Transubstantiate

An Advent reading for December 12.

Read Isaiah 52:13–53:12.

During Advent, it is easy to sentimentalize the Incarnation. We imagine the God-man as a baby with his mother; we anticipate his ministry as “Wonderful Counselor” and “Prince of Peace” (Is. 9:6). These are true aspects of Jesus’ identity and humanity, and are certainly appropriate scriptural themes for this time of year. But Isaiah’s prophetic words in this last of his Servant Songs—which describe a coming servant of the Lord who will be found faithful to lead the nations—augment our understanding of Christ’s incarnate life: Jesus was born to suffer and die.

Jesus’ path to glory was not straightforward. Instead of being accepted by the world, he was despised and rejected (53:3). Instead of being exalted as king, he was tortured and murdered (53:5, 9). This is not merely a human tragedy—it is mysteriously part of the divine plan (53:10). Christ’s voluntary suffering reveals his willingness to be not only our High Priest, but also the sacrificial lamb.

This profound reality is more than a theological concept. Jesus suffered as a human being in a physical body, sharing in the most painful and dark aspects of the human experience. He knows what it is to be brutalized and humiliated (52:14), oppressed and abandoned (53:8). In the Incarnation, Jesus identifies with us even in our worst forms of suffering. For those who experience the holidays as painful or lonely, this aspect of Jesus’ life can be strangely comforting. No human tragedy extends beyond his understanding or his solidarity.

But Isaiah also makes it clear that Jesus’ story does not end in suffering and death. Rather, his affliction is the means through which …

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Chosen by Lisa Wingate, author of “The Book of Lost Friends” and “Before We Were Yours.”

The Woman with the Blue Star

Pam Jenoff

Jenoff uncovers a fascinating, little-known aspect of World War II history in this novel, told through the eyes of two young women. Sadie, a Jew, is forced to descend into the sewers beneath Kraków to survive the Nazi occupation of Poland. Ella, meanwhile, lives an outwardly easy life, albeit with a sadness all her own. When the girls encounter one another via a quick glance through a sewer grate, a forbidden friendship begins, one that will sustain and challenge them amid swirling danger. The Woman with the Blue Star tells an unforgettable story of coming of age during tumultuous times.

The Finder of Forgotten Things

Sarah Loudin Thomas

Thomas brings Appalachian history to life through the eyes of ordinary people struggling to find God amid turmoil. People like Sullivan Harris, who arrives in a small West Virginia town as a fraudster running from the consequences of his choices. Or Gainey Floyd, the local postmistress, who isn’t buying his tricks. As the town’s working people fall victim to one of America’s worst (and least-remembered) cases of industrial abuse—the digging of the deadly Hawks Nest Tunnel—both characters are challenged to make a difference. The Finder of Forgotten Things affirms the heroic spirit that God can bring forth in each of us.

Once Upon a Wardrobe

Patti Callahan

Callahan, author of the 2018 novel Becoming Mrs. Lewis, returns to C. S. Lewis’s world, this time as seen through the eyes of Megs, a brilliant math scholar at Oxford. Megs’s terminally ill brother, George, is desperate to know the secrets behind his favorite new book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This spurs Megs to seek out Lewis himself and get some …

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Visionary artist built Noah’s Ark and world of Genesis with experience gained at the Olympics and Universal Orlando.

Patrick Marsh worked on the design of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and then turned around to help with the renovation of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, which reopened to great fanfare in 1986.

He played a key role in designing two popular rides at Universal Orlando when it opened in 1990—Jaws and Kongfrontation—and then moved to Japan to design cutting-edge theme parks in Tokyo and the foothills of Mount Fuji.

But he didn’t think he had reached the height of his career until he got to Kentucky. He didn’t like the mud, he told a local newspaper reporter, but he loved the work—designing the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.

“That’s probably the most incredible thing I’ve had a chance to do,” Marsh said. “I just feel like all the things that the Lord has been working on my life has led up to actually coming here to Answers in Genesis” (AiG).

Marsh, the creative force behind the creationist attractions in Petersburg and Williamstown, Kentucky, died on December 2. He was 77.

“Calling him a ‘genius’ is not an overstatement,” Ken Ham, AIG founder and CEO, said in the organization’s official announcement. “Patrick’s fingerprints are all over the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter. I have never worked with a more creative person.”

Anthropologist James Bielo, who wrote a book about the process of designing the full-scale recreation of Noah’s ark and the opening of the park in 2016, said there was always a creative give-and-take between Marsh and his team, and Ham had to sign off on every decision, but Marsh was the undisputed “maestro.”

“Patrick would bring Ken Ham fully fleshed-out …

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What a pair of seemingly contradictory psalms teaches us about telling the church’s story.

Every Christian storyteller has a dilemma. When you want to communicate the history of your people—your church, your denomination, or the church as a whole—how do you frame it? As an encouraging story of corporate faith, courage, obedience, and success? Or a chastening story of God’s faithfulness and mercy despite corporate sin, confusion, and stubbornness?

If you’re casting vision or fundraising, you’ll want the former. Everybody likes hearing their victories celebrated and their sacrifices noted. But if you’ve read the Old Testament recently, you’ll notice how often the latter approach prevails. If anything, the Hebrew prophets and poets go out of their way to replace cheery pep talks with cold, hard looks at human intransigence and divine grace.

The storyteller’s dilemma is how to do justice to both. Simply repeating the encouraging version on loop (or whenever you need money) risks blowing smoke, and Pelagian smoke at that; people will assume their good works have merited God’s blessing. But hammering home the chastening version risks despair and apathy. If we’re all such miserable failures, riddled with incompetence and sin, then why bother?

Scripture provides a fascinating way through. Hidden in the Psalter at the end of book 4 lie two adjacent songs that tell Israel’s story in opposite ways. Psalm 105 gives encouragement, depicting an Israel that never puts a foot wrong. Then Psalm 106 chastens, with Israel getting hardly anything right. If we didn’t know the full Old Testament background, it would be hard to credit both portrayals as true.

In Psalm 105, the successes of the patriarchs (vv. 7–25), and especially of Israel during the Exodus and …

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“Rise and Fall” producer Mike Cosper takes listeners backstage to answer questions about production delays, his personal experience, and more.

Last week, CT’s director of podcasts Mike Cosper posted the much-anticipated final episode of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. CT editor Stefani McDade sat down with him to talk about the stress and joy of unexpected interviews, how exvangelicals and other groups responded to the series, and what listeners can expect from bonus episodes and future projects.

How do you feel about the overall reception of the podcast and its wide audience?

If you had asked me, “Who’s gonna listen to the podcast?” I would have said, “I think pastors and church leaders, Gen X men, aged 35 to 50, who were part of this phenomenon.” And then, you know, some broader interests beyond that. The fact that it’s had millions of downloads is not something we would have imagined at all from the beginning. I mean, we were back in the top 10 in Apple podcasts yesterday, you know?

You had some significant delays in production. Tell us about that.

With this influx of unexpected interviews and conversations, we decided to just roll with moving forward. By the end of July, we were like, “This is going to be a problem.” It took this storyline that was kind of a straight line and just kept expanding it and opening it up—“Let’s follow this thread, let’s follow this thread.” And then, you know, there were a couple of stories that just came at the last minute, stories that we really wanted to have. We thought, “This is worth pressing pause. This is important.”

What do you think made all these people change their minds and decide to talk to you at the last second, especially with the final episode?

There were just a few things that happened in a handful of episodes that built …

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Their plight moved a (mostly prayerless) war correspondent to prayer and mourning.

“Islamic fundamentalist groups, in particular ISIS, have ravaged parts of Iraq and Syria and brought those countries’ already decimated Christian population to the verge of extinction. In Egypt, Christian Copts face legal and societal discrimination. In Gaza, which in the fourth century was entirely Christian, fewer than one thousand Christians remain.”

Sobering statistics like these set a grim backdrop for The Vanishing, war journalist Janine di Giovanni’s fearless account of what the book’s subtitle calls “Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets.” There can be few better suited or equipped to tell this story than di Giovanni, who has previously reported on the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Syria and is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.

The Vanishing is neither a chronological record of Christian withdrawal nor a geopolitical analysis of religious trends. Instead, di Giovanni offers a kind of requiem for a disappearing religious culture, a tale rendered all the more heart-wrenching for having been written during some of the worst months of the COVID-19 crisis. The book skillfully manages to combine an overview of the rise and precipitous fall of Christianity in its ancient homelands, moving accounts from believers sticking it out there, and a deeply personal grieving over the withdrawal of the faith from its birthplace.

Di Giovanni’s narrative begins and ends amid the lockdown in Paris: “I light a candle,” she writes. “I pray for those who are sick and for those who have died. Ordinarily, I am not a prayerful person. I am a proud sinner, in fact. But faith is coming back to me …

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Release after seven weeks of captivity comes as Christian Aid Ministries starts three days of prayer and fasting.

A Christian aid group based in Ohio announced Monday that a violent gang in Haiti has released three more hostages, while another 12 remain abducted.

The statement from Christian Aid Ministries (CAM) said the people were released on Sunday in Haiti and are “safe and seem to be in good spirits.” The group provided no further details.

On November 21, CAM announced that the 400 Mawozo gang had released the first two hostages of a group of 17 kidnapped in mid-October after visiting an orphanage. There are 12 adults and five children in the group of 16 US citizens and one Canadian, including an 8-month-old.

The leader of the 400 Mawozo gang has threatened to kill the hostages unless his demands are met. Authorities have said the gang was seeking $1 million per person, although it wasn’t immediately clear that included the children in the group.

“We are thankful to God that three more hostages were released last night,” stated CAM, an Anabaptist missions organization based in Berlin, Ohio. “As with the previous release, we are not able to provide the names of the people released, the circumstances of the release, or any other details.”

The group reiterated its request—proposed by “a Haitian brother in Christ”—for supporters to devote Monday through Wednesday as days of prayer and fasting “to intercede for those who are still being held as well as those who have been released.” (Editor’s note: Throughout the ordeal, the prayers of CAM’s Anabaptist supporters have been noteworthy.)

“We recognize the power of prayer and fasting,” stated CAM. “We believe that it is Satan’s goal to destroy the work of God through strongholds …

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A journalist pieces together the messy lives of Norma McCorvey, her family, and other central figures from the case.

The life of “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade was not what it seemed.

When Norma McCorvey, using the alias “Jane Roe,” sued Dallas district attorney Henry Wade for the right to an abortion that Texas law prohibited, she won plaudits from pro-choice feminists throughout the nation. Years later, in the late 1980s, McCorvey abandoned the anonymity of her alias and became a public advocate of abortion rights and a sought-out speaker on the pro-choice lecture circuit.

But in 1995, McCorvey took an action that made her a hero to a very different group of people: pro-life Christians. She renounced most of her earlier support for abortion rights and converted to evangelical Christianity. A photo that was widely reprinted in many evangelical publications showed an ecstatic Flip Benham—the director of Operation Rescue and the pastor of a Free Methodist church—baptizing a beaming McCorvey. Three years later, McCorvey converted to Catholicism, an action that may have linked her even more strongly to the pro-life cause. Yet in the last two years of her life, McCorvey distanced herself from organized religion, said that she supported abortion rights in at least the first trimester, and told a documentary filmmaker that her work for the pro-life movement had merely been an act.

So, which version of McCorvey was the real one? What does her complicated story tell us about the 50-year political battle over abortion rights in America? And what does it tell us about the Christians who have been caught up in that struggle?

Joshua Prager’s The Family Roe: An American Story is a masterpiece of journalistic research that uncovers the story not only of McCorvey but also her entire family, as well as a number of other …

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What happens to your faith when your church is torn apart?

Five days after resigning as lead pastor of Mars Hill Church, Mark Driscoll was once again in front of a crowd—this time, a packed conference of pastors who offered him a standing ovation in support. It only took 474 days for him to announce he was planting a new church in Scottsdale, Arizona.

But while Driscoll wielded his own force of personality to get as much distance from Mars Hill as possible, life in Seattle was a different story. A confused and hurting church was displaced, hundreds of people were out of their jobs, and the fiercest critics of the church practically threw a party.

In our series finale, we follow a few of those threads, which led some people to new ministries, others to new careers, and still others out of the church altogether. We’ll revisit the legacy of Driscoll’s teaching on gender, and we’ll ask whether or not he really preached good news and freedom.

We’ll also look for the presence of Christ, working in surprising and unseen ways to bring beauty out of the ashes of what was once Mars Hill Church.

As we end 2021, we’d love to invite you to join us as we continue to try to tell stories like this. Subscriptions are a great way to do that, and we’d love if you considered us with your end-of-year giving.

“The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” is a production of Christianity Today

Executive produced by Erik Petrik

Produced, written, and edited by Mike Cosper

Joy Beth Smith is our associate producer.

Music and sound design by Kate Siefker and Mike Cosper

Our theme song for this finale is “Resplendent” by Bill Mallonee and the Vigilantes of Love.

The closing song this week is “All My Favorite People” by Over the Rhine.

Special thanks to …

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The history of Christian celibacy is more complicated than we’d like to think.

Lately, Christians have cast their minds and social media musings back to the early church on the topics of singleness and sexuality. Much of the conversation centers on past spiritual practices of celibacy and claims about what early church leaders taught about singleness.

Some suggest that early church leaders enthusiastically ‘tore down’ the centrality of marriage within the church. Others argue that the way we understand the (so-called) “gift of singleness” today is a direct inheritance from apostles and the church’s earliest centuries.

As a history nerd, practical theologian, and never-married Christian woman, I may not agree with every supposition, but I’m delighted by the revitalized discussion about how we can see ancient ideas about singleness in a new light. After all, church history is our history, and this ancient era is ripe with fascinating insights (and quite a few conundrums) about singleness—many of which are still relevant to discussions on faith and church life today.

The lessons we can learn from the ancient church about singleness are many and mighty, but they are neither simple nor straightforward. In fact, early church leaders do not offer us a singular narrative about being single. However, when we examine the Christian history of celibacy on its own terms, the conversation yields something far more complex and interesting.

So what does it look like for us to approach this past honestly?

First, a proper historical methodology involves observing the details and nuances of the past, rather than painting it with broad brush strokes.

We must keep in mind that the early church era spanned almost 500 years and multiple continents. In that time and space, there was a great …

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