There is only one problem. The Bible never says that. Not once. Search from Genesis to Revelation. You will never find God commanding anyone to love himself. You will not find Jesus urging people to improve their self-esteem. You will not find Paul lamenting a crisis of insufficient self-love. For a problem that modern culture considers nearly universal, Scripture is remarkably silent.

Subscribe now

Instead, Jesus says something much stranger. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Not after you’ve learned to love yourself. Not once you’ve healed your relationship with yourself. Not after you’ve developed healthy self-esteem. As yourself.

The command only works because Jesus assumes something is already true. You already love yourself. The command is not to begin loving yourself. It is to extend to your neighbor the same instinctive concern you already show yourself.

Paul makes the same assumption. “No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it” (Ephesians 5:29). Notice what he does not say. He does not say everyone feels good about himself. He does not say everyone has high self-esteem. He simply observes what every human being does. We feed ourselves. We protect ourselves. We comfort ourselves. We pursue what we believe will satisfy us. We naturally nourish and cherish ourselves because no one is indifferent to himself.

Nor should we misunderstand what Paul means by “nourishes and cherishes.” He is not claiming that people always make healthy choices or take proper care of themselves. That would be absurd. Some people nourish themselves with grilled chicken and vegetables. Others nourish themselves with a bag of Doritos and a six-pack. Still others reach for a meth pipe, another prescription, another affair, another hour scrolling on their phone, or another angry outburst. The question is not whether the choice is objectively good. The question is whether, in that moment, the person believes it offers something he wants. Relief. Comfort. Escape. Control. Pleasure. Acceptance. Every one of us is constantly reaching for what we believe will satisfy us. We may be terribly mistaken about what will actually bring life, but we are never indifferent to our own perceived good.

This should not surprise us. God created human beings to seek happiness. The problem is not that we pursue what we desire. The problem is that sin has disordered our desires. We mistake counterfeit goods for real ones. We pursue comfort instead of holiness, approval instead of faithfulness, control instead of trust. The Christian life is not the destruction of desire. It is the redemption of desire.

That is where modern therapy and biblical anthropology part ways. Our culture says your deepest problem is that you do not value yourself enough. The Bible says your deepest problem is that you value yourself first. Those are not remotely the same diagnosis.

We have confused self-loathing with the absence of self-love. They are not the same thing. The teenage girl who stares into the mirror and despises her appearance is not indifferent toward herself. She is consumed with herself. The businessman who cannot stop proving himself is consumed with himself. The man who endlessly replays every embarrassing conversation is consumed with himself. One boasts. Another despairs. One performs. Another hides. The emotional experience is different. The center is the same. Self.

That is why I cringe every time I hear someone explain destructive behavior by saying, “She just needs to learn to love herself.” Really? Let’s take a woman trapped in an abusive relationship. She says, “I stayed because I was afraid of what he would do to himself if I left.” That explanation sounds completely selfless. It sounds as though she has disappeared from the equation altogether. Her concern is entirely for him. But human beings do not work that way.

Certainly she may care about him. That claim is not in question. But compassion is almost never the only thing happening inside a human heart.

She also didn’t want to live with the guilt if he followed through on his threats. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life wondering if she could have prevented it. She wanted to avoid the terror of starting over. She wanted the financial security the relationship still provided. She wanted to protect her children from upheaval. She wanted the familiar over the unknown. She wanted hope that maybe this time things would change.

But notice what they are. They are her fears. Her desires. Her perceived good.

Every one of those reasons has the word I hidden inside it. I don’t want to carry that guilt. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to lose financial stability. I don’t want my children to suffer. I don’t want to start over.

None of this makes her uniquely selfish. None of those desires make her monstrous. It makes her profoundly human. Every one of us is constantly weighing competing goods, competing fears, competing desires, and then choosing the path that seems best to us. Sometimes we choose wisely. Sometimes tragically. But we are always acting in pursuit of what we believe, however mistakenly, will be our good.

The self never disappeared. It was present in every decision, trying to preserve what it perceived to be its own good.

Share

That is true far beyond abusive relationships. The addict reaches for another drink because he believes it will bring relief. The angry man explodes because anger promises control. The workaholic sacrifices his family because success promises significance. The people-pleaser craves approval because rejection feels unbearable. Every voluntary act is chosen because, in that moment, it appears better than the alternative.

Even our most destructive choices are attempts to obtain some perceived benefit. Comfort. Control. Acceptance. Pleasure. Power. Escape.

We do not sin because we have forgotten ourselves. We sin because we cannot stop putting ourselves first. That is why the language of “learning to love yourself” is so misleading. It encourages people to search for the solution in the very place Scripture tells us the problem begins. We become more fascinated with ourselves, more analytical about ourselves, more protective of ourselves, more committed to discovering our authentic selves, while imagining this endless preoccupation is somehow the road to freedom. It isn’t.

Subscribe now

The modern world has effectively invented an eleventh commandment. Love yourself. It is treated as the foundation for every other virtue. Until you love yourself, we’re told, you cannot truly love anyone else. Jesus says precisely the opposite. He says something our age finds almost offensive. “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” That is not because Jesus wants miserable people. It is because He understands the human heart better than we do.

He knows we already love ourselves. What we lack is rightly ordered love. The first commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself. Notice what is missing. There is no third commandment to love yourself. Scripture assumes that one takes care of itself.

This is why Christianity has never aimed at producing self-hating people, nor self-adoring people. It aims to produce people who finally stop making themselves the center of the universe. The irony is that self-hatred and self-worship are not opposites. They are twins. One admires the self. The other despises the self. Both spend all day staring at the same person.

The gospel offers something far more liberating. Look away from yourself. Lift your eyes to Christ. Love God. Love your neighbor. Paradoxically, only then do we finally begin to become the people we were created to be.

Some people hear all of this and immediately object. “What about the caregiver? What about the mother who constantly sacrifices for her children? What about the nurse? The social worker? The Enneagram Two who spends every waking hour taking care of everyone else?”

Exactly. Let’s talk about them. They are often described as the most selfless people in the room. But ask a different question.

Why do they keep doing it? Not, “Are they sincere?” I think they usually are. Not, “Do they genuinely love people?” Of course they often do.

The question is simpler. Why does caring for others satisfy them?

Because it does.

Some people feel most alive when they’re needed. Some experience deep joy in serving others. Some find profound satisfaction in nurturing, protecting, teaching, encouraging, or rescuing. Some feel secure when everyone else is happy. Some find their identity in rescuing. Some avoid facing their own pain by fixing everyone else’s. Some fear disappointing people. Some cannot imagine saying no.

None of this means their love is fake. But notice what none of those explanations require. None of them require the absence of self-love. It means that loving others has become one of the ways they themselves experience joy, purpose, peace, or fulfillment. That’s why they keep doing it.

I know that’s true of me. I don’t pastor people because I’ve somehow learned to stop caring about myself. I pastor because I love what God has called me to do. I love opening the Scriptures. I love seeing people grow. I love watching someone finally understand the gospel. I love being obedient to the calling God has placed on my life. If that privilege were taken away tomorrow, I would obey Him, but I would grieve its loss. Because I love this work.

Does that make my ministry selfish? No. It means that, by God’s grace, my joy has become bound up with the good of other people. That is not the absence of self-interest. It is the redemption of it. The problem has never been that human beings seek their own joy. This is what grace does. It doesn’t teach us to stop seeking our joy. It teaches us where joy is actually found. The old heart seeks life in itself. The new heart increasingly finds life in loving God and loving neighbor. The pursuit of joy remains. The object of joy changes.

What is remarkable is not that anxiety exists. It is that we often speak as though it were a discovery. As though the modern world were the first civilization to wonder why people lie awake at night imagining futures they cannot control. For nearly two thousand years, Christians buried children, survived plagues, endured persecution, crossed oceans, watched kingdoms collapse, lived through famine, and stood beside countless deathbeds. They knew fear long before anyone spoke of anxiety disorders or cognitive distortions.

Earlier generations of Christians interpreted inner distress through Scripture, theology, and centuries of pastoral reflection. The modern church increasingly interprets it through the categories of psychology. In doing so we have exchanged a rich tradition of spiritual discernment for a weaker psychology of inner distress.

Subscribe now

What Happened to Our Vocabulary?

Christians did not always have anxiety. They had fear. They had melancholy. They had despair. They had temptation. They had an accusing conscience. They had spiritual desertion. They had acedia. They had Anfechtung. What they did not have was one vast category into which every troubled experience of the soul was thrown.

Each generation used a rich vocabulary to distinguish different kinds of spiritual trouble. Somewhere along the way, Christians stopped speaking like Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and the Puritans. Augustine described the troubled soul in terms of disordered loves, fear, hope, and despair. Aquinas distinguished the passions, asking when fear (timor) was rightly ordered and when it was not. Luther became known for his treatment of Anfechtung—the assaults of conscience, temptation, accusation, and spiritual dread that drive a sinner either toward despair or toward Christ. The Puritans multiplied these distinctions still further, writing of melancholy, spiritual desertion, scrupulosity, fear of death, distrust of providence, and cases of conscience. Much of that vocabulary has disappeared from ordinary Christian speech.

We have taken experiences the Christian tradition spent centuries distinguishing and folded them back into a single word: anxiety. Once that happens, different questions begin to disappear. Is this fear or guilt? Is this grief or unbelief? Is this bodily weakness or an accusing conscience? Is this temptation, despair, exhaustion, or distrust of God’s providence? Those questions become harder even to ask because our vocabulary has already decided that they are fundamentally the same kind of thing.

Vocabulary is never neutral. It is a way of seeing. It determines which distinctions seem obvious and which become invisible. Once you rename the problem, you inevitably begin asking different questions. The Christian tradition insisted that not every troubled soul was troubled in the same way.

Share

How Do You Help Someone Die?

For centuries, one of the most common responsibilities of a pastor was preparing people to die. The result was an entire tradition of pastoral literature known as the ars moriendi—the art of dying. These manuals appeared throughout late medieval Europe as practical guides for priests, families, and ordinary Christians facing death. They assumed that dying exposed the deepest condition of the soul.

The earliest ars moriendi manuals identified five principal temptations that commonly confronted the dying: unbelief, despair, impatience in suffering, vainglory, and avarice or disordered attachment to earthly things. Each temptation received its own counsel, prayers, Scriptures, and pastoral response. The dying person tempted toward despair did not receive the same counsel as the one tempted toward presumption. The sufferer consumed by impatience required different encouragement than the one clinging to wealth or reputation.

The ars moriendi assumed that fear alone was not a sufficient diagnosis. Two people could stand at the edge of death with the same trembling hands and require entirely different pastoral care. One needed to be confronted. Another needed to be comforted. One needed assurance of God’s mercy. Another needed to repent. The task of the pastor was not merely to relieve distress but to discern what kind of spiritual struggle lay beneath it.

That instinct has become increasingly unfamiliar. We often begin with the experience of distress itself. The ars moriendi began by asking what kind of distress it was. Faithful pastoral care has never begun by asking, “How do I make this person feel better?” It begins by asking, “What, exactly, has hold of this soul?”

What Are You Afraid Of?

Before asking whether fear is good or bad, Thomas Aquinas asks what kind of thing it is. His answer is precise. Fear (timor) is a passion arising from the apprehension of a future evil that is difficult to avoid. That definition immediately changes the discussion. Fear always has an object. It is always fear of something.

That means fear cannot be understood by looking only at the feeling itself. The object must also be examined. What future evil is being apprehended? Is the danger real or imagined? Is it greater or lesser than the person believes? Does it deserve to be feared at all? Those questions are not secondary. They determine whether fear is rightly ordered or disordered.

For Aquinas, two people may experience the same intensity of fear while fearing entirely different things. One fears poverty. Another fears God’s judgment. One fears public shame. Another fears betraying Christ. The feeling may be equally powerful, but it cannot be evaluated apart from its object. Fear is judged not only by its intensity, but by what it fears and why.

Aquinas could ask those questions because he believed there was an objective order to reality. Human beings do not determine the good; they discover it. Some goods are genuinely greater than others. Some losses are genuinely more serious than others. Fear can therefore be measured against a standard outside the individual.

That assumption no longer commands broad cultural agreement. Modern Western thought increasingly treats meaning, identity, and the good life as matters of personal construction rather than objective discovery. If there is no common account of what human beings are for, there can be no common account of what they ought to fear. We can ask whether a fear is realistic, disproportionate, or debilitating. We struggle to ask whether it is rightly ordered.

That shift changes more than our vocabulary. It changes the task itself. If there is no objective human good, fear cannot be brought into conformity with it. The aim becomes helping individuals live consistently with the values they have chosen rather than asking whether those values correspond to reality. Relief becomes easier to define than order.

Who Is Accusing You?

For Martin Luther, the deepest human problem was not anxiety but guilt. Not guilt as a passing emotion, nor guilt as social embarrassment, but guilt before God. The conscience stood coram Deo—before the face of God—and under the judgment of His law. The question was not, “Why do I feel guilty?” but, “How can a guilty sinner stand before a righteous God?”

That question shaped Luther’s understanding of Anfechtung. The troubled conscience could be assaulted by temptation, accusation, fear, doubt, or despair, but those experiences were never simply psychological states. They were theological realities. Was the conscience condemning because it had truly violated God’s law? Was Satan accusing where Christ had already forgiven? Had the sinner forgotten the promises of the gospel? Each diagnosis required a different response. Luther refused to treat every inward struggle as though it were the same.

Luther could make those distinctions because he believed guilt was an objective reality. Human beings do not merely feel guilty; they are guilty. The law of God exposes a condition that exists whether or not we acknowledge it. Yet that same objectivity made absolution possible. If guilt is objective, it can actually be removed. The gospel is not an invitation to stop feeling guilty. It is God’s declaration that, through the death and resurrection of Christ, the guilty are justified before Him.

That assumption no longer commands broad cultural agreement. Modern Western culture has retained the language of guilt while steadily abandoning the God before whom guilt is measured. The question has shifted from, “Am I guilty before God?” to, “Why do I feel guilty?” Without an objective moral Judge, guilt becomes increasingly psychological, social, or political. It can be managed, redirected, explained, or normalized, but it can no longer be definitively forgiven.

That shift changes the task itself. Once guilt is detached from God, the goal is no longer reconciliation with Him but relief from the experience of condemnation. The conscience still longs for a verdict, yet the modern world offers no court capable of rendering one. There are therapists who can help us understand our feelings, communities that can affirm us, and causes through which we can seek moral repair. What there is not is a word of absolution. Luther’s world assumed that the deepest accusation against a human being came from God. It also proclaimed that only God could finally silence it.

Subscribe now

What Kind of Trouble Is This?

By the seventeenth century, Protestant pastors had inherited centuries of reflection on the human soul. That inheritance appears in works such as Richard Baxter’s The Cure of Melancholy and Overmuch Sorrow by Faith, Thomas Brooks’s Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, and John Owen’s Of Temptation: The Nature and Power of It. Read together, these books reveal a striking assumption about the human person. None of them expects the troubled soul to be understood through a single explanation.

Seventeenth-century physicians commonly understood melancholy as a bodily condition characterized by fear, sadness, and despondency. Baxter adopts this familiar vocabulary but substantially deepens its meaning. His concern is not simply to describe a medical condition but to explain its pastoral significance. Melancholy does more than produce sorrow. It reshapes how a Christian perceives reality. As Baxter explains, “The passions of grief and trouble of mind often overthrow the sober and sound use of reason, so that a man’s judgment is corrupted and perverted by it... He doesn’t think of things as they are, but only as his passion represents them.” A believer whose body has been weakened by melancholy may therefore become persuaded that God has rejected him, not because God has withdrawn His grace, but because bodily affliction has clouded his ability to reason rightly about God’s promises. Melancholy thus becomes, for Baxter, not merely a medical condition but a pastoral reality in which body, judgment, conscience, temptation, and doctrine converge.

Brooks likewise begins with the familiar language of temptation but refuses to treat it as a single experience. His concern is not merely that Christians are tempted, but to identify the particular forms deception takes in different spiritual conditions. As he writes, “Satan has several devices to draw souls to sin, and several plots... to keep souls in a mourning, staggering, doubting and questioning condition.” Rather than treating temptation as a single experience, Brooks distinguishes dozens of recurring patterns by which Satan manipulates the conscience. Before sin he presents “the bait and hides the hook,” persuading sinners that judgment is light. After sin he works in the opposite direction, keeping believers in “a mourning, staggering, doubting and questioning condition” by persuading them that mercy is beyond their reach. Temptation is therefore not merely an impulse toward evil but an assault on the believer’s perception of God, grace, and the promises of the gospel.

Owen likewise refuses to treat temptation as a single undifferentiated experience. As he explains, “We may be tempted, yet not enter into temptation.” Temptation itself is not yet defeat. One “enters into temptation” when the soul becomes entangled with it, allowing it to “parley with the heart,” “reason with the mind,” and “entice and allure the affections.” Owen therefore distinguishes between being assaulted by temptation and becoming inwardly engaged with it. This distinction is pastorally significant. Without it, tender consciences may mistake temptation itself for guilt, while hardened consciences may fail to recognize how deeply they have already become entangled.

The church did not lose its vocabulary by accident. It abandoned it. In learning to speak the language of anxiety, it forgot how to distinguish fear from guilt, temptation from despair, melancholy from unbelief, and bodily weakness from spiritual accusation. The result has not been greater wisdom, but diminished pastoral discernment. We have become better at describing distress than diagnosing it. Until the church recovers its own grammar for the soul, it will continue offering answers to questions it no longer knows how to ask.

Subscribe now

Share

If you came of age in evangelicalism during the early 2000s, you probably remember the slogans.

“The gospel is not just the ABCs of the Christian life. It is the A to Z.”

“Preach the gospel to yourself every day.”

“Religion says, ‘I obey, therefore I’m accepted.’ The gospel says, ‘I’m accepted, therefore I obey.’”

Those sentences became the common language of what was later called the gospel centered movement. Through pastors and writers like Tim Keller, John Piper, D. A. Carson, and many others, a generation of evangelicals rediscovered the centrality of justification by grace alone through faith alone. The gospel was not simply how Christians began. It was how Christians grew. That conviction reshaped preaching, counseling, discipleship, and the Christian life for countless churches, including my own.

The Question

Working as a chaplain in a homeless shelter has forced me to think carefully about how people change. Every day I sit with addiction, trauma, broken relationships, relapse, shame, and the slow work of rebuilding a life. I spend my days assessing people, planning interventions, and trying to understand why some people gradually become different while others remain trapped in the same patterns. It is impossible to do that work for long without asking how lasting change actually happens.

That question slowly changed the way I listened to my own theology. Whether the conversation was about obedience, holiness, fighting sin, perseverance, or virtue, I found myself reaching for the same answer. “Because you’ve already been accepted.” It is a wonderful answer. It protects the gospel from legalism, reminds us that God’s favor cannot be earned, and keeps justification where the Reformers insisted it belongs. What unsettled me was not the answer itself, but how quickly I reached for it. Before I had fully understood the question, I already knew what I was going to say.

When Answers Lose Their Questions

I recently came across one of those internet lists about forgotten sayings. One that caught my attention was, “Great minds think alike.” It turns out the older proverb continues, “and fools seldom differ.” What stayed with me was not the missing half of the proverb but what its disappearance revealed. Sometimes a sentence survives long after the conversation that first gave it meaning has been forgotten. Detached from its original setting, it begins answering questions it was never meant to answer.

Something similar has happened, I think, to one of Protestantism’s favorite slogans. “Religion says, ‘I obey, therefore I’m accepted.’ The gospel says, ‘I’m accepted, therefore I obey.’” That sentence is a modern way of answering one of Protestantism’s oldest questions. How can a guilty sinner stand righteous before a holy God? The Reformers answered with remarkable clarity. We are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone.

The Heidelberg Catechism not only asks that question but answers it. Twenty-six questions later it asks another. “Since we have been delivered from our misery by grace through Christ, without any merit of our own, why then should we do good works?” Its answer is equally clear. We obey “so that with our whole lives we may show ourselves thankful to God for His benefits.” My concern is not with that answer. My concern is what happens when an answer forged for one question gradually becomes our instinctive answer to several others.

The Carpenter

Imagine asking a carpenter, “Why do you build houses?” The answer depends entirely on the question hiding underneath the question. If you are asking about his livelihood, he builds because someone hired him. If you are asking about his vocation, he builds because that is what carpenters do. If you are asking about his character, perhaps he builds with excellence because he is grateful to the man who first taught him the trade. None of those answers compete with one another because each explains a different aspect of the carpenter’s life.

Now imagine responding to every question with the same answer. “He builds because he is grateful someone taught him carpentry.” The answer remains true, but it no longer remains sufficient. It explains one motive without explaining his vocation, his identity, his skill, or the relationship between becoming a carpenter and practicing carpentry. The answer has not become false. It has become overextended.

The same danger exists in theology. Gratitude beautifully answers the Heidelberg Catechism’s question, “Why then should we do good works?” But Scripture asks many other questions about the Christian life. How does a sinner become a saint? What does union with Christ accomplish? How does the Holy Spirit transform desire? How are virtue and holiness formed? Why does obedience increasingly become the natural expression of the new life God has given? Those questions are related, but they are not identical. When they all receive the same answer, the answer itself begins to lose the precision that once made it so helpful.

The Reformers

The obvious objection is that everything I have described is simply historic Protestantism. In one sense, it is. The Reformers fiercely defended justification by grace alone through faith alone, and they consistently taught that good works never earn God’s favor. The Westminster Confession describes good works as “the fruits and evidences of a true and lively faith.” Calvin repeatedly speaks of obedience as the fruit of our acceptance in Christ. On that point, there is an unmistakable line running from the sixteenth century to the gospel centered movement.

The continuity, however, is only part of the story. Read the Reformers, and the language of gratitude is surrounded by a much larger vocabulary. They speak constantly of union with Christ, regeneration, adoption, mortification, vivification, communion with the Holy Spirit, new affections, new creation, and the restoration of the image of God. Gratitude is never absent, but neither is it expected to explain the whole Christian life. It is one voice in a much larger theological choir.

Calvin illustrates the point well. He does not begin his account of sanctification with gratitude but with union. “As long as Christ remains outside of us,” he writes, “all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.” Everything else follows from that union. Participation precedes transformation. Identity precedes conduct. Obedience is the fruit of sharing in Christ before it is the expression of gratitude toward Christ.

The same pattern appears throughout later Protestant theology. John Owen explains holiness through the Spirit’s work in mortification. Jonathan Edwards roots obedience in holy affections. Herman Bavinck describes sanctification as the life of Christ unfolding within the believer. None of them diminishes gratitude. They simply refuse to ask it to carry the weight of every theological question about Christian growth.

Becoming

The carpenter illustration is helpful, but it also has limits. If someone says, “A carpenter builds because that is what carpenters do,” the Protestant instinct immediately asks another question. How does someone become a carpenter? More importantly, when does someone become one? Is it after building a first table? A tenth house? When the quality of the work reaches a certain standard? The moment identity is grounded in performance, assurance quietly gives way to introspection. The question is no longer, Who am I? but, Have I done enough?

That is precisely the question the Reformers refused to answer by pointing to human effort. A Christian is not someone who has finally obeyed enough to deserve the name. A Christian is someone who has been united to Christ by grace through faith. Justification, adoption, regeneration, and union with Christ are gifts before they become experiences. God establishes a new reality before He calls us to a new way of life.

The New Testament follows that pattern with remarkable consistency. Before Paul commands believers to live differently, he reminds them what God has already done. In Romans 6, Christians have already “died to sin,” have been “buried therefore with him,” and have been raised “to walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:2–4). Only then does Paul say, “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11). The command rests upon a reality that grace has already accomplished.

The same pattern appears throughout Paul’s letters. In Colossians, “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” before believers are told to “put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Col. 3:3, 5). In Ephesians, Christians are reminded that they have “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God,” before they are commanded to “put away falsehood” and live accordingly (Eph. 4:24–25). Reformed theology has long summarized this pattern by saying that the indicative grounds the imperative. Scripture first declares what God has done before it commands what Christians must do.

This is a richer account of sanctification than a single appeal to gratitude can provide. Sanctification is not the construction of a Christian identity but the progressive expression of one. The Holy Spirit conforms believers to the image of Christ through the ordinary means of grace, teaching them to become in practice what they already are by union with Christ. Identity does not emerge from practice. Practice expresses identity.

The carpenter’s question, therefore, remains indispensable, but it belongs in the right place. Once someone has become a carpenter, it is entirely appropriate to ask how skill is formed, what habits produce excellence, and why good craftsmanship increasingly becomes second nature. Those are no longer questions about becoming a carpenter. They are questions about growing as one. Protestant theology has always insisted on exactly the same distinction.

Subscribe now

A Larger Vocabulary

This matters because pastors, counselors, chaplains, and disciplers spend their lives helping people change. We sit with addiction, resentment, lust, fear, anxiety, despair, and the thousand ordinary sins that refuse to die quietly. Our task is not merely to explain justification. It is to help people understand how God conforms them to the image of Christ. That requires more than one question, and Scripture gives us more than one answer.

When every question receives the same answer, our pastoral vocabulary becomes smaller than the Bible’s. We instinctively answer with acceptance when Scripture speaks of union with Christ. We answer with gratitude when Paul speaks of the Spirit. We return to justification when the New Testament is describing adoption, mortification, new creation, perseverance, wisdom, virtue, hope, and the slow formation of Christian character. None of those realities compete with the gospel. They are the gospel accomplishing what God always intended it to accomplish.

That, I believe, is the lasting weakness of the gospel-centered movement. It recovered one of the church’s greatest truths with remarkable clarity, but over time it allowed one answer to eclipse many others. The result was not a false gospel. It was a thinner account of sanctification than either Scripture or the Reformers actually give us.

Recovering those forgotten questions does not move us beyond the gospel. It returns us to the fullness of it. Grace not only declares sinners righteous. Grace unites them to Christ. Grace gives them the Holy Spirit. Grace adopts them into God’s family. Grace renews their minds, reorders their loves, reshapes their habits, and conforms them to the image of the Son.

The gospel is still the A to Z of the Christian life. We have simply forgotten how many letters are in the alphabet.

The question is not academic in the pejorative sense. It determines how we read hundreds of passages spread across the canon. It shapes how we understand Israel’s confession, the identity of Jesus, the language of the New Testament, and eventually the development of Christian theology, such as the Trinity.

What follows is not intended as a complete doctrine of God or a comprehensive history of Christian theology. It is an attempt to follow the biblical confession that “the LORD is one” from its origins in Israel’s Scriptures through its reception in the earliest Christian centuries.

Subscribe now

The difficulty begins with the text itself. Moses declares, “The LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4). Isaiah proclaims, “I am the LORD, and there is no other” (Isa. 45:5). Paul writes, “For us there is one God, the Father” (1 Cor. 8:6). Yet the same Scriptures speak of “the gods” (Ex. 15:11), God’s heavenly council (Ps. 82:1), “sons of God” (Job 1:6), and even “many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’” (1 Cor. 8:5).

At this point, modern readers usually reach for a familiar category. We ask whether Israel was monotheistic. The word monotheism is neither biblical nor ancient Jewish. It does not appear in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Josephus, or the early church fathers. It emerged in the seventeenth century, when the English theologian and philosopher Henry More coined monotheismus to distinguish belief in one God from polytheism, atheism, and other competing religious systems.

The word proved useful. It also encouraged readers to organize the biblical evidence around a particular question: How many gods exist? Statements about God’s uniqueness, Israel’s exclusive worship, and the Father’s primacy were increasingly gathered beneath a single conclusion: only one God exists.

Yet those are not obviously the same kind of claim. When Scripture declares that “the LORD is one,” is it making a statement about the number of divine beings that exist? Or about the exclusive worship owed to Israel’s God? Or about the unique source and identity of the Godhead itself?

And while these claims are related and may overlap, it is helpful to distinguish them by name: monotheism, the conviction that only one God exists; monolatry, the exclusive worship of one God; and monarchia, the confession that divine unity is grounded in one source or principle.

1. Reading Deuteronomy on Its Own Terms

If this essay begins by asking what Scripture means when it declares that “the LORD is one,” the obvious place to begin is Deuteronomy itself.

Few studies have shaped this discussion more than Nathan MacDonald’s Deuteronomy and the Meaning of “Monotheism.” Originally published as his doctoral dissertation, the book asks whether monotheism is even the right category for reading Deuteronomy. Instead of starting with a definition of monotheism and looking for it in the text, MacDonald starts with the text itself. His conclusion is careful but significant. He argues that “the term ‘monotheism’ does not adequately describe the beliefs and practices in Deuteronomy.” Instead, “an often quite different picture emerges,” in which “love towards YHWH, the demanding nature of remembering YHWH, and the problem of human propensity to idolatry can again be seen as central to the confession that ‘YHWH is one.’”

The structure of Deuteronomy supports his conclusion. Israel confesses, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Moses immediately follows with a command: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4–5). The chapters that follow continue that same emphasis. Israel is told to remember the LORD’s mighty acts, teach His words to their children, destroy the places of false worship, refuse the temptation to follow other gods, and remain faithful to the covenant He made with them. These themes appear again and again. Together they shape what it means for Israel to confess that the LORD is one.

Read in this context, the Shema is more than a theological statement. It stands at the center of Israel’s covenant life. It grounds Israel’s love, worship, memory, and obedience. The confession identifies the God to whom Israel belongs and therefore the God to whom Israel owes undivided allegiance. Moses is not simply defining God. He is forming a faithful people.

That shifts the question. Instead of beginning with the number of divine beings that exist, Deuteronomy directs our attention to the God who redeemed Israel, entered into covenant with her, and therefore alone deserves her love and worship. Read on its own terms, the confession that “the LORD is one” functions first as a declaration of exclusive covenant allegiance.

Subscribe now

2. The Language of Creation

Reading Deuteronomy on its own terms reveals something important. The confession that “the LORD is one” stands at the center of Israel’s covenant life. It calls God’s people to exclusive love, faithful remembrance, and undivided worship. Any account of God’s oneness should begin there.

Deuteronomy, however, is not the whole story. As we continue reading the Old Testament, another pattern begins to emerge. Alongside passages concerned with covenant loyalty are others that explain God’s uniqueness by pointing to His relationship with the whole created order.

Isaiah is the clearest example. As Israel faces exile, the prophet repeatedly describes the LORD as the one who “created the heavens,” “stretched out the earth,” “formed the mountains,” and “made all things.” These descriptions appear alongside familiar declarations such as, “I am the LORD, and there is no other.” That pairing is difficult to ignore. Isaiah does not simply declare that the LORD is unique. He explains why. The LORD alone created all things. His rule extends beyond Israel because His creative work extends beyond Israel.

Nor is Isaiah alone. Genesis opens with the creation of heaven and earth before it introduces Abraham or the covenant people. The Psalms celebrate the LORD’s kingship by returning again and again to His work as Maker of heaven and earth. Jeremiah declares that the gods who did not make the heavens and the earth “shall perish.” The biblical writers repeatedly distinguish the LORD from every rival by appealing to creation itself. The Creator stands over everything He has made.

That observation pushes the conversation further. Deuteronomy teaches Israel whom she must worship. Isaiah and the rest of the Old Testament begin explaining why the LORD alone deserves that worship. Again and again, God’s uniqueness is grounded not only in His covenant with Israel but also in His relationship to the whole created order. He alone made heaven and earth. He alone gives life. He alone rules over all that exists.

The biblical emphasis on God as Creator would also prove decisive for later theology. Although the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is not explicitly articulated in the Old Testament, many scholars trace its development through the Second Temple period, with 2 Maccabees 7:28 often cited as an important witness. By the second century, Christian theologians such as Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, and Tertullian would give the doctrine explicit expression, particularly in response to Middle Platonic and Gnostic accounts of the world’s origin. By distinguishing the uncreated Creator from everything that exists because He freely brought it into being, creatio ex nihilo became one of the clearest theological expressions of the biblical pattern already emerging in Isaiah and the rest of the Old Testament.

3. Reading the Canon Together

What exactly is Isaiah denying when he mocks idols? What exactly is Paul denying when he says, “an idol has no real existence”? Those questions deserve a slower answer than they often receive.

Isaiah’s polemic against idols reaches its fullest expression in chapters 40–48. A craftsman cuts down a tree, burns part of it for fuel, and fashions the remainder into an object of worship (Isa. 44:9–20). The idol is the work of human hands. It cannot speak. It cannot save. Yet Isaiah’s argument does not end with the manufacture of idols. Throughout these same chapters, the prophet repeatedly identifies the LORD as the one “who made all things,” who “alone stretched out the heavens,” who “spread out the earth by myself” (Isa. 44:24), who “made the earth and created man on it” (Isa. 45:12), and who “declares the end from the beginning” (Isa. 46:10). The contrast is not simply between a real God and imaginary gods. It is between the one who created, rules, and redeems, and those who do none of these things.

Paul’s discussion of food offered to idols follows a similar pattern. He begins, “we know that ‘an idol has no real existence,’ and that ‘there is no God but one’” (1 Cor. 8:4). His next sentence continues the argument. “For although there may be so called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords,’ yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:5–6). Whatever Paul means by the “many gods and many lords,” he distinguishes the one God by His unique relationship to creation. The Father is the one “from whom are all things.” A few chapters later, Paul adds another piece to the discussion when he writes that pagan sacrifices are offered “to demons and not to God” (1 Cor. 10:20). The idol itself is nothing. The worship is not.

Other New Testament writers employ Israel’s confession differently. Romans 3:30 appeals to the oneness of God as the basis for His impartial justification of both Jew and Gentile. James 2:19 invokes the Shema to expose the emptiness of a faith that consists only of correct belief. Neither passage attempts to explain the nature of divine existence. Both assume Israel’s confession and apply it within covenantal and ethical arguments.

Taken together, these texts reveal a consistent pattern. When the biblical authors explain why the God of Israel alone is God, they repeatedly appeal to characteristics that belong to Him alone. He alone created heaven and earth. He alone directs history. He alone redeems His people. He alone stands as the source of all things. Scripture certainly affirms the uniqueness of Israel’s God. The question is how that uniqueness is expressed. Again and again, the biblical writers answer by pointing to what only the God of Israel does.

4. The Language of Monarchia

The earliest Christian discussions of God’s unity are often framed in the language of monarchia. The Greek word monarchia combines monos (”one” or “alone”) with archē, a term whose semantic range includes beginning, source, first principle, authority, and rule. The English word monarchy preserves only part of this range. In Greek, monarchia could refer to sole rule, but it could also denote a single source or first principle. This breadth of meaning made the term well suited to express themes that recur throughout Scripture. The one God alone creates. He alone rules. He alone stands as the source of all things.

The vocabulary itself was not a Christian invention. Greek political writers had long employed monarchia in contrast to forms of divided rule, and Jewish authors were already using the term before the rise of Christianity. Philo of Alexandria, for example, contrasts polyarchia with the worship of the one divine ruler, arguing that true religion acknowledges God’s unique monarchia rather than a plurality of competing powers (On the Decalogue 52–65). The language already belonged to the intellectual world in which Christian theology emerged.

The second- and third-century fathers adopted the same vocabulary. Defending the unity of the Creator against Valentinian speculation, Irenaeus repeatedly insists that there is one God who alone created heaven and earth and rejects every attempt to multiply first principles (Against Heresies II.1; II.28; IV.20). Tertullian makes the point even more explicitly. Responding to Praxeas, he writes, Monarchiam tenemus—”We hold the monarchy” (Against Praxeas 3). His argument is striking. The confession of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit does not divide God’s monarchia or introduce multiple sources of deity. Rather, the Trinity preserves the one divine monarchia because the Son and Spirit proceed from the Father without establishing rival principles.

Origen likewise speaks of the Father’s monarchia while maintaining the eternal generation of the Son (On First Principles I.2; Commentary on John II). The Cappadocian Fathers continued this pattern. Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa consistently grounded the unity of the Trinity in the Father as the one archē, not because the Son or Spirit are lesser beings, but because the Father is the eternal source within the Godhead (Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 42.15; Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius). Across these writers, monarchia functions as a theological description of God’s unique identity as the one source and sovereign Lord.

This continuity is historically significant because modern readers often encounter the word only through the label Monarchianism. The label is misleading if it suggests that monarchia itself was controversial. The controversy was not whether God possesses a monarchia but how that monarchia should be understood. Modalists appealed to the divine monarchia by collapsing the distinction between Father and Son. Orthodox theologians answered by insisting that the Father’s monarchia is preserved precisely through the eternal relations of Father, Son, and Spirit. Tertullian’s Against Praxeas is therefore not a rejection of monarchia but a defense of it.

Conclusion

The subsequent history of theological vocabulary followed a different course. The language of monarchia gradually receded, while the language of monotheism eventually emerged in the seventeenth century. When Henry More coined monotheismus, the term served a new intellectual task: distinguishing religions according to the number of gods they affirmed. It proved to be a useful category. It also encouraged later readers to gather a wide range of biblical claims beneath a single question: How many gods exist?

That is a legitimate theological question. It is not always the question Scripture is asking. Deuteronomy presents the confession that “the LORD is one” as the foundation of Israel’s exclusive covenant allegiance. Isaiah repeatedly identifies the LORD as the one who alone created heaven and earth, governs history, and redeems His people. Paul identifies the Father as the one “from whom are all things and for whom we exist,” even while acknowledging the existence of “many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords.’” These are not competing answers. They are complementary ways of identifying the God of Israel.

This, perhaps, explains why the earliest Christian theologians so naturally spoke of the monarchia of God. They inherited a canon that repeatedly identified God by His unrivaled identity as Creator, source, ruler, and Lord. Monarchia gave them a way to describe those patterns together. Monotheism, by contrast, would arise much later within a different historical conversation.

None of this renders the language of monotheism false or unnecessary. Christians rightly confess that there is but one God. The argument of this essay is simply that the biblical witness is richer than that single category can express. Scripture does not merely tell us that God is one. It tells us who the one God is. He alone is to be worshiped. He alone created heaven and earth. He alone rules history. He alone is the source from whom all things come and the Lord to whom all things belong.

Subscribe now

Further Reading

If this essay has sparked your interest, the following works are excellent places to continue exploring these questions. Both are freely available online.

Nathan MacDonald, One God or One Lord? Deuteronomy and the Meaning of “Monotheism” (Ph.D. thesis, Durham University, 2001).

Daniel O. McClellan, “Monotheism—Still a Misused Word in Jewish Studies?”

Subscribe now

Share

Paul often invokes angels to amplify arguments, not establish new theological propositions. In many instances, the mention of angels functions rhetorically as a maximal comparison within the argument itself. Moreover, it is not clear that such references should serve as independent truth claims about reality.

For example, when Paul writes, “Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you...” (Gal. 1:8), a plain reading of this isolated text would support the conclusion that angels are capable of preaching a false gospel. That conclusion is hardly implausible. After all, the story of Mormonism begins with Joseph Smith receiving a false gospel. Likewise, when Paul says, “We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men” (1 Cor. 4:9), it could be that this verse establishes that angels observe apostolic ministry. Or, for another example, when Paul asks, “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” (1 Cor. 6:3), it could be understood, when viewed independently, that this verse offers an eschatological proof text for the future authority of believers over angels. Even the statement, “That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels” (1 Cor. 11:10), read apart from Paul’s broader use of angels, invites endless speculation concerning angelic concern for public worship practices.

The predictable result of reading each reference as an independent proposition is that every mention of angels becomes not only another contribution to Paul’s angelology but another premise from which further theological conclusions may be drawn. So, in the case of the original proof text, Paul’s mention of “the tongues of men and of angels” (1 Cor. 13:1) is frequently understood by Charismatics, Pentecostals, and Continuationists to establish a category of tongues consisting of a heavenly language.

However, the cumulative effect of these passages points in another direction. Across his letters, and especially throughout 1 Corinthians, Paul repeatedly employs the same rhetorical move. He reaches for angels whenever he wishes to state his point in the strongest possible terms.

Paul invokes angels the way someone might say, “Even Einstein couldn’t solve it.” The point is not to establish a historical fact about Einstein. The point is to say, “No one could solve it.” Einstein supplies the strongest comparison available. The comparison magnifies the point without becoming the point or requiring the speaker to defend truth claims about Einstein. Paul appears to employ angels the same way. He reaches for them whenever he wishes to state his point in the strongest possible terms. In each case, angels give force to the argument by supplying the greatest possible scale for Paul’s comparison.

Taken in context, when Paul writes, “Even if an angel from heaven or we should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you...” (Gal. 1:8), Paul is not attempting to settle whether angels could preach another gospel. It is merely a way for Paul’s to say, ‘Take the greatest messenger imaginable; even they should not persuade you away from the gospel you have received.’ Or when Paul says, “We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men” (1 Cor. 4:9), he is not trying to teach us about the watching activity of angels. He is saying, “Take the greatest audience imaginable. Even there the apostles’ humiliation is on full display.”

Likewise, when Paul asks, “Do you not know that we are to judge angels?” (1 Cor. 6:3), he is not shifting the discussion to the future relationship between believers and angels. He is arguing from the greatest conceivable judgment to the least. In effect, he is saying, ‘Imagine the highest court imaginable. If believers are fit for that, surely they are fit to settle ordinary disputes among themselves.’ Or when Paul writes, “That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels” (1 Cor. 11:10), he is not interrupting his discussion of worship to establish angelic concern for head coverings. He invokes them to heighten the seriousness of the conduct already under discussion. In effect, he is saying, “Take the highest authority imaginable. Even there, this conduct matters.”

Now we return to the passage that began our discussion. When Paul writes, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels...” (1 Cor. 13:1), these words occur within a larger discussion about the gifts (chs. 12–14), but more particularly about the necessity of love in the exercise of those gifts (ch. 13).

Could it be that Paul is suggesting that the gift of tongues extends beyond known human languages? I am not prepared to rule the possibility out entirely. Theology can sometimes be built from details found in the corners of larger arguments. Jesus Himself famously establishes the resurrection from the present tense of God’s words, “I am the God of Abraham...” (Matt. 22:31–32). The question is not whether such arguments are ever legitimate. The question is whether this is one of those cases.

Had this been the only place Paul invoked angels while making an argument, the answer might be yes. However, considered alongside Paul’s repeated use of angels across his letters, another reading deserves priority. Paul repeatedly reaches for angels whenever he wishes to state his point in the strongest possible terms. The comparison does not require the reader to derive new doctrine about angels or about the nature of tongues. Thus, as a rhetorical device, Paul invokes angels as one more step in his rhetorical crescendo. He is saying, in effect, “Take the greatest speech imaginable; even that is nothing without love.”

Yet, once isolated from Paul’s larger pattern of argument, this single comparison is made to bear the weight of an entire doctrine. Thus, what Acts presents as the pattern becomes the exception and what can be inferred from a single comparison becomes the norm for Charismatic Christian practice.

The consequences of this reading are not merely academic. Across much of modern Pentecostal and charismatic practice, tongues no longer have to resemble recognizable human language. They no longer have to sound like one, behave like one, or be identifiable as one. The very features that would have counted against their authenticity under the pattern established in Acts are now offered as evidence that the speaker has moved beyond earthly language into a heavenly one. What would once have called the phenomenon into question has now become its strongest defense.

So no. Nothing in Paul’s argument convinces me you’re speaking in angelic languages. You just sound like a fool.

Subscribe now

Sometimes the search wears pagan clothes. Tarot cards, horoscopes, psychics, lucky numbers, dreams, blood moons, and viral prophecies all promise to decode reality. Other times, it dresses itself in religious language. We replay conversations, dissect coincidences, and wonder whether a closed door is God’s judgment or an open door His blessing. We connect dots that may have never belonged together because uncertainty is harder to tolerate than almost any answer. The human heart doesn’t stop looking for omens just because it becomes religious. It simply changes where it looks.

Subscribe now

Human beings are pattern-making creatures. The same instinct that keeps us alive also tempts us to fool ourselves. We survived as a species by recognizing patterns before everyone else did. The rustling grass might be the wind, or it might be a predator. Better to assume a pattern than miss one that could kill you. The trouble is that the same mind that recognizes genuine patterns also manufactures imaginary ones.

That is why Hermann Rorschach’s inkblot test became famous. There is no hidden picture inside the ink. The meaning comes from the observer. Faced with ambiguity, the mind projects itself onto the page. The test never really measured the inkblot. It measured the person staring at it. We do the same thing with our lives. A relationship ends. A child gets sick. A job disappears. Before the dust settles, we’ve already written the explanation. God is punishing me. Everything happens for a reason. We would rather invent meaning than admit we don’t know.

That is the danger of pattern-making. The stories we tell ourselves often reveal more about our fears, guilt, and desire for certainty than they do about God’s intentions. Most of the time, the signs we think we’ve discovered say far more about us than they do about God.

No. This Is Not a Sign

The widow in 1 Kings 17 reaches exactly that conclusion. Her son dies while Elijah is staying in her home, and she immediately decides she knows why. “Have you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” Notice what never happens. She never asks God. She simply interprets the tragedy. Elijah is more honest. He asks God why, but receives no explanation. God raises the boy to life without explaining why he died. Healing is not explanation.

That silence cuts against one of our deepest instincts. We assume every tragedy arrives with a secret message attached, waiting for the spiritually perceptive to decode it. Scripture refuses to indulge that fantasy. Sometimes suffering has an explanation we are never given. Sometimes the answer to “Why?” is silence.

This is why chasing hidden signs can become a substitute for simple obedience. We become fascinated with God’s secret will while neglecting His revealed will. We obsess over whether this job, relationship, setback, or opportunity is “a sign,” while ignoring the things God has already made unmistakably clear: love your neighbor, forgive your enemies, tell the truth, pursue justice, and remain faithful. Curiosity becomes a convenient distraction from obedience.

Not everything that happens to you is a message from God. Some events are simply the collision of living in a broken world. Some questions remain unanswered. Wisdom begins when we stop demanding an explanation for every circumstance and stop pretending certainty where God has chosen silence.

Yes. This Is a Sign

Rejecting superstition does not mean abandoning the search for guidance. Human beings need direction. The real question has never been whether God gives signs. It is whether we are looking for the right ones.

Most of us ask the wrong question. We ask, “What should I do?” Should I take this job? Move to another city? End this relationship? Go back to school? Wait another year? Those questions matter, but they are downstream from a much larger one. Before asking what to do next, we should ask where we are trying to go. Direction always comes before decisions.

Lewis Carroll captured this better than he probably intended. Lost in Wonderland, Alice comes to a fork in the road and asks the Cheshire Cat which way she should go. The cat answers with another question: “Where are you going?” Alice doesn’t know. “Then,” the cat replies, “it doesn’t matter which way you go.” The exchange is funny because it is true. If the destination is unknown, every road appears equally reasonable. Every sign becomes equally persuasive.

Think about driving across the country. Every highway is filled with signs. Speed limits. Exit numbers. Food. Gas. Lodging. Construction ahead. Thousands of signs point somewhere, but almost none of them matter unless you know where you’re going. The problem is rarely a lack of guidance. It is a lack of destination. Once the destination is settled, most signs become obvious, and most distractions lose their appeal.

That is why so many people become paralyzed by decisions. They are asking for guidance without first settling on the destination. They want certainty about the next step without deciding what kind of person they are becoming. They stare at the crossroads while ignoring the map.

That is exactly the problem Elijah confronts on Mount Carmel. “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.” Israel’s problem was never a lack of signs. It was a lack of commitment. They had not settled on the destination. They wanted Yahweh when He was useful and Baal when he seemed more convenient. They did not need another opinion. They needed to decide whom they would follow.

Only then does God send fire from heaven. The miracle is often misunderstood. It was not divine entertainment. God was not rewarding people who demanded proof. The sign forced a decision that could no longer be postponed. Throughout Scripture, God’s signs rarely satisfy curiosity. They expose divided hearts and call people toward faithfulness. Their purpose is not prediction but direction.

This is why biblical signs look so different from the omens we invent. Omens promise secret knowledge. God’s signs reveal public truth. Omens whisper, “Here’s what will happen next.” God’s signs declare, “Here is who I am. Now follow me.” One feeds our desire for control. The other demands trust.

Guidance is not the same thing as certainty. Most people asking for a sign are not really asking for direction. They are asking for guarantees. They want tomorrow explained before they obey today. Scripture almost never works that way. God usually gives enough light for the next faithful step, not enough information to eliminate the need for faith.

The Christian life works the same way. If your destination is comfort, success, or self-protection, the world offers endless signs pointing in those directions. If your destination is becoming more like Christ, different signs begin to matter. Scripture matters. Wisdom matters. Character matters. Faithfulness matters. The question shifts from “What is God trying to tell me about tomorrow?” to “What has God already made clear today?”

We spend enormous energy trying to identify the next puzzle piece while forgetting there is already a picture on the box. Most people asking for a sign are not really looking for guidance. They are looking for guarantees. They want tomorrow explained before they obey today. Scripture seldom grants that request. Instead, it points us toward Christ, tells us what faithfulness looks like, and calls us to begin walking. The Christian life is not about mastering divine code-breaking. It is about following the direction God has already made clear. People spend their lives asking, “What’s the sign?” Scripture keeps asking, “Where are you headed?”

The critique has force because it presses on an actual weakness in popular evangelicalism. Scripture requires interpretation. Interpretation produces disagreement. Disagreement requires judgment. A rule of faith that cannot adjudicate disputes begins to look useless at the very point where it is most needed. From there the Catholic argument moves quickly. If disputes require a judge, and if a fallible judge leaves the dispute unresolved, then the Church must be protected from error when she judges definitively.

That argument works because many Protestants have already conceded too much. They have accepted an account of authority in which Scripture functions as the only authority in the Christian life rather than the final authority over every other authority. Once that mistake is made, the Catholic critique has an easy target. It is not refuting historic Protestantism. It is refuting a modern evangelical habit of treating the Bible as though it dropped into the hands of isolated readers with no church, no creed, no fathers, no councils, and no binding tradition.

That is not sola Scriptura.

The deeper problem is that the Catholic argument often assumes a particular model of authority without proving it. Authority is treated as a mechanism for producing immediate closure at the point of dispute. If the mechanism cannot identify itself, interpret itself, and settle the argument without remainder, then it is said to have failed. But that is not how authority has functioned in the history of the Church. It is not even how authority functions in ordinary life.

A police officer has real authority. A judge has real authority. A legislature has real authority. Yet none of them possesses final authority. Their authority is real because it is ordered within a larger structure. A constitution does not erase subordinate authorities. It judges them, limits them, and gives them their proper field of action.

Historic Protestantism made a similar distinction. Scripture is the norma normans non normata, the norming norm that is not itself normed. Creeds, confessions, councils, pastors, and traditions are norma normata, normed authorities. They carry real weight. They bind. They teach. They exclude error. But they remain subject to correction by the Word of God.

Subscribe now

This is where modern discussions usually go wrong. They assume that if an authority can err, it has no authority. That is nonsense. A pastor can preach truly while remaining fallible. A confession can bind a church while remaining reformable. A council can possess real authority without becoming a second source of revelation. The question is not whether something is either infallible or irrelevant. The question is what kind of authority it has.

This becomes obvious when reading the early fathers. Irenaeus and Tertullian did not treat Christian doctrine as a pile of private interpretations waiting for clever readers to assemble. They appealed to a public rule of faith. They spoke of the faith handed down in the churches. They used creedal summaries to fence off heresy and identify the apostolic faith. Against the Gnostics, the rule of faith was not a decorative tradition. It was a weapon.

Protestants should not be embarrassed by that. They should agree with it. The rule of faith was public, inherited, ecclesial, creedal, and binding. It constrained interpretation. It named the God of Scripture. It confessed the incarnation, death, resurrection, and return of Christ. It gave the Church a grammar for reading the Bible against heretical misuse. But it was not a second stream of revelation standing beside Scripture. Its authority was ministerial. It summarized and guarded the apostolic deposit. It did not create it.

That distinction is the difference between historic Protestantism and modern biblicism. The “no creed but the Bible” instinct is not the Reformation. It is a reduction of the Reformation into a slogan the Reformers themselves would not have recognized. The Reformers cited Augustine, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Irenaeus, and the councils because they were not trying to invent Christianity from scratch. They were arguing about the proper ordering of authorities within the Church.

The Protestant claim was never that the Church has no authority. The claim was that the Church does not have the same kind of authority as Scripture.

This matters especially when the debate turns to the canon. The Catholic argument usually runs like this: Protestants cannot derive the canon from Scripture alone. Therefore they depend on the Church. Therefore the Church must stand in an infallible relation over the canon. The move is rhetorically effective because it shifts categories halfway through the argument.

Scripture is authoritative because God breathed it. The Church recognizes that authority. Recognition is not creation. Athanasius did not make Christ divine by defending him. The councils did not make the Son consubstantial with the Father by confessing it. They recognized, defended, and gave dogmatic form to what was already true.

The same logic applies to the canon. The Church did not make the Word of God the Word of God. The Church received it, read it, tested it, guarded it, and confessed it. The authority of Scripture is ontological before it is ecclesial. It rests in God’s act of speaking, not in the Church’s act of recognition.

This does not mean the Church’s role was unnecessary. It means the Church’s role was not constitutive. The canon was recognized through worship, usage, doctrinal coherence, apostolic origin, and reception across time and geography. The process was historical, uneven, and human. It was also real. It produced convergence, not chaos.

Modern arguments often treat that kind of process as inadequate because it does not deliver the kind of certainty they demand. But that demand is the issue. It assumes that unless an authority arrives in a single infallible act, visible and self-identifying from the start, then it cannot truly bind. Church history does not bear that out.

Nicaea is a good example. The council did not end the Arian controversy the moment the bishops left the room. It was resisted, contested, and received over time. Its authority became clear through the Church’s continued recognition that it faithfully confessed the apostolic faith. It bound the Church, but not because it operated as an independent source of revelation. It bound because it told the truth about Scripture’s Christ.

This is why appeals to an infallible Church do not remove interpretation. They move interpretation to another location. One still has to ask which councils are ecumenical, which statements are irreformable, what those statements mean, how they relate to previous teaching, and how they apply to new disputes. The interpreter has not vanished. He has been handed a thicker rulebook.

That does not make Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy incoherent. It does expose the cheap version of their apologetic. The promise of a visible authority that ends the burden of interpretation is overstated. Every communion interprets. Every tradition receives, weighs, distinguishes, and applies. Every authority structure requires judgment.

Share

So the real question is not whether Christians can avoid interpretation. They cannot. The real question is where authority finally terminates. Historic Protestantism answers: authority terminates in the speech of God.

That answer does not abolish the Church. It places the Church under the Word. The Church teaches, preserves, disciplines, interprets, and hands down the faith. It has real authority. But its authority is derivative and ministerial. It is not self-authenticating. It does not stand over Scripture. It does not complete Scripture as a co-principle of revelation.

This is also why Protestants can say that the Second London Baptist Confession has real authority without treating it as infallible. A Baptist church can be bound by that confession because it has adopted it as a faithful summary of Scripture. Its ministers can teach from it. Its members can be examined by it. Its doctrine can be guarded through it. But if the confession were shown to contradict Scripture, Scripture would judge the confession. That does not make the confession meaningless. It makes it subordinate.

The same is true of creeds and councils. A Protestant can say, “You may not reject Nicaea,” while also saying, “Nicaea is authoritative because it faithfully confesses what Scripture teaches.” That is not a contradiction. It is the difference between final authority and real subordinate authority.

The modern evangelical problem is not that it has taken sola Scriptura too seriously. It has not taken it seriously enough. It has confused Scripture’s final authority with Scripture’s solitary authority. It has often treated tradition as a threat rather than as the Church’s accumulated judgment under the Word. It has mistaken fallibility for uselessness and then acted surprised when Rome and Orthodoxy appear to offer a sturdier house.

But the answer to evangelicalism is not to hand the Church an authority Christ did not give her. The answer is to recover the older Protestant account: Scripture as final norm, the Church as real ministerial authority, tradition as inherited judgment, confessions as binding but reformable, and councils as authoritative insofar as they faithfully speak according to the Word of God.

That account will not satisfy the desire for instant closure. It was never meant to. It gives something less theatrical and more durable: a Church bound to the speech of God, corrected by the speech of God, and forbidden to place even its own best judgments beyond the reach of the speech of God.

Scripture is the highest court of appeal, not the only voice in the room. That sentence is simple. It is also the difference between historic Protestantism and the fragile biblicism that keeps losing arguments it never should have accepted.

Share

Subscribe now

“Those people just need to get a job.”

The comment reflects one of the dominant explanations for homelessness. The competing explanation is equally familiar. Homelessness, we are told, is fundamentally a housing affordability problem. People are homeless because rents have risen faster than wages. Both explanations identify part of the problem. Neither explains what I see every day.

According to the 2024 Homeless Crisis Response System Report, the largest reported cause of homelessness in Clark County is the inability to afford housing. Twenty-five percent of respondents identified housing affordability as the primary reason for their homelessness (Council for the Homeless, 2025, 2024 Homeless Crisis Response System Report; Clark County HMIS data, January 1–December 31, 2024). The statistic is revealing, though perhaps not in the way it is usually interpreted.

Over the years, I have watched families enter our shelter, pay no rent, maintain steady employment, and fail to save money. I have watched residents receive tax refunds large enough to eliminate debt or secure future housing only to see the funds disappear within weeks. I have watched households whose income exceeded their obligations continue to fall behind financially. If affordability alone explained homelessness, these observations should be rare. They are not. The problem is that “cannot afford housing” identifies the point at which the crisis became visible. It does not necessarily identify the forces that produced the crisis. A family misses rent because the money is unavailable. That much is obvious. The more difficult question is why the money was unavailable.

When I first entered this work, I assumed the answer was financial ignorance. Experience eventually pushed me toward a different conclusion. Most residents understand basic budgeting principles. Most know they should save money. Most know they should spend less than they earn. The challenge is not usually knowledge. The challenge is that financial decisions are embedded within systems of relationships, obligations, loyalties, and assumptions about the future.

Ruby Payne describes one of the hidden rules operating within many poverty communities:

“One of the hidden rules of poverty is that extra money is shared. In middle class there is a great deal of emphasis on being self-sufficient. In poverty, the clear understanding is that one will never get ahead, so if extra money is available, it is either shared or immediately spent, often on some type of entertainment because entertainment takes away the pain. There are always emergencies and needs; one might as well enjoy the moment. If you don’t share your money, the next time you’re in need you’ll most likely be left out in the cold. It’s the hidden rule of the support system” (A Framework for Understanding Poverty, p. 26).

That description aligns closely with what I have observed. Many residents do not make financial decisions as isolated individuals attempting to maximize future wealth. They make financial decisions as members of networks. Money flows toward relatives in crisis, friends in need, immediate pressures, and present obligations. Future stability competes with present loyalty. Long-term planning competes with short-term survival. Viewed through a middle-class framework, these decisions often appear irrational. Viewed through the logic of reciprocal support networks, they become understandable.

This is why I find both popular explanations of homelessness insufficient. The “get a job” explanation assumes income creates stability. The affordability explanation assumes resources create stability. Neither assumption consistently survives contact with reality.

Employment matters. Housing costs matter. Wages matter. Yet the longer I work with homeless families, the more convinced I become that homelessness cannot be understood apart from the systems of values, obligations, and habits that shape how people use the resources they possess. Housing affordability may be the most commonly reported cause of homelessness. My experience suggests it is often the final chapter of the story rather than the first.

However, the more I sat with this, I believe the tendency to prioritize inclusion over formation appears to be symptomatic of a much broader shift within contemporary Christianity. Increasingly, churches seem to assume that the primary spiritual need of every person is belonging. Entire ministry philosophies have been constructed around this assumption. Sermons, small groups, mission statements, visitor experiences, and discipleship pathways frequently communicate the same underlying message: You matter. You are welcome. You belong here.

The question is not whether belonging matters. It does. Human beings need community. We need to know that we are seen, valued, and loved. For some people, particularly those carrying wounds of rejection, abandonment, isolation, or questions of self-worth, belonging may indeed be the deepest spiritual need. Yet not everyone arrives at church carrying that wound.

Yet, anyone familiar with the practice of chaplaincy or spiritual assessment quickly discovers that human beings do not suffer in identical ways. Different forms of suffering generate different spiritual questions.

Some arrive with a crisis of meaning and direction. They are not primarily asking whether they are accepted. They are asking what their life is for. They want to know what is true, what deserves their loyalty, what obligations they bear, and what kind of person they ought to become. They are searching for wisdom, purpose, vocation, and clarity. The central question haunting them is not, “Will this community receive me?” but, “How should I live?” Spiritual AIM identifies this as a distinct spiritual need altogether: the need for meaning and direction.

Others arrive burdened by fractured relationships, guilt, resentment, betrayal, addiction, or moral failure. Their deepest question is neither belonging nor purpose. It is reconciliation. They need to forgive or be forgiven. They need to make peace with God, with others, or with themselves. They do not primarily need a community that assures them they are accepted. They need help facing truths they would rather avoid and relationships they can no longer ignore.

The danger arises when the church mistakes one of these needs for the whole of the human condition. The person whose primary spiritual need is reconciliation does not necessarily need to be told how valuable he is. In many cases, that is precisely what he already believes. His problem, at least in the presenting moment, is not that he loves himself too little, but that his love of self has become detached from love of God and neighbor. He does not enter the room saying, “I am worthless.” He enters saying, “I have been wronged.” He does not primarily blame himself. He blames others. He does not need the church to intensify his sense of personal significance. He needs the church to help him tell the truth, take responsibility, seek forgiveness, and learn to love beyond the boundaries of his own grievance.

The same misdiagnosis occurs with those whose primary spiritual need is meaning and direction. To tell such a person, “You belong here,” may be kind, but it may not answer the question actually tormenting him. His ache is not necessarily exclusion. It is disorientation. He is not asking whether there is room for him in the community. He is asking what his life is for, what is true, what should be chosen, what must be surrendered, and what kind of person he is becoming. Belonging may comfort him, but it cannot by itself guide him. A seat at the table is a gift, but it is not the same thing as a path.

This is why the church’s overreliance on belonging language can become pastorally dull even when it remains theologically true. It is not false to tell people they are loved, welcomed, and valued. It is false to assume that this is always the word they most need to hear. Some need to be valued. Some need to be guided. Some need to be confronted in love. A church that cannot tell the difference will eventually offer comfort where direction is needed, affirmation where repentance is needed, and inclusion where formation is required.

Ironically, this narrowing of vision often produces the very problems it seeks to solve. Human beings rarely experience belonging through affirmation alone. They experience belonging through shared commitments, shared sacrifices, shared loves, and shared practices. In other words, belonging is often the fruit of formation rather than its substitute. The deepest communities in human history have not been those that demanded the least from their members, but those that united people around a common purpose that transcended the individual.

The New Testament reflects this pattern. Jesus certainly welcomes people. The apostles certainly proclaim God’s mercy. Yet neither treats acceptance as the end of the story. Again and again, they call people toward repentance, holiness, obedience, forgiveness, courage, generosity, and self-denial. The church was never envisioned merely as a place where people discovered they belonged. It was envisioned as a people being shaped into the likeness of Christ. Belonging emerged from participation in that shared life.

The church does not need less compassion. It needs better diagnosis. A physician who prescribes the same treatment to every patient is not compassionate. He is careless. Likewise, a church that offers belonging as the answer to every spiritual need will inevitably leave many forms of spiritual suffering untouched. Some people need to know they are loved. Some need to discover what they are called to do. Some need to repent, forgive, reconcile, and begin again. The task of the church is not to choose between these needs, but to learn to recognize them. Only then can we offer the whole gospel rather than the fragment that happens to resonate most with our age.

Chaplains are also interested in what people do. Yet their concern is assessment, not instruction, and intervention rather than formation. I enter the room not as a teacher, theologian, or ethicist, but as a shepherd of souls. My work begins with listening. With the same attention the biblical scholar gives to the text, I give to a patient’s words, relationships, questions, and behaviors.

As the biblical scholar offers an interpretation, the chaplain offers an assessment. A spiritual assessment is not a description of vice. Spiritual distress and sin are not the same thing. In fact, as a chaplain, I am rarely concerned with determining the precise boundary between them. My attention is directed elsewhere. It is directed upstream.

A spiritual assessment is an attempt to discern which unmet spiritual needs are most active beneath a person’s experience and how those concerns are shaping their thoughts, emotions, relationships, and behavior. The focus is not primarily on the symptom, nor even on the behavior itself, but on the deeper spiritual needs that appear threatened, frustrated, wounded, or distorted.

This begins with a particular understanding of what it means to be human. Human beings are relational creatures. We are created for meaningful connection with others, with ourselves, and ultimately with God. Because we reflect the relational life of our Creator, our need for love, purpose, belonging, direction, and reconciliation is not merely psychological or emotional. It is spiritual.

For this reason, the Spiritual Assessment and Intervention Model (Spiritual AIM) proposes that human experience is organized around three primary spiritual needs: Meaning and Direction, Self-Worth and Belonging to Community, and Reconciliation—the need to Love and Be Loved.

These are not pathologies to be overcome. They are dimensions of human flourishing. Every person requires meaning. Every person requires belonging. Every person requires love. Spiritual distress emerges when these goods become threatened. Spiritual distortions emerge in the ways we attempt to secure them.

If these needs are truly fundamental to human experience, we should expect to find them wherever human beings are found, including within Scripture. This raises the central question of this essay: What happens when biblical characters are approached with the attentiveness a chaplain brings to a patient?

The question has obvious limitations. Spiritual AIM was developed for conversation. A chaplain listens, asks questions, tests assumptions, and refines assessments in real time with the patient. None of that is possible with biblical characters.

Yet it does not make the inquiry speculative. In fact, the limitation may not be as severe as it first appears. Spiritual AIM is not built on guesswork. It attends to patterns. Words matter. Questions matter. Relational posture matters. Blame matters. Withdrawal, conflict, silence, pleading, laughter, accusation, and flight are not random narrative details. They are the visible shape of spiritual distress. Biblical narratives are filled with precisely these things.

This matters because moral readings often stop at the visible act. They tell us what to imitate or avoid, but they can overlook the spiritual distress from which the act emerges. Spiritual AIM asks a different question. What primary unmet spiritual need appears most prominent in this person’s experience? The goal is not to replace moral evaluation. It is to understand the spiritual concern around which the person’s thoughts, relationships, emotions, and behavior appear to organize.

The story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar in Genesis 15–21 provides an opportunity to explore the question. The narrative begins with a problem. Years earlier, God had promised Abraham descendants and a future beyond anything he could have imagined. Yet as the years passed, the promise remained unfulfilled. Abraham and Sarah grew older. Sarah remained unable to conceive. What God had spoken seemed increasingly disconnected from what they experienced.

The tension created by that delay drives the narrative that follows. Sarah proposes that Abraham father a child through her servant Hagar. Abraham agrees. Hagar conceives. What begins as an attempt to resolve uncertainty quickly gives rise to conflict, resentment, humiliation, abandonment, and fractured relationships that reverberate through the household for years.

The story is often read through the lens of faith and unbelief, patience and impatience, obedience and disobedience. Such readings are neither wrong nor unimportant. Yet they can leave a different question unexplored. What spiritual concerns emerge within the lives of those caught inside the story?

The crisis is shared. The spiritual distress is not. Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar all inhabit the same narrative. They do not inhabit the same experience of that narrative. The text repeatedly draws attention to different concerns, different vulnerabilities, and different relational tensions. What appears most threatened for one character does not necessarily appear most threatened for another. (This is precisely the kind of distinction Spiritual AIM trains chaplains to notice.)

Abraham: Meaning and Direction

Persons whose primary spiritual need centers on Meaning and Direction often experience distress through questioning, interpretive searching, uncertainty, and difficulty establishing a coherent path forward. Rather than directing blame toward themselves or others, they frequently seek understanding. Their attention gravitates toward purpose, future, direction, and the unresolved question of how present circumstances fit within a larger story.

Abraham’s speech throughout Genesis 15–21 repeatedly reflects this pattern. His recurring concern is not whether God will fulfill the promise but how God intends to fulfill it.

This pattern emerges immediately. After God promises protection and reward, Abraham responds, “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless?” (Gen. 15:2, ESV). A few verses later he presses the concern further. “Behold, you have given me no offspring” (15:3). His distress is not primarily relational. He does not direct blame toward Sarah, himself, or even God. Instead, he attempts to reconcile divine promise with observable reality. The concern is directional and interpretive. How can the promise proceed if no heir exists?

Genesis 15:8 strengthens the pattern. Abraham asks, “O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” Again, his response emerges through questioning rather than accusation. He seeks assurance, coherence, and orientation within circumstances that remain unresolved.

The same concern continues throughout the narrative. When Sarah proposes that he father a child through Hagar, Abraham agrees (Gen. 16:2). The decision is often interpreted as a failure of faith. It may be that. Yet it also reflects an attempt to resolve covenantal uncertainty through an available human pathway. The promise remains certain. The means of fulfillment remain unclear.

Genesis 17 intensifies the pattern. When God announces that Sarah will bear a son, Abraham laughs and asks, “Shall a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old?” (17:17). He then pleads, “Oh that Ishmael might live before you!” (17:18). Abraham does not reject God’s promise. He attempts to reinterpret it through the son already present.

Even Genesis 21 reflects the same orientation. After Sarah demands that Hagar and Ishmael be sent away, Abraham is distressed “on account of his son” (21:11). God responds by providing renewed direction, reaffirming both Isaac’s role in the covenant and Ishmael’s future.

Throughout Genesis 15–21, Abraham repeatedly seeks assurance, clarification, and direction. His recurring concern is not whether God will fulfill the promise but how God intends to fulfill it. The promise itself rarely appears in doubt. The means of fulfillment do.

Sarah: Reconciliation / To Love and Be Loved

Persons whose primary spiritual need centers on Reconciliation often experience distress through blame, mistrust, relational conflict, and attempts to repair or secure relationships through control. Their attention gravitates toward questions of loyalty, injury, fairness, obligation, and relational security. Distress frequently emerges through fractured relationships rather than through interpretive questioning or self-condemnation.

Sarah’s speech and behavior throughout Genesis 15–21 repeatedly reflect this pattern.

The narrative context of Sarah’s distress is undeniably painful. Years of barrenness, covenant uncertainty, and social vulnerability shape everything that follows. Yet Spiritual AIM assessment focuses not simply upon suffering itself but upon how distress manifests. Sarah’s suffering consistently surfaces through relationships.

The pattern becomes clear after Hagar conceives. Sarah says to Abraham, “May the wrong done to me be on you!” (Gen. 16:5). The statement is significant because of its direction. Sarah’s distress immediately moves outward into accusation. Rather than questioning the promise or searching for meaning, she identifies a relational injury and assigns responsibility. She continues, “The LORD judge between you and me” (16:5). The language is relational, judicial, and conflict-oriented.

The conflict with Hagar intensifies the pattern. After Hagar conceives, she “looked with contempt on her mistress” (16:4). Sarah experiences the situation not merely as disappointment but as relational destabilization. The response is coercive. “Sarai dealt harshly with her” (16:6). Distress externalizes into domination, hostility, and fractured communion.

The same orientation appears again after Isaac’s birth. When Sarah sees Ishmael “laughing,” she immediately tells Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son” (21:10). Once again, perceived threat is managed through relational exclusion. Sarah attempts to restore security by redrawing relational boundaries.

Even her response to the promise in Genesis 18 carries this relational quality. Sarah laughs inwardly at the announcement of a son and later denies laughing when confronted (18:12–15). The exchange reveals defensiveness within a moment of vulnerability and exposure. The tension is interpersonal as much as interpretive.

Throughout Genesis 15–21, Sarah repeatedly experiences distress through the lens of relationship. Her attention returns to perceived injuries, threats, loyalties, and conflicts. Again and again, she seeks to restore stability by controlling the relational field around her. The recurring concern is not primarily how the promise will be fulfilled but who can be trusted within the struggle to receive it.

Hagar: Self-Worth and Belonging to Community

Persons whose primary spiritual need centers on Self-Worth and Belonging to Community often experience distress through feelings of invisibility, abandonment, displacement, dependency, and uncertainty regarding their place within relationships and community. Their attention gravitates toward questions of worth, recognition, acceptance, and whether they truly belong. Distress frequently emerges through withdrawal, isolation, or fears of being forgotten rather than through sustained blame or interpretive questioning.

Hagar’s speech and behavior throughout Genesis 15–21 repeatedly reflect this pattern.

Genesis introduces Hagar primarily through social vulnerability. She is “an Egyptian” and Sarah’s servant (Gen. 16:1). Unlike Abraham and Sarah, she possesses little power over the decisions shaping her life. She is given to Abraham as part of another family’s attempt to secure offspring. Her story begins not with self-determination but with dependency and displacement.

The narrative becomes more complicated after conception. Genesis states that Hagar “looked with contempt on her mistress” (16:4). Yet this moment does not become the controlling pattern of her story. The narrative repeatedly returns instead to themes of vulnerability, flight, abandonment, and the search for a place within a world that continually pushes her to the margins.

After Sarah deals harshly with her, Hagar flees into the wilderness (16:6). The response is revealing. She does not attempt to seize control of the household or retaliate against Sarah. She disappears. Distress manifests through withdrawal and isolation rather than domination or accusation.

The wilderness encounter in Genesis 16 becomes the center of her story. The angel of the LORD finds her beside a spring and addresses her personally: “Hagar, servant of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” (16:8). For perhaps the first time in the narrative, Hagar is addressed not merely as a servant but as a person. The encounter culminates in her declaration, “You are a God of seeing” (16:13). The statement is remarkable because it identifies the deepest movement within her experience. Hagar’s crisis is not primarily one of direction or reconciliation. It is the experience of being unseen, forgotten, and displaced. God’s response is recognition.

The same pattern reappears in Genesis 21. Expelled from Abraham’s household, Hagar wanders in the wilderness until the water is gone. She places Ishmael at a distance because she cannot bear to watch him die (21:16). Once again, the narrative portrays vulnerability, helplessness, and abandonment rather than accusation or control. God’s response is likewise familiar. “God heard the voice of the boy” (21:17). Hagar is seen. Ishmael is heard. Their future is preserved.

Throughout Genesis 16–21, Hagar repeatedly confronts the threat of losing her place, her security, and even her visibility. The recurring concern is not how the promise will be fulfilled or who is to blame for its complications. It is whether she and her son have a place within the story at all.

What Spiritual Assessment Reveals

The significance of this exercise lies less in the individual assessments than in what they reveal about spiritual distress itself. Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar inhabit the same story, endure the same covenantal uncertainty, and experience the same unfolding events. Yet their distress does not manifest in the same way. Abraham searches for direction. Sarah struggles through fractured relationships and questions of trust. Hagar confronts abandonment, invisibility, and the threat of exclusion.

This observation suggests that spiritual distress cannot be reduced to a single pattern. Human beings do not merely sin differently. They suffer differently. The same crisis may activate different spiritual concerns, expose different vulnerabilities, and generate different distortions.

For pastors, chaplains, and spiritual caregivers, this distinction matters. Effective spiritual care requires more than identifying behavior. It requires learning to recognize the spiritual concern around which that behavior has become organized. Before guidance, correction, encouragement, or healing can occur, there must first be understanding.

Spiritual assessment offers one way of cultivating that understanding. It trains us to ask not only what a person has done, but what spiritual need appears most active within their experience. Sometimes the path toward healing begins not with a better answer, but with a better question.

His answer centered on the Christian doctrine of sin. Human beings occupy a peculiar position in creation. We are finite creatures bound by limitation, vulnerability, and mortality. Yet we are also capable of self-transcendence. We can step back from ourselves, imagine alternate futures, judge our own actions, and contemplate eternity. According to Niebuhr, this tension generates anxiety. Faced with the insecurity of being finite, human beings seek to secure themselves through power, knowledge, righteousness, or control. Pride becomes the characteristic form of sin because it represents an attempt to escape creatureliness by making the self larger than it is.

Few theologians described this dynamic more powerfully. Yet the very success of Niebuhr’s account raised a question. What if not all forms of spiritual distortion look like self-exaltation? What if some people go wrong not by making themselves too large but by making themselves too small?

In 1960, Valerie Saiving Goldstein posed precisely this challenge in her landmark essay, The Human Situation: A Feminine View. Her concern was not that Niebuhr was wrong about pride. Her concern was that he had mistaken one manifestation of the human predicament for the whole of it.

Saiving observed that much twentieth-century theology described sin as self-assertion and love as selflessness. Human beings were portrayed as creatures anxious about their own survival and significance. Sin emerged when they attempted to overcome that anxiety through domination, prestige, power, or self-aggrandizement. Love, by contrast, required self-giving and self-sacrifice. The problem, Saiving argued, was that this description fit some people far better than others.

For many women, she suggested, the central temptation was not excessive self-assertion but its opposite. Instead of magnifying the self, they often struggled with what she described as “triviality, distractibility, and diffuseness,” “dependence on others for one’s own self-definition,” and the “underdevelopment or negation of the self.”

Saiving’s challenge was theological. If the human predicament has been described incorrectly, then the proposed cure may also be inadequate. A person whose problem is domination may indeed need self-sacrifice. A person whose problem is self-erasure may not.

The irony is difficult to miss. A theology built around combating pride can become remarkably effective at teaching people to surrender themselves. Yet for some people, surrender is not the problem. They have spent their entire lives surrendering. They do not need to become less visible. They need to become visible at all.

Two decades later, Susan Nelson Dunfee sharpened the argument. She observed that Christian theology had developed sophisticated accounts of pride while neglecting what she called “the sin of hiding.” Women, she argued, were often taught to confess the wrong sins. They were called to repent of self-assertion while their actual distortions remained unnamed. The result was not liberation but bondage. By failing to identify the real problem, the church inadvertently reinforced it. As Dunfee put it, Christianity had often “added to woman’s guilt and failed to call her into her full humanity.”

Dunfee’s observation remains unsettling because it exposes a possibility few theologians enjoy considering. What if some forms of spiritual distortion have been hiding in plain sight?

Most Christians know how to recognize arrogance. We recognize the executive who dominates every meeting. We recognize the pastor who cannot tolerate criticism. We recognize the politician convinced of his own righteousness. But what about the person who disappears? What about the individual who cannot articulate a personal desire apart from the expectations of others? What about the person whose identity exists entirely through service, caregiving, or accommodation? What about the person who has become so diffuse that no clear self remains to be offered to God?

These patterns rarely attract the same moral scrutiny as pride. They often appear virtuous. They can masquerade as humility, sacrifice, devotion, or service. Yet beneath the surface they may represent profound distortions of human flourishing.

At this point the discussion is often reduced to a debate about gender. Saiving’s original argument emerged from reflection on women’s experience, but the deeper question extends beyond women and men. The larger issue is whether Christian theology has sometimes universalized one manifestation of spiritual distortion while overlooking others.

One of the difficulties in evaluating Saiving’s critique is determining whether she identified a genuine blind spot in Christian anthropology or merely described patterns associated with a particular social location. Even if one grants her observations, an obvious question remains. How would we know whether these neglected manifestations of spiritual distortion actually occur with any regularity? More importantly, how might they be recognized apart from the theoretical frameworks that first identified them?

However, critique alone cannot carry the argument very far. If pride is not the only recognizable expression of fallen humanity, what other patterns should theology attend to? How might they be described? How might they be distinguished?

A similar question was being explored from an entirely different direction within the field of professional chaplaincy. While theologians debated the nature of sin, hospital chaplains were wrestling with a different problem altogether: How does spiritual distress actually present itself in human lives? Physicians diagnose disease. Psychologists assess cognition, emotion, and behavior. What exactly does a chaplain assess?

The question proved surprisingly difficult. Spiritual distress is notoriously resistant to measurement. Unlike blood pressure, it cannot be observed directly. Unlike depression, it rarely presents through a standardized cluster of symptoms. Two patients facing identical diagnoses may exhibit radically different forms of suffering. One becomes consumed with questions of meaning and purpose. Another focuses almost exclusively on fractured relationships. A third struggles primarily with worth, identity, belonging, or abandonment. The external crisis may be the same. The internal experience is not.

Out of decades of clinical observation emerged the Spiritual Assessment and Intervention Model, commonly known as Spiritual AIM. Developed through more than twenty years of chaplaincy practice and supervision, the model arose from a simple but profound observation: human beings do not experience spiritual distress in identical ways. Its architects repeatedly noticed that patients confronting illness, mortality, loss, and uncertainty tended to cluster around recurring concerns. Some wrestled primarily with questions of meaning and direction. Others with self-worth and belonging within community. Still others with reconciliation, forgiveness, love, and broken relationships. Rather than reducing these patterns to personality types or psychological traits, Spiritual AIM proposed that they reflected differing primary spiritual needs that become especially visible under conditions of crisis.

At first glance, this framework appears far removed from the concerns of Saiving and Dunfee. Spiritual AIM was not developed as a theory of sin. It was not designed to critique Niebuhr. Its architects were not attempting to revise theological anthropology. They were trying to understand why people suffer differently.

Yet this distance is precisely what makes the convergence so intriguing. Saiving and Dunfee argued that theology had become adept at recognizing certain manifestations of spiritual distortion while overlooking others. Spiritual AIM arrives at a similar conclusion from an entirely different discipline, identifying recurring and distinguishable patterns of spiritual struggle that emerge under crisis.

The convergence becomes particularly interesting when one considers Spiritual AIM’s category of Self-Worth and Belonging to Community. The category begins with the assumption that human beings have a fundamental need to know that they are valued, that they belong, and that they have a meaningful place within a community. When this need comes under threat, distress often emerges through concerns of identity, worth, acceptance, and belonging. Yet what makes these struggles difficult to recognize is that they frequently appear under the guise of virtue. Patients may minimize their own needs, resist receiving care, avoid burdening others, or define their value almost entirely through service, caregiving, and responsibility toward others.

Their distress does not manifest through domination or self-assertion but through self-effacement. In this respect, Spiritual AIM begins to illuminate the same territory that concerned both Saiving and Dunfee. The problem is not merely wounded self-esteem. It is the tendency to disappear into relationships, roles, and responsibilities to the point that one’s own personhood becomes difficult to recognize.

Spiritual AIM is not a theory of sin. Its categories are not descriptions of vice. Meaning and Direction, Self-Worth and Belonging to Community, and Reconciliation are not pathologies to be overcome. They are fundamental human needs. Every person requires meaning. Every person requires belonging. Every person requires love. To lack these things is not holiness. It is deprivation.

This distinction matters because spiritual distress and spiritual distortion are not identical. A patient wrestling with the loss of identity brought on by cancer is not necessarily exhibiting a moral failure. A father fearful of becoming a burden to his family is not automatically trapped in sin. A woman grieving the loss of the caregiving role that once gave structure and purpose to her life is experiencing a real spiritual wound. Distress itself is not the problem.

Yet crisis has a way of exposing the places where distortion takes root. When meaning becomes threatened, faith itself becomes vulnerable. Some respond by grasping for certainty and control. Uncertainty becomes intolerable. Every unanswered question demands an answer. Every ambiguity must be resolved. The need for meaning hardens into the need for mastery. Others move toward despair. Hope gives way to cynicism, resignation, or nihilism. The search for meaning collapses into the conviction that no meaning exists to be found.

When belonging becomes threatened, the temptation is often self-erasure. The desire to be loved collapses into the need to be needed. Worth becomes inseparable from usefulness. One’s identity becomes dependent upon the approval, affirmation, or expectations of others. What began as a legitimate desire for community becomes the gradual disappearance of the self.

When reconciliation becomes threatened, the temptation is often blame, resentment, or domination. The desire to love and be loved becomes consumed by conflict. Relationships become battlegrounds rather than gifts. Energy is devoted to controlling, accusing, or correcting others rather than restoring communion.

The distortion, in each case, is not the need itself. The distortion emerges in the way the need is pursued. This distinction helps explain why certain manifestations of spiritual struggle are so difficult to recognize. Pride announces itself. Domination attracts attention. Control is visible. Self-erasure is quieter. It often disguises itself as virtue. The person who never asks for help appears generous. The person who consistently places others first appears selfless. The person who suppresses every personal desire appears sacrificial. Yet self-sacrifice and self-negation are not the same thing. Christianity calls people to love their neighbor as themselves, not instead of themselves. One cannot offer oneself in love if no self remains to offer.

This, perhaps, is where the significance of Saiving’s critique and Spiritual AIM’s observations finally converge. Both draw attention to dimensions of human experience that can be overlooked when spiritual distortion is described too narrowly. One arrives there through theological reflection. The other through clinical observation. Together, they suggest that Christian anthropology requires a richer descriptive vocabulary than pride alone.

The language available to a tradition shapes what it can recognize, what it can challenge, and what it can heal. When entire patterns of spiritual distress remain unnamed, they are easily mistaken for personality, temperament, maturity, or even virtue. The person struggling with control is often visible. The person disappearing into caregiving, usefulness, responsibility, or the needs of others may be far less so.

This is where the contribution of Spiritual AIM may be especially valuable. Its primary achievement is not the creation of new categories but the cultivation of attention. By listening for recurring spiritual needs rather than beginning with predetermined assumptions about how distress should appear, chaplains are trained to notice dimensions of human experience that might otherwise remain hidden.

For pastors, spiritual directors, and chaplains, this kind of assessment offers more than a diagnostic tool. It offers a way of seeing. Spiritual care depends upon the ability to discern what is actually occurring beneath the surface of a person’s words, behaviors, relationships, and questions. The same underlying crisis may emerge through very different concerns.

Spiritual assessment, therefore, becomes an essential pastoral task. Before spiritual care can guide, encourage, challenge, or heal, it must first learn to recognize what is present. The work of spiritual care begins by learning to see more clearly.

That assumption once sat so deep in ordinary life that nobody thought much about it. Children pretended. Adults corrected them. Reality remained intact. Now we hold corporate trainings about it.

A remarkable amount of modern public life revolves around persuading people to speak as though identity originates entirely from inward declaration. Names, pronouns, categories, even the body itself, are increasingly treated not as realities to be received but as materials to be negotiated. The highest authority no longer belongs to nature, family, religion, or biology. It belongs to the private self. This is usually presented as compassion. It is actually a revolution in authority.

Names are not random sounds. A name says something about where you came from, who claims you, and what story you belong to. Scripture understands this instinctively. Adam names the animals. Fathers name sons. Kings rename servants. God renames His people. Abram becomes Abraham. Jacob becomes Israel. Simon becomes Peter. The direction matters because naming reflects authority. The one giving the name stands in relation over the one receiving it.

Modern culture wants to reverse the flow completely. The modern self wants authorship.

That is why arguments about naming have become so intense. The conflict is not really about vocabulary. It is about whether reality is something discovered or something declared. Once identity becomes self-created, society itself must participate in maintaining the creation. Language stops being descriptive and becomes ceremonial. Speech becomes public recognition of another person’s inward claims.

This is why people now speak with such strange moral urgency about names. A disagreement over language is treated as a denial of existence itself because the self being defended rests almost entirely on assertion. You can feel the instability underneath it all.

The modern world tells people to invent themselves and then acts surprised when they become anxious, fragile, and exhausted. Human beings were never designed to carry the full burden of self-creation. We did not create our bodies, our century, our parents, our mortality, or the basic structure of reality. “It is He who made us, and we are His.” We arrive as creatures before we ever become consumers, voters, activists, or brands.

Older societies understood this much more clearly. The purpose of maturity was not inventing yourself from nothing. It was learning how to inhabit reality truthfully. Christianity begins there.

In Scripture, names are overwhelmingly received, not invented. God tells Abram, “No longer will you be called Abram… your name will be Abraham.” Jacob receives the name Israel only after wrestling with God and walking away limping. Jesus looks at Simon and says, “You shall be called Cephas,” before Peter has become anything like a rock. The pattern repeats because the named person does not stand above the one giving the name.

Christians themselves take their name from Christ. That fact has become so familiar it barely sounds strange anymore, but it should. The church does not invent its identity. It bears the name of another man. Baptism itself functions this way. Christians are baptized “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” They enter a name before they build a personality.

The Bible also treats that name with a seriousness modern religion often avoids. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain” is not mainly about avoiding profanity. Israel carried God’s name before the nations. To bear it vainly meant to represent Him falsely. The issue was never merely pronunciation but contradiction.

A holy name places demands on the person carrying it. This is why the New Testament constantly ties identity to conduct. “Walk worthy of the calling you have received.” “Whatever you do… do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus.” “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.” Christianity is not built on the modern fantasy of radical self-authorship. It begins with belonging.

Modern culture dislikes this because it treats identity primarily as self-expression. Biblical religion treats identity as covenantal. You belong before you define yourself. You receive before you announce. Gratitude comes before self-construction.

A society built entirely on self-definition eventually collapses under the weight of its own subjectivity. Every feeling demands validation. Every preference asks for institutional recognition. Every inward impulse seeks legal and linguistic protection. The result is not freedom but permanent instability because the self cannot sustain the pressure of acting as its own creator.

Subscribe now

The real Jesus is not the chaplain of our moral preferences. He is not sent into the world to apologize for Sinai, blush at Sodom, wince at the flood, and assure us that the prophets got carried away. He is the eternal Son, the Word who was with God and was God, the one through whom all things were made. If John 1 means anything, it means Bethlehem was not His beginning. It was His arrival in flesh.

What passes for careful hermeneutics today would not have impressed the early church. They had already seen what happens when you blur the identity of the Son or soften His role in God’s action. Writing against Praxeas, Tertullian did not attempt to rescue God from His own Scriptures. He identified the one acting in them.

“It is the Son, therefore, who has been from the beginning administering judgment, throwing down the haughty tower, and dividing the tongues, punishing the whole world by the violence of waters, raining upon Sodom and Gomorrah fire and brimstone, as the LORD from the LORD. For He it was who at all times came down to hold converse with men, from Adam on to the patriarchs and the prophets, in vision, in dream, in mirror, in dark saying; ever from the beginning laying the foundation of the course of His dispensations, which He meant to follow out to the very last.”

That claim leaves very little room for selective readings of Scripture. Tertullian does not allow you to attribute only the comforting parts of God’s action to Christ while quietly relocating the rest. He does not isolate the Son in the gentle scenes and leave the remainder to a vague doctrine of divine mystery. He traces a single line of action in which the one who speaks, the one who appears, and the one who judges are identified as the same Son, and that identification forces the question of whether the New Testament confirms or overturns that unity.

Subscribe now

The New Testament confirms it. Its claims about Christ are not limited to revelation but extend to agency. “All things were made through him” (John 1:3) and “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17) establish that nothing in creation or its history stands outside His work. “The Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son” (John 5:22) assigns judgment itself to Him. Taken together, these claims do not permit a divided account of Christ’s activity. If He is the agent of creation and the bearer of judgment, then the historical acts by which God creates and judges cannot be placed outside His work.

Scripture presents those acts as direct and revelatory. The flood is framed as God’s response to pervasive violence, “every intention… only evil continually… I will blot out man” (Gen. 6:5–7). Sodom is described as judicial inquiry and execution, “I will go down to see… then the Lord rained… fire from the Lord out of heaven” (Gen. 18:21; 19:24). Babel is a deliberate intervention, “let us go down and confuse their language” (Gen. 11:7). These are not indirect permissions or narrative misreadings. They are presented as God’s own actions, disclosing His opposition to sin.

The prophets and apostles treat them in exactly that way. Amos and Isaiah appeal to these events as precedents of divine judgment. Jesus does the same, “as were the days of Noah… so will be the coming of the Son of Man” and “just as it was in the days of Lot… so will it be” (Matt. 24:37; Luke 17:28–30). Peter and Jude invoke the flood and Sodom as examples of what God does to the ungodly (2 Pet. 2:5–6; Jude 7). The force of these appeals depends on a straightforward assumption that God truly acted in judgment then and will do so again, and Jesus identifies that future judgment with His own authority.

This is where the modern interpretive move becomes visible. It is often granted that Christ is present throughout Scripture, yet His role in judgment is qualified. Judgment is recast as indirect or accommodated, so that what appears to be divine action no longer directly reveals God’s character. But that move introduces a fracture. It separates what God does from what God reveals, turning acts that Scripture presents as disclosure into material that must be corrected.

That fracture cannot be contained once the cross is brought into view. The New Testament presents Christ’s death in terms that presuppose real divine judgment. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Pet. 2:24). God put Him forward “to show his righteousness… so that he might be just and the justifier” (Rom. 3:25–26). These claims are only coherent if judgment is not merely apparent but actual. To bear judgment is to bear what God truly executes against sin, not what He appears to execute while doing something else.

The relation is therefore direct and unavoidable. If one denies that God judges in the way Scripture describes in Genesis and the prophets, then one must also deny that Christ bears that judgment, because there is no stable content left to be borne. Conversely, if one affirms that Christ bears divine judgment, one is committed to affirming that such judgment is genuinely exercised by God and disclosed in the scriptural record of His actions.

You cannot deny the flood as an act of divine judgment while retaining the claim that Christ bears judgment for sin, because the latter depends on the former. You cannot treat Sodom as a narrative misreading while appealing to the cross as the place where that same judgment is satisfied, because the content of what is satisfied has been removed. You cannot evacuate judgment from the events that establish the category and then invoke that category at the cross without emptying it of meaning.

Subscribe now

Share

All sins are equal, and in our cultural moment, to insist otherwise is already to be heard as expressing an oppressive white, male, heteronormative narrative. (Or just a biblical one. Which, for some, is the same thing.) Likewise, to insist that there are distinctions between the genders that are in any way biological and authoritative is heard the same way. Not as a description of reality, but as an extension of that same oppressive framework.

That reaction has become so predictable that it now passes for intelligence. One does not need to refute the argument. One only needs to identify its alleged social location. “That sounds patriarchal.” “That sounds oppressive.” “That sounds like hierarchy.” And with that, the matter is supposedly settled. The argument has not been answered. It has been excommunicated.

Subscribe now

This is the great trick of the modern moral imagination. It has reduced reality to two categories: sameness or oppression. If two things are equal, they must be interchangeable. If they are not interchangeable, then one must be dominating the other. Difference is no longer treated as a feature of an ordered world. It is treated as a signal flare for hierarchy, and hierarchy is treated as inherently suspect. So difference is not examined. It is neutralized.

Scripture, unfortunately for this very fragile framework, is not embarrassed by categories larger than our slogans. Take sin. Scripture levels all sinners before God. “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point… guilty of all of it” (James 2:10). The point is brutal and simple. The law is not a buffet. You do not get to keep nine commandments and invoice God for partial credit. To break the law is to become a lawbreaker. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does not raise the standard. He reveals it. “You have heard… ‘You shall not murder’… but I say… everyone who is angry… liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:21–22). Again, “You have heard… ‘You shall not commit adultery’… but I say… everyone who looks… with lustful intent has already committed adultery in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28).

The respectable sinner loses his hiding place. The person who says, “At least I never did that,” discovers that the law was never confined to the hands. It always reached the heart. In this sense, all sin is equal. Not because every sin does the same damage, but because every sin establishes the same verdict: guilty.

But Scripture also refuses to flatten sin into one undifferentiated moral paste. Jesus speaks of a “greater sin” in John 19:11. Luke 12:47–48 describes differing degrees of judgment. Some sins receive heavier condemnation because some sins carry greater knowledge, greater defiance, greater harm, and greater weight.

This is not a contradiction. It only sounds like a contradiction to people who have been trained to think with a hammer and then complain that every doctrine looks like a nail.

Share

All sin is equal with respect to standing. Not all sin is equal with respect to gravity. One question asks, “Are you guilty?” The other asks, “How grievous is the offense?” Those are not the same question. Scripture knows this. Our age apparently does not.

The same pattern appears with men and women. Genesis 1:27 establishes the shared dignity of male and female in the image of God: “male and female he created them.” And Galatians 3:28 reinforces this at the level of salvation: “there is neither male nor female… for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” These texts speak directly to standing before God. There is no spiritual ranking, no second-class standing, no diminished access to grace.

Scripture, however, does not leave that equality undefined or abstract. It moves immediately to give it form. Genesis 2 does not present the woman as a second copy of the man, as though creation needed redundancy, but as a corresponding partner: “a helper fit for him.” She is necessary, distinct, and situated within a relation that already carries order. The man is formed first; the woman is formed from him and for him. The difference is not incidental or culturally assigned. It is built into the structure of creation itself, and it arrives not as competition, but as coordination.

Genesis 3 then shows what happens when sin enters that ordered relation. God speaks directly to the woman and names what will now characterize the bond: “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” n. This is not the creation of hierarchy but the corruption of it. The desire described is not mere affection but a turning toward control, a grasping impulse toward inversion. What was ordered becomes contested. What was given becomes resisted.

The New Testament does not sidestep the fracture; it speaks into it and carries the same pattern forward. In Ephesians 5, the relation is assumed and then pressed into shape, as the husband is commanded to love “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,” while the wife is addressed within that same bond (Ephesians 5:25). The text does not pause to justify the structure. It takes it as given and assigns weight to it. Authority is defined by sacrifice, which means it cannot be reduced to preference or negotiated into something more comfortable.

Peter speaks with the same directness. He calls the woman the “weaker vessel” and ties that difference to obligation: “showing honor to the woman… since they are heirs with you of the grace of life” (1 Peter 3:7). The distinction leaves her standing untouched, but it binds the man to a way of living. Strength is not something to display; it is something to answer for. The difference does not disappear. It becomes the basis for responsibility.

This is where the conflict begins to show. The issue is not difference as such. The issue is difference that carries weight, difference that fixes responsibility, difference that orders a relation in a way that cannot be rearranged without changing the thing itself. That kind of claim does not pass cleanly through a framework that treats equality as sameness, so the framework shifts until the pressure is gone. Equality is recast as interchangeability. Authority is treated as a problem to solve. Structure is handled like a liability.

That shift does not stay in one place. A church shaped by it no longer receives creation as given. Male and female become categories to interpret. The body stops speaking plainly and becomes something to manage. What was once received is now explained, and what cannot be explained is revised.

Subscribe now

The same flattening corrupts the way the church speaks about sin. Once “all sin is equal” comes to mean “all sin is identical,” moral reasoning becomes useless at the very moment it is needed most. The church can still repeat the slogan, but it has lost the distinctions that make the slogan true. So it begins to operate by cultural reflex. Sins that fit the language of authenticity, healing, trauma, self-expression, or identity are treated as complicated. Sins that violate the approved moral instincts of the moment are treated as unforgivable. Scripture’s categories are replaced by a social credit system with Bible verses stapled to it.

That is how a church can become permissive and severe at the same time. It can shrug at sexual disorder because naming it sounds cruel, while treating the wrong tone, the wrong demographic, the wrong political association, or the wrong institutional failure as damnable beyond repair. This is not mercy. It is selective moral outrage wearing a clerical collar. The doctrine of sin has not become more compassionate. It has become more tribal. It still says “grace,” but it no longer knows what guilt is for. It still says “justice,” but it no longer knows how to measure weight.

The church’s structure rots in the same way. If equality means sameness, then every office begins to look like a privilege, every boundary like exclusion, every act of discipline like harm, and every command like control. Pastors become facilitators of communal feeling. Elders become brand managers. Church discipline becomes an embarrassing artifact from a less enlightened age. The congregation is no longer a household with order, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, correction, care, and obligation. It becomes a religious co-op of expressive selves, held together by preference, therapeutic language, and the fear of sounding unsafe.

This is why the shift reaches far beyond gender debates. It changes the church’s imagination. A people trained to distrust order will eventually distrust lordship. A church embarrassed by authority will preach a Christ who comforts but does not command. A church that cannot receive the body as given will struggle to receive creation as gift. A church that cannot distinguish guilt from gravity will confuse repentance with image management and forgiveness with institutional damage control.

The result is a church that still owns the words but has lost the grammar. It can say kingdom, but it means belonging. It can say Lord, but it means helper. It can say holiness, but it means wellness. It can say justice, but it means approval from the right people. It can say equality, but it means the abolition of every distinction God gave for the good of the world.

Scripture does not bend itself into that shape. It speaks with categories strong enough to hold reality. All sin is equal in guilt. Not all sin is equal in weight. Men and women are equal in worth, “heirs with you of the grace of life,” and they are not interchangeable in form, calling, or relation. Lose those distinctions, and the Bible does not become clearer. It becomes a problem to be managed.

And that is where much of the modern church now lives: not under Scripture, but in negotiation with it, trying to keep the vocabulary of faith while quietly removing the architecture that made the words mean anything.

Share