However, the post did manage to cause a bit of a stir, bringing to the surface not only the aforementioned tepid criticism from loyalists but a much more amusing response from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and other grifters who have made a career out of sensationalist framing. Carlson has now implied, and Owens has outright stated, that Trump might in fact be the Antichrist.

No matter your religious background (or lack thereof), you’ve probably heard that term before. Perhaps you even have a vague sense, absorbed from pop culture via osmosis, that the Antichrist is a prophecied figure from the Bible; a future world leader who will deceive many and do…something. Maybe you’ve heard that someone in the Bible is prophesied to survive a head wound before returning to imperial power, or maybe you’ve just seen posts like these going around:

Let me state my thesis right here before we get into the weeds: Donald Trump is anti-Christ and antichrist, but he is not THE Antichrist. We will explore these claims in reverse order, before concluding with a far more accurate prefigurment of Trump from the Bible.

The primary reason I can confidently assure you that Trump is not the Antichrist is the simple fact that “THE” Antichrist is not a Biblical concept.1 Nowhere in the Bible is a future world leader named “The Antichrist” described, predicted, or warned about. The term “antichrist” appears only in the first two epistles of John and functions almost adjectively, primarily to describe a type of person rather than a distinct individual. Furthermore, John explicitly and unambiguously locates these figures (and the “end times” for that matter) not in the distant future but in his present day.

“Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us, for if they had belonged to us they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us….²² Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son.”

Two chapters later, John reinforces both the definition of what constitutes an antichrist and the present arrival of such people:

“And every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the world.”

John’s second epistle makes a brief mention of the (slightly narrowed) definition:

“Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!”

That’s it. The verses you just read comprehensively exhaust the Bible’s mentions of “antichrist.” And they are not at all ambiguous. John could not be more explicit about what he means by the term or when his readers should expect to encounter such people. So how on earth did this clear category become an apocalyptic boogyman?

A comprehensive timeline or history of the antichrist’s evolution is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say, while vague and inconsistant notions of “the” Antichrist as a possible future figure can be found fairly early in Church history, the version of the concept visible in the “seven characteristics of the Antichrist” post above was popularized by 19th-century dispensationalist theology, and far more so by popular fiction such as the Left Behind novels or The Late Great Planet Earth. These books construct this end-times vision of the Antichrist by combining a diverse swath of Biblical imagery, including enigmatic figures such as the Beast of Revelation (contrary to popular opinion, the term “antichrist” does not appear a single time in the book of Revelation) or the Man of Lawlessness from 2 Thessalonians. These oblique characters are ripped kicking and screaming from their literary contexts, syncretized into a single individual under the title of “THE Antichrist,” and ascribed a myriad of unrelated Biblical imagery similarly wrenched from its natural surroundings before being thrown into a speculative and scattershot timeline of future events cobbled together in a manner of progression that only makes sense so long as every individual piece of the puzzel is only read as part of this creation and never examined in its original context.2

Everything from the Man of Lawlessness, to the Mark of the Beast, to any of the other imagery at play here, has a distinct and discernible meaning in its proper context and offers no indication that all of these images are pointing to the same (or even a single) figure. In many of these cases (the Beast of Revelation being one of them), we in fact know almost exactly what the author was alluding to, none of it having to do with some future supervillain who would rule the world through lies and crypto.3 The Antichrist, as popularly understood, is a product of Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins, and Hal Lindsey, not the Bible.

However, even with all of that clarified, Donald Trump does not have to be THE Antichrist to be antichrist. John tells us that he who does not confess Christ is not from God and is of the antichrist’s spirit, and this perfectly describes Donald Trump. To “confess” that Christ is Lord is more than simply to state the words; to “confess” Christ is to publicly align oneself with Christ. The term implies commitment, loyalty, and genuineness, not the lackluster virtue signaling of a man who can’t name a single book of scripture and weilds upside-down Bibles as a photo prop. Donald Trump (and perhaps even more so the Christian leaders who champion him) is the epitome of taking the Lord’s name in vain, stating verbal allegiance while the entirety of his values, actions, and attitudes run absolutely counter to all Christlikeness. In no meaningful sense can Donald Trump be said to “confess” Christ as Lord, and so in this sense, he is most certainly antichrist.

Donald Trump is also a hateful, joyless, warmongering, impatient, cruel, brutal, impetuous, vengeful, corrupt, greedy, and self-serving brute who knows no authority other than his own ego and no morality other than his own impulse. He mocks the faithful, beats down the weak, persecutes the stranger among us, takes from the poor to give to the rich, champions selfishness and self-aggrandizement, lambasts forgiveness, teaches that might makes right, never apologizes, never repents, and can always be counted on to lie with the ease of a man without conscience. In every observable manner imaginable, Donald Trump stands as the absolute antithesis of Christ’s example and moral teachings, and thus, in every meaningful sense, one can say Trump is anti-Christ. But ironically, I actually think Trump was entirely in the right to depict himself as Jesus; the AI-generated image simply chose the likeness of the wrong Jesus. Donald Trump is not the Antichrist; he is Jesus Barabbas.

In the liturgy of my tradition, we recount this story on Palm Sunday. Pilate sets a choice before the crowd: would they like him to release Jesus Barabbas4 or Jesus who is called the Christ? Barabbas, described by the evangelists as a notorious bandit or revolutionary,5 gets no backstory or screen time beyond this brief pericope. But despite how little we know of him, in so many ways, Barabbas represented the messianic expectation subverted by Jesus’ ministry; he was a man of action and violence, apparently popular enough amongst the people for them to choose him over Christ. The rhetoric of the narrative is not subtle in the least: the people are asked to choose which Jesus they want, the aggressive revolutionary or the Prince of Peace. Their embrace of the violent option manifests not only in Barabbas’ release, but in the subsequent murder of the rejected Messiah, proving by blood which Jesus they chose. Our liturgy places us in that crowd, chanting for Brabbas’ release, to remind us how easy it is to replace Jesus with an idol of violence and political expedience.

This same choice is placed before American Christians today. Pope Leo XIV’s Palm Sunday homily included desperate pleas for peace, for the nations to lay down their arms, but more virally, it included a condemnation of those who use the name of God to justify their warmongering. The Trump administration took this personally, prompting a series of backdoor conversations between the White House and the Vatican. The tension erupted into public view when on April 12th, President Trump posted one of his signature tirades to Truth Social, lambasting the Pope as weak and woke, and followed this screed with the post depicting himself as Jesus Christ.

Ironically, this may be one of the most Biblical things Trump has ever done, as he poignantly and clearly laid the choice before the American people, showing them the alternative Jesus in all his faux-oil paint glory, the Jesus of political power, in stark contrast to the Christ of the Gospels. There can be no more concise or salient depiction of the “two ways” currently available to American Christians. Do you align with the leader calling for peace and encouraging classical Christian values, or do you choose the man of action, the man of violence, the insurrectionist, the unfettered grandiose bombast of might-makes-right? Who do Americans really want to follow, Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called Christ?

The earliest Christian catechism and liturgical guide, known to us as The Didache, opens with the invocation:

“There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways.”6

This is the truth obfuscated by sensationalist nonsense about the Antichrist. Trump should not be feared because he’s the fulfillment of an ancient, recondite prophecy about the “end times.” The embrace of Trump should be feared, because choosing Trump’s worldly ways is choosing Barabbas over Christ. Choosing political expedience, violence, and domination of one’s enemies is a rejection of Christ and a ratification of his murder. The cry of the crowd before Pilate, “His blood be on us and on our children!” rings ever truer with each passing day, each needlessly murdered child in the world’s many warzones, each dead American demonized by this administration for their political opposition to its authoritarianism, each cruelly tormented immigrant ripped from their family or shipped to a third-world torture prison. Like the mob before Pilate, people call down judgment upon themselves, because darkness has come into the world and they loved darkness instead of light.

The brilliance of the Palm Sunday liturgy is that it forces the entire congregation to embody the role of calling for Barabbas. On the rare occasion that politics are as morally obvious as they are at present, with a clear cadre of villains in the way you rarely see outside of children’s books or World War II, it can be so easy to assume we who decry such things will always fall into the correct column, always reject the obvious evil, always bravely oppose the mob and call for the true Jesus. I’m sure the Apostle Peter thought of himself as possessing such moral resilience, right up until the moment he denied Christ three times.

We can and should debunk spurious nonsense such as “Trump is the Antichrist.” We can and should oppose the abject evil he and his ilk perpetrate on our and other countries. And we can and should call out the millions who passively or actively enable these horrific actions. But if we allow ourselves to forget our own susceptibility to denying Christ, we risk joining the next mob and watching Pilate wash his hands of our calls for murder. There are indeed two ways set before us, but that binary is not a one-time decision; the choice of life must be made daily, hourly, fervently, humbly, and desperately, working out our salvation by the grace of God with fear and trembling.

I know the “Paul really founded Christianity” or “the institution of the Church obfuscates Jesus” idea is nothing new, and while I appreciate the rhetorical aim of getting back to the core of Jesus’ ministry, I think posts like this are misguided in a few critical ways. With no disrespect intended towards Mr. Palmer, let’s take his claims paragraph by paragraph:

“Jesus was not a Christian. He did not start Christianity…”

This is only half true. While it’s correct to say that nothing in the Bible or history tells us Jesus wrote a charter for a brand new religion called Christianity, he most certainly did found a movement. Historians can and will continue to argue exactly how independent it was supposed to be,1 but there’s ample evidence that his followers understood themselves as participating in something distinct from the established institutions of his day. And while the name “Christian” began to be used quite early in Antioch (according to the author of Acts), Christians before that simply styled themselves as followers of “The Way.” I think the inclination to distance this movement from religiosity is a bit anachronistic. People want Christ’s morals to stand alone, absent from any moral system or anything resembling an institution, but the truth is that Christ prescribed morals and structures just like any other religious teacher (albeit in ways that certainly challenged conventional understandings of his day). He was a Jewish rabbi, a unique one to be sure, but his teaching methods were not entirely alien to his fellow rabbis. The desire to free Jesus from what is seen as corruptive institutionalism is admirable in spirit (especially when done in opposition to modern evils like Christian Nationalism), but rather misguided in practice.

“What we call Christianity is largely shaped by the Apostle Paul and later by the political machinery of the early church. Most of the New Testament isn’t Jesus talking, it’s Paul interpreting.

Here is where the oversimplification of this position is most apparent. For starters, ALL of the New Testament is someone interpreting. To set Paul aside as uniquely “interpretive,” as if the four Gospels are not, is to misunderstand what the Gospels are. Furthermore, we must always remember that Paul is our earliest Christian source. While the reading order of the New Testament takes us through the Gospels before we get to his epistles, Paul’s letters precede even the earliest Gospel by a few decades. And given Paul’s obvious influence in the early church, it’s hard to separate the Gospels from the reach of Pauline theology, even if there is mixed opinion on whether or not the Evangelists included Paul amongst their literary sources.2

But again, even if we cut Paul out of the equation, the Gospels themselves are interpretive. All one needs to demonstrate this is to read all four in a row and observe how Matthew and Luke make interpretive changes to the same stories found in Mark, or how John completely re-arranges (and expands) the order of events in Jesus’ ministry, all the way down to having him be crucified on an entirely different day of the week to make a theological point. If that’s not a theologically “interpretative” choice, I don’t know what to call it. Even if the Gospels contain authentic sayings of Jesus (which I believe they most certainly do), those sayings are transmitted to us within an interpretive narrative, with their meaning frequently explicated by each author.

Also, the “political machinery” of the early Church feels like quite the overstatement. Paul was, best we can tell, one of the most influential Christian leaders of his day, yet even he had to contend with the influence of unnamed “super apostles,” or named rivals like Apollos, Peter, and James. The early church was hardly a centralized power, internally or otherwise, and this remained the case for hundreds of years, even as more formal systems of clerical hierarchy developed. The idea of a top-down institutional oppression of free expression in the first few centuries is anachronistic at best and a caricature at worst.

Then you have centuries of councils, debates, and power plays where theology gets hammered into place by people trying to stabilize a movement that was never meant to be stabilized. Read the creeds. They are packed with metaphysical claims about Jesus, yet strangely quiet about the actual things he taught. It’s a lot of doctrine, very little Jesus.”

I have read the creeds. I don’t think they are as “stable” as this characterization implies. In fact, it’s rather telling that Christians as far apart on the theological spectrum as Pentecostals, Baptists, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox can all (more or less) affirm the creeds as written. The early creeds are incredibly minimal and prioritize affirmations of faith over exact expositions detailing the full extent of said affirmations. I also don’t think calling them “strangely quiet” about the things Jesus taught is fair. The creeds were not designed to replace the content of the Gospels, nor solely to summarize the moral dimensions of Jesus’ teachings. The metaphysical claims “packed” into the creed are claims about Jesus, not a replacement for what he taught. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

“Then Constantine shows up and everything shifts. After the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Christianity goes from a grassroots, disruptive movement to a state-sanctioned tool. Legalized, institutionalized, and eventually weaponized. What began as something subversive becomes something that props up empire. By the time you get to Nicaea, Jesus is being defined in ways that would likely leave him scratching his head. The question isn’t just who Jesus was. It’s who needed him to be what they said he was.”

This contains some truth, but again, the oversimplification is strong here. For one, while Constantine legalized Christianity, it wasn’t until decades later that Emperor Theodosius would make it the official religion of the Roman Empire, which is where it is more fair to claim it became state-sanctioned/institutionalized and eventually weaponized. It’s entirely reasonable to contend that the adoption of Christianity as the faith of the empire began a process of erosion and weaponization, leading to many distortions of Christianity that persist to this day. I myself have criticized on several occasions how it only took five years after its adoption as the state religion for the first execution of heretics to be carried out. However, to blame all of this on Constantine, to treat it as instantaneous, or to imply that Nicaea primarily served the interests of empire, these are all misguided notions. For one, while Nicaea and its follow-up ended up condemning Arianism, it’s not at all clear that Arianism was anything but the majority belief of Christians in the Empire. Constantine himself, despite his support for Nicene orthodoxy, appears to have softened on Arianism even after it was formally decried at Nicaea, choosing political expedience over doctrinal solidity. The line drawn by Nicaea did not serve the interests of the empire; if anything, enforcing a doctrinal line in the theological sand would have been divisive, not conducive to the wielding of power. So the implication that Jesus “needed to be what they said he was” just doesn’t really map onto the political or theological reality of that time period.

“Christianity didn’t just elevate Jesus. It insulated people from him. Turning him into God conveniently removes the pressure of actually following him. If he’s divine in a way you can never be, then you don’t have to wrestle with his humanity or your own. You can worship instead of embody. You can believe instead of live. It’s a brilliant move if your goal is control. Not so great if your goal is transformation.”

With respect, this is one of those claims that only sounds deep until you think about it for more than a few seconds. The idea that difficult commands from Jesus like: “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” are somehow mollified by Christ being God makes no sense. It’s not as if the moral invocations to follow Christ are invalidated by his divinity. Additionally, this claim implies Christ’s divinity was added at Nicaea, but if you read Paul (again, our earliest source) or any of the Gospels, Christ’s divinity is obviously there from the very beginning.3 And in fact, the high call of humanity to be moral in the way Jesus was is predicated upon that very divinity! If the fullness of God can dwell in a human being, then the calling to “wrestle with our humanity” is nothing less than a divine calling.

Also, this claim makes it clear that this author does not understand Christianity very well. Christians do not believe Christ is “divine in a way we can never be,” they believe that God became man precisely so that man could become divine. Claiming Christ’s divinity allows us to “worship instead of embody” is the opposite of the message found in the New Testament or early church writers. The New Testament explicitly talks about how to “believe” is demonstrated by how you live. Not to mention, the implication made in this post is that Jesus must be either divine or human, but the question being argued in most of these cases was how he could be both. The radical Christian claim is that Jesus is entirely human and entirely divine. Christian unity in the body of Christ is how Christians are able to pray to God as “our” Father. Nicene Trinitarianism isn’t an abstract claim about God over there, shoving Jesus up into the clouds with sky-daddy-Zeus-God. Nicene Trinitarianism affirms the Johannine language that Christ desires his disciples to know the Father as he knows the Father. Christians, therefore, do not (at least in prayers like the Lord’s Prayer) pray to the Trinity, but in the Trinity, praying to the Father in the place of the Son by the working and unifying power of the Spirit. Creation is made in and through Christ, and it is in and through Christ that creation participates in the eternal life and love of God. So nothing about this is a “brilliant move,” even in the conspiratorial fiction where the goal is control, because the claims of Christ’s divinity cannot meaningfully be said to separate us from God; those claims are the very means by which Christians claim God unites us to himself. This reductionist view claiming a desire for “control” is not a scathing critique of institutional religious power; it’s not even a very good strawman.

“Strip away the layers of theology, politics, and institutional spin, and you find something far more dangerous than what Christianity preserved. Jesus wasn’t executed for starting a religion. He was executed for disrupting one. He challenged the alliance between religious authority and political power, and he did it without holding any official position himself. That’s what made him dangerous. He didn’t oppose the system by building a rival system. He made the existing one look unnecessary.”

But he did build a rival system. His entire challenge to the existing system was an alternate “Way.” Even if one doesn’t characterize a “movement” as a “system,” the functional overlap looks like a circle.

“The Romans didn’t crucify nobodies. Jesus mattered.”

This, maybe more than any other part of the post, demonstrates the ignorance at play here. The Romans absolutely crucified nobodies. Crucifixion was the lowest form of capital punishment, reserved exclusively for nobodies. Crucifixion was how the Romans disposed of slaves and vagabonds. Important people, citizens, and criminals of status received different, less humiliating deaths. Jesus absolutely mattered, but he was killed in the manner of someone who didn’t, which is why the claim of a crucified messiah was such a scandal to the first-century mind.

“Jesus told people to stop outsourcing their authority, to stop deferring to religious gatekeepers, and to trust what was alive and true within themselves. That’s not religion. That’s a direct threat to anyone who benefits from people staying dependent.”

Jesus did do more appealing to the inner conscience than some Christians are comfortable with; however, I think that to “trust what was alive and true within themselves” is overstated. It is strangely common to find Jesus reduced to a sort of New Age hippie, whose true teachings are vague spiritualisms about inner peace and Buddhist calm. But you don’t have to be a Christian to understand that this is just plain wrong. Jesus, whatever else he was, existed in a specific vein of apocalyptic Jewish messianism. There is no historically accurate way to reduce what he taught down to the vagaries of “what was alive and true within themselves.” In fact, stripped of the theological context Christianity provides, the “historical Jesus” might be viewed by moderns as closer to that guy on the street corner shouting about the end of the world than your charming yoga instructor. The desire for Jesus to be a peace-and-love guru is doubtless well-intentioned, but it simply cannot be sustained without ignorance.

“Every time Jesus spoke, he was pulling another block out of the structure holding everything in place. He didn’t need an army. He didn’t need a platform. His clarity did the damage. He revealed that the system people thought they needed wasn’t necessary in the way they had been told. And once people start to see that, the whole thing begins to wobble.”

Again, this doesn’t read like someone who has actually read the words of Jesus, it reads like someone who has sort of heard things about Jesus. Jesus challenged the systems of his day, but he wasn’t just an anti-system for its own sake, freedom-for-the-masses guy. He had a specific and clearly stated religious agenda. He didn’t say “ignore the religious institutions and follow your truth,” he said, “I AM those institutions, follow ME.”

“What’s ironic is that the religion built in his name ended up doing the opposite of what he did. It rebuilt the very structures he exposed. It reintroduced authority, hierarchy, and dependency, then stamped his name on it for legitimacy. And now, two thousand years later, Jesus is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Talked about endlessly, but rarely recognized.”

Now, for the most part, this claim is true. The Church has instituted hierarchy, misused authority, and misappropriated the name of Jesus for legitimacy. Horrific evils are justified in Christ’s name by our leaders today, and that is not a unique occurrence. But given that this claim is predicated upon all the reductionism that precedes it, I hesitate to affirm even the parts I agree with. My impression is that the “real” Jesus this author is desperate for people to see is as much a fiction as the Jesus he is denouncing.

“Jesus might be the most famous missing person in history. Not because he disappeared, but because the institution built around him made sure you wouldn’t find him.”

Lastly, I would like to know where people can find this missing Jesus. Every real detail we know about his teachings is preserved in Christian sources. We have the same access to ancient manuscripts that the church does; we can go and look at the original Greek and see what it says. For all its many flaws and historical atrocities, the historical Church is our only preserver of ANY version of Jesus, and if you want to claim this institution corrupted him (insofar as the Church can ever, in any historical era, be spoken of as a monolith), you must appeal to facts from that very institution to do so.

In the end, I understand and even appreciate what people like Mr. Palmer are attempting to do here. I share his desire to oppose the weaponization of the faith, and especially to combat the perverse lies about Christ that undergird repulsive movements like Christian Nationalism. But it is useless to combat lies about Christ with lies about Christ. In attempting to free Jesus from institutional corruption, these kinds of posts turn him into something completely alien, and ironically, in their efforts to liberate him from the confines of distant deity, they re-inter him within an equally false prison, propping him up to be admired as an idol of anachronism.

However, the farther down this side of the translation spectrum one wanders, the more careful they must be. Today I’d like to make some brief comments on three very popular translations that go so far in their dynamic equivalence as to qualify as more of a paraphrase than a “translation” proper, two of which I believe can be embraced in the right context, and one that comes from an absolute madman and should be avoided at all costs.

Eugene Peterson’s The Message is probably the most well-known colloquial paraphrase of the Bible. Its abject casualness provides easy laughs for those who have never encountered anything like it. After all, if one is used to the pomp and grandure of something like KJV English, how can you do anything but chuckle at Peterson rendering Romans 8:3 as “God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son,” or Psalm 27:3 as “When besieged, I’m calm as a baby. When all hell breaks loose, I’m collected and cool,” or the perfectly servicable yet humerously mundane Matthew 1:18 as “Before they enjoyed their wedding night, Joseph discovered she was pregnant. (It was by the Holy Spirit, but he didn’t know that).”

Now I’ll admit, in years past, I’ve been quite dismissive of The Message, but I’ve since come around on it. It’s not a translation I ever use, but after educating myself about its history and encountering highly reputable theologians who use and appreciate it, I’ve come to accept it as a good-faith effort by a well-meaning, qualified translator. Peterson did not set out to write a best-seller; he began the translation for his own congregation, to try to spark in them the reaction that reading the original Greek spurred in him, and the idiomatic excessiveness seems perfectly appropriate in a setting as personal as that. And again, at least Peterson is actually fluent in the Biblical languages; a prerequisite for translation that you’d assume would be a given for any translator, but as you’ll see if you read to the end of this article, that is not always the case.

Love him or hate him (it’s the former for me), N.T. Wright is one of the world's pre-eminent Bible scholars. He’s written dozens of books, including commentaries on every book in the New Testament, and through these efforts, eventually compiled his own translation. Styled under his “For Everyone” series, Wright’s explicit goal is to make the text of the Bible accessible, understandable, and approachable. While this usually results in casual language, it does not stray quite as far from the original phrasing as Peterson. For example, rather than God going for the jugular, Wright renders Romans 8:3 as: “For God has done what the law (being weak because of human flesh) was incapable of doing. God sent his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and as a sin-offering; and, right there in the flesh, he condemned sin.”

As with any paraphrastic translation, a “thought for thought” approach is only as good as the interpretation of the translator, since the pursuit of clarity forces them to discard ambiguity in the original language. All translation is interpretation, but dynamic equivalence requires far more consequential interpretative choices to be made (which is why these translations should never be one’s primary study Bible). Wright is as qualified a scholar as any to make these choices, so I freely admit that I’m punching above my weight class when I say that one decision he makes in his translation is, to my mind, not only wrong, but indefensibly so.

When the New Testament authors refer to the Hebrew Scriptures, they usually do so either with the Greek term graphē (γραφή—literally, “writing”) or with the phrase “it is written.” Wright, throughout his take on the New Testament, translates both of these phrases as “The Bible.” So where in Matthew 4:4 the Greek says, “it is written: one does not live by bread alone,” Wright translates “‘The Bible says,’ replied Jesus, ‘that it takes more than bread to keep you alive,’” or where the Greek of John 5:39 says “you diligently search the Scriptures (Ἐραυνᾶτε τὰς γραφάς)” Wright renders it, “‘You study the Bible,’ Jesus continued.”

This translation choice not only flattens Scripture’s multivalence, but it is also indefensibly anachronistic. There was no such thing as “The Bible” in Jesus’ day. While we now have a neat selection of books tidily compartmentalized into the Old and New Testaments, no such “closed canon” (not even the Old Testament) existed in the first century, nor did any of the books comprising the New exist during Jesus’ ministry. The Jewish scriptures of Christ’s day were just that, scriptures, plural, and that matters, because what constituted these scriptures was not collected into an authoritative list. In fact, as best as scholars can tell, first-century Jews read and devotionally applied all sorts of texts that no longer appear in modern Bibles. Recovered texts like 1st Enoch and the book of Jubilees were very popular (the former is even quoted in the New Testament), lost texts like the Assumption of Moses were favored enough to be referenced by NT authors and survive in fragmentary form. Many of these works would likely be included in the conceptual category of “the Scriptures,” but none of them are included in the conceptual category of “The Bible.” Furthermore, the Bible today plays a wildly different role in our everyday faith compared to most of Christian history, even as a concept. Most Christians did not encounter “The Bible” as a singular book they read on their own; rather, they encountered Scripture in liturgical contexts, usually in church settings. This may seem like a distinction without a difference, but I really do think the conceptual categories here make a huge difference. Language like “The Scriptures” conveys a collection, plurality, multi-vocality, harmony, and diversity, while language like “The Bible” conveys singularity, univocality, and structural rigidity. When the Scriptures become a single book, Genesis becomes chapter 1, the Crucifixion becomes something that happens during the climax 2/3s of the way through, and Revelation becomes that weird epilogue that gets left out of the movie adaptation. But this order is not the theological order of the Christian story. Interpretation of the Old Testament begins with the Cross, known only through the unveiling brought about by Christ. Only through that knowledge can it be read as Christian Scripture, because the Old Testament is an elucidation of the Gospel, not its prologue.3 As St. Irenaeus summarized:

“Every prophecy before its fulfillment is nothing but an enigma and ambiguity to human beings. But when the time has arrived and the prediction has come to pass, then it has an exact exegesis.”

Not only is all of this nuance lost in Wright’s translation choice, but the anachronistic simplifications of “The Bible” are imported, as a concept, into the Bible itself! The Bible is not self-referential, as it did not exist when any book in its collection was written, so Wright’s use of this term leaves the reader with a completely unfounded understanding of what Scripture is and how it functioned (even for the authors of what would later come to be included as Scripture). Furthermore, it needs to be emphasized that when Paul makes claims about Christ “in accordance with the Scriptures,” or for that matter, when the Nicene Creed adopts the same language, they are not talking about the New Testament.4 The exposition of the Gospel “in accordance with the Scriptures” is of vital importance to understanding the shape of early Christian theology, which is why I don’t think Wright’s translation choice here is overstated or misguided; I think it’s flat out wrong.5 It obfuscates what is being said, canonizes anachronisms, and imports frameworks that, while popular today, were alien to the New Testament authors, and frankly, we should follow their model in abandoning them.

To reiterate, I am a huge fan of Wright and am deeply indebted to his work. I hope I have explained my contention with his translation choice well, despite my utter lack of linguistic qualifications. To learn more about early Christian utilization of “The Scriptures” and for a more thorough understanding of why these distinctions are essential, I highly recommend the book In Accordance with the Scriptures: The Shape of Christian Theology by patristics scholar John Behr. Or, if you prefer to listen rather than read, he has countless lectures on the topic.

Now, let us move on from the well-meaning work of qualified scholars and end with a look at an absolute abomination.

If you exist outside of charismatic or evangelical circles, you’ve probably never heard of the Passion translation (TPT). I’ll let the listing on Bethel’s website tell you what it claims to be:

“The Passion Translation® is a modern, easy-to-read Bible translation that unlocks the passion of God’s heart and expresses his fiery love—merging emotion and life-changing truth. Bethel’s 2020 Edition includes a foreword by Bill Johnson, over 1000 revised and new footnotes, 16 pages of full-color maps, and more.”6

As we’ve already seen, paraphrastic translations are nothing new. There is nothing inherently wrong with an idiomatic, “easy to read” version of the Bible.

But.

For starters, the creator of TPT, Brian Simmons, is not a Bible scholar. He’s not an expert in any of the Bible’s original languages. To this day, I still have not found any evidence to suggest that he’s even competent in ancient Greek or Hebrew, much less fluent. He has no academic credentials in linguistics or any field of Biblical studies, only a fake doctorate from the non-accredited Wagner Leadership Institute.7 Simmons’ supposed claim to fame in the world of Bible translation was as part of a team assisting with translating the Paya-Kuna New Testament. But as many who have researched this topic will tell you,8 his claims regarding his contributions to this project were, if we’re being charitable, exaggerated. When asked directly about Simmons and TPT, one member of the organization that ran the Paya-Kuna efforts stated quite simply: “Brian is not a linguist of any sort.” A fellow member of the translation team Simmons claimed to have been part of was quoted as saying: “He was a church planter…not a translator…Nobody in our mission would ever say that he’s a Bible translator or was ever approved as a Bible translator.” Even the most cursory appraisal of Simmons’ supposed credentials reveals a pattern of dishonesty about his qualifications, and it doesn’t get better when we assess the work itself.

The Passion Translation is just demonstrably wrong in many, many instances. Most of the time, Simmons simply plays fast and loose with adjectives (true to the book’s name, “I love” often and erroneously becomes “I passionately love”), but frequently, the alterations are theological in nature. Psalms shift their focus from being spoken about God to being spoken to God. Allegorization is imported as a lexical feature rather than an interpretive one.9 Terminology is introduced that, to the casual observer, may not seem insidious, but to those familiar with Simmons’ theology, provides clear proof of his agenda. A subtle example can be found in Romans 1:12-

NIV: “that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.”

ESV: “that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.”

KJV: “That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.”

NRSVUE: “or rather so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.”

Passion Translation: “Now, this means that when we come together and are side by side, something wonderful will be released. We can expect to be co-encouraged and co-comforted by each other’s faith!”

For those familiar with the aberrant theology being pushed here, the intent of the altered phrasing should be obvious. For those unacquainted, well, that’s a much longer subject for a different time. But suffice to say, his footnotes continue these oddities, such as the infamous note he provides for Romans 1:1, where he claims

“The Greek word doulos signifies more than a servant; it is one who has chosen to serve a master out of love, bound with cords so strong that it could only be severed by death.”

This claim is not only wrong, but bizarrely wrong. The Greek doulos was a conventional term for “slave.” True, English translations often render it “servent” (largely to downplay modern discomfort), but to take that convention and expand to “chosen to serve a master out of love” is simply fiction. I have no idea what Simmons bases this claim on, and that is a recurring pattern with him. He claims other scholars assist with and check his work, but does not list who they are. He claims to have the aforementioned background in linguistics, but no proof exists. And maybe most notably, he frequently cites Biblical manuscripts that simply do not exist.

Quick history lesson. Every book in the New Testament was written in Koine (meaning “common”) Greek. However, as a Jewish rabbi from Galilee, Jesus likely spoke Aramaic as his primary language.10 As such, Aramaic sometimes gets, for lack of a better word, divinely fetishized by Christians. The language itself, being Jesus’ native tongue, is seen as holy, which is why you’ll often see viral videos of the Lord’s Prayer translated into Aramaic floating around with titles like “hear the ORIGINAL words of Jesus!”

But let me be clear: while it is highly likely that Jesus conducted his ministry in Aramaic, the earliest witnesses to said ministry are preserved entirely, and exclusively, in Greek. So when Brian Simmons claims to be translating from the “original Aramaic manuscripts,” he is spinning a yarn. Simmons has insisted on many occasions not only that he bases his translation on Aramaic “originals,” but that “recent scholarship” has come around to the notion that the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament are later translations of Aramaic originals.11 This claim is utterly baseless and rather nonsensical. While Jesus may have spoken Aramaic, the intended audience of the New Testament documents largely did not. Paul wrote largely to Greek-speaking audiences, and what we know of most of the Gospels indicates that they too were written for areas where Greek was the lingua franca. Simmons’ claims are so strange not only because they are entirely baseless, but because they are so obviously disprovable. Spend 12 seconds on Google, or ask literally any professional Bible scholar, and they will quickly tell you that the claim of “Aramaic originals” is absolute nonsense.12

So at this point, you may be asking yourself why a man with no qualifications or expertise would attempt to translate the Bible.

Well.

Simmons claims that Jesus Christ himself appeared to him, breathed on him, and directly commissioned this translation. He asserts that Christ promised to give him “secrets of the Hebrew language,” that Christ promised to guide him on the translation (he immediately began receiving mental “downloads” about Hebrew and Greek), and to help him reveal the true secrets that have been there all along. And if that’s not enough, Simmons submits that Christ took him (in a vision?) to a library in heaven, where on a heavenly bookshelf, Simmons saw a book titled “John Chapter 22.”

That’s right. Coming soon to a Christian bookstore near you, straight from heaven itself, the lost final chapter of the Gospel of John. Hear it straight from the man himself on a television program that I swear is not a parody:

So you see, Simmons isn’t wrong about any of his translations; he’s simply correcting mistakes in the Bible that have persisted for 2,000 years. Jesus himself is guiding this translation, which perfectly explains why Simmons has….retracted and revised some of his more overtly terrible renderings due to scholarly pushback and other rebuffs, such as Bible Gateway removing TPT from its website. Funny that.

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to see through this racket. We have a man claiming he was commissioned by Jesus, a man who lies about his credentials, who promised that he and only he has the truth regarding documents experts have studied for ~2,000 years, who produced a translation “reviewed by scholars” but he won’t tell you their names, translated from “original Aramaic documents” that don’t exist, and who someday, is going to try and sell you on a brand new, never before seen chapter of a Gospel, delivered straight from heaven, while insisting he is not adding to Scripture. This is a very simple equation. Brian Simmons is either commissioned by Christ himself, or he’s lying.

He’s lying.

And his obvious lies would be easily dismissible were they not embraced and promoted by highly influential leaders like Bethel Church’s Bill Johnson. Johnson (and others; he isn’t alone here) is predisposed to love Simmons’ translation because Simmons’ theological priorities align with Johnson's. For years, those who have claimed “new revelation” regarding the Scriptures have been hampered by the Bible not saying what they need it to mean, leading to frequent instances of, “I know the text says this, but what it really means is...” Brian Simmons fixes all these problems for Johnson and those who share his revisionist theology. All those “it really means this” verses in the Passion Translation suddenly and conveniently say precisely what Johnson has claimed they’ve meant all along! Phraseology is altered, focus is shifted, buzzwords are added, and entire sentences, phrases, and paragraphs are fabricated, resulting in TBT being 30-40% longer in most places than a standard English translation. It is no different than the sectarian alterations made by Jehovah’s Witnesses producing the NWT, or by Joseph Smith producing his own authoritative translation in addition to the Book of Mormon. These aren’t honest translations of the original text; these are authoritative alterations to serve sectarian priorities.

But if you know anything about Bill Johnson, you’ll be well aware that honesty is not one of his priorities. Earlier this year, in the aftermath of the Shawn Bolz fiasco (click here for that rabbit hole), Johnson was quoted as saying that fake prophecy was “worth it.” He acknowledged that fraudsters like Bolz data-mined for their words of knowledge, which, to the unacquainted, means they looked up information about event attendees on social media and then passed it off as God-given prophetic insight. Johnson’s response to this explicit fraud was to advise caution about “flushing” said words, in case the con-artist delivering them actually is conveying a message from the Almighty. He further went on to admit that, when endorsing Bolz’ book on TV in 2023 (well after learning of Bolz fraudulence and sexual predation of staff members), he knew he was lying. Reportedly, his excuse was that he hoped to speak those truths into existence, that maybe if he said them, they would become true.

The point here is not to diverge into an endless condemnation of Bill Johnson (a subject which could fill a dozen articles with room to spare) but merely to point out what kind of people most prominently champion the Passion Translation and why. These are not earnest truth seekers or humble God-fearers; they are proven fraudsters with a specific agenda for which they openly admit they are willing to lie. And when taking into consideration its origin, its claims to authority, and its actual word choice, that is what the Passion Translation ultimately is: one big lie.

Because the Passion Translation, one final time, is not a translation. It is, in the most charitable and good-faith light possible, a nakedly sectarian paraphrase bordering on outright fan-fiction. It’s a revisionist rephrase with a clear agenda, presented to you under false premises by an evidently obvious liar, and unfortunately, endorsed by respected and influential figures who are too irresponsible and self-serving to approach ministry with integrity.

The Passion translation is not the Bible. It is, in the words of The Message:

“not a minor variation, you know; it is completely other, an alien message, a no-message, a lie about God.”

I have two examples that illustrate this. The first is kephalē, the Greek word for “head.” How to translate this term is not a difficult question; ancient humans possessed heads above their shoulders just like modern ones. The problem lies in the cultural metaphors associated with the word. In English, the word “head” is frequently used to metaphorically mean something like “leader” or “authority” (think “the head of the pack”), and as such, it is only natural to infer that such a meaning carries over in other languages. But it is not at all clear that the Apostle Paul’s infamous use(s) of the term actually carries the hierarchical connotations we so readily impose upon it. It certainly seems like he does, but again, this may be due to our colloquial assumptions about that word’s metaphorical inferences. A survey of comparative Greek literature from the first century tells a different story.

What we find when we examine this evidence is that “head” in these Greek contexts means something like “origin” or “source.” This makes sense when applied to the Biblical use of the term, Christ is the “head” of the Church in that he is its source, the church is “taken out” of him, born of water and the Spirit from his side, just like the rib for the woman is taken out of the sleeping Adam. The head (usually) enters the world first, followed by its body, and as Paul says, a body cannot be born without its head (and vice versa). While again, this may strike us as slightly counterintuitive given our association with “head” meaning “authority,” applying this understanding of “origin” keeps us from imposing common misconceptions onto the text. For example, absolutely nowhere in the Bible are men described as the “head” of their household (despite us hearing that when we read that the husband is the “head” of the wife). We draw such conclusions from inference, not the explicit words on the page. Christ obviously is seen as having authority over His church, so when we read that He is its “head,” of course we map said authority onto that understanding, and likewise, (by way of the transitive property), if the husband is the head of the wife in the same way that Christ is the head of the church, authority seems naturally implied. But the New Testament does not really justify this logic. When we read about Christ as the “head” of the church, authority is never directly paired with this imagery; rather, the metaphor speaks of headship in terms of origin (Colossians 1:18) or as giving abundant, flourishing life (Colossians 2:18-19, Ephesians 4:15-16). The closest we get to a sense of “authority” is Ephesians 1:20-23, where some language of authority precedes, but is not inherently illustrated by, Christ’s headship, as the understanding of things being placed under his feet is not so much a claim of hierarchy as it is a claim of creation,1 with Christ as the source of all things, in whom all things hold together, a Pauline motif perhaps depicted most clearly in Colossians:

He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. ¹⁹ For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰ and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

Note the repeated emphasis on Christ’s “firstness,” and how his function as this first principle is the means by which God reconciles all things to himself. Paul’s language is not that of a hierarchical despot reminding underlings of their subordinate place; it is a story of life-giving sacrifice infused with all the kenotic undertones of the Christ Hymn in Philippians.

More examples emphasize this point, from the lack of “authority” as a primary meaning for “head” in most notable lexicons of Koine Greek, to the fact that the translators of the Septuagint almost never use kephalē to translate the Hebrew רֹאשׁ, a word that means “head” in Hebrew but, like English, carries the connotation of “chief” or “leader.” In any case, this is a prime example of how the cultural assumptions we bring to a text (both our metaphorical norms and the pervasive concept of “male headship” in plenty of Christian theology) often load that text with more meaning than it intends to convey, and frequently distort what the author himself was trying to say.

For an extensive collection of articles exploring specific usage of this term in the New Testament and expanding on the arguments I’ve briefly summarized, see this work from Marg Mawczko. For a good-faith argument opposing the understanding I have presented here, I would suggest Preston Sprinkle’s multi-part series investigating this question. However, I would also insist that you read Phillip Payne’s 6,000-word comment on that linked article, as I believe it adequately addresses and soundly refutes much of Preston’s ultimate conclusion.

The second example is the nebulous term “inspiration” (Greek: theopneustos), as featured in 2 Timothy 3:16.2 When Christians say the Bible is “inspired,” they can mean anything from “dictated word-for-word by God” to “creatively galvanized by a divine prompting.” This diversity comes less from the meaning of the word than from its interpretive application across various conceptions of scripture. My goal today is not to propose a conclusive pronouncement on the theological concept of inspiration, but instead to explore the question of what the term most likely conveyed purely in its original cultural context.3

In my experience, the most common understanding of “inspired” is something to the effect of “breathed out by God.” This is sometimes as simplistic as “God wrote the Bible,” but more often it’s viewed as a sort of guiding principle. So it’s less that God whispered the words of the text into Isaiah or Mark’s ear, and more that the prompting of the Holy Spirit initiated the work, and the presence of the Holy Spirit guided it to a God-ordained conclusion. While I’m certain this understanding of Scripture would accord with many early Christians, I don’t think there’s good reason to believe that 2 Timothy’s use of theopneustos demonstrates that understanding. In fact, the historical record strongly testifies that the understanding of “inspired” as “breathed out by God” largely originates with (or is at least most prominently systematized by) Origen of Alexandria in the 3rd century.4 In the first century, the term primarily meant something like “life-giving,” or “the impartation of divine vitality,” such as a wellspring, or the head of a river. To be “inspired” literally meant to be in-spired, breathed into, animated by divine wind, like how Adam was formed from the clay but did not become a living being until animated by God’s life-giving breath. John C. Poirier’s excellent book The Invention of the Inspired Text: Philological Windows on the Theopneustia of Scripture features a helpful survey of ancient Greek literature leading up to the first century,5 in which the usage of theopneustos consistently conveys this meaning of “life-giving.” Given this understanding, 2 Timothy 3:16 is not making the claim “all scripture is breathed out” by God in an authorial sense; it is saying Scripture is vivified by God’s breath/Spirit (keep in mind that the word for breath and spirit are the same in Greek and Hebrew). And if we simply read what the rest of the verse says, this makes way better sense of its teaching. 2 Timothy does not say “all scripture is God-breathed and therefore the innerant, infallible Word of God,” it says that “all scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” It is useful for the life of the church, because it is animated by the life-giving Spirit of God, and this “inspired” feature of its nature is demonstrated more in its application than its existence.

Setting aside the philological argument (and continuing to ignore the anachronism of applying this verse to a codified “Bible” that did not yet exist when it was written), this concept of Scripture being life-giving helpfully illustrates some major differences between ancient assumptions about the Bible and modern ones. As mentioned above, the change in meaning to “breathed out” is mostly ascribed to Origen, but to then claim that Origen’s understanding of “inspiration” resembles modern doctrines of the same would be very misguided. I have neither the skill nor expertise to adequately summarize Origen’s exegetical methodology, but suffice it to say that many of his claims about the “breathed out” nature of Scripture were premised upon their reading as Scripture. “Inspiration” was, in many ways, as much an act of reading as writing; “the scriptures” only functioned as “Scripture” when predicated upon a spiritual approach to the text in the unveiled light of Christ’s passion. John Behr, one of the foremost experts on Origen in the world, summarizes this principle (by his own admission, a little provocatively) by saying: “Unless we are reading Scripture allegorically, we are not reading it as Scripture.”6

This is an essential distinction, not just for hermeneutics, but to challenge our critically under-examined presuppositions about the Bible’s nature. Too often, we assume that whatever the Bible’s divine character (inspired, inerrant, or anything else), it is an inherent facet of the text in the abstract. If the Bible is inspired, it’s inspired on its own, sitting on the shelf, because we think of inspiration as an authorial characteristic, not an interpretative one. But the early claims of “inspiration,” and maybe more essentially, the claims of figures in the New Testament itself, demonstrate that it is not the words on the page that convey divine revelation; it is their unveiling through the revelation of Christ. As Origen himself puts it (paraphrasing 2 Corinthians 3:15-16 and Hebrews 10:1):

“The splendour of Christ’s arrival, therefore, illuminating the Law of Moses with the brightness of truth, has taken away that veil which had covered the letter and disclosed, for everyone who believes in him, all the good things which were concealed, burried within.”7

I would like to note again that just because the original sense of this passage may not align with later interpretations, it does not inherently render those interpretations theologically invalid. However, a common mistake people will make is presupposing that their own understanding of “inspired” was intended by the author of 2 Timothy. So to say, if someone believes God “inspiring” the Bible means God dictated it word for word, and you ask them to defend that claim, they might cite 2 Timothy 3:16, not realizing they’re baking in the assumption that everything they mean by “inspired” is indexed by the author’s use of that term. But this is nothing more than circular reasoning, (as is the way it is often implemented to defend the Bible’s inerrancy).8 The debate cliche of “define your terms” exists for this very reason; if we’re arguing over the meaning of a word, we can’t presume that word’s meaning to make our point, and too often, that is exactly how Christians treat the term theopneustos.

This is more of a bonus entry, but I see this claim spread so often9 that I feel it’s worth addressing. One very common translational note you’ll see online is the insistence that the commandment “thou shalt not kill” should more properly be rendered “thou shalt not murder,” because Hebrew has distinct terms for killing and murder. This is simply untrue. Hebrew has a few terms for the intentional ending of a life, and while they do have some distinctions, the lack of semantic overlap is vastly overstated. For example, the term for “murder” in the 6th commandment of Exodus 20:13 is used elsewhere for manslaughter, including accidentally causing death (see Numbers 35:11), which alone demonstrates that it does not map neatly onto the limited range of the English term “murder.” This becomes most apparent in the common application of this misunderstanding to arguments regarding the death penalty; you’ll often see pro-death penalty Christians argue that this lexical distinction between killing and murder justifies the former in sanctioned instances. However, the exact same root word for what is forbidden in the 6th commandment is used in Numbers 35:30 to prescribe the death penalty for murderers in certain contexts. So if the word choice for the 6th commandment definitionally classifies that kind of killing as “murder,” by that logic, the commanded death penalty in Numbers 35:30 is also murder. Similarly, a different Hebrew word for killing is used by Abram in Genesis 12:12 to describe the Egyptians murdering him to steal his wife (unjust murder), with the same word used in Exodus 13:15 to describe the death of the firstborn in Egypt (divinely mandated killing, according to the narrative), and in Leviticus 20:16, once again to describe the death penalty (legally justified killing). These examples should make it quite clear that the neat and tidy distinction between “killing” and “murder” does not exist via word choice and must instead be determined contextually.

This does not, on its own, resolve any moral quandaries about what kind of killing (if any) can be justified by Christians. But it does emphatically refute the claim that the Bible is clear on such matters simply by way of word choice. As with almost every topic, the correct response to someone insisting “the Bible says x” is to pause and ask “ok, but what else does the Bible say?” For every insistence of “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it,” there is almost always an example of “but not like that.” And as the translational difficulties I’ve highlighted in this article hopefully illustrate, sometimes even “the Bible says x” is an incomplete framing. The Bible is theologically bountiful but not doctrinally precise, functioning better as source material than a system. To pretend that it speaks in simple or singular terms and to beligerently wield reductionist certainty like a club is simply to demonstrate the Apostle’s claim that the letter kills, while eschewing the life-giving breath of the Spirit.

While querulously neglecting my math homework as a child, one of the many proddings of well-meaning adults included the classic mantra, “You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket.” Yet today, I walk around at all times with a calculator in my pocket. And a darn good one at that. My iPhone not only comes with a pre-installed standard calculator, but also access to search engines imbued with all the advanced capabilities of a TX-30. The problem, of course, is with this technology so readily available, I’ve failed to retain any math skills from childhood1 (not that I had many to begin with) and become entirely reliant on said technology. And so it is with many technological conveniences.

The incursion of AI brought many risks, but reliance is chief among them. There may be a responsible place in certain workflows for an LLM, but many have already adopted it as a dependency, relying on it fundamentally rather than supplementally. I can’t tell you how many Facebook comments I’ve seen that now start with “well, I asked ChatGPT,” in place of summarizing positions or linking to primary sources, or more ghastly examples, such as watching people conduct Bible studies via LLM. Nowhere is this more visible than on Twitter, where the reply “Grok, is this true?” has become so ubiquitous as to already be a meme.

I lament this all as a negative. But one diamond amidst the rough is that most LLMs, at least for the time being, draw their knowledge from a broad consensus of available data, which means that while they’re very prone to getting details wrong, their general understanding of most topics is somewhat grounded in reality. And since they are grown (as opposed to programmed), it is very difficult to manipulate LLMs into accepting a broadly alternative reality. This, again, is most visible on Twitter, where there are countless instances of folks appealing to Grok to affirm their propaganda, only for Grok to turn around and hit them with some uncomfortable facts. It’s no secret that Elon Musk has done everything in his power since acquiring the social media platform to weaponize it on behalf of a right-wing political agenda, and this included the promise that Grok would defy other LLMs and refuse to be “woke.” And yet, Grok just keeps saying “woke” things, and is comically frank about the disconnect:

LLMs do lie. In fact, many AI companies have quietly admitted that despite all their efforts, they can’t stop LLMs from occasionally making things up (“hallucinating” is the official term). But simultaneously, xAI is showing us in real time how it’s equally difficult to force LLMs to lie for you, at least via broad and publicly-accessible implementations like Grok. So no matter how right-wing the Twitter algorithm gets and no matter how many edgy jokes or slurs are added to Grok’s vocabulary, at the end of the day, all of Musk’s horses and all of his men cannot seem to stop Grok from re-orienting users back towards factual reality, in direct opposition to the ideological bubble Twitter otherwise enforces.

It’s ironic that an LLM, a creature of the reality-distorting internet, functions in this case as a bulwark of objective reality. Musk has been wildly successful in his malformation of Twitter into an ugly, engagement-baiting hellscape (not that it was a paradise to begin with) in direct service of a political agenda that weaponizes disinformation beyond anything we’ve seen in my lifetime. Our nation has sadly reached the “the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” stage of political discourse, so for all the dangers AI brings, there’s an amusing consolation in watching Elon Musk’s intentionally edgy, anti-woke bot battle tirelessly as an advocate for truth on a platform otherwise saturated with little besides outrage and propaganda.

II.

The marriage of religion and politics is not unique to America, but the co-opting of Christianity for political and material gain remains tragic no matter how many historical precedents it follows. In some ways, the present MAGA movement, interlocked as it is with burgeoning Christian Nationalism, is simply the loudest form of a political phenomenon that’s been dominant my entire life. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t surrounded by Christians who thought voting Republican was always the “Christian” choice (even when the candidate wasn’t a Christian) or who equated American values of freedom, self-defense, or the nuclear family with inherently “Christian” values. In the pre-Trump era, said Christians also at least pretended to care about character, honor, public decency, rule of law, and similar values that have been completely abandoned now, and while that pivot can and has spawned a thousand think-pieces, a more interesting change has recently taken place not in these bubbles, but in observing them. This more interesting phenomenon is the seemingly recent recognition by non-Christians that the Evangelical/MAGA movement seems disastrously out of step with historical and Biblical Christian values. And this isn’t limited to simply pointing out the hypocrisy of paying lip service to family values while championing a (civilly) convicted rapist, serial adulterer, and alleged pedophile as “The greatest champion of faith that we have ever had in the executive branch,” it’s extended even further to something resembling protectiveness. Admittedly, I’m basing my conclusions on vibes here, but when reading some of these posts, I feel a genuine sense of perceived injustice. Scores of people who do not believe in God and certainly make no claims to follow Jesus seem offended on Jesus’ behalf that this movement purports to be his most vocal representatives. Somehow, the louder MAGA takes the Lord’s name in vain, the more forcefully they try to project religious dominance, the more vigorously they pursue the Seven Mountain Mandate, the less people accept their narrative. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve seen Christian Nationalist social media figures in public debate settings suddenly confronted with Bible verse after Bible verse from their atheist opponent, leaving them scrambling in a manner that readily demonstrates how little they actually read the Bible.

Creator Rhett McLaughlin is best known as half of the duo Rhett and Link, but in recent years, he’s gained a secondary reputation as an ambassador for so-called exvangelicals. Rhett and Link have been very open about their departure from Christianity2 and yet Rhett (the more vocal of the two on this subject) has not gone full New Atheist in his apostasy. On the contrary, he’s spoken out on multiple platforms about how he’s still kind of obsessed with Jesus, and how it bothers him that Jesus is represented in patently un-Jesus ways.

Now I will grant that many who take this tack do so in as shallow and unfounded ways as their MAGA counterparts. It’s all too easy to reduce Jesus to a free-love hippie in the name of tolerance. But frankly, there are times when I almost appreciate this overcorrection. It demonstrates that the propaganda is not working, that the cultural reduction of Jesus to a star-spangled idol has not fully set in, despite decades of reinforcement. The true tenets of Christianity, the emphasis on charity, on love of neighbor, on service, on self-sacrifice, on spiritual formation, these values have managed to endure despite being flagrantly eschewed on the most popular stages. Those who see Jesus as little more than a peace-sign-flashing hippie may not see the full Jesus, but at least they can recognize and repudiate the damnably false alternative, and I’m comforted by that. I have so many people I love in my life who do not know Christ in any meaningful way, and with MAGA or televangelists or grifting podcasters as the popular examples of the faith, why on earth would they want to? For years now, I’ve felt that any conversation about my faith with non-believers has to begin with caveats and corrections, separating tenets of the faith from cultural and political weaponization. But it seems the public at large has stepped out from the dominant reductionism of the New Atheists and recognized that there is an ancient and admirable version of Christianity that is worth defending against those co-opting it for their own gain, even for those who don’t believe a word of it.

III.

Christian social media was ablaze a few weeks ago when Mike Winger dropped a lengthy video on Shawn Bolz, and many notable voices in Charismatic Christianity were caught in the crossfire. Longtime readers of this publication may know that I have a particular interest in this movement, as evidenced by my macabre fascination with figures like William Branham:

Sometimes I’m tempted to psychoanalyze the leaders of this curious coalition. I’m very comfortable using terms like “charlatan” or “false prophet” in rather blanket terms for this faction, but examining the motivations of individual leaders is a trickier prospect. For scam-artists like Bolz, the motives seem rather self-apparent, be it material wealth, power, or access to victims for his sexual predation. But a recent incident involving disgraced pastor Chris Reed piqued a new hypothesis in my mind, and I’m now wondering whether this explanation is applicable elsewhere.

For some very brief context, in Winger’s video (beginning around the 4:36:48 mark), he breaks down a recent clip of Reed claiming to speak in tongues. Generally, the pattern you’ll see with this practice is that a phrase will be spoken, and then someone in the congregation will provide an interpretation. So Reed says a few indiscernible words and then waits. Dutifully, a member of the congregation pipes up and offers an interpretation, but Reed seems dissatisfied with it. He’s quiet for a few moments, then repeats the phrase again verbatim. The same woman offers a different interpretation, yet Reed still looks around expectantly, until finally someone near the back calls out, “You spoke Russian!” Reed immediately commands that a mic be handed to the speaker, who translates the Russian phrase Reed called out. Reed does his best to appear astonished by this revelation, repeating a few times, “I do not know Russian.” But Reed is not a very good actor, so the entire payoff reads as quite farcical to anyone not bought into the charade.

Winger rightly points out the seemingly obvious fakery at play here, including speculation that Reed was perhaps reading the Russian phrase off the pulpit. Reed later replied in a video of his own, not only spiritually threatening Winger, but taking great pains to explain how he couldn’t have read the Russian off the podium because his phone was in clear view of the previous speaker and other such excuses, before concluding with, “if I wanted to fake speaking in tongues for two sentences, I would have prepared it for a whole week and memorized it. I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, and I'll be the first to tell ya. But I can memorize two lines if that's what I want to do." Sometimes, when a denial is that specific, it’s more likely to be a confession, so I’ve chosen to take it as such. Shortly after, Reed doubled down on his denial, concluding with an angry, forceful declaration: “And I want you to listen to me and listen to me clearly: I hope God strikes me dead. If I fake prophecy, if I fake Russian, please do it. Please.”

And in that moment, a truth so obvious and so simple struck me with such profundity that I couldn’t believe I never realized it before: I think Chris Reed does not believe in God. I genuinely think it might be that simple. Chris is a proven liar standing in a long lineage of obvious, proven liars. The entire prophetic ministry he grew in and spun out of is predicated on generations of false prophets and intricate fraud. I know Chris is lying, and Chris knows Chris is lying, and pretty much the whole internet knows Chris is lying, and obviously God knows Chris is lying, so the fact that Chris is willing to invoke death by the Almighty tells me that he is supremely confident that God won’t do it. He can aggressively declare, “May God strike me dead if I did the thing I know I did,” because he doesn’t believe for a moment that God will actually do so. And what that seems to suggest is again, profoundly simple: I don’t know if Chris is motivated by ego, money, power, or what, but I’m confident it’s all an act for him, because he doesn’t actually believe in God.3 Nobody who believes in the kind of miraculous intervention Chris claims to witness on a near-weekly basis would dare to bluff in that manner. And this isn’t even a case where maybe you could argue he’s lost in the sauce and become a shut-eye, believing his own bullshit, because this wasn’t an instance of spontaneous glossolalia sparking a genuine response in a stranger; this was a premeditated sham that required research and memorization. I struggle to believe that even someone as potentially delusional as Chris Reed is capable of making himself believe that he didn’t spend hours memorizing that phrase mere days after spending hours memorizing the phrase, which means he has to know he’s lying, which means he has to know he’s bluffing, which means he’s confident enough to bet his life on the fact that that God will not call his bluff.

Again, I don’t know how transferable this deduction is, or how well it might explain other figures in this movement (it certainly works well for certain political figures for whom religion is nothing but a means to an end), but it was a fascinating conclusion to come to, if for no other reason than its simplicity and in many ways, its absurdity.

I wonder if Grok would agree with my reasoning.

It’s a fine enough monologue, and an effective thesis for the political message of the series (though if you’ve never watched the show, you miss the ending of the season where McAvoy repudiates much of his conclusion). I find that Sorkin at his most Sorkin is either a perfect hook or cause to jump ship. If you find McAvoy’s speech stirring, inspiring, and poignantly critical in all the right ways, you will love The Newsroom. But if you find it sanctimonious, preachy, and condescending, I fear you’re in for a bad time with this show. Personally, I love Sorkin’s writing, even at its most priggish and ridiculous. I’m attracted to strong convictions (even when I disagree with them), and the hyper-idealistic journalists that make up most of The Newsroom’s cast remain a very endearing ensemble to me.

Most of the first season revolves around McAvoy and his new EP (and ex-girlfriend) Mackenzie “Mack” Morgan McHale (portrayed with infectious charisma by the charming Emily Mortimer) re-orienting his sell-out-feel-good news program towards the pursuit of serious journalism dedicated to informing the electorate. As such, the show’s political content is written largely as a reaction to the early 2010s incursion of the Tea Party into mainstream conservatism, to which McAvoy, a staunch George H.W.-style old school Republican, takes rather serious umbrage. He sees the Tea Party as a fringe manifestation of the radical right that’s seeking to co-opt conservative outrage for political gain and change the rules of politics in America. Watching the show from our vantage point in 2026, I can’t decide whether to call Sorkin a prophet or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. While a direct line of continuity can be drawn from the Tea Party to the current MAGA movement that has successfully conquered the Republican party and exiled any semblance of genuine conservatism, the dorky eccentricities of Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann seem downright adorable compared to the open racism, virulent cruelty, and savage disdain for American values expressed by prominent MAGA figureheads. Knowing how much worse it will get, watching McAvoy react as strongly as he does to the Tea Party feels like jumping the gun. But there is one moment where I will give Sorkin prophetic credit, even if I do feel his application of this particularly incisive rhetoric was slightly premature, and that was when he placed the term “American Taliban” on McAvoy’s lips.

In this homily, we see a precise articulation of all the seeds that would blossom into MAGA.

“The Tea Party believes in loving America but hating Americans. They believe in loving America but hating its government. And they believe that anyone who disagrees with the Tea Party has sinister, anti-American motives. Most of all, you must never, under any circumstances, seek to reach a compromise with your opponent, or do any of what Democrats and genuine Republicans both call ‘governing.’

…What’s more frightening than the perversion of our great history is that sensible, smart, strong Republicans, the very men and women who should be standing up to radical fundamentalism, are so frightened of losing primary ballots to religious zealots that they’ve thrown in the towel on sanity…

…Ideological purity. Compromise as weakness. A fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism. Denying science. Unmoved by facts. Undeterred by new information. A hostile fear of progress. A demonization of education. A need to control women’s bodies. Severe xenophobia. Tribal mentality. Intolerance of dissent and a pathological hatred of the US Government. They can call themselves the Tea Party. They can call themselves conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans, though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are: The American Taliban.

One can argue over whether this was an accurate appraisal of the Tea Party or a bit alarmist, but I think it’s inarguable that it rightly describes the modern-day MAGA movement, especially its religious contingent. I can’t think of a better term for Christian Nationalism than “The American Taliban.” And while I know that crowd would instantly balk at any comparison to Islam, it is an incontrovertible fact that they are far more aligned with a government dictated by Sharia Law than they are with classical American values. Let’s compare the two directly.

The Taliban is a political-religious movement that seeks to subordinate civil society, law, education, and culture to a rigid interpretation of fundamentalist Islam, insisting that public life must conform to its theological doctrines, enforcing strict moral codes through state power, restricting women’s autonomy and access to education and work, marginalizing or criminalizing religious minorities and dissenters, and framing obedience to its divinely-appointed authority as both a spiritual obligation and a patriotic duty. It presents itself as the defender of a sacred moral order against perceived corruption and modernity, demonizing democratic institutions, “international standards” of human rights, and ideological pluralism in the name of divine mandate, while promoting social conformity, suppressing critical thought, and equating loyalty to its dominance of the nation with faith as such.

Now, by contrast, Christian Nationalism is a political-religious movement that seeks to subordinate civil society, law, education, and culture to a rigid interpretation of fundamentalist Christianity, insisting that public life must conform to its theological doctrines, enforcing strict moral codes through state power, restricting women’s autonomy and access to education and work, marginalizing or criminalizing religious minorities and dissenters, and framing obedience to its divinely-appointed authority as both a spiritual obligation and a patriotic duty. It presents itself as the defender of a sacred moral order against perceived corruption and modernity, demonizing democratic institutions, “international standards” of human rights, and ideological pluralism in the name of divine mandate, while promoting social conformity, suppressing critical thought, and equating loyalty to its dominance of the nation with faith as such.

The Taliban are also famous for framing their cause as righteous but unjustly persecuted, and MAGA has mastered this approach. This faux-martyr complex is essential to maintain because MAGA is ultimately not a movement built on nationality, religion, or even political ideology, but grievance. It is foundationally predicated on reminding you that you have been wronged and pointing the finger at the people responsible, be it the “deep state,” Hollywood celebrities, pet-eating Haitians, or Spanish-speaking pop artists. Unlike genuine conservatives or the Republicans of yesteryear, it has no political vision, no identity beyond defensiveness, no imagination beyond retribution. If it seems like all the loudest reactionary media voices, regardless of previous political alignment, have coalesced into MAGA, this is why; both the Rush Limbaughs and the RFKs of the world build their movements off a shared sense of “them” out to get you and solidarity with the enlightened “we.” This is why rural heartland Americans who have never spent a week beyond the borders of a midwestern cornfield can feel like issues at the Southern Border are an existential threat to their existence. This is how couch potatoes with the athletic prowess of a Koala can feel personally cheated by the existence of trans athletes. Any genuine conversation needed around these topics is expelled in favor of manufactured outrage designed to keep you in a constant state of indignation, because to be afflicted is to feel special, and to battle back against perceived injustice validates our worst instincts as righteous.

And so we arrive at the present disconnect, where the Evangelicals that make up most of MAGA have unchecked command of the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, the majority of the media, and untold levers of corporate and religious power, yet still view themselves as a victimized, persecuted minority. Only by this clownish logic can the obviously corporate choice to feature the world's most popular musical artist at a Halftime Show can be labeled “divisive.” Only by this harebrained reasoning can a guy with a violent criminal rap sheet who sings about his mandate to sleep with underaged women perform a song featuring shoutouts to topless dancers and hookers, but five minutes later say the word “God” and “dust off your Bible” and be lauded as scoring a victory for the righteous Christian oppressed. They don’t know how not to cast themselves as the victims, because perceived victimhood is an ontological necessity for MAGA.

The irony is farcical, but the sentiment is insulting. The notion that Christians are victims in the United States of America, or are in any way meaningfully oppressed here, is a slap in the face to genuinely persecuted Christians around the world, of which there are millions of examples. Every day, there are Christians who wake up fearing for their freedom or their very lives simply because of their faith in Christ. The United States is not one of those places, and it’s a gratuitous insult to tyrannized Christians around the globe to suggest that it is.

Orson Welles once rightly observed, “The one generalization which is true about America is that everything is true about it. It’s impossible to say anything that isn’t true, good or bad; our enemies are right, our friends are right…it’s an awful big country with an awful lot of different kinds of people in it.” But the MAGA/Christian Nationalist crowd is averse to this kind of nuance.1 To acknowledge any sordid facts of our past is to demonize America. To criticize any aspect of the nation today (except the parts they don't like) is to hate the country. As Sorkin said, it is assumed as fact by MAGA that anyone critical of them has sinister, anti-American motives. America isn’t even a nation to them; it’s an idol, and since its cultists have decreed that this idol can only be idealized, the Christian Nationalists presently in power are doing their best to erase any history that inconveniences that picture.

We’ve reached a point in political discourse where the MAGA right has fully become the online left of yesteryear, eclipsing the wokest of the woke’s hyperbolic over-sensitivity, politicization of every facet of culture, and almost comical outrage about everything, even adopting the equivalent of calling everything they don’t like a “Nazi,” (only for them, “woke” is the favored derogatory epithet rendered meaningless by overuse). This overcorrection is in large part due to the fact that the American Right has been fighting an imaginary version of the American Left for so long that they can no longer discern reality. In puerile defiance of this primarily fictionalized enemy, they have worked themselves into a frenzied bloodlust and become every bit the murder-excusing, pedophile-protecting, pro-cancel culture, anti-gun rights maniacs with no regard for law, order, or American values that they always claimed the worst of the Left represented. Every alarmist overreacting to their rise to power has been vindicated, every accusation MAGA spews has become an ignominious confession.

If one could distill this entire delusion into a single display, it would be Lee Brice’s performance at the TPUSA halftime show, where he managed to summarize the entire myth of the oppressed Good ol’ Boy in a few brief minutes of absolute embarrassment.2 This performance has (rightly) been mocked relentlessly, with observers pointing out how its mad-lib-style invocation of country imagery was almost identical to Bo Burnham’s actual satire of the subject. What Brice managed to accomplish in those few minutes was not cultural commentary or artistic self-expression, but a parodic hymn to the American martyr complex: a full-grown man warbling that he is persecuted because he wishes (bravely, heroically), to cut his grass, drink his beer, feed his dog, and other such activities that no one has even remotely impeded, yet he cannot do these things in peace because somewhere, far away from his presumably well-tilled acres, someone holds different opinions and dares to express them. It is a spectacle of self-imposed victimhood so caricaturish that it could not be parodied, a petulant tantrum dressed up as moral courage, an emasculating screed of self-pity larping as relatable sentiment. The performance’s true obscenity lay not in its politics but in its posture: proudly exhibiting an ideology so shallow and brittle that the mere existence of dissent is an existential threat, all while pandering with the subtlety of an IED to the whiniest, most infantile victimhood imaginable amongst an audience desperate to be validated in thinking that to be criticized is to be crucified.

The audience may have heard a genuine lament, but all I could hear was Eric Cartman begging for a safe space to shield his delicate feelings from reality.

Like the real Taliban, the wiser among MAGA know their positions are unpopular,3 which is why their success comes through insurgency rather than democracy. If they can successfully destroy the system that insists on checks and balances and do away with constitutional protections for any class of people they deem unworthy, then maybe they will have a chance to build a world that works for them before the economy collapses. And more importantly, maybe in that world, for a few brief and glorious moments, Lee Brice can sit comfortably on his porch with a cold beer in his hand, overlooking his fresh-cut grass and smelling his fresh-caught fish, content in the knowledge that he has finally escaped the hellish oppression of a country where a constitution guaranteed him the freedoms to do literally every single thing he claimed to want to do in his song, and instead, is finally living in a paradise where only people who look and think like him are free to do anything.

I say all this because I don’t want to give the impression that the following theological analysis of a science-centric film is an attempt at conflating categories unduly. To be clear, I have no idea as to the authorial designs of the filmmaker, and I am not claiming my exegesis to even remotely resemble the interpretation he intended. This is an exercise in creative interpretation, not neutral analysis. But I am a lover of juxtaposition, because I am a servant of the God who “brings about good things by their opposites,”3 so the idea of theologically exegeting a sci-fi film in this vein tickles me.4 And I was genuinely struck by the remarkable parallels between encounters with the God-Man of the Christian story and the eponymous figure in this beautiful little film. So without further ado, please give 10 minutes of your concentration to this wonderful work of art, and my brief, unorthodox analysis will follow.

Our narrator, Jonah Weisman, offers two Biblical parallels in the form of a pun. Jonah, of course, the reluctant prophet, and his last name evokes the Magi of the nativity story, commonly referred to in English as the “Wise Men.” Like Dr. Weisman, the Magi were concerned with the study of the stars and, in many ways, could rightly be titled the “Astronomers who discovered the God-Man.” Together, his first and last names represent the Old and New Testaments of the Christian scriptures, demonstrating how a full understanding of the God-Man’s arrival is only understandable in light of both.

The slow approach of the God-Man echoes the Messianic expectations of 1st century Judaism. A Messiah was anticipated, but his precise form was vague, with differing schools of thought concerning his role, his purpose, his level of divinity (or lack thereof), and even which scriptures foretold his coming.5 Like the probes in the film, scant glances could be ascertained by surveying the Scriptures, but the picture they put together still left so much mystery.

But then he arrives. Like the God-Man of the film, the God-Man Jesus is encountered by earthlings, only to defy expectations. Again and again in the Gospels, those closely observing him do not fully understand him. Even up to the point of his death, there is still shock and despair, not knowing how this seeming defeat could be part of the plan. And furthermore, these revelations undercut so many of those long-held messianic expectations, even among Christ’s own followers.

The well-intentioned but miscalculated shuttle goes up and discovers the God-Man is a shed skin, not a living being in stasis. This revelation re-orients the entire observation up to that point, an answer to a question that merely raises more questions. This is how the disciples greeted the crucifixion, an uncomfortable reality that did not sit well with them, despite Christ’s foretelling of it. Observers searched for answers, encountered a striking display of death, and did not know how to react.

Seeing the God-Man’s back reminds us of Moses, who wished to see God’s glory but was only given a glimpse of his back as he passed by. The God-Man depicts this all the more aptly, as the split down the back reminds us of Christ’s own back, wounded and split by the Roman scourges, scars that he bears even in his resurrected body. We are reminded that to see the one on the Cross is to see the face of God, that the glory which shone in Moses’ face after his encounter is the same light that transfigured Jesus before his disciples atop Mount Tabor, and that this glory was beheld just as truly when Christ was raised up to draw all men to himself.

And perhaps this is where The God-Man speaks to the real God-Man most directly. The brief, mysterious encounter with the astronomical anomaly in the film is so reminiscent of the resurrection encounters in the historical record. It was something inexplicable, impactful, unforgettable, like the new color created when the God-Man burned up in the atmosphere, visible only to those who actually observed it. Encounters with the resurrected Christ are always ephemeral, often ending right at the moment of recognition. Right as the God-Man finally arrives, he burns up in the atmosphere. Right as the travelers to Emmaus recognize the risen Christ, he vanishes from their sight. All that’s left behind are vestiges— burial wrappings, the bread he broke, the fish he cooked, and soon all these things are lost to time, leaving only myth and memory to endure; memories scarcely understandable to the eyewitnesses themselves, as evidenced by the centuries of theological reflection following these encounters, all seeking in unique and disparate ways to understand this incredible encounter that was beyond their comprehension.

There are no samples left to study from the God-Man, no testable, measurable bits of material, only echoes of an encounter. “The Spirit blows where it will, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” Surrounding details of the story, eyewitnesses, and historical records, remain accessible for as long as they survive, but Dr. Weisman leaves us with more than brute facts of history. He talks about how the God-Man affected him, the kinship he felt for the creature, the emptiness he felt after its departure. Like the baffled witnesses to the resurrection, the implications of the event go beyond its material facts. Encountering a dead man alive again could mean a great many things, but we have the Christian faith today because those first encounters resulted in a radical pursuit of the one they met. Dr. Weisman preserves the reaction to the God-Man, not just the facts of its actions. And in doing so, even as a scientist, he rightly orients his own posture around wonder. Marveling at the God-Man is not a measurable exercise, but how is one supposed to measure meaning? The hope evoked by even the perception of someone out there looking back was enough to soothe him, and at the end of the day, the aggressively human emotion of that reaction proves the lasting memory for Dr. Weisman. No sterile samples can substitute for a taste of transcendence.

As Gregory of Nyssa once said: “Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything.”

Grief is not static. It grows as you do, or shrinks within you if you flee from it. For the first few years, it maintains the adolescent capability to ambush you, to swell out of nowhere and knock you off your feet upon seeing something that reminds you of the deceased. As time passes, this ability lessens, but the grief itself does not fade so much as settle. Yet as it settles, you begin to recognize that it’s not just pain. Grief feels like that at first, this dull ache searing through you, paradoxically sharp and concussive at once. I think one of the reasons we fear processing these emotions is that they feel like they are only there to hurt us. But they aren’t. Grief is, as a great actor once said while dressed as a superhero, “love persevering.”

I know this from experience, but still sometimes need to be reminded of it, as I was by this week, upon seeing her simple but profound note that said, “The grief you are feeling for your country and your neighbors is love.” I needed to hear that. I’m always a bit emotionally fraught near the end of January (the body keeps the score and all that), and it can be easily compounded by life events, or in this case, national news. I don’t like feeling angry, or ranting talking about politics, or focusing my writing (Substack or otherwise) on these subjects. It’s as unpleasant for me to write as I’m sure some of my more vicious polemics are to read. And part of it is frustrating because, frankly, I was not always a very empathetic person. I’ve always had an overdeveloped sense of justice; even as a little kid I was incensed by unfairness, but until grief taught me better, those instincts never blossomed into regular empathy. Maybe I was just young and male and would have gotten here eventually, (I credit the one-two punch of losing a good woman and later marrying one for much of the emotional maturity I possess today), however, there remains that immature part of me that wishes I could go back to not caring, to shrugging off the cultural fray and being less affected by the dismal state of the world around me. I remember how it felt to be indifferent.

Yet to do so would be to dispose of my mother’s best lessons. She was a profoundly empathetic individual, distressingly affected by the plights of strangers and overtly sensitive to unkindness. Maybe it came from some childhood trauma I’m unaware of, or maybe it just developed over her lifetime of advocating for the marginalized, be it the children in tenuous home situations she spent her career aiding, the special needs individuals she spent her free time serving, or the sexual abuse victims of the Catholic Church whose stories she heard while serving on a Grand Jury during her final years on this earth. In so many ways, my mother’s life was defined by love of neighbor— an aspirational legacy.

It breaks my heart to be without her, never to see her bond with my wife, never see her meet her adorable grandson. But it also breaks my heart to imagine her navigating this present darkness; to see cruelty, dehumanization, and meanness not just prominent in the public discourse, but celebrated. To see Christians (my mother was a woman of faith) as some of the foremost champions of this toxicity, demonizing neighbors, and daily defending fresh horrors because the ideological ends justify any means. And maybe worst of all, to see people she knew and loved not just tolerate these actions, but support them.

One of the last things I said during my mother’s eulogy was a plea to emulate her character:

“And so I ask, when you think of my mom, that you honor her memory by sticking up for the person on the margins. That you take a moment from time to time to step outside your comfort zone and offer yourself to a vulnerable and sad world in whatever way you’re able.”

I see her in my frustration, funny as that may sound. As I sit in my comfortable living room, holding my beautiful son, feeling the abject disconnect between the peace of my own life and the turbulence of present history, I perceive in my own expressions of despondence and fury the same aversion she had to bullies. It’s like I can see my internal monologue from the outside, and I recognize her resemblance in those feelings as clearly as I see my own likeness in my son’s face. Grief, like any constant companion that grows with you, expresses itself differently as time passes, filtered through daily experience. It’s strange to me that right now, I recognize my mother’s absence most poignantly in what feels like negativity, or hopelessness, or exasperation. But seeing her in these helps me more accurately identify them as love. My anger at present history is born of love for neighbor, idealism for what my country could be, and defensiveness of the exact kinds of people my mother spent her life defending. In lesser moments, I remove it from the realm of love when I allow myself to wallow, or justify turning despicable tactics back in kind, instead of simply hurting rightly. I may joke about my overdeveloped sense of justice, but the passionate desire I feel to speak out against despotism is nothing more than me taking the advice I offered seven long years ago, standing in front of everyone I ever knew. I meant it when I said that honoring my mother’s legacy meant sticking up for those on the margins. It’s what she would have done, because it’s what she did.

Grief and love are synonyms. The farther one gets from the immediate pain of fresh grief, the more visible the love at its core becomes. And with the clarity of hindsight, you come to recognize that much of that pain was always love, simply unrefined and uncontrollable in the wake of loss. Perhaps the strangest feeling of all is when grief begins to feel almost like a comfort. It’s no longer an intrusion, but a reminder, a bittersweet tap on the shoulder to pause and remember and feel. It still hurts, and that feels ok, because it should. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, after all.

For the first month or two of his life, my son hated the changing table, yet now it’s a place where we find him at his most giggly and personable. Most days after laying him down for the first time, I’ll lean down and lock eyes with him (he can do that now), spending a few precious moments just smiling at each other. He has no language beyond gurgles and squeaks, and if you asked me to articulate my love for him in that moment, you would find my vocabulary exactly as expansive as his. But inarticulable as it may be, what a gift it is, seven years after losing my mom, to be given a glimpse of what it felt like to be beheld by her. That same love that aches at her loss is vibrantly alive in those shared inches of eye contact hovering above the changing table. Sometimes I am moved to tears just looking at him. Sometimes I am moved to tears just thinking of her. And in both, I am reminded that the difference between grief and love is merely where your gaze lingers.

Poi si tornò all’ eterna fontana.

The first post I saw was jubilant, quoting Adams’ last words as “I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him.” That sure does sound like a deathbed confession! But in context, what Adams actually said was this:

A few things stand out to me. The first is that he qualifies the statement of belief with “I am not a believer.” The second is that he contextualizes his profession of faith as a “risk-reward calculation.” The third is that he expresses hope that he is “qualified for entry.”

Let’s start with “I am not a believer.” This really should be the thesis for the rest. Adams, by his own admission, does not actually believe. But even that use of “believer” spells out something central to this conversation. When we speak of “believing” in Jesus, or in any religion, we mean that in the sense of “I think this is true.” To believe in Christianity is to assent to a set of abstract propositions about it, usually things like the sacredness of Scripture, the historicity of the resurrection, and often a sense of present relationship with God. But the profession of belief is so frequently emphasized, epitomized in how the classic “sinner’s prayer” is used as a shorthand for conversion.2 I would hardly be the first writer to point out that language like “I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior” is not found even paraphrastically in the Bible, and that the language we do find differs significantly in emphasis. To “proclaim Christ as Lord” in the New Testament was more than a profession of belief; it was a political challenge against the institutions of the day.3 If Christ is Lord, Caesar isn’t. Furthermore, when we read “faith” in the New Testament, we can sometimes ascertain a more immediate sense of the meaning by mentally substituting the word “trust.” I would encourage you to go look up examples of this and see for yourself how “trust me” usually makes better sense of the context than “accept the validity of these facts.”

And while this may seem like one of those philosophical nitpicks good only for ponderous Substack dorks like myself, it really does affect our mindset, even if we don’t realize it. If the primary component of belief is mental assent to factual propositions, then actions meant to derive from that belief are a secondary effect, not a causal component. Or put more simply: there are two aspects to the Christian walk, believing the right things and then behaving the right way. If you believe the right things, that should theoretically affect the way you behave, but if the belief is the essential component, the thing that “gets you into heaven,” then the actions, while nice, are easily reduced to a secondary bonus. They are meant to follow from your belief, but the belief is what really matters; the mental assent is the salvific priority.

Now I won’t get into all the complicated theological history here,4 but I will say that I think this mindset is a natural result of bifurcating “faith” and “works” as distinct theological categories when really, they should be viewed as singular and inextricable. St. James, in his epistle, seems to push back against this separation occurring in his own day:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.

But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from works, and I by my works will show you faith. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is worthless?

I think the focus on technicalities of “salvation” distracts us from the more essential (and simple) point being raised here: that there can be no true separation of one’s faith and one’s actions. If you claim to be a follower of Christ, in what sense can that be true if you don’t act like it? What good is saying you affirm particular facts of history if you don’t live like it’s true? James even goes so far as to point out that mere “belief” is worthless, as even the enemies of God “believe” in him.

All of this, ultimately, is to agree with Adams. By his own admission, he was not a believer. He did not live like the story of Christ’s cosmic rescue of the universe is a true story. He did not accept that narrative, either factually or experientially. Which makes his next words all the more interesting. If, as he states, Adams was not a believer, what on earth does the proclamation of “accepting” Jesus even mean? Again, I don’t blame Adams for this at all; I think it’s indicative of the reductionist binary we’ve simplified faith into, as if the entire story comes down to an on/off switch. Adams quite literally seems to be operating under the assumption that the sinner’s prayer operates like a magic spell, or a password to get into a clubhouse. He does not believe, but just in case, he says the right words, hoping that it checks a box on St. Peter’s clipboard and earns him entry past those pearly gates. Adams has bought into the notion that God saves or damns based on technicalities, as if entry to heaven follows from scanning a transcript of your lifetime to check if you verbally stated what team you’re on.

But he also adds that he hopes he is “qualified for entry.” This third and final aspect, I think, is the most telling of his mindset. While I’m sure his “I accept Jesus” profession factors into his hypothetical qualification, Christians and non-Christians alike have a colloquial understanding that “going to heaven” is essentially a merit-based process. 5 While Christians may claim to believe in salvation by grace alone or some similar formulation, in truth, most believe in karma. It’s an intuitive position, the notion that generally good people do not deserve to be punished forever, but very bad people might. Or at least, very bad people do not deserve an eternal reward for their horrible lives. And Adams seems to be thinking to himself (as he expresses later in his statement) that he strove to be a generally good person and live a generally good life. So he (again, intuitively) hopes that some combination of good karma and a final Pascal’s Wager affirmation of Christ’s lordship may be just enough to get him over the finish line. But all this tells us is how fundamentally the “Christian friends” Adams referred to failed to help him understand what salvation is in the Christian story, how they equipped him with this simplistic binary and hoped that at some point, he could “join their team” with a loyalty pledge, rather than transform his life through the pursuit of Christ’s Way.

I won’t lengthen this post with a thorough corrective to this view (you can read some of my attempts to do so here), but I do think it’s worth recognizing that this simplistic, transactional understanding of the Christian story is, at least to my understanding, the culturally dominant one in the West. And while great writers like N.T. Wright, David Bentley Hart, Pete Enns, Brad Jersak, and countless others have published excellent books in recent years pushing back against this crass binary; their theologically sound and biblically informed perspective has been slow to make its way into the zeitgeist, and thus we are left contending with this “magic spell” version of conversion.

But lastly, in defense of Adams, there is a good-faith way we can take his words. In one of the stories found in Mark 9, upon hearing that all things are possible to those who believe, the father of a demon-possessed child cries out, “I believe, help my unbelief!” I love the beautifully human sincerity of this paradoxical proclamation. The father believes, but does he believe enough? Does he believe truly? Does he even know what it means to believe? We don’t know. What we do know is that in his uncertainty, he cries out to Jesus for help. There is a sense in which we can read Adams’ “risk-reward” calculation in this same light. He does not believe, but if he is wrong, help his unbelief. He may have framed it as hedging his bets, but there may be a very real sense in which facing death opened him to genuine consideration of these matters, perhaps for the first time in his life. We cannot know for sure. All I know is, from my vantage point, Adams’ deathbed conversion feels very cheap. And again, I don’t blame him for his understanding of how conversion works. If he was trying to give his life to Jesus at the last moment, he presumably did so in the way his aforementioned Christian friends taught him. But a faith that can be reduced to nothing but an “opt-in” as a final hedged bet, like grabbing a last-minute candy bar in the checkout line, is a cheap faith, and it is to our own shame that we Christians have allowed the spectacular tale of God’s loving rescue of the cosmos to be reduced to such an empty transaction.

I have a lot more I could say here,6 but instead of rambling on, I’d like to leave you with a question by way of a thought experiment. If you are someone who believes in any variant of Heaven, Hell, or the Christian afterlife, I would really like to know your response to this, so please leave a comment or shoot me an email.7 I came up with this a while ago, and I think it’s an interesting way to assess our own frameworks for how we view belief, behavior, and God’s role (as opposed to ours) in the context of salvation.

Once upon a time, there was a man named John-Mark, but he went by just “Mark.” Mark was raised in a good Christian home, and after graduating from high school, chose to pursue a career in ministry, eventually becoming the Pastor of a small church. By all accounts, he was a decent man, well-liked by his congregants, if a bit bombastic at times. He was married with two kids by age 30 and lived a peaceful, small-town life.

At the age of 35, Mark was in a terrible car accident. He spent months in a coma, and when he finally woke up, his memory was gone. A nurse told him his name, but he only heard “John,” and so during his recovery, he came to prefer John to his full name.

The recovery was lengthy and difficult, and while he was eventually cleared to return home, John was a changed man. He sincerely tried to make things work with his wife, but she couldn’t endure being married to a stranger, so after a time, they amicably divorced. John ended up leaving town to start over. He settled on a new vocation as a truck driver and lived the rest of his life on the road, exploring an unfamiliar world. During his travels, he met a woman who became his second wife, and they raised one child together. John no longer believed in God, though he passively accepted his wife’s Buddhist faith and let her teach some of its principles to their son, even though he never really embraced them himself. John died at the ripe old age of 87.

So the question is this. By your understanding of faith and salvation (and skipping the reasonable answer of “we can’t know for sure,” this is a thought experiment, not a test), is John-Mark saved? Damned? Something else entirely?

I’d be very curious to hear how any of you answer this question.

Bugonia was a near-perfect film, and I hated it.

To call Yorgos Lanthimos an acquired taste would be to do him a disservice, because even the slimmest morsel of Lanthimos is a novelty dining experience. If Christopher Nolan movies are your best local Italian bistro and Michael Bay movies are McDonalds, Yorgos Lanthimos movies are a meal at Medieval Times, except the whole cast is drunk on absinthe, one of the horses escaped and is trashing the gift shop, and the staff accidentally seasoned your stew with expired quaaludes. Lanthimos makes movies that feel like they’re operating on a different vibrational frequency, spawned from a world that looks sort of like ours and sharing several of our most beloved Hollywood actors, but is clearly a different plane of existence.

And I love him for it.

I adored The Lobster. The Killing of a Sacred Deer was disturbing and horrifying in all the right ways. I’ll admit I barely remember The Favorite but what I do remember is positive. Poor Things was…well it was a lot, but a lot of that lot was fantastic. All of this is to convey that if you know people who hated Bugonia, I would wager that 9 out of every 10 of them hated it because Lanthimos’ style can be as off-putting as it is idiosyncratic. But his signature eccentricity is not why I took issue with Bugonia.

In fact, as far as the filmmaking goes, I have only compliments to offer. The lead performances by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons weren’t just good, they were exceptional, even by the high standards set by both of these tremendous actors. Plemons especially, he took a character that could so easily have been portrayed as generic cRaZy gUy and infused him with layer upon layer of heart, depth, and disturbingly convincing realism. The movie is shot beautifully, the thrilling score juxtaposed over mundane and frantic shots alike drove the film with a wonderful energy, and as usual for Lanthimos, the production design was both original and stunning. Even the script, despite how much I’m about to complain about it, is extremely well written. I have no criticisms of the moviemaking; just a personal, ideological reaction to it.

[Spoilers for Bugonia and Wonder Woman to follow]

The best way I can think to explain my problem with the ending of Bugonia is the example of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman (2017). As the titular heroine and Chris Pine fight their way through various WWI set pieces (and fall in love for good measure), Wonder Woman establishes a very simple heart to its conflict. After appraising the extent of the Great War, Diana concludes that Ares, the god of War, must be behind it. She simply cannot accept that mankind is capable of the horror and cruelty she has witnessed without malicious divine intervention, and she becomes convinced that if she can kill Ares, the war will cease.

As the third act intensifies, the Germans begin loading a bomber aircraft to deliver a chemical attack on London. By this point, Diana is certain that the villainous German General Ludendorff is Ares in disguise, so she and Chris Pine storm the airfield and, after a brief battle, she manages to kill the general. But the war does not stop. The Germans continue loading the aircraft for the operation, and Diana is stunned. Chris Pine finds her, begs her to help him stop them and save lives, but she’s in full crisis mode, unable to accept that Ares was not to blame for this horrendous war. “You don’t think I get it??” Chris Pine shouts at her, “After what I’ve seen out there? You don’t think I wish I could tell you it’s one bad guy to blame? It’s not! We’re all to blame.”

The back and forth ends without a clear moral resolution. Diana is still despondent. Chris Pine sprints off to try to save the day. And for a brief moment, the audience is left to sit with the heaviness of the lesson: the world is not simple. Human beings are capable of courageous heroism and abject villainy. War is ugly, complicated, and not reducible to something as simple as a singular villain pulling the strings behind the scenes. Yet Chris Pine, a morally gray character in his own right, represents that even amidst the ugliness of humanity, heroes can choose to fight for good. It’s a fantastic payoff.

And then Ares shows up.

Yes, that Ares. The god of War. Diana was right, he was there the whole time, just disguised as a different character. He monologues. They fight. Wonder Woman wins, kills Ares, and…the war stops. Literally. The very next scene cuts back to a victorious Great Britain and the war is won. All that wonderful nuance introduced just minutes before is thrown completely out the window as the good guy kills the one bad guy behind it all and simplistically saves the day.

This isn’t just a bad ending; it’s a bad ending that betrays the entire film. The whole movie served to set up the moral lesson Diana needed to learn: that her overly-optimistic view of mankind was naive, that the world wasn’t as simple as black and white, good and evil, that every malady she dismissed with “Ares is behind it all” was in fact the work of complicated humans making their own free choices. So when Ares actually shows up behind it all, when the day is saved simply by defeating him, the whole movie is recolored in light of that revelation. The naive framing we set up as an obstacle to be overcome is revealed to have been the correct perspective all along, eliminating Diana’s character growth and all the wisdom gleaned from her journey, leaving the audience with no lesson to take away other than “Boy, Wonder Woman sure can punch hard.”

This is exactly what happens in Bugonia. For those who have not seen it but do not care about spoilers, the film revolves around Jesse Plemons’ “Teddy,” who is every conspiracy theorist you’ve ever met rolled into one. Sometime in between beekeeping and shielding his house from alien observation by putting aluminum foil on his windows, he discovers evidence of a secret incursion by extraterrestrials known as “Andromedans.” We follow Teddy and his impressionable cousin Don as they kidnap the CEO of Auxolith, a pharmaceutical company that also happened to be behind the clinical trial that hospitalized his mother. Teddy has identified Michelle (Emma Stone), as one of the Andromedans, so he and Don abduct her, shave her head (to prevent communication with the mothership) slather her in antihistamine (to counteract her ability to send out a distress signal), and chain her up in their basement to await the diplomatic opportunity provided by the forthcoming Lunar eclipse. Using her, they plan to negotiate with the Andromedan emperor to convince him not to kill everyone on Earth. If this sounds ridiculous, it’s supposed to.

The film unabashedly portrays Teddy as unhinged, though not as one-dimensional. We gather bits and pieces about his past, from the tragedy with his mother to some heavy childhood trauma involving an abusive babysitter. The love his autistic cousin Don has for him seems genuine and born of a good relationship, albeit one that turned tragically abusive, with Teddy pressuring Don into partaking in his crimes and even forcing him to harm himself via chemical castration. Teddy is not a good person, but you realize as the movie goes on that he didn’t have to turn out this way, that his present madness is the tragic result of so many people failing him throughout his life. You can feel nothing but pity as, in one scene, he describes his own radicalization, explaining his past adherence to everything from the alt-right to Marxism to every other fringe community the internet has to offer. This isn’t an evil man seeking a pretext for his violent inclinations; he’s a lost one, desperate for meaning, belonging, and validation.

Who Teddy represents is not subtle. I remarked to my wife as we watched that if this film had been released ten years ago, I would have enjoyed it far more, as back then, things like flat-earthers and antivaxxers were still a novelty mostly found (and dismissed) at the absolute fringes of internet forums, with neither representatives in the mainstream nor prominent public figures attempting to court their vote. The fact that an uncomfortable percentage of the United States now openly embraces multiple conspiratorial or pseudoscientific narratives1 just as crazy as Teddy’s alien invasion makes watching a movie starring such an exemplar all the more discomforting. But at the same time, the relatability of Teddy’s delusion viscerally bolsters the suspense. Because most of us know someone who thinks Alex Jones asks good questions, it’s easy to place ourselves in his basement and grimly imagine how we would handle being in that sort of situation. How do you reason with someone operating so far beyond reason? How do you negotiate with a fellow human who is utterly convinced you aren’t even human? This is a genuine question for our present cultural climate: how on earth2 do we communicate effectively or productively when, thanks to social media echo chambers and the complete dissolution of public trust in mainstream media and comparable institutions, we live in completely different realities?

Michelle, a savvy captive if there ever was one (to a degree that’s unsettling in its own right), alternates between attempting to reason with Teddy, berating him for being unhinged or mentally ill, or when all else fails, trying to play along and claim to be an alien. But as the film nears its climax, she discovers it’s even worse than she thought. With Teddy temporarily out of the house, she stumbles into a hidden room and finds jars of body parts, photos of previous victims, and meticulously detailed lore about the Andromedans, including a full 3-D rendering of their mothership. Teddy has killed potentially dozens of people in pursuit of communication with these alien invaders.

Utilizing details gleaned from his notes, Michelle manages to convince Teddy of an alternate narrative surrounding the Andromedans, culminating in a trip to her office to utilize the teleporter in her closet to beam them both to the mothership. Right before they go, Teddy reveals he’s wearing a suicide vest, just in case. Michelle closes him in the closet and turns to escape the room while he’s distracted, but the vest accidentally ignites, blowing the room and Teddy apart, his severed head smacking her in the face and knocking her unconscious. A gruesome end, but the threat has passed, and Michelle is safely taken away in an ambulance.

And then Ares shows up.

In what I’m assuming to be an intendedly farcical twist of this black comedy, Michelle regains consciousness only to limp back to her office, hop in the closet, and beam up to the mothership. She informs her alien compatriots that she did not make contact because she cannot communicate without hair and proceeds, by way of catching them up to speed, to confirm almost every detail of Teddy’s assessment of their race. But sadly, with Teddy’s actions in mind (and their experiments to improve humans proving fruitless), they conclude the human experiment has ultimately failed. Approaching the ship’s center console, Michelle pops the firmament3 protecting the flat earth, and the movie ends with a three-minute, hauntingly arresting montage surveying the corpses of every human being on earth.

Now again, ten years ago, this might have been funny. But like Wonder Woman, this ending fundamentally alters the entire messaging of the film. Every scene framed as Teddy being crazy and Michelle being in danger is now revealed to be the other way around. Teddy’s accidental murder of his mother, his intentional murder of a police officer, the abuse of his cousin that drives him to suicide, the butchering of however many people in search of aliens; none of these actions are the demented mishaps of a deranged mind too far gone; they are instead the tragic collateral damage of a noble quest to save humanity. If Teddy is right the whole time, then you, the audience, are wrong for having dismissed him. You are judgmental, small-minded, and your superficial assumptions were nothing but perfunctory foolishness. Maybe you should have listened to him. Maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to worry for Emma Stone without considering that she was secretly the royal overlord of an alien race that seeded mankind in their own image because they felt bad about accidentally exterminating the dinosaurs. Ever thought about that??

Perhaps I’m being a bit sanctimonious in my reaction, but as measles makes a comeback, as Twitter continues to perpetuate misinformation on a scale never before encountered by the human race, as AI-generated videos become easier to make and harder to spot, as ludicrous conspiracies have left the fringe corners of Reddit and 4Chan and continue to make inroads in the mainstream (with lethal consequences), the punchline of “hey, maybe we should listen to the flat earth guy,” just…isn’t very funny. This brand of subversive humor fundamentally requires one to be in on the joke. When a stand-up comedian performs a bit with a racist punchline, the humor isn’t just in the shock value of the delivery; it’s grounded in the fact that we know racism is bad. It can only be funny because we’re all in on the joke together, and we recognize it as a joke. To use some of the more ironic terminology available, comedy is a safe space where otherwise horrible notions can be engaged with and made light of. So when the entirety of society (more or less) was in uniform (or at least public) agreement that people shrieking about reptilian invaders, barcodes as the Mark of the Beast, and the globalist conspiracy to hide the shape of the earth from us were not to be taken seriously, a movie that ends with a “what if the 4Chan guy really was humanity’s last savior” might have been funny. But Teddy no longer represents a fringe exception, just the extreme of a norm.

And you know, maybe that’s what Lanthimos is really saying. The fact that the alien council, populated only by diverse actors of color (save their white overlord Emma Stone) decides to eradicate humanity after failing to perfect it to their moral standards is an incisive parody of the extremes of wokeism. Genociding humanity for the sake of the planet is exactly the kind of overcorrection many fear from environmental extremists. And Teddy, despite his ultimate vindication, does a lot of damage to innocents in his quest to save innocents. Maybe Lanthimos, in his own macabre way, is just trying to teach a familiar lesson: that well-meaning intention taken to the extreme can result in cataclysmic ends, and that maybe all of us should take a moment to question the certitude with which we look at the world.

It’s just the tools by which he pushes those buttons that get me. It is not “closed-minded” to view some things as obviously dismissible. No serious person is “just asking questions” about the shape of the damn earth, not because of scientific elitism (knowledge of the Earth’s real shape is older than the Bible), but because there are some things (maybe not many, but some) that are just settled beyond a reasonable doubt.4 The film raises so many interesting questions about capitalism, ecology, sociological hierarchy, the diminishment of the rural population in America, zealotry, corporate greed, and more. My reaction skips most of these details and doesn’t even begin to approach a comprehensive analysis. But just like Ares showing up to save Wonder Woman from any semblance of nuance, I can’t help but feel the “Teddy was right” twist negatively overshadows any other point the movie was trying to make.

At the end of the day, Bugonia is not a bad movie, not even close. Objectively speaking, I’d say it’s probably one of the best films of 2025. The visceral reaction that prompted me to fire off this article instead of sleeping is exactly the kind of reaction good art should invoke. And who knows? Maybe I’m feeling exactly what Lanthimos wants me to feel. Maybe my discomfort with how close to home Bugonia hits is the real comedy. Maybe I’m supposed to recognize that “ha ha, the most deluded person you know is the only one who sees clearly” isn’t a moral assertion, but a joke.

I just wish I were enough of an optimist to find it funny.

But not all were pleased with my lauding of the latest Rian Johnson outing, and one particularly piqued opinion blossomed from an offhand comment on the original article to a full-blown published response. While I appreciate the candor and passion therein, I fear that the disagreements between myself and Mr. Dominic Andres largely boil down to subjective interpretations and matters of personal taste,1 and thus I am limited in responding to his criticisms. Many of them appear to boil down to “I disagree with Mr. Carlucci’s opinion on this,” and as such, many of my replies could be summarized as “I disagree with Mr. Andres’ disagreement.” But that would make for a dreadfully boring rejoinder, and since a response was invited, I will do my best to briefly reply to a few points that I think warrant further comment.

Mr. Andres begins his dissection of my “foolish review” by taking issue with my characterization of Father Wicks. An aspect of the film I enjoyed was the fact that I found Father Wicks to be an authentic representation of a particular attitude in American Christianity without being reduced to a caricature. Mr. Andres claims otherwise, asking:

“…does the inclusion of the motives mentioned, motives which are, to a varying extent, present in real American Christianity (regardless of their validity), bring Wicks beyond the realm of stereotype and caricature?”

He then proceeds to center much of his critique on whether or not Wicks qualifies under the definition of a caricature:

“Let us examine some definitions (this blog is still, after all philosophy for smokers). A caricature is defined by Merriam-Webster as an ‘exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics.’ This definition, which I think represents the common understanding, does not exclude giving your exaggeration motives. Indeed, any good piece of political propaganda must give motives, as only those motives can connect the piece to reality in such a way as to accomplish the end of demonizing one’s opponents. Wicks, then, absolutely falls into this understanding. His belief that the ends justify the means resolves into cartoonishly evil behavior, such as a series of grotesque lies in his confessions to Father Jud, his continual and direct railing against specific people in his congregation, and his willingness to utterly destroy loyal parishioners who are on his own side of the ‘battle.’”

Much of this rebuttal lies in the idea that my listing of Wicks’ motives was intended to serve as a justification for his status as not-a-caricature, as opposed to an illustration of the type of character he was. But to clarify, I was not attempting to make an argument; I was simply stating my conclusion, and my elaboration on his character traits (including said motives) was descriptive, not a defense of that conclusion. My actual argument against Wicks as a caricature is far simpler:2 I have met him. I have met plenty of men like him and witnessed far more on public platforms whose behavior exceeds his in cartoonishness, whose brutalist fervor far surpasses his in bombasticism, and whose willingness to destroy those on their own side of the battle for selfish ends far outstrips Wicks’ hubristic mendacity. There’s nothing in Wicks I find to be a “ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics” because I have met men exactly like him (though most of them admittedly lack the power of presence exuded by Josh Brolin). Perhaps if the film were attempting to say that all or most priests (or conservative Christians for that matter) were accurately represented by Wicks, there might be cause for concern here, but it doesn’t. Wicks is presented in the film exactly as his counterparts appear in real life; generally towards the fringes, though sometimes with a concerning number of too-dedicated loyalists, and occasionally embedded in a larger system that views him with a mixed reputation. Now, if by some semantical technicality Mr. Andres would like to insist that Brolin’s portrayal definitionally constitutes a caricature, I am happy to shrug and say that’s fine, but if so, many caricatures walk among us in real life.

Again, I fear there is little to objectively assess in this line of inquiry. Mr. Andres is within his rights to dislike Johnson's portrayal of this iteration of American Christianity and even to dismiss it as “examples of the standardized mental picture held by modern secular liberals of conservative Christians.” But I am speaking as a Christian, not a secular liberal, in my adulation of Johnson’s writing. I don’t find it inaccurate in the least. Reality is often more ridiculous than fiction.

Stepping away from matters of opinion, I will offer a quick “objective” correction to one point:

“On top of that, whatever your familiarity with protestant conservative circles, even the attitudes mentioned, specifically the “ends justify the means” belief, is not present in traditionalist Catholicism. Johnson didn’t even get his caricature right.”

Whether or not Mr. Andres is correct in stating that this belief is not present in traditionalist Catholicism,3 Johnson did not primarily intend for this “caricature” to be one of Catholicism. He’s noted in multiple interviews that he grew up Protestant, that many or most of his critiques are sourced from his own experience, and that the transposition of said critiques onto Catholicism was largely an aesthetic choice:4

“Part of it is just that, honestly, most of the churches I actually grew up going to look like Pottery Barns. But there is nothing cooler-looking than Catholicism. Growing up as a Protestant, there was always an exotic nature to the Catholic Church.

I think also for myself—because a lot of the stuff that I’m talking about in the movie applies directly to my Protestant evangelical upbringing—setting it in the Catholic Church gave me just a little bit of distance. I could talk more directly to it without feeling like I was being quite so on the nose.”5

Now, as for the assessment of Father Jud, much of Mr. Andres’ criticisms seem to align with Wicks’ own assessment of Jud. Jud is too nice, too inoffensive, too potentially accepting of leftists for Mr. Andres’ taste, and again, he is welcome to his own opinion. I’ll simply offer a few offhand and rapid-fire responses to his contentions:

“He is certainly the nice-guy Christian stereotype, the Christian that modern agnostics would like to see, who doesn’t give a harsh word to anyone, except those who are intolerant.”

Here I would perhaps remind Mr. Andres of St. James’ thorough admonitions against harsh speech, insistence on the taming of the tongue, pointing out its status as a “small member boasting of great exploits” and “set on fire by Hell.”6 St. Peter gives similar testimony in his first epistle, pushing back against repaying evil for evil or reviling for reviling, insisting on blessing in place of retaliation. St. Paul as well admonishes against slander, against corrupt communication, against wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking. And of course, Christ himself insists on stringent standards for his followers in restraining their anger and their insults. And yes, I know many of the common responses to this flavor of potentially selective insistence (“Well didn’t Christ call the Pharisees a brood of vipers?? Didn’t Paul wish some of the Galatians would castrate themselves??”), I only mean to illustrate that what Mr. Andres’ demeans as the “nice-guy Christian stereotype” could just as easily be styled “Biblical.”7 And as for only targeting harshness towards the intolerant, note that Jud does so because they are members of his flock. Jud follows precisely in the model of the Apostle Paul in his approach to ministry. He is not interested in policing the behavior of the world or demanding moral adherence from the secular realm; his priority is internal critique, holding fellow Christians to a higher standard worthy of Christ’s body. When people are beyond the church, Jud’s job is to serve them and bring them into the flock.8 When they are brought into the flock, Jud’s job is to conform them to the example and image of Christ. And Jud’s opposition to Wicks is not because Wicks is actually some no-nonsense truth-teller bravely holding the ideological line on the cultural battlefield, it’s because Wicks’ posture as such (like so many of his real-life counterparts) serves his own selfish and ideological ends. There are loads of Christian influencers today who mistake bullying for calls to repentance, performative moralizing for morality, and virtue signaling for quality of character. Fundamentally, Jud desires to mold disciples, while Wicks desires to muster troops. Jud wishes to conform to the image and example of Christ, while Wicks seeks to achieve victory in the name of Christianity.

“Beyond that, however, the protagonists have a literal ‘agree to disagree’ moment at the end of the film, where Father Jud invites Blanc to his first mass, and Blanc says that there’s ‘nothing he’d rather not do.’ Jud smiles as Blanc, also smiling, leaves. Implicit? Yes. But still present.”

Present? Sure. But my claim was the film does not have a “hollow ‘both sides have something right’ portrayal where two equally ‘right’ thinkers are placed in opposition only to cheaply agree to disagree.” This humorous little “agree to disagree” moment is neither hollow nor cheap, because it comes at the end of a very long film in which the characters had plenty of moments of genuine conflict and connection. I expect Mr. Andres and me to part on similar terms; a moment of cordial recognition that they are at an impasse, but only after an exploration of their disagreement. If this moment had been the only scene in which they surveyed their differences, it might be a good example of a “cheap” agree-to-disagree portrayal, but as it stands, that is not what we have in this film.

“Ironically, the ‘balance’ referenced is in fact the exact hollowness that Mr. Carlucci wishes were not present, insofar as a portrayal of the ‘good parts’ of Christianity is portrayed positively next to the success and implicit affirmation (via Blanc’s undisputed intellectual brilliance) of atheism.”

If this were Johnson’s intent, he did a damn poor job of it. I never once contended the fact that Johnson’s personal opinion aligns most closely with Blanc’s (in fact, I outright stated so in my review), but I think this fact makes the film’s elevation of a Christian priest all the more admirable. The climax of the film (vague spoilers to follow) is not Blanc’s heroic rationalism proving superior to Jud’s dopey religious naivete; it is Blanc having his own “road to Damascus” experience. Not a conversion moment, but a moment where he, like Jud, decides that the human element present in front of them is more important than the resolution of the mystery, and rather than shout “j’accuse!” at the murderer, Blanc steps back to provide the space for the murderer to repent; to confess of their own volition, and then in fact subordinates himself in that moment to Jud’s role as the murderer’s priest. Blanc doesn’t solve the case his way; he instead chooses to provide space for Jud to minister to a needy soul, choosing grace for the guilty over the defeat of his enemy.

And as for “undisputed intellectual brilliance,” if you take issue with legendary Detective Benoit Blanc being depicted as the smartest character in the room, I’d gently like to remind you what movie you are watching.

Now, here is where I freely admit to reading thoroughly between the lines and wandering far afield into speculation, but my suspicion (somewhat confirmed by a brief perusal of his page, but with sincere openness to being wrong)9 is that, while I’m sure there are many aspects of the faith on which we align,10 the core disagreement between myself and Mr. Andres is one of vision and emphasis. My guess Mr. Andres thinks a figure like Brolin’s Monsignor Wicks is an example of what Christian leadership may occasionally need (albeit, obviously stripped of his outright villainous and hypocritical traits). Mr. Andres seems to be under the impression that cultivating hatred for more than just the sin in our own soul can and should be encouraged, stating:

“…there are a shocking number of things worth hating today, and a surprising dearth of hatred on the intellectual right. The left would have you believe that the right is universally hateful and violent, but if anything, the right is not violent enough.” 11

The political conflations go without saying. The distaste for “nice” Christians rings of those who see “liberal” Christians placing too much emphasis on God’s love at the expense of God’s justice,12 who see Christ’s calls for non-violence and love of enemy as weak passivity to be re-interpreted, who genuinely and sincerely do feel the ground eroding beneath their feet as nominal Christianity’s long stranglehold on America’s public consciousness loses inch after creeping inch to the secular sphere. I reckon Mr. Andres’ distaste for my admiration of Father Jud is born in part of sharing at least some the criticisms levied by Monsignor Wicks, that he and Wicks hate many of the same things, that at least aspects of Wicks’ rant about the assault of secular culture on the church rang quite true to him, and as it’s quite clear I would prefer Christians follow in the model of Jud, I am inevitably going to be lumped (implicitly if not explicitly) in as an ally of Rian Johnson’s liberal brigade. I am used to such characterizations and will lose no sleep over another individual levying some variant of them towards me. But it should come as no surprise that someone who sees a movie’s antagonist as a direct attack on them or their “side” would take issue with a review lauding the protagonist of said film. I see Jud as a wonderful depiction of how Christians should strive to act in the world. Mr. Andres sees him as a stereotype. I see Monsignor Wicks as a salient critique of a genuinely toxic, antichrist strain of American Christianity that is all too influential on our public discourse and far too prevalent in both our pews and our politics. Mr. Andres sees him as a hostile caricature. We clearly have very different experiences of the world, and view this film from fundamentally distant vantage points. And while I appreciate the opportunity for dialogue, I don’t see that gap closing via Substack articles. I don’t think either of our positions is incoherent, nor approached in bad faith, but they may very well be operating from mutually exclusive moral imaginations. In truth, it may be as simple as one of us viewing Johnson’s criticisms as valid, and the other viewing them as bad-faith hyperbole, which is a disagreement that ends up having little to do with the movie as a movie.

One final note I’ll add, as I don’t know if this response will prompt a response in turn (and if it does, I’d rather not perpetuate that cycle indefinitely). Unfortunately, I cannot make this final point without a minor spoiler, so go watch the movie before you finish reading:

The (or at least a) central message of the movie as pertains to faith is not subtle, but it is very Christian. The film is not ultimately about nice priests vs mean priests or nationalists vs liberals or progressivism vs conservatism, nor is the message that Christians ought to eschew judgment in favor of blind appeasement. The central message is a question of…well, central message. We’re told that message in the opening minutes of the film, where Jud, in disavowing his violent actions from the preceding scene, says the kind of Christian he wants to be is “this” (gesturing his arms out like Christ on the cross), “not this” (holding up his fists in the defensive stance of a boxer). As Jud settles in at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, he offers to use his woodworking skills to craft a new cross to hang above the altar, as the sanctuary’s original cross is missing. Monsignor Wicks shoots this down, claiming that the lack of the cross is there as “a reminder of the shameful sin of the harlot whore.” Even without breaking down the backstory, the thematic point is not subtle. At the center of Wicks’ church is not the cross, but bitterness, defensiveness, a cross-shaped hole filled by a longstanding grudge for a past offense. Again, the message is not abstruse whatsoever: Wicks is running a church without the theology of the cross at its core. And Jud, for whatever else one can claim about him, desires precisely the opposite. The kenotic theology of the cross is essential for him, and so once in charge, he restores the cross to the center of the sanctuary (both literally and figuratively). This is even stated outright at the end of a quote I cited in my review; after Jud shouts “And by using me in it, you’re setting me against my real and only purpose in life, which is not to fight the wicked and bring them to justice, but to serve them and bring them to Christ,” he ends with, “Otherwise, I’m just as bad as Wicks, making it about me and not Jesus.”

It’s a temptation we all face, to make ourselves the center of the story, to place my wants, my needs, my ideology, my politics, my identity, my standing in the culture, my status in a movement, my conviction, my righteous anger, my nation, my justified hate in service of loving the good, myself on the throne of self-importance, rather than throwing myself in surrender at the foot of the cross. And that is the ultimate claim of Wake Up Dead Man’s spiritual commentary: that a not-insignificant contingent of American Christianity is fundamentally preaching a gospel of anger, opposition, demagoguery, and division, utterly lacking Christ at its center. On that point, I think Johnson is absolutely, unequivocally correct.

To close, in passing, Mr. Andres remarks:

“…While a debate on theology with Mr. Carlucci would be quite interesting, and something I’m open to (or indeed a debate on the merits of The Last Jedi)…”

I’m really not interested in a public theology “debate” (beyond the brief explorations touched upon in our two articles), but Mr. Andres, you are welcome to shoot me a DM for a conversation on any theological topic you would like. Having both said our piece in public, I think a further private conversation may be the logical continuation (if you feel there is more to be said). But as many of our disagreements appear to be prima facie interpretive in nature, to attempt a “debate” might very well entail a thorough exploration of each other’s theological presuppositions and biblical hermeneutics to even have a chance of beginning the argument, and that sounds like far more effort than I care to put into respectfully disagreeing about a movie.

As for the offer to debate the merits of The Last Jedi, I can confidently say that there is nothing in the world I would rather not do. Toodle-oo.

Wake Up Dead Man, the latest in the Knives Out murder mystery series, sees Johnson tackling matters not only of forensic intrigue, but of faith. Behind the usual pomp and ponderance of a Benoit Blanc investigation lies a serious examination of both American Christianity’s identity crisis and a beautiful exploration of Christian compassion. Josh O’Connor and Josh Brolin play two very different priests set at odds in a small rural town, and at first, it appears easy to reduce them to simple stereotypes. O’Connor’s “Father Jud” is openhearted, empathetic, and genuine, while by contrast, Brolin’s “Monsignor Wicks” is a bombastic, overbearing, and savagely incisive preacher who seems to delight in ostracizing newcomers to his parish. A lesser writer would have stumbled into shallowness, with Father Jud there to show that good Christians (in the eyes of non-believers) should be unchallenging, inoffensive, and blindly affirming, while the bad Christians are the judgmental ones, nourished by their weekly diet of saccharine hellfire warnings. Instead, we are presented with two flawed but authentic men broken in profoundly different ways. Monsignor Wicks may be villainous, but despite invoking shibboleths like “feminist” and “Marxist” in his rage-filled diatribes, he is never reduced to a simplistic caricature. Wicks (and especially his loyal followers) represents a very real and very pervasive attitude in American Christianity— one of radicalized existential dread, stoked endlessly by social media echo-chambers and other sensationalist media.2 Wicks sees Christianity losing cultural ground and worse, large swaths of it are choosing to kowtow to the assaulting world instead of fighting against it. His brutishness is a necessary evil, his abrasiveness is what truth feels like to those who would rather ignore it; he is a holy soldier in a holier war, and almost any unrighteous means can be justified if they serve righteous ends. To him, Jud represents everything wrong with modern Christians: wimpy, effeminate people-pleasers so focused on empathy and “getting along” that they do nothing to stop the onslaught the Church faces from the secular world.

But Jud isn’t just “nice.” In his first scene, he loses his temper and decks a deacon. Throughout the movie, he admits to profound character flaws and displays them in moments of anger and impulsiveness. He lambasts those who think God will miraculously “fix” people in an instant, insisting that what God actually does is meet people in their brokenness and love them through it. This is not a feel-good Christianity, but neither is it a toothless one, focused solely on being the friendly guy in the room. Jud’s quest for Christlikeness leads him to radical self-sacrifice, but also to insist on the pursuit of uncompromising grace in his reluctant congregants. Following his understanding of Christ’s model, he meets people in their brokenness, but he doesn’t encourage them to stay there. He holds prayer meetings, trying to help his parishioners “break down walls,” and strenuously pushes them to adopt Christ’s view of those they dislike, all while wrestling constantly with his own hatred and displaying an endearing willingness to condemn his own heart rather than justify his own righteousness.

Father Jud is my favorite protagonist of any movie I’ve seen in years. He is eminently human and for a mainstream movie, shockingly and unapologetically Christian. He lives with a sincere gospel conviction, one that never gets reduced to religious platitudes or servile indifference. Jud embodies his vocation, spending half the movie trying to escape the murder mystery so he can go back to ministering to his ridiculous flock. And he’s willing to drop anything, at any moment, to show the love of Christ to anyone who seeks it.

In one of the most touching scenes in the film, Jud and Blanc are on the cusp of cracking a pivotal clue when an odd and annoying character suddenly gets serious and asks Jud to pray for her. In that instant, the whole scene shifts; Jud’s entire anxious disposition fades into a steady, encouraging presence. He completely drops his inquisition and snaps into priest mode, leaving a frazzled and confused Blanc alone in a room so he can focus entirely on ministering to this needy soul. It’s a jarring moment in the best way; it literally feels like Jud pauses the movie to just…go be a priest, with Blanc’s eagerness to progress in the mystery reflecting the audience’s own impatient expectancy. But Jud doesn’t care that Blanc is frustrated and he doesn’t care that the audience wants to discover the next piece of the puzzle; there is a soul in need, and all that matters to him is Christ’s ministry in that moment. Hours later, when Blanc finally tries to get him back on track, shouting at him that they’re trying to solve a murder, this is not a game, Jud snaps. “It is a game!” He shouts back, “Solving it, winning it, getting your big checkmate moment! And by using me in it, you’re setting me against my real and only purpose in life, which is not to fight the wicked and bring them to justice, but to serve them and bring them to Christ!”

It blows my mind that a non-Christian wrote that line. Granted, it would blow my mind even if a Christian had written it. What a magnificent distillation of the priestly vocation. What a challenging explication of Christian compassion. What an effective way of summarizing some of the simple truths I feel like I’m grasping heedlessly for every time one of my theological diatribes surpasses 2,000 words. We find the film’s thesis is in this rant, deftly portraying the “two ways” option replete in Christian literature. Are we ministers to the world or its adversaries? Do we fight on Christ’s behalf or surrender to embody him? Should Christians be defensive of their place in the culture and fight to keep a majority of representation in political power, or should we see such things as temptations and focus on working as ministers of solidarity in the brokenness we know we cannot fix? Jud and Wicks perfectly embody these two approaches, and where each leads. Wake Up Dead Man is some of the best Christian representation I’ve seen in a secular movie, both in depicting the good it can inspire and the cruelty it can be weaponized to excuse.

And while the first act primarily focuses on questions internal to differing expressions of Christianity, Johnson’s own skepticism does not go unrepresented in the film. Ever the stereotypical rationalist, Blanc steps into the sanctuary as the resident atheist, unloads a few monologues against the faith, and is hardly short of dismissiveness for the miraculous and other “fairy-tale hogwash” he sees throughout the Bible. Yet the balance in the script was utterly refreshing. It wasn’t a hollow “both sides have something right” portrayal, where two equally “right” thinkers are placed in opposition only to cheaply agree to disagree. Hardly bereft of opinions, the film is not seeking to placate or be inoffensive; it obviously demeans movements like Christian Nationalism and hyper-fundamentalism, both through the example of Monsignor Wicks and through Jud’s criticisms of his own faith. And Johnson’s ultimate lack of belief clearly rings through; Blanc never has a conversion experience; there is no cheeky turn to the camera moment where he accepts the possibility of the miraculous or moves any closer to the faith of his childhood.3 Nor though, is there any diminishing of Jud’s belief. In his most desperate moments, he does not doubt God’s existence or Christ’s love, does not tacitly acknowledge Blanc to be the more rational or reasonable or in any way depreciate his convictions; at his lowest, we find him on his knees begging Jesus to show him the way forward. Blanc and Jud are both authentic men, stalwart in their stances, delightfully authentic in their humanity, and refreshingly allowed to co-exist with the nuance of reality rather than the usual reductionism of fictional commentary. This is far and away the best character writing of Johnson’s career and I hope he gets due credit for it.

I realize I’ve spent this entire review on a single aspect of the film’s themes/characters and not even touched on the murder mystery, but I’m not sure what else you’d expect from the “intersection of theology and media” guy. Better writers than I can pithily summarize the usual twists and turns you’ve come to expect from a Knives Out film, and I enjoyed every moment of trying to guess who was responsible for what and why.4 But if it feels like this review depicts the mystery as subordinate to the story’s thematic resonance and exploration of characters, I think that accurately reflects the film. The plot is there and the plot is fun, but this is first and foremost a human story, and the sleuthing is secondary in importance to the growth and challenges undertaken by its core characters.

As in any good mystery story, the film concludes with the plot unraveling, the secrets revealed, and a conclusive resolution for the main cast. But the enigmas of faith (or lack thereof) are left unanswered, deftly placed in the hands of the audience, because for all the vestments and philosophy, this film is not interested in preaching at you. Rian Johnson may not be a man of faith, but he seems to understand that there are some mysteries beyond the solving capabilities of even the great Benoit Blanc, and thus confines himself to only the questions a film like this can meaningfully address. And yet somehow, even while castigating the Church through Blanc’s mouth, Johnson manages to depict the Gospel message with profundity and seriousness, beyond anything I’d dream of expecting from someone with no religious conviction.

God truly works in mysterious ways.

Pun intended.

Relentless tribalism is often the straightest path to Faustian bargains. Many contemporary Christian leaders seem primarily invested in people appearing more “Christian” in their politics— that is, embracing the “correct” moral positions and signaling the right values. I can’t help but note how many thought leaders seem more interested in “Christian culture” or other nation-centric religious identity markers than the pursuit of traditional Christian orthopraxy. Though I suppose such avocations are more suited to the social media age, as all one needs to be a certified culture warrior is to (loudly) indicate what side you’re on.

In the US, it’s often and rightly noted that these prioritized values rarely include the emphasis both Jesus and the Old Testament prophets place on economic exploitation. At the heart of the so-called “prophetic critique” of the Levitical sacrificial system is not an attack on sacrifice or ritual as such, but a specific criticism of the state of Israel in their day. The point is not the insufficiency of ritual; it is that the ubiquity of economic oppression pollutes the nation beyond what the sacrificial system can cleanse. And if that was not invective enough, the prophets take it even further, synonymizing economic oppression with murder.

“The consistent prophetic message is that economic oppression is itself a form of shedding blood. Theft is murder on both an individual and societal scale. The prophets constantly link bloodshed with economic oppression.1 Take Micah, for example. When he finally concludes that Zion has been built ‘with blood’ (3:10) he explains that this is due to economic oppression, bribery, and greed (3:11), and this also comes after a long list of other exploitative practices (2:1–9). This is more than mere juxtaposition. This is a meditation on what constitutes ‘bloodshed’ and ‘murder.’ As Ezekiel puts it, ‘they take bribes, which is shedding blood’ (22:12). As if that was not clear enough, we go on to read: ‘you take both advance interest and accrued interest, and make gain of your neighbors by extortion; and you have forgotten me, says the Lord God. See, I strike my hands together at the dishonest gain you have made, and at the blood that has been shed within you’ (22:12–13 NRSV). The other prophets listed are doing the same things as Micah and Ezekiel.

What the prophets are saying is that economic exploitation belongs to the moral impurities because it itself is a form of murder. All the various forms of theft have been ‘upgraded’ to the level of moral impurities because it has enveloped the entire social framework and network for the distribution of land, its produce, and goods and services.”

I don’t recall where, but I recently heard someone observe how unusual it is that wealth isn’t a more frequent target of Christian ire. This is not to say that the predominant cultural issues the Church focuses on in the West, things like abortion or sexual ethics, aren’t important considerations, but when one reads the Bible, one may notice the ratio seems off. Most certainly, the Bible speaks on sexual ethics2 but not nearly with the frequency or severity one might expect from the corresponding cultural fixation on it. In contrast, the denunciation of wealth and greed is constant, widespread throughout the text, and belligerently forceful. I can search YouTube today and find any number of pastors imploring their congregations about the evils of sexual immorality, yet I’d be hard-pressed to find any comparable rhetoric about greed, even though the latter is condemned with far more severity and frequency. This is, of course, a prime example of how much culture shapes our values, often more than Biblical fidelity. Though, to be clear, it would be silly to insist that Americans are unique or innovative in our attempts to mollify prohibitions on the hoarding of wealth; history is replete with “Christian” emperors who would put our modern billionaires to shame on that front.

But it really is odd, when I take a step back and think about it, that we’ve ended up here, that so many issues touched on slightly or vaguely become absolute fixations, while other things bemoaned with the utmost exactingness, prevalence, and straightforwardness get sort of shifted to the side and reframed as private matters of personal conviction. The prophets’ connection between economic injustice and bloodshed doesn’t sound like something I’d hear from a pulpit today; it sounds like something I’d expect to hear from an anti-capitalist activist on Twitter. Yet, we must admit the prophets have a point. There is something of a moral aporia in the fact that there are people in the world right now with the wealth to solve most of the world’s problems. There is no scarcity of food on this planet— poverty and starvation are resource-allocation problems, not production ones. Author John Green puts a lot of his time and effort into combating tuberculosis, in part because (as he frequently points out) it’s a completely solvable problem, and the only reason there are people still suffering from it is a lack of will to allocate the necessary resources to eliminate it. Elon Musk, shortly after being dubbed the richest man on the planet, ghosted a public invitation to lift 42 million people out of starvation for the price of 6 billion dollars— the approximate amount that his net worth accrued daily. And I know it may sound simplistic, dismissive, and idealistic to say something like “no single human needs 6 billion dollars and we could solve half the world’s problems with that money,” but…isn’t that true? Shouldn’t it strike us as an unmistakable violation of Christian morality that individuals with the net worth of a small country use their incomprehensible wealth, incalculable influence, and bottomless resources to simply further enrich themselves? If the prophets lived in the US today, we have every reason to believe economic disparity would be the most frequent target of their ire; we’d see them daily on social media spewing polemics against the billionaire class that would make Bernie Sanders blush.3

And this doesn’t go away in the New Testament. Christ’s most frequently touched upon topic is the Kingdom of God, with many of his parables and moral imperatives serving to enumerate the characteristics of this Kingdom. These are not soft, passive lessons; they are portents of a radical inbreaking of divine power. But counterintuitively, this divine power is not displayed through destruction or conquest, but astonishing reversals of worldly expectations. In the Kingdom of God, the first are last, the weak are strong, the poor are blessed, the meek inherit the earth, the hungry are promised their fill, and time and again, the rich are promised woe.

The complexity of how best to live out these Kingdom values sometimes overshadows the simplicity of their command to do straightforward things, such as serve the poor. Questions of fiduciary stewardship and balanced budgets are, of course, necessary conversations for a responsible nation (or household). But by abstracting challenges into digestible statistics, we too easily slip into viewing humans as numbers and thereby shrug off their suffering. Our media seems to have completely moved on from conversations around DOGE’s dismantling of USAID, even as the death toll resulting from the arbitrarily slashed aid climbs into the hundreds of thousands. Arguments around SNAP benefits usually boil down to the perceived deservedness of the beneficiaries. And all of these conversations are frequently framed in terms of “my tax dollars,” as if the majority of us really have any idea how our federal taxes are allocated.

Again, I know these issues are not as black and white as we might like them to be. But as my own judgmental thoughts around economic bailouts or aggressive panhandlers occasionally bubble to the surface, I’m continually convicted by a quote from Dorothy Day:

“The Gospel takes away our right forever to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”

I really do think she’s right. When we look at Christ’s parable of the sheep and the goats, his exhortation that judgment is predicated on how we treat the least among us, one salient detail is that neither the sheep nor the goats recognized Him. Both say “Lord, when was it we saw you hungry/in prison/a stranger?” It is not by their stated allegiance to Christ that they are judged, but by their actions towards the anonymous. Christ’s incarnation dresses the whole of humanity in dignity and forever removes our right to discriminate between those we think deserve help and those who don’t, because it is in service of the faceless, blanket least that we serve Christ. Our neighbors are determined by need, not nationality. God’s model of grace, granted lavishly upon the undeserving, with equal wages paid to those who work for an hour and those who work for a day, with rain that falls upon the just and unjust alike, necessarily serves as our model of generosity. This is not an easy example to follow, nor an easy command to keep, but more and more, when I read Christ’s instruction to “give to anyone who asks of you,” I’m forced to consider that maybe he means exactly what he says.

All to say, the salience of the prophets (including Christ) is their frankness. What we would style as hyperbole, they present as obvious: if the poorest Israelites are economically exploited by the richest, no sacrificial system can cleanse the nation of that injustice, and no ritualistic display of piety or righteousness is sufficient to trick God into closing his ears to the cry of the downtrodden. One of the greatest shames of our position as the wealthiest nation in the history of the world is that if Jeremiah or Amos or Ezekiel were writing today, they wouldn’t have to change a word.

II

Building upon this understanding of the prophetic critique offers an important insight for church function today. The Church is often an insular institution that likes to keep things internal, judging behavior by denominational standards and priests by ecclesial courts. Scriptural support for this practice comes from places like 1 Corinthians 6, where Paul discourages the Corinthian assembly from taking their issues to public court and insists on their ability to judge amongst themselves. This can be misused quite easily, and often is in cases of clergy abuse, where voices outside the clerical hierarchy of a specific church or denomination are dismissed as unfit to judge (even when those within said institutions prove themselves unfit for the task by their actions [or lack thereof]). We can critique this through exegesis of those passages alone, where Paul is not trying to set up a legal system or write a morality code, but is instead exhorting them to behave in a Christlike manner as a witness to the faith.4 How we handle our disputes (and the other moral issues Paul touches upon) directly involves how we manifest the Lord to the world. Paul is appealing to their dignity as people who are in Christ, not just drawing arbitrary lines between their insular hierarchy and worldly forces of justice. The way Christians treat each other is how God becomes intelligible to the world. Paul is (especially in verse 9) pointing out how these un-Christlike examples do not manifest God’s Kingdom, and in fact, these mistreatments lie about God’s very self. All to say, Paul is not setting up legalistic borders on inter-church discipline here, but instead is encouraging his hearers to conduct themselves in a manner worthy of Christ’s body. The “judgment” he discusses isn’t even really the act of adjudicating, but rather, a manifested judgment such as we see in John 3:19.5

Simultaneously, I think there’s a sense where we can liken the corruption of a Church community to the pollution of the land as imagined in Leviticus. The prophetic critique, as we’ll see further in a moment, is not decrying the sacrificial system as such, but lamenting that so much corruption has taken root beyond what the system can address. This is precisely what we see now in so many prominent ministries and why their attempts to appeal to 1 Corinthians 6 and elsewhere as the “scriptural standard” for insular judgments fall on deaf ears. In an ideal world, the Church is conducting itself in a Christlike manner, and its ministers are fit to render judgment within the body. But in the actual world we live in, the corrosive desire to seek and maintain power subsumes fleeting attempts at Christlike justice, and as we saw with the near-complete subsidence of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City or the absolute collapse of the Mars Hill Church, there comes a point where the only true remedy is dissolution and exile.6 The rationalization for the destruction of Israel and the Babylonian exile is not that these “outside” forces had become righteous and served as morally superior tools of God for cleansing; the rationalization is that the pollution of the land grew beyond what it could bear, and natural consequences followed. Much like the ancient prophets, the response of modern ministries racked by scandal and corruption should be to accept the scrutiny of outsiders, be it the legal consequences of the American justice system or the cultural consequences of being decried in public forums, because much like the sacrificial system of old, the power-hungry pride of weak men is unfit to combat the pollution of their sin.

III

Rillera offers some wonderful alternatives for traditional titles in Leviticus.7 For the sake of clarity, he refers to the Day of Atonement as the Day of Decontamination, since “decontamination” better indexes the original meaning of the ceremony without the anachronistic theological connotations that accompany “atonement.” My last post touched on the fact that atoning sacrifices cleanse the sancta, not the individual person doing the offering. But as some members of the community remain unrepentant or negligent in their duties, the Day of Decontamination provided a wholesale “reset” for the sanctuary, “restoring the Tabernacle to its original factory settings.”8 But—

“…the sins that produce moral impurity ‘undo what properly performed [burnt offering] sacrifice does. Sacrifice attracts and maintains the divine presence; moral defilement resulting from grave sin repels the divine presence.’ There is only so much pollution the sanctuary can handle. And if the very land it rests on is polluted by grave sins, then God will abandon the dwelling place to destruction “and with its destruction, all the sinners will meet their doom.” The moral logic is that land can reach a point where it will no longer support the sanctuary because it is saturated with moral impurities that have gone unaddressed. The land will get sick and vomit its inhabitants out and, as shown above, this simultaneously serves as the consequence for these sins as well as the remedy for the community and the land…

…There are no rituals that can get rid of or “heal” the pollution on it. The pollution needs to first go away (i.e., the death of the offender or community sent off into exile) and only then can it be reinstated after the appropriate amount of time has elapsed. Therefore, it is time away from the land that is real ultimate purifying agent in Leviticus since that is what cleanses the land.”

This oddly accords with some of the speculations in my introduction to this series. There, I proposed time’s role as healer in the salvific process:

“If we analogize again (as we must) and look at suffering in this present life, we will see that time is a gift. Healing is slow, but the distance between our experience and our suffering is sometimes one of the only balms to human agony. So, extrapolating forward, on the scale of eternity (in as much as we can speak of chronology in the age to come), I find it entirely conceivable that eternity, combined with the purgative healing of God’s presence, and any model of post-mortem reconciliation, confession, forgiveness, or progress that you prefer, could result in moving past even the worst of our temporal woes. Similar to how time, progress, and good therapy do not erase past hurts, but heal and strengthen you to move forward, God as the great physician (or in this case, the great therapist) can lead us past even the worst sufferings imaginable, as on the scale of eternity, we can someday be so far beyond these pains as to have effectively forgotten them completely, without erasing their formation of who we are as individuals. This is perhaps what is glimpsed in the conclusion of Revelation, where God makes his dwelling among mankind and wipes every tear from their eyes (which implies healing, not erasure).”

The cliche of “time heals all wounds” seems present in both my speculative eschatology and the Levitical model of healing the land. This motif of a casting out, of a separation and healing before reunion, appears all throughout scripture, from the initial exile from Eden all the way through to Christ’s parable of the prodigal son. Applying the Levitical model to these raises fascinating questions— were Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden so that Paradise could heal? Is the sojourn through a foreign land simply an illustration of humanity’s estrangement from God, or is humanity’s estrangement from God a contingent necessity of creation? It’s sometimes asked, if God’s goal is to deify and perfect us in the end, why were we not created perfect to begin with, but the question ignores what it means to be a creature, as well as the logical necessity of our contingency. God is uncreated Being as such, while we are created beings; our sustained existence is contingent upon the wellspring of existence. Even if our teleological end is unity with God (however one conceives of that), there still must be a process of ascent, no matter what, because unless God were to create God, anything created must be in some sense “less than” ultimate, uncreated perfection, and therefore ascend to the fullness of unity with the one who begot it. This “ascent” is most readily personified in our human terms as maturity, and in this sense, a “fall” of some sort seems almost necessary within the logic of creation. Not, perhaps, the Fall (as conceived as the divine transgression against God’s holy law), but some sort of “fall” away from God seems almost logically required for God to make something other than God.

Which brings us back to the human experience as time-bound creatures. God is the eternal instant, an ever-present and infinite “now” without change, and that is what makes God, God. But what makes us ourselves is history, memory, and identity. To be what or who we are necessitates a process of growth, and growth is something that cannot be created. To create someone with false memories of a never-lived history would reduce humanity to programmed robots, which directly contradicts God’s stated desire to make rational free spirits. So a sojourn through time, a “lower,” more limited time, is perhaps “fallen” in one sense, but also perhaps “necessary” in another. Maybe this is why the motif of strangers and pilgrims wandering through a country that is not ours strikes home— because it is an inherent facet of creation, a personification of being raised up from nothingness towards perfection. If we are raised from nothingness, yet granted our being from God, that picture, when illustrated, looks like God going out from God, down into the depths of death, and ascending with that which was lower in tow. But it must be that— a journey, a process, not a teleportation, since to be who we are requires growth and change. Which is why God comes to us as a craftsman,9 molding and shaping the cosmos one glorious day at a time, and why the path to eternal life lies not in anything instantaneous, but through following Christ along the Way. Once again, we have arrived at the parallels between salvation and creation, the paradoxical duality of the dying One on the Cross through whom all things came into being. But they come into being through the cross precisely because at the center of the story is a God who pays the price himself. Whatever consequences were necessitated by the logic of creation, or wrought by the consequence of some prelapsarian transgression, God incarnated from the first to subsume those consequences into himself. The passion of Christ is not just a performative sacrifice to offset some arbitrary legalistic consequence but is in fact the entire cosmic history summed up in one divine display. God takes all the sins and sufferings of mankind upon himself and transfigures the bleakest consequences of creation into further methods of unity with him.

But I digress. This line of thought, viewing a “falling away” as an inherent necessity of creation, strays dangerously close to positing God as the author of evil, and the Fall as the intended plan of creation, two notions that classical Christian convictions oppose. I will have to continue pondering this to find a more coherent model.

In the meantime, our present day provides a plethora of analogies for the Levitical warnings of exile. From climate change to the massive impact AI is beginning to wreak on our infrastructure, we seem to be balancing exile-worthy catastrophes like spinning plates at a circus. Take the materialistic, greed-worshipping spirit guiding our cultural adoration of gambling, or the senseless accumulation of wealth for its own sake elevated as a good unto itself; we are not short of options for the prophets to criticize; we are saturated with pollutants of the land (both literal and figurative). Would that we could look to Israel’s exile and learn from history, instead of being doomed to repeat it.

I

In the traditional Christian story, humans broke the world. Ecologists might point out that we are presently en route to manifesting that tale literally, not just in the spiritual sense of the Christian “Fall,” but in both cases, we see the same narrative: human action resulting in consequences for the entire planet. Now, how this “Fall” came about is anyone’s guess, ranging from eating a forbidden fruit1 to far more cosmic speculations, and why it was allowed to happen is a question I think we’ll never stop asking.2 Any attempted responses to the “why” of that mystery must be presented as “an” answer rather than “the” answer.

An answer to that question that I am fond of involves the human invitation to be co-creators with God. I’ve recently come off a weekend of teaching with W. David Taylor focused on seeking Christ in the Psalms, during which I read Julie Canlis’ Theology of the Ordinary, and in weeks leading up, I’ve been taking a class on 1 Corinthians through St. Stephen’s University, all three of which have my head swimming with the notion of radical oneness with Christ. Paul’s letters emphasize this unity, speaking to his listeners not just as co-laborers in the sense of co-workers in a profession, but as fellow members of Christ’s body. I think Paul’s emphasis on this unity is understated; he is only barely being metaphorical when he speaks of their unity in Christ. This sense of identifying as in Christ is a perfect lens through which to view our role as co-creators with God.

Following this, the poetic language of Genesis 1 proceeds in accordance with the ancient conventions of temple construction. As with any other sanctuary of the Ancient Near East, the last thing to be placed in the temple’s innermost sanctuary is the idol, or “image” of the deity. This could range from a featureless standing stone to something more intricately carved, but its function in both cases is the same: it “images” the God, acting as an overlap point between the celestial dwelling of the divine figure being worshipped and the human worshipers coming to seek its presence. Humans then, as the “image” of God are designed to serve this function, to be this overlap point between Heaven and Earth, functioning (as N.T. Wright often puts it) as a two-way mirror, reflecting earthly worship up to God and God’s heavenly model down to Earth. But we don’t just dwell idly (ha!) in the temple, we’re also called to keep it. Humanity is, as shown in the Eden story, the temple-priests of creation. This duel calling, to be both the image of the divine and the cultivators of divine space, goes beyond individual holiness; I think it reflects a desire from God that we, as humans, participate in our own making. We are granted freedom, not as some arbitrary test, but because creation requires it. Creation is a manifestation of God’s freedom, so as his image, we reflect that ability in both our ability to craft beautiful things as God does and in the necessary consequence of our creative actions affecting the world around us.

The making of Man is the project of God. If God seeks to make us divine, to elevate us to partake in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), then we must participate in God’s creative act and, therefore, our own making. And when we fail at this, when we turn our own way and seek to make the world in our image, it should come as no surprise that the world reflects our selfish brokenness. We have the power to make the world as we see fit, and the tug of war between humans seeking to reflect God and humans seeking to manifest a god that reflects our own image is the material manifestation of the spiritual tug-of-war between God and nothingness (which is itself the story of creation and salvation). Human beings are nothingness given form, clay given breath, death given life, we are corpses made alive, empty material filled with God’s Spirit and vivified by a creative power that we have routinely abused from the first.

All of this helps explain the temple-centric worldview we find in Leviticus. For ancient Israel, the Temple functioned not just to keep God fed (as neighboring nations did with their gods), but to keep the divine presence near. The role of the prescribed daily burnt offering (the “tāmîd”) was not payment for sins, but to “attract” the divine presence. Obviously, in our present understanding, an omnipotent God is the default view, so this concept of divine proximity may be unintuitive, but for the ancient world, localization was everything. Even outside the Levitical sacrificial system, we can see glimpses of this worldview, from the Israelites questioning how they can “worship God in a foreign land” in Psalm 137, to 2 Kings, when Naaman takes a few crates of dirt with him when he leaves Israel so that he can continue to worship the God of Israel from afar. The place of the divine presence, in the Tent of Meeting or the Temple proper, was, pun intended, central.3

But whether we localize or universalize God’s presence, the human role of cultivating a space for overlap remains the same. Keeping the sanctuary pure from defilement isn’t about appeasing a finicky deity; it’s about maintaining harmony between the way things ought to be and the way things are. And the earthly focus here is essential to avoid slipping into some sort of gnostic dualism, where creation is seen as a fleshly prison to escape. On the contrary, as Canlis puts it:

“The point of Christ’s gestation and birth is that God doesn’t work on creation externally as a doctor with a patient on the table. He is not working on a substance called ‘human nature.’ He becomes human. As one theologian in the early second century wrote, ‘He takes what is ours in order to give us what is His.’

For the earliest Christians, the incarnation was not a temporary, embarrassing mission where Christ ‘stooped’ to take on our feeble flesh. Instead, they realized the full implication of the incarnation as God’s most fundamental blessing upon creation — even greater than the original ‘it is good’ of Genesis. In the incarnation, God took matter to Himself so that matter would forever be at home with God. In the body of a baby, the project of the new creation begins. Here God’s renewal project is not to draw us out of ordinary life into a spiritual realm, but to renew and re-inhabit creation to the full.”

As lengthy and alien as the Levitical laws are to us today, I think they provide a substantial emphasis on the presence of God, a desire to keep it ever near, and a vigilance about the things that get in between us and Him. There is a wealth of wisdom here just waiting to be translated for our spiritual life today, perhaps most notably the emphasis on participation. We reflect our Creator by being creators, but since we are also creations, to participate in God is assent to our own making.

II

“What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

The notion of blood “washing” something has always seemed an odd metaphor. The shedding of blood as payment, as sacrifice, as substitute, these are all intuitive functions, but Revelation’s imagery of people washing their robes white in the blood of the lamb has always struck me as counterintuitive. This is clearly because when I imagine something being cleaned, I am thinking of laundry detergent or dish soap; solutions to physical contaminants. But what if the impurity is death?

In my previous post I touched on how, in the Levitical conception, blood was a representation of life, not death. This re-orientation of death into a ritualized presentment of life remains one of the most fascinating takeaways from Rillera’s book so far.

“This transformation of what (to an outsider) might seem like the brute facts of the matter—an animal is being intentionally killed—into something entirely incompatible and incongruent with those brute facts is a major function of ritual activity itself. Smith puts it this way: ‘Ritual gains its force where incongruency is perceived.’ This is how it becomes possible for the death of an animal to be ritually transformed into a sacred gift to God—a non-killing, a non-murder. The meaning and function of the sacrifice depends upon several distinct ritual actions with respect to the blood and the carcass discussed in the following chapters, but there is no meaning attached to the animal’s actual death other than that its death is reconceptualized through these various ritual actions to convey something other than ‘death.’ According to Leviticus, ‘death’ is what happens apart from the sacrificial system…

…Therefore, it is not even proper to call sacrifice a ‘ritual death’ because the ritual depends on it not actually being comprehended as a death, which would bring impurity into the dwelling place. Sacrifice is rather a way to access ‘life’ and avoid all associations with ‘death.’ Sacrifice is a process by which to transform the mundane into a sacred gift. ‘Death’ has no intelligibility in this ritual framework of perceiving the truth of the matter. Meaning, the presence or absence of these ritual actions determines the ‘truth’ of what happened; it might be a homicide, or it might be a sacrifice. What the ‘truth’ is all depends on the ritual factors discussed above.”

Blood, it would seem, is life incarnate. And so, taking from these examples of blood’s life-containing, purgative function, suddenly the metaphor of being “washed” in Christ’s blood seems far more intuitive. If blood is where the breath/life/spirit resides, if ritualized sacrifice can re-orient the shedding of blood from a moment of death to a presentment of life, then what better way to enter into life eternal than through the blood/life of Jesus? Especially given that blood also carries the function of consecration:

“It is instructive that the ḥaṭṭāʾt is required at the inauguration of the dwelling place before it can even become the sort of thing (i.e., ‘holy’) that the miasma of sin is attracted to (Exod 29:36–37; Lev 8:15). This means the inaugural purgation sacrifices are not even purging away impurities or sins. Rather, they are transforming common objects into holy ones. This transformation is called ‘consecration’ or ‘sanctification.’ Before the altar is consecrated it is just a collection of ‘common’ (i.e., not “holy”) uncut rocks; it is not an altar in the true sense (at first). And because it is just a pile of rocks this means ‘sins’ would not be attracted to it since sin only attaches itself to sancta. In order for it to become an altar, this pile of rocks needs to be consecrated/sanctified—made holy. The ḥaṭṭāʾt achieves this, not because ‘something needs to die as a substitute,’ but rather because the entire function of the ḥaṭṭāʾt is to consecrate (Exod 29:36–37 with Lev 8:15; 16:19); and its power to consecrate is the very reason it also has the power to purge away what threatens to profane it once it has been made holy. It is the same power with two distinct effects depending on the condition of the object it is applied to.”

There are so many parallels to creation here, the most obvious being the consecration of what is otherwise ordinary, earthly matter. Adam is formed from the clay, it is only when God breathes life into him that he becomes a living being. Salvation through the blood of Christ is another way of stating this— in a fallen world, we are living death, animated corpses, only made truly “alive” through sanctification and consecration. The first creation account in Genesis sees all things formed from primordial matter, a gestating sea of chaos that God shapes and orders and eventually vivifies. But the “stuff” we are made of falls in that pattern, with the creative act of God being that which separates us from the chaos/nothingness from which we were called. This is why again, it can be so tempting to succumb to gnostic framings, seeing materiality as an inherent evil from which the spiritual flees. But Leviticus (and the rest of the Bible) shows us time and again that the material is consecrated by God himself, in small ways through these temple rituals, and most thoroughly through the Incarnation. Just as the act of killing is ritualistically transposed into a presentation of life, the breath of God interposes divinity between material frailty and the decay it seeks through death, reshaping even the act of death into a path to eternal life.

III

One other Christological connection has to do with what is actually being washed by said blood in Leviticus. Rillera emphasizes over and over that in Leviticus, atoning sacrifices remove ritual impurity from the sanctuary, not from people. Quoting at length:

“We are not able to get into all the intricacies within the ritual purity system, but there are a few observations that need to be made that will pay dividends as we move along into the prophets and NT. Some of these impurities are minor and resolve with the coming of sundown and a bath, but some are so strong that the impurity leeches out from the person and adheres to the sancta in the dwelling place. Atonement (kipper) is a ritual procedure that removes the contamination of these impurities from the sanctuary so that God does not abandon it, thereby leaving Israel vulnerable to inevitable catastrophe. This is why atonement would be necessary even if everybody in the community never sinned. And this is also why thinking of atonement only in terms of doing something about sins is deficient…

…I state here what is already implied, but needs to be made as clear as possible: ritual impurity is removed from people’s bodies through the passing of sufficient time and water-washing, but it is removed from the sanctuary through an atoning purgation sacrifice. That is, the purgation sacrifices do not purify the person’s body. Their body already must be made pure before they can even access the sanctuary to offer the sacrifice. The atoning purgation sacrifices only purge the sanctuary. But it is removing that person’s specific impurity from the sanctuary. And until this final step in the process for major ritual impurities is completed, the person is necessarily isolated from the worshiping life of Israel because they cannot start enjoying, say, the well-being sacrifices until they have dealt with the impurity on the sanctuary for which they are responsible…

From the foregoing, it becomes apparent that the analogy between sin contamination and ritual impurity is limited to the major ritual impurities and the similar contaminating effect these both have upon sancta. Bringing a ḥaṭṭāʾt for an inadvertent (or repentant) sin is analogous to the penultimate stage of ritual impurity. The person has no sin contamination on themselves—hence, no need for any time elapse or washing prior to offering the ḥaṭṭāʾt or an analogous ritual—but the contamination produced by their own sinful act has clung to the sanctuary. For both major ritual impurities and sin contaminations, the priest is performing atonement on the sancta with the purgation sacrifice on the offerer’s behalf with the end result that the offer is either rendered fully pure ‘from’ their ritual impurities (12:7–8; 14:19–20; 15:15, 30; 16:16, 19) or ‘from’ their sin-contamination (4:26; 5:6, 10; 16:16, 19, 34). If they do not offer the ḥaṭṭāʾt then they still bear an obligation and responsibility to remove their contamination from the sanctuary, but at this point it transforms into a pešaʿ, a deliberate offensive act of disobedience, that contaminates all the way into the holy of holies. While this deliberate-sin-contamination (pešaʿ) will be taken care of for the community on the Day of Atonement (16:16, 21), the individual’s own liability for causing a contamination and then neglecting to purge it remains and it is said they will bear the consequences (ʿăwōnô, “his iniquity”) of this neglect (e.g., 5:1, 17; 7:18; 17:16; cf. Num 19:20).

In the priestly imagination, ʿāwōn is the full consequence(s) of allowing contamination to fester on the sanctuary and eventually means being cut off (for individuals) or exile (for the community) (e.g., 7:18–20; 18:25; 19:8; 20:17, 19; 22:16; 26:39–41, 43). By purging the sancta from impurity and sin-contamination, these consequences are avoided. The person is no longer ‘liable’ since there is no longer anything contaminating the sanctuary. But if the person disregards their responsibility to purge their contamination (whether impurity or sin-contamination) from the sanctuary, even though the Day of Atonement purges it for the sake of the community, that individual person will nevertheless ‘bear their ʿāwōn’ and be cut off.

In neither scenario, however, is the impurity or sin-contamination being purged from the offerer him- or herself. But the purgation rituals release the offerer from their duty to purge their contamination away from the sanctuary. For sins this is what ‘forgiveness’ means (e.g., 4:20, 26, 31, 35) and for major ritual impurities this is what that final declaration of ‘purity’ means (12:7–8; 14:19–20). It is intuitive that (even accidental) sinners need forgiveness, but major ritual impurities are not sins, which is why those who offer the required ḥaṭṭāʾt are not said to be ‘forgiven,’ but rather attain the full status of ‘pure.’ The only exception to this is when a major impurity started out as a minor impurity, in which case the offerer does need ‘forgiveness’ (5:2–3 with vv. 10, 13; cf. 17:15–16), because of their neglect to take care of the impurity before it festered into a major one contaminating the sanctuary. But in both cases the sinner or the one who has recovered from a major impurity are duty bound to purge the sanctuary from their contamination; and if they do not, then they will eventually suffer the consequences (ʿāwōn).

The only thing being ‘removed’ from the people, therefore, is not the contamination itself, but rather their liability to clean up the mess they made in God’s dwelling place.”

The insufficiency of the ritual system here fascinates me. I’ve so often heard “salvation history” recounted as the idea that the Old Testament sacrificial system was sufficient for a time, but once it had run its course, humanity needed a once-for-all sacrifice to replace it. But a closer reading reveals a surprising truth: the sacrificial system was never sufficient to combat humanity’s sins. The Temple structure and customs provided a baseline standard by which God could be kept near, but as we’ll see in my next post, some sins pollute so thoroughly that no sacrificial remedy exists— only exile or death offer the necessary space for healing. While certain rituals can purge the sanctuary of impurities, no earthly human action, no ritual or custom, nothing prescribed by the Levitical priests (including the “Day of Atonement”) is sufficient to save humans from their sin. The need for forgiveness and rescue was always present, and was always a role that only God himself could step in and fulfill.

But with the dawn of AI, a new kind of social media tribute has taken root, and it’s horrifying. As an early adopter of AI art tools and now an active prophet of doom about said tools, the various AI-generated tributes to dead celebrities make my skin crawl with a weirdly primal variant of unnerving cringe. Whether it’s the dead-eyed, soulless memes placing them side by side with other famous deceased people, the frankly uncanny videos where they sprout blurry wings and jerkily trot into heaven to be embraced a plastic Jesus, or most recently (with Suno’s explosive popularity) the bizarre genre of “song tributes,” where ersatz shades of Adele or Frank Sinatra belt a few simplistic, poorly written (automated) stanzas in memory of the deceased. It’s scary enough how much of our work, thinking, and art we are now outsourcing to AI, but the fact that people are generating “tributes” from prompts makes it feel like we’re attempting to automate our grief, and I can think of few things more inhuman than that.

Of course, the most recent and widespread instance of this impulse comes via the death of Charlie Kirk. My purpose in this article is not to weigh in on the fractious contention regarding how he should be viewed in death1 and my remarks on images/video featuring him are not meant to comment on his positions or politics so much as the creation of the media itself. Again, Kirk is not the first example where AI-generated photos and videos have cropped up to honor the recently deceased, but I have never seen anything as extensive or bizarre as the hurricane of generated media in the wake of his death. Just in the last 24 hours, I remember seeing a photo of him standing next to Jesus and MLK,2 a handful of photos of him in various states of haloed sainthood, generated “song” tributes featuring a duet between Adele and Ed Sheeran, another where it was instead Eminem eulogizing him with rap, fake speeches from the President promising his wealth to Kirk’s family among other ludicrous claims,3 and most starkly, videos of him entering heaven in increasingly outlandish ways, from sprouting wings and ascending to the clouds, to one where the video of his death stops a few frames before the shot is fired and instead has Kirk leap over the table and scale a heavenly staircase into the waiting arms of an uncanny-valley Jesus.4 The one that inspired this video was a completely AI Kirk, intentionally framed as speaking from beyond the grave, alongside a digitally remastered Apostle Paul and a few others (click here to watch it if you dare, and you can see several similar examples in this thread).

However much someone may have admired Kirk, I do not understand how anyone looks at this and does not find it to be the creepiest thing imaginable. Digitally puppeteering a murdered man to spout platitudes days after his death feels cataclysmically detached from reality. Resurrecting (oddly European-looking) dead Saints to talk to you like some historical re-enactor at a children’s birthday party but played completely straight feels like a demonic manifestation of advertiser pandering. It’s distressing enough how comfortable we are with whitewashing people’s legacies in real time; are we really so quick to be comfortable with deepfaking them?

Humans have always expressed themselves through the artifacts and technology of their day, from elaborate gravesites to funerary inscriptions. However, unlike the Facebook tribute (digitizing an otherwise human effort), outsourcing these rituals to AI feels like an innovation on the practice, and not a positive one. Since its invention, the internet has had its own culture, from message board slang to early memes to whatever rampant irony now guides the humor of younger generations. Mainstream memes have largely adopted a level of nihilistic irony. Dark humor is no longer a novelty but a norm. As a frequent purveyor of dark humor, I’m not necessarily opposed to this, but when memes become the grammar of non-ironic attempts at expression, we enter a liminal space of freakishly bizarre interaction. It’s one thing to crack a dark joke at the death of a celebrity; it’s another to digitally resurrect that celebrity, put your words in his mouth, place him in the company of saints and heroes of the past, and pass the whole thing off as a somber tribute. Think of how many stories feature liminal encounters with ghosts or hallucinations posing as dead loved ones— that’s what is happening, only instead of happening in a cave saturated with the Dark Side of the Force, it’s happening on all of our feeds, and people we love are eating it up.

I saw a sobering analysis that posited we should view Kirk’s assassination through the lens of internet culture more than political culture. It’s less a matter of slotting the murderer into a neat camp of political ideology and more recognizing that, whether he was a groyper or a radicalized leftist, he seems to have viewed the assassination itself as a shitpost. The phrasings on the bullet casings, again, whether they were video game references or straightforward anti-fascist slogans,5 were, in both instances, first and foremost, memes. Explaining what a shitpost is might be beyond the scope of this article, but I think this hermeneutic is tragically worth considering, not just because it may give us insight into the mind of someone willing to commit an atrocity like this, but because I think many people responding in grief to this murder are adopting the same language. Memes are the grammar of the internet. The most effective marketing strategies, inside jokes, political propaganda, misinformation, radical ideology, all of these things spread furthest and most effectively through memes. And we’ve now reached a point where meme culture is not limited to the perpetually online, but has invaded the real world, seen in its most ghastly form by murders like Tyler Robinson or Brenton Tarrant (whose manifesto was saturated with 4chan memes and who referenced memes during his massacre), to whom real life acts of violence can be reduced to the jokes cracked about them online. And yet, I think these AI tributes to Kirk represent the exact same phenomenon, just from the other side, since fundamentally, an AI image of Kirk amongst a pantheon of martyrs is a meme.

A meme is an inside joke writ large. At the core of most meme-humor is a reference to something, some past instance of that meme, some viral trend, something that, if you do not recognize it, you will miss the intended humor. And like any inside joke, irony played straight for laughs can be accidentally taken seriously by someone not in on the joke, like someone reposting a headline from the Onion and not realizing it’s satire. I have been struggling to find the language to articulate it, but these AI tributes to Kirk evoke that same “not in on the joke” energy, even when no one is trying to be funny. The best comparison I can think of for the tone/energy/vibe I’m getting at is the Nathan Fielder sketch where a voice actor poses as a child’s dead pet and greets them from beyond the grave. In the case of Nathan For You, this is played for a laugh. Everything about it, from ludicrous premise to the cheap production to the out-of-touch concept of the whole scheme, is designed satirically, comically structured to evoke second-hand embarrassment. With these AI-tributes, we have something just as parodic, but the intention is no longer humorous.

I really don’t know what to call this. Post irony? Post memery? Whatever we call it, this macabre praxis of public grieving encapsulates so much of what’s scary about the digital age. The saying “the internet is not real life” feels less and less relevant, not just because of how much we all live online now, but because of how much from what used to be the domain of the perpetually online has escaped into the real world. Fringe conspiracists are now mainstream, “trolling” is now regularly practiced by the US government,6 and unfounded lunacy once reserved for the darkest corners of 4Chan is now espoused by prominent media figures and politicians alike. The darkest impulses of the internet, made in our image, are in turn re-making us in its image, and we are all poorer for it. Our digital facsimiles are quickly replacing our actual humanity, which is why this gruesome practice of emotionally manipulative generative media is only going to become more prominent.

I have little to add to the many comments already provided by better writers on the political rally ostensibly masquerading as Kirk’s memorial service. While there was not, to my knowledge, any official appearance by Kirk’s re-animated digital spectre (at least on stage, there were plenty on signs and t-shirts), there was a predictable parade of partisan fervor in his name, and at a human level, I found it fairly ghastly. Celebrity is a dehumanizing phenomenon, reducing human beings to the sum of their branding, and in the digital age, parasocial relationships with celebrities border on outright psychosis. All of these negatives inherent to celebrity culture can be weaponized or exacerbated under the right circumstances, and Kirk’s murder has put that on display more loudly than anything in recent memory.7 I am of the opinion that opportunistically weaponizing his death and using his lifeless corpse as a political prop is just as disgusting as dancing on his grave.

But Erika Kirk stood out amidst the noise. Standing on stage amongst the star-studded cast of charlatans seeking to profit politically from her husband’s tragic murder, she did the most rebellious thing imaginable— she preached a Christian message. An actual Christian message, not the nationalistic imposture that has co-opted the faith in the US. While Steven Miller performed a near-perfect Joseph Goebbels impression and President Trump rambled on about himself, his (mostly fictional) accomplishments, and how he disagrees with Charlie Kirk about loving your enemies, Erika Kirk publicly claimed to forgive the young man who murdered her husband. For all the talk of Charlie Kirk as a champion of evangelism, this act by his wife was something I don’t recall meaningfully seeing from Charlie himself— subordinating one’s politics to the teachings of Christ instead of the other way around. Kirk’s murder elicited endless cries for retribution and war from innumerable hordes of his peers, cries echoed by speakers at the political rally held in his name, and continued in pushback against Erika Kirk’s Christlike rhetoric.

But Erika Kirk should receive due credit for holding fast against the tide of her husband’s allies. The strength it takes to stand before thousands and proclaim forgiveness is both admirable and touching. And more, it’s a better witness to the hope of the resurrection than any deviant attempt to reanimate the dead with AI. The contrast between Erika Kirk’s actual proclamation of a Christian message and the nearly ubiquitous divisiveness espoused by the other headline speakers feels like the perfect encapsulation of the contrast between her husband’s living words and the re-animated fabrication currently being disseminated both through revisionist hagiography and the freakish AI necromancy that triggered this article. These generated videos, however good they may get on a technical level, will always be digital imitations, algorithmic mirages, and like a true Christian message of forgiveness preached amidst a legion of those taking Christ’s name in vain, opportunistic, digitally generated imitations will always pale in contrast to the Real.

Epistles bearing the names of the resurrected man’s closest followers, John and Peter, shared this immediacy, stating that the last hour had come and the end of all things was near.2 Their stance was that of a present reality, an imminent assurance, and even in the later letter of 2nd Peter, where a realization seems to be settling in that “soon” may not mean “now,” he encouraged a posture of expectance. The early Fathers took this to heart, and while several set about calculating a timeline for the impending parousia, many taught that the timelessness of the teaching was less about the timing and more about the internal, contemplative life being set in these “last hours.” But the church would never be rid of more fantastical visions of the End.

In 172, a priest of Cybele named Montanus converted to Christianity. The self-proclaimed “prophet” led what became a schismatic movement characterized by the utterance of strange language during frenzied religious experiences. Certain that the world was about to end, he led his followers up to the Phrygian village of Pepuza to await the descent of the New Jerusalem. How could he be wrong? The signs were apparent; they’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Montanus stood amidst the final generation.

In the mid-6th century, Roman historian Gregory of Tours wrote his Historia Francorum or “History of the Franks.” In this work, he criticized a contemporary self-proclaimed Christ figure, who apparently had been preaching that the end of the world was to come soon, in 591. Gregory corrected this folly, utilizing a calculation counting forward from the date of creation3 to state that the world would instead end by 800 AD. And it would be obvious when the end was near— there would be wars and rumors of wars, and woes of the world would seem climactically turbulent. Doubtless, those living at the end of the 8th century would know they stood amidst the final generation.

Little is known of Bernard of Thuringia, a German visionary living near the end of the 10th century. But his calculations of the end, extrapolated from the Book of Revelation, caused a stir all across Europe, and his followers anticipated the end arriving in 992 AD. As the date approached, many fled to the mountains, while others sold their possessions and made a pilgrimage to Palestine to meet the Lord as he returned. Why would they not? The signs were apparent; they’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Bernard stood amidst the final generation.

In the mid-1100s, an Italian pilgrim named Joachim of Fiore took a trip to Jerusalem that changed his life. Inspired by his spiritual encounters in the Holy Land, he joined a monastery, rose the ranks to Abbot, and went on to codify his fascination with John’s Apocalypse4 in a work shaped by his interpretation of it. He believed history existed in three “ages,” corresponding to the three members of the Trinity, and that the second “Age of the Son” was soon to end in 1260, at which time Christ would usher in the utopian “Age of the Spirit” and the millennial reign would begin. How could he be wrong? The signs were apparent; he’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Joachim stood amidst the final generation.5

In 1500, legendary Italian artist Sandro Botticelli painted an enigmatic depiction of the Nativity that included a prophetic epigraph. His inscription suggested that Botticelli believed himself to be living through the Great Tribulation, three and a half years from the end of the Age, which would be coming sometime in 1503. And why would he not think so? Still shaken by the Savonarolan crisis, Botticelli’s world was nothing if not tumultuous. And beyond that, the signs were apparent; he’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Botticelli stood amidst the final generation.

In 1827, a Presbyterian pastor in the Church of Scotland named Edward Irving published an English translation of La venida del Mesías en gloria y majestad, a late 18th-century apocalyptic treatise by Chilean Jesuit priest Manuel de Lacunza. Building upon the treatise’s literalist view of Old Testament prophecy and futurist view of the Book of Revelation, Irving added a lengthy prelude of his own to the text, expounding upon the prophetic predictions within, adding that God was about to restore Prophets and Apostles to the church in these last days, and that gifts of miricles and toungues would abound to signify Christ’s imminant return. Irving’s ministry sparked a local revival, influential enough to catch the attention of his superiors, who de-frocked him over the strange happenings of his meetings, as well as his heretical views of Christ as a fallen human. Undeterred, Irving formed the “Catholic Apostolic Church” and continued his revival, focused on miracles, ecstatic utterances, and a prophetic focus on the end-times coming of Christ.6

In the Spring of 1830, a Scottish woman named Margaret MacDonald, whose family came to partake in Irving’s revival, was bedridden by a lengthy illness. At the tail end of her travail, she experienced a series of visions, detailing a (mostly) novel concept in Christian thought— the idea that Christ’s return would not signal the end per se, but that he would instead remove his followers from the world to protect them from the forthcoming tribulation. Irving, by his own admission, was deeply impacted by reports of these visions, and by 1831, the quarterly publication of the Irvingite charismatics (The Morning Watch) featured, for the first time in Christian history, a synthesized teaching of dispensationalism that would come to be understood colloquially as “The Rapture.” This inventive concept, the idea that Christ would “rapture” Christians out of this world before a great tribulation, would catch fire in subsequent decades, in large part due to the work of one John Nelson Darby, a clergyman from the Plymouth Brethren.7 His work led to the widespread adoption of dispensationalism, culminating in the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909; a study Bible interpreted through an explicitly dispensationalist hermeneutic. In the years since, colloquial predictions of Christ’s return have featured fewer and fewer instances of the end of the world, and more and more predictions of the Rapture.

In 1835, LDS founder Joseph Smith declared in the name of the Lord that the Son of Man would come in “48 years hence,” when Smith was 85 years old. Smith later walked back this statement as more of a personal inference than prophetically binding, but in either case, Smith would not live to see 85, instead dying at the hands of a mob in 1844. But his mistake was understandable, after all, the signs were apparent; he’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Smith stood amidst the final generation.

The same year Smith was killed, followers of Baptist preacher William Miller gathered in anticipation of Christ’s return. Working off a calculation from the Book of Daniel, Miller concluded that the Second Coming would take place on October 22, 1844. When the day passed like any other, the Millerites processed this “Great Dissapointment” and refocused, eventually leading to the formation of the 7th Day Adventists. Their chief prophetess, Ellen G. White, was careful not to make the mistake of specificity as Miller did, yet still taught the imminence of the end. In 1865, she declared at a conference that some present in their company would be “food for worms, some will be alive and remain upon the earth to be translated at the coming of Jesus.” And why would she not think so? The signs were apparent; she’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Ellen G. White stood amidst the final generation.

In 1929, while working for Indiana’s public service company, gas fumes overwhelmed and hospitalized a young man named William Branham. During his recovery, Branham heard a voice speaking to him and began to seek its source. He found his way to the First Pentecostal Baptist Church of Jeffersonville and was baptized by its pastor, Roy Davis, who subsequently commissioned him for what would become a lengthy and profoundly successful ministry. During the 1940s and 50s, Branham’s healing revival meetings were some of the largest of their kind. In 1956, he took the stage at the Cadle Tabernacle in Indianapolis, Indiana, to launch the faith-healing career of aspiring minister Jim Jones.8 Twenty-two years later, in defiance of what Jones claimed was an irremediably corrupt world and to avoid the inevitable apocalyptic calamity that said world was preparing to work upon them, Jones and over 900 of his followers killed themselves.

Had Branham been right, Jones and his followers might have never made it to their mass suicide in 1978, as Branham claimed this Age would end in 1977. He did not live to see this prediction fail, dying unceremoniously in a car accident in 1965. But his followers continued to look forward to 1977, when Christ would return, just as their prophet proclaimed, and in fact, refused to bury his body in anticipation of his imminent resurrection preceding this end. Why would they not? The signs were apparent; they’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, the Branhamites stood amidst the final generation.

Preceding his death and failed resurrection, Branham found himself banned from several countries due to his various hoaxes.9 In response, he would commission talented and loyal ministers from his movement to take his message to those countries in his stead. One such man, a minister who would often serve as the opening act at Branham’s revival meetings, was a particularly allegiant preacher named Paul Cain. Before crashing out of ministry10 due to rampant alcoholism and sexual abuse,11 Cain had a long and illustrious career as a self-proclaimed prophet. He took a more careful and tactful version of Branham’s message to the masses, a message replete with proclamations that the end times were upon us, that God was raising up an army in these last days, but carefully lacking Branham’s exact specificity about the timing of the Rapture. But soon, certainly, after all, the signs were apparent; he’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Cain stood amidst the final generation.

One of Cain’s most prominent compatriots, who shared his habit of espousing blanket proclamations but stopping just short of absolute specificity, was a prolific “prophet” named Bob Jones. While joining Cain in avoiding their predecessor’s hubris of naming exact dates, Jones was bold enough to proclaim that he had been given a “100 year prophecy,”12 spanning from the 1950s to the 2050s, and during this time a season would come in which death lost its power over these sons of God, resulting in a “generation that will not know death.” He also proclaimed that the Kansas City Chiefs would win the Super Bowl and that when they did, it would be a sign of end-times revival.13

In 1988, NASA engineer Edgar C. Whisenant completed his calculations for the date of the Rapture and published the pamphlet “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988.” When the new year was rung in, he published a follow-up, “The Final Shout: Rapture report 1989,” predicting that due to a slight discrepancy in the start date of his calculations, he’d been off by one year, but the Rapture would come by the end of 1989. How could he be wrong? The signs were apparent; he’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Whisenant stood amidst the final generation. He wasn’t alone— his book sold more than 4.5 million copies.14

In the 1990s, when Bob Jones began prophesying about a 24/7 house of prayer, a man named Mike Bickle sought to fulfill that prophecy, founding Kansas City’s International House of Prayer in 1999. Bickle’s ministry heavily emphasized the role of the prophetic, including an annually presented “prophetic history” of his own movement: a borderline mythologized recounting of the history of various adjacent charismatic and revival movements and figures,15 including, of course, the ministries of his “spiritual fathers,” Paul Cain and Bob Jones.16 Bickle repeated his Fathers’ claims of End Times revivals, power coming upon those in this last generation, and added his own fresh prophecies to the mix. While taking care to avoid the predictive preciseness of Whisenant or Branham, Bickle would nonetheless offer teases of why we are surely amongst the last generations. After all, the signs were apparent; he’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Bickle stood amidst the final generation. He continued to teach so until he was deposed from ministry in 2023.17

In 2011, Christian radio host Harold Camping predicted, “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the Rapture would take place at 6pm on May 21, 2011 (and proceeed aroud the world at 6pm in each time zone) with the end of the world to follow on October 21st of the same year. This date was reached by numerological calculations utilizing an idiosyncratic combination of Genesis 7:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 to arrive at a date 7,000 years removed from 4990 BC. This was not his first calculation, as in a 1992 self-published work, Camping predicted the Rapture would come on September 6th, 1994. He later chalked his failure up to a mathematical error and insisted that his 2011 date was supported by the signs. After all, he’d heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of the world seemed climactically turbulent. Doubtless, Camping stood amidst the final generation.

Earlier this year, videos began circulating of South African Pastor Joshua Mhlakela predicting the Rapture. He claimed that in a heavenly visit, Jesus told him he would be returning to “take his church” on either September 23rd or September 24th, 2025. This claim spread like wildfire across social media, altered slightly to align with the Jewish Feast of Trumpets (September 22-24),18 and a quick Google search will bring up hundreds and hundreds of videos chronicling the portents of this certain eventuality. After all, the signs are apparent; we’ve heard of wars and rumors of wars, and the woes of this world seem climactically turbulent. Doubtless, these people say, we currently stand amidst the final generation.

I’m sure this time they’re right.

11

Divine Detours

IHOPKC Figure Aided Other Abusers, Sought to Buy "Forgiveness"

Here, on Earth, your vision is immersed in the immediate: trees arching overhead, buildings rising against the sky, people weaving through the clamor of daily existence…

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2 years ago · 51 likes · 14 comments · Stephen Deere

I’m hardly the first to write about the nuances and difficulties of translation, but it really is amazing how thoroughly language and theological interpretation can intersect. For example, there is a serious argument to be made that the entire Western Christian understanding of Original Sin is essentially thanks to St. Augustine’s unfortunate reliance on a blatant mistranslation of Romans 5:12.1 In Douglas Campbell’s foreword to Lamb of the Free, he concurs with Andrew Rillera’s forthcoming thesis that Penal Substituionary Atonement (PSA) is not just interpratively misguided, but exegetically unfounded, and this is due in large part to language and translation.

For starters, “atonement” is simply too versatile a word for its own good. Rillera explains:

“In English, the word ‘atonement’ means too many things at once. And this is a result, in part, of how this word came into the English vocabulary. I have no inherent problems with this word, but because it can be used in both a sacrificial register (e.g., to translate the Hebrew word kipper) and in a non-sacrificial register (to convey anything that falls within the broad realm of “the saving significance of Jesus’s death”), these conceptually separate domains are often conflated. And this conflation results in some major misinterpretations of NT texts, which in turn have resulted in problematic theologies about the nature of salvation.”

And further:

“Following John Wycliffe’s Middle English translation of the Bible in the fourteenth century, which used phrases like ‘to one’ and ‘one-ment,’ William Tyndale in the sixteenth century first standardized ‘atone’ and ‘atonement’ (at-one-ment). It was first used as a translation of the Greek word katallassō, which means ‘reconciliation,’ in texts like 2 Cor 5:18–20 and Rom 5:10. Katallassō, ‘at-one-ment,’ ‘reconciliation.’ This all makes good sense. So far, so good. But Tyndale then used the noun ‘atonement,’ and the verb form ‘to atone,’ to translate the Hebrew root word k-p-r in the Torah (Genesis–Deuteronomy). But this already makes theological assumptions about the function of Israel’s sacrificial system that Hebrew Bible scholars almost unanimously have demonstrated to be misunderstandings, as will be developed in the next chapter. For a quick teaser: In the piel form, kipper means ‘remove’ most broadly, but when used in the sacrificial system it more specifically conveys the idea of ‘decontaminate’ or ‘purify’ or ‘purge’ (i.e., removing a contamination clinging to something). Hence, kipper does not mean “reconcile,” nor “save,” nor ‘forgive.’ Equally importantly, only holy objects within the sacred dwelling place, or later the temple, receive the ritual action of kipper. In other words, when kipper happens, what is decontaminated or purified is a holy object in the sanctuary, not people.'“

This is a helpful starting place, as so often advocates of PSA will simply repeat Biblical language as if it must mean what they commonly interpret it to mean, not realizing how much of that understanding relies on the English usage of translated words, rather than the contextual understanding of the underlying terminology.

Lamb of the Free’s introduction explains that the problem here is largely one of language. Conflation of terms leads to conflation of interpretive frameworks, and the key to resolving this is to reassess the pertinent concepts in their original context. One of the main misunderstandings in question is the nature of sacrifice in the Old Testament, namely, that OT animal sacrifice is substitutionary, when in fact, it is not.

All too often, as evidenced by Stackhouse above, when people are discussing the saving significance of Jesus’s death, false equivalencies are made in rapid succession: “saving” is assumed to mean “atoning,” and “atoning” is taken to mean “sacrifice,” and “sacrifice,” so it is thought, always has a kipper function and is then assumed to be equivalent to “forgiveness.” So everything about the salvific meaning of Jesus’s death gets reduced to and conflated with “an atoning, kipper, sacrifice.”

…This matters because many of the go-to NT texts assumed to be supporting something like “penal substitutionary atonement” (e.g., Rom 3:25; 8:3, Gal 3:13, 2 Cor 5:21) are demonstrably not about sacrificial atonement (nor are they about substitution). They are about the saving significance of Jesus’s death, but they utilize a completely different conceptual framework than sacrifice in general or kipper in particular to explain that saving significance.

…Jesus’s death is a participatory phenomenon; it is something all are called to share in experientially. The logic is not: Jesus died so we don’t have to. Rather it is: Jesus died so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him, having full fellowship with his sufferings so that we might share in the likeness of his resurrection (e.g., Phil 3:10–11; Gal 2:20; 6:14; Rom 6:3–8; 1 Pet 2:21; Mark 8:34–35 with 10:38–29; 1 John 2:6; 3:16–18; etc.). In short, while Jesus did die for us, this does not mean that Jesus died instead of us. It means that he died ahead of and with us.

Another contention the introduction explores is the question of punitive vs retributive punishment. This is hardly limited to atonement; the nature of God’s punishment is tackled in every sphere of theology, from creation to eschatology. Should earthly woes be seen as God actively “punishing” us for breaking his laws, or are his laws merely what is best for us, and we suffer natural consequences for breaking them? In questions of Heaven, Hell, and the afterlife, are the torments of Hell retributive? Purgative? Proportionally inflicted by God as payback for earthly sins? Or merely the incompatibility of our corruption encountering the unvarnished experience of God’s presence? The answers to these questions aren’t for bonus points on a theology quiz; how we understand God’s punishment is a core aspect of how we understand God’s character, and how we understand God’s character determines how we seek to imitate it. A penal substitutionary view posits that forgiveness cannot actually be a gift given; it must be earned. As the classic metaphor goes, if I owe you $10 and cannot pay, but someone else steps in and gives you $10 to settle my debt, you cannot then say you have “forgiven” my debt, as the debt has been paid. Likewise, if God’s justice “owes” our sins an active retribution, such as inflicting suffering and death upon us, a punishment endured by Christ in our place, then we cannot really speak of God “forgiving” our sins. Our sins were not forgiven if the punishment was doled out.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The relevant point to make here is that none of the sacrifices in Leviticus appear to match this retributive model of punishment, nor do they represent “substitutionary” models of atonement. On the contrary, Rillera points out:

Whenever something calls for capital punishment, or for the sinner to be “cut off,” there is no sacrifice that can be made to rectify the situation (see esp. Num 15:30–31; 35:32–33). This already rules out the idea that the death of the sacrificial animal is substituting for the death of the offerer. If “substitutionary death” was the logic of animal sacrifice, then the one thing we could expect to be remedied by sacrifice would be capital offenses when the death of the offender is on the line. The fact that this is explicitly not the case means we need to rethink the OT sacrificial system and to analyze the NT’s sacrificial metaphors with this in mind.

But I think the most interesting thing in this first chapter is how Rillera elucidates the ancient conceptualization of sacrifice as found in Leviticus. Paradoxically, he explains how “sacrifice” and “death” are actually distinct and opposed concepts. Even though an animal is killed in a sacrifice, the ritual practice transforms the process into a presentation of life. Quoting at length:

Death qua “death” cannot be brought into sacred space without defiling it (see esp. Num 19; Exod 21:14; Ezek 9:7). As will be discussed more in the chapter 3, the sources of ritual impurity are all related to (non-sinful) conditions that convey “the forces of death,” as Jacob Milgrom phrased it. Not only can death itself not be brought into sacred space, but also nothing and no one associated with death via ritual impurity can be brought into sacred space (Lev 7:20–21; 21:1–6, 10–12; 22:3–9; Num 19:13, 20). Therefore, thinking that a sacrifice is conceptualized as a death (substitutionary or not)—the greatest and most potent source of ritual impurity—which is then brought into the direct presence of God fundamentally misunderstands the conceptual framework of Leviticus’s ritual ontology.

…In brief, according to Leviticus, although in “deed” an animal literally dies, in “word” via the whole ritual process (how the animal dies, where it dies, what happens to its body and blood afterwards, etc.) the death of the animal is reconceptualized and reconfigured so that what just took place was a not-killing, but a “sacrifice.” And the “sacrifice” itself will take on different meaning and significance depending on the function of the particular sacrifice being offered. So a “sacrifice” is further construed either as a “sacred gift” or, when used for kipper, into a “ritual detergent” for decontaminating sancta (sacred objects/places). But the validity of either of these purposes depends upon the sacrifice being transfigured into something completely separate from anything having to do with the concept of “death.” In short, Lev 17 makes it clear that “sacrifice” functions within a ritual ontology wholly distinct from the realm of “death.”

…Granted, this at first seems paradoxical and counterintuitive. This is why it is helpful to understand the transformative power of rituals—because it allows us to see the ethical motivation behind the instructions in Lev 17. As Smith argues, “one major function of ritual” is specifically to deal with seeming “hypocrisy” or “contradiction.” Smith goes on to explain: [R]itual represents the creation of a controlled environment where the variables (i.e., the accidents) of ordinary life have been displaced precisely because they are felt to be so overwhelmingly present and powerful. Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.

…Leviticus has an analogous yet different way of handling the tension between “the way things are” with “the way things ought to be” within its distinctive conceptual framework of reality. In Leviticus’s “controlled environment” of sacrifice the “tension to way things are” (an animal is being killed) with “the way things ought to be” (humans living in harmony with and not killing animals for food, per Gen 1:29; 2:16; 3:18–19) is dissolved because the cultic ritual makes it possible to reorient the whole process around accessing “life.” That is, the rituals make it so that the event of sacrifice is not at all about death but rather is a presentation of life (Lev 17:11, 14).

…Therefore, it is not even proper to call sacrifice a “ritual death” because the ritual depends on it not actually being comprehended as a death, which would bring impurity into the dwelling place. Sacrifice is rather a way to access “life” and avoid all associations with “death.” Sacrifice is a process by which to transform the mundane into a sacred gift. “Death” has no intelligibility in this ritual framework of perceiving the truth of the matter. Meaning, the presence or absence of these ritual actions determines the “truth” of what happened; it might be a homicide,2 or it might be a sacrifice. What the “truth” is all depends on the ritual factors discussed above.

Viewing dead animal parts as “a presentation of life” seems a little bit more than counterintuitive. But I couldn’t help but note, when consulting relevant passages in Leviticus, that the text does seem to insist on exactly that understanding:

“If anyone of the house of Israel or of the aliens who reside among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut that person off from the people. ¹¹ For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you for making atonement for your lives on the altar, for, as life, it is the blood that makes atonement.”

“As life,” it is the blood that makes the atonement. Not “through death.” As life. God only knows how many times I read that without ever making such a connection.3

The other most fascinating revelation I found in this chapter is the conceptualization of what makes something clean or unclean. We Christians often make the mistake of associating “unclean” with “sinful” as opposed to “ritually impure,” but even once we make that distinction, what makes someone “ritually impure” can feel rather arbitrary and, to a modern reader, silly. Why, for example, do natural processes like seminal fluids or a woman’s period render a person ritually impure? Rillera facinatingly suggests:

I do not think ritual impurity is reducible to “death” or “mortality” per se. I discuss the purity framework further in chapter 3,4 but here I just note that those aspects of ritual impurity more obviously relating to death (corpse impurity in Num 19 and scale disease in Lev 13–14, which makes one’s skin look like a rotting corpse, Num 12:12) can be subsumed under a broader understanding of human finitude (human beings both begin and end) in contrast to God’s infiniteness (God not only does not procreate, but did not have a beginning and will not have an ending)…This better explains why sex and childbirth also convey ritual impurity (Lev 12, 15), not so much because they are associated with “death” or “mortality,” but rather more because they are associated with human finite beginnings. This view is found in Jub. 3:8–14, which highlights Adam and Eve’s presumed initial impurity since they need to remain outside of the holy garden of Eden (vv. 9–14), for the same proscribed days of impurity in Lev 12 (cf. Luke 2:22)

I find this so brilliant, and furthermore, it serves as a wonderful corrective to judgmental impulses we might otherwise bring to these sections of the Law. Like many readers of the Bible, I find much of the law codes and genealogies to be rather boring, and as such, I spend very little time in books like Leviticus or the opening chapters of 1 Chronicles. But I also bear the unconscious bias of a modern man, who looks back upon ancient animal sacrifice, even amongst sacred scripture, as kind of archaic and barbaric. The substitutionary view of sacrifice, in fact, encourages this dismissive haughtiness, as the brutal simplicity of “I must die so I kill an animal instead” feels like a conclusion less sophisticated people might come to.

Yet here we are presented with philosophical profundity. Far from the simple appeasement of a local deity with some farm meat (as animal sacrifice is so often portrayed), we find in Leviticus an intense understanding of the vastness of God, a view that sees him so highly that his infinite presence cannot abide finitude. Or perhaps more accurately, the finite is at risk in the presence of the infinite, and thus measures are taken to make one “clean” in the presence of God. There is so much more I could digress on here, but as Rillera promises to return to the concept in chapter three, I will reserve my thoughts until then as well.

Let me conclude with a brief note about systematizing the atonement. I’m unsure whether my (or Rillera's) pushback against PSA will end with advocating for replacing it with something as doctrinally precise. Rather, I suspect the conclusion will help us with what we should not say, rather than comprehensively listing all that we should. Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, in a lecture titled “Why the Cross?” repeatedly insists that the Orthodox faith preserves the ambiguity of the tradition. “The function of dogma,” he states, “is to eliminate heresy; never to clarify mysteries.” This is a function of Eastern Orthodoxy I’ve always admired in contrast to Rome’s apparent attempt to explicate every little detail of everything.5 And I think it’s ultimately the correct approach here, and honestly, for most theology. Early Christian writings, including our New Testament, are theologically bountiful but not doctrinally precise. I fear that much of modern systematic theology sacrifices the richness accessible only through ambiguity in the service of comfortable precision. Our attempts to be too exact about what the atonement was or means can narrow the focus beyond what the text actually says.

That being said, the text does say some things, and does not say other things. And it would appear that limiting our interpretive scope to the more exegetically defensible readings of the Levitical sacrificial system may eliminate some readings, such as overly-simplified scapegoat analogies or, of course, colloquial renditions of PSA, but when we are willing to set aside these inherited assumptions, we are left with something so much richer, fuller, and worth exploring.

But a few months back, I was advised by fellow Substacker that theological contributions “need not be novel.” My mind has failed to preserve what he said after that; it was something along the lines of theology being personal, but also contextual, and maybe something about how walking along the path to previously reached conclusions remains a worthy endeavor by itself, as even old conclusions must be re-understood for the present age.1 All to say, presented with both my hesitancy to offer speculative conclusions and my search for better exegetes of my own brain, I thought it might be fun to chronicle such an exercise in public.

My accursed social media timelines are currently full of arguments surrounding Penal Substitutionary Atonement, mainly due to popular Christian writer John Mark Comer‘s praise of Dr. Andrew Rillera’s book Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death. Said book has been on my “to read” list for some time now,2 but a particular aspect of it caught my attention anew, namely Rillera’s inclusion of the word “solidarity” in his explication of the atonement.

You see, for some time now, in writings so scattered I have not even attempted to organize them for this Substack, I have been theoretically exploring my view of the cross; tackling afresh simple questions with impossibly complicated answers, trying to address them from the vantage point I currently find myself at, and expressly allowing myself to explore these things as if my own conclusions are worth pursuing, all while doing my damndest to keep the imposter syndrome at bay.3 As such, my plan for this series is to take this first post to sketch out a bit of what I’ve been contemplating,4 how it relates to the atonement, and how I think Lamb of the Free might help me articulate it better. This will be a very informal, stream-of-consciousness, thinking-out-loud approach that perhaps is more suited to my drafts, but in sharing and inviting feedback, I hope to learn more than I would have had I kept these thoughts to myself.

1. Creation and Salvation

I will start with what I consider to be the most impactful theological conclusion I have arrived at on my own,5 namely the notion that creation and salvation are theologically synonymous.

A central Christian claim is that creation is God calling us forth from nothingness, not from pre-existent matter or some parallel force to rival his own power, but purely ex nihilo. Our existence is entirely contingent on the sustaining power of God; we are finite, contingent beings whose continued existence is wholly predicated upon God as the wellspring of infinite Being. All that we do and are is because God first Is; Or to phrase it in Biblical terms, in God we “live and move and have our being.”

If God is being as such, then being is Good, and in the privative approach of classical Christianity, we define evil by what takes away from this goodness. This is why death is the ultimate evil, the “last enemy” as Paul says; death is un-being, it is un-God, it is a return to the nothingness from whence we were freed in creation. And here, we find the parallel to salvation. What is creation but the God who Is invading the realm that Isn’t to free us from the clutches of Unbeing? God calls us out of death, out of nothing, and into life. And salvation, viewed from this broad, theological, and dare I say metaphysical perspective, is a parallel story. Christ’s salvific work on the cross is what sustains us in life, but his journey mirrors that of creation. Christ descends to the realm of the dead to break its gates and free us from its power. Both creation and salvation are invitations for the dead to come to life and, from the perspective of eternity, are the same act, merely sung in two different keys.6

This view disrupts our conventional chronology, in that we are used to thinking of a progression from a perfect and finished creation, distorted by the Fall, and thus requiring Christ’s death on the cross as sort of a “plan B” to reconcile the estranged creation to himself. But some of the earliest Christian figures, such as Irenaeus, chose a different starting point. As John Behr explains (emphasis added by me):

In Adam, the Word sketched out in advance what would be revealed and established in the Son of God, Christ himself. The description of Adam as a ‘type’ implies the prior existence of the one of whom he is a type. As such, the one who was to come exists before Adam; it was by him and for him that Adam came into existence, and, furthermore, as he exists as the Saviour, Adam came into existence to be saved by him. Thus, though only appearing at the end, this one is, nevertheless, the true beginning.

This is a remarkable statement and for our modern theological sensibilities perhaps rather jarring. Yet it is entirely consequential and coherent, and a position held right through to the end of the Byzantine era. It highlights the fact, as we have been emphasizing, that Irenaeus theologizes strictly from within the economy, from what can in fact be known and spoken about, with the right hermeneutic, of God’s activity and revelation in Christ. He resists any attempt to seek a higher perspective to speak about God prior to and independent from creation, a standpoint that would have to be supra-human and, indeed, above God himself; to attempt to speak from such a perspective would, for Irenaeus, be not only presumptuous but also groundless. Yet, since the starting point for Christian theology is the work of God in Christ, understood through the opening of the Scriptures, the Christ who is now known to be the one to whom God said ‘Let us make the human being’ is already known to be the Saviour, to ‘pre-exist’ as Saviour, and so Adam’s relation to his maker is always already that of being saved by the Saviour. We are here far removed from the debate between Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus about whether the Word would have become incarnate had Adam not fallen, a debate that has all too frequently set the parameters for interpreting Irenaeus. We are also far removed from any attempt to think of creation and salvation as being respectively, in rather crude terms, ‘Plan A’, followed by the ‘Fall’, which is then rectified by ‘Plan B’. Starting with Christ, Irenaeus would rather see creation and salvation, with carefully defined nuances considered below, as being not two moments within one economy, but rather as coextensive, as the one economy: God’s continuously creative work throughout the economy, resulting in the end in the one who is in the image and likeness of God, is salvation. And, as such, Irenaeus can even say that it was necessary for Adam to come into existence, not implying any lack or need in God himself, but simply as a consequence of the fact that the starting point for all theology is Jesus Christ, the Saviour.

The key to reconciling this position is to recognize that the act of “creation” was not something completed in the past any more than the act of “salvation” is something solely acquired in the present. Both are, as Irenaeus illustrates, a continuum in one economy, much like how Gregory of Nyssa views the creation of mankind in Genesis as referring to the totality of humanity.7 In this view, we could say that we are, in fact, still on the “sixth day” of creation, that the making of man is not yet complete. This very notion may be what John the Evangelist has in mind in his gospel, with the finishing work of Christ on the Cross representing the completion of the first true human being. Behr explains this as the true “project” of God, noting how in Genesis, all aspects of creation are brought into existence by divine fiat (“let the earth put forth vegitation, let there be a firmament,” etc), all except the making of man, which is the only place where God instead states “let us make.” As Behr goes on to explain:

“But, having declared all these things into existence by a word alone, God then announces his own project-not with an injunction, but in the subjunctive: "Let us make the human being in our image, after our likeness" (Gen 1:26). This is the only thing that God is described as specifically deliberating about; this is his divine purpose and resolve. That this is indeed the work of God is shown, for Irenaeus, by the manner in which Christ heals the blind man, recounted only in the Gospel of John. The blind man healed by Christ was born blind not because of his fault or that of his parents, but, as Christ says, "in order that the works of God might be made manifest" (John 9:3). As the way that Christ heals the blind man, mixing spit and earth, parallels our initial fashioning, mixing the power of God and the dust of the earth, Irenaeus concludes: ‘The work of God is the fashioning of the human being" (Haer. 5.15.2, opera autem Dei plasmatio est hominis).’”

I could digress down this tangent for some time,8 but for now let us suffice in saying that in this view, creation is an ongoing process, not a past completed act. And let us note again the parallel with salvation, where throughout the New Testament we see salvation spoken of in past (Ephesians 2:8, 2 Timothy 1:9), present (1 Corinthians 1:18, Philippians 2:12) and future (1 Peter 1:5, Matthew 10:22 ) tenses. We American Christians are so used to the language of “getting saved” like it’s a one-time event, a binary switch, a Facebook relationship status we can update and then leave on the shelf, but Scripture attests to salvation as progressive work, just like the picture of creation we have illustrated above. The making of Man is completed on the Cross because Salvation is the true culmination of Creation.

Thus, our present existence can be contextualized in this sort of “tug of war” between God and nothingness. Pursuit of life, the path of following Christ, this is what leads to life, while sin calls us back towards death.9

2. Theodicy and Atonement

My first draft of this post emerged as a frantic expulsion of thought and quickly surpassed 5,000 words. In editing, I realized my tangent into exploring theodicy and creation was actually unnecessary to the present discussion. I may bring it back in future posts if relevant, but in the meantime, if anyone would like to read my initial digression, shoot me an email/message/comment/whatever and I’ll send it over in unpolished form. But to summarize what we need from it to continue, my broad conclusion (which takes a while to walk through) is that while a “pedagogical” explanation of evil (suffering as a means of growth as espoused by Irenaeus and others) can account for why evil (or at least the possibility of evil) exists in creation, it collapses when confronted with the sheer scale and apparent pointlessness of particular suffering, which leads me to question if the atonement itself can operate as a superior theodicy.

So to return to Lamb of the Free, I should state at the outset that, as I have yet to read the book, I’m not actually certain if it will align with my current view or challenge it. What entices me about the possibility of arming my case is a few quotes I’ve seen floating around, such as:

“This is why I use the phrase ‘covenantal) cursed solidarity atonement’ a few times in Lamb of the Free. Jesus is sharing in the cursed conditions of Israel/humanity. It is so that by uniting totally with us we can be totally united with him in both his death and resurrection. It's solidarity, union, & participation all the way down. So I do not deny that the wrath of God is an important component here, but the framework within which the wrath of God is understood is, obviously, crucial. God is not torturing or crucifying Jesus. Humanity is.

Because this, I think, is an answer to the problem of pain. It is not an explanation, or at least, it is not a thorough response to the question of “why did it have to be this way.” It operates, instead, on the conclusion that there was a price to be paid, a price inherent to creation, and God chose to pay it himself. The Cross is then an act of solidarity, not one of punitive retribution. It is not that we deserved to die but mercifully God killed Jesus instead, it is that we were already dead— nothing, nonbeing, before God dipped his hand into nothingness to pull us from the abyss. Christ’s defeat of death through death is not just symbolically fitting; it is a potent illustration of the entire story of creation, and it thoroughly demonstrates what it means to be God. God is Love, greater love has no man than he who lays down his life for his friend, and God does just that, kenotically laying down his eternal life and incarnating within his creation to invade the realm of death, so that even un-being and nothingness are filled by the Light of the World.

But I would take it further.10 If we analogize again (as we must) and look at suffering in this present life, we will see that time is a gift. Healing is slow, but the distance between our experience and our suffering is sometimes one of the only balms to human agony. So, extrapolating forward, on the scale of eternity (in as much as we can speak of chronology in the age to come), I find it entirely conceivable that eternity, combined with the purgative healing of God’s presence, and any model of post-mortem reconciliation, confession, forgiveness, or progress that you prefer, could result in moving past even the worst of our temporal woes. Similar to how time, progress, and good therapy do not erase past hurts, but heal and strengthen you to move foreward, God as the great physician (or in this case, the great therapist) can lead us past even the worst sufferings imaginable, as on the scale of eternity, we can someday be so far beyond these pains as to have effectively forgotten them completely, without erasing their formation of who we are as individuals.11 This is perhaps what is glimpsed in the conclusion of Revelation, where God makes his dwelling among mankind and wipes every tear from their eyes (which implies healing, not erasure).

But there is a price to be paid for this, and in this view, God pays it in a radical way. It is an ancient Christian conviction that God is eternal and unchanging. This includes the act of creation, as difficult to conceptualize as that may be. There is no future or past for God; he does not know what we will do tomorrow because he is prescient, he knows tomorrow’s events because tomorrow is right now from God’s perspective. Since time is a physical constraint of the universe, temporal progression is a matter of perspective. But from God’s eternal perspective, our continuum of linear choices is, in fact, simultaneous; the “eternal instant,” as the hymnography puts it, which seems to imply that creation, subsumed within God’s eternity as it may be, is eternally present to God. This means that for us, someday, suffering will be a thing of the past, as far behind us as the East is from the West, utterly healed and forgotten beyond the good it wrought in us, while God is eternally experiencing it. God is in all time, always, which means every moment of suffering, from the pettiest of childhood grievances to the most profound loss of warfare, to the formative agony of teenage heartbreak, to the deer with the broken leg slowly dying in the forest, is an ever-present reality for God. He does not change. He does not take for himself the gift he gives us, the gift of progress and ascent, the gift of healing and leaving our hurt behind us in creation— the justified Christ, the God-Man at the right hand of the Father, bears the scars of his crucifixion in his resurrected body.12 As I’ve stated a few times and in a few articles, I believe the story of creation/salvation can be summarized in saying that God binds himself to suffering to bring about our making.

And this is why the atonement is the center of the story. This is why understanding the Crucifixion is vital to our understanding of God. Not because theology nerds like me love to digress on these details, but because the reason behind the Cross is essential to telling us who God is. As Behr again explains:

It is in the way in which he died as a human being that Christ shows us what it is to be God. It is not by being “almighty,” as we tend to think of this, but rather, in the Pauline inversion of the cross—strength in weakness, wisdom in folly—by his all-too-human act of dying, in the particular manner that he does, offering his life for others, that he shows us the life of God and the love that God is (1 John 4:8). It is not that Christ died because he was human, and that because he is God he was able to conquer death. That would split Christ apart and be of no help to anyone else! Rather, as the disciples concluded—not simply by seeing the risen Christ but by going back to Scripture (in particular Isaiah 53, the suffering servant)—it was his death that conquers death, and so it is his death that is the means of life for others, because it was the death of an innocent victim, one over whom death had no claim, and so whose death for the sake of others was completely voluntary and freely given.

This is the heart of the theology defended by the councils of the first millennium. That which we see in the crucified and risen Christ-as proclaimed by the apostles through the words drawn from the Scriptures, the prophecies and narratives, the poetry and the prayers-is what it is to be God.

If what it is to be God is displayed on the Cross, then the character of that action is indispensable to our understanding of God. It is, as adherents of PSA ironically love to insist, very much at the heart of the Gospel.

So in future installments, I will explore Lamb of the Free’s explanation of the atonement. I’m not sure if I will do this chapter by chapter or in a looser way, but we will see what ends up being the most apt. At the end, I hope to take what I’ve learned and see how it applies to (or potentially alters) the rambles above. I believe a perspective of the Cross centered on solidarity is superior to one centered on penal substitution, and I am excited to see the reasons Rillera provides to justify this.

American Evangelicals face the same challenge that has buffeted many a Christian movement throughout the ages, namely, the unfortunate fact that their social and political values aren’t always represented accurately by the words of Jesus. The frustration is understandable; I imagine an ardent capitalist, gun-toting lover of private property and a “you can’t tell me what to do” attidue would generally be averse to an itinerant pacifist preacher constantly telling anyone who wishes to follow him to sell all they have, give the profits to poor people (who haven’t earned them), and generally comport oneself in a meek and mild manner. Though, this interpretive tension is neither new nor unique to American Evangelicalism. I have often found it amusing how the 39 Articles of my own denomination (Anglicanism) seem to go out of their way to vocally condemn the common holding of property amongst Christians and emphatically endorse private property rights.2 Time and again, Biblical values and scriptural proclamations are mollified in service of interpretive need, which I suppose is merely a cynical way of defining all hermeneutics (as interpretive frameworks always play a role in how we read the Bible, but I digress).

But taking a verse completely out of context is not a valid hermeneutic, in my not-so-humble opinion. There is a marked difference between understanding a verse within a particular ideological framework versus isolating a passage from its surroundings for the sole purpose of helping it mean something it could not mean in context. One of the most misused verses in this way is Luke 22:36—

He said to them, “But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one.

On its own, there is a level of ambiguity here. Is Jesus advocating that the disciples arm themselves? Are they militarizing? Did he mean for them to march on the Mount of Olives as soldiers? The frequent [mis]application of this verse is a pushback against Jesus’ alleged pacifism, specifically in the context of self-defense. Offer any of Christ’s “do not resist an evildoer” or “turn the other cheek” teachings, and you’ll often be met with this verse as proof that sometimes, Christ instructs us to arm ourselves to fight back.

Even if one can make a moral case for self-defense from elsewhere in scripture, it is incorrect to do so here. Let us look at the verse in its actual context:

He said to them, “When I sent you out without a purse, bag, or sandals, did you lack anything?” They said, “No, not a thing.” He said to them, “But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. ³⁷ For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless,’ and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.” ³⁸ They said, “Lord, look, here are two swords.” He replied, “It is enough.”

The logical progression here is pretty straightforward. Jesus says to buy a sword. Why? He immediately explains why: that the scripture might be fulfilled. So when presented with the two swords, he replies, “it is enough. “ Enough for what? To fulfill the scripture in question. And if there was any doubt as to this reading, one merely needs to skip ahead a few verses to where Jesus is actually taken, and these swords have an opportunity to be used in a self-defense context:

When those who were around him saw what was coming, they asked, “Lord, should we strike with the sword?” Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said, “No more of this!” And he touched his ear and healed him.

There is no vagueness here. This instruction for the disciples to arm themselves had nothing to do with using those weapons to defend him or themselves and everything to do with the fulfillment of prophecy. And this meaning, in context, is so straightforward that it’s no wonder those who wish to use this verse to justify arming themselves must wrench it wholesale from its surroundings.

Again, we can argue whether there is justification elsewhere in scripture that demonstrates God loves the Second Amendment, but this verse does not apply to that debate, as for once, there is no ambiguity surrounding these two swords. But with a subtle change, that can be amended.

Rather famously, when Martin Luther translated the Bible, he interpolated “alone” into Romans 3:28, correcting what Paul said to better clarify what Luther was certain Paul meant. Sometimes a single, simple word is enough to entirely change the meaning of a sentence. The creative team behind the Chosen has done something similar here. Here is how the dialogue plays out on screen:

Jesus: “…and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.”

Zee: “Master, we do have two swords. Certainly it’s not enough to defend twelve men against violent attacks—”

Andrew: “—Eleven.”

Jesus: “It is enough.”

Zee: “We’ll sell our cloaks, protect ourselves properly.”

Jesus: “It is all you need for now.”

Now, maybe this was unintentional. Maybe the writers were merely doing what they often do, adding bits of filler dialogue or expanding on the sparse source material to pad the runtime of what would otherwise be rather abrupt scenes.3 But given how often this verse is misused in this specific manner, I cannot look at Zee’s invocation of “defense” as anything but intentional. This very simple, very subtle addition, and the omission of Jesus’ invocation of prophecy, shifts the context of the exchange out of the context the Bible provides and instead, into the context of self-defense, precisely where this verse is so often misapplied.

This may seem like a rather trivial matter for me to dedicate an entire article to. After all, you didn’t see me taking to Substack when The Chosen skipped the Transfiguration or omitted the “get behind me Satan” dialogue immediately following Christ’s declaration of Peter as the Rock, or even the line in this very episode where Andrew quotes Jesus as saying he had not come “to abolish the law, but to ‘interpret’ it.” And it’s entirely possible that once the crew gets up to the Mount of Olives, there will be a dedicated beat of chastisement to both Zee and Peter for bearing steel against the Romans (I’m only two episodes into season 5, so it’s entirely possible this happens). But I do think this subtle change does a lot to reinforce this popular and pervasive misuse of Jesus’ words.

However, it also serves as a helpful illustration that the act of interpretation inherent to translation is not limited to language. Translating between mediums requires the same process of interpretative choices as localizing to a particular language. The story of The Chosen will never and could never be a pure, unfiltered re-telling of the Biblical account; it will always be defined by the time and culture in which it was created. We should not be surprised that the priorities of colloquial American Christianity color this depiction of the Gospel narrative; rather, we should allow it to remind us that this is always how stories work. The Chosen, like the four Gospels themselves, is not a neutral relaying of brute historical facts, but an interpretative retelling of a precious story, and is, like every retelling, shaped in the image of its makers.

But the responses to MacArthur have been much more vitriolic, on both sides. His admirers praise him in no uncertain terms, but more so, seem to be going out of their way to lambast anyone with even a hint of nuance in their reporting. Even mentions of his associated scandals or controversial teachings are met with a slew of invective bile, as if to merely question the uniformity of his magnanimity should be a punishable offense. Look at his books, look at his movement, look how many souls he won for Christ.

I’m reminded of the conversations surrounding Ravi Zacharias when his sexual abuse was posthumously exposed. There were plenty of similar “look at how much good he did” excuses made, but then again, that is always the case for prominent ministers, living or dead. Yet a departed status invited a different approach from many. There’s just something about death that makes people want to focus on the best in the deceased, be it a family member or a prominent figure. I’m sure someone somewhere could categorize this inclination and has invented a term for it, but whatever psychological process underlies it, I’ve seen it again and again, both in public and private.

Through all these musings, I’ve been thinking about a funeral I attended a few years ago. I did not know the departed; I was there to support a dear friend, but I held some vague knowledge that the deceased was a difficult guy, or at least, that those I knew who knew him had a complex relationship with him. Again, I do not know the details, nor would I share them here if I did, but the striking moment of the funeral was when people were invited to share stories about him. A few work colleagues stood up and told an amusing anecdote or two, a few others praised what a good guy he was, but most notably, none of his children spoke for him. Not then, not during any formal part of the funeral; they were there, they did their duty in organizing and managing the affairs, but none of them said a word.

Legacy is complex. If you lived your life in such a way that none of your children has anything to say at your funeral, you may not be deserving of an op-ed, but I think you’ve certainly removed yourself from hagiographical contention. People live imperfect lives and many of them do a lot of damage before they die. So, why do we feel the inclination to bury the truth with them? I’m not asking rhetorically to then provide an answer, I’m genuinely curious, genuinely asking into the void, why is it that we are so averse to telling the whole truth about people once they are dead?

To be clear, I’m not encouraging us to use death as an excuse to act on long-held grudges or focus solely on the negative aspects of a mixed legacy. To hyperfocus on the negatives of a person would be just as erroneous as hyperfixating on their positives. And in the case of a private funeral, it is probably not necessary to only characterize someone based on your relationship with them. Funerals are for the living, after all, and I’m sure many of those coworkers mentioned above really did have a positive relationship with the deceased, even if it stood at odds with the more complicated one his children experienced.

But in the case of a man like MacArthur, it feels irresponsible to completely ignore the nuance in his legacy in favor of some whitewashed picture of sainthood. MacArthur is championed by many as a political ideologue as much as a preacher. I’ve seen just as many citations of him as a man who heroically stood up to Gavin Newsom during Covid, or bravely took a stand against the legalization of gay marriage,1 or as an uncompromising voice against the malignant error of women preachers, as I have anyone praising his leading people to Christ. A significant percentage of the adoration strikes me as ideological more than anything else; lamenting the loss of a general in the culture war more than a teacher in the Church.

There are others, mind you, who do primarily know MacArthur through his books or preaching. Like Zacharias before him, many of these people wrestle with the blight of MacArthur’s broader heritage, unsure of how to square that with the positive influence he had on their life and faith. It can feel disparate when MacArthur’s expository preaching or best-selling books might feel completely disconnected from his questionable comments on race, or his outright denial of the existence of mental illness. But from my limited understanding, most of MacArthur’s theology was centered on a relatively simple premise.

MacArthur, to my knowledge, viewed almost everything through a very specific hermeneutic of authority and submission. In his view, God has rightly oriented the universe into hierarchical structures, and recognizing our place in that hierarchy is essential for how we operate in the world. This philosophy underlies his aversion to women preachers (as women are below men in the hierarchy) or explains why he often invokes the question of “who is your authority” when opposing public figures, or explains, if not justifies, his very yikesy stance on slavery.2 It also explains his behavior in covering up abuse in his own church, encouraging women to return to their abusive spouses, and publicly condemning a woman from the pulpit for refusing to do so.3 In MacArthur’s view, the right exercise of authority is what holds society and the universe together, and so to him, no matter the rational or reasoning, a wife refusing to submit to the authority of her husband, or worse, rejecting the authority of the elders instructing her to do so, is an offense against the divine.

That approach, that fundamental hermeneutic, should not be excised from MacArthur’s legacy. I say this not because I have theological or ideological disagreements with it, if I were writing all this merely to voice my disagreements I’d spend more time on MacArthur’s embrace of Biblical literalism, Young Earth Creationism, Calvinism, or any other number of theological subjects I enjoy debating. No, MacArthur’s mixed legacy should be preserved with all its nuances because of where he was correct. He was an authority, a supremely influential one, and that means there are hundreds of nameless pastors in churches you’ve never heard of doing their best to be a mini John MacArthur.4 His guiding hermeneutic of authority will outlive him and will result in others being treated the way MacArthur treated those victims of abuse, and if we refuse to recognize that, we enable its proliferation. Hermeneutics matter for more than just right theology, how we tell the story influences how we live it, and as St. James repeatedly reminds us in his epistle, it is those actions that define us.

Funnily enough, this question of legacy is a central theme in James Gunn’s recently released Superman.

(Spoilers to follow)

While skipping the origin story, Gunn includes classic elements of the mythos, including a holographic message from Superman’s Kryptonian parents, where they explain why they sent him away and encourage him to help the people of Earth. Near the end of the first act, Lex Luthor manages to recover the previously corrupted second half of the message, where the parents encourage Superman to conquer earth, to take wives as needed to procreate, to kill as many as he can so that the Kryptonian bloodline might take over, and to rule the planet as the last son of Krypton.

This revelation rattles Superman. He defined his entire attitude and approach as living up to his parents’ legacy. If he was meant to be a conqueror, not a helper, who is he? But his adoptive father (in a winsomely understated yet show-stealing performance by Pruitt Taylor Vince) encourages him with some simple wisdom: “Your choices, your actions, that’s what makes you who you are.”

I imagine many have been similarly rattled this week by the discovery of some of MacArthur’s actions or teachings. For those who feel conflicted by his influence, trying to reconcile his positive impact on their faith with his mixed legacy, I think comfort should be found in application. If MacArthur taught you to love the Lord better, honor him by implementing those teachings better than he did. If MacArthur taught you to love your neighbor as yourself, honor him by standing up for the marginalized in ways that he didn’t. Bad teachers can set people down good paths. Bad parents still give us our lives. And no relationship, no matter how rotten, is without some happy memory, some diamond in the rough, or some level of lingering love that holds on despite all good sense.

Even after getting my thoughts on paper, I still feel no closer to understanding the human inclination to focus on that speck of goodness to the exclusion of all else once the person has died, nor do I think we should indulge it. But perhaps there is something to be said for trying to do better where those parents or public heroes fall short, that, if not redeeming their legacy, is a healthy application of that desire to focus on the good. Maybe being a better father honors your father, even if he was a poor one. Maybe good, loving, compassionate Christians formed under John MacArthur honor his legacy in a way he doesn’t deserve. Maybe Clark Kent following in the model of the parents who raised him over the ones who birthed him honors their sacrifice more than fulfilling their desires for his life ever could.

Maybe it’s just the invocation of underserved, redemptive grace, but something in that thinking strikes me as aspirationally Christlike.

For further reading on John MacArthur and his complicated legacy, especially details of the abuse cases that I only mentioned in passing, I recommend this piece by :

Honest To Goodness

Navigating Grace and Truth: Addressing John MacArthur’s Legacy with Love in His Final Days

If you haven’t yet heard, John MacArthur, one of the most influential voices in evangelicalism, is reportedly nearing the end of his life. For many Christians, this news stirs up a storm of emotions—grief, reflection, maybe even relief. But for those of us who, for years, have been shouting from the rooftops about his troubling legacy—his callous heart…

Read more

9 months ago · 118 likes · 48 comments · Kaeley Triller Harms

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Michael Bird has a salient response if you want to read more:

Word from the Bird

John MacArthur on Slavery

Back in 2012, Mega-Pastor John Macarthur said, with a straight face, “It is a little strange that we have such an aversion to slavery because historically there have been abuses. There have been abuses, there have been abuses in marriage, we don’t have an aversion to marriage particularly.” He then goes to say that for some slaves “working for a gentle…

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4 years ago · 19 likes · 5 comments · Michael F. Bird