Christians once believed that heresy could destroy a person. We now congratulate ourselves for knowing better. Doctrine is treated as an intellectual hobby for men with large libraries and small social skills.

Now the only things that seem to matter are whether someone hurts your feelings, sells VIP tickets to a concert, or poses for a photograph at the gym. False doctrine lacks the vulgarity required to trend.

We have become experts on the lies people believe about themselves and amateurs on the lies they believe about God. We understand how false beliefs about identity shape emotions, desires, and behavior. Once the subject turns to God, however, ideas suddenly become harmless. Apparently, a lie becomes dangerous only when the subject is you.

Yet the soul lives by faith. Faith receives a word, rests upon a promise, and trusts a person. Change the word, the promise, or the person, and faith bends toward another object. A lie about yourself can wound your confidence. A lie about God can corrupt your worship. What you believe about God shapes what you worship. What you worship shapes what you love. What you love orders your life.

Heresy does not merely place the wrong answer on a theology exam. It disorders the soul. It directs trust toward a god who does not exist, a Christ who cannot save, or a gospel with no power to raise the dead.

There are things in this world that can kill you. We naturally fear them. There are lies that can damn you. We tend to feed on them.

The grave is not the worst place you can end up. Hell is.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped burning heretics. Then we stopped believing there was anything worth burning for.

Now, seriously, leave the matches in the drawer. Retiring the stake did nothing to make falsehood safe. It left us with harder work. If beliefs can deform a soul, how do we confront them without destroying the person who holds them? How do we take truth seriously without turning every conversation into a doctrinal trial?

I face some version of that question every day as a chaplain. I care for Christians with whom I disagree, people from other religions, people whose spirituality has been assembled from podcast clips and painful experiences, and people who want nothing to do with religion at all. I do not enter the room with ecclesiastical jurisdiction. I cannot demand agreement, administer church discipline, or treat vulnerability as an opportunity to win an argument. Suffering has never been a permission slip for commandeering another person’s conscience.

It has also never made a person’s beliefs harmless. Someone may believe that illness is God’s punishment for an undiscovered sin. A woman may believe that forgiving her abuser requires returning to the abuse. Someone may refuse necessary treatment because accepting help would demonstrate weak faith. A grieving parent may believe that anger toward God has made God angry with her. These beliefs may be spoken in Christian language, reinforced by a religious community, and held with complete sincerity.

Interfaith care does not require me to declare every religion equally true. It requires me to offer excellent care without requiring another person to become more like me before receiving it. Respect for a person is not agreement with every proposition inhabiting his head. Sometimes respect means taking a belief seriously enough to ask what it is doing to him.

That is the value of spiritual assessment. It is not an orthodoxy exam disguised as bedside conversation. Heresy is not a clinical diagnosis, and “patient remains stubbornly Monothelite” would be an extraordinarily useless chart note. Spiritual assessment listens for how a person makes meaning, locates hope, assigns responsibility, receives love, understands suffering, and relates to whatever he considers sacred. Spiritual care listens long and closely enough to discover which beliefs are carrying the person and which are standing on his throat.

The belief can be examined without placing the person on trial. That examination requires courage because affirmation is easier. Affirmation keeps the room pleasant, protects the chaplain from conflict, and brings the conversation to a tidy close. A person says, “God is punishing me,” and the chaplain reflects that it sounds painful. A woman says forgiveness requires returning to her abuser, and the chaplain admires the importance of her faith. Everyone feels heard. Nobody has been helped.

A chaplain can coast a surprisingly long way on reflective listening and holding space. Yet, spiritual care eventually has to risk a question.

• How did you come to understand God that way?

• Who taught you that forgiveness requires access to you?

• What does this belief ask you to do?

• What part of your faith forbids medication?

• Does this fit with what you otherwise believe about God’s mercy?

• Has “God will provide” become a reason to leave the application unfinished?

• May I offer another way this has been understood?

These questions belong to the church’s ancient care of souls. The church has never needed to choose between caring about doctrine and caring about people because doctrine is one of the ways it cares for people. It tells us who God is, what has gone wrong, and where salvation may be found.

The chaplain does not introduce theology into the room. The room is already pregnant with beliefs and stories interpreting the cancer, the relapse, the eviction, the death, the unanswered prayer, and the family member who refuses to call.

This does not require the chaplain to become a theological chameleon. I remain a Protestant while caring for a Muslim, an atheist, or a Christian whose theology consists entirely of Brandon Lake lyrics. My convictions teach me that this soul belongs to God. That is precisely why I must understand the person in front of me and remain within the authority I have actually been given.

An immortal soul deserves questions equal to the weight of what it believes. So leave the matches in the drawer. Bring better questions.

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Outside the hospital, I had never encountered quite so many Calvinists. Yet in the trauma bay and ICU, I seemed to meet them regularly. Most would have been surprised by the designation. They were not defending a confession or making an argument about predestination. They were lying in a hospital bed, confident that God was in control. More than that, they believed he had done this for a reason.

What did they mean by “a reason”? It is doubtful that they meant that their suffering was the regrettable price of preserving a world in which people could choose good or evil. They believed God had some good purpose for this particular suffering. They could not identify it, but they trusted that it was sufficient to justify what he had allowed.

I came from a non-Reformed theological background. From what my patients reported, so did they. Yet they spoke with a confidence in God’s sovereignty and providential purposes that surprised me. The longer I have served as a chaplain, the more often I have encountered this response from hospital rooms to NA groups.

What made this especially striking was that books on pastoral care had repeatedly warned me against telling sufferers precisely what they were telling me. Kate Bowler’s 2018 memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, captured that warning in a memorable title. Her account of cancer and the collapse of assumptions about blessing and control deserves more than a rebuttal to its cover. There are lies here worth abandoning. The question is whether confidence in God’s providence belongs among them.

There is a vast distance between “I cannot tell you why this happened” and “God has no reason for allowing it.” My patients had no explanation for their suffering. Yet they believed God had one. Their confidence raises a question that advice about what to say at a bedside cannot settle: Does God have a good purpose for the suffering he allows?

Permission Is Not an Alibi

At this point, someone will object that the Reformed account means more than saying God allowed the suffering. It says the event belonged to his decree. By “decree,” Reformed theology means God’s eternal purpose determining what will occur. Ephesians 1:11 describes God as the one “who works all things according to the counsel of his will.” The claim is that events unfold according to a purpose God brings about. If so, is “permission,” then, simply a gentler word brought out when the implications become uncomfortable?

No. To permit something is to allow it to proceed without preventing it. That can itself be planned. God’s decree includes the means by which an event occurs, including his decision to let someone act on an existing desire rather than restrain him. Permission describes how the event occurs within providence. It does not withdraw the claim that God ordained it.

Put a skateboard on a hill and let it roll. Once it is moving, allowing it to continue differs from stepping in front of it. That remains true even if you put it there intending it to roll downhill. You arranged the situation, and you allowed the movement. Both descriptions are accurate.

People, of course, have intentions that skateboards lack. The illustration makes only the narrow point that allowing something to proceed can be the means by which a prior intention is accomplished. “Permitted” does not have to mean “unplanned.”

So far, we have only cleared up the language. We have not justified the permission. If you send the skateboard hurtling downhill into your neighbor’s car, “I merely let it roll” may be descriptively and linguistically acceptable. However, your neighbor will still be looking for a morally sufficient reason not to hold you culpable.

Likewise, why would God ordain that an evil be permitted when he could prevent it? By evil, I mean a distortion of the good God created. Human wickedness, disease, death, and suffering all belong within that category.

Reject the Reformed account of providence, and the question remains. The Roman Catholic Catechism also teaches that God permits moral evil while respecting creaturely freedom and knowing how to bring good from it. Among the accounts now found within Protestant theology, Arminianism holds that God foreknew the evil that would occur without determining the choices that produced it. Molinism holds that God knew what free creatures would choose under every possible set of circumstances and chose which circumstances to bring about. Open theism denies that future free choices are already settled facts, yet still holds that God knowingly created a world in which freedom carried the risk of terrible evil.

Only process theology escapes the question in this form, and it does so by leaving historic Christian orthodoxy. Its God does not sovereignly permit an evil he could prevent. He lacks the power to prevent it.

The Price of Keeping Our Options Open

Among accounts built around libertarian freedom, understood as the ability to choose otherwise under precisely the same conditions, the usual explanation begins with love. God wants creatures who can freely love him and one another. Love cannot be coerced. For love to be genuine, the argument continues, we must be capable of withholding it. God therefore permits the misuse of freedom because freedom makes love possible.

Notice that this is already a greater-good argument. Evil is permitted for the sake of something valuable enough to justify its permission. The libertarian has not escaped that structure. He has nominated freely given love as the greater good and the ability to choose otherwise as its necessary condition. Put less abstractly, every murder, every assault, every war, every abused child, and every family left to grieve become collateral damage in the defense of creaturely freedom.

Even granting libertarian freedom, the defense has more work to do. Why must God allow every consequence of a wicked choice? Preventing a murderer from reaching his victim need not prevent him from forming the intention. We restrain people precisely because their choices have become dangerous. Nobody accuses the locked door of abolishing the will.

The free-will defense may explain why God allows people to harm one another. Yet by itself, it does not explain cancer, earthquakes, or other suffering no human being chose. A Christian may appeal to the Fall, regular natural processes, or other goods. But once he does, free will is no longer doing all the explanatory work.

Even where the free-will defense applies, another question remains. Freely given love is good. But is preserving the ability to choose otherwise good enough to justify this much blood? The defense has named a greater good. It has not yet shown that the good is great enough.

Must Love Be Able to Say No?

Whether freely given love is good enough to justify the cost is one question. Whether love requires the ability to choose otherwise is another.

Compatibilism holds that divine determination and human freedom can coexist because a person acts freely when acting willingly from his own desires. This does not make coerced affection love. Affection extracted at gunpoint is a contradiction in terms. But willing does not necessarily mean undetermined. Acting from a heart that loves is different from acting against one’s will. God’s providence can encompass the first without turning it into the second.

“But if God determines what I want, how am I responsible?” That is the serious objection. Compatibilism locates responsibility in my willing action, intentions, and responsiveness to reasons. It does not require me to be the ultimate cause of my own character. The critic may find that insufficient. That is the argument to have. Calling everyone a puppet supplies a caricature where an argument is needed.

God cannot lie, yet Christians do not regard his truthfulness as meaningless. The saints in glory will not need the continuing possibility of revolting against God to keep their love authentic. If the ability to choose hatred is what makes love real, heaven will be a remarkably loveless place.

A Morally Sufficient Reason

None of this explains why God permits a particular evil. Compatibilism explains how human beings can act willingly and remain responsible within God’s providence. It does not claim that God permits suffering in order to preserve our ability to act according to our desires.

Augustine did not finally leave the matter at creaturely freedom. He wrote that God “judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist” (Enchiridion 27, p. 33). Freedom may explain why the evil belongs to the creature who wills it. It does not explain why God permits it.

The Reformed answer is that God has a morally sufficient reason, even when he has not revealed what that reason is. This is not an appeal to any benefit we can imagine after the fact. A silver lining is not a justification. The good must be weighty enough to warrant permitting the evil and bound to it in such a way that the good could not be accomplished without permitting it.

The claim is hardest when evil arrives by ambulance. A drunk driver crosses the center line, and someone else wakes up in the ICU. Yet this is where providence becomes hope. Thank God that even this belonged to his decree. Not one broken bone, not one loss of life, is wasted. God is not merely making the best of the wreckage. From the beginning, every moment of that suffering belonged to a purpose wise and good enough to justify its permission, even if the patient never sees that purpose in this life.

Redemption Is Not a Retcon

The cross is the clearest example. The crucifixion was betrayal, torture, and judicial murder. Human beings killed God incarnate. Yet Peter says Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” and then tells his hearers that they “crucified and killed” him “by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). Their act belonged to God’s plan without ceasing to be evil or ceasing to be theirs.

Comic book readers have a word for changing a story after the fact. A retcon, short for retroactive continuity, revises what happened earlier to serve the story an author now wants to tell. Early Star Wars scripts treated Darth Vader and Luke’s father as different men. George Lucas changed that history while developing The Empire Strikes Back, turning a revision of the original plan into one of cinema’s greatest twists.

Redemption is not God’s retcon of the crucifixion. God did not look at Calvary and decide how to work it into a happier ending. The cross was the appointed means by which he would forgive sinners, defeat death, and reconcile the world to himself. Here the good was weighty enough to provide a morally sufficient reason, and God accomplished it through the evil rather than merely after it.

The cross does not tell me why any particular patient suffers. It shows that a horrifying evil can belong to a good purpose established before anyone involved can see it. That gives me no license to invent God’s purpose for someone else’s suffering. It does keep me from treating my ignorance as a verdict on God’s providence.

That is why my patients’ words have stayed with me. They were expressing confidence in a purpose they could not see. I still do not know why those patients suffered. But I am increasingly reluctant to correct the confidence with which they told me that God had one.

______________________________

Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved (New York: Random House, 2018).

Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1996), 33.

Still, I remain Protestant.

I remain Protestant because I believe the Church must be corrected by the Word it preaches. Serious biblical preaching and ordinary Christians knowing their Bibles matter because churches can become practiced at defending what they should repent of. Pastors, creeds, councils, and tradition have real authority. Sola Scriptura means that Scripture alone is the Church’s infallible rule. Every other teacher remains teachable.

Catholics have two fair questions. “Where does Scripture teach that? And where does Scripture tell you which books belong in it?” Protestants cannot demand biblical grounds for everyone else’s doctrines and excuse themselves from providing their own. Nor can we pretend our Bibles arrived without the Church. Christians preserved these books, read them in worship, and handed them down. We depend upon their testimony.

Yet, does that dependence undo our argument?

Imagine two business partners. One says, “Our signed contract has the final say.” The other asks, “Where does it say that?”

“There is no single sentence using those words. But look at how the agreement works. It defines our obligations, limits our managers’ authority, and requires their instructions to conform to its terms. Taken together, those provisions support my conclusion.”

Then the other partner asks, “How do you know this is the version we signed?” The first produces an email from their attorney confirming that this is the signed copy.

“Hold on. You said the contract has the final say. Now you’re letting an email settle the question!”

“A different question. The email confirms which contract we signed. My argument about its authority comes from the contract itself.”

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The Protestant case likewise has two tasks. We must establish Scripture’s authority from its teaching and explain how we recognize its books.

1. Why Should Scripture Have the Final Say?

Catholics agree that Scripture is inspired and that church teaching must serve God’s Word. They believe Scripture and Sacred Tradition transmit the apostolic faith, which the Church’s teaching office authoritatively interprets. Announcing that the Bible is inspired therefore settles something both sides already believe. We disagree over whether Christ also protects certain judgments of a continuing teaching office from error. (Dei Verbum 9–11)

Paul describes the Church as built upon “the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (Ephesians 2:20). He instructs Timothy to entrust what he received to faithful people who can teach others (2 Timothy 2:2). The apostles supply the foundational teaching. Later ministers preserve and transmit it. Holding office does not turn a later teacher into another Paul.

That apostolic teaching carried authority whether spoken or written. Paul told Christians to hold the traditions received “by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Protestants must account for both. The question is how we receive that teaching after the apostles’ deaths.

Luke wrote so that Theophilus could know the certainty of what he had been taught (Luke 1:1–4). John selected his material so that readers might believe and have life in Christ (John 20:30–31). Paul required his letters to circulate among churches, and Peter placed them alongside “the other Scriptures” (Colossians 4:16; 2 Peter 3:15–16). These writings preserve testimony so that people who never met the apostles can nevertheless receive their teaching. Scripture is “God-breathed” and equips God’s servant for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17).

The authority of a teacher remains bounded by the teaching entrusted to him. Jesus condemns tradition that nullifies God’s command (Mark 7:8–13). Paul places even himself beneath the gospel already preached (Galatians 1:8–9). An officeholder cannot rescue false teaching by pointing to his office.

Protestants understand these writings to contain everything necessary for the Church’s faith and obedience. The theological term is material sufficiency. Formal sufficiency means that Scripture can govern the Church without another infallible interpreter. Neither claim excuses us from studying difficult passages, learning from earlier Christians, or listening to our pastors. Both require us to explain why Scripture can perform the work we claim for it.

Irenaeus expected readers to recognize why Gnostic interpretations failed by comparing them with truths “clearly and unambiguously” expressed in Scripture. Clear passages should govern obscure ones. His argument required readers to examine the evidence and understand why one interpretation was better than another. (Against Heresies 2.27.1–3)

Cyril of Jerusalem told his hearers not to give even him “absolute credence” without scriptural proof. He expected Christians under his instruction to recognize the biblical grounds for what he taught. His authority did not excuse him from showing his work. (Catechetical Lectures 4.17)

Neither man needed to be told that Christians disagreed about Scripture. They were addressing disagreement through arguments their readers could understand and assess. Their appeals do not settle every later dispute about church authority. They do show that disagreement need not leave Christians helpless until an office supplies an answer.

Appealing to an infallible interpreter would still leave Christians reading and interpreting that interpreter’s words. A council’s decree must be understood before it can be obeyed. If people can understand an authoritative decree despite disagreements about its meaning, disagreement alone cannot establish that they are unable to understand Scripture.

Understanding the teaching and deciding how a church will act are related responsibilities. Pastors must teach, councils must judge controversies, and churches must discipline. The Constitution provides a limited analogy. Courts apply a written standard through judgments that govern public life without becoming incapable of error. The need for a judgment does not establish that the judge must be infallible.

Christians therefore owe their churches a presumption of submission and must give scriptural reasons for dissent. Being able to question a ruling does not make obedience optional. A Christian who dismisses every unwelcome judgment has not defended sola Scriptura. He has appointed himself its replacement.

I receive Scripture as the Church’s final rule because these writings preserve the apostolic teaching, equip the Church, and supply the standard by which later teaching is judged. Claims that necessary apostolic doctrine survives outside these writings, or that a continuing office interprets them infallibly, require evidence of their own. The Church’s need for faithful teachers cannot supply that evidence by itself.

2. How Do We Know Which Books Are Scripture?

Protestants received their Bibles through the Church. We should be grateful enough to admit it. Christians copied these books, read them aloud, taught them to their children, and distinguished them from other writings. The question is whether we must believe that the Church performed this work infallibly before we can trust what it handed down.

Historical evidence is critical, but it cannot do everything. Establishing that Paul wrote Romans is different from establishing that God inspired it. Authorship, circulation, public reading, and reception tell us how a writing entered Christian life. They do not, by themselves, prove that God spoke through it.

The Protestant account therefore includes the Spirit’s witness through Scripture as the Church reads, preaches, and obeys it. This is more than an individual feeling strongly about a book. The writings’ testimony to Christ, their agreement with the apostolic faith, their historical origins, and their reception within the Church belong together. Confidence rests upon that combined witness. Our recognition does not acquire the inspiration of what we recognize.

The process begins within the New Testament. Paul required his letters to be read publicly and exchanged among churches (1 Thessalonians 5:27; Colossians 4:16). Peter placed Paul’s letters alongside “the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:15–16). These writings were already teaching and governing churches before later councils gathered their names into lists.

However, recognition did involve real disagreements. Eusebius distinguished widely accepted writings from books still disputed, including James, Jude, and Second Peter. He also recorded disagreement over Revelation. The early Church possessed neither complete uncertainty nor immediate agreement about every book. It inherited a substantial common collection and worked through disputed boundaries. (Church History 3.25)

Athanasius listed our twenty-seven New Testament books in 367. He described them as handed down and received as divine. He also distinguished canonical writings from books useful for instruction. Here is a bishop exercising authority through judgment about an inheritance. His letter does not present itself as the event that first made these books authoritative. (Festal Letter 39.3–7)

Local councils, including Hippo and Carthage, helped consolidate that reception. Their decisions mattered. But the Church’s recognition did not begin with a universal council handing an otherwise empty-handed Christianity its New Testament. Books circulated, churches compared their inheritance, teachers disputed particular writings, and agreement developed. Later definitions addressed a collection already received for centuries.

A Catholic can understand this process as Sacred Tradition operating under the Spirit’s protection. Decentralized recognition is compatible with that belief. It does not establish the belief. Calling the reception infallible adds a claim about God’s protection to the history being described. The word Tradition cannot do that work merely by being capitalized.

The same care is needed when Tradition is offered as evidence for Rome’s authority. Ancient testimony can supply evidence. But if we accept particular testimony as decisive only because Rome approves it, that testimony cannot then serve as independent proof that Rome deserves our trust. The argument needs grounds beyond the institution’s endorsement of its own witnesses.

Protestants owe an account of their confidence too. We cannot simply call the process providential and consider the question answered. We must examine the books, their origins, their reception, and their agreement with the apostolic faith. We receive them within the Church’s worship and teaching, trusting the Spirit who speaks through them. This warrants confidence without requiring us to claim that our judgment cannot be mistaken.

The point is modest. Yet no less consequential. The Church can hand us something more authoritative than its own judgment. Its testimony gives us reasons to receive Scripture. Scripture can then give us reasons to correct the Church. Gratitude for receiving the Bible does not require believing that those who handed it down have nothing left to learn from it.

The Certainty I Would Like

Christian division is painful. I have often wondered why Christ would give his Church a revelation that Christians can read so differently. Catholicism offers something Protestantism does not. It offers a universal institution capable of bringing selected controversies to formal closure. That is a genuine advantage on paper.

Yet it remains a distinction without a difference because the Magisterium provides no exhaustive, infallible interpretation of Scripture. Moreover, Catholics must still interpret biblical texts, historical evidence, councils, papal statements, and the authority belonging to each.

Anxiety about being wrong can make a final answer feel indispensable. However, our desire for reassurance cannot change the reality of what we have been given.

Corinth was divided while Paul was alive (1 Corinthians 1:10–13). Galatia departed from the gospel after hearing it from an apostle (Galatians 1:6–9). These churches needed correction despite having received authoritative teaching. Christ’s faithfulness did not spare them the work of listening, repenting, and learning again.

I remain Protestant because I find grounds for receiving the apostolic writings as the Church’s final rule and for trusting the Church’s recognition of them. That leaves plenty of work for pastors, councils, and ordinary Christians. We must read carefully, judge humbly, and submit to correction. I would like a Church that could spare us some of that difficulty. But I must receive the Church Christ has given us, even when I wish he had arranged things differently.

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I met my first throuple while working as a hospital chaplain. At the time, polyamory still felt unusual enough that I had to learn its vocabulary and understand how the relationship worked.

Since then, I have met an increasing number of people who are living in polyamorous relationships or recovering from them. I now serve as a chaplain in a homeless shelter, where relationship theories eventually collide with housing, parenting, jealousy, abandonment, pregnancy, money, relapse, and the persistent human desire to be chosen. Ideas about love become painfully concrete when someone has nowhere else to sleep.

Polyamory usually arrives in the language of consent, honesty, communication, and personal freedom. Its arrangements vary, yet all depend upon the same extraordinary proposition: a person can be divided. Sexual intimacy may be given to one partner, romantic love to another, emotional security to another, and domestic life and future to another. The self stands above these relationships, assigning each one its sphere. Polyamory requires the person to function as a federation of parts.

The prophets understood worship and sexual fidelity as claims upon the same covenantal self. They described idolatry as adultery because the pursuit of many gods divided the allegiance of a people who had been joined to one God. Solomon’s multiplied wives and multiplied altars formed one spiritual history.

Polytheism supplies the religious grammar of distributed allegiance. Practical Gnosticism supplies the divided person capable of living it. Polyamory brings both into intimate life. The body can be given here, the heart there, the home somewhere else, while the sovereign self stands above the arrangement and assigns meaning to every part.

Christian anthropology begins with the human being as an embodied soul. Body, memory, desire, attachment, and future belong to one living person. When the body joins another, the person goes with it.

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Solomon’s Divided Heart

Solomon gives this argument its clearest biblical form. Deuteronomy warned Israel’s future king: “He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray” (Deuteronomy 17:17). First Kings records the fulfillment with grim precision. Solomon gathered seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and “his wives turned his heart after other gods” (1 Kings 11:3–4). His harem became a pantheon.

Solomon’s marriages belonged to the world of imperial polygyny. Foreign wives established political alliances. Concubines displayed royal power, wealth, and sexual access. Marital accumulation, international loyalty, and religious accommodation became one imperial appetite.

The king who built the temple of the Lord built high places for Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Molek. Scripture places the multiplied bed and the multiplied altar within one moral history. Solomon divided himself among many women, welcomed their gods, and ceased to be whole before the Lord.

His divided household formed and revealed a divided heart. The divided heart of the king eventually divided the worship of a nation.

Jacob’s Different Household

Jacob’s marriages belonged to the world of kinship polygyny. His love for Rachel was real. Laban’s deception, fourteen years of labor, family obligations, infertility, childbearing, inheritance, and the economic vulnerability of women shaped the household that followed.

Leah and Rachel became wives within one household. Bilhah and Zilpah were servants given as secondary wives for the purpose of bearing children. Each union created economic obligations, descendants, inheritance claims, and permanent relationships between families. Sex was inseparable from household, labor, lineage, and survival.

The Torah later regulated such households by protecting the food, clothing, marital rights, and inheritance of wives and their children (Exodus 21:10–11; Deuteronomy 21:15–17). These laws met damaged social arrangements with concrete obligations toward those most vulnerable within them.

Genesis leaves the misery in plain view. Rivalry between sisters, favoritism among wives and children, servants used for reproduction, bargaining for affection, and women hoping another child might finally secure their husband’s love. The household provided belonging and material security while dividing the affection and fidelity of one husband among several women.

Thus, while historical arrangements differ between Solomon and Jacob, both fracture the one-flesh pattern established in Genesis. Jacob’s many marriages produced one wounded household. Solomon’s many marriages produced a household crowded with nations, loyalties, and gods.

The Greco-Roman Household

The ancient Mediterranean world often practiced legal monogamy inside a wider sexual economy.

Roman law generally recognized one legal wife. It also permitted a free man sexual access to concubines, prostitutes, and enslaved people. Yet, a wife was expected to be faithful to one husband while her husband could have access to several free and enslaved partners. Thus, legal monogamy existed within a broader accepted structure of the polygynous world of slavery and imperial power.

In this setting, a wife secured legitimate children, inheritance, and the continuity of the household. Whereas other women and enslaved bodies could be assigned other functions such as pleasure, companionship, reproduction, status, and domestic legitimacy.

The apostolic ethic confronted this arrangement directly. Paul told Christian men that their bodies belonged to the Lord and warned that sex with a prostitute made them “one flesh” with her (1 Corinthians 6:13–20). The bodily act carried a significance that Roman social rank could not erase. The sexual availability of a woman or slave did not reduce her to an instrument for another person’s appetite.

Christianity demanded from men the sexual faithfulness ancient cultures had chiefly demanded from wives. The body belonged to Christ, and that allegiance governed the bed as surely as it governed the altar.

The Divided Self

Modern polyamory arises from a different social world than the households of Jacob, Solomon, or Rome. Its governing concerns are personal fulfillment, sexual compatibility, emotional authenticity, negotiated consent, and freedom from inherited expectations. These concerns are not merely values applied to relationships. Together, they express a particular understanding of the human self: where identity comes from, who determines the meaning of the body, and what authority our choices have over the obligations created by sex.

That understanding combines three modern impulses. Materialism explains the body through biology, stimulation, hormones, neural activity, and attachment mechanisms. Expressive individualism treats the inward self as the authority on personal meaning. A practical Gnostic reflex then places that authentic self above the body, with the power to decide what bodily acts will mean.

Within this account, sexual acts possess no settled meaning apart from the intentions of those involved. The body supplies the experience, the inward self assigns its meaning, and consent authorizes the arrangement. The central moral question therefore shifts from What does this act mean, and what obligations belong to it? to Did everyone knowingly agree to it?

Consent is morally necessary because it establishes whether an act has been authorized. But permission and meaning are not the same thing. An agreement can authorize an act. It cannot determine everything that act means or erase the attachments, memories, vulnerabilities, and obligations bodily union may create. Consent protects agency. It cannot bear the entire moral weight of sex.

A defender of polyamory may answer that this still misrepresents the relationships involved. Partners need not be assigned separate functions. A person may sincerely love several partners as whole persons, and each relationship may include honesty, tenderness, sacrifice, and care. Polyamory need not mean rationing a limited supply of affection among several people.

This answer is important. The Christian argument cannot rest on the idea that human beings possess only a finite quantity of love. The birth of another child does not divide a parent’s love into smaller portions. Love can multiply.

The question, however, is not simply how many people can be loved. It is what form each love takes and what obligations belong to it. Parenthood, friendship, neighbor-love, and marriage make different claims upon a person. Parenthood is plural by its nature: a parent can give himself or herself fully to several children without altering what parenthood is. Christian marriage makes a different kind of claim. It gathers sexual intimacy, bodily fidelity, household, kinship, and future within an exclusive covenant.

Polyamory places plurality inside this conjugal domain. Some arrangements distribute its goods among different partners: sexual intimacy here, domestic life there, emotional priority somewhere else. Other arrangements attempt to share sexual, romantic, and domestic life more fully among several partners. The second form may avoid treating partners as specialists, but it still requires the claims of several conjugal relationships to be defined in relation to one another. Fidelity must be redefined, priorities established, sexual boundaries negotiated, and household and future apportioned among several bonds.

Monogamous marriage also requires communication, consent, and practical negotiation. The difference is that the spouses do not negotiate the fundamental shape of the covenant from the ground up. They consent to enter a received form of relationship whose exclusivity then places limits upon their future choices. Polyamory makes that exclusivity itself negotiable.

The difficulty is therefore not that polyamorous affection must be false. It is that several conjugal allegiances require an authority capable of determining how far each relationship may reach. The autonomous self assumes that jurisdiction. It defines fidelity, ranks priorities, establishes boundaries, and determines which obligations will be recognized as following from each bodily union.

Here polyamory follows the religious grammar of the pantheon. Different relationships may receive different spheres of allegiance, or several may share the same sphere under negotiated terms. In either case, the self remains above them as the organizing authority, assigning each relationship its jurisdiction and determining the sacrifices each may require.

The resulting division is not necessarily a failure of affection. It is a division of allegiance. Body, desire, fidelity, household, and future are distributed among several sexual bonds while the sovereign self remains enthroned above them all.

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One God, Whole Persons, One Flesh

The Christian alternative begins with a different center. The sovereign self does not assign each allegiance its sphere. The one God gathers the whole of life under his lordship. Israel confesses this in the Shema, which takes its name from the Hebrew command to hear and obey: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” The one Lord claims the undivided love of the whole person. Worship, body, household, possessions, and future are gathered into one covenantal allegiance.

A pantheon distributes the goods of life among many gods. One governs fertility, another war, another wealth, another the household. Each receives its own sacrifice and its allotted sphere of devotion. Israel’s God refuses such partition. Fertility, war, wealth, household, body, and future all come from him and remain beneath his authority. The one God gathers what the pantheon distributes.

Theologian David Kelsey describes human existence as “eccentric.” Its center lies outside itself in the God who creates, reconciles, and brings it to fulfillment. The term names the Christian alternative to the jurisdictional self. We do not stand above our bodies and relationships as their sovereign authors. We receive existence, identity, value, and destiny from God.

The body therefore arrives as gift rather than property. Sex arrives as a created capacity rather than raw material waiting for the self to assign it meaning. Other people arrive as neighbors bearing the image of God rather than as territories within a negotiated emotional arrangement.

Christianity treats the body as part of the person throughout the whole story of redemption. God creates human beings as embodied creatures, the eternal Son lives a fully embodied human life, and the resurrection gives embodied life a future. The body is therefore neither property possessed by an inner self nor a temporary instrument of desire. What a person does bodily is something the person does.

Because bodily actions are personal actions, sexual union cannot be reduced to sensation or given its meaning entirely by the intentions of those involved. Genesis describes sexual union as becoming “one flesh.” Paul uses the same language even when warning against sex with a prostitute: “The two will become one flesh” (1 Corinthians 6:16). His point is not that every sexual act creates a marriage. It is that no sexual act is merely physical. Private intention and limited commitment cannot empty it of personal significance. The body does not enter sexual union alone. The person goes with it.

Christian marriage gives this whole-person union a covenantal form. It gathers body, affection, labor, provision, property, kinship, and future within one promise. Sex becomes the bodily enactment of that shared life. Marriage does not invent the meaning of sexual union. It receives that meaning and gives it a truthful home within exclusive fidelity.

This brings the argument back to the Shema. The connection between one God and one flesh marriage is covenantal rather than mathematical. Monotheism does not require monogamy simply because both involve the number one. The one God claims the undivided allegiance of his people. Christian marriage makes a corresponding claim at the creaturely level by joining sexual intimacy, bodily fidelity, household, and future within one covenant. Both concern the integrity of a person whose body, loves, loyalties, and future belong to one life.

Polytheism supplies the religious grammar for distributed allegiance. Materialism reduces the body to its mechanisms. Practical Gnosticism places the authentic self above the body and gives it authority to determine what bodily acts will mean. Polyamory brings these movements together by allowing the jurisdictional self to distribute the claims of sexual union among several relationships.

Christianity offers a different account of the person. Our lives possess a center we did not create. Our bodies bear meanings we did not invent. Our covenants place claims upon us that cannot be continually renegotiated while we still claim to give ourselves whole.

Our gods teach us how to love. The pantheon makes divided allegiance intelligible. The God of Israel gathers worship, body, household, possessions, and future beneath one covenantal allegiance. Christian marriage gives that gathered life a human form as two whole persons give themselves to one another in one-flesh fidelity. Christianity gathers the pieces.

I attended an Assemblies of God school, where I earned my bachelor’s degree in pastoral ministry. I then spent years as an ordained Assemblies of God pastor. I worshiped with people who spoke in tongues, gave prophecies, prayed for healing, and expected the gifts described in Acts and 1 Corinthians to continue in the Church. Today, I am no longer an Assemblies of God minister. More importantly for this essay, I no longer find continuationism easy to defend.

My doubts did not begin with Scripture, but with years of watching these gifts in practice. I do not like to say that. As a Protestant committed to the Bible, I am uncomfortable allowing experience to determine what Scripture is allowed to mean. So I find myself asking whether I have misunderstood the gifts, misread the relevant texts, or mistaken contemporary practices for the gifts Scripture describes.

In this essay, I will share five parts of this conversation that keep me in this place of tension. This is vulnerable for me because they reach into beliefs I once taught, practices I participated in, and the way I now read Scripture. Together, they explain why I find the biblical case for continuation difficult to reject and the evidence for continuation difficult to accept.

What Is Supposed to Have Continued?

Before going further, it might be helpful for me to define what I mean by continuationism and cessationism.

Continuationists are those who believe that all the spiritual gifts described in the New Testament remain available to the Church. This includes prophecy, tongues, interpretation, healing, and miracles.

Cessationists are those who believe that at least some of these gifts belonged to the apostolic period and are no longer given to the Church. This usually refers to the revelatory and miraculous gifts, not gifts such as teaching, service, generosity, or leadership.

This does not mean cessationists believe that miracles are impossible. A cessationist may believe that God still heals people and answers extraordinary prayers. What has ceased, in this view, is the giving of miraculous gifts as continuing ministries within the Church.

1. The Text Seems to Favor Continuation

The New Testament gives no clear instruction to separate temporary gifts from permanent ones. Or that there are even “permanent” or “temporary” gifts. Without a clear reason for making that division, it takes some real hermeneutical origami to fold Paul’s lists until only certain gifts disappear.

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul places prophecy, tongues, healing, and miracles alongside faith, wisdom, knowledge, and discernment. He says that the Spirit distributes all of them throughout the congregation for the common good. Paul then tells the Corinthians to desire prophecy and not forbid tongues. He tells the Thessalonians not to despise prophecies, but to “test everything.” He says the Corinthians are “not lacking in any gift” as they wait for Christ to be revealed.

First Corinthians 13 says that prophecy and partial knowledge will pass away when “the perfect” comes and we see “face to face.” Seeing face to face sounds more like Christ’s return than the completion of the biblical canon. Peter also places prophecy and visions within the “last days.”

The strongest cessationist response begins with the end of apostleship. Paul refers to “the signs of a true apostle” in 2 Corinthians 12:12. Ephesians 2:20 describes the apostles and prophets as the Church’s foundation. Since the apostolic office and its foundational work ended, cessationists conclude that the gifts that revealed and confirmed the apostolic gospel also ended.

Yet these gifts were exercised by more than the apostles. Paul distributed them throughout the Corinthian congregation. Stephen and Philip performed signs and wonders. Agabus prophesied. Philip’s four daughters prophesied. The end of apostleship therefore does not establish the end of every gift associated with the apostolic period. Cessationists must still show that these gifts belonged only to the Church’s foundation rather than its continuing life.

2. Experience Raises a Different Problem

The New Testament gives me reason to believe these gifts continue. I want to believe they do. My difficulty is that years spent among Christians practicing them gave me little convincing evidence that what we called prophecy, healing, and tongues was what the New Testament describes.

Prophecies were often vague enough to survive being wrong. Impressions, desires, and ordinary observations were attributed to God. Failed predictions were revised or spiritualized afterward. The prophecies surrounding the 2020 election provide a clear example. Numerous Christian leaders prophesied that Donald Trump would win reelection and begin a second consecutive term

Moreover, the New Testament presents tongues as human languages unknown to the speaker. I often heard missionary stories about Christians suddenly speaking languages they had never learned but were known to their local audience. However, what I witnessed in the local church was never shown to be a language, and the interpretations could not be verified.

The early Pentecostal movement faced the same problem. Some believers thought they had been given foreign languages and went overseas expecting to preach without language training. They soon discovered that the people they hoped to reach could not understand them. What had been claimed as Chinese or another foreign language could not actually function as one.

Now, I firmly believe that false claims do not prove that the gifts have ceased. I also believe I have witnessed God act miraculously. Yet witnessing God heal someone in answer to prayer is different from witnessing the gift of healing operating as a recognizable form of giftedness. After years within continuationism, I remain unsure that I have witnessed prophecy, tongues, interpretation, or gifts of healing in the sense described in the New Testament.

3. Perhaps “Possessing a Gift” Is the Wrong Frame

One possibility is that I have misunderstood the nature of giftedness. We often speak as though a spiritual gift were a resident ability. The healer carries a supernatural ability roughly as the teacher carries an ability to teach.

But Paul does not introduce 1 Corinthians 12 with the word gift. The Greek in verse 1 refers more broadly to “spiritual things.” A few verses later, Paul speaks of “varieties of gifts,” “varieties of service,” and “varieties of activities.” He then calls what is given to each believer “the manifestation of the Spirit” and says that the Spirit distributes these things “as he wills.” Paul returns to the word gifts, but it is not his only category.

That broader language matters. Gift sounds like something a person possesses. This is why we take spiritual gifts tests. Yet no one asks whether we have taken a spiritual manifestations test, a spiritual services test, or a spiritual activities test. Paul uses all four terms for the Spirit’s work through the Church. Perhaps some miraculous gifts were occasional manifestations of the Spirit rather than powers Christians could exercise whenever they chose. His phrase “gifts of healings,” with both words in the plural, at least allows for that possibility.

This would explain why healing was not always available even during the apostolic period. Paul prescribed wine for Timothy’s stomach. He left Trophimus sick in Miletus, and Epaphroditus nearly died. Perhaps gifts of healing were occasional rather than controllable. However, if the gift means only that God sometimes heals when Christians pray, have we preserved the New Testament gift or changed its meaning?

4. Prophecy Is Harder

Now, healing concerns something God does. Prophecy concerns something God says. So, either God miraculously healed the broken leg or he did not. Either God disclosed a message or he did not. Our ability to determine what happened may be incomplete, but the event itself is not partly true.

This makes prophecy harder to evaluate because several questions become entangled. Did God reveal something? Did the person understand and report it correctly? Did the hearers interpret it properly? Was the message predictive, conditional, symbolic, or exhortative?

Continuationists often appeal to Paul’s instruction: “Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said” (1 Corinthians 14:29). They understand this weighing to mean that genuine prophecy may contain divine revelation mixed with human misunderstanding. The Church receives what came from God and rejects the rest.

Cessationists read the same command as a test of whether God spoke at all. Weighing separates true prophecy from false prophecy, not truth from acceptable errors within a genuine prophecy. The command itself does not settle which reading is correct.

At this point, a brief detour into food manufacturing may help explain my concern. The FDA sets limits for unavoidable defects in food. Fig paste can contain some insect material and remain below the level that triggers regulatory action. It still receives, in effect, the FDA stamp.

That may be reasonable for manufacturing Fig Newtons. But is prophecy supposed to work the same way? Does a message retain the label of prophecy as long as its human contamination remains within acceptable limits?

Christians can mistake desires, fears, memories, and intuitions for the Holy Spirit. We can also draw conclusions beyond what we were given. But if God spoke, what he said is true. I have difficulty calling a statement containing falsehood something God said.

Fulfillment alone cannot authenticate prophecy. Deuteronomy 13 warns that even a sign that occurs does not prove the speaker comes from God. But when someone says God predicted an event and it does not happen, lowering his prophetic accuracy rating does not solve the problem. Christians make mistakes. The question is whether we should call those mistakes prophecy.

5. Would We Have to Add It to the Bible?

Once I insist that genuine prophecy must be true because God does not speak falsely, a cessationist objection follows. If God still gives true words through prophets, why should those words not be added to Scripture?

I do not find this objection convincing because it assumes that every genuine prophecy belongs in the canon. The Bible itself shows otherwise. Obadiah hid one hundred prophets of the Lord from Jezebel, but we do not possess their prophecies. Saul prophesied without his words being recorded. Philip’s four daughters prophesied, but Luke never tells us what they said. Judas and Silas encouraged the believers with “many words” as prophets, most of which were not preserved. Paul also refers to prophecies made about Timothy without recording them fully.

Not all genuine revelation became canonical revelation. A prophecy could be true, local, and given for a particular circumstance without becoming part of Scripture. Asking whether we should add it to the Bible does not answer the continuationist case.

The objection does point toward a better question. If God continues to speak through prophecy, what authority do those words carry?

A local prophecy might not establish doctrine for the whole Church or carry permanent authority for every Christian. But if God actually said it, then it is true. The people to whom it is addressed cannot treat it as an interesting suggestion.

Sola Scriptura identifies Scripture as the Church’s only infallible rule of faith. It does not require every word God has ever spoken to appear in the Bible. Ongoing prophecy would still introduce true and authoritative words from God outside the canon. The harder question is how such words can remain subordinate to Scripture while carrying God’s authority for those who receive them.

What Must Each Side Explain?

The New Testament never directly says these gifts will cease, but that alone does not disprove cessationism. A doctrine may follow from the combined teaching of several passages. Cessationists can build a cumulative case from the end of apostleship, the foundational role of the apostles and prophets, and the use of signs to confirm their message. Their burden is to explain why gifts distributed throughout congregations and included in instructions for church life belonged only to that foundational period. The end of apostleship does not establish that conclusion by itself.

Continuationists also carry a burden. It does not establish that what currently passes as prophecy, tongues, or healing is what Scripture describes. A practice does not become a spiritual gift because it claims the name or because our theology says the gift should continue. Continuationists must show both that the gifts continue and that their contemporary examples are actually those gifts.

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The Comments Are Open

The comments are open, and I welcome correction. If I have overlooked a passage, misunderstood the nature of a gift, or framed either position unfairly, tell me where. I am especially interested in arguments that engage the biblical texts and examples that can be meaningfully tested.

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Tom Holland's Dominion, Glen Scrivener's The Air We Breathe, and more recently the public debates and videos of Mike Jones (Inspiring Philosophy) all exemplify a growing contemporary apologetic. The historical fruits of Christianity are presented as compelling evidence for its truth. Human rights, the dignity of women, the protection of children, hospitals, universities, the abolition of slavery, and the moral instincts of the modern West are all traced back to the influence of Christ and His Church. Christianity produced a more humane civilization. Therefore, Christianity should be taken seriously.

I find these arguments compelling. Like many apologetic arguments, they strengthen my own confidence in the truth of Christianity. Whether they are equally persuasive to those who do not already believe is another question. A friend recently observed that apologetics often reassure believers more effectively than they convert skeptics. He may be right. My concern here, however, lies elsewhere. These arguments are fascinating not simply because of what they argue, but because of how they argue. They reveal something about the Christian imagination of our own age.

A fourth-century Christian would have looked at exactly the same evidence and reached a different conclusion. He would not have said, “Christianity must be good because it produces flourishing.” He would have said, “Christ must be King because He has conquered the nations.”

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The change reaches beyond apologetics. It reaches into the Christian imagination. Christianity is increasingly presented as something the world should admire before it is asked to submit to it. The faith is commended through its compassion, its charity, its schools, its hospitals, its concern for the weak, and the civilization it has produced. The hope is that once Christianity is seen as beautiful, it will also be seen as true. Beauty, it is often said, will save the world.

That instinct would have been largely foreign to earlier generations of Christians. They did not expect Christ to become more persuasive by first becoming more palatable. The nations were not invited to admire a better way of life. They were summoned to repent before their rightful King.

The shift does not end with apologetics because apologetics always rests upon a deeper imagination of reality. The way Christians explain why Christianity is true eventually shapes the way they read Scripture, understand the Church, preach the gospel, think about politics, interpret history, and even imagine Christ Himself. A civilization commended by its moral beauty produces one way of seeing the world. A kingdom advancing under the authority of its King produces another.

The New Testament reads history with the same categories. Peter does not merely announce that Jesus has risen. He declares that God has made Him “both Lord and Christ.” Paul does not simply preach forgiveness in Athens. He announces that God has fixed a day on which He will judge the world through the Man He has appointed. The Great Commission begins with universal authority because universal authority explains the mission that follows. The apostles do not interpret the conversion of the nations as the triumph of a more compelling philosophy. Throughout Acts, idols fall. Temples are threatened. Sorcerers burn their books. In Ephesus, the craftsmen fear that Artemis herself “will be deposed from her magnificence.” The gospel advances because rival worship retreats. Paul commends the Thessalonians because they “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.” Revelation closes where the story has always been headed, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.”

Likewise, the Fathers read history with the categories Scripture had given them. Athanasius looked upon abandoned temples and silent oracles and saw the triumph of Christ over the gods who had once deceived the nations. “Behold how the Savior’s doctrine is everywhere increasing, while all idolatry... is daily dwindling, and losing power, and falling.” Justin Martyr spoke of the gods of the nations as demons whose dominion had been broken by Christ. Origen answered Celsus not by appealing to Christianity’s usefulness but by pointing to its astonishing advance through the empire. Eusebius interpreted the conversion of nations as the kingdom of Christ becoming visible in history. The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas assumes the same world. Rome possesses the sword. Christ possesses the kingdom. The empire passes judgment upon the martyrs for an hour. Christ will pass judgment upon the empire forever.

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Christian political thought naturally followed. Kings and rulers were not addressed merely as citizens with moral responsibilities. They were addressed as men who belonged to Christ. Psalm 2 was read as a command to rulers, not merely as a prophecy about Christ. The Great Commission began with authority because authority explained the mission that followed. Religious liberty was defended because faith cannot be compelled, not because every object of worship possessed equal legitimacy. False worship remained false worship. The first commandment did not cease to apply because a government lacked the authority to produce genuine faith.

Christian mission and evangelism have reflected the same shift. The gospel is increasingly introduced through human need rather than Christ’s kingship. Loneliness, guilt, shame, anxiety, purpose, belonging, and meaning become the point of contact. The apostles began elsewhere. Jesus Christ had been raised from the dead, enthroned above every ruler and authority, and appointed Judge of the living and the dead. Repentance followed because repentance is the proper response to a reigning King. Forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, and eternal life belonged to that announcement because the King had already come.

The center of Christian virtue shifted with everything else. The vindication of God’s name gradually gave way to the flourishing of man. Christian ethics increasingly asked, “What is good for people?” Scripture more often asks, “What glorifies God?” The shift is visible even in the way the Fathers are remembered. Irenaeus is repeatedly quoted, “The glory of God is man fully alive,” as though the sentence were chiefly about human flourishing. It is not. Irenaeus is arguing that God has no need of man. God commands because He is good, not because He lacks anything. Man, by contrast, is utterly dependent upon fellowship with God. “The life of man consists in beholding God.” Human life is not the center of the argument. God’s glory is.

The modern imagination understands history through human flourishing, therapeutic well-being, and individual fulfillment. It therefore increasingly apologizes for Christianity’s victories. The conversion of nations is spoken of with embarrassment. The displacement of pagan worship is treated as cultural loss. Christian influence is welcomed only so long as it remains private, therapeutic, and politically harmless. Religious diversity itself comes to be treated as an unquestioned good, so the disappearance of any religion is instinctively mourned as though humanity has become poorer.

Yet this sits uneasily beside the very apologetic offered by Holland and Scrivener. If Christianity truly liberated the nations from practices that diminished human dignity, why should Christians hesitate to celebrate the passing of the religions from which those nations were delivered? We gladly celebrate the fruits while apologizing for the tree that bore them. We celebrate hospitals, the protection of children, and the dignity of women, yet speak of the defeat of pagan worship as though it were a tragic loss.

Scripture and the Fathers knew no such tension. They grieved for idolaters, not for idols. The prophets did not mourn when Baal lost his worshippers. The apostles did not regret that Artemis was “deposed from her magnificence.” Athanasius did not lament abandoned temples. They received these events as public testimony that the living God had acted. The spread of Christianity was not celebrated because Christians had become more persuasive. It was celebrated because Christ was demonstrating His dominion. False gods were not cultural treasures awaiting preservation. They were rivals that had lost their kingdoms.

The disagreement finally concerns what history is allowed to prove. Modern Christians increasingly ask history whether Christianity is beneficial. Earlier Christians asked what history revealed about God. Both readers look upon the same hospitals, the same conversions, the same collapse of pagan worship, and the same transformation of civilization. One concludes that Christianity deserves admiration because it has improved the world. The other concludes that Christ has publicly demonstrated His lordship because the gods of the nations have lost their kingdoms.

Why does this older imagination now feel so unsettling? Because modern Christians have learned to associate victory with domination and domination with injustice. We instinctively assume that if one religion triumphs, another people must have been wronged. We have become reluctant to believe that history can publicly vindicate the claims of one God over another. Victory itself has become morally suspect.

I first encountered this instinct years ago in Peter Rollins’ parable “God Joins the Army,” from The Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales. Rollins was one of the more recognizable voices in the Emerging Church movement, a close friend and frequent collaborator of Rob Bell during a period that helped shape many of the instincts later associated with post-evangelicalism and deconstruction. I have not thought about the story in years, but it has stayed with me because it expresses an instinct that has since become increasingly familiar.

An island is invaded by a vastly superior army. Before the battle, an oracle announces that God Himself has joined the invading force and placed all His power behind it. The island’s leaders immediately debate whether to surrender or flee, convinced that defeat is inevitable. The chief nevertheless chooses to fight, and against every expectation his people prevail. When the bewildered oracle asks how he dared oppose an army backed by God Himself, the chief replies, “It does not matter which side God is on. When God is involved, the oppressed always win.”

The story is more than provocative. It teaches the reader how to interpret history. The decisive question is no longer whether history has vindicated the living God. The decisive question is who occupies the place of the oppressed. Once that becomes the controlling lens, every triumph is reinterpreted as domination, every defeat as innocence, and every claim that history reveals the judgment of God becomes morally suspect.

This argument should not be confused with the claim that every act committed in Christ’s name has therefore been just. Scripture itself distinguishes righteous rule from tyrannical rule. My argument is simpler. The public acknowledgment of Christ’s kingship by peoples, laws, and nations is a good to be desired, not an embarrassment to be explained away. Historic Protestantism did not apologize when Christian worship shaped public life or when civil laws reflected Christian moral convictions. It regarded these developments as signs of Christ’s reign in history, while still recognizing that rulers remain accountable to God’s justice.

If that older imagination is correct, Christians should not apologize when history reflects it. Dominion is not an unfortunate chapter in Christian history. It is one of Scripture’s central themes. Humanity was commissioned to exercise dominion in Genesis. The Son was promised the nations as His inheritance in the Psalms. The Son of Man received dominion over every people, nation, and language in Daniel. The risen Christ declared that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to Him. Revelation ends with the kingdoms of this world becoming the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Christians should rejoice because their King is receiving what the Father promised Him.

Christians must once again learn to think, pray, preach, worship, labor, vote, govern, educate, and raise their children as those who believe that Jesus Christ truly possesses the nations by right. The Church cannot be content merely to survive within history. It must once again expect history to bear witness to its King. Every conversion, every church planted, every family restored, every law brought into greater conformity with God’s justice, every idol abandoned, every people taught to obey Christ is another testimony that the kingdom announced by the prophets has entered the world and will not be shaken. The Church does not wait for Christ to receive His inheritance. It lives because He already has.

There is something wonderfully absurd about the slogan “Love is Love.” Grammatically, the slogan is a tautology. The first “love” is merely identified with the second. Its problem is not syntax but moral reasoning. It treats love as morally self-authenticating, assuming that the sincerity of the lover establishes the goodness of the love.

Yet, love is not good merely because it is felt deeply or expressed sincerely. Love receives its moral character from its object, form, and end. To love what is good, truthfully and rightly, is a virtue. To love what is evil, destructive, predatory, or degrading is not made virtuous by intensity. A person can sincerely love another person, a bottle, another man’s wife, power, cruelty, or the sound of his own voice. Authenticity does not perform moral alchemy.

Still, “Love is Love” has tremendous sloganistic power. It converts a disputed moral conclusion into a verbal identity and then repeats the identity as its own proof. Love is love. No object, definition, distinction, or reasoning is required.

Fighting that uphill battle with truth, grammar, and logic can become exhausting. So, as the saying goes, if you cannot beat them, join them. Thus, I am proposing a new civic slogan: Crime is Crime.

It has all the intellectual sophistication of “Love is Love,” but it arrives at an increasingly necessary conclusion.

The Urgent Case for “Crime Is Crime”

The City of Vancouver recently directed police officers to change how they handle several misdemeanor offenses, including third-degree theft, criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, possession of controlled substances, and public drug use. Instead of automatically issuing citations into municipal court, officers are generally to refer these cases to the City Attorney’s Office for a possible charging decision.

The city has emphasized that these acts remain illegal, officers will still take reports, and arrests may still be made when necessary. This is not the formal legalization of theft, trespass, or public drug use. It is something more bureaucratically refined. The law remains on the books while its immediate consequences become increasingly theoretical.

The reason is a genuine crisis. Washington’s Supreme Court adopted substantially lower public-defense caseload standards beginning January 1, 2026, while permitting them to be phased in through annual reductions. The purpose is defensible. An accused person has a constitutional right to competent legal representation, not merely the appearance of an attorney whose caseload makes meaningful representation impossible. Assembly-line defense is not justice. Washington Supreme Court Order No. 25700-A-1644

But Vancouver does not have enough public defenders to meet its obligations. By June 2, the city says 55 cases had already been dismissed because counsel was unavailable, including ten domestic-violence cases involving such allegations as assault, stalking, harassment, and violations of protection orders. The city therefore says it must preserve scarce defense resources for more serious cases. City Manager Lon Pluckhahn’s explanation

When Government Failure Becomes Everyone Else’s Burden

Yet, no matter how real the crisis, the proposed solution is still an abdication. When government lacks the capacity to prosecute crimes while protecting defendants’ constitutional rights, its responsibility is to build that capacity. It must find attorneys, provide funding, restructure contracts, seek assistance from the state, revise budgets, or plainly admit that a core public institution is failing. What it must not do is quietly transfer the consequences of its incapacity to store employees, business owners, families, neighborhoods, and everyone else expected to absorb the disorder.

The city calls these “low-level” crimes. That is a statutory classification, not a description of their human significance. Theft may appear low-level when reduced to a line on a municipal spreadsheet. It feels rather different to the shopkeeper who must replace the merchandise, raise prices, confront the thief, or close the bathroom because it has become unsafe. Trespass sounds minor until the trespasser is outside your apartment, inside your business, or refusing to leave the park where your children play. Public drug use is low-level only to the person who does not have to step over it, clean it up, explain it to his children, or watch someone slowly disintegrate on the sidewalk. “Low-level crime” often means crime whose costs are distributed among people without enough influence to make the government care.

The city insists that police will continue responding and taking reports. This is reassuring if the principal purpose of law enforcement is the production of paperwork. A citizen may still enjoy the comfort of knowing that the theft, trespass, or public drug use occurring in front of him has been carefully documented for a prosecution that may never happen.

Police Chief Troy Price acknowledged the problem more candidly. He wrote that many offenders may face “no immediate legal consequences” and, if their cases are never refiled, “no legal consequences at all from the courts.” Chief Price’s public statement. A law without a credible consequence is not entirely a law. Increasingly, it is a municipal suggestion.

The president of the Vancouver Police Officers Guild has also warned that the loss of an anticipated citation or arrest may impede officers’ ability to investigate offenses and recover stolen property. If an officer cannot lawfully search a suspected shoplifter or the person’s belongings, the stolen merchandise may be plainly identified and still practically unrecoverable. KATU’s report on the policy

A government that will neither restrain destructive conduct nor maintain the institutions necessary to adjudicate it is not protecting victims, and it is not helping offenders. It is allowing both to deteriorate together while congratulating itself for prioritizing resources.

Justice is owed to the accused, but it is also owed to the victim. A functioning government must be capable of protecting both. When it cannot, the answer is not to decide that one party’s rights will be financed by another party’s vulnerability.

Moreover, a man permitted to steal repeatedly is not being loved. A woman allowed to consume drugs publicly while her life collapses is not being treated compassionately. A person whose disorder is endlessly tolerated is being abandoned to that disorder.

Consequences restrain appetites that have already escaped a person’s control. They establish boundaries, interrupt escalating behavior, compel confrontation with reality, and protect a person from becoming further enslaved to his own impulses.

Emergencies Do Not Erase Responsibilities

Now, there may be no immediate solution to Washington’s public-defense crisis. Attorneys cannot be conjured out of the air. Budgets cannot be rewritten overnight. Difficult circumstances require triage, and triage necessarily involves painful judgments. But emergencies do not erase responsibilities. They reveal which responsibilities a government is willing to abandon first.

Vancouver’s citizens pay taxes, obey ordinances, submit to authorities, and fund the institutions of civil order. In return, they have a reasonable expectation that theft will be treated as theft, trespass as trespass, and public drug use as public drug use. They should not be required to absorb predictable harm because the government lacks the institutional capacity to enforce the laws it continues to impose upon everyone else.

So perhaps the moment has come for a slogan that meets our civic reasoning at its present level: Crime is Crime.

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There may be no compliment more common (or more meaningless) than calling someone “nice.” He’s a nice guy. She’s a nice person. The pastor was nice. The doctor was nice. The church was nice. But what have we actually said?

Usually something like pleasant, agreeable, easy to be around. They did not upset us. They did not make things awkward. They smiled. They listened. They made us feel comfortable.

None of this tells us much about whether someone is good. A coward can be nice. A liar can be nice. A con man had better be nice. An abusive husband can be charming at dinner. A dishonest pastor can shake every hand on Sunday morning. Some of the most dangerous people you will ever meet learned long ago how useful it is to be likable.

Nice tells us what someone is like to be around. Good tells us something about who they are. We have increasingly allowed the first word to swallow the second.

A good person has come to mean someone who affirms us, does not judge us, does not confront us, and does not say the thing that ruins dinner. Once nice becomes our working definition of good, discomfort begins to look like evidence of wrongdoing. If you upset me, you have done something wrong. If you confront me, you are unkind. If you tell me something I do not want to hear, you are judgmental. If your words hurt, your words must be harmful.

We have taken a word about character and turned it into a word about comfort.

I know what you might be thinking. Your reading this saying ”No, that’s not what I mean.”

Think about this. Suppose a surgeon walks into your hospital room. He does not smile or make small talk. He looks at your scans and says, “You have an aggressive tumor. Without surgery, you will probably be dead in six months. We’re operating this afternoon.” He signs the chart and walks out.

Was he nice? No.

As a chaplain, there is a good chance I would hear about him later. “That doctor was a jerk.” Perhaps he was. His bedside manner was terrible.

But that is not the question you most need answered. Is he good?

You do not know yet. You need to know whether the diagnosis is true, whether surgery is necessary, whether he is competent to perform it, whether he will enter the operating room sober, whether he has honestly explained the risks, and whether he is recommending the procedure for your welfare rather than his profit. Those things tell you whether this is a man you can trust with your life.

A charming surgeon can be incompetent or corrupt. An unpleasant surgeon can tell you the truth and save your life. Pleasantness, competence, and character are different things. Whether you like the doctor is simply not the most important question when you are about to hand him a scalpel.

A Strange Little History of “Nice”

Ironically, nice did not begin as a compliment. English received the word through Old French from the Latin nescius, meaning “ignorant” or “not knowing.” In its earliest English uses, calling someone nice could mean foolish or ignorant. Over the centuries it passed through meanings such as fussy, delicate, precise, agreeable, and eventually pleasant or likable.

None of this means that nice secretly means “idiot” today. Words change. Today the word principally tells us that someone is pleasant to encounter. That is far too little information to tell us whether someone is good.

Many of us spend our lives looking for the nice doctor. The nice therapist. The nice sponsor. The nice pastor. The nice chaplain. The nice church. We notice who makes us feel affirmed and who makes us uncomfortable, and then we turn that experience into a judgment about who is good.

“How did that make me feel?” becomes “Was that good?”

An unpleasant doctor may be a bad doctor. A confrontational therapist may be wrong. A pastor who offends people may simply be an offensive man. Discomfort proves goodness no more than comfort does. The mistake is using comfort to decide the question at all.

Once comfort becomes the measure, we can keep searching until we find someone who tells us what we already wanted to hear. We change counselors. We change sponsors. We change churches. We find voices that reassure us and avoid voices that might tell us the truth.

Then we bring the same definition to God. Christians say, “God is good.” Yet if good has come to mean pleasant, agreeable, affirming, accommodating, and unlikely to make us uncomfortable, we will judge God accordingly. Commands that frustrate our desires will seem suspect. Judgment will seem incompatible with love. Correction will feel like rejection. A God who refuses to affirm us will appear morally deficient.

We will think we are asking whether God is good when we are really asking whether God is nice. Those are two very different judgments.

God Is Not Nice. He Is Good.

The Bible does not merely say that God does good things. It describes goodness as belonging to the character of God himself.

Exodus 33–34 begins with a disaster. God has delivered Israel from Egypt, entered into covenant with them at Mount Sinai, and given them his commandments. Israel responds by making a golden calf and worshiping it as the god who brought them out of Egypt. They break the covenant almost as soon as it is made. Moses intercedes for them, and the question hanging over the story is whether this holy God will continue to dwell among a people who have already proved unfaithful.

So Moses asks God, “Please show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). God answers, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD’” (33:19). God answers a request for his glory by promising his goodness and his name. These are not three unrelated ideas. Moses has asked to know God, and God will answer by declaring who he is.

God does so in the next chapter, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.” Exodus 34:6–7

Israel hardly needs an explanation of these words. It has just lived them. The golden calf has made “iniquity and transgression and sin” concrete. The fact that there is still an Israel for God to address has made mercy concrete as well. Their rebellion has been judged, but judgment has not ended God’s covenant with them. Nor has Moses persuaded a reluctant God to become merciful. The mercy Israel receives belongs to the character God now names as his own. And “will by no means clear the guilty” prevents forgiveness from becoming mere indulgence. Mercy and judgment are not rival impulses in God negotiating a compromise. Exodus places both within the goodness God promised Moses.

Israel keeps returning to this description of God. The language of Exodus 34 appears in Numbers 14:18, Nehemiah 9:17, Psalm 86:15, Psalm 103:8, Psalm 145:8, Joel 2:13, and Jonah 4:2. God tells Moses who he is, and Israel learns to speak about God with the words God has given them.

Psalm 119:68 reduces the claim to one line, “You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.” God is good and God does good. His actions proceed from his character. The psalmist can therefore trust God’s statutes as well as God’s gifts. If the Lawgiver is good, his commands are not arbitrary exercises of power. They express the character of the One who gives them.

This also rules out a weaker meaning of good. To say that God is good is not simply to say that he is good at accomplishing his purposes. The distinction is the same one exposed by the surgeon. A surgeon can be technically brilliant and morally corrupt. Skill is not character. The Christian claim about God is not merely that nothing can frustrate his will. It is that the God whose will cannot finally be frustrated is himself good. There is no deceit in him, no private interest bending his judgment, no vice hiding behind his power. “You are good and do good.”

The Psalms refuse to make that goodness abstract. “The LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations” (Psalm 100:5). God’s goodness can be trusted because God does not cease to be what he is. “The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9). His goodness issues in generosity toward the creation he made and continues to sustain. “Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” (Psalm 34:8). The point of calling God good is not simply that one can say something true about him. One can entrust oneself to him.

Nahum makes a sentimental account of that goodness impossible. Nahum prophesies against Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, an empire that built its power through conquest and terror. He begins by calling the LORD “jealous and avenging” and “wrathful” toward his enemies (Nahum 1:2). Then he describes this avenging God with the language of Exodus 34, “The LORD is slow to anger and great in power, and the LORD will by no means clear the guilty” (1:3).

The verbal connection controls how Nahum’s language should be read. “Slow to anger” and “will by no means clear the guilty” are the language God used when he revealed himself to Moses. Nahum’s God has not acquired an angry personality. The God judging Nineveh is the God of Exodus 34. His patience is real, and so is his refusal to make peace with evil.

Nineveh had already learned about the first. In the book of Jonah, an earlier generation hears the warning of judgment, repents, and is spared. Jonah complains because he knows God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Jonah 4:2). Jonah is quoting Exodus 34 too. The same confession explains why Nineveh is spared in Jonah and why Nineveh is judged in Nahum.

Nahum can therefore say in the middle of an oracle of judgment, “The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him” (Nahum 1:7). The judgment of Nineveh belongs to that goodness. Assyria’s victims need a refuge because Assyria has made one necessary, and God’s care for them takes the form of opposition to what is destroying them. Indefinite tolerance of oppression would amount to indifference. Goodness protects what is good by opposing what destroys it.

But by what standard do we call God good? When a wealthy man addresses Jesus as “Good Teacher,” he replies, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:17–18). God alone is good in the unqualified sense. Human goodness is received, we learn what is good, grow or fail in it, and are measured by a moral order we did not make. God’s goodness is underived.

The standard is God’s own character. If goodness stood above God, something would be more ultimate than God. If good meant whatever sheer divine power happened to command, calling God good would tell us nothing about his character. God wills what is good because God is good. His will expresses who he is.

That makes human guilt a problem for more than human beings. Romans 3 says “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:23), then describes sinners as “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (3:24). Paul puts the emphasis on God’s righteousness as well as our salvation. God put Christ forward as a propitiation “to show his righteousness,” “so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (3:25–26).

Exodus 34 had already placed the problem before us. God “forgives iniquity and transgression and sin” and “will by no means clear the guilty.” Romans locates the answer in Christ. God deals with guilt and justifies the guilty. The cross makes forgiveness an act of righteousness. God is “just and the justifier.”

Scripture’s claim can finally remain as simple as the psalmist made it, “You are good and do good.” God’s mercy, faithfulness, judgment, commands, and salvation proceed from the same character. Goodness belongs to who God is.

We Need Lions

Christians have quoted Lewis on Aslan so often that the line risks becoming cliché. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Susan learns that Aslan is a lion and asks whether he is safe. Mr. Beaver answers, “Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”

The line works because safe and good answer different questions. Safety concerns what Aslan might do. Goodness concerns who Aslan is. His character is what makes his enormous power trustworthy.

That is close to the distinction we have lost. Nice tells us that someone is pleasant to encounter. Good tells us whether they can be trusted.

A therapeutic culture makes the same mistake at scale. Feeling affirmed becomes evidence that something is healthy. Discomfort becomes evidence that something is wrong. Niceness thrives under those conditions because it works. It is socially efficient. Agree, affirm, avoid the difficult subject, and people generally think well of you. What began as a pleasant disposition can easily become a way of moving through the world without ever paying the social cost of conviction.

That becomes a problem when we are expected to lead. Leadership cannot merely facilitate whatever people already want. It has to distinguish better from worse, wisdom from foolishness, truth from falsehood, the road that leads somewhere from the road that does not. There are moments when leadership requires the nerve to say no, stop, this is wrong, or simply follow me.

We are living through one of those moments. People are being destroyed by appetites and ideas they were taught would liberate them. At the same time, there is a real hunger for Jesus. The fields are ripe. This is no time to substitute pleasantness for character.

We have enough nice Christians. We need lions. I would take one good Christian over a room full of nice ones.

The homelessness debate isn’t just about homelessness. It’s about whether we’ve lost the ability to distinguish a boundary from an injustice. Increasingly, every government prohibition is treated as cruelty, every consequence as punishment, and every “no” as oppression.

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One of the stranger arguments in the homelessness debate is that banning sidewalk camping violates the First Amendment. It doesn’t, because camping isn’t speech. The First Amendment protects what you say, write, publish, preach, protest, and advocate. It does not protect every action simply because you can explain it politically.

This isn’t a difficult distinction. Speech communicates. Conduct does something. Camping is conduct. It occupies public space, stores property, erects structures, blocks access, and excludes others from using what belongs to everyone. None of that becomes speech because someone says, “I’m making a statement.”

We understand this everywhere else. Driving 90 miles an hour to protest speed limits is still speeding. Refusing to pay taxes because you oppose the government is still tax evasion. Trespassing to protest private property is still trespassing. The political motive may explain the action, but it does not redefine it. Motivation doesn’t change categories.

If attaching a political message transformed conduct into speech, then every law could be escaped with a press release. Every zoning violation would become activism. Every act of vandalism would become performance art. Every trespass would become a constitutional case. The First Amendment would no longer protect speech; it would function as a universal exemption from ordinary law.

That’s why the distinction matters. Rights are defined by their object. Each amendment protects a specific kind of activity, not whatever someone chooses to associate with it. The Fourth protects against unreasonable searches, not every inconvenience imposed by government. Likewise, the First protects expression, not occupation. You have every right to argue that the city has failed the homeless. You do not acquire the right to convert a public sidewalk into a private campsite because your campsite expresses an opinion.

We’ve become careless with constitutional language. Increasingly, people treat rights as if they erase every rule they dislike. They don’t. The Constitution protects your freedom to speak against the government. It has never guaranteed your freedom to ignore the ordinary laws governing public space. Camping is a policy question. Speech is a constitutional right. Confusing the two doesn’t strengthen civil liberties; it empties them of meaning.

Ironically, however, this was never the real constitutional battle.

The Real Constitutional Question

The lawsuits that shaped homelessness policy across the West were not primarily First Amendment cases. They were Eighth Amendment cases. The argument was that enforcing anti-camping ordinances against people with nowhere else to sleep amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.” In decisions like Martin v. Boise, courts in the Ninth Circuit reasoned that if every shelter bed was full, sleeping outdoors became an unavoidable consequence of being homeless. Punishing someone for sleeping in public, the courts concluded, was effectively punishing them for their status rather than their conduct.

That reasoning carried enormous consequences. Cities across the Ninth Circuit—including those throughout Washington and Oregon—became convinced that meaningful enforcement of camping ordinances could not begin until enough shelter existed for everyone. Whether or not that was the courts’ intent, many local governments interpreted the decisions as a legal warning: enforce too aggressively, and you’ll lose in court. The result was years of hesitation, litigation, and paralysis while encampments multiplied.

At first glance, that sounds compassionate. In reality, it rests on a profound confusion. The Constitution forbids cruel punishment. It does not require the government to permit every act born of hardship. Poverty is tragic. Addiction is tragic. Mental illness is tragic. But tragedy does not transform every “no” from the government into unconstitutional punishment.

More importantly, look at what this reasoning produced. Cities across the West became convinced they could not meaningfully enforce camping laws until they had enough shelter for everyone. So they waited. They debated. They commissioned studies. They postponed action. Meanwhile, thousands of people continued living in tents, exposed to fentanyl, untreated psychosis, exploitation, violence, theft, disease, and the elements. Entire encampments became places where the strong preyed on the weak and addiction became the organizing principle of daily life.

And somehow this was called compassion.

If we are going to use the language of cruelty, let’s use it honestly. Is it more cruel to tell someone they cannot erect a campsite on a public sidewalk, or to leave them there for years while addiction destroys their body, criminal networks exploit them, and exposure slowly kills them? Is it more humane to enforce standards that push people toward treatment and shelter, or to normalize a way of life in which overdose, infection, assault, and despair become ordinary?

The modern instinct is to equate any government prohibition with oppression. If the state says “no,” it must be punishment. But civilization depends on the state’s ability to say no. No, you cannot sleep in the airport terminal. No, you cannot build a shack in a public park. No, you cannot permanently occupy a sidewalk. Those are not acts of cruelty. They are the ordinary boundaries that make shared public life possible.

The deeper tragedy is that we have mistaken permission for compassion. Allowing someone to remain in conditions that strip away dignity, destroy health, and shorten life is not mercy simply because the government declined to intervene. Sometimes refusing to enforce boundaries is not kindness at all. Sometimes it is abandonment dressed up as empathy.

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For a friend who reminded me that some of Scripture’s most overlooked figures still have much to teach us. Her interest in Dinah’s story prompted this reflection. Thank you, Allison.

Genesis 34 records the rape of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah. That description is accurate, but it obscures the shape of the narrative. The rape occurs in the opening two verses. The remaining twenty-nine verses recount negotiations, arguments, deceptions, calculations, revenge, and political fallout. The chapter therefore, spends remarkably little time describing the crime and enormous amounts of time describing the reactions to the crime.

Most discussions of Genesis 34 focus upon questions of justice. Did Shechem commit rape? Were Simeon and Levi justified? Was Jacob passive? Did the men of Shechem deserve their fate? Such questions arise naturally from the narrative because every major actor behaves badly and because the chapter culminates in a massacre. Yet these questions share a common assumption. They assume that Genesis 34 is primarily interested in assigning moral responsibility among its participants.

The structure of the chapter suggests a different center of gravity. Genesis 34 contains an extraordinary amount of speech. Shechem speaks. Hamor speaks. Jacob speaks. Jacob’s sons speak. The citizens of Shechem listen, deliberate, and respond. The chapter is saturated with explanation, negotiation, persuasion, and argument. Yet the two figures with the greatest claim to interpret the event never speak.

Dinah never speaks.
God never speaks.

The woman whose violation drives the entire narrative never utters a single word. The silence cannot be explained by a general reluctance to record female speech. Genesis repeatedly gives speech to women. Sarah speaks. Rebekah speaks. Rachel speaks. Leah speaks. Hagar speaks. Dinah does not.

The silence becomes more significant because Dinah gradually disappears beneath the reactions of others. Shechem interprets the event through desire. He seeks marriage and offers wealth. Hamor interprets the event through politics. He proposes alliance, trade, and integration. Jacob interprets the event through fear. He worries about retaliation and survival. Simeon and Levi interpret the event through family honor and vengeance. The men of Shechem interpret the event through economic opportunity. Every major actor offers an explanation. Every major actor proposes a solution.

The chapter, therefore, presents more than an act of violence. It presents the social life of violence. The violation occurs in the opening verses. The remaining narrative concerns competing attempts to define the meaning of the violation and respond to it.

Genesis 34 is not the story of Dinah, nor is it even the story of what happens to Dinah. Genesis 34 is more removed than that. It is the story of the people who respond to the story of Dinah.

Moreover, if Dinah’s silence deprives the reader of the sufferer’s testimony, God’s silence deprives the reader of an authoritative interpretation of the event. The chapter, therefore, becomes a battleground of rival explanations. Shechem explains. Hamor explains. Jacob explains. Simeon and Levi explain. Later interpreters continue the pattern. The struggle to assign blame, identify justice, and locate meaning persists because Genesis 34 never provides a final interpretive voice.

That absence becomes striking when Genesis 34 is situated within the broader patriarchal narrative. Genesis is not a book characterized by divine reserve. God speaks to Abraham. God speaks to Isaac. God speaks repeatedly to Jacob. He appears in dreams. He renews covenant promises. He changes names. He explains events. He interprets events. He redirects events. Divine speech functions as one of the principal ways Genesis guides the reader’s understanding of reality.

Then Genesis 34 arrives. A woman is violated. The house of Jacob nearly collapses. A city is destroyed. Brothers become executioners. A father remains passive. God says nothing.

The chapter, therefore, creates a remarkable imbalance. The victim does not interpret the event. God does not interpret the event. Everyone else does.

This observation changes the way the chapter functions. Genesis 34 is not merely a story about rape. Neither is it merely a story about revenge. It is a story about interpretation. The chapter asks who gets to define what happened, what it means, and what should happen next.

Shechem answers that question through desire. Hamor answers it through diplomacy. Jacob answers it through fear. Simeon and Levi answer it through violence. The citizens of Shechem answer it through economics. Every actor attempts to occupy interpretive territory that does not belong to him.

The result is not clarity but escalation. Shechem’s solution fails. Hamor’s solution fails. Jacob’s solution fails. Simeon and Levi’s solution fails. The city’s solution fails.

Each response expands the tragedy created by the original crime. The rape leads to deception. The deception leads to massacre. The massacre leads to plunder. The plunder leads to deeper division within Jacob’s household. Every actor possesses speech. No actor possesses wisdom sufficient to resolve the crisis.

The chapter’s ending reinforces the point. Jacob condemns the consequences of his sons’ actions. Simeon and Levi condemn the failure to answer Shechem’s crime. Both positions contain elements of truth. Neither position restores what was lost. The chapter closes without reconciliation, repentance, healing, or divine explanation. The final scene consists of competing human voices speaking past one another. And the silence remains.

The issue is not that Dinah possesses a privileged moral interpretation unavailable to everyone else. Neither Scripture nor human experience grants sufferers infallibility. Yet Genesis 34 records a pattern that remains familiar. Human communities often become more interested in interpreting suffering than in hearing sufferers.

As a Chaplain, I have seen time and again how suffering creates pressure for explanation and action. Friends want answers. Families want causes. Communities want action. Leaders want solutions. Tragedy creates a vacuum, and human beings rush to fill it.

Yet pastoral care often begins with a different task. Before asking what suffering means, one must attend to the person who suffers. Before assigning meaning, one must resist the temptation to lose the individual beneath the event. Genesis 34 presents a community that does precisely that. Everyone responds to Dinah’s suffering. Nobody appears interested in Dinah herself. The victim becomes a symbol around which others pursue their own projects.

Yet that silence should not be mistaken for divine absence. The very next chapter opens with God speaking again. The silence is therefore temporary, not permanent.

Genesis 34 ends with human beings attempting to explain, manage, avenge, and control evil through their own resources. Genesis 35 begins when God re-enters the conversation. The juxtaposition suggests that Genesis 34 functions as a portrait of human life conducted without either of the voices most capable of authoritatively interpreting suffering.

Ultimately, Genesis 34 ends where it began. A human being has been harmed, and the people surrounding her remain unable to respond rightly. The chapter’s tragedy lies not only in the evil that enters the story but also in the inability of every human voice within the story to overcome it.