by | Oct 3, 2024 | Uncategorized
You may be tempted to read The Pursuit of Safety: A Theology of Danger, Risk, and Security with an eye toward determining whether and to what extent its author, Wheaton College theologian Jeremy Lundgren, agrees with your own risk assessments and safety measures.
Don’t.
Though Lundgren leaves some hints about where he lands on discrete safety questions—most controversially, COVID-era rules and parenting decisions—his interest here is the bigger picture. Pursuit is an expansive examination of how Western culture prioritizes safety above other values and barely questions certain methods of ensuring it.
Lundgren rightly draws our attention to assumptions about safety so familiar we often fail to notice them, let alone consider their moral implications. He issues a timely call to churches to develop theologies of safety before they’re needed. And he effectively indicts modern bureaucrats who fiddle with past safety accomplishments but don’t consider the consequences.
But Pursuit also leaves key matters insufficiently addressed. One, about our culpability for unintentional harms, gets only a brief mention even though it could have far-reaching implications for day-to-day life. Another, about violence and other deliberate human harms, is part of a strange silence throughout the text. Lundgren attends primarily to safety from accidents.
Noticing the scenery
“The world we inhabit is scattered with tokens of safety,” Lundgren observes early in the book, “the warnings, notices, slogans, and labels that have been so thoroughly incorporated into the modern landscape.” Safety is literally part of the scenery, and that makes it easy to miss how its pursuit shapes our lives and informs our moral judgments.
Of course, it is good to be safe. Lundgren affirms that repeatedly. But he also observes that safety is not the only—or, for the Christian, the paramount—good that exists in the world. His aim is not to steer readers away from safety but to warn against pursuing it uncritically and at the expense of other goods we ought to value more.
That’s a tall order in the 21st century. For decades now, safety has had “an elevated moral status” in Western culture, Lundgren argues:
In an era typified by the lack of a cohesive moral framework, safety is something of an unquestioned, and therefore unifying, virtue. Its unifying power can be seen in the pervasiveness and homogeneity of the tokens of safety across all spheres of life. Safety has an authoritative ethical place in our world, influencing how we make decisions, interact with creation, respond to hardship, and relate with each other. Declaring something unsafe is generally equivalent to declaring it wrong.
That wasn’t always the case. The human need for safety is a historical constant, but our society’s practices for pursuing it are novel. I can’t recount the linguistic, mathematical, religious, and technological history Lundgren relays, but it’s useful equipment for understanding how we think about safety today, how we thought differently in the past, and how our attitudes might change going forward.
This portion of Pursuit includes important exhortations to prudence in a procedure-dependent age. Don’t simply follow the rules of safety, Lundgren urges. Develop wise and humane judgment and shoulder the responsibility that comes with it. There’s also an admirable rejection of chronological snobbery here, as well as a sharp critique of how our safety apparatuses continue to grow even after major risks have been ameliorated and all that remains is relatively minor fine-tuning.
Alongside that broader discussion, Lundgren reliably returns to theological questions: whether, how, and why the church’s pursuit of safety should differ from the world’s. Safety, again, is a good thing—but it is not better than Christ, nor is it a good we can perfectly acquire and maintain before the full redemption of a fallen creation. “The resolution of humanity’s battle with danger,” Lundgren writes, “will not take place within the horizons of history.”
While that battle continues, though, he calls Christians to build a theology of safety before danger strikes. The contemporary Western church was caught flat-footed when COVID-19 and its containment policies appeared, Lundgren says, because we never had to think much about safety in the past. (How little of humanity can say the same!)
Lundgren never spells out his preferred pandemic policies, but even if you think he’s hinting in the wrong direction, his push for a more deliberate theology of safety is needful. Having one wouldn’t have guaranteed the same pandemic decisions from every local congregation. But I do think it could have encouraged choices grounded more in Christ-centered prudence, care, and courage than in partisanship or instinct.
COVID and culpability
On the subject of COVID, there’s a portion of The Pursuit of Safety concerned with unintentional sins. It’s part of a larger discussion of accidents—more on that in a moment—but here Lundgren’s focus narrows to the moral status of accidents that cause harm. The discussion is heavily informed by how the Mosaic Law deals with acts like unintentional killings, and much of Lundgren’s interest here is in forgiveness.
“All lawlessness is sin,” he writes, “whether intentional or unintentional. Accidents—such as dropping a rock, using a malfunctioning ax, or forgetting a boiling pot of water—may not, in themselves, be sins if they cause no harm. But they are frequently the result of other sins such as impatience, pride, or worry, and they may become sins if they lead to harm.”
Few would quibble, I expect, with the idea that a person who accidentally starts a fire by forgetting a boiling pot is responsible for that fire and must make amends. But if that accident isn’t the result of another sin (and it’s easy to imagine scenarios in which the forgetfulness is not sin-related), does responsible necessarily mean culpable? Is that forgetfulness necessarily sinful?
The question becomes even more pressing when Lundgren turns to the transmission of infectious diseases, like COVID-19 and the flu:
Sometimes a person’s actions set in motion a sequence of events that result in harm to others, but the person never knows. When the Covid virus first began to spread, efforts were made, with minimal success, to trace the web of its transmission. The actions of many, knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, were part of that web with its sometimes harmful and occasionally fatal consequences. While a spotlight was put on the spread of this particular virus, human interactions and movements contribute to the spread of viruses constantly. The common flu is transmitted through seemingly innocuous movements and gestures, yet it is the cause of death for tens of thousands of people in America every year.
That is a complete paragraph, and it comes at the end of the section in which Lundgren says that “all lawlessness is sin” and unintentional killings are “transgressions, violations of the law and ‘an intrinsic offense’ against God.” While the next section doesn’t address infectious disease transmission, it reaffirms that “accidental harm is sin.” Yet it tempers that judgment by saying God “has not burdened us with a system of morality based on fate or chance in which people are responsible either for their part in an endless chain of unchangeable events or for the random and unknowable results of their actions.”
So does Lundgren think we sin when we unwittingly spread a flu bug? Are we culpable for that kind of accidental harm? I think that’s his implication. But if a virus mistaken for an allergy or a presymptomatic bus ride are sins, then surely Lundgren’s discussion of forgiveness and amends for known harms is not enough. You could reach “ZeroCovid” extremes with a view of sin like that.
Safety and security
The subtitle of Pursuit mentions “security,” and early on Lundgren briefly distinguishes between security and safety, linking security to intentional harm (“murder, war, abuse, theft, and sabotage”) and safety to unintentional harm (“accidents, crashes, injuries, and mishaps, occasions when harm comes about through carelessness, chaos, or unanticipated events”). But then he concedes that the two words are “synonyms, with a high degree of overlap in meaning and usage,” and he never places security and intentional harm outside the book’s scope.
Yet as The Pursuit of Safety proceeds, it overwhelmingly considers unintentional harm. Lundgren does mention school shootings and dangerous missionary work, but not at length. He doesn’t dwell on the modern state of security, even though its trappings—and especially visible post-9/11 changes like airport security and mass surveillance—will have shaped many readers’ thinking on safety. And though he gives attention to natural and spiritual evil, deliberate human evil is strangely neglected in favor of workplace and traffic accidents.
Some of that imbalance surely owes to the history Lundgren reviews. Much of it concerns the wildly unsafe workplaces of the early Industrial Revolution and the pro-safety activism and bureaucracy that emerged to tame them. But a century after the Progressive Era, the danger of workplace accidents doesn’t loom quite so largely for most of us.
Indeed, insofar as we manage any scrutiny of safety culture and its tradeoffs, we tend to apply the lens of intentional harms, not accidents. The pandemic is a recent exception to that pattern, but typically we have debates about things like the value of childhood freedom versus the risk of kidnapping, the value of civil liberties versus the risk of terrorism, or the value of digital free speech versus the risk of disinformation and verbal abuse.
Beyond that mismatch, Lundgren’s attention to accidents also allows him to avoid directly addressing whether Christians can ever resort to violence in our pursuit of safety. Much of his language—not to mention the extensive citations of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—suggests Lundgren is commending some variant of Christian nonviolence.
“It is possible to anticipate and avoid certain types of danger,” he writes, “but to do so in an immoral way that exposes you to other types of dangers, a way that is not rightly formed by love of neighbor or love of God, but is based on anticipations that are not rightly formed by Scripture’s prophetic testimony regarding the future.” Lundgren warns against allowing the pursuit of safety to become “idolatrous, the strivings of the nations,” and emphasizes “the priority of keeping one’s way pure over keeping it safe.”
Life’s risks, he advises, should not stop us “from doing what is good and right.” He reminds readers that “Christ’s disciples are called to give up physical well-being, even to the point of death, for his sake. When the call of Christ conflicts with the pursuit of safety, the call of Christ prevails.” And, crucially, Lundgren describes enemy love as “quite reasonable to those whose lives are held secure by the love of God.”
None of this necessitates a Christian pacifist reading. But that’s a plausible interpretation, and the status of violence for Christians is an important element of any theology of safety. Is eschewing violence how we keep our way pure? Is nonviolence essential to following the example and call of Christ? At the end of Pursuit, I don’t know what Lundgren would say, but less on accidents and more on violence would have been clarifying.
Even with that imbalance, however, The Pursuit of Safety is a bracing and informative call to resilience and critical thinking, to trust in God and hope in the Resurrection, to notice unintended consequences, and to get on with a life of following Jesus instead of endlessly making sure.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
The post Safety Shouldn’t Come First appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 3, 2024 | Uncategorized
It is Sunday morning and quiet throughout our house. The first morning light is slipping through our blinds, just enough for my husband to read his Bible and for me to write. The only thing I hear is our coffee percolating. Sunday mornings are easily the most peaceful time in our otherwise noisy, demanding schedule.
During the pandemic with churches closed, we learned to savor Sunday mornings as especially convivial and serene. After a couple quiet reading hours, my husband, Chris, would prepare breakfast. Our three children would tumble out of bed around 11 to pancakes or waffles, eggs, and bacon. Then Chris and I would head out for a walk around our neighborhood, waving at neighbors. On more ambitious weekends, we’d take to hiking trails.
When struck by convictions about missing church, Chris and I would wake the kids a bit earlier, around 10:30. Though they were only really losing 30 minutes’ sleep, they’d make a grumpy little show of it. We’d file into the living room, sit on our green couches, and take in some spirited preaching by a local megachurch pastor. Megachurches had an advantage during the pandemic, easily pivoting to sleek broadcasts while many smaller churches struggled to improvise.
After the pandemic faded away, though, we found our new routine difficult to break. Attending church in person now feels like a series of sacrifices. We have to wake the children at 9:30 to get them fed, dressed, and out the door on time. All this bustle means Chris and I get less peace, less quiet, less reading, and no leisurely morning walk. It’s 8:09 a.m. now, as I write this. To get to church this morning, I’ll have to stop writing in 30 minutes.
Reader, I don’t want to. I do not want to make these little sacrifices. Sunday mornings are restorative when they are quiet and leisurely. They are good for all of us.
Or so I once thought, but no longer.
The pandemic had far-reaching consequences in our society, especially for young people—including my children. My smallest had her kindergarten year disrupted so that when she finally returned to school in person, she struggled to make friends. My middle child’s online elementary school didn’t prepare her for the very different demands of middle school. And my high schooler spent too much time online, imbibing geopolitics and national news in ways that left him stressed and cynical.
Sundays at home did renew our individual energy and family life. But they also exacerbated our sense of disconnection from community life. Staying in meant we got more and more of our information from screens—which in turn presented the world as increasingly fractious.
By staying home as a family on Sundays, I realized, I was subtly and unintentionally telling my children that the world was too tiresome and too fraught to engage on the weekends. I was modeling the idea that we could retreat, even from life together with fellow Christians.
Our children took note. Initially, they complained that they saw less of our friends, but then they began to communicate a growing distress about public life. They told me their worries about school shootings, the prospect of a military draft, friends moving away, and disagreements within our extended family over politics. For a variety of reasons, each of my children grew more ambivalent about relationships in our family, church, and schools. Our withdrawal from church fed into other kinds of retreat. Looking back, this trajectory seems designed to produce a collective depression.
Upon reflection, the most spiritually formative time in my life bears some similarities to this one.
I was a couple of months shy of twelve years old when my littlest sister died from a heart condition. Shortly after she passed away, my dad built our family a new house. Moving into this house meant that I had to leave my school and church, which were too far from our new neighborhood. When I began seventh grade just a few months later, I was overwhelmed by grief and had no cousins, no church community, and no school friends around to help. I’d never been so profoundly alone before this experience and have never been so since.
Mercifully, we joined Westover Hills, a vibrant, 400-person congregation that embraced our family at the lowest point of our lives. Though our grief felt isolating, we still attended services every Sunday morning and night, and every Wednesday too. Soon, our family life was structured by our church participation. My dad joined the orchestra, my mom, the choir. I joined the youth group and my younger sister, children’s church.
When I look back now, I see my family was hobbling along, doing the best we could under the circumstances. But I also see choir members’ mauve robes with cranberry accents, their arms lifted and eyes closed in worship; deacons with broad shoulders and smiles; friends with cars, picking me up for a Friday youth game night. The people of Westover carried us through the most trying time of our lives with their faithfulness, their voluntary good cheer, their testimonies, and their prayers. They were not just our church but the church, helping us to keep our faith when our hearts were broken. I remain so grateful to them, and I always feel deep down that Westover Hills of the 1990s is the community I am truly from.
Westover came to mind when my husband recently announced that we really need to return to church, in person and for good. No more Sundays on the couch.
We committed to going to the same church we’d been watching online, at least for a while. We couldn’t risk losing momentum by going church shopping. We needed the structure, the regularity of church every Sunday in person. The megachurch would suffice.
This church is 22,000 strong, and in our service, there are about 5,000 people each week. This is a massive number of people. I feel like an ant when we walk in and even more so when we try to walk out, a process that brings the word “stampede” to mind. Two weeks ago, we waited 30 minutes to exit the parking lot.
There are so many little inconveniences in our Sunday mornings now, and they add up—to work. It is work to wrangle everyone, including myself, into the car, into the pew, and then back home again.
But we have a totally different experience of church in our actual pews. Our pastor preaches the same sermon in real time and online, so it isn’t the sermon that’s different. It’s the palpable participation of the congregation that makes the greatest difference.
In person, you can hear and see how the preaching lands with fellow believers. Three weeks ago, I heard a man say, “You better say that again”—emphatically, in a baritone staccato—when our pastor preached a salient point.
Another time, a person directly in front of me spent three minutes intermittently nodding her head in agreement during a section of preaching about surrender. She sat with her smallest girl right next to her, almost in her lap, and three boys right beside them. When our pastor landed a point, she nodded. He repeated or extended an idea, she nodded again. Later, the pastor asked, “How many people here have ever felt they are not worthy of a calling they feel God has placed on their lives?” Hands went up all around us.
A few weeks ago, more than 200 people were baptized. From our seats, we could see their bodies dipping into water on the main stage. We watched their faces in detail on the big screens, televised next to the words of the worship song we were all singing.Another person went down into the water; she came up smiling. She lifted her arms in triumph and the congregation swelled with cheers—a roar of celebration.
I would have seen none of this online: not the nodding, not the hands, not the vulnerability to say, I struggle with a sense of unworthiness. I might have seen the same person get baptized on my screen, but I wouldn’t have been there to raise my cheer with the congregation.
Now I realize, we make the event an event. The congregation, the laity, together, responds to ideas, to baptisms, to the need for prayer, and to the opportunity for praise. We model vulnerability and faithfulness for each other. Without our voices, our nodding heads, our cheers and encouragement, church does not happen. We don’t hear much about liturgy in a megachurch like this, but the word comes from a combination of Greek words for people and work. And it’s true, it takes work to get to church on Sunday and participate—but it is our work to do. Only we can do it.
Since recommitting to church in person, my children seem more sure of the world. They’re still aware of its troubles, but they have a visceral knowledge of what a life-giving community feels like and what it means to take heart, together, because Christ has overcome the world (John 16:33).
This is not knowledge I alone can give them. I can teach them, and a pastor can preach to them, but only a community of believers can cocreate the context in which our teaching and preaching make robust, embodied sense. Every time my children hear someone encourage the pastor, cheer on a fellow congregant, or lift their voices in earnest praise, they see that God has been faithful to real, live people. God grows more and more visible, more and more plausible, as they witness worship in real time.
As I look back on our season of withdrawal, I feel a new sense of responsibility. People go through trials, individually and as families. We reach breaking points. We sometimes weather grief and get stuck in sadness. It is the work of the laity to come together, to lift up the name of Christ, to receive God’s Word, to bear each other’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and foster each other’s faith as they—we—heal and grow closer to God.
I want to do my part.
Erica Bryand Ramirez is a sociologist of religion who teaches Christian History at Baylor’s Truett Seminary. She lives in San Antonio with Chris and their three children.
The post No More Sundays on the Couch appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 3, 2024 | Uncategorized
For the first few minutes of Kendrick Lamar’s new song, I only half listened, nodding in time to the hypnotic beat while responding to emails on my laptop. Then came the line that made me sit up and stare bug-eyed at my husband, who was listening beside me on the couch.
“Did he say Lecrae?” We kept listening. A few minutes later, Kendrick said the name again. My mouth dropped open. When the song ended, we played it from the top, this time listening carefully.
The untitled track, released on Instagram on September 11, expresses the acclaimed rapper’s weariness and disgust with the contemporary hip-hop world and the music industry at large. In the song, Kendrick feels jaded by the machinations of the very system in which he has found exceptional success. He has received 17 Grammys, 29 BET Hip Hop Awards, and a 2018 Pulitzer Prize. His Drake diss track “Not Like Us” broke multiple streaming records, becoming so popular that, earlier this year at a sold-out Los Angeles arena, he performed the song to roaring applause five times in a row. Kendrick was recently announced as the headliner for the 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show.
But instead of celebrating any of these successes, Kendrick spends all five minutes and six seconds of his new song venting his contempt for an industry full of people who “parade in gluttony” and “glorify scamming.” He describes a “culture bred with carnivores,” rife with liars, mercenaries, and cowards whose money emboldens them to make “nasty decisions.” His lyrics are equal parts searching and vengeful. In a repeated refrain, Kendrick pleads for God to give him life, peace, and forgiveness—to “draw the line” between himself and the peers whose wickedness he despises.
Elsewhere, his words turn violent, calling for the “village” to burn down, for heads to crack, for “agony, assault, and battery.” “I think it’s time to watch the party die,” Kendrick repeats again and again. Things are so irredeemably corrupt that he suggests the only solution is destruction, Great-Flood style.
The rapper doesn’t waver from his verdict until the final verse, where he asks the question that made me sit up and stare: “Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do.”
Lecrae, of course, is the Christian rapper Lecrae Devaughn Moore, whose career began in the early 2000s and whose frequent collaborators have included Andy Mineo, Trip Lee, Sho Baraka, and Jackie Hill Perry. Most of Lecrae’s early work is explicitly theological, with songs like “Don’t Waste Your Life” (“We’re created for him / Outta the dust he made us for him / Elects us and he saves us for him”) and “Tell the World” (“You hung there bleedin’/ And ya’ died for my lies and my cheatin’ / My lust and my greed, and / What is a man that you mindful of him?”) garnering him widespread acclaim in the evangelical world and ins with the likes of John Piper, Tim Keller, Tony Evans, and Judah Smith.
Later, with albums like Gravity (2012) and Anomaly (2014), Lecrae moved away from overtly theological lyrics, instead weaving his faith into songs about identity, relationships, race, and class. In more recent years, he’s written extensively about experiences with corruption, hypocrisy, and racism within the church that resulted in a severe crisis of both faith and mental health.
Still, the core of Lecrae’s music remains his relationship with God and the church. Although a highly successful artist in his own right—with BET Awards, Grammys, and several No. 1 Billboard hits—his audience has always been, perhaps always will be, much smaller than someone like Kendrick Lamar’s.
And yet—his influence matters. Lecrae and Kendrick struck up a friendship early in their careers after the latter released his theodicy-themed track, “Faith.” Kendrick has long been vocal about his relationship with Jesus, and though some have questioned his orthodoxy, his faith remains a central theme in his music.
“Sometimes I wonder what Lecrae would do / F— these n— up or show ’em just what prayer do?” Kendrick wonders. Faced with the same seemingly irredeemable industry, would Lecrae pursue some form of vigilante justice—visceral, instant, immediately satisfying—or the slow, patient route of prayer? Moments later, after a fresh round of denunciations, Kendrick repeats the question: “I mean—[I] wonder what Lecrae would do.”
Perhaps Kendrick has read Lecrae’s memoir, released in 2020, detailing the rapper’s struggles with childhood trauma, depression, and a crisis of faith after the evangelical church’s cold response to a string of police killings of unarmed Black men.
Or perhaps he’s listened to Lecrae’s 2022 track “Deconstruction,” in which the rapper describes hitting rock bottom until a midnight encounter with God broke through the fog of despair.
In both works, Lecrae details a process of healing marked by weakness and surrender, a slow, steady journey entirely dependent on the love of God and others. It’s a stark departure from the brute force and willpower Kendrick finds so attractive. And it’s clear that both Lecrae’s art and his life have been compelling enough to make Kendrick take notice.
As a writer whose work revolves around my Christian faith, I often find myself discouraged, imagining I am destined to obscurity. When peers publish bestsellers or have their books adapted into movies, I find myself wishing my work was more like theirs, addressing Zeitgeisty themes like race, sexuality, or climate anxiety from a primarily agnostic worldview.
Instead, I find myself compulsively writing about spirituality—specifically, the conundrum of being a rational person whose life trajectory has been shaped by supernatural experiences. Sometimes I even feel resentful at my religion, as though it’s a restriction on my art, relegating me to a lifetime of limited reach at best, and irrelevance at worst.
So to hear one of the most talented and decorated rappers alive name-check an artist whose work has revolved around Jesus was deeply heartening. What moves me is not the idea that someday my own work might be noticed by someone more famous. It’s the thought that a sincere, intelligent, and profound artist like Kendrick Lamar, someone who’s seen no end of good ideas and interesting art, might find something in straightforwardly Christian music that gives him pause, that makes him reconsider.
Art that gains this sort of traction must do more than present accurate theological facts or insist on the supremacy of a “Christian worldview.” It must be prophetic.
Prophetic art is art that reveals truths heretofore unrecognized, unseen, or inaccessible. To be recognized as prophetic is one of the highest forms of praise an artist can receive. It’s a word that’s been used to describe Kendrick Lamar, who cunningly folded a lament about toxic drinking culture into his “club-banger” track “Swimming Pools” and spares no one in his excoriating analysis of anti-Blackness in “The Blacker the Berry” (“You hate me, don’t you? / I know you hate me just as much as you hate yourself” and “So why did I weep when Trayvon Martin was in the street / When gang-banging make me kill a n— blacker than me? / Hypocrite!”)
I would argue that “prophetic” is a fitting description for Lecrae’s work as well. Throughout his career, Lecrae has used his music not only to preach the gospel but also to engage his audience with uncomfortable truths about everything from religious hypocrisy (“Bookstore pimpin’ them hope books / Like God don’t know how broke looks / And telling me that I’m gon’ reap a mil’ / If I sow into these low crooks”) to the entrenched racial biases that mar white America’s practice of Christianity (“Right before the fall of 2015, I was all off / It involved killing Michael Brown, had me feeling down / Tweeted ’bout it, Christians call me clown … spoke about my pain, I was met with blame / ‘Shame on you, ’Crae, stop crying, get back to Jesus’ name’”).
Prophetic work is more than just eloquent or insightful, and it doesn’t always find commercial success. It is born of an abiding connection to the Spirit of God—the type of connection that empowers us to create honestly and courageously, even at risk to our comfort and reputation. To make prophetic work is decidedly not to change ourselves to fit the Zeitgeist but to maintain fidelity to the unique questions, ideas, perspectives, and modes of expression God has placed within us—and to make our work unto the Lord, the source of all wisdom and prophecy.
Only then can we contribute something to culture that doesn’t already exist—something capable of causing the Kendrick Lamars of our own disciplines to wonder what we would do.
Christina is the author of the audio series The Last Two Years and the cofounder of Estuaries.
The post What Would Lecrae Do? appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 2, 2024 | Uncategorized
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
My family is from one of the most hurricane-prone places in the United States—our hometown was virtually wiped from the map by Hurricane Katrina. Because of this, we spend hurricane season tracking each tropical depression with dread and then, often, relief, when the storm moves somewhere out of the path of the people we love.
This time, though, with Hurricane Helene, we exhaled too soon. Instead of hitting the coast, the hurricane devastated inland places we never expected to be vulnerable—such as Asheville, North Carolina; Valdosta, Georgia; and countless other communities flooded nearly out of existence, with people stranded without food, electricity, or cell service.
After the storm passed through, I spent some time searching through social media, trying to determine the well-being of people I know and love. As I did, I saw—as we all have—image after image of human suffering and neighborhood devastation.
And, since it was social media, I also saw a lot of the usual types using the disaster to vindicate their own negative polarization. Some posted that the massive disaster befalling Asheville was due to that city’s well-known progressive culture and politics. Others countered by saying that most of the North Carolinians left homeless by the flood were in “red” counties, so maybe this was God’s judgment on MAGA. And on and on it went, as it always does.
In the past, after almost every hurricane, we could usually count the hours until Pat Robertson or some other television evangelist would blame it on God’s judgment on something—sometimes as specific as New Orleans’s annual “Southern Decadence” parade, and sometimes as general as “America’s turn away from God.”
Nor was this limited to the political right. While our families were crawling out of the rubble of Katrina, now almost 20 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (then on the left and well before his gadfly persona of today) quoted the prophet Hosea to suggest that the storm was retribution for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol for combating climate change: “For they that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”
The trivialized venue of modern social media is unique, but the underlying sarcasm about “What did they do to deserve this?” is not. And the much more serious, much more sober fears and questions beneath that are not unique either. What does it tell us about God when human beings have their entire lives wiped away?
Kris Kristofferson, the singer/songwriter who died this week, wrote a song, “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” based off of unbelieving philosopher Voltaire’s book Candide. Kristofferson’s song references police brutality, systemic racism, and unjust treatment of the poor with a tongue-in-cheek praise to living “in this best of all possible worlds.” Kristofferson laughed, but Voltaire mocked, pointing his satire at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s defense of God’s justice in a cosmos of suffering and evil, that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”
While I believe Voltaire was wrong, Kristofferson was right to point out the kind of fatalism the philosopher saw as coming along with many attempts to justify God. We can yield to a shrugging “that’s the way it is” mentality that sees in every evil a signpost as to what God actually wants. That can lead to a “eat, drink, and be merry” hedonism, with a passive acceptance of all sorts of things that should be, at least, mourned, and, at best, changed.
The way Voltaire points, though, leads to the same form of pessimistic resignation in the long run. If the universe around us is random, chaotic, and meaningless, then we ought to read in it what is most ultimate: suffering, pain, and death.
Christians, Jews, and other theists have wrestled with the so-called “problem of evil,” including the problem of “natural evil,” for millennia. Some give greater emphasis to God’s sovereignty, with good biblical backing. Others emphasize the freedom and responsibility of human beings, along with a rejection of the idea that God could ever be the author of sin—also with very good biblical backing.
The question abides: How could a good and powerful God allow a world such as this one to exist? Why could he not stop the dam from breaking to keep that North Carolinian family’s house from being washed away? Is it because God was angry at them?
This is not just about hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis. Often, even in the quieter, less visible manifestations of very personal suffering, someone will wonder—even if they don’t say it—What has that person done to deserve this?
The Bible doesn’t ignore this question. God does not tell Job why, ultimately, he was allowed to suffer—nor does he give Job an answer as to why the universe is so seemingly filled with chaos and danger. God does, however, reject the easy answers of Job’s counselors, some of whom seek to read backward from the suffering an oracle about what God wants.
Jesus, likewise, condemns the suggestion that those who suffer at the hand of other people’s evil intentions or in the throes of some natural calamity are to blame for their calamity (Luke 13:1–5). He repudiates the religious leaders’ suggestion that a man’s congenital blindness was his or his parents’ fault (John 9:3). The chaotic natural forces around Jesus—whether wild animals or unclean spirits or boat-threatening storms—were calmed and redirected by the presence and voice of Jesus, the one who puts heaven and nature back together again.
When Christians speak of the existence of natural evil as a mystery, some balk that this is a way of evading the question. And yet every attempt—from that of nihilists to hyper-Calvinists to everyone in between—to answer the meaning of suffering bumps upon a mystery of some sort. The question is, what kind of mystery?
The mystery we see in the way of Jesus is one in which we hold together a tension: that of a God for whom not a sparrow falls apart from his awareness (Matt. 10:29–31) and for whom the death of a friend is received with weeping by Jesus himself (John 11:35).
Without a sense of the mystery of the wildness and fallenness of this present universe, the danger is that we come to see it as “normal.” Even worse is the danger that we would see in the bloodiness and violence of nature some picture of the way that God is. As Reinhold Niebuhr warned in the last century, “Our obsession with the physical sciences and with the physical world has enthroned the brute and blind forces of nature, and we follow the God of the earthquake and the fire rather than the God of the still small voice.”
The fact that we view the world around us with simultaneous awe, wonder, terror, and grieving is itself a signpost that there’s something missing from the merely natural. Jesus told us that earthquakes and other natural disasters would happen. He did not picture these as good but as the “birth pains” (Matt. 24:7–8, ESV throughout) of an old order that will be passing away, yielding to a new order beyond imagination.
The Bible itself tells us that these birth pangs are a creation in upheaval, “groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now” (Rom. 8:22). Our response is not to solve that nature-in-crisis the way we would an algebra equation. Our response is to groan right along with it as we wait, with a hope we cannot see, for all things to be where they belong: under the feet of a resurrected Christ and his joint heirs.
In the meantime, we do exactly what numerous people are doing right now: Clearing away the trees in front of people’s homes. Sitting alongside grieving families who have lost the ones they love. Serving food to those whose pantries are empty and whose local grocery stores are under water.
A hurricane doesn’t tell us who to hate. It reminds us who to love.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
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by | Oct 2, 2024 | Uncategorized
Nowhere on its website or in its founding documents does the new Global Methodist Church call itself evangelical.
Perhaps the term is too controversial, too divisive and political.
Or perhaps the Methodists are just out of practice.
“You know, as Methodists, it’s okay to say we’re born again,” said Asbury Theological Seminary professor Luther Oconer, preaching to the more than 900 people gathered in San José, Costa Rica, last week for the denomination’s first General Conference.
“Tell the person next to you, ‘I’m born again.’”
Around 900 people turned and said, “I’m born again,” laughing at themselves as they did.
The convening General Conference looked and sounded evangelical, with charismatic tinges. There was talk about evangelism, missions, the Great Commission, discipleship, and revival. People spoke unselfconsciously about the presence of the Holy Spirit, words from the Lord, what God is doing among them right now, and their love for Jesus. They read aloud from Scripture, taking the words as personal promises. Delegates raised their hands, singing “Oceans” and other contemporary worship songs, and lifted their voices with camp-meeting fervor when the band struck up “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”
Oconer, who is originally from the Philippines and described himself as a third-generation Global South minister, ended his sermon with an altar call. He asked people to come forward to give themselves and their new denomination to Christ, committing to the biblical vision of a New Testament church.
“Let us be a church of Pentecost first,” he said. “We must be a church of Pentecost first. We are a people born of the Spirit, first and foremost.”
People streamed forward, kneeling, praying, crying, singing. Steve Beard, editor in chief of Good News, described this as “old-time Methodism,” a religious movement unconcerned with the propriety of mid-century mainline Protestantism, a movement of field preaching, circuit riders, conversion experiences, and testimonies about freedom from sin.
In the midst of resurgent evangelicalism, however, some Global Methodists are worried about preserving Wesleyan distinctives. They expressed concern that the denomination might slide into a kind of generic evangelicalism.
The religious landscape is increasingly dominated, after all, by nondenominational churches that reject the importance of distinctives. Even churches that have affiliations often downplay their differences. Many evangelical churches feel about the same, whether they’re Southern Baptist or Evangelical Free, Independent Christian or Christian and Missionary Alliance. They sing the same songs, talk about the same Christian celebrities, listen to similar sermons, and practice mostly indistinguishable liturgies.
Roughly half the congregations that left the United Methodist Church have not joined the Global Methodists. Some are waiting to see what happens. They have said they might join, depending on the shape the new denomination takes, its authority structure, and the guarantees put in place to prevent the repetition of their bad experiences. But others are just done with denominations—liberal or conservative, mainline or evangelical. Hanging on to Methodist connections isn’t that important to them.
Mark Tooley, president of The Institute on Religion and Democracy and a lifelong Methodist, said the new denomination is going “against the headwinds of current American religious preferences.” As they embrace an evangelical style, Global Methodists will be forced to answer the question, “Why should Christians be specifically Wesleyan?”
In Costa Rica—as delegates passed a constitution, established the process for nominating bishops, and dealt with the legislative business of founding a new denomination—they also worked informally to articulate a Wesleyan charism, the unique spiritual gift that the Global Methodists could offer to evangelicals and the whole church.
“I think what we have to offer as a movement is the ‘heart strangely warmed,’ which is hearts changed, sanctification,” said Emily Allen, an Asbury seminary student and a delegate to the General Conference. “There’s a line I love from the Methodist communion liturgy: freed for joyful obedience. That is such a joyful thing! We need to have our hearts transformed.”
Jeff Kelly, pastor of the largest Global Methodist church in Nebraska, said he sensed the Holy Spirit changing hearts during the legislative sessions in Costa Rica.
“I’m seeing an injection of grace—that Wesleyan gift of grace,” he said.
It made him think that the new denomination might put an emphasis on the doctrine of sanctification, Kelly said. That idea could be reclaimed as the key Wesleyan distinctive.
“I think John Wesley called it the Methodist depositum,” he said. “After you’re saved, you’re not done. God is still bringing change.”
Seedbed, a publisher specializing in Wesleyan literature, currently lists two books on sanctification among its best-selling titles.
The publisher also released a hymnal specifically for the convening General Conference. Editor Sterling Allen, a Global Methodist minister at a church in Houston, called it “a curated renewal of Charles Wesley’s most beloved hymns” that he hoped would serve as “a catalyst for repentance and renewal, a celebration of the joyous proclamation of the gospel, and an outpouring of the Spirit.” It includes 58 hymns on sanctifying grace, including “Spirit of Faith, Come Down,” “What is Our Calling’s Glorious Hope,” “Lord, Fill Me with a Humble Fear,” and “O Joyful Sound of Gospel Grace!”
Seedbed is also reprinting Methodist texts as pocket-sized tracts. One is John Wesley’s On Perfection. Another is The Character of a Methodist, where the founder of the movement writes that “Methodists are continually offering their whole selves to God … holding back nothing but giving all to increase the glory of God in the world.”
On the final day of the General Convention, the Global Methodists voted to change their mission statement to put more of an emphasis on sanctification. The original mission statement, put in place by transitional leadership, said the church’s goal was “to make disciples of Jesus Christ who worship passionately, love extravagantly, and witness boldly.”
David Watson, New Testament professor at United Theological Seminary and lead editor at Firebrand, said it seemed too generic to him. That mission statement would work for any evangelical megachurch—but wasn’t specifically Wesleyan.
With input from Paul Lawlor, a pastor in Memphis, and Jason E. Vickers, a professor at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor, Watson proposed an alternative. The new mission statement said, “The Global Methodist Church exists to make disciples of Jesus Christ and spread scriptural holiness across the globe.”
It passed overwhelmingly.
“What I’ve tried to do is keep us theologically grounded so we don’t lapse into mere pragmatism but stay Methodist,” Watson said. “What’s at stake is our identity as Methodists. … For us, the heart of it all is sanctification.”
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