:24: “Let no one seek his own good, but the good of the other.” Basil thus concludes that it is necessary “to submit either to God according to his commandment or to others because of his commandment” (Patrologia Graeca 31:1081.30–38).
In a treatise attributed to Basil, the author describes members of a monastic community as both “slaves of one another” and “masters of one another.” This “slavery to one another” is not brought about by coercion, but is rather done willingly, with “love submitting the free to one another” (Patrologia Graeca 31:1384.7–14).
In a sermon addressing sexual promiscuity, the fourth-century archbishop John Chrysostom states that “the bridegroom and the bride” who have not had prior experience with other sexual partners “will submit to one another” in marriage (Patrologia Graeca 62:426.33–35).
In an exhortation to mutual submission, Chrysostom considers how one should treat a fellow Christian who has no intention of reciprocating: “But he does not intend to submit to you? Nevertheless, you submit; not merely obey, but submit. Entertain this feeling towards all, as if all were your masters” (Patrologia Graeca 62:134.56–59).
In a treatise attributed to the fourth-century monk Macarius of Egypt, the author exhorts members of a monastic community to remain “in this good and edifying slavery” and to render “all submission to each one.” The author envisions “all the brothers submitting to one another with all joy,” and exhorts them “as imitators of Christ” to embrace “submission and pleasant slavery for the refreshment of one another” (Great Letter 257.22–261.1).

Grudem’s interpretation of Ephesians 5:21 is thus founded upon a misunderstanding of the Greek verb hypotassō. As illustrated by the passages cited above, this verb is not only used to describe submission to people in positions of authority; it is also used to describe submission to neighbors, to brothers, and to wives.

Moreover, using Thesaurus Linguae Graecae—a massive digital library containing essentially all of the extant Greek literature from the ancient world—I have examined every citation and allusion to Ephesians 5:21 prior to A.D. 500. I find no evidence that the Greek-speaking church was even aware of the some-to-others interpretation defended by Grudem. Paul’s words in Ephesians 5:21 are uniformly understood by the ancient Christians to require submission to everyone in the community, regardless of rank, and are thus routinely associated with passages such as Mark 10:44 (“be a slave of all”) and Galatians 5:13 (“be slaves to one another”).

For example, immediately after quoting Ephesiasn 5:21, Chrysostom gives the following exhortation to mutual submission: “Let there be an interchange of slavery and submission. For thus there will be no slavery. Let not one sit down in the rank of free, and the other in the rank of slave; rather it is better that both masters and slaves be slaves to one another” (Patrologia Graeca 62:134.28–32).

Notice that in expounding Ephesians 5:21, Chrysostom uses the language of Galatians 5:13: “be slaves to one another.” While these two verses are routinely associated in the Greek patristic literature, Paul’s English readers often miss the connection. English Bibles typically render Galatians 5:13 as “serve one another,” but Paul’s language is stronger than this translation suggests. The Greek noun for “slave” is doulos, and the verb used in Galatians 5:13 is the cognate douleuō, which means “to be a slave.”

The verbs douleuō and hypotassō are thus quite similar and are sometimes used together as near synonyms. Consider the following four passages in which the verb hypotassō is paired with the verb douleuō.

The second-century Roman author Plutarch cites Plato’s advice not “to submit and be a slave” to passion (Moralia 1002E).
The Roman philosopher Epictetus, a younger contemporary of Paul, excoriates the one who fails to attain the Stoic ideal: “You are a slave, you are a subject” (Discourses4.4.33).
The Shepherd of Hermas, a second-century Christian text, describes what will happen “if you are a slave to the good desire and submit to it” (45.5).
In the first of the eight passages cited above, Antiochus writes, “Let him submit to his neighbor, and let him be a slave to him.”

In his arguments against mutual submission, Grudem has overlooked the similarity between these two verbs. He correctly observes that hypotassō implies a hierarchy in which one person is ordered below another person. Since two people cannot simultaneously be beneath each other, Grudem and other critics of mutual submission dismiss the concept as self-contradictory.

However, these scholars fail to observe that the verb douleuō in Galatians 5:13 also implies a hierarchy in which one person is ordered below another person. Nevertheless, as all commentators acknowledge, Paul is obviously using the verb douleuō in Galatians 5:13 to describe action that is mutual, not one-directional. Thus, while Paul’s language of mutual submission in Ephesians 5:21 is indeed (deliberately) self-contradictory, it is no more self-contradictory than his language of mutual slavery in Galatians 5:13.

The ancient church uniformly understood Ephesians 5:21 to require mutual submission, and the modern rejection of this interpretation among some evangelicals is rooted in spurious claims about the Greek verb hypotassō. Jesus took “the form of a slave” (Phil. 2:7), and all who follow him, both male and female, are called to embrace submission too.

Murray Vasser is assistant professor of New Testament at Wesley Biblical Seminary. This article summarizes academic research that was presented at the 2023 meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and is forthcoming in Lexington Theological Quarterly.

- More from Murray Vasser

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Arranged with artistry

Purposeful answers

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share

In this series

Share

Share

Share

Share

Share