I would say that the two fundamental things that we need to do is first recognize and then notice. We need to recognize that the one God who spoke in the Old Testament also speaks in the New Testament. We should expect, then, that he knew what he was doing all along, and he knew what he was going to say when he was giving his earlier revelation.
Because all Scripture is God-breathed and because the God who spoke in the prophets to the fathers also speaks to us in the Son, we can be confident that things in the Old Testament do correspond to and do point to the things in the New. We can be sure that it’s a possible project, that reading the Old and the New together isn’t going back in time in a way that’s inappropriate, but is indeed what we were designed to do.
Second, we need to notice. For this I’m going to say we need to notice both parallels and resonances. We need to be able to see where the words of the Old Testament are used in the New Testament. This isn’t an accident or something that happens by chance, rather the New Testament authors, guided by God, were carefully reading and interpreting the Old Testament Scriptures.
Whenever we’re using their words, we should stop and ask Why? and How? What point is this citation being used to make? In what ways are these themes being developed in this new setting in the New Testament books? What context is brought in that we wouldn’t expect or that we might? And then beyond the actual exact words of the Old and the New, we should see resonances. Look for ways in which things in the Old Testament look like things in the New Testament.
God structured history and inspired the Old Testament to point forward to greater realities in the New.
In the book of Hebrews, it is commonly referred to as shadows or types—things in the way that God structured history and inspired the Old Testament that point forward to greater realities in the New. So we can see the tabernacle and see the ways in which that points to the place where Jesus ministers in heaven before the presence of God for us.
We can see the Levitical priesthood and the sacrifices on the day of atonement, and we can use that resonance to see the way that Jesus offers himself once and for all to atone for the people.
So if we have these things in mind—the one God who spoke in the past still speaks in all of his word, and if we see how the words are used again and the themes correspond—we will be able to read the Old and the New alongside one another for our good.
Daniel Stevens (PhD, University of Cambridge) is assistant professor of New Testament Interpretation at Boyce College, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Daniel lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Hannah, and two children.
The point of interpreting Scripture is not to rob us of the joy of the journey but rather to protect us from wrong turns and unnecessary repairs that will slow us down.
If we look to the way the New Testament uses the Psalms, we will discover that in addition to an emotional outpouring to God, the New Testament authors find a rich theology of God in the Psalter.
Hebrews is a rich treasury of life-transforming truth and heart-sustaining encouragement. Do you long to know Jesus? Hebrews introduces him as the eternal Son who radiates the glory of God.
For Christians, the resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of our faith. But for many who have never explored the story of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, the details may be largely unknown, and the story on the surface may appear to be more myth than fact.
For Christians, the resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of our faith. But for many who have never explored the story of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, the details may be largely unknown, and the story on the surface may appear to be more myth than fact.
The book Is Easter Unbelievable? Four Questions Everyone Should Ask About the Resurrection Story invites those unfamiliar with or skeptical about the events surrounding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to consider the historical evidence. This brief, sixty-page book concisely explains why the Gospel records are historically credible. It addresses questions like “Is there any proof that Jesus actually lived?” and “What makes Christians believe that He rose from the dead?”
The author, apologist Rebecca McLaughlin, draws not only from the Gospels but also from non-biblical sources, like scholars and ancient Roman historians, to address four main questions:
Is Jesus’ death historical?
Is Jesus’ death ethical?
Is Jesus’ resurrection credible?
Is Jesus’ offer of eternal life desirable?
This is a book for you to give to unbelieving or skeptical friends, neighbors, and colleagues. It comes bundled as a three-pack so you can keep one and give two away—or give all three away! As Easter approaches, this book is perfect for opening the door to a Gospel conversation or to give along with an invitation to your church’s Easter Sunday worship service.
Caleb Morell traces the story of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and how God sovereignly worked through history to both build his church and bring himself glory.
In this episode, Caleb Morell explores pivotal moments in the history of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, from enduring wars and navigating modernist controversies to facing pandemics and pastoral challenges. Through these experiences, he reveals how history remains surprisingly relevant in understanding the church’s identity and recognizing the local church as something worth dedicating your life to.
Matt Tully
Caleb, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.
Caleb Morell
Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Tully
The foundational, core theme of this new book that you’ve written is the idea that church history—even the history of a single, local congregation—holds profound lessons for Christians living today. And yet we live in a culture where often history is not valued. We’re obsessed with the new, we’re obsessed with innovation and change and the future and so the history can feel like and afterthought. And there are some people who love history and love studying history, but when it comes to thinking wisely about how to live in the world, that’s often not where we would think to go. So what is it that first got you excited and passionate and awakened this realization for you that church history in particular holds with it so much wisdom for us living today?
Caleb Morell
I’ve always loved history. Ever since I was a kid, I loved reading and reading books about history. And the only thing I loved more than history as a kid was detective novels. I just ate up detective novels—Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, you name it. The thing I love about history is it is kind of like detective work. You’re discerning, you’re turning over stones, you’re learning new things, you’re putting clues together to try to learn something, to try to answer questions. Because ultimately what you’re answering is, How did things get to be the way they are today? That’s the question that history is answering. If you look around you, you see all kinds of technological developments, social developments, cultural developments, and they all come from something. And so tracing those back, and I think as a Christian in particular, what you’re tracing is the sovereign hand of God. He is sovereign over history. He is the God of history. He’s working in history, ultimately, for his glory and to build his church. And the Christian historian’s task is tracing those glimpses of God’s sovereignty in the lives of people—and in this case, in the life of a church—in a way that helps people see God’s glory on display in what he is doing.
Matt Tully
It’s such an interesting dynamic that sometimes, though, when we look at history and we have that perspective—God is sovereign, he’s orchestrating these events for his purposes—we can think that applies to history because we can kind of see how things work out, but we can forget that about our lives today and the situations and the struggles that we face today. We can almost neglect the fact that God is actually still sovereign over those things.
Caleb Morell
When it comes to history, I tell people that there’s a relationship between memory and identity. If you don’t know your past or if you’ve forgotten the past, you don’t know who you are and you don’t know where you come from. The more you know about your family history, your own personal history, the more you remember of it, the more you know who you are and where you came from. And I think as evangelicals, as Christians, the same is true for us. We need to know where we come from to know who we are. And so tracing back those steps and seeing where we come from—the good, the bad, the ugly—ultimately, just learning from that and seeing God at work.
Matt Tully
That’s a counter-cultural message today, because today the notions of identity are often rooted in my own personal feelings. Like, what do I feel right now? What do I want for myself right now? So the idea that my identity would be, in a very significant way, shaped by history, something I didn’t have control over, it can be a little bit hard to accept sometimes.
Caleb Morell
God assigns each person a time to live in, and today we’re living in the twenty-first century. Acts 17 says that God allots times, peoples, and the boundaries for them to live in. So these are the circumstances we’re born into, and we need to understand that and live faithfully. I just think if you’re not studying history, if you’re learning from it in order to face the problems of tomorrow, then you’re just missing out on collective wisdom that’s there. Because the more you look particularly at church history but history in general, you see that a lot of the problems we’re facing aren’t all that new. Christians have faced many of these challenges before. We can learn lessons in how they responded poorly and how they responded well to face the challenges of our day.
Matt Tully
One of the examples that we’re not going to get into today but one that you hit on in your book a little bit is even something like a pandemic, where churches were dealing with decisions about whether or not to meet, whether or not to obey different government mandates, and just all the nuances that came with that. That’s something that isn’t new. Actually, the church that you profile here in this book had to deal with this 100 years ago.
Caleb Morell
I remember vividly. It was maybe March 15th—I forget if the state of emergency had been called yet or not—but I was working as Mark Dever’s personal assistant at the time. He called me up and he said, “Hey, go down to our church archives and see what we did during the Spanish Flu.” And I was thinking, What’s the Spanish Flu? People were just starting to talk about this. They were just starting to remember, Oh, this has happened before. And he wanted to figure out what did our church do.
Matt Tully
That’s amazing that was one of his first instincts—I wonder what we can learn from history.
Caleb Morell
And thankfully, we have a fairly good minutes and fairly good records, so I go down to the basement, I start flipping through some old records. This is before I was even working on this as a formal project. And lo and behold, we see that we, in fact, submitted to the request of the D.C. Health Commissioner, and we didn’t meet for three weeks. Just three weeks. And then they lifted the request that churches not gather.
Matt Tully
And they had made a request for the pandemic because they had previously, earlier that same year I believe, had—
Caleb Morell
That’s right. We’ve got to set the context. It’s 1918. World War I is still going on. It hasn’t officially ended yet. Troops are abroad, there’s lots going on. So people are already in this heightened state of emergency. The expansion of government powers were obviously in Washington, D. C., and these things are happening. And earlier that year, there had been a coal shortage. They needed coal to go toward the war effort. And much to the frustration of many of the churches, among the prohibited activities during this coal shortage in January 1918 was church gatherings. They said that instead of having all the churches burn coal, let’s just have each denomination pick a church that will meet—one of each denomination in the city—and then the rest, we’re just going to ask you not to meet. I think, again, it’s a case where the churches had to figure out what to do. Was that a valid request? They understood they had a civic duty to support the war effort. They also understood that they had a spiritual responsibility, in terms of gathering for worship. They also understood that the government seemed to be toeing the line of stepping outside both the bounds of the First Amendment of the Constitution, and there were concerns there of the government overstepping the bounds. They were also stepping into the autonomy of the local church. And so churches had to think really carefully. And they thought variously about it. But one thing I’ll say is, at least at that time, the churches of the city met together and they deliberated so that they would speak with one voice. And in many ways, they had the formal authority and the relationships to gather together to deliberate, to make a decision, and to make requests as a block. And I’d say that, in many ways, we’ve lost some of those partnerships and relationships. I’m not sure we’d really be able to do the same thing. And I’m not sure even a government official would think, Okay, I’m going to speak to the churches, and I’m going to have to listen to them and respond and relate to them as a block. But that certainly contributed to their collective power is that they were able to come together, organize, and make a case.
Matt Tully
And we’re not going to go on too much further in that particular topic, so people can get the book if they want to learn more about that, but it’s just an illustration of the way that history can be so relevant—surprisingly relevant—to the things that we’re dealing with today in the modern world. Sometimes we think that there are new situations and new problems that we’re facing, but most often they’re not. So when we do history, we tend to focus, at least in terms of the way that we tell history at a more lay level, we tend to focus on these big history-shaping movements, these big key events, influential figures who had a big impact in some way. But in your new book, you zoom in on one particular church way down in a focused kind of way. What’s the value of doing history not just with a bird’s eye view but almost under a microscope? How do you see the balance there?
Caleb Morell
There’s value in doing the broad strokes. I think those broad strokes can leave out some voices though. They leave out the texture of church life. So if you think about most broad histories, they’ll either trace theological topics and just focus on disputes, disagreements, theological controversies. That’s one approach. That’s usually how denominational histories are done. A second approach is more the way a secular history would be written, is it traces political movements. It looks at social and political movements, and it is interested in religion insofar as it contributes to political outcomes. And so you’re going to look at this is why there’s such a focus on, say, with fundamentalism over the Scopes Monkey Trial. That’s kind of viewed, probably out of proportion, as this catalytic event, whereas I didn’t find a single reference to that, for instance, in our minutes. It doesn’t come up.
Matt Tully
Same time period, but they’re not even thinking about it.
Caleb Morell
Right. And so that can also be a way that captures some things, but it can also get things out of proportion. It reflects what we might value today and care about and want to know about; it doesn’t tell us as much about what they cared about and what they spent their time focusing on. Especially if you have a lot of minutes, if you have a lot of primary sources, if you have a lot of data, interviews, memoirs, and you’re able to reconstruct the social context in culture of a church and get a sense of what they valued and what they cared about, that might give you a more accurate sense of the texture of evangelical Christianity in America. And it’s definitely worth doing that slow, inductive work of let’s listen to them and let’s see what they have to say. And we’ll listen to them and we’ll let them tell the story. And that’s what I tried to do in this book. Rather than starting with the storylines and say, “I’m going to write about these five topics because I know people will care about them,” I started with I don’t even know what’s going to be there. I don’t know what I’ll find, but I’ll see what I find, and I’ll try to trace the storyline that is naturally emerging in the life of this church.
Matt Tully
That’s where you get that detective story dynamic to it. I wonder if sometimes the reason why more people don’t like history—or they think they don’t like history at least—is because they often are thinking in terms of those really big movements, the high-level summary that they might have gotten in high school. And actually, what we love as humans is we love stories. We love the texture. We need the texture to actually feel the things that people were feeling, understand their motivations for things so that it isn’t just decontextualized events that just happened a long time ago.
Caleb Morell
And it just brings it to life. Can I tell a couple stories from the life of the church? Will it give away too much?
Matt Tully
No, no, that’s great. There are lots of good stories in the book.
Caleb Morell
One of the stories I love telling is Celestia Ferris. Celestia Ferris has been remembered as the washer woman at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing who started the church. She called together a prayer meeting in her home. We knew that she was a widow. We just didn’t know much about her. So I just dove into the sources. I tried to find out everything I could about her. I visited other churches where she had been a member and went through their records. I reconstructed her childhood, her worldview, her experience during the Civil War as a teenager.
Matt Tully
Because the church is founded in what year?
Caleb Morell
The church was founded in 1878. She had started this prayer meeting in her home in 1867.
Matt Tully
The Civil War ended in 1858?
Caleb Morell
April 1865.
Matt Tully
And it started in 1850-something.
Caleb Morell
And so she’s growing up in this city, this war-torn city. She’s at a church where there’s a lot of controversy over the Civil War. The church splits over various responses to the Civil War. So this is just the world she’s inhabiting, growing up in the nation’s capital. She ends up marrying a Civil War veteran, Abraham Ferris, who has his own fascinating stories of close encounters during the war. And it’s in their second year of marriage that they call together a group of friends on Capitol Hill to start praying for a church. So they start praying just two years after the Civil War ended, because there was no local church in their vicinity. They thought somebody should start a church. “We’re not in full time ministry. We’re not going to be pastors, but we should just pray.” And that’s what Christians do. Christians gather together, they pray, and they ask God to work. And so that’s where Capitol Hill Baptist Church comes from; it comes from a prayer meeting. They prayed for years. They prayed for four years before anything really happened.
Matt Tully
Just meeting in their home.
Caleb Morell
Meeting in their home, praying. They started a Sunday school. They started a Sunday school. People always wonder why the Sunday school predates the church. Well, it’s because, one, that was the way to evangelize. On Sunday afternoon, they would evangelize kids in the neighborhood, share the gospel, hope that they’re converted, and reach the families through the kids. And then they bought a lot and they built a building on the same site where the church now stands. They started building and building, and it took eleven years. So from prayer meeting to church formation, eleven years. And during that time, Celestia became a widow and a single mother to three. Her husband, Abraham, died of wounds from the Civil War, ad so she was left, at 33, as a widow and a single mom. And yet she presses on. And she’s not the only one. Other people are involved, but she’s the one who got it started. And she stays. She stays at the church and serves faithfully until her death. Those are the kind of stories that I want to bring to life. Because you look at somebody like Celestia and you think there had to be seasons in her life where she’s just asking, What is the point of my life? What am I doing? Her husband dies. Her father died. She becomes the sole breadwinner for her family. And I’m sure life was hard. And yet she poured her life into her children and into her local church. And look at the fruit.
Matt Tully
And it’s also amazing that she did all that, she poured her life into this, not knowing what was going to happen necessarily.
Caleb Morell
Not knowing what was going to happen.
Matt Tully
We look back 150 years later and we can see how the Lord used that faith and used that perseverance and that prayer to do amazing things—Capitol Hill Baptist Church. But she didn’t have that perspective. So how do we keep that mindset when we don’t have the benefit of hindsight?
Caleb Morell
Faith in God. I think the right definition of success, which is not visible results. Success cannot be defined by my ability to perceive the impact of my life on the people around me. That is not a metric that is sustainable. That is not a metric that’s spiritually safe, because we can be so prone to deception. It’s also one that may not pass the test of heaven, when, as Paul says, that day will reveal the work each one has done. The work of some will be wood, hay, stubble, and burned, and the others will last. I think Celestia’s work is going to last. And I think there will be great rejoicing and joy on that day, but she didn’t necessarily live to see it. But we need the right definition of success. And we need a vision of the local church as something worth investing your life in, because God has attached his name to it, and he’s attached his promises to it. There are a lot of things in our lives that the Lord has not attached his name and promise to.
Matt Tully
Let’s talk about another person that you tell a little bit of their story in this book, a man named John Compton Ball. He served as pastor of CHBC for over four decades, I believe, which is quite the tenure as a pastor. You point to his life and his work as a pastor as illustrating the value of this longevity that pastors can have in a local church and the impact that can have. Tell us a little bit more about him.
Caleb Morell
Sure. He’s another fascinating guy. He’s born in England in 1867. He emigrates to America as a young boy, lives in Philadelphia. He’s eventually converted, and he works in the business world. He works for a large department store called Wanamaker’s. This guy, John Wanamaker, the founder of that store was a Presbyterian layman, and he supported young men to go to seminary. And John Compton Ball was one of those young men. He comes to the church in 1903. He had studied at Crozer, when it was a very theologically conservative seminary. And part of what I point out here is the length of his pastorate, forty-one years, gave the church a critical stability and leadership during an incredibly tumultuous time—1903–1944.
Matt Tully
It’s the First World War and the Second World War.
Caleb Morell
That’s exactly right. The Spanish Flu, the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the Great Depression. And that was a huge blessing to the church. And I think particularly that they didn’t have to pick a new pastor, who would have likely been trained at an institution that taught theological modernism in a way that undermined the trust in Scripture. Had they had to call a younger minister during that time, there’s a strong likelihood that he would be somewhat compromised in his theology. But I think in 1944, that allowed them to just kind of wait it out, so people could see the outcome of where those different movements were going.
Matt Tully
And what was it that led him, ultimately, to step down?
Caleb Morell
You’ve got to read the book to get the full story, but he was quite old at the time. He probably should have retired sooner. He preached the Bible faithfully, but it was one of those situations where it was time.
Matt Tully
And that’s the other half of it. Longevity is a value to pursue, but sometimes the transition portion—transitioning out of pastoral ministry and leadership role like that—can be really hard for guys.
Caleb Morell
Yeah, absolutely. And what ended up happening is the pulpit committee, well, first, just to set this up a little bit, he made sure the church voted that he would retain three quarters of his salary and retain the title Senior Pastor Emeritus after retiring. So that was a sweet deal.
Matt Tully
Interesting. A little built-in parachute.
Caleb Morell
He lived across the street. So the pulpit committee comes, and they nominate a guy named Ralph Walker from Portland, Oregon. And at the members meeting, when the pulpit committee presents this new candidate to succeed the forty-one year ministry of this very established and well-known figure, a long-time Sunday school teacher named Agnes Schenkel raises her hand at the meeting and says, “I’ve heard considerable reports about this man, that he’s compromising in matters related to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy.” She’s saying he’s a man in the middle. He’s not clearly one way or the other. And that concerned her. And someone else spoke up and said, “I’ve heard the same thing.” The pulpit committee retracts their nomination, and the motion comes from the floor to call another pastor who had candidated, a guy named K. Owen White, who is a noted conservative. There was no question about where he stood. He stood on the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. So they call K. Owen White because of a motion from the floor against the pulpit committee, and that is Congregationalism in action.
Matt Tully
That’s another theme that you draw out, that Congregationalism can help to protect the gospel, protect a church from compromise, in some ways, when the congregation is empowered to have a voice in these decisions.
Caleb Morell
You don’t want to pull that emergency brake all the time, but you want that to be there just in case. And in this case, that was the right call. So K. Owen White, some listeners may know, goes on to be president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He preaches the famous “Death in the Pot” sermon about the liberalism that’s happening at the seminaries that calls the conservative resurgence into being. So he was definitely the right man for the moment. And I tell people this may have been the most consequential moment in the life of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. And I think that was the turning point, in terms of so many of these urban city center historic churches, somewhere in the twentieth century, lost their aim. And I think if we had called Ralph Walker, there’s a good chance we would’ve just started going on that slippery slope toward liberalism. And that was the turning point. Right there. And it started with Agnes Schenkel.
Matt Tully
I know one response from a non-Congregationalist person could be that just as often as a congregation like that might protect a church from compromise, they could also draw a church towards that kind of compromise, towards that loss of fidelity to the gospel. What would be your response to that?
Caleb Morell
Yes, but that’s why we don’t baptize babies, Matt. That’s why we’re a believer’s church. No offense to my Presbyterian brothers.
Matt Tully
So church discipline is so important?
Caleb Morell
Well, no, you’re right. It’s not just one thing and not the others. You don’t want to put too much weight on one single factor. Obviously, the gospel is paramount. Obviously, the preaching of the word. Clearly, John Compton Ball, for any problems he had, preached the Bible faithfully enough that the congregation themselves were able to discern which direction they needed to go. So the preaching of the word is paramount. There are other factors like the health of the church, good leadership. But in that instance, that wasn’t the only time the congregation had to step in. There was an earlier instance when the church went through a split in the 1880s, and again, the congregation stepped in. But on the whole, I’d say in the life of the Capitol Baptist Church, when those moments have happened, the congregation’s gotten the decision right.
Matt Tully
The story of Ball and his relatively faithful pastoral ministry for forty years that then maybe ended in a slightly more complex way, where he’s struggling to let go in some ways, it illustrates another dynamic of history that can be both quite interesting and fascinating to think about but also challenging sometimes for us. Just the complexity and the grayness at times of certain figures and things that happen, where we can see a lot of good that he did, perhaps. We can see the benefit to the church that he was for all those decades. And yet we can also see that there were things about his ministry, things about his decisions that we don’t love so much. How have you wrestled with the grayness at times with some of these people?
Caleb Morell
You want to view people not just as black and white characters but as complex characters with complex motivations. In history you don’t always know why people are acting the way they’re acting, so you want to complexify. And I think the book leaves plenty of riddles unresolved in some ways. Even if you take the same guy, John Compton Ball, he was very comfortable having a woman in the pulpit preaching in the 1920s and 30s. There was at least one evangelist, Amy Lee Stockton, who would regularly stop by the church and preach on Sunday mornings in the 1930s. And this is in a conservative church. This is an inerrantist church. And that didn’t happen from 1944 on. What do you do with that? How do you make sense of that? These are some of the things you wouldn’t really expect to find in church history until you really start digging around.
Matt Tully
It always tends to blow up the simple categories and the simplistic narratives that we often have when it comes to history. It’s usually not that clean.
Caleb Morell
Yeah.
Matt Tully
One more story that you can maybe tell us here, Harry Killbride. What was his story? Why was he a significant person in the history of Capitol Hill?
Caleb Morell
Yeah, Matt, this was the hardest chapter to write by far. It’s definitely what took the most time in painstaking research, because I went into it knowing that Harry disqualified himself and that he was Mark’s predecessor in ministry here. He was the pastor here for three or four years before Mark Dever came here. And I knew it would be sensitive for all those reasons—sensitive toward the other party involved, sensitive toward him and his family, sensitive toward our church and members there who were still hurting from the event. And I tried to go into it with an open mind, without prejudgment or preconception, and just follow the evidence and where it led. I did dozens and dozens of interviews. And I think what it left me with was a very gifted man who had incredible credentials, presented himself as a disciple of Martyn Lloyd Jones, came from the United Kingdom, had pastored prominent churches, and yet who seemed to leave a wake of carnage in his wake. I tried to interview him before he passed, and he wasn’t able to meet. He was very sick. And it’s heavy to listen to sermons from someone and you can read their books and say there’s so much good here, there’s so much correct grasp of things theologically, and yet we’re left with this life that does not reflect the qualifications for an elder or what the New Testament commands the Christian life to look like.
Matt Tully
That’s a challenge and a struggle that I’m sure all of us, to some extent, we’ve either heard of stories or we’ve even been directly impacted by examples like that of those in ministry—prominent positions of leadership and authority and influence—who, in some way, fall short of the calling that God has called them to. And then we’re left wondering, What do I do with the things that they said and the things that they wrote or did that I think God used powerfully in my own life? In your conversations with people, how have they wrestled with that difficult dynamic?
Caleb Morell
I think variously. It’s important to remember that these aren’t new things. If you look at your New Testament, Judas was one of the twelve. You see that Paul talks about Philetus and Hymenaeus and others who have left the faith. Demas, at great pain. And you’re also given instructions in the New Testament for what to do when an elder disqualifies themselves. First Timothy says to rebuke them in the presence of all so that they may stand in fear. And I think a sober mindedness about sin, a warning against self-deception, and a concern to watch one’s own life and doctrine was one of the most consistent takeaways from people I interviewed as they reflected on it. Just the need for the minister’s self-watch. I’ve really wrestled with this chapter with how much to tell. And some people thought it’s not appropriate to spend time exposing sin in the ministry, or that doing so will be confusing and challenging to Christians, or it’s better just to live and let live. I tried to write about it in a way that was both accurate in bringing it to the light and yet not unnecessarily groveling in the details of things. But I think it is important in the life of a church to tell the truth, when there’s an opportunity to do so. Not for the sake of destruction—this happened in this church, we need to burn it down. But saying like, no, this can happen in any church. And actually, I think the way the church responded on the whole was good, and I think there’s some lessons to learn from there.
Matt Tully
Because that can be the response of some Christians when there is some kind of scandal, for lack of a better word, in a church. The temptation can be, “Let’s just not talk about it. Let’s just move on. Let’s deal with it quietly and move on.” What’s your response to that? How do you think about that? Especially as someone doing history and looking back, how do you respond to the fear that in dredging up things like this and talking about the failures of a church or of a Christian, you’re questioning or you’re harming the church’s witness to a watching world?
Caleb Morell
It’s amazing that Psalm 51 is in the Bible, especially with the superscript to the choir master: “A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba.” So that’s in the inspired word of God, superscript and all. And I think David was willing for his life to be on display because as a leader, he was responsible for what had happened, and that’s there in Scripture for a reason, so that we, as 1 Corinthians 10:12 says, should take heed lest we fall. You think of Paul and his life on display: persecutor, blasphemer, insolent opponent. What’s the point of that? Well, it’s so that we could see his his repentance. We could see how his life changed after an encounter with Christ. Do you think of Peter denying Christ three times? Greatly he had sinned, and greatly he repented.
Matt Tully
Caleb, any other fun or funny stories from your research of this church that come to mind?
Caleb Morell
What didn’t come through in the book but what we can talk about is the process of writing, because this was a very non-straightforward book. But the detective-like work of finding sources, finding people to interview is just absurd.
Matt Tully
Not the most efficient, straight forward, linear process.
Caleb Morell
No, but I would do things like this. So take John Compton Ball. I’m thinking we don’t have any of his sermons in our archives. This man preached here for forty years. He must have left a deposit. Where is it? Who has it? No one knows. Probably with the family. Okay, well he had a daughter. Okay, well not actually his daughter, an adopted daughter, but, okay, daughter. Is anyone alive? Are any descendants alive? She’s not alive. So going through newspaper records, looking at marriages, looking at obituaries. Obituaries are where you find all the family members.
Matt Tully
Yeah, they list out all the family members.
Caleb Morell
So I’m able to go through and I’m able to find a name of somebody who owned a company. So I call the company. I say, “Do you know so and so?” “Oh, yeah! His daughter still works here.” “Can I speak with her?” So just finding a human being and someone we could speak to. It turns out that there are family members who’ve kept everything. So I drive over to their home in an hour and twenty minutes, I set up an appointment to go meet with them, and we sit down, and they open up this chest of sermons, clippings, photographs, everything. Just a treasure store. And we’re looking it all over, and then she turns to me at one point and she says, “So is grandpa’s church still there? Does it still exist?” She has no idea.
Matt Tully
Wow.
Caleb Morell
And so just getting to share with her, “Oh, you have no idea.” She appreciates it for sentimental family reasons, but so many people appreciate it for kingdom reasons. And so to get to share with her some of the joy and impact that her grandfather had on countless hundreds, if not thousands, because he was part of keeping the church going. That was maybe the greatest joy. And I had that experience several different times, tracking down family members, collecting documents, that just added a real texture to the experience of writing the story.
Matt Tully
Yeah, absolutely. Caleb, thank you so much for taking the time to write this book, to do this research and give each of us just a glimpse into one church of God’s sovereign orchestrating of just one congregation and the incredible impact that’s had on so many people, as you just said. We appreciate it.
Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.
Rosaria Butterfield encourages us to engage our LGBTQ neighbors for Christ, highlighting how God used the radically ordinary hospitality of Christians to draw her to himself.
On September 17, 1944, a relatively unknown pastor named Kenneth Owen White arrived at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D. C. (later known as Capitol Hill Baptist Church), eager to prove himself.
On September 17, 1944, a relatively unknown pastor named Kenneth Owen White arrived at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D. C. (later known as Capitol Hill Baptist Church), eager to prove himself. In time, he would rise to national prominence—most famously, grilling John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign and then later serving as president of the Southern Baptist Convention. But at the time, White was simply a freshly minted PhD eager to test his mettle as pastor.
What greeted him was chaos. Like many mid-twentieth-century Southern Baptist churches, the church’s membership rolls boasted nearly 3,000 names, but Sundays told a different story. Barely a fraction of those members showed up. White suspected as much, and when he decided to test his hunch with attendance cards one winter Sunday in 1948, he confirmed it: 763 people, in total. The numbers weren’t just inflated—they were a mirage.
But worse than the numbers was the shadow cast by his predecessor. Dr. John Compton Ball had pastored Metropolitan for an astonishing forty-one years. He was beloved, a patriarch of sorts, tied to the congregation across generations. He had baptized their children and buried their grandparents. And now, though officially retired, he lived directly across the street and had no intention of letting go.
The Problem of Letting Go
Ball’s presence wasn’t just felt—it was palpable. He retained his role as pastor emeritus, a generous salary, and a seat at the deacons’s meetings. More troubling, he seemed to relish reminding the congregation—and White—of his continued influence. During services, Ball expected recognition, sometimes demanding to sit on the platform where the pastor traditionally sat. He even justified it by explaining, “People say unless I’m seated on the platform, it just doesn’t seem like Metropolitan.”
White tried to manage the situation tactfully. He chose 1 Corinthians 2:2—Ball’s inaugural sermon text—as his own first sermon to demonstrate continuity with the past. He praised the church’s history under Ball, declaring that Metropolitan had been built on “Jesus Christ and him crucified” and promising to carry that legacy forward.
Yet, Ball’s interference escalated. During one of White’s early Wednesday night presentations, while outlining a few priorities for the church, Ball asked to address the congregation. “Well,” he said, “you have heard our pastor’s suggestions. He is a young man and unknown to most of you. You will not feel free to go to him with your most personal problems, but I want you to remember that I still live across the street. You can always come to me.”
One Sunday after service, Dr. White walked to the vestibule to greet members and visitors, only to find Dr. Ball at the center of a jovial group of congregants, holding court. As White approached, the laughter died, replaced by an awkward hush. Every polite inquiry White made was met with stiff, monosyllabic replies, and as he walked away, he could feel the conversation reigniting behind him. “This does something to a man,” White later reflected, the ache of those moments still palpable. “I think it’s bound to.”
For K. Owen White—who would later shepherd First Baptist Church of Houston through the turbulent waters of racial integration and ignite the “conservative resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention with his 1962 article “Death in the Pot”—nothing compared to the grueling ordeal of his pastoral transition at Metropolitan Baptist Church. Reflecting on the experience, White admitted, “Probably the most difficult experience I have ever had. Mrs. White said my hair turned gray within the first six months.”
When Patience Runs Thin
White’s initial strategy was patience. He tried to mollify Ball, occasionally calling on him to close in prayer or publicly recognizing his contributions. But Ball wanted more. He continued attending deacons’s meetings. He conducted weddings without informing White. He fumed when his name was left off a church advertisement. And all the while, his presence undermined White’s authority.
After more than a year of navigating these tensions, White reached his breaking point. At a private meeting with the deacons, White laid out the situation: Ball’s behavior was stifling the church’s progress and making it impossible for White to lead. To White’s relief, all but one of the deacons sided with him. They assured White of their support and confronted Ball, insisting that it was time to step aside.
To his credit, Ball relented—mostly. While there were minor tensions in the years that followed, the worst of the power struggle had passed. With Ball no longer meddling, White was finally free to lead. During his five-year tenure, the church thrived, baptizing nearly 1,000 new members.
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What We Can Learn
Pastoral transitions are fraught with difficulty, compounded by the length and public prominence of the outgoing pastor. The experience of K. Owen White at Metropolitan Baptist Church, though humorous in retrospect, is a cautionary tale for churches navigating pastoral transitions.
Lessons for Retiring Pastors
A retiring pastor’s influence can either strengthen or undermine the transition process. The role of a retired pastor is not to remain in the spotlight but to encourage and support their successor. Retiring pastors should be intentional about fostering unity by directing the congregation’s focus to trusting God under the new pastor’s leadership.
Lessons for Incoming Pastors
When Mark Dever arrived at Capitol Hill Baptist Church half a century later, Martyn Lloyd-Jones’s son-in-law wisely told him that for the first five years, “it was the other man’s church.” For incoming pastors, stepping into the role of a shepherd can be daunting, particularly when following a long-tenured and beloved leader. Success requires a combination of respect for the past, clarity in leadership, and patience.
Honoring the outgoing pastor’s legacy is essential for building trust with the congregation. White, for instance, emphasized continuity by preaching 1 Corinthians 2:2 (Dr. Ball’s inaugural sermon text) and expressing his appreciation for the church’s history and values. Yet respect for the past must not come at the expense of leadership in the present. When the former pastor’s actions undermined the church’s unity, White wisely confronted the issue.
Lessons for Elder Boards
One difficulty in Metropolitan’s case was that the church lacked a biblical plurality of elders. In what was fairly typical for the time, John Compton Ball was the sole pastor and expected the deacons to follow his leadership. A plural eldership.
A church’s board of elders (or leadership team) has the most critical role to play in ensuring a healthy pastoral succession. Their actions—or inactions—can either alleviate or exacerbate tensions during transitions. Most importantly, the elders have a responsibility to protect the new pastor’s ability to lead effectively, as White’s deacons did when confronting Dr. Ball. Elder boards should first and foremost set clear expectations. Churches should establish a written succession plan outlining the retiring pastor’s responsibilities (if any) and setting boundaries to prevent overlap with the incoming pastor’s role. By providing structure, the elders can set both pastors up for success and avoid the relational and organizational pitfalls that plagued White’s early years at Metropolitan.
Conclusion
Pastoral transitions are among the most delicate moments in a church’s life. Retiring pastors, incoming leaders, and church leadership teams each have a vital role to play in ensuring a smooth and God-honoring transition. When approached with humility, wisdom, and trust in God’s sovereignty, these transitions can strengthen the church for generations to come.
Caleb Morell (MDiv, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is an assistant pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church and a doctoral student in historical theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He lives with his wife and three children on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
The calling, or mission, of the church as the church is to proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth, not to be another merely (or even chiefly) political, social, or economic institution.
In the past five years alone, how many reading this have questioned your calling, lost ministry friends and co-laborers, or have grown generally weary?
I am more convinced than ever that prayer is and should be Trinitarian. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every single prayer must reference the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Like every other Catholic child growing up in the 1960s, I learned the sign of the cross as a standard way of beginning prayer. It involved both action and words. You made a simple motion, first touching your forehead (saying, “In the name of the Father”), then your chest (“. . . and of the Son”), and finally your left and right shoulders (“. . . and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”). I confess I hadn’t thought about this since I was a boy, but it came back to me recently as I was writing on Trinitarian prayer. If nothing else, I was trained very young to think that prayer involved the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This was a gracious gift of God, even though it made little impact at the time.
After decades of reading the Bible, following Jesus Christ, and participating in countless worship services, I am more convinced than ever that prayer is and should be Trinitarian. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every single prayer must reference the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But for prayer to be truly Christian, it must consistently bear witness to the three-in-one.
The Trinity in Creation and Redemption
The reason prayer is essentially Trinitarian is because, according to Scripture, everything is Trinitarian. Genesis 1 and John 1 bear witness to the activity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in creation.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Gen. 1:1–2)
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1–3)
Second Thessalonians 2:13–14 and other passages similarly show Trinitarian cooperation in the work of salvation.1
But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thess. 2:13–14)
John Frame nicely summarizes the mutual deity and work of the Trinity in creation and salvation: “All three stand together as Creator and Savior. Scripture joins them together in contexts of praise and thanksgiving. They are the ultimate object of the believer’s trust and hope. What else can they possibly be, other than one, somehow threefold God?”2
The Trinity and Prayer
This Trinitarian mutuality impacts public prayer in two ways. First, each member of the Trinity is intimately involved in the very act of praying. As the old saying goes, we pray to the Father, through the Son, by the power of the Spirit. Paul Miller helpfully elaborates on the mysterious Trinitarian interplay in the act of praying:
Even now I often don’t realize that I am praying. Possibly, it isn’t even me praying, but the Spirit. Paul said, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Galatians 4:6). The Spirit is not assisting us to pray; he is the one who is actually praying. He is the pray-er. More specifically, it is the Spirit of his Son praying. The Spirit is bringing the childlike heart of Jesus into my heart and crying Abba, Father. Jesus’s longing for his Father becomes my longing. My spirit meshes with the Spirit, and I, too, begin to cry, Father.3
While Miller is talking about the Trinity moving us in personal prayer, the same is true in public prayer. The Holy Spirit moves leaders to prepare and pray Christlike prayers to the Father on behalf of his gathered children.
The Holy Spirit moves leaders to prepare and pray Christlike prayers to the Father on behalf of his gathered children.
Second, since the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are equally divine and essential for our salvation, it makes perfect biblical, theological, and practical sense that we would refer to each of them in prayer. Notice how Paul does this in Ephesians 3:14–19. He prays to the Father that the Ephesians would be strengthened by the Spirit so that the Son would dwell in their hearts by faith. This kind of Trinitarian prayer is not simply a formula to follow; it is the natural movement of a mind instructed in gospel truth and a heart enflamed by gospel grace.
While the normal practice for Christians is to pray to the Father through the Son by the power of the Spirit, it is also biblical on occasion to address Jesus in prayer (John 14:13–14). Praying to the Holy Spirit (as opposed to “in” the Spirit—see Eph. 6:18; Jude 20) seems more problematic. There is no biblical precedent for praying directly to the Holy Spirit, and for good reason. He is the most self-effacing member of the Trinity who loves to point to Jesus and apply his work to our lives. But it is also true that he is equally God and worshiped with the Father and the Son. And as it can be said of the Father and Son, so also of the Spirit: without him we would still be dead in our sins and totally unable to pray at all. Therefore, it is appropriate to praise the Holy Spirit and to occasionally petition him in public prayer. Keith Getty’s hymn “Holy Spirit” begins, “Holy Spirit, living Breath of God, breathe new life into my willing soul.”4 Getty’s thoughts on the song are relevant to addressing the Holy Spirit in prayer: “‘Holy Spirit’ is the final hymn I wrote with Stuart Townend as part of the Apostle’s Creed album we created in 2005. In this particular song, we desired the hymn to function as a sung prayer about the Holy Spirit’s renewing power.”5
Matthew Henry’s prayer of adoration is a good example of Trinitarian prayer:
We pay our homage to three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: for these three are one. We adore thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth; and the eternal Word, who was in the beginning with God, and was God, by whom all things were made, and without whom was not anything made that was made. . . . We also worship the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, whom the Son has sent from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceedeth from the Father, and who is sent to teach us all things, and to bring all things to remembrance.6
Henry’s prayer concisely exalts the Father as the “Lord of heaven and earth,” Christ as “the eternal Word . . . by whom all things were made,” and the Holy Spirit as “the Comforter . . . sent to teach us all things.” The mind is enlightened and the heart enflamed in praise to the glorious three-in-one. This is the goal of good public prayer.
Notes:
See also Rom. 1:1–6; Gal. 3:10–14; Eph. 1:3–14; Col. 1:3–8; 1 Thess. 1:1–5; Titus 3:4–7.
John Frame, The Doctrine of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 643.
Paul Miller, A Praying Life (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2009), 64–65.
Keith Getty and Stuart Townend, “Holy Spirit” (Getty Music Label, 2019).
Keith Getty, quoted in Bob Kauflin, Worship Matters (blog), August 10, 2012, worshipmatters.com/2012/08/10/holy-spirit-breath-of-god-gettytownend-hymn/.
Matthew Henry, A Method for Prayer, ed. J. Ligon Duncan (Fearn, Ross-shire, Scotland: Christian Focus, 1994), 24–25.
Pat Quinn (MA, Calvin College) is director of counseling ministries at University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan, where he also serves as an elder and teacher. Quinn led worship at University Reformed Church for several decades, composing many worship songs and congregational prayers. Pat is married to Judie, and they have two grown children.
The eternal communion of Father, Son, and Spirit is the grounds for our communion with him and one another. Our triune God, simple and perfect for all of eternity, has always been the one God.
There are better ways and worse ways to explain the Trinity. We can describe a pie chart where we split God up into parts, and this is one of the worst ways to explain the Trinity.
Looking at prayers that came from those before us was just an opportunity for me to personally dive into where the church has been and to understand that we’re not alone.
Doug O’Donnell discusses the new Daily Liturgy Devotional, sharing how he really wrote the book for himself first and foremost, and how it has impacted his devotional life recently.
Justification and sanctification, though related, are different gifts. The most serious, and potentially damning, errors surface when the two are not carefully distinguished.
The Bible typically uses the language of “sanctified” or “sanctify” to refer to the believer’s positional holiness as one set apart unto God. In systematic theology, however, sanctification usually means the renovation of men and women by which God takes the joined-to-Christ, justified believer and transforms him more and more into the divine image. That is the sense we are talking about right now—progressive sanctification rather than definitive sanctification.
Sanctification can be understood passively and actively—passively, inasmuch as the transforming work “is wrought by God in us,” and also actively, inasmuch as sanctification “ought to be done by us, God performing this work in us and by us.”1 This is a crucial point. In sanctification, God is doing the work in us, but at the same time we are also working. Any theology that ignores either the passive or the active dimension of sanctification is going to be lopsided and unbiblical.
From this definition, we can already see that justification and sanctification, though related, are different gifts. The most serious, and potentially damning, errors surface when the two are not carefully distinguished. According to Turretin, justification and sanctification differ in at least five ways.2
They differ with regard to their object. Justification is concerned with guilt; sanctification with pollution.
They differ as to their form. Justification is a judicial and forensic act whereby our sins are forgiven and the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us. Sanctification is a moral act whereby righteousness is infused in the believer and personal renewal is begun and over a long process carried to completion.
They differ as to the recipient subject. In justification, man is given a new objective status based on God’s acquittal. In sanctification, we are subjectively renewed by God.
They differ as to degrees. Justification is given in this life fully, without any possible increase. Sanctification is begun in this life but only made perfect in the next. The declaration of justification is once for all. The inward work of sanctification takes place by degrees.
They differ as to the order. God only sanctifies those who are already reconciled and justified by faith.
In sanctification, God is doing the work in us, but at the same time we are also working.
Some Christians have argued that sanctification is also “by faith alone.” While we are right to stress that sanctification is a gift that comes only to those who put their faith in Christ, and that we grow in godliness by believing in the promises of God, the phrase “by faith alone” is not helpful. Both justification and sanctification are by faith, but whereas faith is the instrument through which we receive the righteousness of Christ, faith is the root and principle out of which sanctification grows.3 We say that justification is by faith alone, because we want to safeguard justification from any notion of striving or working. But sanctification explicitly includes these co-operations, making the description of “alone” misleading at best and inaccurate at worst. We are apt to misunderstand both justification and sanctification if we describe them in ways that are too similar.
Notes:
Turretin, Francis. Institutes of Elenctic Theology. 3 vols. Translated by George Musgrave
Giger. Edited by James T. Dennison Jr. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1997, 2:689.
Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte. He has written books for children, adults, and academics, including Just Do Something; Impossible Christianity; Daily Doctrine; and The Biggest Story Bible Storybook. Kevin’s work can be found on clearlyreformed.org. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children.
Certainly Paul teaches that Christians are transformed by God’s grace. But we must not make the mistake of reading Paul’s theology as a whole into every word he uses.
Does the Old Testament teach justification by faith alone? We certainly don’t find the explicit teaching on the doctrine that is present in the New Testament.
Matthew Barrett sheds light on the meaning of justification by faith alone, explaining why it’s so central to the Christian faith, and he explores why the book of James says that we’re not justified by faith alone.
Of all the harrowing images from the Second World War, of mushroom clouds and floating corpses, one of them stands out to me. The picture was taken in 1942, outside Ivanhorod in Ukraine. A mother is running from left to right, holding and perhaps shielding her child.
The scene itself was not rare. It played out tens of millions of times, across dozens of nations, to families long forgotten to history.
What’s rare is that someone chose to capture the scene on film, someone who approved of what that photograph depicted.
At left stands a German soldier, rifle aimed at the mother and child. In just a split second after this picture was taken, mother and child would both be dead.
As I write, we have just learned the fate of a Jewish family captured in the terrorist attack of October 7, 2023. Terrorists from Gaza captured the Bibas family, then killed the mother, Shiri, and her two sons in captivity. One child strangled to death by bare hands was four years old. The other, with red hair like his brother, was just ten months old.
As I write, we have also just commemorated the three-year anniversary of Russia invading Ukraine in what Vladimir Putin termed a de-Nazifying campaign. And just like that, the fields of Ivanhorod don’t feel so far away, and 1942 doesn’t feel like so long ago.
So, where is God in a world with so much evil?
That’s a question I can’t avoid asking when I look around the world today. And it’s a question I certainly can’t avoid asking when I look to history. Can this fallen, brutal, cruel world really be God’s plan? Every night my family gathers in our home library to read the Bible, sing, and pray. My older son often asks about the war in Ukraine. How do I answer? What is God’s answer to our many, fervent prayers?
Stupid Kindness
When we turn to Scripture, we find anything but safe and sanitary answers. Instead, we find many of the most faithful, inspired writers of Scripture asking the same hard questions. We remember Lamentations 3 for being one of the most beautiful passages in all the Bible, the inspiration for one of the greatest songs in our hymnbook. We read in Lamentations 3:21–24:
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
Go a little further in the chapter, though, and the prophet Jeremiah’s perspective, or at least tone, begins to change and darken. We read in Lamentations 3:43–48;
“You have wrapped yourself with anger and pursued us,
killing without pity;
you have wrapped yourself with a cloud
so that no prayer can pass through.
You have made us scum and garbage
among the peoples.
“All our enemies
open their mouths against us;
panic and pitfall have come upon us,
devastation and destruction;
my eyes flow with rivers of tears
because of the destruction of the daughter of my people.”
You can imagine these words in the mind and on the lips of Shiri Bibas as she huddled in the family safe room in Nir Oz and tried to shield her two sons in captivity. You can see the look of sheer terror on her face, as the ordeal that would lead to her death and the death of her sons was captured on video by terrorists.
And you can imagine these words, this wild swing of emotions, when Jewish families finally debarked from cattle cars at concentration camps to a fate we know in hindsight was already sealed. Maybe no one has captured these emotions more poignantly than Vasily Grossman in his twentieth-century classic novel Life and Fate. His Jewish mother died in Berdichev, Ukraine at the hands of the invading Germans in 1941.
Grossman wrote of the elation Jews felt when they escaped the stinking, cramped trains and were told they were going straight to the bath house. “No merciful God,” Grossman wrote, “could have thought of anything kinder.”
Soon, of course, they learned the reality. Within minutes, the elderly, women, and children had been gassed to death and then cremated. How can such evil even be comprehended? How could the fathers and husbands carry on in their grief?
“How can he continue to exist,” Grossman wrote, “seeing the glow in the sky flaring up with renewed strength? Now the hands he had kissed must be burning, now the eyes that had admired him, now the hair whose smell he could recognize in the darkness, now his children, his wife, his mother.”
Grossman, a veteran of the Red Army, became famous for questioning whether the Soviets and Nazis were really so different, given their shared lust for mass murder. But he became one of the most beloved and respected writers of the 20th century because of his gift for depicting poignant scenes of love within the horrors of the Holocaust. You feel the ache in his pen for a love that can never be extinguished, the love between a mother and her son.
“This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being,” Grossman wrote. “It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!”
Lament for Evil
I wrote the new book Where Is God in a World with So Much Evil? as a lament for evil—past, present, and future. I wrote about the image of God and countless attempts to snuff out life and blame its Author. I wrote about the evil within—our war against the world, the flesh, and the devil—and our desperate need for the steadfast love of a Lord whose mercies never end.
The problem of evil is a problem of humanity and humility. Asking God hard questions is acceptable, even welcome. It’s sanctioned by Scripture and part of what it means to be made in God’s image. The problem, then, is that we don’t always like his answers. Because in Scripture, as in history, we see that we are capable of both better and worse than we imagine.
“Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness,” Grossman observed. “The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed—while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”
Truth is the first victim of any great evil. There is much we don’t understand about God’s ways in the world. Evil begins, as it did in the Garden, when we imagine we know better than he does, when we take vengeance into our own hands, when we divide people between good and evil instead of identifying the sin that separates us from God. Only Christ can set us free from the cycle of revenge that makes our world go ‘round (Rom. 8:2; Gal. 5:1).
Lamentations never resolves the tensions we encounter in chapter three. At the end of the book, we read in Lamentations 5:19–22:
But you, O LORD, reign forever;
your throne endures to all generations.
Why do you forget us forever,
why do you forsake us for so many days?
Restore us to yourself, O LORD, that we may be restored!
Renew our days as of old—
unless you have utterly rejected us,
and you remain exceedingly angry with us.
When we look to the cross, we find the resolution God planned from before the beginning. Seeing Christ, we know God has not rejected us. God is not angry with his people because, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).
So, where is God in a world with so much evil? Look to Christ—the answer to our prayers, the guarantee of our future, the victor over sin and death.
Collin Hansen (MDiv, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) is the vice president for content and editor in chief for the Gospel Coalition and the executive director of the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. He hosts the Gospelbound podcast and wrote Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. He is an adjunct professor and cochair of the advisory board at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. You can follow him on X at @collinhansen.
What problems with our lives, priorities, and even theology do we not recognize? What would it look like to wake up to our own blind spots and to lovingly engage with those with whom we disagree?
Collin Hansen shares insights on deepening your theological convictions in the age of rampant de-conversion and de-churching with a tool that has stood the test of time: catechisms.
We have to remember that the vine dresser loves the vine, and the vinedresser loves the branches. And his pruning is not just hacking away or lopping off things carelessly, but he’s very, careful.
Pruning does sound painful, doesn’t it? And so I think it’s important to remember who’s doing the pruning. Scripture says, “My Father is the vinedresser . . . I am the vine; you are the branches” (John 15:1, 5).
We have to remember that the vinedresser loves the vine, and the vinedresser loves the branches. His pruning is not just hacking away or lopping off things carelessly, but he’s very careful. He is very precise, and he only removes and takes away that which hinders bearing fruit. That’s what the text says.
And in fact, it says, “Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:2). So we need to remember who he’s pruning. He’s pruning those who are abiding in Christ.
The word abide actually means “to remain” or “to endure.” And so there’s a sense that as we abide in Christ, we trust the vine dresser enough to remain under his pruning. We trust that he is doing a good work—that he is taking things away from us that are not good for us and that hinder the fruit of sanctification in our own lives and also the things that hinder the fruit of good works in our lives. And so the Father, because he is a loving vine dresser, is going to carefully take those things away. And so our job as the branch is to abide, to remain, to trust. And there is great joy in that.
Courtney Doctor (MDiv, Covenant Theological Seminary) serves as the director of women’s initiatives for the Gospel Coalition. She is a Bible teacher and the author of From Garden to Glory as well as several Bible studies, including Steadfast; Remember Your Joy; and In View of God’s Mercies: The Gift of the Gospel in Romans.
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