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Let’s Talk About Orthodoxy, Unorthodoxy, & Heresy Pt. 2: The Incarnation.

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As I first considered this second installment, I planned to anchor it in theology’s habit of pitting Scriptural texts against one another in a lowest-common-denominator game. You’ve seen it before. It shows up in the classic tensions between grace and works, sovereignty and human responsibility, or predestination and free will.

In each case, there are strong scriptural texts supporting both sides. But we humans do not particularly enjoy living with ideas that appear contradictory, so we develop systems in which one side rises to prominence while the other is reduced to a supporting role. If you are Catholic, works tends to ascend. If you are Calvinistic, sovereignty ascends. If you are Arminian, free will ascends. From there, each camp figures out where to tuck the countertexts beneath the primary, elevated ones.

It is a little like trying to figure out what to do with the three bolts left over after replacing a head gasket. They certainly belonged somewhere. You just have no idea where.

This is not necessarily a bad enterprise. Theology can be a valuable tool for bringing coherence to the Scriptures. But it also has a tendency, at best, to unintentionally elevate some texts above others or, at worst, to diminish texts that have something equally important to say from another angle.

The Scriptures are what God has revealed to us. Theology, however, remains a painfully human endeavor. The challenge, then, is to resist elevating our various tribal syntheses to the level of the Scriptures themselves. No theological framework, however useful, can contain the full breadth and mystery of God. All theologies do some boot-stomping in the living garden of the Scriptures.

Anyway… that is how I planned to write this installment, but I shifted. Instead, I decided to root this part in Jesus.

Historic Christianity rightly affirms that Jesus is fully God. John declares that the Word was God and that this divine Word became flesh (John 1:1, 14). Thomas addresses the risen Jesus as “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Paul writes that in Christ “all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9). Hebrews describes the Son as “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Hebrews 1:3).

These are not minor claims. Jesus does not merely speak for God. He reveals God. He is God in human flesh. Whatever mysteries or questions we have about God, Jesus is the closest we will get to understanding God’s nature and person. I didn’t say that; John did (John 1:18).

Yet the same Scriptures that present Jesus as truly divine also present him as genuinely limited.

Did that last sentence make you uncomfortable? Me too. That’s why I love the messiness of Scripture over the tidiness of theology.

Jesus became tired and thirsty (John 4:6–7). He slept from exhaustion during a storm (Mark 4:38). He experienced hunger (Matthew 4:2), sorrow (Matthew 26:38), physical suffering, and death (Mark 15:37). Those human weaknesses are usually explained as part of the Incarnation, and rightly so. Jesus became human.

But there are other limits expressed about Jesus that press more directly against later theological categories. As theology developed, it became common to speak of God as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and the other fun omnis. The word omni simply means “all.” God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present. In other words, limitless.

And this brings us to the ancient theological question: Could God make a burrito so hot he could not eat it?

For theology, especially theology shaped by Greek philosophical categories, the answer is a firm “no.” If anything could overpower God, even a piping hot burrito of doom, then God would no longer be all-powerful. Something would exist outside his “all.”

So what does this have to do with Jesus?

These same omnis often get applied to Jesus during the Incarnation because Jesus is God. He knew men’s hearts (Mark 2:8), therefore omniscient. He saw Nathanael elsewhere (John 1:47–49), therefore omnipresent. He commanded the wind and waves (Luke 8:24–25), therefore omnipotent.

And yes, Jesus certainly displays divine qualities. But the text itself does not seem anxious to prove that Jesus possessed unlimited omni qualities in the way our later systems often require.

For example, how can one be omniscient and also “grow in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52)? Luke is clear: Jesus progressed in wisdom. More telling still, Jesus says he did not know the day or hour of his return (Mark 13:32). This is not young Jesus in the temple. This is Jesus near the end of his public ministry, acknowledging a future reality he does not know.

He knows all, but not all of all.

The same could be said of omnipotence. In his hometown, Mark says Jesus “could not do any miracles there,” apart from healing a few sick people, because of their unbelief (Mark 6:5–6). It does not say he would not. It says he could not. The text presents his mighty works as genuinely constrained in that setting.

Then there is temptation.

James tells us that God “cannot be tempted by evil” (James 1:13). Yet the Gospels describe Jesus being tempted in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13), and Hebrews says he was “tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

Are you sensing the tension?

If I said:

God is unaware of certain facts.

God is limited in certain acts of power.

God is genuinely exposed to temptation.

I would likely be shown the orthodoxy door with the right foot of disfellowship.

Yet if I said:

Jesus was unaware of certain facts.

Jesus was limited in certain acts of power.

Jesus was genuinely exposed to temptation.

I would probably get a pass, even if an uncomfortable one, because there is a proof text for each point.

But Jesus is God, right?

So…

God is not tempted, yet Jesus, who is God, was tempted.

God’s power is not frustrated, yet Jesus, who is God, encountered a place where his abilities were suppressed by the circumstances around him.

God is not ignorant, yet Jesus, who is God, said he did not know something and grew in wisdom.

That tension is not a theological accident. It is sitting right there in the Scriptures, wonderfully undomesticated and uninterested in how badly it pokes at our systems.

Now, Christian theology has worked hard to explain how the limitless omnis of God and the very real limits of Jesus, who is God, can coexist. I understand why. Theology can be a helpful tool for linking ideas that seem to pull in different directions.

But too often, the explanations become so extra-Scripturally elaborate that the messy beauty of the actual Scriptures gets stripped of meaning.

The Scriptures say Jesus did not know, and then we explain that he actually did know but chose not to access that knowledge.

The Scriptures say Jesus was tempted, and then we explain temptation in a way that makes genuine temptation nearly impossible.

The Scriptures say Jesus grew in wisdom, and then we construct systems in which no meaningful growth could really occur.

The technical explanation begins to sound like a theological shell game: Jesus did not know, except he did. He was tempted, except he couldn’t really be. He grew, except nothing essential actually developed. He possessed all the omnis, but did not always opt to employ them actively.

Huh?

At some point, it begins to feel as though theology is trying to rescue Jesus from the very Scriptures that testify about him.

Before long, the tensions within the text have been tidied into a rational doctrine shaped by and for the eye of each beholder. And when considering the Incarnation, the result can be that Jesus is reconditioned to fit a more metaphysically polished vision of divinity, shaped by later theological categories, rather than the less domesticated portrait we encounter in the Scriptures themselves.

Yet the writers of the Scriptures do not appear nearly as nervous about these tensions as we are.

Mark can tell us that Jesus forgave sins, calmed storms, commanded demons, and raised the dead, while also telling us that Jesus did not know the day of his return and could do no mighty work in Nazareth (Mark 13:32; 6:5). That same Gospel can portray Jesus as God Incarnate and also as the one who cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).

Luke can describe Jesus as conceived by the Holy Spirit and called the Son of God, while also saying that he grew physically, intellectually, and spiritually (Luke 1:35; 2:40, 52). Hebrews can proclaim the Son as the divine agent through whom God created the universe while also portraying him as learning obedience through suffering (Hebrews 1:2–3; 5:8).

The writers do not stop the story to explain how every piece fits within a perfectly polished architecture. They simply proclaim the mystery: “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14).

Not fake flesh. Not pretend humanity. Not God cosplaying the human condition.

Flesh.

Jesus entered our weakness, vulnerability, suffering, and mortality. He shared “in our humanity” and was made like us “in every way” (Hebrews 2:14, 17). He emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and humbled himself even to death on a cross (Philippians 2:6–8).

This does not diminish Jesus’ divinity. It reveals, with tension and mystery, what the God of love in action truly looks like.

God’s greatness is displayed not merely in remaining above creation, but in entering it. The one through whom all things were made became flesh, breathed our air, learned to speak, grew in wisdom, made friends, ate good food, went to parties, faced temptation, hit impediments, didn’t know when he was coming back, felt heartache, experienced anxiety, suffered rejection, and tasted death.

In Jesus, God did not save humanity from a safe distance. God came near. God joined us in the frailty of human existence. God stood in suffering solidarity with his creation in love for love.

Perhaps that tension in the Scriptures should not be theologically cleaned up, but marveled at.

I am not seeking to discard the historic confession that Jesus is fully God and fully human. I am asking whether our explanations of that confession sometimes become more polished than the Scriptures themselves.

The Scriptures present a mystery in the Incarnation. A mystery theology is ill-equipped to unravel fully. At times, the Scriptures paint a picture of Jesus that does not fit our orthodoxy boxes.

That’s okay.

That is the beauty of it all.

God remains bigger than our theological borders, even when we try to contain him. As the apostle reminds us, we are all seeing through a glass dimly—especially us Calvinists, who tend to think we see most clearly.

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In Pt. 3, I hope to explore how we can practice a more generous theology by giving space for Scriptural complexity, not to diminish the Scriptures, but to revere them above our systems. Or, to say it more provocatively, when claiming something is “biblical” or “unbiblical” often says more about our theological framework than it does about the biblical Scriptures themselves.

Then, in Pt. 4, I hope to discuss how the Incarnation can and should be the primary interpretive lens for dealing with Scriptural complexity.

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Character Still Matters More Than Winning

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For years, I’ve struggled to put my finger on why I’ve been so intuitively disconnected from my Republican Party. Yes, to the shock of many, I am still registered in the GOP. But if I’m frank about the whole thing, I’ve always been more concerned with how the “upside-down and backwards way of Jesus” intersects with the messy world we live in than with the political parties themselves. My ballot is shaped less by loyalty to a particular political ideology and more by my attempt to discern how the Sermon on the Mount can inform public policy for all who bear the image of God.

Nonetheless, my disheartenedness with the Grand Ol’ Party has only grown over the last decade. So I’ve continued to churn on why. Why am I so outside of the tribe I was once in? What shifted? What were the policy issues? And it finally dawned on me:

I never became a Republican primarily because of the platform or a set of policies. It was for one reason only: character first.

Like many evangelicals of my generation, I had certain issues that mattered deeply to me. But what first drew me to the GOP in my twenties was a conviction I heard repeated over and over again: character counts. In fact, character was presented as the nonstarter for all leadership.

The message was clear. A candidate could have all the right policies, all the right positions, and all the right promises, but if they lacked proven character, they were unfit to lead – hard stop. Character was the fault line, the watershed issue, and the non-negotiable standard that could not be compromised.

Going a step further, I believed the primary process existed, in part, to protect that conviction. “We the people” of the “character-first party” would never allow someone who might undermine this stalwart value to become our candidate. Character was not simply an issue among many. It was the foundation beneath all the others; without it, we labor in vain – or worse, for our vanity.

Now I’m in my mid-fifties. And over the last decade, I have watched that conviction steadily erode.

What has surprised me most is not simply that character has become an elective rather than a compulsory standard regarding leadership, but also how often its absence is excused. And all for what? For policy gains? For political victories? For social change? For fiscal responsibility? To combat the left? The culture? The uncertainty of the future?

I often hear, “Yeah, but the character of the opposition on the left is _____________!” (fill in the blank). As though the new standard is that character no longer matters, so long as the other side is worse. But that was never the principle I thought we were advancing. If character truly matters, it must matter even when it costs us something. It must matter even when it means losing. Otherwise, character is not a conviction. It’s just a platitude.

Personally, I would rather lose while upholding the belief that character matters than win by convincing myself that poor character is tolerable if I can hold my nose long enough. Credibility is lost the moment we excuse in our own leaders the very things we once – oftentimes still – condemned in others.

Unfortunately, the result has been a seismic shift. We once argued that a good leader must first be a good person. Increasingly, we seem to argue that effectiveness matters more than integrity, strength more than goodness, winning more than virtue. And every time the absence of character succeeds, it only proves the point more. Maybe character never really mattered after all.

And that’s the hinge on which my disheartened soul swings.

For me, that is the sole – and soul – great loss. Not political accountability but moral credibility.

I joined a party that once insisted character was essential to leadership. Today, it is often treated as incidental. Which then sacrifices credibility.

And when credibility is lost, it is notoriously difficult to recover.

And when character no longer commands respect, power is often used to do what integrity once did.

And when the carrot of character is proven to be optional, the stick of control is reached for as the most effective substitute.

And when this happens, the cycle can only spin downward because we don’t require anything different except more of the same.

Yet, I still believe what I was taught all those years ago. Character matters. It matters in our homes, churches, businesses, communities, and especially in our politics. Wise policy matters. Competence matters. But character matters most. Character is still first.

Maybe that’s why I’ve felt politically homeless. Not because I care most about politics, but because I’ve always believed character comes before politics. And perhaps more tragically along the way, I’ve watched much of my evangelical tribe trade away its witness and moral credibility for the idols of political power, certainty, and victory. Things the Scriptures would call the spirits of the age.

Personally, I would rather lose while preserving character than win by excusing it away. Why? Because when we abandon our own standards, the world takes notice. But when we hold to them no matter the cost, they notice that too.

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The Southern Baptists May Have Just Banned More Than Women Pastors.

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I am a graduate of a Southern Baptist Seminary, but I am not a member of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). So my thoughts come from an outsider perspective, but an adjacent one.

The SBC has once again moved to canonize its position that women should not be called pastors and should not teach men in gathered church settings. While many within the SBC view this as a necessary defense of biblical faithfulness, I find myself drawn to a broader concern than the specific conclusion.

My concern here is not primarily about where one lands on women serving as pastors, though I do have a primary interest in that bigger question. My concern is what happens when a denomination takes a debated question and attempts to permanently settle it for future generations through constitutional force.

History suggests that rarely ends well. Trust me, I have been on the receiving end of canonized denominational dogma.

The reality is that theology is not static. The Scriptures do not change, but our understanding of them often does. Christians today understand many passages differently than believers did centuries ago. We have access to ancient documents, inscriptions, papyri, and linguistic discoveries that previous generations never possessed. Scholars continue to sharpen our understanding of Greek grammar, Hebrew idioms, ancient cultural practices, and the meaning of words within their original contexts.

In my own three decades of studying the Scriptures, I have watched discoveries in linguistics and the ancient world overturn interpretations that many Christians once considered permanently settled. Some understandings stood virtually unquestioned for centuries, only to be reconsidered when new evidence, better lexical data, or broader manuscript discoveries provided a clearer picture of how words and phrases were actually being used in the first century. What was once presented as certainty are now shown to hang there with a level of ambiguity. What was once considered obvious sometimes became more nuanced.

That does not mean the text changes. It means our understanding improves. The history of biblical scholarship is filled with examples of interpreters revisiting long-held conclusions in light of better information. Humility requires us to acknowledge that future generations may see things more clearly than we do, just as we sometimes see things more clearly than those who came before us. It is nothing less than hubris to believe that our generation, in one small nook of the historic and universal Church, stuck the landing for all time on a theological topic.

The church has always been learning.

This should not frighten us. It should humble us.

Every generation inherits the responsibility of wrestling honestly with the Scriptures. Every generation must ask whether long-held interpretations accurately reflect what the biblical authors intended to communicate.

But when a denomination effectively declares that future generations may not revisit a question, it risks forcing tomorrow’s church into yesterday’s debates. Instead of preserving unity, such actions often guarantee future division. The fact that the SBC has disaffiliated churches over this one issue while remaining aligned on virtually every other major theological conviction reveals just how elevated a traditionally secondary issue has become.

Yet, tragically, church history is full of examples.

And, the irony is that many of the people who now insist that the question is settled belong to traditions that were themselves born from challenging settled interpretations.

What especially concerns me is the way this conversation is often framed. Increasingly, the debate is presented as a choice between being conservative or liberal, faithful or progressive, biblical or compromised. It’s loaded as a clear and present danger, with dog-whistle nomenclature, before it’s openly and sincerely investigated.

However, many conservative scholars, pastors, and churches affirm the authority of the Scriptures, reject progressive theology, and still reach different conclusions regarding women serving in leadership roles, holding ecclesial titles, teaching in church services, and influencing the direction of the church alongside men. They do not see their position as a concession to culture. They see it as an attempt to faithfully interpret the relevant texts.

One may disagree with their conclusions. One may even strongly disagree. But to reduce the discussion to “conservative versus liberal” is to replace exegesis with tribalism.

What makes this framing especially dangerous is that it creates a false measuring stick for future generations since the question quietly shifts from “What do the Scriptures teach?” to “What kind of church are you?”

Once that happens, the debate is no longer merely about interpretation. It becomes about identity. And yes, identity politics is as much, if not more, a feature of evangelicalism as any left-wing social group.

Tragically, then, if a church appoints a woman as a pastor or elder, many will no longer ask how that church arrived at its conclusion. They will simply assume the church has become compromised. The label arrives before curiosity or conversation ever begins.

But reality is even far more complicated than that.

One may disagree with those conclusions. But it is simply inaccurate to suggest that every church with women pastors or elders has abandoned a conservative hermeneutic. Many churches arrive at different conclusions while still approaching Scripture with a high view of its authority and a serious commitment to careful exegesis.1

When the labels “liberal” vs. “conservative” become the framework (did you know those words are not in the Scriptures as virtues or vices), the issue becomes a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Instead of allowing the Scriptures to drive the discussion, we let political and tribal categories determine which conclusions are permissible before the study even begins. The category becomes the argument.

The result is a dismissive “or” where there may actually be room for an “and.”

Conservative and open to women serving in leadership.

Committed to the authority of the Scriptures and persuaded by a different interpretation of several contested passages.

Whether one agrees with those positions is not the point. The point is that these combinations exist. Once we deny that reality, we stop evaluating interpretations on their biblical merits and start evaluating them according to which tribe they appear to strengthen or threaten.

That is not theological discernment. It is boundary maintenance.

And history suggests that whenever tribal identity takes precedence over careful interpretation, the church inevitably pays a price.

The moment a position is declared invalid simply because it falls on the wrong side of a doctrinal, political, or cultural binary, the discussion has ceased to be primarily about the Scriptures.

Ironically, this is its own form of undermining the very Scriptures groups claim to protect. Whereas liberalism tends to extract texts from the Scriptures, legalism tends to inject more than is there. Yet, legalism is not merely adding rules. It is also the tendency to create boundaries that prevent faithful believers from honestly wrestling with the text. It occurs whenever institutional certainty begins to outrun biblical debate.

The issue becomes even more complicated when we remember how rarely the word “pastor ” actually appears in the New Testament. The term is surprisingly rare. The vast majority of leadership discussions focus on elders, overseers, shepherds, teachers, apostles, prophets, and deacons.

Yet modern church structures often import assumptions about the pastoral office that would have been foreign to the first century. To make the title pastor the defining line of orthodoxy seems particularly precarious when the New Testament itself places so little emphasis on the title.

This is one reason I worry that the SBC’s decision reflects something larger than careful interpretation. It may also reflect the cultural moment. Dog, meet your already wagging tail.

We are living through an era shaped by reactions against wokeness, identity politics, and broader cultural shifts regarding gender. Some of those reactions are understandable. Some are even necessary.

But every generation has blind spots.

Every generation is tempted to mistake its cultural battles for biblical battles.

The church should always ask whether it is defending the Scriptures or simply baptizing the anxieties of its own age.

Future generations will inevitably revisit these questions. They always do. The question is not whether future generations will revisit this issue. The question is whether we will leave them room to do so. Will they inherit a framework that encourages careful study and humble dialogue, or one that forces them into another painful denominational fight?

At Redemption Church, we are currently investigating this question ourselves. We have not treated the matter as settled merely because others have. Nor have we assumed that newer conclusions are necessarily better than older ones.

When I drafted our founding documents fifteen years ago, I can guarantee that I was shaped by a host of factors. Some were reactive. We were coming out of a four-year challenge within an egalitarian denomination. Some were dogmatic. At the time, I was becoming decidedly more Calvinistic, due in no small part to my reaction against that same dastardly Arminian denomination. And some influences, in hindsight, have proven far less healthy than I recognized at the time. The cool cowboy Calvinism and complementarianism of the era—Acts 29, James MacDonald, Mars Hill, Mark Driscoll, and others—shaped my perspectives then, as they did for many evangelical leaders of my generation. Perspectives that we are all now critiquing.

The reality is that none of us interpret Scripture or formulate theology in a vacuum. We are all shaped, to varying degrees, by our experiences, our reactions, our cultural climate, and the zeitgeist of our age. That does not mean our conclusions are necessarily wrong. It simply means we should approach them with a measure of humility. And it is precisely why there should always be room to wrestle, revisit, and reexamine our assumptions in the light of Scripture.

So, like my sophomore algebra teacher always said, it’s time to check our work. And as I’ve done that, I’ve found things I said and wrote years ago that I no longer believe are as clear or in alignment with the Scriptures as I once thought.

Thus, we are attempting to listen carefully to the Scriptures, to church history, to the best scholarship available, and to one another.

Where that process ultimately leads remains to be seen.

But I am convinced of this:

The church is healthiest when it approaches difficult questions with humility rather than certainty, with curiosity rather than fear, and with confidence that truth has nothing to fear from honest investigation.

The Scriptures have survived every generation’s questions.

They do not need protection from careful study.

They need people willing to study them carefully.

  1. As a sidebar, I do believe the label “conservative hermeneutic” can sometimes hinder authentic Scriptural study. It subtly introduces a predetermined expectation that the text must be read in a particular way before the investigation even begins. Ideally, our first commitment should not be to reading Scripture conservatively or progressively, but to reading it honestly and allowing the text to challenge our assumptions wherever it leads. But that is a different discussion for a different day. ↩︎
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Let’s Talk About Orthodoxy, Unorthodoxy, & Heresy Pt. 1

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This topic has swirled around in my mind ever since I took a seminary class on the evolution of theology in church history. Not church history, but how different doctrines rose and fell and divided Christianity into thousands of factions over 2000 years. It was perhaps the only class I found to be truly novel, and surprisingly honest about the inconsistent and messy business of practicing theology (see “practicing” here in the same way you would see practicing medicine, it’s important, but not always as certain or settled as we like to believe). The gaping hole in the course is that it quickly diverged to only track doctrinal development in the western church of Catholics and eventually Protestants, which automatically cuts out a full 1/3 of historic Christianity, but it was still eye-opening.   

While a number of things have prompted me to begin this series lately, a headline I came across this week finally made me pull the trigger. The headline read, “Kirk Cameron’s Position on Hell Is ‘Unorthodox’ but Not ‘Heresy,’ Says Apologist Wesley Huff.”  Now, my point here isn’t to get into the weeds of that discussion in this installment. Rather, I think it’s interesting that somehow Wes Huff, whom I appreciate, especially for his sometimes surprising candor regarding the overstated facts by conservative apologists on manuscript transmission and textual criticism, has become the voice of pronouncing what is orthodox, unorthodox, heterodox (I left this one out of the title – too wordy), or heretical (see below for a definition of each).

Here is why this type of assessment has always sat uneasily with me. The challenge with declarations about what constitutes orthodoxy or heresy is that there is no transcendent, divinely inspired rulebook that draws clear lines for all Christians as people wrestle with the implications of Scripture. Terms like orthodoxy, unorthodoxy, heterodoxy, and heresy often exist in the eye of each group’s doctrinal beholder. Thus, they are human assessments, yet often presented as divine declarations.

For example, the Protestant “orthodoxy” of salvation by grace through faith alone is deemed a damnable “heresy” by the Catholic Church, as articulated at the Council of Trent. The same holds in reverse in the polemical writings of the Reformers and in confessional statements such as the Augsburg Confession. So one group’s orthodoxy becomes another group’s heresy. But in the end, it is still people rendering judgments about other people, arguing from the same Bible through differing dogmatic paradigms.

The same could be said of original sin. The Eastern Orthodox Church, one of the oldest expressions of Christianity, regards the Augustinian view of original sin as a heretical error (they use different terminology, but the idea is the same) and not represented in apostolic teaching. Personally, my issue with Augustine is that I find him more informed by Stoic-Platonism than Judaism, but I digress. Anyway, if you trace Augustine’s reasoning for the version of original sin he promoted (see especially City of God XIV), it is rooted in the idea that Adam’s first sin, after eating the fruit, was an involuntary erection. Yes, you read that right.

Augustine believed that before the fruit, Adam and Eve possessed perfect rational control over their bodies. Bodily functions, including sexual arousal, were fully subject to the will, and sexual union occurred calmly, deliberately, and with reason over passion. After sin, such mastery was shattered, and libido took charge. For Augustine, the first experiential consequence of Adam’s sin was the emergence of bodily movements that no longer obeyed rational command. The most vivid and humiliating example of this loss of mastery was involuntary sexual arousal. Adam felt lust for his wife, had an involuntary erection, and acted on both. From this, shame follows immediately, hence Adam and Eve covered their nakedness.

Thus, his conclusion – from this wildly Freudian speculation (see his Confessions, especially books II, III, VI, and VIII to get perhaps the real genesis of his take on Genesis) – was that original sin is transmitted through sex. I have seen some reading into the white lines between verses, but this is as bad as the time I heard a pastor tell people to write the word “Rapture” in the white space between Revelation 3 and 4, a book of the Bible that literally warns of judgment on anyone who “adds to or takes away from the words of its prophecy.” Yet this is the genesis of our Western orthodoxy, which in the East is regarded as heresy.

I say all of this simply as a reminder that while we may use categories like orthodox, unorthodox, heterodox, or heretical, these labels do not speak for God with the level of certainty they sometimes imply. They function more as internal tribal benchmarks set by one community to caution against what they perceive as doctrinal error in another, and often rush to “we are extremely right = orthodox” and “you are extremely wrong = heretical.” This, in and of itself, should give us pause, given how much theological evolution has occurred over 3500 years of Scriptural interpretation and wrestling. Besides, we Protestants are the Johnny-come-latelys after all.  

So to conclude Part One, let’s end by defining the terms, which I am sure some people will push back on because, well, that is the very point I am making about there being no single papal voice that defines everything for everyone. But I have to offer something. Then, in Part Two, we will dive deeper into how to navigate these trigger words and how to better measure the merits behind their use.

Orthodox: Beliefs, teachings, or practices that align with the accepted, official, or historically affirmed doctrine of a particular religious tradition.

Nuance: Considered “right belief” (from Greek orthos = straight or right, doxa = belief or opinion). Functions as the doctrinal center or boundary marker. What counts as orthodox depends on the group (Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, etc.).

In short: Inside the group’s doctrinal fence, but with points that sometimes differ from those of other groups. Usually, fine-tuning subcategories beyond the historic Christian Creed.

Unorthodox: Beliefs or views that differ from standard or traditional doctrine but are not necessarily condemned.

Nuance: Can be innovative, speculative, or unconventional. May raise eyebrows but not alarms. Often tolerated as minority opinions, theological exploration, or non-essential disagreements.

In short: Outside the norm of the group, but not against the historic Christian Creed.

Heterodox: Beliefs that deviate from established orthodoxy in more serious or substantive ways, though not always formally condemned.

Nuance: From Greek heteros, meaning other or different. Seen as doctrinally problematic or theologically risky. May conflict with core teachings but stop short of outright denial of essential doctrines. Often used in academic or ecumenical dialogue.

In short: Significantly off-center of the group, concerning but not universally rejected by the historic Christian Creed.

Heresy: Beliefs or teachings that directly contradict essential, defining doctrines of a faith and are formally rejected or condemned by that tradition.

Nuance: Denies or distorts core tenets (for example, the Trinity or the divinity of Christ in historic Christianity, think contrary to the Nicene Creed). Historically, subject to church discipline, excommunication, or conciliar condemnation. From Greek hairesis, meaning “choice” or “sect,” later used for a divisive doctrinal faction.

In short: Outside the historic Christian fence entirely that all groups universally see as the center.

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My Burden And Motivation As An Evangelical Pastor: Tending To Our Logs Before “Their” Specks Regarding Culture, Politics, and Partisanship.

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I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and in light of some recent commentary, I thought it might be helpful to lay out my thoughts and motivations for why I address the issues I do and the topics I tend to engage, be it on social media, my blog, or my podcast, The Everyday Missionary. I refrain from most of this on Sundays, on purpose, because my objectives and audience there are more nuanced than on other platforms of communication. Quite honestly, the people who make up Redemption Church already tend to get what I am getting at, which is why I use other forums as supplementation. They are a truly remarkable community, and I am deeply grateful to be a part of it.

Now, this is by no means exhaustive and, in the interest of brevity, will inevitably rely on some caricature, but I hope it offers a basic sense of what I’m trying to communicate—or perhaps more accurately, why I choose to communicate about the things I do.

In my casual observation, there are three general postures I see among my fellow evangelical pastors when it comes to how they use their position and platform.

First, there are those who generally choose to stay out of the fray when it comes to policy, politics, and culturally sensitive matters. The benefit of this posture is that it often avoids criticism from either side since the focus is simply on spiritual stuff. The downside, however, is that it can miss meaningful opportunities to connect Jesus and Scripture to real-life situations, areas where both are well equipped to speak with wisdom and conviction. I sincerely don’t fault this position, and quite honestly which I felt I could take that track. It would make my life a whole lot more peaceful.

Second, there are those who engage very directly by calling out what they perceive as the sins of groups they view as unsaved, morally compromised, or not as doctrinally aligned as their tradition asserts. This often includes sharp critiques of cultural movements and political positions associated with the Left or progressive causes. The strength of this approach is that it resonates deeply with a significant portion of the evangelical base and is frequently affirmed as courageous truth-telling. It’s also the fastest way to build an audience. The cost, however, is that it can leave those being addressed feeling judged or even disliked by people who claim to follow Jesus—the same Jesus who, in the Gospels, seemed to genuinely enjoy, love, and befriend those on the margins or those with complicated, messed-up, scandalous lives.

Within this posture, I also observe a considerable investment of energy in defending evangelicalism, its partisan alignments, and particularly its close relationship with the current administration’s evangelical political ecosystem. What often proves more difficult is a willingness to acknowledge or repent of our own inconsistencies, blind spots, and failures. As a pastor, I regularly encounter people who are genuinely curious about Jesus, yet hesitant or resistant because of the way His name has been publicly represented among some of these groups. I wish I could take this road; I imagine my podcast would be larger. But for reasons that will soon be apparent, my conscience will not permit it.

Third, there are those like myself, an evangelical speaking to evangelicals, about cultural evangelicalism. Those who are more concerned with addressing the log within evangelicalism than the speck they see in the broader culture. This posture echoes the prophets, who consistently called Israel to account for failures of mercy, justice, and faithfulness to God’s heart for the nations. It also reflects the ministry of Jesus, who spoke far more often about the hypocrisy of God’s people than about the moral failures of Rome. The downside here is that this approach rarely earns affirmation from one’s own evangelical tribe, and as Scripture itself asserts, it does not often find a warm welcome. It also doesn’t tend to draw an audience as much as ire. And yet, as the apostle reminds us, “judgment begins with the house of God.” Unfortunately for me, this is what the Spirit has placed on me as my burden.

In my own context of the Pacific Northwest, I feel a burden to reach people whom I often see the broader evangelical world either belittling or fighting—frequently over specks—while overlooking our own planks. Yet, the apostle warns more sharply against the religious self-righteousness of Romans 2 than the pagan excesses of Romans 1, concluding with the haunting indictment, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles (disbelievers/deconstructors/nones/I love Jesus but not the Church-ers/I just can’t do it any more-ers) because of you.” Therefore, for me, this is not about equal time or political balance between left and right. It is about addressing what I believe is a harmful “lampstand stripping” trend within evangelicalism, where our potential hypocrisy is, quite literally as Jesus warned, “shutting up the kingdom” to those we are called to reach and causing “little ones” to stumble away from the faith. Too often, this happens because our collective reputation is more about advocating against than advocating for. Demonizing their offenses and downplaying ours. It’s about strength, control, and personal security over the way of sacrifice, humility, and becoming the least to reach the more. In fact, those last two references above from Jesus are directed, not at the permissive Romans or syncretistic Herodians, the former was Yahweh professing, Scripture reading, doctrinally conservative Pharisees (Matthew 23) and to the latter the Apostles themselves who were arguing about greatness as opposed to service (Matthew 18). Jesus warns both of those groups, in those texts, of the dangers of hell for such sinful conduct. So yes, I think it’s important.

However, the good news is, once we address our planks, we can then see well enough to care for others and their specks. And that is the key. Helping a person with their speck is about care, caution, and compassion. Specks are not removed through culture wars, name-calling, or parroting pundits, but through genuine love and investment. If we want anyone to seriously consider the Good News of Jesus, they must be able to see both why it is truly good and how it actually forms good people. The gospel is not only something we proclaim with our words, but something we must make visible with our lives toward all image-bearers. When the good news is truly good, it leaves behind a trail of healing, humility, and love that invites others to take a second look.

Why is the Good News Good?

It’s Good because Our All Powerful God became A Humble Man to Serve and Save a Broken and Burdened Race.

It’s Good because He came with Mercy.

It’s Good because He came with Grace.

It’s Good because He came with Compassion.

It’s Good because He came with Forgiveness.

It’s Good because He came with Restoration.

It’s Good because He came with Servanthood.

It’s Good because He came with Love .

And we should be known for this same Good as well.

The apostle says that God first preached the Good News to Abram when He said, “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Thus, our calling is to be the blessing than brings the blessing. And Jesus made that posture profoundly, and uncomfortably, clear for all who claim to follow Him. Allow me an amplified version.

Those who are blessings and thus blessed are those who know they need God’s help in this world; God meets them first.

Those who are blessings and thus blessed are those who grieve the brokenness of this world; they will find the comfort of a God who aches with them.

Those who are blessings and thus blessed are the gentle in this world; they outlast the powerful.

Those who are blessings and thus blessed are those who long to do right by God and others in this world; God shares that hunger and will satisfy it.

Those who are blessings and thus blessed are the merciful in this world; they receive mercy for mercy.

Those who are blessings and thus blessed are the wholehearted in this world; they will see God clearly in the world to come.

Those who are blessings and thus blessed are those who seek to create peace rather than merely keep it in this world; they resemble God’s children.

Those who are blessings and thus blessed are those who joyfully suffer for doing right by God and others – be it fellow follower, neighbor, citizen, foreigner, or enemy – for God’s kingdom already belongs to them.

That is flavor for the world.

That is light in the darkness.

That is a city which beckons…

“Come, see these good (news) works, and celebrate the God who inspires them in Heaven.”

Grace

bible, Church, Missional, Theology

Christians, Sin, Certainty, And The Wisdom Of Humility

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I’m currently preparing for a series in The Book of the Twelve (the Minor Prophets, for us Western church folks). In the process, I’ve taken a deep dive into the problem of sin within the community of faith. Sin is traditionally understood as “missing the mark” or as “the willful transgression of a defined boundary.” In the Hebrew tradition, there are nine concepts that capture this idea, but these two will suffice here.

While conversations about sin are often directed toward the surrounding, disbelieving culture, my initial application was more personal: to quantify how often an average Christian sins per day. One might assume this would be a straightforward task, but it’s not.

The perception and definition of sin vary dramatically across Christian denominations. Each group also tends to establish its own hierarchy of sins, hierarchies that can be almost entirely inverted from one tradition to another. As a cultural example, in some U.S. Christian contexts, “wokeness” is viewed as a paramount cultural abomination, while in others, indifference to poverty and injustice, often labeled as “wokeness,” is considered a profound social evil. Consequently, what constitutes a grave sin for some Christians is its direct opposite for others. This divergence is perhaps most evident in contemporary debates about what it truly means to love one’s political or social neighbor, or enemy, in our deeply divided climate. Some interpretations of love increasingly resemble hate, advocating avoidance, taunting, mockery, and disparagement rather than blessing, prayer, and doing good (Luke 6:27–36). That currently Evangelical Christians are debating whether empathy is a virtue or a vice only highlights this divide.  

Adding further complexity is the distinct nature of Christian sin itself. Ontologically speaking, when a Christian sins, they implicitly affirm, “I agree with you, God, that this is wrong, yet I am doing it anyway.” This arguably renders Christian sin, in any given instance, more significant than that of a non-believer. While Christians across the spectrum, from progressive to fundamentalist, often employ interpretive “hacks” to explain away certain scriptural expectations, a disbelieving person, by virtue of their disbelief, is not actively disregarding God in their actions. Their motivations are no more aimed at offending God than Odin or Zeus. Christian sin, then, is arguably more severe because it arises from belief in sin while still resulting in either committing or excusing it.

Doctrinal differences further compound the problem. All Christian traditions hold certain doctrines as truth, yet they frequently disagree on many of them. In every area of disagreement where these truths are misaligned, at least one side is teaching error as truth, or equally possible, both sides are wrong. Statistically speaking, every Christian tradition is guilty of this at some point, often unknowingly. The posture with which these doctrines are held, humility versus certainty, can either mitigate or amplify the gravity of this error. Humility in the face of unrecognized error may lessen culpability, whereas conviction in error, as exemplified by the Pharisees, compounds it by being sincerely, yet sincerely, wrong.

As one example, I recently read a Jewish-Christian scholar who argues that Penal Substitutionary Atonement, the dominant Calvinistic and Reformed view within my own theological tradition, departs so thoroughly from the Mosaic framework of atonement that it is better described as a pagan theory. In his view, it is rooted less in Israel’s God and more in the logic of the surrounding ancient world, particularly its images of capricious deities who demand violence to appease their wrath. A key component of his argument is that none of the sacrificial texts depict God pouring out wrath on the animal. Instead, he contends that later Greek philosophical categories were used to overwrite the original scriptural imagery. If anything, when the community’s sin is symbolically transferred to an animal, it does not culminate in the animal’s death as a vessel of divine wrath, but in its release as the scapegoat into the wilderness. While the Calvin-ish theologian in me wants to take a stand, the biblical scholar in me says I should sit down and listen, since he makes a solid exegetical point. Yep, maybe you “scapegoat atonement theory” people are on to something here.

I am not asserting one position over another, but the point stands: across denominations, one group’s dogma of God is another group’s doctrine of demons. In this case, Penal Substitutionary Atonement could be understood either as a pagan appropriation of troubling proportions or as an accurate depiction of atonement itself. Only in death will we know for sure.

The implication, then, is that the odds of doctrinal sin are relatively high for every group at some point. And, somewhat ironically, the more confidently a group insists it is immune from such error, the more caution its claims likely deserve.

Some will accuse me at this point of denying capital “T” Truth. That is not my claim at all. I have no quarrel with the idea of concrete truth. Rather, I acknowledge that none of us possesses the decoder to know it perfectly or to wield it without distortion. We can grasp what is sufficiently important, but on this side of the resurrection, the apostle reminds us that we never see as clearly as we imagine.

That reality should not surprise us. With 30 to 40 technically distinct interpretive approaches to Scripture and an estimated 45,000 Christian denominations spread across three major traditions, spanning two thousand years, countless languages, and vastly different cultural worldviews, it is safe to say we are not all getting everything right. At some point, every community teaches something in error while sincerely calling it truth, which itself may qualify as a sin against the truth we claim to defend.

In light of all this, humility feels like the most honest takeaway. We are all wildly dependent on grace, which means Christians ought to be the most enthusiastic distributors of it, handing out kindness, forgiveness, patience, peace, and love as if it were always in season.

After all, we know ourselves well enough to recognize our remarkable ability, both intentional and accidental, to participate in the full range of acts, attitudes, and affections we so neatly label sin. Our plank, it turns out, is already quite substantial. Perhaps a little extra humility might help loosen its grip, giving us clearer sight and softer hearts to notice the specks in our neighbors’ eyes, not with judgment, but with compassion, tenderness, and love.

Addendum

Below are some basic ways various Christian traditions articulate their emphasis on different aspects of what is generally referred to as sin. This is not exhaustive, but illustrative. I only included it because I find the various large branches of Christianity can all contribute to seeing this topic from different points of view.

1. Roman Catholicism

Types of Sin

Mortal Sin: A grave offense committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent; it severs one’s relationship with God.

Venial Sin: Lesser sins that damage, but do not break, one’s relationship with God.

Remedy

Mortal sins require sacramental confession to a priest and the completion of penance.

Venial sins may be forgiven through prayer, participation in the Eucharist, and acts of charity.

2. Eastern Orthodoxy

View of Sin

Sin is understood primarily as a spiritual illness rather than a legal violation.

The emphasis is on healing and restoration rather than guilt and punishment.

Remedy

Confession is essential, but the primary focus is on transformation through the sacraments, spiritual disciplines, and growth in holiness.

3. Protestant Traditions

Lutheranism

View of Sin

Humanity is inherently sinful due to original sin.

Even good works are considered tainted by sin apart from God’s grace.

Remedy

Justification by faith alone (sola fide).

Confession is encouraged but not required for forgiveness.

4. Calvinism (Reformed)

View of Sin

Total depravity: every aspect of human nature is affected by sin.

Strong emphasis on God’s sovereignty in salvation.

Remedy

Salvation is by grace alone, with redemption applied to the elect.

5. Methodism

View of Sin

Affirms original sin while emphasizing human free will to respond to God’s grace.

Strong focus on personal holiness and sanctification.

Remedy

Ongoing repentance, spiritual discipline, and growth in grace.

6. Popular Evangelicalism

View of Sin

Emphasis on personal and individual sin.

Central focus on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Remedy

Salvation through faith in Christ, often marked by a conscious conversion experience.

7. Anglicanism / Episcopalianism

View of Sin

Holds a broad range of views, incorporating both Catholic and Protestant emphases.

Recognizes both personal and systemic sin.

Remedy

Confession (private or corporate), participation in the Eucharist, and ongoing spiritual formation.

bible, Church, Politics, Theology

When The Cross Bows To “National Here And Now:” Why Does Christianity Get Easily Co-Opted?

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I’ve been reflecting on the intersection of the Christian faith and leadership, as well as political or nationalistic ideologies. While this dynamic certainly applies to other religions as well (and none at all), my focus has been on the particular tension within Christianity.

What strikes me as odd — and troubling — is how a faith centered on a sacrificial and suffering servant, who called his followers to love their neighbors and enemies alike, care for the poor and marginalized, and treat others as they would want to be treated, can be so easily co-opted into something dismissive, divisive, or even aggressive. Instead of being a force for unity and service, it can become a tool used to attack or exclude at the cultural level. Now, this isn’t to say that Jesus is never divisive, but oddly, his division was related to his upside-down and backward Kingdom vs. nationalistic fervor and religious dogma. The repeated accusation of his friendship with sinners, his departure from tradition, and his care for the outsider highlight the nature of the divide between Jesus and his religious nation-state. Even when he spoke of the divide between daughter and mother or son and father, the divide was between the older and younger: the old, stifling, monolithic tradition versus the new, inviting Kingdom living. He clearly knew the new wine was just too much for those old skins.

Historically, tragically, religious people have all too often followed the path of Jesus’ opponents in the name of Christianity, but sincerely believing they were doing the godly and righteous thing. That paradox is what I’ve been wrestling with. Therefore, I wanted to conduct a thought experiment in which I took a series of quotes, leaving blanks in place of the original labels used. I did this to overlay whether this rhetoric has thematic links to modern sentiments.

“Hence, today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the ____, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” (p. 65)

“Political parties have nothing to do with religious problems, as long as these are not alien to the nation, undermining the morals and ethics of the race; just as religion cannot be amalgamated with the scheming of political parties.” (p. 116)

“This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.” (p. 152)

“Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time. A fight for freedom had begun mightier than the earth had ever seen; for once Destiny had begun its course, the conviction dawned on even the broad masses…” (p. 161)

“The founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the ____ people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God.” (p. 174)

“His [the ____ person’s] life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the ____ people, and when necessary he even took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for ____ votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic ____ parties — and this against their own nation.” (p. 307)

“Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.” (p. 383)

“It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying foreigners with missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our National humanity that where parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother…” (p. 403)

“The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God’s will, and actually fulfill God’s will, and not let God’s word be desecrated. For God’s will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord’s creation, the divine will.” (p. 562)

“As far as this variety of ‘folkish’ [social justice/culture] warriors, are concerned, I can only wish the National movement and the nations people with all my heart: “Lord, preserve us from such ‘friends,’ and then we can easily deal with our enemies.” (p. 565)

“For this, to be sure, from the child’s primer down to the last newspaper, every theater and every movie house, every advertising pillar and every billboard, must be pressed into the service of this one great mission, until the timorous prayer of our present parlor patriots: ‘Lord, make us free!’ is transformed in the brain of the smallest boy into the burning plea: ‘Almighty God, bless our arms when the time comes; be just as thou hast always been; judge now whether we be deserving of freedom; Lord, bless our battle!’” (pp. 632-633)

Adolf Hitler ~ Mein Kampf

No, I’m not calling anyone Hitler, except Hitler, of course. And frankly, I’m not all that focused on any particular current or future leaders, pundits, and media types who leverage politics and religion to create a rift of division between the majority and minority. All parties seeking to influence will utilize whatever tools they can exploit. Instead, I’m thinking about how Christians support such individuals in politics, churches, the media, online, and so on. How other names, races, genders, sexualities, labels could be, or are being, dropped into the _______ with just a tinge of piss and vinegar in the tone. Because here’s the hard-to-swallow truth: the majority of Evangelical Christians backed the Nazi Party (70-80% with anti-Communism, nationalism, and the desire for order being the top three reasons). But it’s nothing new. Over the centuries, Christians have more often than not lined up behind nefarious players, inhumane policies, adopted or stood silent to the most overtly un-Christian ethics, and excused it all in the name of an amalgamation of religion, patriotism, economic necessity/opportunity, and nationalism. Of course, there has always been an inspiring, though at the time despised, remnant who press against the flow, but it’s usually a remnant. The majority are often too quick to pick the wrong side of history and excuse away the words of Jesus every time. Luckily, it seems, the rest of the world eventually hears the remnants, catches up, and rights the ship (which is why I land in the revivalistic postmillennial camp, but that’s a topic for a different blog on a different day). Still, it usually leaves another stain in the history of the Christian faith where the moment was exploited, people suffered, and Jesus’ reputation was tarnished, all in the quest to enthrone a mute idol of Christ in the shadowlands of Babylon – yet again.

What started this was reading Martin Luther’s “On the Jews and Their Lies.” Honestly, I’m shocked that we Protestants still hold him in such high regard after reading it. The common defense—”That’s just how things were back then”—falls short as a moral argument. Jesus’s teachings on loving our neighbors and enemies alike were just as clear then as they are now. But I guess that’s my point. Every generation is at risk of, and even all too eager to, cut out the tongue of Christ to uphold the Zeitgeist of the age, especially when the nation is at stake. Sure, the idol of Christ as a rallying figure is elevated in the enterprise, but Jesus, the counter-cultural incarnate God who calls his followers to radical love, is quickly dispatched. In place of all this comes the practical urgency of the “hear and now,” the “more important,” the “don’t you see the existential threat,” etc. That’s precisely why I wanted to run the “whose label goes in the _________” thought experiment.

Below is an excerpt from Luther’s work that illustrates the extreme nature of political and nationalistic rhetoric when cloaked in the language of Christianity, and how, even still, modern Christians elevate a man like Luther and overlook his inhuman and un-Jesus-like dispositions. However, we continue to do that as well in other ranks. Additionally,  I think it would be equally confronting if we took out all of Luther’s uses of “Jews” and substituted blanks in there as well to see which names would find more or less offensive. I say that since we Evangelicals are a bit more defensive of the Jewish state than perhaps some other people groups, even though every person bears the image of God (Genesis 1) and houses the indwelling service-worthy Christ (Matthew 25).   

“What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? Since they live among us and we know about their lying and blasphemy and cursing, we can not tolerate them if we do not wish to share in their lies, curses, and blasphemy. In this way we cannot quench the inextinguishable fire of divine rage nor convert the Jews. We must prayerfully and reverentially practice a merciful severity. Perhaps we may save a few from the fire and flames [of hell]. We must not seek vengeance. They are surely being punished a thousand times more than we might wish them. Let me give you my honest advice.

First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it. And this ought to be done for the honor of God and of Christianity in order that God may see that we are Christians, and that we have not wittingly tolerated or approved of such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of His Son and His Christians.

Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed. For they perpetrate the same things there that they do in their synagogues. For this reason they ought to be put under one roof or in a stable, like gypsies, in order that they may realize that they are not masters in our land, as they boast, but miserable captives, as they complain of incessantly before God with bitter wailing.

Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer-books and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught.

Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threat of death to teach any more…

Fifthly, passport and traveling privileges should be absolutely forbidden to the Jews. For they have no business in the rural districts since they are not nobles, nor officials, nor merchants, nor the like. Let them stay at home…

If you princes and nobles do not close the road legally to such exploiters, then some troop ought to ride against them, for they will learn from this pamphlet what the Jews are and how to handle them and that they ought not to be protected. You ought not, you cannot protect them, unless in the eyes of God you want to share all their abomination…

To sum up, dear princes and nobles who have Jews in your domains, if this advice of mine does not suit you, then find a better one so that you and we may all be free of this insufferable devilish burden – the Jews…

Let the government deal with them in this respect, as I have suggested. But whether the government acts or not, let everyone at least be guided by his own conscience and form for himself a definition or image of a Jew. When you lay eyes on or think of a Jew you must say to yourself: Alas, that mouth which I there behold has cursed and execrated and maligned every Saturday my dear Lord Jesus Christ, who has redeemed me with his precious blood; in addition, it prayed and pleaded before God that I, my wife and children, and all Christians might be stabbed to death and perish miserably. And he himself would gladly do this if he were able, in order to appropriate our goods…

Such a desperate, thoroughly evil, poisonous, and devilish lot are these Jews, who for these fourteen hundred years have been and still are our plague, our pestilence, and our misfortune.

 I have read and heard many stories about the Jews which agree with this judgment of Christ, namely, how they have poisoned wells, made assassinations, kidnapped children, as related before. I have heard that one Jew sent another Jew, and this by means of a Christian, a pot of blood, together with a barrel of wine, in which when drunk empty, a dead Jew was found. There are many other similar stories.”

I include this quote to press another wrinkle in the fabric. Here, the issue is that Hitler didn’t convince the Protestants into their nationalistic sins, but it was the First Protestant who convinced Hitler, who in turn convinced the Protestants into their sins.

“Martin Luther has been the greatest encouragement of my life. Luther was a great man. He was a giant. With one blow, he heralded the coming of the new dawn and the new age. He saw clearly that the Jews need to be destroyed, and we’re only beginning to see that we need to carry this work on…. I believe that today I am acting in accordance with the will of Almighty God as I announce the most important work that Christians could undertake – and that is to be against the Jews and get rid of them once and for all.”

Adolf Hitler ~ Reported from a speech given in Berlin, Dec. 1924

That could be the telling issue: that the head is often eating the tail, and until the followers of Jesus relentlessly apply his upside-down and backwards ways in this messy world, we will be a part of perpetuating the problems and believing the lies are the solutions.

I’m not asking you to agree with my critique, but I am asking you to always measure your points of view against those pesky red letters of Jesus, especially the preschool-sounding ones. I believe he made them simple because we are so good at complicating things.