Transubstantiate

We’re quick to affirm the Resurrection, but we often miss its full meaning.

It may sound a little strange or morbid, but I enjoy preaching at funerals. Of course, I hate seeing friends, family, and church members leave us behind. But some unchurched family members and friends may hear about God’s love and the reasons for the hope that is in us. In these raw moments, mourners tend to consider their own mortality and give serious thought to the claims of Christ.

Jesus expressed a similar sentiment when Lazarus died and his disciples saw the resurrection and the life in action: “Lazarus has died. I’m glad for you that I wasn’t there so that you may believe” (John 11:14–15, CSB). We cannot know the joy of resurrection without experiencing the pangs of death and loss.

Funerals are opportunities to rehearse the drama of our eschatology, to practice the experience of hope before others. When I stand before a coffin or an urn, I proclaim that the resurrection of Jesus is the guarantee of our own future resurrection. Jaroslav Pelikan’s aphorism always comes to mind: “If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen—nothing else matters.”

Books on the Resurrection typically emphasize questions about the historical credibility of the Gospel accounts, and with good reason. The apostle Paul staked everything on this one event happening in time and space: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17, CSB). Academic studies usually try convincing readers that Jesus was raised from the dead while having little to say about why we should care.

Regent College theology professor W. Ross Hastings flips this script in his newest release, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Exploring …

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In grief, he is our consolation.

Right after September 11, 2001, theologian Calvin Seerveld told singer-songwriter Michael Card: “The church has no such songs (of lament) to sing.” Our contemporary praise music does not seem to account for such a national tragedy as 9/11 or even for funerals, no dirge or lamentation appropriate to express loss beyond words.

As a survivor of 9/11—my family lived three blocks away from the World Trade Center and I was trapped in a subway stop underneath the collapsing towers—I can testify to this lack. Today, we may similarly pause to ask, “Do we have songs to sing during a pandemic?”

There was one piece of music that was played over and over during the period after 9/11 on classical music radio stations. It was Lux Aeterna by Morten Lauridsen. In this choral piece, the overwhelming cascade of voices coalesces and moves deeply into our lament, yet the music rises above the nadir of our common despair and somehow reframes our hopes.

Several years after 9/11, I had an opportunity to reflect on Lauridsen’s composition and honor him. I was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by president George W. Bush and worked on the nominations for the 2007 National Medal of the Arts. The council selected Lauridsen as one of the award recipients. I was the table host designated to welcome him to the list of great artists and arts advocates including the likes of Andrew Wyeth and Henry Steinway. Lauridsen’s legacy will be known with other great composers who’ve received this high honor, such as Aaron Copeland and John Williams.

As Lauridsen looked around the room, he said, “What am I doing here?” I responded: “Sir, millions of people sing your songs; I think you …

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The resurrection message draws power from God’s kingship. But we often miss it.

In gospel presentations today, Christ is often reduced to a mere name, personal identifier, or alternative way of referring to Jesus. “In Christ alone,” and the like, is the language we find in our songs and theology textbooks. To most Christians, Christ is equivalent to Jesus.

Christ is a title. But to treat Jesus and Christ as equivalent terms is a huge mistake.

On the one hand, it is true to say, “Jesus saves” and “Christ saves.” Likewise, one could truly say, “Matt teaches” and “the professor teaches” because that accurately reflects my job title. But Matt does not mean the same thing as professor. Christ is comparable to His Majesty if we’re describing an English king. It is a special title designed to bring renown. Christ is the title for the universally significant Davidic king.

Failure to treat the Christ as a title is one of the reasons why kingship has been missing from the gospel.

Forgiveness without kingship? Our haste to get what we so badly need causes us to misunderstand how forgiveness is available. What is foremost in our minds when we consider the gospel is a transaction at the cross: Jesus is Savior, Redeemer, atoning sacrifice, and Lamb of God. Perhaps he has some vague authority too as Lord.

We fail to see that forgiveness flows not just through a person, but through a person in his official capacity as king—crucified, raised, and reigning. While serving as king at God’s right hand, he is also the high priest and the sacrificial offering that covers our sins. As will become clear, Jesus’ forgiving power cannot be separated from his royal authority as head of a new creation.

Although the foundational …

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The victory of Christ was won by crucifixion, not societal conquest.

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote this week in The Atlantic that we are all now living on the other side of the Tower of Babel.

Haidt, an atheist, doesn’t mean that literally, of course. The metaphor points to America’s fracturing into culturally tribal factions, which Haidt argues reached its tipping point in 2009, when Facebook pioneered the “Like” button and Twitter added a retweet function.

Although culture wars have always existed, these technological developments encourage triviality, mob mentalities, and the potential for everyday outrage like never before.

For Haidt, this descent into Babel means not a new culture war, but a different kind of culture war—where the target is not people on the other side so much as those on one’s own side who express any sympathy for the other side’s viewpoints (or even their humanity).

Political, cultural, or religious extremists whose goal is to produce viral content target “dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team,” making sure that democratic institutions based on compromise and consensus “grind to a halt.”

At the same time, Haidt contends, this sort of outrage-fueled, enhanced virality explains why our institutions are “stupider en masse” because “social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted.” This leaves the discourse controlled by a tiny minority of extremist trolls—all looking for “traitors,” “Karens,” or “heretics” to root out.

Haidt’s metaphor might be even more on point than he realizes. Babel, after …

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Pastors, leaders, and members pray and volunteer in the city’s communities amid a surge of COVID-19.

It had been a week since the beginning of the lockdown. The day after he joined the neighborhood volunteer team, pastor Xue of GB Church received a white one-piece protective suit, a pair of shoe covers, a pair of gloves, and a face mask. (Xue and others throughout this piece have been given pseudonyms for their own safety. So have the church names.)

After 8:30 p.m. that day, he was responsible for collecting the garbage placed in the doorways of 72 homes on the 16th to 27th floors of the building. It took him about an hour to move nearly 150 kilograms of trash. The following day, the 150 bottles of alcohol and thousands of masks he ordered through online group purchase rapidly met the demand, and the community volunteers quickly became acquainted with him.

When they saw him at a community meeting, the local aunties and uncles immediately switched from Shanghainese to Mandarin with a strong Shanghai accent in their chatting to ensure unhindered communication. Xue’s newly added WeChat friends are all neighbors in the community. Neighbors are no longer an abstract concept or a group of people in the administrative or geographic sense, but people of all types, with their own temperaments.

In another area of the city, morning prayer meetings at the CL Church had seen a significant increase in attendance since the lockdown. While the city’s early risers were busy ordering groceries on their mobile apps, more than 20 Christians and seekers began online worship.

“With 15 minutes of Bible sharing and 15 minutes of prayer every morning, we encourage people to pray first after they wake up and before they do anything else. As Martin Luther said, if you wait till you finish everything else and then pray, you are actually …

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The number of full-time students at the evangelical seminary has dropped 44 percent in 20 years.

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) has cut nearly $1 million in spending, hoping to head off financial disaster as the seminary’s enrollment numbers decline.

President Nicholas Perrin told faculty and staff on Thursday that the suburban Chicago seminary has to make some “pretty fundamental changes in how we go about our business plan and mission.”

Trinity International University (TIU)—which includes an undergraduate school with two campuses, a graduate school, and a law school, in addition to the influential evangelical seminary—is concluding the first part of a three-phase process of “creating efficiencies.”

The first phase is focused on the seminary. It includes “reshaping the personnel” so that TEDS can carry out its mission “in a revenue-effective way,” Perrin said in a recording obtained by CT.

TEDS, never a big school, has long had an outsized influence on evangelicalism. The seminary made a name for itself in the defense of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and served as the birthplace for Sojourners magazine. It was the institutional home for theologians D. A. Carson, Wayne Grudem, Clark H. Pinnock, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Bruce Ware, and has produced scholars such as Scot McKnight, Douglas Moo, Mark Noll, and David F. Wells.

What happens at the Deerfield, Illinois, school reverberates in evangelical institutions across the country.

Last week, the seminary eliminated at least seven faculty positions. A spokesman for the school declined to give exact numbers. Multiple professors, speaking on the condition that they not be named in this article because they are not authorized to speak for TEDS, said two faculty members have taken early retirement, three …

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Pastors weigh in on the critical formulation of the sacrament.

A Catholic priest resigned in February after learning that 20 years of baptisms were invalid because he said, “We baptize you” instead of “I baptize you.”

We asked a range of evangelical ministers about the importance of baptismal words.

Yes, but …

I believe the “formulation of the words” used during baptism is important. The words should not convey something false about God or teach something inaccurate regarding the meaning of baptism. However, I don’t believe saying, “We baptize you” rather than “I baptize you” invalidates 20 years of baptism. Of course, as a Baptist, I also don’t believe pedobaptism is the proper application of baptism. Even so, God judges our hearts.

As a pastor, I affirm the significance of how clergy leads a sacrament. The words, the context, and even the posture of those who gather for the sacrament have significance. But we must never forget that the sacrament of baptism is the action of God.

I do believe that for the sake of the unity of the church and the teaching of the flock, those administering sacrament should strive to be as faithful to the universal formularies as possible. When we depart, I am hopeful God’s grace covers our stutters and feeble understandings.

Not exactly

The words definitely matter, but the precise formulation can’t be determinative, otherwise we would all need to use the Greek or Galilean dialect of Aramaic that Jesus spoke. Wonderfully, Pentecost sanctified the use of every language to speak words of grace! This doesn’t open the door to a sort of paraphrasing that obscures meaning, but it does open the door to a wideness of ways by which grace may be “exhibited and conferred.” …

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There are no easy answers to the spiritual’s convicting questions.

I’m standing in the big house at a plantation in Nashville. It’s an impressive structure. Big white pillars. A long, wide porch is dotted with wooden rocking chairs—all of them filled now with tourists like us, people waiting for a tour guide to walk them around the grounds and recount the day-to-day life of a slaveholding family’s massive operation—all 5,400 acres run by 136 enslaved Black men, women, and children.

Still, inside the grand house, a tourist’s hand goes up and a wearying question gets asked. “But weren’t some slave owners good?” The room grows quiet. I pull my little grandchildren closer. But the tourist persists: “Didn’t they take good care of their slaves? After all, they’d invested in them.”

I’ve heard such questions before—perhaps we all have. Still, I stifle a groan. To feel better perhaps, some still yield to the common impulse to look away from horror, to sanitize history. To diminish the reality of evil.

But were you there?

Piercing Questions

This year, Passion Week will likely find our same tone-deaf singing of one of Christianity’s most boldly convicting songs. Most of us may sing it—with its piercing questions—without a lick of context or historical reflection. Sadly, some may sing, too, without deep pondering of the visceral realities of the Cross.

Yet it’s at the Cross, when we dare to look, that we see Jesus most needing us to be fully there. Except for his mother, Mary, and a few other faithful, stalwart women—who stayed during his entire ordeal—Christ comes to history’s most pivotal moment joined only by mocking Roman soldiers and two convicted thieves.

Just days before, …

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