Transubstantiate

Remembering the heroics and good works of athletes, coaches, and fans.

This third Sunday of Advent, millions of Christians will be at church. But millions will also be glued to a screen, anxious to find out if the Argentinian GOAT will at long last claim a World Cup title. Though past his prime, the 35-year-old team captain Lionel Messi has been sublime in the competition, with five goals and three assists under his belt, and is leading the golden boot race in his fifth World Cup.

Although the reserved Messi, whose right arm bears a tattoo of Jesus crowned with thorns, has not expressed his faith openly beyond pointing to heaven after his goals, this World Cup has featured numerous heroics of confessing Christians.

Leading the freewheeling French attack against Argentina will be 36-year-old striker Olivier Giroud, who has Psalm 23’s “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want” tattooed in Latin on his right arm. During this World Cup, Giroud became the all-time top scorer for France with four magnificent goals.

While the team’s talisman Kylian Mbappé has lived up to the hype with his blistering speed and lethal shooting, Giroud has provided a reliable focal point in offense and his selfless play has created openings for his teammates. “I try to speak about my faith whenever I can,” he said after winning the World Cup in 2018. “I feel I have to use my media profile to talk about my commitment to Jesus Christ.”

During most of the past decade when Giroud played for two clubs in London, he attended St. Barnabas Church in Kensington, which belongs to the evangelical wing of the Church of England. During France’s quarterfinal against England, when he netted a header …

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But evangelicals have rightly made it more gospel centered.

Conservative evangelical Christians have sometimes been eager advocates of the modern campaign to “keep Christ in Christmas” and preserve the traditional religious meaning of the holiday.

There’s one major problem with this campaign: The original religious message behind the American Christmas was not evangelical at all.

Instead, it was the creation of Unitarians, Episcopalians, and other liberal Protestants who had little interest in several key tenets of the evangelical understanding of the gospel.

Those of us who are evangelical in our faith can still have a merry Christmas. But if we want to do so in a way that foregrounds the gospel, we may have to discover a new approach to the holiday that does more than simply preserve the old.

Here’s the story.

Among the 17th- and 18th-century American colonists, the Christians who most closely resembled modern evangelicals uniformly refused to celebrate Christmas. The New England Puritans were strong opponents of Christmas, not only because of its connections with Roman Catholicism but also because, in 17th-century England, it had become a day known more for excessive drinking and gaming than for any religious observance.

Even at the beginning of the 19th century, long after the Puritan religious fervor had largely dissipated in New England, Congregationalists in the region continued the Puritan practice of not observing Christmas in their homes or their churches. Massachusetts, which in the Puritan era punished those who dared to celebrate Christmas, did not recognize it as a state holiday until 1855.

Though perhaps slightly less hostile to Christmas than the Puritans, the major American evangelical denominations of the late 18th and early 19th century likewise …

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After losing my father as a child, I learned to see the Incarnation as my true lineage.

As a kid, I loved combing through the Christmas cards my family received each year. In the days before social media, those annual pictures in the mailbox helped me feel connected to long-distance friends and family.

After my father died, however, Christmas cards served as a reminder of what I’d lost. Photos of smiling, intact families and their cheerful greetings were like salt in a wound. Holidays are always hard for the bereaved. But for me, they added a layer of shame to the grief I carried year-round. As a hurting child, I intuited: My siblings and I were no longer Christmas card material, because our family was no longer whole. For that reason, we never sent another holiday greeting after my father’s death.

Our cultural fixation with the nuclear family takes on a religious tone around Christmas. We conflate Mary, Joseph, and Jesus nestled in the crèche with our own sentimental notions of family togetherness. We invite families up to light the Advent candles in church. We gather around extended family tables to celebrate. In all the hype, it’s easy to assume that “peace on earth” comes exclusively in the form of a whole and healthy family in front of a Christmas tree.

To be clear, family is a gift from God worth celebrating and supporting. God created the family in part to teach us how to love and be loved. The world needs to see families doing the hard and holy work of togetherness. But as New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley writes, “Our image of family at Christmas—well-decorated, wealthy, happy, and intact—actually sits uneasily beside the gospel of the first [Christmas].”

Jesus’ own family was not exactly Christmas card material. His first “Christmas” …

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Our picks for the books most likely to shape evangelical life, thought, and culture.

When my alarm buzzes on the morning of an especially busy day, I often respond with a strange lack of urgency. A low rumble of dread builds as I ponder all the chores, errands, or work tasks that need completing. But instead of resolving to get up and get cracking, I linger in bed, nearly paralyzed by the weight of responsibility. I know what I need to do, but for some reason I can’t summon the willpower to do it.

Something similar plays out in the lives of many Christians, according to Uche Anizor, a professor at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology. They know they’re supposed to love God, study Scripture, and pursue a life of holiness, but they can’t escape the clutches of spiritual indifference. In Overcoming Apathy: Gospel Hope for Those Who Struggle to Care, Anizor appeals to lukewarm believers, not with an accusing glare or a motivational speaker’s bullhorn, but with the compassion of someone who has fought this battle himself.

It’s a worthy choice for CT’s Book of the Year. Across the board, the judges who read and evaluated it commended Anizor for putting his finger on a problem that routinely flies under the radar, even as it sinks so many of God’s people into a spiritual quagmire.

Like Overcoming Apathy, all of our Book Awards winners have the capacity to awaken slumbering souls, whether they ring out with theological wisdom, literary beauty, pastoral warmth, or everyday encouragement. Don’t sleep on any of them. —Matt Reynolds, CT books editor

Apologetics & Evangelism

The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality

Glen Scrivener | The Good Book Company

The Air We Breathe is a book for this moment. Western …

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A firing at Dane Ortlund’s Naperville Presbyterian Church spurred a rare legal determination that could be a useful case study for churches.

A 2021 firing of a female staff member from a Chicago-area church led by pastor and author Dane Ortlund was determined to have “substantial evidence” of retaliation, according to an investigation into alleged discrimination by the state of Illinois.

The former director of operations at Naperville Presbyterian Church, Emily Hyland, said her termination came days after privately complaining to two elders about gender discrimination from Ortlund. At the time, she had worked at the church for eight years, and he had been senior pastor for six months. After her firing, she filed charges over gender discrimination and retaliation at the state agency.

The Illinois Department of Human Rights (IDHR) did not find evidence that the church or Ortlund discriminated against her based on her gender. Evidence shows that “Ortlund … never made any discriminatory remarks directly related to [Hyland’s] sex,” the report said, nor was there evidence of discrimination that rose to the level of a “hostile work environment.”

But the agency found “substantial evidence” that she was fired “in retaliation for having engaged in prior protected activity.”

Even if there is no “actionable” discrimination found, employers cannot retaliate against an employee for making a report, said employment lawyer Ed Sullivan.

Ortlund, a pastor in the Presbyterian Church in America, is the author of Gentle and Lowly, a bestseller. A longtime member of the Naperville congregation, he became its pastor in October 2020, with Wheaton College president Philip Ryken leading the installation.

Ortlund declined to comment to CT on the allegations, but in the state filing, the church said that Hyland …

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The Incarnation exists for the Atonement, but it is also so much more.

Wait … is this actually on the Incarnation? If you take up Athanasius’s fourth-century classic On the Incarnation for your Advent or Christmas reading, you’ll likely find yourself asking this very question. For you’ll soon make the discovery that many Athanasius readers make: On the Incarnation is mostly not about the birth of Jesus.

On the topic of the baby in the manger, Athanasius has only a little bit to say. Everything he does say about it is certifiably mind-blowing: “The incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God comes into our realm, although he was not formerly distant. … But now he comes, condescending toward us in his love for human beings.” Merry Christmas!

But most of Athanasius’s narrative energy goes into telling us about the risen Lord who died and now lives forevermore. You might wonder where the Christmas in your Christmas reading went.

Part of the problem is that Athanasius has a great mind and a full heart and wants to share the whole truth. Helmut Thielicke once voiced the theologian’s can’t-say-it-all lament in exactly these seasonal terms: “I have to speak about everything at once like the preacher who cannot talk about Christmas without touching on the theme of Good Friday and pointing out that the crib and the cross are hewn out of the same wood.” But to everything there is a season, and we ought to be able to focus on the Incarnation during this season.

I remember the disappointment I felt going to church one Christmas when, for whatever reason, I was especially well attuned to the buildup of the whole holiday. It was one of those years when all the carols were really connecting with me, wherever I happened to hear …

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Thirty proverbs on power, justice, and politics.

The Book of Proverbs can be a humbling or even humiliating read. For every verse that lulls us into self-satisfaction of our righteousness comes another that aims its arrows at our own hearts too.

That incisive wisdom is particularly sharp when applied to election-year politics and our personal habits of political engagement. It’s uncanny enough to make us wonder whether King Solomon had foreseen cable news and Twitter. With another presidential election already underway, here are 30 proverbs for American politics in 2023.

On power

Proverbs doesn’t often directly address the subject of power, which is especially surprising for writings largely attributed to kings. Its authors envisioned a divinely appointed monarchy, a form of government far afield from our system, in which “many rulers” is not the result of rebellion (as in Proverbs 28:2) but constitutional design.

Yet that’s not to suggest the book has nothing to say of power as it works in our political context—far from it. Proverbs cautions us to be humble about our resources and abilities, to avoid grasping at power, and, if we find it in our hands, to remember it is often fleeting. Power can corrupt those who wield it, so we must take care to wield it justly.

Proverbs 16:32

Better a patient person than a warrior,
one with self-control than one who takes a city.

Proverbs 27:1, 24

Do not boast about tomorrow, and a crown is not secure for all generations.

Proverbs 31:4–5

It is not for kings, Lemuel—it is not for kings to drink wine, not for rulers to crave beer, lest they drink and forget what has been decreed, and deprive all the oppressed of their rights.

On tricks and transactions

We tend to think of political debates as arguments …

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The centuries-old tradition has returned to community theaters after a pandemic hiatus.

If you attend this year’s performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Des Moines Community Orchestra, you’ll walk into the sanctuary of Grace United Methodist Church and notice the orchestra, of course. But there’s no choir.

Isn’t Messiah famous for the exhilarating “Hallelujah” chorus? What about “For Unto Us a Child Is Born”?

This time, the choir is you—the audience, that is. You can borrow a score, and there are even markings among the seats to divide the audience by vocal part—soprano, alto, tenor, and bass, though sitting in your section is optional.

Messiah sing-alongs, also known as “Scratch Messiahs,” are a long-standing tradition in the United Kingdom and United States, dating back to the first half of the 19th century. Attendees get to step in and cocreate a centuries-old musical work that tells the story of Christ’s life from incarnation to resurrection.

For the Des Moines orchestra and many other community groups and ensembles around the country, this year is bringing a return of the tradition after a two-year pandemic hiatus.

“There’s nothing like conducting it,” said Carl Johnson, the conductor of the Des Moines Community Orchestra for the past 20 years. “It’s so big and powerful. And you look out at the audience, the looks on their faces … that’s worth it.”

Handel’s Messiah premiered in Dublin on April 13, 1742, as a charity concert benefiting two hospitals and prisoners’ debt relief. Although the work is now associated with Christmas, it is historically linked to Easter: Handel conducted annual Easter performances of Messiah at the Foundling Hospital in London beginning in …

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How a church is enduring uncertainty and disappointment as many struggle to find a home.

Since Wong Siu-yung opened a church for Hong Kong Christians in Taiwan last year, it attracted more than three dozen attendees. But in that time the only Cantonese-speaking church on the island has faced significant turnover.

A few congregants returned to their previous residence. But most of the 10 who departed moved to the United Kingdom.

“I watched them all give up and leave Taiwan,” Wong said. “Relocating for the second time in such a short period of time is very difficult.”

This week, Wong himself joined the exodus. The 48-year-old pastor boarded a flight Thursday to Nottingham, England, hopeful about making a new home more than 6,000 miles away. This wasn’t a journey Wong had anticipated when he left Hong Kong for Taiwan in July 2020. At the time, his involvement in the 2019 pro-democracy protests had made him a potential government target, so he decided to leave his homeland immediately.

Taiwan initially promised to provide “settlement and care” to thousands of Hong Kongers like Wong. But in the months since, the government has made it increasingly difficult for Hong Kongers to gain permanent residency, preventing many from working and settling on the island. Government officials fear that allowing Hong Kongers to resettle in Taiwan could provoke China and open the door to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) infiltrators.

Wong and his congregation have faced roadblock after roadblock: After selling their homes in Hong Kong, quitting their jobs, and pulling their kids out of school, they arrived in Taiwan to find the requirements to gain residency changed and their cases stuck in limbo. “Hong Kongers have fallen for [the Taiwanese government’s] great scam of the century,” …

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How evangelical computer programmers changed the way we read Scripture.

In the summer of 1979, just a few years after Jimmy Carter brought the term “born again” into the mainstream American lexicon and Steve Jobs made the home computer a part of everyday life, two engineers at Intel hatched a plan to create a new kind of technology company.

Kent Ochel and Bert Brown’s new endeavor would combine their religious faith and their lifelong desire to build their own company, enabling them to do something unprecedented—they would bring the Bible into the digital age and put it on every personal computer in the world. Early the next year in Austin, Texas, at the crossroads of the American Bible Belt and the burgeoning computer industry, they created Bible Research Systems and set to work merging their technical know-how with their love of Scripture.

In January 1982, they released the first version of The Word Processor for the Apple IIe, making it the first commercial Bible study software on the market. Softalk magazine hailed it for including a complete and searchable text of the King James Bible, promising it would “aid the serious Bible student” and comparing Ochel and Brown’s accomplishments to Gutenberg’s printing press.

As the personal computer industry and Bible software market grew alongside one another in the 1980s, scholars and religious people alike began to wonder if computers might fundamentally change religion and, more specifically, how the shift from printed books to electronic media would transform the practices of Christians, who for centuries had been called “the people of the book.” What would happen to Christians as they became “the people of the screen”?

Before the advent of Bible software, Christianity had undergone …

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