Interview by Stefani McDade

In our present era of deep political division, the American church is caught between two eschatological extremes: a “rapture” theology seeking to escape the world, and a “dominion” theology seeking to conquer it. But what if both miss the posture of Jesus and his kingdom?

Discussing his newly released book, God’s Homecoming, N.T. Wright challenges the “modern nonsense” of imposing Christianity by force. Pointing to the Sermon on the Mount, Wright argues that God’s Kingdom doesn’t arrive via tanks or political takeovers, but through the “meek and the hungry-for-justice” who quietly care for the vulnerable left in the shadow of the empire. From Jesus and John Wayne to the pitfalls of Christian Nationalism, Wright offers a pastoral and political corrective centering on the cross rather than pulling the levers of worldly power.

Stefani McDade: So, you know, some people hear things like “Jesus is the King of the world now”, and they can think of political takeovers. How is your homecoming argument different from things like the Seven Mountains Dominion theology?

Tom Wright: Yeah, I don’t know much about that dominion theology, because it’s very much an American phenomenon. If there are pockets of it here in the UK, I’m not aware of it. We have lots of other problems, but not that one. And part of the answer there is—what does it mean to be human, and what does it mean for God to become King and to recruit humans within that purpose? And the answer to that is the Sermon on the Mount. And I’ve said many times, you may have heard me say before, people think that if God is becoming king, then he needs to send in the tanks. And if God doesn’t seem to be doing it, we need to go and build a tank, and we’ll get on with the job, and we’ll sort the world out and put those wicked people to shame, etc. 

The Sermon on the Mount says, “No, when God wants to come and be king and sort the world out. He doesn’t send in the tanks. He sends in the poor in spirit, and the humble, and the meek, and the hungry-for-justice people, and the people who are mourning over the world’s wickedness.” And by the time that the bullies and the bad guys wake up and realize what’s going on, the meek and the hungry-for-justice people have built hospitals and schools and helping the poor and are proclaiming that there is good news, particularly for the downtrodden and the outcast, etc. Which is not what the power brokers want to hear, because we want to keep those people well aware, because they’re an embarrassment to us.

I know your country is going through a certain amount on this front, as we speak. I’m coming to America next week, God willing, to do some lectures on the West Coast. And I know I’m going to be asked this question again and again. But I mean the idea that a Christian nation—which is an odd idea anyway, by the way—but that a Christian nation should then try to impose, by force, a certain type of brand of Christianity, without reference to the Sermon on the Mount or to Luke 4, which is Jesus’ own kingdom agenda—let alone to all the other passages about humility and service and caring for the poor, etc.—this is just a bit of modern nonsense.

Do you know I just finished reading a book a friend of mine told me I had to read by Kristen du Mez called Jesus and John Wayne. You know that book that was a real eye opener, because if that’s what American evangelicalism is. It just shows that that word means something totally different when you cross the Atlantic. Because I have been in the Anglican evangelical world most of my adult life, and none of that has any resonance in England at all. In fact, most evangelicals in England are probably politically center left, or what some people would call center left, without any trace of all that other stuff. 

And so, we’re living in a very misleading and worrying time when somehow the churches need to hold their nerve. Because sometimes when I’ve said the sort of things that I say about God’s welcome to the outcast and so on. People have said, “Oh, Tom, that’s you’re just following the woke agenda, aren’t you?” And I said, “Absolutely not, you won’t see anyone less woke than me.” But if the church has been forgetting its true calling, don’t be surprised if other people with other motives, eg, Marxism, come in to fill the gap that we have left. And that doesn’t mean that all their agenda is now validated—far from it. It just means, shame on us that we weren’t doing the stuff we were supposed to be doing.

SM: Right. Because some Christians think we need to be in positions of power to prepare for the millennial reign. There’s an over-realized eschatology—overestimating how much of the kingdom can come now before Jesus returns—which can lead to a kind of Christian nationalism.

TW: Now that’s that’s interesting, because the other thing that’s, of course, dominated a lot of American Christianity is dispensational premillennialism, which is, “The world is getting worse and worse and worse, and it’s we few, we happy few, and we’re going to be raptured.” But what you’re describing there is a recurrence of the old post-millennialism, which is, “We’re making the world better and better and better until it becomes Christian, and then Jesus can come back.” And so we’re wrestling there, really, with 17th Century post-millennialism, versus late 18th and 19th century pre-millennialism. And again, I want to say this is an American problem—most of the world, most of the Christian world, doesn’t work on those axes. But both of those ways of telling the story misconstrue how the Bible talks about the inauguration and work of the Kingdom.

I mean, I remember when I was studying in the gospels at undergraduate level, we did essays on why did Jesus tell parables and that sort of thing, and we maybe did an essay on Mark’s view of the cross or something like that. But nobody ever was talking about that Jesus was launching the kingdom of God, going around saying, “Kingdom, yes, but not like you imagine it. It looks like this—healing this blind man. It looks like that—the poor old widow who’s being helped. And it’s like a father who had two sons. And this happened, and that happened. Jesus is redefining what it means for God to be king on earth as in heaven, and then, the redefinition climaxes with the cross and resurrection and ascension. Because that’s how the whole thing comes together and means what it means. 

And so when people talk about either making the world a better and better place,”Well, are you doing it in the Jesus way? And if not, why not?” Or if they talk about, “Oh, well, you know, one day there’ll be a rapture and we’ll be snatched away.” Well, bad luck on the meek, who are told they will inherit the earth.

So, we have told the story in radically unbiblical ways. I’d still rather people were telling the story of Jesus as the story of that there is a God who loves us. Because if they believe that, they may at least find some other stuff. But when you get these distorted versions of the story—which are baked into certain churches, life, teaching, statutes, etc.—watch out. I’m very old fashioned about this; I tend to think that the Bible is the Bible and the traditions are later.

SM: And I think that a lot of people have walked away from the church because of the sort of fear-based End Times teaching, right? So, what would be your pastoral vision or heart for that?

TW: Yeah. I mean, it’s a funny thing. When I started out many, many years ago, because I was a good young Anglican Evangelical, my vision was to do biblical exegesis as well as I could—to show the Liberals that their wishy-washy, half-baked stuff really wasn’t up to the mark, and that the Bible was much more important than they’d given me credit for. As I did that, and was going around different places, doing lectures, I realized that I was having an equal and opposite effect, as it were, on people who’d grown up with fundamentalism—whether Protestant fundamentalism or Catholic fundamentalism—in a world where heaven and hell were these big, extraordinary, worrying things.

And, well, you know, all the shtick about either saying a prayer said you’ll go to heaven or waiting for the rapture or whatever. And so, particularly when I would lecture in America, I had these people coming up to me and saying, “You’re remaking my worldview.” And I thought, “I’m just pointing out what’s in the Bible, actually.” And so I realized that, yes, there is an argument to be taken too. I mean, when I grew up, most theologians didn’t believe in the bodily resurrection. That may still be the case, but I think the work that I and many others have done has actually changed the shape of public theology on that one. But likewise, so many fundamentalists simply believe in that dualistic world from which Jesus will rescue us—and with all the misreadings of the Son of Man coming on the clouds and so on, that go with that.

And so, quite accidentally, in doing the one task, I seem to have been doing the other one as well, helping people out of that. Which then I’ve, of course, I’ve had stick for because people don’t like the New Perspective on Paul, so-called. And so we’re all in this mix of trying to understand the Bible better and make it real for people.

Interview with Stefani McDade

If you asked the average person in the pew what happens when we die, the answer is almost always about going to heaven. But in his latest book, God’s Homecoming, N.T. Wright argues this rescue narrative owes more to the Greek philosopher Plato than to Jesus or the writers of the New Testament. If the Gospel is ultimately about God returning here rather than us going there, much of our modern hymnody and funeral liturgy might be missing the point entirely. Wright makes a bold call to move past a dualistic hope of heaven and reclaim the robust, earthy biblical promise of a new creation where Christ finally returns home to dwell with his people.

Following up on his landmark work Surprised by Hope almost 20 years later, Wright discusses the “missing piece” of the eschatological puzzle: the Holy Spirit as “agent of our future resurrection”. Moving from the tragedy of resurrection-less funerals to the Hebrew concept of the nephesh (our whole person), Wright argues we should “forget” our modern understanding of the soul and explores what he thinks happens to us after death in the intermediate state. Along the way, he addresses how this “homecoming” vision reframes everything from creation care as part of our “priestly vocation” to hell as a “dehumanizing” vote against being a genuine image-bearer.

Stefani McDade: So if  the Gospel is all about God coming here versus us going there, does that mean all of our songs and stories about going to heaven throughout Christian tradition are getting it all wrong?

Tom Wright: Yes, when you say throughout Christian tradition, one of the great redemption hymns is, of course, Revelation chapter five, which is about “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain”. But the ending of that song gets it right, of course, because it doesn’t say “You’ve ransomed humans for God so that they can go to heaven and stay there forever and ever.” It’s, “You ransomed humans for God so that they can be the royal priesthood, so that they can be genuine humans and they will reign on the earth.” Now, do you know any hymns that end up like that? I know one or two, but not very many.

Most of the hymns I grew up singing—one of the great hymns, “Love divine or loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down”—I talk about that at one point in the book. And it’s ironic, because almost all of that hymn is about God coming to us in Jesus and in the Holy Spirit. But then right at the end of the hymn, “Changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love and praise.” It’s a great ending to the hymn, except it’s completely wrong. It takes Revelation four and five, the image of the elders casting their crowns in front of the throne, as though that was a picture of the ultimate end, which is really bad exegesis. Because in the ultimate end, which is Revelation 21, the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth, and so on.

So yes, we have all been conned by platonic versions of Christianity, and the more I look back at the Christian tradition, the more I think that’s true. Now, it’s much better to go with Plato than to go with a lot of other possible philosophers as a framework. The best sorts of Platonic Christians are doing a great job, and they say their prayers and they love their neighbors, but the narrative is still wrong, and particularly the narrative is not biblical. And unless we’re in tune with that, we’re selling ourselves short.

SM: Yes, that’s perfect. And why do you think it’s so much easier for us to talk about Jesus as my Savior and being saved, you know, escaping to heaven, than it is to talk about Jesus returning — as the return of God to Jerusalem?

TW: Because I think, like in one of my books, I have this riff on the Lord’s Prayer, and how most people, if they pray, probably are praying the Lord’s Prayer backwards. In the sense that when people start to pray, the thing they most want to say is, help get me out of this mess. So, “deliver us from evil” is where people sort of start. And then they realize they may be part of the evil. So “forgive us our trespasses”. And then they realize there’s a few things they need, so they work back to our daily bread. And if you’re lucky, you may get back to actually worshiping God as the beginning of the prayer.

But in the same way, the notion of salvation, of rescue, is so powerful, because all humans know in their bones that things are radically wrong with the world and with themselves. So, the idea of being rescued from what’s wrong is very powerful and very biblical. The Psalms are full of it. But, then, what will that rescue consist of? And the implied Platonic narrative is, “Well, this earth is not my home. I need to be rescued from it.”

Some years ago, I’ve often told this story, I decided to take with me on holiday some little volumes of Plutarch, the great first century Greek philosopher. And I like reading kind of wacky things on holiday. And I read Plutarch’s treatise on exile, where he says quite cheerfully that we have souls which are exiled from their true home in heaven and which are looking forward to going back there when they’re allowed, rather than the scruffy Old Earth. And when I read that, I thought most of my Christian friends think that that’s what Christianity is. Plutarch is a middle Platonist. He’s a pagan priest in the shrine of [Delphi]. He’s a philosopher, a biographer, etc. But what’s wrong with this picture? And the answer is, that’s the Platonic picture. It’s not the Christian picture. And so I’ve spent some of the best years of my recent life, as I slide into elderly age, trying to persuade people to get the story the right way up.

SM: Yes, that’s great. So, if the final goal is a physical New Earth, what is happening with all the people who have died but are yet waiting for resurrection? Do you address any of that?

TW:  Yes, the last chapter in this book is very much about that, because I was starting to explore this in my last couple of years in St. Andrews and just bringing it into lectures. But it seems to me the missing piece of the jigsaw for many people is the work of the Holy Spirit. Because we’ve thought in terms of a soul, and the soul is going to heaven or maybe going through purgatory or whatever. Then what is the soul doing in between the one and the other? And the answer is, forget the soul. The Bible never uses the word “soul” the way that Platonism does. In fact, the Greek word psyche, translated as soul, actually refers to the Hebrew nephesh, which is, like the whole person.

Just a riff on that in the parable of the wicked, of the rich fool, when God says, “This night, your soul will be required of you”, people think, “Oh, there it is. God’s going to take his soul away.” But actually it means your life, your whole life. It means you’re going to die. Because immediately before, this guy who’s built his barns and stocked them, well, he says, “Soul, take your ease, eat and drink and enjoy yourself”. Now he doesn’t mean soul in the Platonic sense. He means “I’m going to have a good time. I’m going to be drinking and eating”, and that’s the soul. That’s the whole self anyway.

So now, if the Holy Spirit has indwelled somebody in the course of this life, inspiring faith and hope and love and enabling them to whatever measure, to reflect the love and purpose of God into the world and the love of Jesus, etc. Then when that person physically dies, it seems to me to make no sense that the Holy Spirit would say, “Well, that was an interesting experiment in sanctification. So we’ll just park that one over there somewhere, and when it’s time for the resurrection, I’ll come back and scoop them up again,” Because it’s clear that the Spirit is the agent of our future resurrection. Romans, 8, 9, 10, 11. “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then He who raised the Messiah from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also.” So what’s the Spirit doing in between?

And I think that’s where that line from the Psalms, “He holds our nephesh in life.” He holds our whole self in life. And when Paul says, “My desire is to depart and be with the Messiah, which is far better,” that’s Philippians chapter one. I think we can fill that out by saying that that is the Spirit in Romans, 8, 1 Corinthians 1-6, Paul talks about the fusion of the Holy Spirit with our spirit. That’s a very mysterious thing, and I don’t think we’ve often made enough of that. But then the person that we are is the person that the Spirit has enabled us to be. And if the Spirit has shaped us, then there’s a sense in which the Spirit also is shaped by the people that we have become. That’s an extraordinary idea.

But then, so, in the intermediate state, we are still indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We’re in the close, personal presence of Jesus. We are waiting for the time when the Father makes remakes the whole world. And now, that would be a complicated funeral sermon, and don’t try and preach this at a funeral, because people are not expecting that. Preach it during the rest of the year, so that when we come to the funeral, it’ll make more sense.

And here’s another important riff on that. I’ve been to a few funerals recently, including a family member and couple of friends, etc., and at good evangelical churches where the word “resurrection” is almost entirely absent—including one where the only place where the word resurrection came up was when the coffin was being brought in, and somebody read from John 11, “I am the resurrection and life’ says the Lord”. But the whole of the rest of the service was about going to heaven. And I came out thinking, these are good Bible Christians. What’s happened to the resurrection? And I think we have done ourselves and the Church and one another a serious disservice, by the way that we have taught some things and forgotten others.

SM: We’ve sort of become modern-day Sadducees, like just neglecting the resurrection. And Paul says, if there’s no resurrection, bodily resurrection, what’s the point? Our faith is worthless.

TW: Exactly, exactly. And modern-day Sadducees, in a sense, though I would reserve that particularly for the post enlightenment secularists. Because part of the Sadducees saying there’s no resurrection is a political point. They’re the guys in power. People who believe in a resurrection, there’s no knowing what they will do. They’re dangerous people to have around, because they will critique power. Because ultimately, resurrection is God’s answer to the power of the tyrant.

So the whole enlightenment world, which says—basically Epicurean—”God’s upstairs somewhere. He’s left us to run the world. So we’re going to run the world our way. We wield the Empire our way.” And so that the rejection of resurrection in post-enlightenment theology looks as though it’s saying, “Oh well, we have modern science, so we don’t believe in these things anymore.” Well, phooey to that. But in particular, it’s a power grab. It’s an imperial power grab. I think I articulate this a bit in my Gifford lectures, history in eschatology, and so that comes back to politics, actually. And we have to say, “No, the Christian who believes in the resurrection is somebody who, by the Spirit, has the vocation to speak the truth to power.”

SM: Right. The resurrection takes away the power of death, which is the main tool of the empire to wield their power and instill fear and control.

TW: Exactly. I don’t know if you know my big book on the resurrection of the Son of God, that big green book, there’s a quote at the beginning of one of the nearly at the end chapters, which is a quote from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome. Do you know this line where Herod Antipas hears a rumor about this person, Jesus, and the courtier says to him, “This man, Jesus, he’s going around healing the sick, and he’s making the blind see, and he’s raising the dead.”

And Herod suddenly says, “He’s raising the dead? This man must be found and stopped” and told him, “I don’t want anybody to raise the dead”, because, as you say, death is the last weapon of the tyrant. And Herod knows if he’s raising the dead, well we might get John the Baptist back for a start, but then who knows what else could happen? So I think I say in the Giffords that “Resurrection is undesirable for a Platonist, impossible for an Epicurean, nonsensical for a stoic and scary for a tyrant”.

SM: Yeah, that’s great. And a sort of corollary to that is: obviously this is a totally different conception of heaven, but what often goes hand in hand is a conversation about hell. How, if any, does this do you talk about hell in the book? Do you not?

TW: Not much in this book. In fact, I’m not sure; I’d have to go back to the Index. There’s one page reference, hell, 184, there you go. But when I wrote Surprised by Hope, the penultimate draft, somebody said to me, “Tom, you haven’t mentioned hell, what you’re going to do?” And, now, here we are. No, there’s no discussion of it here, but so there is a short section in Surprised by Hope. And the trouble is that when people say hell, they think of these medieval pictures of torture and little demons, which is actually a pagan picture. One of the reasons for the rise of Epicureanism a few centuries before Jesus was because many pagans had this terrible vision of hell, and Epicurus was saying, “No, no, it’s all just atoms bumping into each other. So when we die, we die. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Phew, okay, I don’t have to worry about hell anymore. It’s still a pretty bleak future, actually, just my atoms are going to dissolve, and that’s that guys.

But so we first have to disabuse people of that medieval picture in order then to say when God finally puts the world right, the way as he intends to. Because God has made us humans, not puppets. God actually wants to woo people into his love. But if people say, “Absolutely not, I am worshiping these gods or goddesses, and wherever they take me is where I’m going”, then I believe that ultimately, that is them voting against being a genuine image-bearing human—which is a very hard thing to say.

And part of the problem here is, I’m talking about people I know and love who seem at the moment to be saying, “Not in my life, thank you very much”. And actually I want to say, “Please see it differently, come in.” But it seems to me that part of the dignity of being human is to have the chance to say, “Actually, I do not want to reflect God into the world. I do not want to reflect the praises of the world back to God. I don’t want to be a royal priest. I don’t want to be an image bearer.” And how you then proceed from there is very difficult, because we’re into imagery, and how much of that means something on the surface, etc, but that there is a prospect of final loss in some way, shape or form, I think, is built into the fact that God is going to put the world right, and that humans do have the chance to worship the non-gods and to go that route.

And when you think back through the last century or two, I find it very, very difficult to say, “Oh, well, “God will give Adolf Hitler another chance and another chance and another chance, and maybe he’ll go through purgatory, and maybe he’ll make it in the end.” Well, who knows if, in the split second that Hitler committed suicide, maybe he did repent, and hallelujah if that was so. But I think we have the right and the duty to speak of people who seem, as we say, “hell-bent” on worshiping idols and living according to that, and dehumanizing and destroying everything in their path as a result.

SM: And it brings up the whole matter of God’s justice. If there’s no justice, you know, then, well…

TW: Exactly, exactly. And I mean, actually, faced with the world over the last 10 years, I find myself in fear and trembling being drawn back to some of those psalms which often churches miss out on. Because they are saying, “Let the wicked fall into the pit that they’ve dug for others” That’s now a prayer which I need to pray for the world.

SM: I love that. Now, I have another sort of provocative question. If all of creation is a temple, does that mean that taking care of the earth, and our bodies, for that matter, are equal forms of worship to God to any other—like praise, like obedience?

TW: It depends on what you mean by equal, they are certainly forms of worship, of honoring God. I mean Psalm 119 has that wonderful verse, “The earth Oh Lord, is full of your hesed, your lovingkindness.” So when we are looking after the earth, we’re looking after something which is already saturated with God’s lovingkindness. That God made this world not as kind of neutral rubbish, but as a world in which he is already present and doing stuff—and the world which he has promised ultimately to saturate with himself.

In a previous podcast I did, somebody quoted back at me, Isaiah 11:9. He said, “I think this is one of your favorite texts.” I said, “Too right it is!” It’s “The earth shall be full of the knowledge of Yahweh as the waters cover the sea.” And you may have heard me say before, how do the waters cover the sea? The waters are the sea. And so when we are working with the grain of God’s good creation, and working for the healing of creation, for the fruitfulness and the beauty of creation, we are enabling creation to worship God the way it really wants to, the way God intended it to. And I think that’s part of the priestly vocation, is to enable creation to praise God. But the danger with saying it the way you did would be that some people would say, “Well, okay, I’m digging in the garden. You can go off to church, and I don’t need to do that,” but I would say, “You probably do need to come to church as well and pull it together.”

But for me, in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, morning prayer has a variety of categories you can choose, and one of them is the song of the three children in the burning, fiery furnace: “All you works of the Lord, bless you the Lord, praise him and magnify Him forever.” And it runs right through mountains and hills, seas and floods, whales and all that move in the waters, you beast and cattle. It’s a way of saying, “The whole lot of you, come on, praise the Lord.” And I’m articulating that—that’s become very, very important to me.

I’m sorry there wasn’t a chapter on ecology in this book. My dear friend Brian Walsh in Toronto read the draft of it. He said, “Tom, you need a chapter on ecology.” Now Brian, as well as being a theologian, is a farmer, so he’s read all this stuff—Wendell Berry, goodness knows what. He gave me a bibliography, and I looked at it. Sorry, the book’s already long; I just don’t have the expertise to do that. I’d happily hand that agenda over to anyone who can do it.

First, the responses from ChatGPT metaphorize and individualize Scripture without a clear method for when and why, without warrant, and often in direct contradiction to the text itself. Second, the bot’s interpretations are ignorant of the interpretive tradition(s) that produce them. And third, as a disembodied bot, the interpretations themselves are necessarily disembodied and thus unable to recognize the realities of Scripture and interpretation.

Since human interpretation can fall prey to each of the above tendencies, I consider it a great honor to mentor a group of young undergraduate men who have committed to living out Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in their everyday lives. Each of us is convinced that the Sermon contains teachings of Jesus that are meant to be followed. After all, Jesus himself emphasizes that his disciples should practice what he teaches (5:17–20 and 7:21–29). Thus, the true interpretive experiment is to start by living the teaching.

For the sake of these men, then, I decided to explore how ChatGPT interprets the Sermon on the Mount, especially since many have said that undergraduate students are those most vulnerable to using this new technology as a shortcut. (As a side note, I have become convinced that undergraduates are not in fact the most likely to use this technology or the most at risk from it, but that is a different essay.)

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a responsive large-language model chat bot, essentially a souped-up version of a smartphone’s text prediction. ChatGPT is trained to respond to human dialogue partners in ways that would make sense. What makes ChatGPT so revolutionary is that its training involved more content than that of previous language models, yielding about 175 billion language nodes, which is more than three times as many nodes as previous models had.¹ This is the same technology behind Google’s chatbot LaMDA and the new chatbot being integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine.

None of these technologies understands either language or the ways humans use language to point to real-world phenomena. Instead, the words they receive from a human interlocutor are treated as a series of tokens. These chatbots then return a series of further tokens that humans understand. This nature of ChatGPT explains how its responses can quickly be shown to be wrong, ridiculous, or both. The words do not signify anything to the program. They are not representative of truth because truth is not something these bots can process. It is for this reason that the beginning of my conversation with ChatGPT turns out how it does.

ChatGPT Metaphorizes the Sermon on the Mount

All quotations from ChatGPT are verbatim, including spelling and grammar errors.

I opened by asking ChatGPT about interpreting the Sermon on the Mount:

Me: How should we interpret the sermon on the mount?
ChatGPT: The sermon on the mount is a set of teachings found in the Bible, specifically in the book of Matthew. In this sermon, Jesus teaches his followers about the importance of living a righteous and moral life, and offers guidance on how to do so. Many people interpret the sermon on the mount as a blueprint for how to live a good and meaningful life, and as a guide for how to treat others with kindness and compassion. Some key themes in the sermon on the mount include the importance of humility, forgiveness, and love. Ultimately, how the sermon on the mount is interpreted will depend on an individual’s personal beliefs and values.
Me: How do you interpret it?
ChatGPT: As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I do not have personal beliefs or values, so I cannot offer my own interpretation of the sermon on the mount. I am designed to provide general information and answer questions to the best of my ability, based on the information and knowledge that I have been trained on. I am not capable of personal opinions or interpretations.

So far, this response is okay. ChatGPT accurately states that it cannot offer an interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. But it quickly became apparent that, when asked the right questions, ChatGPT would indeed interpret the Sermon on the Mount, whether by providing a specific interpretation or by providing several and adjudicating among them, though it could not explain its method of interpretation.

For example, when asked about Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 5:29–30 (“If your right eye causes you to sin . . .”), ChatGPT responded, “It is important to note that this passage should not be taken literally. Jesus is using figurative language to make a point about the seriousness of sin and the importance of avoiding it. He is not literally instructing his followers to mutilate their bodies in order to avoid sin.”

It’s not that I disagree with this claim (although its claim that “most Christians do not interpret Jesus’ statement . . . as a literal command to physically harm oneself” may be subject to some scrutiny), but I was struck by the firmness and certainty it expressed when only two questions earlier it told me it was incapable of interpreting the Sermon.

The more that I explored specific teachings with ChatGPT, the more it seemed to pitch towards a metaphorical interpretation of Jesus’s teachings. So, I finally asked it whether there might be a specific teaching that should be taken literally:

Me: Where is one place in the sermon on the mount where Jesus speaks literally?
ChatGPT: It is difficult to say with certainty where in the sermon on the mount Jesus speaks literally, as the use of figurative language in the Bible is complex and often debated. The sermon on the mount . . . contains many examples of figurative language. In general, the Bible often uses figurative language to illustrate a concept or to make a point, and it is not always clear whether a specific passage is meant to be understood literally or figuratively.
One possible example . . . where Jesus speaks literally is Matthew 5:38-39, where he says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” In this passage, Jesus is quoting a well-known proverb, “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” and he is then offering his own teaching on how to respond to violence and aggression. He is not using figurative language, but rather is offering a clear and straightforward instruction about how his followers should respond to such situations.
However, it is important to note that this is only one possible interpretation of this passage, and there may be other ways to understand it.

Even ChatGPT’s identified teaching where Jesus spoke literally comes with cautions about how this is only one possible interpretation, despite its strong assertion earlier in the answer that Jesus “is not using figurative language, but rather is offering a clear and straightforward instruction.” No such cautions accompanied its interpretations that claimed Jesus was speaking figuratively. Moreover, as I continued to press it on these specific teachings, it ended up claiming that anyone who takes Jesus’s teachings about non-violence literally is “pollyannish.” When I questioned it about that claim, it retreated and apologized. But it continued to maintain its caution around taking this and other teachings in the Sermon on the Mount literally. (Two additional examples of this: that Matt 5:32 does not forbid divorce, but simply prizes marriage and that Matt 5:22 is not actually about someone being in danger of hell, but rather emphasizes the seriousness of anger.) As I questioned its process of arriving at these interpretations, ChatGPT pointed to its training on a large number of texts, including translations of the Bible and literature about the Bible. It also stated that its claims are based on “the broader message of the Bible.”

ChatGPT’s Ignorance of Its Training and Preference for Individual Interpretations

After I queried ChatGPT’s understanding of the broader message of the Bible, it repeated that its training gave it that understanding. Yet it also stated that it is unable to say which translations or writings on the Bible were used in its training. (Although it can and does reference particular translations, it will not confirm whether such translations were used in its training.) Its framework of a broader message of the Bible, though, led it on occasion to turn to Paul’s writings.

Our discussion of Matthew 5:29–30 brought us to 1 Corinthians, because I was trying to suss out what ChatGPT means when it produces lines of text like “the Bible consistently teaches,” a passage is “generally understood to mean,” and “most Christians understand [a text] as.” In the process, ChatGPT revealed a tendency to individualize passages that are actually addressed to a community. This tendency emerged when I posed the following question:

Me: How did you arrive at the conclusion, then, that the “Bible consistently teaches that harming oneself is not an acceptable or moral response to temptation or sin,” when historically Christians have denied themselves food, water, medical care, sleep, etc. in attempts to stave off sin?
ChatGPT: I apologize for any confusion that my earlier response may have caused. While it is true that some Christians have practiced self-denial or self-mortification as a means of resisting temptation or sin, the statement that “the Bible consistently teaches that harming oneself is not an acceptable or moral response to temptation or sin” is not accurate or complete. The issue of self-harm or self-mortification is complex and has been subject to different interpretations throughout Christian history, and the Bible itself contains passages that could be interpreted as supporting or condemning such practices.

ChatGPT goes on to reassert its interpretation that Jesus was speaking figuratively in Matt 5:29–30 and then summons Paul in 1 Cor 6:19–20 for backup, making the striking claim that “our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and should be honored and kept holy.” In doing so, ChatGPT implies that this verse is referring to individuals rather than to the church as a whole. (I did explore the use of the first-person plural pronoun here, asking after its own body and whether the Holy Spirit dwells “in” it, but alas that conversation was rather banal.)

This response and our continued chat about 1 Corinthians 6 were illustrative of the bot’s tendency to confidently assert an interpretation of a biblical text, admit an error around a detail, and then, upon questioning, to change the interpretation with a response that includes an admission of inaccuracy or exaggeration. Yet the bot usually wraps that admission in a reassertion of the very claim it has just undermined.

Our discussion of Paul’s statements in 1 Corinthians show this. I pointed out that Paul uses a plural second person pronoun in 1 Cor 6, not a singular pronoun, and then asked about its individualizing interpretation. After admitting my correct claim about the plural pronoun, it defended its use before concluding with this statement:

Furthermore, throughout the New Testament, the concept of the individual believer’s body as a temple of the Holy Spirit is emphasized. For example, in 1 Corinthians 3:16-17, Paul writes: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” Here, the language is even more explicitly directed at the individual believer, as Paul uses the second person singular pronoun “you” to address each individual Corinthian believer.

But Paul does not use a singular second person pronoun in 1 Cor 3. When I asked, ChatGPT admitted the mistake, but asserted that 1 Cor 6, the passage we had just discussed, supported its individualizing claim about chapter 3 because chapter 6 uses the singular pronoun! The conversation continued until ChatGPT finally concluded the opposite of what it had originally claimed: “Based on the evidence from Paul’s theology, the literary context, and the use of language in the Greek text, the most well-supported interpretation of Paul’s temple imagery in 1 Corinthians is the collective interpretation.” All it took for the chatbot to flip its interpretation was a series of questions asked in the Socratic style.

In our discussion, then, of 1 Corinthians and of ChatGPT’s training and understanding of the broader message of the Bible, we see both its preference for individualizing interpretations of the Bible and also its own ignorance of the interpretive methods and traditions that lead it to provide the interpretations it does. ChatGPT can quote various English translations when asked, and it can respond in excellent ancient Greek language and discuss the finer points of grammar in the Greek text of the NT.

However, it will not (cannot?) provide an account for which translations and which interpretations of the Bible were used in its training, and therefore it does not have the wherewithal to push back on my questions about 1 Corinthians using the well-reasoned and valid history of interpretation that would treat both 1 Cor 3 and 1 Cor 6 as individual, based not only on the permissibility of the grammar for those interpretations, but also on the broader history of interpretation of Paul and the Bible. Instead, in the face of my sophisticated prodding questions, it retreated and flipped its own assertions.

The Challenge of Interpreting without Experiencing

Why does ChatGPT continue to produce figurative and metaphorical interpretations of Jesus’s teachings? Why is it so easy to convince the chatbot to flip its claims on something like Paul’s use of temple imagery? The reasons are at least two: first, ChatGPT has no account of its own training and the traditions informing these interpretations; and second, ChatGPT has no connection to lived experience or reality. As it confidently asserted when I first asked it, it has no “personal beliefs or values.” Despite this, it vigorously pursues an interpretation when asked, privileging certain perspectives and sometimes outlawing or excluding other perspectives. It does so because the words are a statistical game, not Scripture to be lived. It is only parroting what it has been trained on, a body of texts that it cannot share because it seemingly no longer knows (if it ever knew) what they are (if “know” is even the proper term).

This presents a two-fold problem for Christians who might seek out information about the Bible from ChatGPT. First, one cannot be certain of the sources of the perspectives offered by ChatGPT. Jesus asserts several times in Matthew that his true disciples may be known by the fruits evident in their lives (Matt 5:15–20, 12:33–37, 21:33–46). If one cannot access the life of the interpreter and thus the fruits it has produced, how might the Christian know whether the interpretation comes from a true disciple of Jesus?

Second, ChatGPT and other large language models are “black boxes,” meaning we do not know what is happening to generate the responses they provide. Both Christianity and Judaism have historically emphasized engaging with the past and present religious community and that community’s interpretations of sacred texts and traditions. ChatGPT, however, denies it is interpreting while it simultaneously pulling a sleight of hand to interpret the Sermon on the Mount through a tradition that it has hidden, even from itself. For ChatGPT, there is no community debating, discerning, and living their way into and through interpretations. There is only the statistical game of language tokens.

Finally, as the young men I mentor know well, there is a knowledge that comes only through living the teachings of Jesus. ChatGPT cannot do this and it never will be able to do it. As it told me when I asked about its use of “our” in discussing bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures are “not applicable” to it. Because it has no body, it has no experience of the topics signified by the words it interprets and uses.

The Lessons We Can Learn from ChatGPT’s Interpretation

In the end, ChatGPT offers us a mirror and a caution. ChatGPT’s interpretations of the biblical texts are a distillation of the spirit of our age. Like ChatGPT, we tend toward metaphorical interpretations of Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. Like ChatGPT, we tend toward individualizing interpretations of Paul. And like ChatGPT, we tend to forget or be ignorant of whose interpretations have formed our own interpretations of the text. These tendencies are interconnected. After all, it is not the tendency to metaphorize Scripture that is the problem, but rather the default to a metaphorizing interpretation as a kind of short circuit when we are unable or do not wish to examine the interpretative tradition and application of the text. ChatGPT cannot do these latter two things, but we can. Thus, ChatGPT exposes us to ourselves.

This experience with ChatGPT therefore cautions us to consider the value of any of the interpretive tendencies it exposes. Will we treat the Bible as a statistical game of tokens? As words and ideas to be bandied about in disembodied dialogue? Or will we take up the challenge of Jesus to be wise, to hear his teachings and to do them (Matt 7:24) in community with one another? In a word, will we outsource our understanding of the Scriptures? Or will we choose to live together, seeking the meaning of these texts through our history and our common commitment to God, and thus teaching them to those who come after us (Matt 28:20)?

Footnotes

But I also encountered the hands, fists, and batons of few peace officers. Those officers spoiled the lot for me. I learned to fear sheriff’s deputies most when pulled over on the outskirts of town. Out there, as one deputy once screamed at me, “I can do whatever I want, boy, ‘cause I’ll be the one writing the report!” (Or something like that.) Another time, I remember the frontal chokehold of another deputy sheriff in response to my sarcastic answer to his question. Over thirty years later, I can still feel his fingers trying to meet each other around the back of my trachea.

We all know that policing is difficult. We also know we need police reform. Some American communities have known it longer and with more scars. Most police departments know it too. But what principles will guide such police reform? I want to suggest an odd source for our thinking: the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the “Old Testament”).

The increase of us-versus-them thinking has only worsened with the tactical fortification of police departments. According to those who track police culture, “to serve and protect” is gone. Now it’s all “bad guys,” “good guys,” and “surviving the shift” for cops these days. Despite all of this, many officers regularly find the courage and wisdom to police as a godly vocation. And praise God for that.

But police reform won’t ever become what we want it to be until we retrieve an ancient biblical notion of humanity and imbue it not only into police training, but also into our own civilian thinking.

The Bible’s Neglected Legal Imagination

The Bible’s legal ethics have too long been underappreciated. The primary shaper of a Christian community’s legal imagination should be Scripture. The guidance we all crave for police reform comes straight from the pages of the Hebrew Bible and gets repeated in the New Testament. Even though there are no instructions to police or incarcerate in the Bible, its thinking shines a powerful light on our path toward more humane policing—policing that can glorify God while it manages the darkest corners of human behavior.

The most radical legal principle in the Bible demands us to consider “the other” as if they were our own brother or mother. Christians often mistakenly think this idea originates in the mouth of Jesus. But he merely quoted these principles from the Hebrew Scriptures. When Jesus cites the teaching “love your neighbor as yourself,” he knew that he was simplifying a more extensive set of legal principles found a finger-length down the Torah scroll from “love your neighbor” (Leviticus 19). It goes on to demand “love [the foreigner] as yourself for you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt.” The biblical authors also demand equal treatment of the poor, the wealthy, the native-born, and the foreigner alike in their marketplace, home, courts, and business practices. By doing so, they are shaping our imaginations of justice and criminality—two highly distorted concepts in American thought and practice.

This simple step of imagining outsiders as if they were close family members generates a matrix of other-inclusion, from neighbors to foreigners, and even high regard for one’s enemies (and their animals too!).¹ The Torah required ancient Hebrews to foster an imagination that sees people who are not one of us as if they were our own father or mother.

Dream with me about nurturing the imagination of novice police officers and fellow citizens to treat every person, no matter how out-of-hand they may be, as if they were their own mother or brother. It does not mean that the use of force and citations will disappear. Police or not, we could all find ourselves in harrowing situations where we might have to use our bodies to intervene to curb violence. The police must courageously employ force for the sake of protecting life, but they must act discerningly in such moments. What a high demand we place upon them! They deserve our prayers.

However, a biblically honed imagination creates the possibility of glorifying God even within the use of force because it transforms our conception of its use. Imagine a training session in a police academy that teaches about the complexities of these encounters, about the powers of arrest and citation, guided by a biblical imagination. A cadet runs through an arrest scenario and is critiqued by a trainer, who then says, “Let’s do it again, only this time, pretend that it’s your mother, Patricia, whom we’re arresting.”

The second biblical principle that can guide police reform might surprise us: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” (Exod 21:24–25). Despite what many have thought, this principle doesn’t demand retribution. Instead, it restrains retribution only to what was harmed. There is no room for “you touch my stuff, I break your face” in the Bible’s legal reasoning. Ancient rabbis regarded the rule as a type of restraint. Furthermore, the examples in Exodus 21 of this principle being applied feature the more powerful actor as the wrongdoer who receives retribution.

The two sentences immediately following Exodus’ “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” imagine scenarios where someone might be tempted to wield power inappropriately. After the “eye for an eye” general principle, the very next sentence makes its focus specific: “If a man strikes the eye of a servant” he must release him (Exod 21:26). The second sentence makes sure we don’t miss the intended focus, doubling down: “If he knocks out the tooth of a servant,” then he must release the servant (Exod 21:27). Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth: if you exploit power, then you lose it.

In the end, the legal principle exemplified in these imagined scenarios forces us to question: Whose eye and tooth does this legal code have in mind? In the end, it’s the vulnerable servant’s eye and tooth being protected (and presumably their whole body by extension). The law restrains the boss’s entitled sense of power. “Eye for an eye” does not enforce a simplistic tit-for-tat mentality or literal rule. (Even ancient rabbis couldn’t figure out how to follow this as a rule. They pondered: What if a one-eyed man injures the eye of two-eyed man? Removing his eye would then be a disproportionate punishment.) It’s unclear that it was ever meant to be taken literally. Even more, the two sentences after “eye for eye” do not require its literal enforcement.

Rather, “eye for an eye” instructs us to take extra care to restrain harm and avoid the mistreatment of someone over whom we might wield social, policing, familial, or political power.

Imagine, with the biblical authors, police officers who emerge from a culture that values such a legal vision—officers trained to treat citizenry with such care. Citizens might think of strangers in their neighborhoods as uncles or nieces first, even if they prove to be more like our delinquent relatives.

In cases where police abuse their power to investigate or detain, the favor falls to the vulnerable citizen just as it does in the “eye for eye” servant scenarios (Exod 21:26–27). The officer loses the very power she sought to exploit by not carefully navigating the power disparity in such encounters. This extreme mindfulness of their powers gets imbued into the habits and bodies of police officers through training and re-training. In turn, citizens honor and respect officers who police themselves with this biblical legal vision. When acts of force or arrest inevitably occur, the community tends to support their police who act as their emissaries.

Pre–Police Reform

Before we can reform policing in America, we need to tackle a central problem: how we imagine the other. What do we assume about the person who doesn’t look or smell like us, doesn’t eat our food, and speaks another dialect of American English? Former police officer and police academy trainer Dr. David E. Jackson points to his imagination as the key to community policing: “As a native Atlantan . . . I saw each person as a relative—literally. That imagination dictated my engagement even in the most difficult and sometimes dangerous situations.” Police reform might include different tactics and police accountability boards, but they must also include the imaginative perspective of police officers for the kind of change we all want.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson taught us about the danger of a poorly formed imagination. However, in Jefferson’s imagination of humanity, “the blacks . . . are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” He lamented that their inferiority was the “powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”² He had nurtured a view of the African person as fundamentally other, different from the white person. The brutal treatment of Black people was the unfortunate consequence of this view for as long as whites held power. Dividing humanity into us-versus-them always paves the road to mistreatment of “them.” (And systemic mistreatment of whomever we consider “them” inevitably dehumanizes “us.”) We can attempt to legislate the souls of our police officers, but that has never worked. We can’t simply add five rules for treating people well to police officers’ training. While on duty, they will soon have encounters that no list of rules can cover. Rather than rules, might it not be better to retrieve the grand biblical tradition of imagination-building—seeing the other as if they were our own brother or mother?

Police have a lot of latitude in what they cite and why they arrest and charge, and to a lesser degree in how they apply force. Police discretion in enforcing code violations and in use of force to detain opens opportunities for injustice. Citing or arresting the son of a middleclass family has had notably different effects and outcomes than it has had for other sectors of the population. Those injustices begin with how the officers imagined the people they police, what they assumed, what they’ve witnessed, and how they objectify some while identifying with others.

It’s easy for us to imagine some folks as if they were our mother or brother. But a Hebraic legal imagination requires us to learn how to extend that imagination to every person, and that requires us to train our imaginations Hebraically. This renewed imagination combined with a rigorously enforced care for the citizens’ vulnerabilities pervades biblical thought. The Bible might surprise us here, not only in its ethical and legal innovations, but also because its unique collection of legal principles can guide us toward the police reform and just community we all still want.

Footnotes

One often reads reports about skyrocketing rates of anxiety among modern Americans, and many Christians are quick to condemn this anxiety as unbiblical. But are people today really more anxious than ever? And what does the Bible say about anxiety? Do the biblical authors really want us to “cast all our cares” on God until we have no anxiety whatsoever?

Let me introduce you to a psychological theory that supports a surprising answer to these questions: Terror Management Theory (TMT). TMT is a counterintuitive psychological theory that sees one anxiety at the root of all others: death anxiety.

Are you feeling anxious now that I mentioned death? Don’t worry, terror management theorists would reassure you that I haven’t increased your death anxiety, but that you have always been (and will always be) anxious about death. According to TMT, we live and move and have our being in a state of death anxiety, ever engaged in the anxiety-inducing task of trying to stay alive, as well as the uniquely human, anxiety-inspired task of trying to make our lives count before we die. This is why TMT theorists claim that people today are no less (or more) anxious than people from long ago, only that our terror management strategies have changed.

TMT was inspired by the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, especially his book The Denial of Death (1973). Becker’s ideas were not taken very seriously in his own day, but beginning in the late 1980s, social psychologists found ways to empirically test Becker’s theoretical existentialist ideas, showing the hidden power of death anxiety over human lives. Although some skeptics remain, TMT has become a prominent social psychological theory.

If any of this sounds vaguely biblical, it might be because the author of the Book of Hebrews says something similar about the power and pervasiveness of death anxiety. What does the Bible say about anxiety? Both TMT and the author of Hebrews name the fear of death as a hidden and subjecting power over humanity that is operative throughout our lives: “Since the children have flesh and blood, [Jesus] too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (2:14–15, emphasis added).

I believe that TMT theorists and the Bible share a very similar point of view. Both recognize that death anxiety permeates our existence, and that it cannot be eliminated because there is no escaping the vulnerability of the flesh-and-blood life that we humans live.

The good news, however, is that we can, to some extent at least, choose where to direct our anxiety, and the biblical authors tells us that we ought to direct it toward a reality that is more ultimate even than death—namely, God. Furthermore, redirecting our fear of death might, paradoxically, be a kind of solution for the crisis of anxiety that so many are feeling today.

In the first part of this article, I make the case that TMT’s description of the human condition matches the psychological world as described by Genesis. In the second part, I make three suggestions for how a TMT-enriched reading of the Bible might help us to better understand and address the anxiety crisis.

Terror Management Theory and the Book of Genesis

TMT tells an origin story of human anxiety that has several surprising connections with the Book of Genesis. Isaac M. Alderman notes some of these connections in The Animal at Unease with Itself: Death Anxiety and the Animal-Human Boundary in Genesis 2-3, and some of his insights are included here.

According to TMT, the prefrontal cortices of our brain developed to help us predict and prepare for the future. This development was positive. It helped us to plan and coordinate our actions toward goals that would help us to survive. However, it also led to the debilitatingly terrifying discovery of our mortality. Why work hard to stay alive when you know that all your efforts will ultimately be futile? And how can you stay sane and secure when you know that you could die at any time?

This account from TMT of the psychologically challenging setting in which the drama of human development occurred resonates strongly with the biblical description of life outside the garden. What does the Bible say about anxiety in Genesis? In Genesis, too, there is a discovery of death as something problematic for human beings. After humans disobey God, their eyes are opened to the knowledge of evil and to human vulnerability in the face of death: “For dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen 3:19). Humans learn that they will need to work to secure their lives, families, and societies “in pain” (3:16) and “by the sweat of [their] brow” (3:19). And then, even still, all their efforts to stay alive are merely temporary fixes. Outside the garden, anxiety permeates human existence and death looms over everything.

Another significant detail from Genesis also connects with TMT: human-animal boundary-keeping through the invention of clothing. TMT predicts that when humans are reminded of their mortality, they will reach for reassurance that they are different from animals and their biodegradable fate. In Genesis, after humans become aware of their nakedness, we see how clothing reifies the human-animal boundary and marks a transition to life now outside the garden of Eden (Gen 3:10–11, 21).

Moving beyond Alderman’s work, we come to another surprising convergence between Genesis and TMT: their account of culture.

According to TMT, human cultures represent social psychological strategies of coping with death anxiety. Without a permanent solution to the problem of death, cultures were created by humans as a way to manage the potentially unmanageable situation of living in a terrifying world defined by death. Ancient cultures tended to feature “literal” beliefs and practices guaranteeing life after death because this was a direct and psychologically effective way for humans to manage the terror of death. Modern cultures, on the other hand, tend to feature more symbolic and evasive terror management strategies. TMT uncovers how even contemporary cultural activities like wearing designer clothing, having tanned skin, and owning fancy cars can serve a death-denying function. Dozens of TMT experiments confirm these psychological insights.

As Ernest Becker put it: “It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized . . . people serve [culture] in order to gain a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakeable meaning.” In other words, cultures provide pathways to identity that give us a sense of security against death.

If we return to Genesis, we see that the biblical authors expressed this insight about our cultural striving for immortality long before Becker or the TMT experiments that he inspired. Building cultural immortality projects is what we see humans attempting to do right out of the garden gate; first with Cain’s descendants and the building of the first city (Gen 4:16–17), and later with the building of the tower of Babel: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4). In the words of Ernest Becker, these early humans built the tower to overcome their death anxiety and to gain a “feeling of primary value” and of “unshakeable meaning.”

Addressing the Crisis of Anxiety

As we consider the applications of these shared insights from TMT and the Book of Genesis to our contemporary crisis of anxiety, someone will say, “Humans today aren’t terrified of death—our anxiety doesn’t have anything to do with death. We don’t have to work hard to stay alive or worry about dying suddenly, because we have medicines and hospitals. Our modern world is safe and comfortable.”

TMT has an answer for this objection. According to TMT, when a culture is working effectively (psychologically speaking) people will remain uncrippled by their death anxiety, which will be hidden even from themselves—but that death anxiety remains active. It is true that modern Western culture has, for the most part, successfully banished death anxiety to the margins of our lives and minds. Still, it has not managed to escape the shadow of death completely. Ours is a generation that, like every generation before us, is trying to figure out how we can manage our death anxiety—how we can live outside the garden.

In the rest of this article, I suggest that a TMT-enriched reading of the Bible might help to address our crisis of anxiety by 1) challenging simplistic notions of anxiety as something bad, 2) redirecting our death anxiety God-ward, and 3) helping us to discern biblical alternatives to our current cultural narratives that are failing to manage our death anxiety.

What Does the Bible Say about Anxiety? Death Anxiety as Positive

Many Christians suffer under a sense of guilt and condemnation because they feel anxious. “Jesus commanded me not to worry, but I still feel anxious—am I not disobeying the Lord?” Or, similarly, they might reason as follows: “If God has promised to grant perfect peace to those whose minds are steadfast, then there must be something wrong with my mind.”

But what does the Bible say about anxiety, actually? There is no denying that the Bible sometimes speaks about anxiety as sinful and symptomatic of a breakdown of faith or trust in God. For example, in the tower of Babel story, we saw how death anxiety outside the garden motivated humans to deny their creatureliness and reach for god-likeness in ways that were sinful.

Arguably, however, humans were meant to relate to God with a (God-directed) death anxiety. When God commands the human not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest he die, it would seem that God is appealing to something like death anxiety to rouse obedience. This kind of anxiety would serve to root the human in a creaturely dependence on God. It would help to keep humans alive lest they eat from the forbidden tree and die (Gen 2:17). Even inside Eden, it would seem that there is a place for death anxiety.

According to TMT, death anxiety is an adaptive creaturely endowment that plays an important role in keeping us alive and generating many positive and uniquely human behaviors and cultural activities. Imagine if humans were not anxious about death. We would walk heedlessly into countless dangers, and we would lounge around carelessly in the summer sun when we should be preparing for the coming winter. Living with death anxiety is part of what it means to be a vulnerable creature. Just as pain signals help our bodies avoid further injury, death anxiety helps us avoid dying sooner than we otherwise might. The death anxiety of our ancestors is the reason we are alive today.

Also, without death anxiety, it is difficult to imagine so much of what makes our human existence good and meaningful. Our striving to do great things in order to be remembered, our thirst for life and urgency to check things off our bucket lists, our passion to love the things and people in our lives rendered precious by death—all these things would feel very different in a world without death anxiety. Death anxiety is a deep well of motivation from which comes great good (as well as great evil).

Insights like these from TMT help us to read our Bibles more deeply and wisely. They can help us to notice when biblical authors reflect positively on the role of death anxiety (e.g., Deuteronomy 28; Psalm 90; Ecclesiastes 12; 1 Corinthians 10), and they can correct simplistic readings of the Bible that leave people feeling spiritually stuck and sinful in their anxiety.

Directing Our Anxiety Toward God

If TMT is correct that we can’t live without death anxiety, and that this death anxiety might even serve a helpful purpose, what might it mean to direct our death anxiety toward God?

If the idea that God is worthy of your anxiety sounds strange or off-putting to you, it might be a translation issue. In both Greek and Hebrew, the difference in meaning between “fear” and “anxiety” is smaller than in English. If you swap “anxiety” in every time you come across “fear” or “reverence,” you won’t be able to miss a theological move that biblical authors frequently make, redirecting human fears that are normally directed away from God back toward God. For example, Paul writes, “Do not be anxious about anything,” but then in the same epistle he writes, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 4:6; 2:12). Or take Moses, who says, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning” (Exodus 20:20). Similarly, Matthew and Luke feature Jesus’ exhortation not to fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, but rather to fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell (Matthew 10:28, Luke 12:4–5).

Consider also the famous passage in the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus prohibits anxiety . . . or does he? Again, I think a more accurate reading of this text would see Jesus citing typical human anxieties (e.g., not having enough food or clothes, losing our treasures on earth) and redirecting these anxieties towards God and the things of God. Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added to you. Make God and the things of God your highest anxiety and all your other anxieties will find their rightful subordinated place.

In Jesus’ own life, we see a demonstration of death anxiety subordinated and redirected toward God. We see this in Gethsemane most clearly, but arguably throughout his life as depicted in the synoptic gospels. The author of Hebrews tells us, “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission” (Hebrews 5:7). The Greek word that the NIV translates here as “reverent submission” has connotations of fear, suggesting that Jesus is subordinating his fear of death to a rightful fear of God.

Accepting death anxiety as an unavoidable part of human life and redirecting that anxiety towards God may sound rather unappealing and untherapeutic; however, I think the anxiety Jesus invites us to cultivate toward God is not frantic or constraining, but rather, soul-settling and paradoxically freeing. “My yoke [and it is still a yoke] is easy and my burden [and it is still a burden] is light” (Matthew 11:30).

Another might object—even if we should direct our anxiety toward God, wouldn’t God want our love even more? Yes and no. This is how Martin Buber put it: “He who begins with the love of God without having previously experienced the fear of God, loves an idol which he himself has made, a god whom it is easy enough to love. He does not love the real God who is, to begin with, dreadful and incomprehensible.” Buber’s point is not that we cannot love God or that the love of God is not real. Rather his point is the same as that of the author of Hebrews: “It is a dreadful [terrifying] thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (10:31).

Texts like these are a little intense, and they are not usually brought up to help people who are already feeling anxious. Of course, the Bible does also have a lot to say about God’s personal love, comfort, and knowability. I don’t intend to undermine any of this; however, I believe the God of the Bible cannot be reduced to a straightforwardly therapeutic role. Moreover, the fact that biblical authors can speak both about loving and fearing God should make us question strong antitheses between that love and fear.

Managing the Terror of Death with New Cultural Narratives

One of the central claims of TMT is that we rely on cultural narratives, or “hero-scripts,” to assuage our death anxiety. Therefore, when we notice anxiety rising in ourselves or when we notice rates of anxiety rising in the community around us, we need to ask ourselves the following: What social hero-scripts or cultural narratives are we relying on to manage our death anxiety? Are they working for us? Whom are they not working for?

Have we assumed a hero-script in which we must be rich to be respectable, beautiful to be lovable, and successful to matter? Have we adopted a cultural narrative in which we must be better than others to have value, or one in which we must possess certain things to feel secure?

Jesus warned the Pharisees about the deceptive power of loving money and human honors: “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight” (Luke 16:15). What about us? Are we looking at ourselves—not through God’s sight—but through the eyes of others and justifying/judging ourselves accordingly?

Could our lack of conscious death anxiety actually be a sign that we are too well-adjusted to the cultures that we identify with? What if the cultural narratives we are spending our lives making and maintaining are ultimately meaningless according to a biblical judgement? What if—as Paul tried so hard to show the Corinthians—our human standards of wisdom and power are actually their opposites in God’s sight?

Asking these questions and relinquishing our cultural narratives and hero-scripts will be terrifying, especially if we have spent a lifetime living according to them. The good news is that the Bible offers us alternative cultural narratives in which death need not be denied or feared (at least in an ultimate sense) because it exists in a world in which God is Lord over all the cycles of life and death (Psalm 104). The biblical narrative also offers us a surprising hero-script in which the hero we are called to imitate conquers death by dying (Revelation 5). This theological grounding in the Old and New Testaments makes possible a new kind of social and cultural life—one in which humans need not pursue death-denying cultural immortality projects to manage their death anxiety, but where they are free simply to be humans, loved by God in all their vulnerable creatureliness.

We need to write new cultural narratives together for the sake of those who are experiencing anxiety, even if we ourselves are not. In the Torah, God’s people learned that part of what it meant to fear God (or, to be anxious toward God) was to make a collective effort to ensure that the vulnerable among them would be provided for—economically, judicially, and otherwise. As we think about what it means to fear God today, we might ask what it means to provide for the vulnerable among us, psychologically speaking. Those who are suffering from anxiety need more than our non-judgmental listening—they need us to discern from their testimonies that many of our shared cultural narratives and hero-scripts don’t work. This may be particularly evident in the lives of those who are culturally, socially, and economically marginalized, because TMT predicts that death anxiety will often surface most clearly in individuals and communities who can’t connect with the meaning(s) offered by their culture(s).

Together, we can look to the Bible to build psychologically stronger communities, in which, for instance, it is OK for humans to be humans—to get sick, to get injured, to age, and to die. People in such cultures would be unashamedly imperfect. But what amazing cultures these would be—free of all the suffering and anxiety exacerbated by denials of our human condition.

What Does the Bible Say about Anxiety? Redirect It

The crisis of anxiety that so many are feeling and observing is an opportunity for us to rediscover the power of the Bible’s message. As we read the Bible with the help of TMT, our eyes will be opened to the power of death and the even greater power of God who is Lord over life and death (Psalm 104; Romans 14:9).

Death anxiety often leads to sinful (or maladaptive) behaviors, but death anxiety can positively motivate us to root ourselves in creaturely dependence on God.

A “victorious life” free of anxiety is often held up as the Christian ideal. However, a TMT-enriched reading of the Bible helps us see that the biblical authors are more concerned that we learn to live with our anxieties by directing them toward God, who (unlike death) is ultimately worthy of our anxiety.

And because we all rely on cultural narratives to manage our terror of death, it is critical that we wisely choose cultural narratives inspired by the Old and New Testaments.

Let’s spend our short and fragile lives contributing to communities and cultures that direct death anxiety God-ward. God helping us, the sociologists might even notice that rates of anxiety start to decline.

There are three ways that I try to navigate this dilemma. First, I invite my students to think differently about their lives and to let Scripture shape their perspective. In Paul’s language, I invite them to “renew their minds.” Second, I show my students how Scripture portrays the ideal and the real. While the biblical authors outline the ideal way of life and narrate ideal human experiences with God and other humans, they’re also brutally honest about the harsh realities of life in this world. I aim to help my students live in the tension between the ideal and the real as it is presented in Scripture. Third, I encourage my students to persevere in hope. Even in a trying situation, they can be faithful to God and fruitful in the work that he has laid out for them.

Let’s take my class on the book of Genesis as a prime example of the tension between Scripture’s beautiful vision and the incarcerated experience. Unsurprisingly, I begin this course with a thorough exploration of Genesis 1–3. More than anything else, I want my students to see that Genesis 1–3 presents Israel’s God, YHWH, as the creator of a beautiful world that has been broken by human rebellion. YHWH’s creation is beautiful. YHWH’s beautiful creation has been broken. We explore these themes in Genesis 1–3 and then consider how their life stories reflect these realities. The reflection is immediate and obvious for incarcerated men. Many of them grew up in terribly broken environments. The personal and social turmoil that they experienced from birth is tragic. As they relay their stories, they quickly resonate with the theme of the brokenness of creation in Genesis 3.

However, I also want them to see that God’s creation was and is beautiful. Admittedly, this is a harder sell for many of them. My students continue to experience deep brokenness in prison. The trauma inflicted upon them from their youth along with the guilt and shame over their actions creates a mental and emotional prison in addition to the physical prison in which they live. The world is not bright and beautiful to them. It is dark and dismal. So, how do I encourage them to see the beauty of God’s creation? In three ways: by looking outside, by looking around them, and by looking in the mirror. Even in prison they can look outside and see the beauty of God’s good creation on a sunny day. Even in prison they can look around them and see a community of human beings to whom God gave the breath of life and whom God loves. Even in prison they can look in the mirror and see a man whom God loves, forgives, and is healing from his shattered past.

The Fall of Genesis 3 matches their experience, while Genesis 1–2 seems to contradict their experience. So, I invite them to see the world through the lenses of Genesis 1–2. I show them the tension between these chapters and ask them to live in the tension. I encourage them to persevere in hope. One day YHWH God will completely restore his beautiful creation.

Here’s another example of the tension between Holy Scripture and the incarcerated experience. Genesis 16 and 21 relay the story of Hagar. Hagar (lit. “the foreigner”) is a foreign slave subject to the whims of her mistress, Sarai. She produces a son for Sarai’s husband at Sarai’s demand (Genesis 16:1–4). She suffers intense abuse at the hands of Sarai due to Sarai’s jealousy such that she flees from Sarai while pregnant (Genesis 16:5–6). She returns and raises her son, Ishmael, only to be exiled by Sarah (who has been renamed by Genesis 21) because of some unacceptable interaction between Ishmael and Isaac (Genesis 21:8–14). Hagar’s story is the story of the vulnerable, oppressed foreigner. This is a story that many of my students can easily understand. Many of them grew up in vulnerable and oppressive environments. They resonate with Hagar’s suffering because they have also experienced profound suffering.

However, Hagar’s story is not simply the story of an oppressed, vulnerable woman. Ultimately, her story is the story of YHWH seeing and caring for her in her most vulnerable moments. YHWH sees Hagar in Genesis 16 (and she sees him in return!). God provides a well for Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness in Genesis 21. The text then alludes to God’s provision for them throughout the rest of their lives when it says, “God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness and became an expert with the bow. He lived in the wilderness of Paran, and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt” (vv 20–21, NRSV)

God’s attention to and provision for Hagar and Ishmael challenges my students. In some ways, they struggle with this story because they doubt whether God really sees them or cares for them in prison. Due to their experience of oppression throughout their lives, many of them wonder if Hagar’s God is their God. They ask, “Does he really see and provide for me?” Again, I invite them to let the Hagar story renew their minds. Yes, God sees them. Yes, God provides for them. Yes, God will continue to see them and provide for them. I show them the tension between the ideal and the real. Though God does and will see and provide for them, sometimes (maybe even many times) they won’t feel his attention or provision. So, I encourage them to persevere in hope. One day they will perfectly experience God’s attention and provision and, like Hagar, they will even see God themselves.

One final example: Genesis 39 narrates Joseph’s experience in an Egyptian prison for a crime that he did not commit. Two themes dominate this narrative: YHWH was with Joseph and YHWH gave Joseph success in everything he did (even while he was in prison!). The relevance of Genesis 39 to my students is immediately obvious. After we study the literary shape and theological message of Genesis 39, I always leave time for the following question: Has this been your experience in prison? The answers are somewhat diverse, but the general sentiment goes something like this, “We know the Lord is with us. We can relate to Joseph in that way. But we have not experienced success like Joseph did.” I try to respond with a listening and sympathetic ear. The challenges of life in prison are many. I don’t wish to undermine this fact at all. At the same time, I want my students to consider their present situation. They are studying to receive a Bachelor of Arts in Pastoral Ministry which will equip them to become field ministers in prisons throughout the state of North Carolina. Upon graduation and deployment, they will have a massive influence on the lives of incarcerated men throughout the state. Because they are themselves incarcerated, they will be able to relate and minister to other incarcerated men in a way that no one else can.

Do you see what I’ve done there? I invited them to reconceptualize their experience. Perhaps their experience is more like Joseph’s than they initially thought. I showed them the tension between the ideal and the real. There’s no doubt that differences exist between Joseph’s experience in prison and their own. Nevertheless, there are tangible similarities that could function as a source of strength for them. I encouraged them to persevere in hope. God will use them in prison and God will one day release them from prison (in this life or the next) to rule and reign over the nations with Christ just as Joseph ruled over Egypt.

Everyone has experiences that seem to contradict biblical claims, and incarcerated people feel this tension acutely. The advice that I give my students is relevant for anyone struggling with the tension between Scripture’s beautiful vision and our broken experience. A faithful and receptive reading of Scripture will renew the human mind, teaching us to live between the ideal and the real and to persevere in hope that this beautiful vision will be fully realized in the eschatological age. Or in the words of a contemporary hymn, “Speak, O Lord, and renew our minds; Help us grasp the heights of your plans for us. . . . Speak, O Lord, till your church is built and the earth is filled with your glory.”

Soon after the Asbury revival started, I began to see accounts about it on social media. My wife attended the Brownsville Revival and encountered God in a powerful way, including healing from dyslexia and auditory processing disorder. So, after talking with my wife, we decided to make the long trek with our children to attend. If the event at Asbury was truly a revival, we did not want to miss it. If it turned out to be just a continuous worship service, we would have participated in a beautiful church gathering driven by hunger for the Lord. We didn’t see any drawbacks to this trip (except the long drive!).

What might the biblical authors make of the Asbury revival? From my perspective as a Pentecostal, I’ll start by considering the related terms of revival, outpouring, and awakening to provide a modified working definition and characteristics of revival. Next I’ll look at Luke 24:13–53 and Philippians 2:1–12 as important markers for revival and reformation. Finally, I’ll reflect on the Asbury revival in light of the biblical picture. I believe the features of the Asbury revival gave a glimpse of a genuine Christian faith that stirs hope for reformation where the effects of revival spread.

Defining Terms: Revival, Outpouring, and Awakening

The word “revival” carries a lot of baggage. From what I have gathered following online conversations, one of the controversies surrounding the Asbury revival regarded proper terminology. For some, revival requires a Pentecost-like mass conversion. For others, God’s presence and glory must be so palpable that people experience intense physiological effects, such as being laid out on the floor. Interestingly, Asbury University used “outpouring” and “spiritual renewal” to describe what occurred on campus. Its president, Dr. Kevin Brown, was unconcerned with the terms.

Whichever terms are used, they are generally synonymous. They all indicate religious renewal, including awakening to new life through justification, which is the work of God. Outpouring in biblical revival passages indicates conscious recognition of the Holy Spirit’s work, as seen in Isaiah 32:15–20, Joel 2:28–29, Peter’s appropriation of Joel in Acts 2:14–38, and Romans 5:5. Revival is inherently an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. As such, it is an outpouring of God’s love. In Augustine’s exposition of 1 John 4, he shows that abiding in love is the way to abide in God, and the knowledge of our abiding in God is made possible by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Our love for God and others, the sign of our abiding in God, is only possible because God first loved us in giving us the Spirit; our love is evidence of the presence of the Spirit. God’s outpoured love comes through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5).¹ Hence, although the triune Godhead is love, Augustine calls the Spirit the “common charity” or the bond of love between the Father and the Son.² Revival, outpouring, and awakening are thus synonyms to describe religious renewal effected by God through the Holy Spirit.

Such revival could happen within an individual. In my life, I had walked away from Christianity in high school. While serving in the US Navy, I sensed that God was drawing my attention. One morning after a night of my drunken revelry, the Holy Spirit powerfully convicted my sense of purpose and meaning in life, and I felt compelled to repent. I immediately drove home, and I experienced God’s outpoured love and was awakened to new life. However, we do not have such revival in mind when we reflect on the social phenomenon that we normally associate with revivals such as Asbury’s. Furthermore, revival often follows some crisis moment that confronts one with the need for repentance or a recognition of the need for God. In Scripture, we see these crisis moments throughout Judges, in Hezekiah’s response to the idolatry of his father Ahaz (2 Chr 28–29), and with the national idolatry and the discovery of the book of the Law during Josiah’s reign (2 Chr 34). Therefore, I will adopt the definition of revival in the Encyclopedia of Religious Revivals in America but with modification based on the reasons stated above: Revival is a corporate, intensely experiential event [my addition: effected by the work of God through the Holy Spirit in renewing the works of love for God and others, often in response to a crisis moment] that creates and renews religious feeling and expression in pronounced ways.³

The Asbury revival meets this definition. It began in corporate chapel in response to a crisis moment, a challenge and call to love. According to testimonies, students lingered in prayer after chapel and even returned to chapel after class to seek the Lord in response to this call. Testimonials that followed, including ours, were ripe with experiential and affective elements. That it renewed religious feeling and expression is without question. Everyone recognized that the Spirit was at work, and the revival was filled with love for God and each other. The spirit of unity and peace was palpable.

Importantly, since revival is an outpouring of God’s love through the Holy Spirit and such love manifests in love for others (1 Jn 4:20–21), we must judge the Asbury revival based on its long-lasting manifestations of love. This means that the Asbury revival did not end with the ceasing of the services. Though the sensational parts of revivals get most of the coverage, the reverberations of revival have greater effect, perhaps even with little to no acknowledgment of their association with the initiating revival.

The Road to Emmaus and the Christological Hymn

I now turn to the Road to Emmaus story because it shares some of the traits of the Asbury revival and meets the definition of revival. I’ll then turn to the Christological hymn of Philippians 2 as a model of what should happen after revival.

In the Emmaus story, we are confronted with two traumatized and bewildered disciples. They had believed that Jesus was to be the one who would redeem Israel, only to have their hopes dashed by his execution. Yet, there was now testimony that Jesus was alive! After a good tongue lashing, Jesus explained to them all that the Hebrew Scriptures said about the Messiah. When they were nearing Emmaus, Jesus acted as if he intended to continue in his journey. The disciples urged him to stay with them, as is common in ancient hospitality but also because they desired to hear more about Jesus’ explanation of Scripture. It was not until Jesus broke bread and gave it to them, clearly an allusion to the Last Supper, that their eyes were opened to recognize him before his vanishing. Jesus appears again, this time to the eleven and other disciples. Interestingly, despite the verification of his physical resurrection, the disciples “were disbelieving and still wondering” (Lk 24:41).

Five observations can be made here. First, the disciples have a corporate and intense experience. For the disciples on the road, they exclaimed upon initially seeing the risen Jesus, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Lk 24:32) Other disciples also have bewildered responses that later transform into joy. Second, the chapter clearly indicates Jesus’ love for the disciples and the world. Even his chastisement was motivated by his love. For he wanted his disciples to understand and participate in God’s cosmic plan. Thus, he acted to alleviate their fears and blessed them in his ascension.

Third, the recognition of Jesus and the understanding of God’s cosmic plan in Scripture were made possible by God’s opening their eyes and minds. For the disciples to become renewed in their trust, God visited them in their situation and sovereignly worked to equip them for participating in God’s mission. Fourth, Jesus equipped them to be witnesses of God’s cosmic plan and prepared them to receive the outpouring of God’s love and the animating power of the Holy Spirit that had anointed him in his earthly mission. In his human nature, Jesus’ anointing by the Spirit indicated God’s presence with him and the power through which he would bring about the kingdom of God.⁴ The last two points reveal that revival is a sovereign work of God through the Holy Spirit.

Finally, we see that their revival led to renewed religious feeling and expression. In both occurrences, the expression of their newfound religious understanding manifest in witnessing. The two disciples quickly told others about their encounter with the risen Jesus. The rest are told that they are to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins to all the nations. They were also revived to experience joy, which was expressed in worship.

The disciples were recipients of God’s love. Their revival from trauma occurred because of God’s mercy. Importantly, their hearts were set aflame not because of some sensational manifestation but because they encountered, even unknowingly, the risen Jesus. Their other encounters were also not sensational, at least apart from meeting a once-dead man. They had Bible lessons and meals with Jesus. They then needed a time of preparation for the promised Holy Spirit.

Revival is God’s work. Though encounter with God can be intense, revival need not be accompanied by sensational manifestations. From my experience, the Asbury revival followed a similar pattern. When compared to other contemporary revivals, it was not sensational. Though there were testimonies of signs and wonders (our middle child was healed of long COVID; we received prophetic words in prayer, contents of which those who prayed for me would not have known; and there were several testimonies of being healed from trauma), they were discreet and not sensationalized. The focus was on the worship of Jesus. People’s hearts were also turned to one another in service. Peace and unity were visible in the atmosphere. Even though it was an intense experiential event, the Asbury revival characterized a self-emptying attitude that everyone exhibited toward one another. Simply, people were renewed to become more like Jesus as depicted in the Christological hymn of Philippians 2.

Philippians 2 pictures the essential characteristics of those who abide in God through the outpouring of the Spirit. The essential theme is to be like Jesus, which is to be humble in love toward one another. Being united with Christ through the Spirit should express in love, unity, selflessness, humility, compassion, and concern for others (Phil 2:2–4), which Jesus supremely modeled for us in his incarnation. The Christological hymn beautifully states that Christ Jesus,

Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross (Phil 2:6–8).

After listing the character traits we should model, Paul exhorts Christians to continue working out their “salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). For Paul, being conformed into the image of the Son by modeling these characteristics is sign of sanctification. Importantly, Paul does not separate sanctification from salvation. Sanctification is the continuation of our justification; they are two sides of the same coin.

According to Richard Lovelace, reformation and renewal are often interrelated: “Reformation grows out of awakened spiritual interest, and spiritual renewal seldom persists long without continuing reformation. This suggests that God has chosen to bless his church with the fullness of the Holy Spirit on the condition of its moving toward certain vital norms of health and witness.”⁵ Revival must reform people. Without this reformation, revival will be short-lived. In fact, change through reformation must become the “norms of health.” Also, the reformation of character is not purely a human effort. Though virtuous character development occurs through habitual repetition, the list of virtues in Galatian 5:22–24 show that virtues develop in synergistic cooperation with the Spirit. We crucify our flesh and are guided by the Spirit, and this relationship results in the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22–23).

Reformation should follow revival, which takes time to realize, so judging a revival merely by the duration of its central gathering is questionable. Lovelace’s lengthy statement is thus fitting:

[F]allen human nature is fertile ground for a fleshly religiosity which is impressively ‘spiritual’ but ultimately rooted in self-love. High emotional experiences, effusive religious talk, and even praising God and experiencing love for God and man can be self-centered and self-motivated. In contrast to this, experiences of renewal which are genuinely from the Holy Spirit are God-centered in character, based on worship, an appreciation of God’s worth and grandeur divorced from self-interest. Such experiences create humility in the convert rather than pride and issue in the creation of a new spirit of meekness, gentleness, forgiveness and mercy. They leave the believer hungering and thirsting after righteousness instead of satiated with self-congratulation. Most important, their end result is the performance of works of mercy and justice.⁶

What I witnessed at Asbury carried the hallmarks of a genuine renewal Lovelace described.

The Asbury Revival

While waiting a long time to enter the chapel, we recognized the peaceful atmosphere that surrounded everyone. The spirit of service was evident, as people served those in line, whether through an organization or as individuals. It seemed that there was no need among us. My wife commented a few times, “It’s like the early church.” When we finally made it inside, what was extraordinary about the revival was its ordinariness. There were no bright lights, fog machines, or ear-piercing music that are barriers to disabled people in many churches. Lights were not dimmed so that focus was only on the “leaders” on stage. Prominent were the throng of student singers in the front, the filled altar with prayer teams and those who received prayers, and the words displayed in the center, “Holiness unto the Lord.” Title and prestige were nowhere to be found. My wife discovered that a group that was handing out food outside was from a church only because she asked. The lyrics of all worship music were God-directed. Those who spoke in chapel only gave their names and not their titles. Missing were what Lovelace described as fleshly religiosity that is ultimately rooted in self-love. In its place was radical humility before the Lord.

Upon reflection, it was unsurprising that a revival begun with praying students and which emphasized the participation of Gen Zers would be so unassuming. Gen Z prizes authenticity. They have seen polished churches succumbing to moral controversies and generally not holding up to their professed beliefs and teachings. No amount of seeker-sensitive strategies will win over Gen Zers. And what they desire in their hearts is what God sovereignly brought at Asbury: an authentic, unassuming encounter with God that powerfully renewed the people’s faith and love.

I am hopeful for the revival’s fruits, not only because I am convinced that the revival was a sovereign work of the Lord but also because the Spirit seemed to have presented a beautiful, authentic expression of faith that powerfully impacted the gatherers, especially the Gen Zers. Though the revival event at Asbury ended, and the events begun at other places will also end, the real work of revival will now unfold: the synergistic work of sanctification. Revival and reformation go hand-in-hand.

I end with a challenge and a hope. Encounters with God can have powerful, immediate effects on people’s lives. However, we cannot underestimate the power of sin that tempts us to return to idolatry. It may be bewildering to see the Israelites continually return to apostasy after witnessing God’s deliverance until we recognize sin’s depravity at work. Though we are freed from the guilt of sin, we will not be rid of sin until the second coming of Jesus. And until we recognize the remaining power of sin and the necessary participation in God’s sanctifying work as part of our continual journey of salvation, revivals will be short-lived. Surely, some will have had a short, summer-camp like emotional high at Asbury. However, I have greater hope of the enduring fruit because revival is God’s sovereign and sanctifying work. We must participate in God’s kingdom work, but the kingdom of God will advance ultimately because of God. Therefore, even if we never hear of the enduring effects of the revival in individuals’ lives, we can be assured “that the one who began a good wo

Footnotes

It describes a woman divorced by her first husband and given a “certificate of divorce;” later married to another man; then separated from her second husband with, potentially, another “certificate of divorce;” and finally desired back by the first husband—who is barred from remarrying her (Deut 24:1–4). What in the world is that all about?

As we will see, this law is not about divorce at all! It is an example of an ancient Near Eastern form of law-writing scholars call “wisdom law.”¹ A mini-narrative is crafted to capture a moral principle that may have little to do with the specifics of the illustration itself. It is an approach to law designed not to regulate the courtroom but to shape the people’s moral imagination.

The book of Deuteronomy is a remarkable example of such wisdom laws. Modern readers often mistake Deuteronomy as a reference book for rote application by ancient judges facing specified situations, like modern law books. Instead, we should view Deuteronomy as a series of thought exercises expounding the Ten Commandments through paradigms that form a people in moral wisdom.

The Shape of Deuteronomy

Here is a riddle. It’s a very old one from ancient Sumer. See if you can solve it:

Whoever enters it has closed eyes.
Whoever departs from it has eyes that are wide open.
What is it?

When you are ready, the answer is in this footnote.² Did you solve it? This riddle is actually a statement about education.

The process of schooling may look different today than in the ancient world. But teachers ancient and modern share the same goal: to open their students’ eyes. Instruction is not just about filling heads with information to regurgitate. It is helping students see, think, and solve problems even where answers are not obvious—in short, it is helping students become wise and develop moral imagination.

In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses wanted to train Israel to be wise (Deut 4:1–6) since he was about to leave them. The people would enter the Promised Land, but Moses was about to die. So he poured out his heart in one final series of lessons to equip the people to settle the land without his guiding presence.

The prophet’s class began with a recitation of the Ten Commandments (5:6–21). The people had previously received those commands directly from the voice of God (5:4). After repeating the Decalogue, Moses launched into a series of “statutes and rules” which “the Lord your God commanded me to teach you” (6:1–26:19). These “statutes and rules” were legal thought exercises expounding each of the Ten Commandments, one at a time.

Many scholars have recognized that the statutes in the body of the book are topically organized according to the Ten Commandments.³ This view is still debated and is not universally accepted. There are difficulties with the thesis, but the case is growing stronger as new evidence emerges to support it.⁴

In most sections of the book, the coordination of grouped statutes and the related commandment is clear. For example, the lengthy section beginning with the Great Shema (“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one”) contains numerous exhortations on exclusive fidelity to Yahweh (6:4–11:32), matching the concerns of the First Commandment (“You shall have no other gods before me”).

Likewise, the concerns of the Sixth Commandment (“You shall not murder”) are present throughout Deuteronomy 19:1–22:8—a section with guidance to distinguish accidental manslaughter from intentional murder (19:1–13), laws on just and unjust killing in warfare (20:1–20), instruction for handling unsolved murders (21:1–9), and so on.

The Ten Commandments are a succinct summary of all moral goodness, and the book of Deuteronomy is a series of practice exercises to unpack the wisdom contained in them. But some of the connections between Deuteronomy’s statutes and the corresponding commandments are not clear—until we learn to read them as wisdom laws.

Moral Imagination and the Nature of Deuteronomy’s Laws

The genius of Moses’ curriculum is in the nature of the laws he gives. These statutes are not narrow rulings for precisely defined circumstances. They are broad and provocative learning paradigms, more like proverbs that cultivate moral imagination than what we now think of as laws. In fact, some of his laws are legal proverbs.

Consider a pair of laws in Deuteronomy 22:9–10: “You shall not sow your vineyard with two kinds of seed, lest the whole yield be forfeited, the crop that you have sown and the yield of the vineyard. You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together.”

These are wise business practices—and obviously so. Israel did not need laws to regulate these problems, since these are not really problems Hebrew farmers would face. There is no temptation to plant grain in the same field with grapes! Grapes and grain grow differently, mature at different seasons, and require different harvesting methods. To swing a sickle among grain stalks that are intertwined with grape vines would be disastrous for both. Likewise, there is no reason any Hebrew farmer would yoke an ox with a donkey; both animals would be harmed and the field would not be plowed.

As a teacher of wisdom, Moses uses these legal proverbs to begin his section of rules on Seventh Commandment themes: “You shall not commit adultery” (5:18; 22:9–23:14). The teacher is not regulating farming practices here. He is using obvious agricultural follies to shape our thinking about sexual integrity. When fidelity is flouted everyone suffers—as both grain and grapes are lost and both ox and donkey are harmed in these hypotheticals. On the surface, these farming laws do not appear to be about the Seventh Commandment. But they actually are. And they train us to think more broadly than their specific scenarios.

Not all of Moses’ laws are proverbial. Some address real situations. But even these are crafted for broader application than the circumstances stated. For example, we encounter this rule in the section about the Eighth Commandment (“You shall not steal”): “You may charge a foreigner (nākrî) interest, but you may not charge your brother interest” (23:19-20).

Read narrowly, this sounds like ethnic prejudice. But read as a wisdom law, we reflect on the stereotype the scene evokes for broad application. In this case, the contrast is not based on ethnicity: it is not a Hebrew settler and a Gentile settler (a “sojourner,” gēr). The term used (nākrî) suggests, in this context, a foreign trader whose desire for a loan is contrasted to that of a needy neighbor.⁵ From this contrast we learn that interest on a business loan is fair, but imposing interest on loans to the poor—making money off another’s misfortune—is a form of stealing. The implication of the law is much broader and more conceptual than the scenario used to teach it.

How the ‘Divorce Law’ Teaches Economic Honesty

What about that complicated “divorce law” in Deuteronomy 24? Here is that law in full, displayed here to show its if-then construction:

When a man takes a wife and marries her,
IF then she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, and she departs out of his house, and
IF she goes and becomes another man’s wife, and the latter man hates her and writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter man dies, who took her to be his wife,
THEN her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been [declared] defiled, for that is an abomination before the Lord. And you shall not bring sin upon the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance. (24:1-4)

This law is strangely specific. How often would Israel face this rather remarkable situation? Furthermore, the law tells a story about divorce, but it never offers imperatives about divorce. That is because the law is not really about divorce at all. Divorce is just the story used. This is a law about economic honesty, which is why it appears among Deuteronomy’s reflections on the Eighth Commandment.

In the ancient world, the purpose of a “certificate of divorce” was to document the property that a woman retained after divorce. In the first scenario, the husband divorces the woman because of a fault in her (“he found some indecency in her”). She was the guilty party, so she would have been released empty-handed. In that scenario, the husband profited by divorcing her, keeping her dowry for himself as documented in her certificate.

In the second scenario, the woman was divorced due to the displeasure of the man or was single again on account of his death. Those scenarios share the common result that the woman would retain her dowry and inheritance rights. The second certificate documents the woman’s retained property. Suddenly her original husband has renewed interest. But this law forbids the man from suddenly declaring the woman eligible for marriage whom he before conveniently “[declared] defiled.”

This is not really a law about divorce. It is a law about changing one’s opinion to suit present economic advantage,⁶ like claiming ownership of a piece of real estate when it is valuable, but denying ownership when it becomes a liability. In modern law, we use the term “estoppel” to address such inconsistent claims. Moses’ law uses a very specific (extremely unlikely!) example to teach a much broader lesson. It is a wisdom law designed to stir our imagination about the nature of justice in all kinds of economic dilemmas.

Thought Exercises for Today

Today, there is a growing interest in Old Testament law. Recent scholarly breakthroughs in the understanding of ancient Near Eastern law are fueling renewed attention to the role of biblical law in churches, synagogues, and classrooms. It is exciting to see.

One frontier of these developments is to rediscover the character of Deuteronomy as a wisdom text for all times to shape moral imagination, rather than a law code for ancient judges. Biblical law is more like ancient proverbs and less like modern legislation than we have generally realized.

The Decalogue, in particular, presents a grand vision for human society in ten simple strokes. And Deuteronomy helps us unpack those ten succinct commands through a series of thought exercises to make us wise. It is a wisdom curriculum that remains useful to shape us to love God and love our neighbors well, even today.

Footnotes

To begin understanding this, picture a woman—call her Mary—browsing Amazon and clicking “buy now” on an ESV Bible. When it arrives in the mail, she opens to chapter 8 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Then imagine that, in doing so, Mary accidentally opens some sort of magic portal. Suddenly, she sees a more distant scene where dozens of men and women celebrate their finished translation of her Bible. Next, she sees hecklers and inquisitors jeer William Tyndale for desecrating the Word of God by translating into English. Her translation came at the cost of the lives of Kingdom revolutionaries such as Tyndale and John Huss. The scene transforms again; she sees Roman Catholic monks sitting by candlelight as they painstakingly copy Greek and Latin versions of Paul’s letter. Back, back she travels in time, until she now sees a gathering of believers in Rome around the time of Nero. They’re in a house where a toga-clad man stands before the church speaking the letter to everyone, but it seems more like a performance than a reading.

The scene pivots to Paul in Corinth about to depart for Jerusalem. His hair is long and scraggly as he grows it out readying himself to perform a Nazarite vow when he reaches the Jewish temple. He’s putting things in order for the long trip back. The sack of coins on the table is the collection for famine relief— an offering to the apostles. Mary then sees another man, Tertius, writing down on a piece of parchment every word Paul speaks.

Finally, Mary begins hearing whisperings—they are coming from Paul’s head. It’s the Holy Spirit prompting Paul in what to say. Now she stands awestruck and trembling. She is in the Prescence—the Throne Room of God! His voice is saying, “I love you. Nothing will ever separate you from my overwhelming conquering love!”

This is not just an allegory, but a description of what the Scriptures are and how we got them. The Scriptures in our hands come from of the mind of God (I Cor 2, Heb 1:1–4). Let’s begin by considering the mind and nature of God—not the Bible itself, but more how he revealed himself to us. Ultimately God’s own revelation relates to how we communicate the Word as those made in his image so that others may personally know his mind, his heart, and his love.¹

Orality as the Divine Capacity for Inner Speech

Before the beginning, God is and is in three persons. No human can fathom that truth, but somehow, we reflect it as creatures made in his image. At some “time” before this finite universe existed, God intricately planned a species capable of living with him and choosing to love him as he loved them. Yet before the Word spoke all this into existence, the Father, Spirit, and Son contemplated what that meant: rejection of his love, and redemption for those who might choose to return to live under his authority. The Scriptures unfold that plan from their stated beginnings of Genesis to the climactic story foretold as the new beginnings of Revelation 21–22.

So, the Bible is a witness to our microscopic glimpse into the mind of God, and all that we can learn of him finds its grounding only in that Word. He in some way reveals that infinite mind and expansive love to his beloved family of Eve and Adam. Yet, many of our closed suppositions regarding the Bible and God’s revelation of his mind see the Scriptures as the Word of God and an end in themselves. That suggests that we can only know his mind as we accurately translate and interpret the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek surviving texts that scribes faithfully handed down to the best of their abilities. This self-revealing God is much greater than that, so let’s consider more closely how he communicates.

God, the Communicator

He created us in his image to communicate like our Father. It all begins with what we call our thoughts, which Lev Vygotsky calls “inner speech.” God expressed his inner speech in some way among the Godhead then spoke the world into existence. He made things each day and named them. He later expressed his inner speech by talking with Adam and Eve in their intimate garden discussions in the cool of the evenings. He painted his glory in the heavens and earth, and even communicated through the revelation seen and eventually touched, the focal point of the garden: two trees.

Think of all the other ways God historically communicated his thoughts to his children. He audibly spoke to Noah and then to Abraham. He physically appeared at the tent of Abraham announcing the promised son as well as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’s blight on creation. He appeared in visions to Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. He appeared in a burning bush to Moses. He came as a pillar of smoke and fire to the “Exodites.” He commissioned an earthly representation of his presence with an arts galleria called a tabernacle—from the outer skins to the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies. He engraved stone tablets and wrote on walls. He spoke in proverbs and riddles, ordained symbols, metaphors, acting, songs, dances, feasts and meals, beautiful and holy garments, clothing accessories, sacrifices, scents of incense, perfumes, and special oils, and the list continues.

As children in His image, we also share His capacities for communication through all five senses. You can influence others’ thoughts and imaginations through various forms of expression. You can make up proverbs, compose songs and dances, and speak expecting some kind of action—sharing your inner speech with others.

Spoken by the Holy Spirit to prophets (I Peter 1:21; I Cor 2:10–16). The mind and thoughts of God the Father came to those chosen to receive and speak his Word and to make clear his will and counsel. So, in terms of the present discussion, the inner speech of God the Father came to prophets and apostles (such as Paul, John, Peter, and all who might receive a “word of knowledge” given in extra-biblical revelations).

Received in community. God, who dwells in divine community, reveals his mind to and through individuals commissioning them to share it with a widening circle of communities. The Law was given for all Israel. He expected them to etch that Law into every fiber of every family in this emerging culture. Moses took that family history to its genesis so that Israel and all nations/peoples of the earth could know and worship God alone. He carved out a homeland for the sons of Jacob and commanded them to live as a kingdom of priests for the nations.

Later he communicated to entire churches. Whole Christian communities of Thessalonica, Rome, Corinth, in Galatia, Ephesus, and Philippi. The inner speech of God now became the inner speech of his children to produce God’s intended results. Sometimes it resulted in belief and repentance (Acts 2). Sometimes it was for encouragement of those under great pressure (Timothy and Titus, Hebrews, I Peter, Revelation).

Made permanent into written forms. Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch eventually wrote down all the inspired messages delivered to the weeping prophet. In at least one case he spoke the word to a king who rejected the message (Jer 36). Then Baruch put the message in writing for the king and his court. The king proceeded to burn the scroll, so Jeremiah told Baruch to write it out again and deliver it to the king a second time. As further documentation, royal court historians in the Davidic ancestral dynasty even produced a record of all the God-given stories then recorded in the Annals of the Kings (2 Kings 1:18).

God commanded Moses to write down his warnings and teach them to Israel in a song. John recorded the words of Jesus yet acknowledged that much more could have been written. The angel of Revelation instructs John to “write these words” and deliver them to the seven churches of Asia. Recording the mind of God in a more permanent mode accurately preserved it for future generations to speak aloud over and over.

Duplicated for generations of new churches among all peoples and all times. Even as Paul sent words to the Christians living in regions of Colossae and Ephesus, he intended the message to spread through circulation of the letters. At each stop on the circuit, it would be inconceivable to think that the letters were not immediately copied and read/performed to all the believers in every city. It was a common practice that Paul may have expected Timothy to do publicly, and later to bring his “books and parchments.”

Secured in an agreed-upon canon for posterity. Collections of all the inspired revelations of the Law and the Prophets culminated a few centuries after the death of John. The Hebrew Scriptures were not even universally accepted in the days of Jesus outside of the Torah and a few prophets, as the Sadducees insisted. But eventually a series of Western church councils weighed in on what writings they believed carried divine authority and apostolic connections. You hold in your hands or on your screen the fruit of their labor—the canon of Scripture.

A Broader Concept of God’s Word

Orality is about communication—how we reach shared understanding of our realities. It comprises everything that we are as God-stamped children made in his image. Orality is about all of who we are and how we develop into adults with every joy and nightmare that comes down our road, and the way that shapes how and what we communicate.

God’s messages came to the prophets and then were communicated to others teaching God’s children. Then, they were condensed to writing. In this cycle of revelation, eventually the average person with sufficient literacy (only 20 percent of the world) could access those print-text versions of God’s recorded inner speech. But how will the rest of the non-literate, high orality-reliant world receive it? Process it? Remember it? Pass it on to others? These questions should haunt all Western Christians, who have seemingly unlimited access to the Scriptures.

Is orality in conflict with Biblical texts? Not in any way. The text of Scripture remains our plumb line for all truth and revelation. At the same time, it must be repeated: the oral transmission of the mind and heart of God preceded the text. It always has, and always will. Further, textual performance loses significant parts of a message. Inflection, tone, volume, and body language all contribute to meaning, which is maybe partly why God commanded the Scriptures be delivered in collective settings—publicly and in families. New Testament writers even included the words of first century hymns and poems that we now regard as inspired. They are part of the text! The text of Scripture confirms the revealed mind of God to be personally passed on generation after generation (Deut 6; 2 Tim 2:1–2).

If we believe the Bible is the mind of God for all his children of Adam’s race, we stand accountable to deliver it to those who remain in darkness. They live without God and without hope in this world (Eph 2:12). Orality is not an argument for “oral evangelism methods.” Orality stands as a witness shouting that 80 percent of the world cannot receive the word of God because of our learned and preferred methods of print-text-based communication.

Our fictitious “Mary” was transported into a timeless reality. Her relationship with God changed that morning. The way she read the Bible changed. He spoke the word to her. Her discussions of the Scriptures in her discipleship group changed. God was speaking to and through them. She could no longer ignore those “without God and without hope in the world.” She can help others translate it into oral forms, send it, and support other servants who can and will share it.

For a more in-depth discussion of orality visit the Institutes for Orality Strategies website

Footnotes