It was Philip Yancey’s book The Jesus I Never Knew that first drew my attention to this unsettling moment in the post-Easter appearances of Jesus. Yancey provided what I now know is a common way to understand this “doubt”:

[T]he Gospels portray Jesus’ followers themselves as the ones most leery of rumors about a risen Jesus. One disciple especially, “doubting Thomas,” has gained the reputation as a skeptic, but in truth all the disciples showed a lack of faith. None of them believed the wild report the women brought back from the empty tomb; “nonsense,” they called it. Even after Jesus appeared to them in person, says Matthew, “some doubted.” The eleven, whom Jesus had to rebuke for a stubborn refusal to believe, can hardly be called gullible.

One could, as Yancey seems to do, spin this Matthean moment for apologetic purposes. By refusing easy comfort, the doubting disciples demand more solid proofs, thereby fortifying the faith of us who believe in their wake, in the absence of the firsthand encounter they had. Alternatively, one could use Matthew’s brief narrative to underscore the ultimate insufficiency of “eyewitness testimony”: if even those who saw the risen Jesus on a mountainside in Galilee could struggle to believe, then we too can breathe a bit easier, knowing that when we doubt, we’re in good company and no worse off than the first generation of Christian believers.

If we look more carefully at Matthew’s Greek text, however, the meaning of the disciples’ doubt becomes less clear. The RSV passage makes it sound as if the disciples are divided into two groups: those who worshiped Jesus, and those (others) who doubted. But, as Walter Moberly points out in The Bible, Theology, and Faith, the Greek syntax does not favor this interpretation. It’s likelier that the subject of the two verbs — worshiped and doubted — is the same group and that it is the entire company of those who meet Jesus on the mountain. This explains why the updated edition of the NRSV differs from the RSV: “When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.” All those who worshiped also doubted, and vice versa.

Moberly proposes one further tweak, though. He asks whether doubted is the best way to render the verb distazo in English, since in the one other place in Matthew’s Gospel where it appears (14:31), it suggests a certain flailing or uncertainty, rather than skepticism. So Moberly translates 28:17: “when [the disciples] saw [Jesus] they reverently prostrated themselves. But they were hesitant.”

But why would the disciples, in the presence of the risen Christ, be hesitant or uncertain? Centuries of Christian tradition have blunted our ability to appreciate the sheer strangeness and shock of one faithful Jew being raised from the dead in advance of the hoped-for general resurrection of all the dead at the culmination of history. Many of Jesus’ contemporaries, schooled in the prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel, were eagerly anticipating the latter; none were expecting the former. And so the earliest witnesses of the risen Jesus were confused about what it should mean for them, what it obliged them to say or do. Should they go back to their fishing and hunker down in Galilee for a few more weeks or months (surely not years?) until Jesus returned unambiguously to establish his kingship? Or … what, exactly? Given the bizarreness of Easter morning, just what was the appropriate response?

Maybe this hesitation can help us better understand the assurance, joy, and boldness that came with the end of Jesus’ resurrection appearances and the arrival of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost. If seeing Jesus alive brought a kind of happy but hesitant hope, it was what happened next that solidified the disciples’ faith and galvanized their missionary proclamation. With the presence of the Spirit, it now became unmistakably clear that Jesus had been raised and exalted not for some arcane purpose but precisely so that he could be present in a newly empowering, comforting way. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” Jesus said before his return to his Father. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

And, according to Luke, that is exactly what happened ten days later: Jesus’ hesitant followers did remember — with palpable signs and wonders — that he would be with them, and they did begin to go out from Jerusalem to baptize new converts and make disciples.

Some forms of hesitation and doubt will always be with us, but surging underneath them is the Spirit-given confidence that Jesus’ risen life really is for our salvation — and not for ours only but for the whole world’s.

By Wesley Hill

In my work as a New Testament professor, I regularly introduce students to the Jewish diaspora — the post-exilic life of the people of Israel outside their ancestral home in Palestine. I encourage them to try to identify the burning questions that would have arisen for Jews determined to keep the commandments of the Torah in a place like Susa in modern-day Iran, after the Persians took control of Babylon: How far would they go in assimilating to the cultural expectations in their foreign setting? How much would they be willing to adjust and accommodate their habits and traditions to fit in among their neighbors? To what degree would they try to maintain a distinct identity? How much compromise would they attempt while endeavoring to stay true to their way of life?

Although I recommend that my students read Chaim Potok’s wonderful novels about 20th-century characters in Brooklyn to get a feel for how these questions have never really gone away for Jews, I could just as easily travel the other direction in time and encourage them to read the Joseph cycle in Genesis 37-50, the episodes in Daniel when Jewish exiles stick to their guns in the face of pressure to assimilate (see Dan. 1:8-21; 3:1-30; 6:1-28), and the story of Esther. These are all stories that pose the same challenge: What does it look like to be faithful in places where no one understands you, where you have little to no external support for the life you believe you’re called to lead?

Esther is one of the selections for this year’s Good Book Club, a time when a lot of us in the Episcopal Church try to read the same parts of the Bible together and talk about them with each other. At this point, we’ve arrived at the book’s central section, 5:9–8:14. If you’ve kept up, you’ll know by now how different Esther feels from most other parts of the Old Testament. It reads more like a novel, fable, or romantic adventure than a dry chronicle of military conquests or dynastic transitions. And like a novel, it doesn’t neatly deliver a moral lesson. The Harvard scholar Jon Levenson is right:

The book of Esther is so entertaining, so comical, and so subtle that to speak of its “message” can be profoundly misleading. Like all great literature, it demands at least that the term be in the plural: A book whose structure is amenable to many angles of vision surely has more than one message.

Even so, there are enough oddities in the book that make you want to read closely to ensure you aren’t missing the way artistic narrative can also be the vehicle of profound theological proclamation.

In his short, provocative book Esther and Her Elusive God, John Anthony Dunne rejects most of the usual interpretations of Esther: that it is mainly about heroic the Israelites’ faithfulness and God’s consequent (though hidden) protection of them from annihilation. Dunne points out that Esther, the book’s protagonist, and Mordecai, her cousin, aren’t really depicted as conscientious observers of the Torah. Many readers have noticed their lack of prayer to God (or any mention of God in the book at all, for that matter); the complete absence of any longing for home, for Zion and a rebuilt temple and freedom from Gentile domination; and — at an absolutely crucial juncture (3:13), when they are facing the imminent prospect of genocide — the neglect of the Passover, the keeping of which would have allowed the Jews to beg God to show up again with the Exodus mercy and might he’d exercised before. Dunne concludes: “we have no reason to assume Esther or Mordecai have much faith at all”; “the people of God portrayed in Esther appear to have experienced a decline in faith and religious adherence to the God of their ancestors.”

If Dunne is right about all this, then it may be that we need to rethink the implicit theology many of us think we’ve discovered in Esther. Although God is never named and only, maybe, in a couple of spots alluded to (4:13-14; 6:13), most religious readers have wanted to detect a subtle, under-the-radar providential orchestrating of events, so that behind Esther’s achievement in rescuing her people lies the quiet but no less effective fidelity of God to Israel. I feel sure that that impulse isn’t wrongheaded. But maybe it doesn’t go far enough.

It could be that what we have in Esther isn’t just a theology of divine providence and protection but also something like a doctrine of “the justification of the ungodly” (Rom. 4:5), God’s commitment to stand by God’s people when they’re at their covenant-keeping worst and see them through anyway. In this way, there may be more theology, not less, in what Dunne calls this most “secular” of biblical books. God not only intervenes; God intervenes precisely at the point when no human virtue or piety would compel him to do so, where the only hope is the sheer divine intention to bless, save, and protect, regardless of whether it’s acknowledged by the saved ones at all.

Samuel Wells, vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square, has said provocatively that the Book of Esther “provides the most explicit foreshadowing of Christ in the whole of the Old Testament.” That may be a bit of homiletical exaggeration, but then again it may not. If Jesus the Jew isn’t just the human one who stands in the breach to rescue his people Israel and the rest of the nations from certain destruction — if he is also the embodiment of God’s own faithfulness despite all human indifference and rejection — then Esther may be one of the best windows onto the meaning of the gospel that we have.

One of the Gospel readings appointed for the Advent season used to send chills up my spine when I heard it as a child. “Then two will be in the field,” Jesus says, conjuring the image of two virtually indistinguishable fellow workers engaged in the same form of toil. “One will be taken and one will be left.” Then he repeats the story for emphasis: “Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.” Then he spells out the implied imperative: “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming” (Matt. 24:40-42).

When I heard that Gospel in my childhood, I assumed Jesus was talking about “the Rapture,” which one of the revered teachers in my church tradition had described as the end-of-history “carrying away of the church from earth to heaven” (Charles Ryrie, Basic Theology, p. 537) before the beginning of the “Great Tribulation” on earth.

The imagery I had in mind was from the 1972 film A Thief in the Night, which had, as N.T. Wright predicts its theology would, “frightened [me] into some kind of (distorted) faith.” In the film, which was popular in many fundamentalist and evangelical spaces in the next several years (until its copycat, the Left Behind series of books and movies, replaced it in the mid-’90s), various characters wake up to find that housemates, relatives, friends, and coworkers have vanished spontaneously, leaving behind still-running lawnmowers, kitchen mixers, and the like. It’s theme song was Larry Norman’s 1969 hit “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”: “A man and wife asleep in bed / She hears a noise and turns her head / He’s gone / I wish we’d all been ready / Two men walking up a hill / One disappears and one’s left standing still / I wish we’d all been ready.”

One minute there are two friends sitting in a restaurant having a conversation, and the next minute one of them has disappeared. The theological framework behind this plot lies in “premillennial dispensationalism,” an interpretation of history’s end that has Jesus returning to rescue (or “rapture,” from the Latin rapere, “to seize or snatch away”) his true believers, while the rest of humanity endures the brutal seven-year dictatorship of the “Antichrist,” who makes life on earth the penultimate hell before the final judgment — when Jesus returns, again, to inaugurate the millennial golden age.

According to Wright, though, dispensational interpretations of Jesus’ picture in the Gospel — of two people working side by side when one of them is “taken” — almost certainly have it backward. As with a midnight raid on an unsuspecting village or when you hear a knock on the door from the secret police, those who are “taken” shouldn’t be understood as being whisked away to safety. No, the ones left behind are lucky. It’s those who are “raptured” who are heading for a jail cell or worse.[1]

What, then, is Jesus’ point in the Advent Gospel reading? It seems to be something like this: There is a catastrophic conclusion the world is hurtling toward. So stay alert. Keep your eyes peeled. Don’t fall asleep. Because you don’t know when you might be taken off-guard by an enemy. And mostly because you want to wait and watch for me when I come for you, as I promise to do.

The trouble is, when you read the rest of the story the Gospel tells, it doesn’t go well for the people whom Jesus exhorts to keep alert. On the night when he was betrayed and arrested, he asked for his friends to stay up with him in vigil: “I’m very sad. It’s as if I’m dying. Stay here and keep alert with me” (Matt. 26:38). But they eventually succumb to drowsiness. They fail to link arms with Jesus in his direst time of need.

And yet the forecasted outcome never materializes. The three men who fell asleep — Peter, James, John, whom Jesus had predicted would be “taken” in judgment if they didn’t keep alert — are the ones who are, contrary to the way this plot is supposed to unfold, “left” or spared. And the one who did stay awake, who prayed all night to the God he called “Father,” who could have called in an unbreachable angelic fortress to encircle and defend him, was the one “taken” into custody. From there, he endured a sham of a trial, with its usual physical and psychological brutality. And the next morning, before noon, he was strung up on a death stake to await the suffocating fate that, all things being equal, could have been and should have been the fate of his friends instead.

It’s at that stark, singular point where we can glimpse the deepest meaning of all the prophetic, end-times, judgment imagery that saturates our readings during Advent. All the lurid images — the sudden darkness, the earthquakes and convulsions of the supposedly stable order of the world, the people being secreted away in the night to suffer unknown tortures — all of them come to a head when Jesus dies, alone, on the cross. He suffers our fate. He is, as Karl Barth said, the Judge judged in our place.

In Advent we’re asked to face up to the truth that a final reckoning, a last judgment, has been promised, and maybe one of the reasons so many cherish this part of the Church year is because we know firsthand the dread of it on the horizon. But the deepest truth of Advent is that the judgment has, in its truest and fullest sense, already taken place. It has fallen on Jesus, for our sake. And so, in Advent as in every other season, “Christians will never find that they are called to anything other than hope — for themselves and the world.”[2]

[1] “It should be noted that being ‘taken’ in this context means being taken in judgment. There is no hint, here, of a ‘rapture’, a sudden ‘supernatural’ event which would remove individuals from terra firma. Such an idea would look as odd, in these synoptic passages, as a Cadillac in a camel-train. It is a matter, rather, of secret police coming in the night, or of enemies sweeping through a village or city and seizing all they can. If the disciples were to escape, if they were to be ‘left’, it would be by the skin of their teeth” (N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, p. 366).

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1, p. 118.

 By Wesley Hill

One of the prominent themes for discussion and debate in the Episcopal Church at present is the theological status of moral disagreement. How are we to give a theological account of disagreement among Christians over moral issues, and how might we point the way toward its resolution or at least amelioration? The pitched battle for same-sex marriage (or marriage equality) rites has all but dissipated, at least in its most recent form, given the outcome of the 79^th General Convention in 2018 — which “memorialized” the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, thus guaranteeing that a traditional understanding of marriage as the union of male and female will remain available as one teaching, alongside the recently approved alternative marriage liturgies. Via Resolution B012, the 79^th General Convention also made rites of marriage for same-sex couples available in every diocese and parish that wishes to use them, while providing a mechanism for traditionally-minded bishops to appropriate oversight of such parishes to another bishop. This truce of sorts, whereby two teachings about marriage sit uneasily alongside one another, seems to have lowered the temperature on at least one moral disagreement. At the same time, General Convention signaled a recognition that more theological work remains to be done by commissioning a Task Force on Communion across Difference, the report of which was published in 2021 (available online in The Blue Book 2021).

After long centuries, the divided churches of East and West are by now used to reflecting theologically on the status of doctrinal disagreement. But we are much less sure of the status of moral disagreement. In our own context, work on what the Archbishop of Canterbury has called “good disagreement” has in many ways only just begun. The Church of England Conversations regarding sexuality in 2015-16 were forthright in acknowledging that theological reflection on moral disagreement was still in its infancy, and they postponed any possibility of a common mind on the matter for the foreseeable future, while calling for Christians to “consider together what the practical consequence of disagreement might be” and enjoining charity and Christlike humility in the process.

As we Anglicans continue to engage the question of the theological status of moral disagreement in our own churches and ecumenically, one of our tasks is to return to Scripture for illumination and instruction. Just here, one particular text has recommended itself as especially germane in Anglican debates about sexuality: the so-called “Jerusalem Council” in Acts 15, in which Peter, Barnabas, and Paul recount to James and the other Jerusalem apostles and elders the effects of their missionary proclamation of Jesus as Messiah among the Gentiles. That the Gentiles receive the Spirit apart from being circumcised and observing other dictates of the Mosaic law counts, says Peter, as certification that they are acceptable before God through Christ as they are and do not need to be circumcised in order to attain justified status (vv. 7-11). For many readers in recent decades, this text has suggested, by analogy, that there is warrant for the full inclusion of lesbian and gay couples in our churches, apart from their having to accept traditional heterosexual behaviors or mores. Additionally, perhaps more for “traditional” or “conservative” readers, Acts 15 has loomed large in discussions of moral disagreement because of the manner of adjudicating such disagreement that it displays.

I do not want to relitigate these long-running debates. I do want to offer three theses arising from reflection on Acts 15 that ought to help guide our discernment of the theological status of moral disagreement. Put differently, I won’t argue for one particular “side” in the disagreement over sexuality. I will argue for how I propose the two opposed sides ought to go about appealing to Acts 15 in the context of their disagreement.

My first thesis is simple: The disagreement over the circumcision of Gentile converts in Acts 15 is best understood as a genuine moral and theological disagreement.

Many modern interpreters would have us approach Acts 15 as an example of a disagreement about “ceremony” or “ritualism” as opposed to “morality” or “theology.” For first-century Jews, however, the circumcision of the flesh was not disconnected from what we would call the moral or ethical life. Not only was circumcision commanded in the Mosaic law and thus part and parcel of what the law would describe as a life of obedience; it was also understood as the visible and effectual renunciation of the evil impulse that dominated Jewish understanding of temptation, moral struggle, and the quest for a life of virtue. For the Jerusalem apostles to disagree with Paul and others about whether Gentile believers in Jesus as the Messiah needed to be circumcised is therefore properly a disagreement about moral behavior with theological, and not just sociological, ramifications. Acts 15 is much more relevant to our current moral and theological disagreements than we might have initially thought.

My second thesis relates to the much-discussed verdict that James renders in Acts 15:13-21. After Peter, Barnabas, and Paul complete their narrative recounting of how God performed signs and wonders through them among the Gentiles and bestowed the Spirit on the Gentiles without their having first gotten circumcised, James summarily concludes: “Simeon has related how God first looked favorably on the Gentiles, to take from among them a people for his name. This agrees with the words of the prophets” (vv. 14-15). However, as several readers have pointed out, this translation reverses what the Greek says: “with this the words of the prophets agree.” Many who have sought warrant in Acts 15 for the inclusion of non-celibate LGBTQ believers in the Church today have placed enormous weight on the direction of James’s formulation in the latter, more literal translation. James appears to subordinate the inscripturated prophetic word to the missional experience of Peter, Barnabas, and Paul; which, in turn, may seem to warrant the subordination of the supposed scriptural prohibition of same-sex sexual intimacy to the experience of observable LGBTQ holiness and acceptance in contemporary contexts.

Were this the only possible construal of the text, it would seem to forecast the settling of moral disagreement by one “side” of our current ecclesial division simply giving up its position and capitulating to the other side. Those who believe that they should not (or cannot) bless same-sex unions as Christian marriages would, like James, need to allow contemporary experience to override their prior understanding of Scripture and thus surrender their previous belief. Here, however, it is crucial to note that St. James still treats the words of the prophets as abidingly authoritative. It is not so much that experience alters or reconfigures the scriptural word. It is that experience is treated as illuminative of the scriptural word, with Scripture retaining its authoritative role albeit in a newly unveiled form.

What Acts 15 envisages, in other words, is a more complex, dialectical and hermeneutical process, in which missionary experience sheds new light on Scripture and in which Scripture, in turn, validates or confirms what experience has taught. The party at the council in Jerusalem concerned to safeguard the scriptural deposit is not shown to be simply in the wrong. Their understanding of Scripture is, to be sure, transformed, but their basic commitment to scriptural authority is left intact. This, finally, suggests my second thesis: The search for reconciliation and unity of mind does not require either “side” in an intractable moral disagreement to surrender its conviction regarding what is good. What is required is a willingness to be led by the Spirit into new understandings that may recast, without necessarily overturning, previously held convictions.

This way of framing the quest for unity is commonplace in ecumenical theology. Many have suggested that a similar posture ought to obtain when the churches face moral disagreements. Oliver O’Donovan has tied this approach to the churches’ moral disagreement over human sexuality. As he writes:

The only thing I concede in committing myself to … a process [of dialogue between “gay-affirming” Christians and “traditional” Christians] is that if I could discuss the matter through with an opponent sincerely committed to the Church’s authorities, Scripture chief among them, the Holy Spirit would open up perspectives that are not immediately apparent, and that patient and scrupulous pursuit of these could lead at least to giving the problem a different shape — a shape I presume will be compatible with, though not precisely identical to, the views I now hold, but which may also be compatible with some of the views my opponent now holds, even if I cannot yet see how. I do not have to think I may be mistaken about the cardinal points of which I am convinced. The only thing I have to think — and this, surely, is not difficult on such a subject! — is that there are things still to be learned by one who is determined to be taught by Scripture how to read the age in which we live. (Church in Crisis, p. 33)

This is the posture Acts 15 encourages. Instead of prompting the question, “How can the other side be made to see things my way?” the text appears to suggest that both “sides” of a moral disagreement may find themselves transformed as they together engage the experiential and scriptural contours of their disagreement. The disagreement may or may not be thereby resolved, but it will almost certainly be given a more promising shape.

Third and finally, Acts 15 suggests that moral disagreement is enclosed within the missional, reconciling purpose of God and is superintended by the Spirit.

When we attempt to draw connections between Acts 15 and our contemporary experience of moral disagreement, we should attend to the placement of the chapter in the larger structure of Acts as a whole. First, we have the opening frame: “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach.” This framing implies that what will follow in the narrative to come is the record of what Jesus continues to do and teach after his ascension, through the agency of the poured-out Holy Spirit, including the vicissitudes, detours, and tensions of the Acts narrative. And this providential work in the midst of conflict and brokenness is foregrounded when the opening of chapter 8 records the outcome of the persecution the believers in Jerusalem endure. As St. Luke says, “all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria” (Acts 1:1). The violence the Church suffers is made to serve her mission, as Jesus had forecasted at the narrative’s beginning (1:8). Persecution leads to the fulfillment of Jesus’s prediction. The Lord guides and governs even the narrative’s most unassimilable elements, bending them to a higher purpose.

The same pattern holds with respect to chapter 15. The disagreement between the apostles over the status of uncircumcised Gentiles becomes the doorway into the second missionary journey of Paul, leading to evangelism in Macedonia and elsewhere. The conflict among the apostles was not ancillary to this outcome. It was ingredient to it.

This suggests, I believe, that we must do more than merely ask about the theological status of moral disagreement and how to go about achieving unity of mind and spirit among contemporary believers. We must also inquire into what we might call a pneumatology of moral disagreement. Acts 15 suggests that our task is not merely to strategize an end to moral disagreement but also to probe, amid ongoing disagreement, what God’s strange purposes might be in permitting believers to remain at odds with one another over moral matters (cf. 1 Cor. 11:19).

Such an inquiry should not lead to theological fatalism. We should not use the Spirit’s ability to work in and through human recalcitrance and folly as an excuse to rest content with disagreement, throwing up our hands and declaring that it must be God’s will for us since we cannot find a way beyond it. But nor should we fail to recognize that the Spirit can make use of human conflict as well as concord. The command to maintain unity of Spirit, even in its breach, will be caught up in the Spirit’s work of judgment and purgation. How might our moral disagreement appear in a new light if we ask, through prayer, study, and debate, how God is acting in, through, and beyond it?

A long number of springs ago, when I was living with some friends in Minnesota and tired of wintering in my dim basement apartment, I made a habit of taking my Bible and first cup of coffee to the back porch and reading a chapter of Peter Leithart’s commentary on 1-2 Kings for morning devotions. It remains a cherished memory not just because I can still summon the sensation of the crisp, bright air on my skin, and the vague scent of the herbs and vegetables I was learning how to grow in my corner of the garden just over the porch railing, but also because Leithart’s commentary was shaking me. Reading it almost single-handedly prompted what retired Bishop Daniel Martins has called the “third conversion”: the conversion not only to Christ, not only to mission in his name, but also to his body, the Church, the visible community of his baptized followers.

I was a lifelong Baptist when I read Leithart on 1-2 Kings, and without much introspection I was able to see myself in his portrayal of the righteous, doctrinally orthodox remnant of true Israelites within the tragic decline narrative that those Old Testament books depict. We Baptists, according to the self-understanding I’d imbibed growing up, were the ones who knew and cherished our Bibles and tried actually to do what Jesus said, in contrast to the milquetoast Methodists and Lutherans. (I remember asking my parents when I was very young about the Roman Catholic Church. “They have the Knights of Columbus,” I recall them telling me. “And they drink.” We Baptists were, appropriately and “biblically,” teetotalers. Chalk another one up to distinguishing virtue.) We were (though I don’t think I ever heard it put exactly this way) the remnant — the true believers’ church, the obvious successors to the zealous first Christians.

But as I read Leithart’s comments on the role the faithful remnant plays in the unfolding storyline of 1-2 Kings, I started to feel the ground shift:

American fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals in particular tend to operate with free-church ecclesiologies in which they regard themselves as the remnant, the true Israel, separated from the false church in the mainline [Protestant churches]. Thinking that they are following Luther, they withdraw from contact with the mainline churches, largely ignoring them and leaving them to their own devices. To be sure Elijah and Elisha set up their own network of prophetic communities, but they remain in regular, if confrontational, contact with Israel’s mainline. An ecclesiology of total withdrawal cannot be sustained by 1-2 Kings. Elijah and Elisha do not entertain the comforting illusion that they can carry on happily as the true Israel while the Omrides take the nation further into the cesspool of idolatry. They recognize that they are inevitably bound with the nation as a whole, and their prophetic labors that gather faithful communities within Israel aim not at forming a permanent alternative to Israel but at renewing Israel.

Leithart goes on to draw a pretty on-the-nose contemporary conclusion:

To put it into contemporary terms: those outside the mainline do not have the luxury of considering mainline confusions and apostasies “their problems” as opposed to “our problem.” If the Episcopal Church in the United States of America sanctions homosexual conduct among its bishops, that is as much a problem for believers in a Bible church as it is for Episcopalians themselves. (p. 125)

Leithart writes as a “conservative” here, without bothering to argue for the “traditionalist” line on sexuality. And it’s no doubt because I take the same line that I felt so gripped by his recommendation: that I view those, within my own Episcopal Church, with whom I’m in disagreement on the appropriate Christian way to live out one’s sexuality, as part of my family — perhaps wayward, in my view, but no less part of my family, to whom I bear obligations of recognition and fidelity and charity. I remember closing the book at that point and scribbling some notes, my conscience pricked by an unsettling thought: What if, by having all my theological ducks in a row, I’m still not justified over against my theological enemy? What if I’m part of the problem, rather than the solution?

What prompted me to think back to my reading of Leithart was this horrible, tragic mess of a situation in the Southern Baptist Convention. The most visceral thing I’ve read about it all so far is this piece from Russell Moore, who recently left the SBC amid a cloud of controversy and has become a prophetic voice for reform. Here’s one part that struck me:

When my wife and I walked out of the last SBC Executive Committee meeting we would ever attend, she looked at me and said, “I love you, I’m with you to the end, and you can do what you want, but if you’re still a Southern Baptist by summer you’ll be in an interfaith marriage.” This is not a woman given to ultimatums, in fact that was the first one I’d ever heard from her. But she had seen and heard too much. And so had I.

Moore is now a minister-in-residence at a non-denominational church in Nashville, and he’s written eloquently about his inability to remain in fellowship with the SBC.

The first reaction I want to register is complete and utter sympathy with Russell Moore and his wife especially — and maybe also a sheepish wish that he and she would jump farther into catholic order (his associate, Ray Ortlund, is now an ACNA canon theologian). I grew up in the SBC and I met Jesus there, but I’ve also been convinced that to love Jesus is also to cleave to his visible body sacramentally and publicly, as widely as is possible (hence Austin’s Law: “If you feel conscience-bound to change denominations, never join anything smaller. The danger of self-deception is too great.”)

It’s no frivolous thing to depart from the community that taught you to know and trust God’s incarnate presence in Jesus, and Moore is enough of a churchman to see that and lament it. Solidarity with others who name the name of Christ matters, and he’s been one of the main spokespersons for that view, as far as I can see (from, for instance, his gracious effort to maintain charitable Christian ties with Mike Pence while strenuously critiquing his administration).

But for that same reason, I’m also thinking about the line every “catholic” I ever talked to, when I was considering my own jump into the Anglican fold, said to me: “If you can stay where you are in good conscience, then staying should be your default.” And the rationale for that advice, I think, was more or less the same as Leithart’s exegetical arguments: If you jump ship from one Christian denomination to another, you may — wittingly or unwittingly — be saying that, thank goodness, their missteps and crimes and rebellions are no longer yours to deal with. And if you say that, what are you ultimately saying about the centrality and finality of your shared baptism in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

Is Russell Moore’s departure from the SBC an effort at self-exoneration? There’s no way to answer that, aside from trying to read motives, but my hope for his public witness going forward is that he’ll remind all of us that the crisis in the SBC isn’t just theirs to shoulder but is for all of us who share in the same baptism. Their crisis is ours. And we’ll only be fully healed and restored if and when they are.

At various points in my life, I’ve taken up the partisan banner with gusto. Although I planned to vote for Barack Obama for president in 2008, I remember being unsettled by Obama’s then-pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s remarks that emerged during the course of the campaign. “God damn America!” Wright had said, and I had absorbed enough Hauerwas at that point to sympathize with the point. But I still couldn’t look my GOP-voting parents in the eyes and say that I was ready to defend Wright as someone with whom I was in full, unimpaired communion. Then I read this from the “progressive” evangelical Jason Byassee in the “conservative” evangelical magazine Christianity Today:

Charity requires that evangelicals do business with Wright. He, like them, is part of the body of Christ. Not less than John Hagee or Rod Parsley — extremist ministers aligned with John McCain —Wright’s churchmanship means he is more brother than enemy.

Did I really believe the bonds I share with fellow Christians like Wright — and my parents — required me in some way to believe that all of us were part of the same dysfunctional kinship network? And what would it mean for my speech and action if I really did believe that? And what would it mean for me to learn from Wright, as a fellow Spirit-filled believer, even when I thought he was wrong?

A few years later, on the eve of Obama’s second term, I read this from Francis Spufford, an English atheist convert to the Church of England:

[If you’re a Christian,] what you can’t do, no matter how tempting, is to push wholly away from those who do their Christianity very differently. You can’t say: no kin of mine. I can find Sarah Palin, for example, as politically ridiculous and terrifying as (perhaps) you do, but I can’t just shun her. No matter how strange, bizarre and repulsive the expressions of her faith may be to me, I have to believe that she’s got something right, that she’s a member like me of the body of Christ, in need like me of the grace of God, and as sure to receive it. She is, despite everything, a sister. And I have to recognize her as such, while being very glad that Alaska is a long, long way away; and to hope that, in the same way, she would recognize a brother in me, despicable gunless high-taxin’ Euro-weenie socialist that I am. (Unapologetic, p. 214)

Again, as with my encounters with Leithart and Byassee, I was rattled.

I don’t mean to say that Russell Moore and his wife shouldn’t have left the SBC — let alone the survivors, who have been courageous and prophetic throughout this whole cataclysm. And I certainly don’t mean to throw any cold water on the entirely commendable and necessary efforts to blow the SBC coverups wide open.

I left the SBC myself, for reasons of conscience and doctrinal considerations, so I can’t very well cast stones on anyone else who does. But I hope that those of us who have left won’t view ourselves as having somehow succeeded where our Southern Baptist siblings have failed, as having escaped unscathed from the judgment that’s coming for us all. I hope we’ll view ourselves as all alike floundering about in the ark of salvation, opposing each other on vital, urgent matters but, for that very reason, occupying the same space and trying, however haphazardly, to listen the same Lord. And I hope we’ll be granted the repentance and amendment of life that these awful days surely call for.