If Christians confess that God is personal, both capable and desirous of real relationship with his creatures, then to talk to him should be as natural as it is necessary.
What exactly is prayer? The simplest and most straightforward way to define prayer is as a person talking to God. The English Reformer Thomas Becon (1512–1567), whom scholars have identified as having authored the very first English Protestant treatise devoted exclusively to prayer, published a catechism in 1548 in which he defined prayer as “an earnest talk with God.”1 If Christians confess that God is personal, both capable and desirous of real relationship with his creatures, then to talk to him should be as natural as it is necessary.
As Campegius Vitringa helpfully noted, “It is a characteristic of God to ‘hear prayer’ (Ps. 65:2).2 We read in Genesis 4:26 that shortly after the fall, “people began to call upon the name of the Lord,” and throughout Scripture the faithful are described as both hearing from God and speaking to him in return. The Psalms overflow with cries to God such as “Give ear to the words of my mouth” (Ps. 54:2) and corresponding praises such as “On the day I called, you answered me” (Ps. 138:3). Scripture assures us that “when the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears” (Ps. 34:17). The connection between inclusion among God’s people and confidence that God will hear one’s prayers is very tight: it is precisely because “the Lord has set apart the godly for himself” that David can immediately conclude, “The Lord hears when I call to him” (Ps. 4:3). Indeed, the entire Christian life itself begins with hearing God’s word and responding back with words of repentance and faith: “When they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ’” (Acts 2:37–38).
God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers. Or as William Ames put it, “In hearing the word we receive the Will of God, but in Prayer we offer our will to God, that it may be received by him.”3 Scripture and prayer thus work together to create a conversational, or “dialogical,” dynamic that lends structure to our communion with God and growth in grace.4
As with our ordinary conversations, our conversations with God in prayer will vary in length and intensity as our changing circumstances dictate. The English Puritans thus distinguished between “two kindes of prayer”: there were times of set and focused, or “solemne,” prayer—what happens, say, during our quiet time—and then there were also short, spontaneous prayers uttered throughout the day, “the secret and sudden lifting up of the heart to God, upon the present occasion.”5 The latter sort of spontaneous praying was understood to be a necessary part of a Christian’s spiritual life and often understood as both a means to and a mark of a more general spirit of prayerfulness that would begin to permeate one’s entire life and outlook. Indeed, it is spontaneous prayer, as the Puritan John Downame (1571–1652) explained, that helps the believer “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17):
It is not enough that we use daily these set solemn, and ordinary prayers, but we must, as our Saviour injoyneth us, Pray always, and as the Apostle speaketh, continually, and without ceasing. That is, we must be ready to pray, so often as God shall give us any occasion, . . . craving God’s blessing when we undertake any businesse, and praysing his name for his gracious assistance, . . . craving his protection at the approaching of any danger, and his helpe and strength for the overcoming of any difficulty which affronteth us in our way.6
Moreover, these two kinds of prayer were understood as mutually reinforcing. They went together, and either one would quickly wither in the absence of its counterpart. Spontaneous prayer, it was said, should supplement and enhance our settled prayer “as salt with meat.”7
God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers.
As we read the various definitions of prayer scattered throughout the Reformed tradition, we find elaborations on the idea of prayer as talking to God, even as we don’t find anything fundamentally at odds with it. Thus, William Bridge defined prayer as “that act and work of the soul, whereby a man doth converse with God.”8 Likewise, according to John Calvin, to enter into prayer is to “enter conversation with God,” a conversation “whereby we expound to him our desires, our joys, our sighs, in a word, all the thoughts of our hearts.”9 Such communication is not overly formal and impersonal, but rather, it is an “intimate conversation” in which believers find the living God “gently summoning us to unburden our cares into his bosom” and inviting us “to pour out our hearts before him.”10 Sometimes the metaphor was slightly tweaked, as when Matthew Henry (1662–1714) described the Bible as “a letter God has sent to us” and prayer as “a letter we send to him,” but the emphasis was always on prayer as a way for the believer to communicate and dialogue with the living, personal, and ever-present triune God.11
Such prayer, by its very nature, encompasses the entirety of the Christian life, shaping and being shaped in turn by the breadth and depth of redeemed experience. “I understand prayer in a broad way,” wrote Campegius Vitringa. “It refers to everything we communicate to God.”12 Such communication includes our praises, our petitions, and our thanksgivings. It includes expressions of joy, lament, and anger. As we communicate to God in prayer, we confess our sins, intercede on behalf of others, and cry out to God for his miraculous intervention amid trial and storm. In response to the question “For what things are we to pray?” the Westminster Larger Catechism (1647) suggests that the scope of our prayer should be as wide and deep as life itself: “We are to pray for all things tending to the glory of God, the welfare of the church, our own or others’ good.”13
Sometimes our communication with God is eloquent and profound, as when we take the lofty expressions of the Psalter as our own; at other moments we “do not know what to pray for as we ought” and must lean on those Spirit-wrought “groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). Yet in all moments, our prayers communicate the full range of our Christian experience and represent an ongoing conversation with the God in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Notes:
Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 99.
Campegius Vitringa, The Spiritual Life, trans. Charles K. Telfer (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018),
116.
William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1639), 244.
This dynamic also characterizes corporate worship. For a discussion of the “dialogical principle” in worship, see D. G. Hart and John R. Muether, With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 95–97.
William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge, 1606), 282.
John Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse(London, 1629), 209–10.
William Gouge, quoted in Ryrie, Reformation Britain, 147.
William Bridge, The Works of the Rev. William Bridge (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845),
2:102.
Calvin, Institutes, 2:853 (3.20.4); John Calvin, Instruction in Faith, trans. and ed. Paul T. Fuhrmann (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949), 57.
Calvin, Institutes, 2:854–55 (3.20.5).
Matthew Henry, Directions for Daily Communion with God (London: William Tegg, 1866), 12.
Vitringa, Spiritual Life, 115
“Westminster Larger Catechism,” in Van Dixhoorn, Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, 402 (q. 184).
Matthew C. Bingham (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is vice president of academic affairs and associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is the author of Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution and has served as a pastor in the United States and Northern Ireland. Matthew is married to Shelley, and they have four children.
Those who pray in Christ’s name truly hear back from God in their most pressing need and are strengthened in hope that they will continue to hear in days to come.
A good quiet time is when the Lord is speaking to us by his word and his Spirit, and we are speaking back to him what we are hearing in his word by the Spirit.
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.
Heads down. Phones out. Fingers scrolling. This is the humanoid posture of our age. We see it everywhere. Sit in a coffee shop and look around you. All eyes on devices.
Heads down. Phones out. Fingers scrolling. This is the humanoid posture of our age.
We see it everywhere. Sit in a coffee shop and look around you. All eyes on devices. Wait in line at the post office or grocery store. All eyes on devices. Sit at a red light and look at the drivers in the cars around you. Same story. More disturbing still, look at the drivers on the highway going full speed. Even some of them have their eyes darting between the windshields and their smartphones.
We see it in ourselves too. Sit down to read a physical book with your phone nearby. Observe how long you can go without scrolling, texting, or checking some notification. When you’re standing in line at a coffee shop and have forty-five seconds to spare, notice how hard it is to resist the urge to pull out your phone to do something— anything—to fill that blank space. More disturbing still, monitor how much time elapses between the moment you wake in the morning until the moment you unlock your phone and start scrolling.
For many of us, it’s only a matter of seconds.
From the rising of the sun to its going down, we scroll our way through the day. We scroll our way through life. And we are scrolling ourselves to death.
The death march of our scrolling society is not just a metaphor. In many ways, the smartphone is literally killing us (and not just in distracted-driving automobile accidents). Researchers have made compelling correlations between smartphone (especially social media) usage and rising mental unhealth (depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, loneliness), especially among teens and young adults.1 Consider the staggering rise in suicide rates among US youth and young adults since the dawn of the smartphone age. Between 2001 and 2007, the suicide rate for kids ages ten to twenty-four was fairly stable, but since 2007 (the year the iPhone debuted), it has skyrocketed, rising 62 percent between 2007 and 2021.2
Technology has also helped accelerate a “loneliness epidemic” with demonstrable, wide-ranging negative effects on overall health.3
The ominous term “deaths of despair” has become part of contemporary vernacular. And after steadily climbing for most of the last century, average life expectancies in the United States have, since 2021, started to decline.
Certainly more than technology is at play in these trends. But not less. When we consider the variables that have most changed in society in the last two decades, any answer we come up with will center around digital technology. We didn’t know what “social media” was twenty-five years ago. The term smartphone was first coined in 1997. The World Wide Web is barely three decades old. Each of these things has utterly reshaped the world in the last quarter century. And things continue to move fast—so fast that we rarely pause long enough to ask questions or ponder unintended side effects. As Antón Barba-Kay put it in A Web of Our Own Making, digital technology has so vastly transformed human life over just a few decades that “there is now arguably a greater chasm between someone age twelve and someone age fifty (or forty, or thirty) than there ever was between people separated by a millennium of pharaonic rule in ancient Egypt.”4
Our critical faculties struggle to keep pace with the scope and speed of the digital revolution. As a result, we’re often blind to the ways we’re being transformed. If we could jump forward in time a few decades, we could see more clearly. But since we can’t do that, our best path to wisdom is often in the other direction: looking back in time, learning from bygone eras and voices. What we can’t see now can be illuminated, at least in part, by the insights of generations past.
One book I return to again and again is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book was prophetic when it released in 1985, and it’s even more prophetic now, four decades later.
Which Dystopia?
Just as today we look back to Postman’s book to help make sense of our cultural moment, so too did Postman look to the past from his vantage point in 1985, at the peak of what he called the “Age of Show Business.” The old books Postman looked to for insight were a pair of dystopian novels: George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Working on his book in 1984, Postman pondered: Had Orwell’s vision of that year come to fruition? Or was Huxley’s dark vision of the future more accurate?
What we can’t see now can be illuminated, at least in part, by the insights of generations past.
Postman concluded that Huxley’s dystopia, not Orwell’s, better predicted the shape Western society took in the latter half of the twentieth century. As he explained,
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.5
If Postman was astute in 1985 to observe the Huxleyan shape of our “trivial culture”—where opted-in distractions and diversions kept us numb and dumb—how much more accurate does his prophetic vision describe life in 2025?
When Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves, he had television mostly in view as the chief purveyor of trivial information that swept us away in a “sea of irrelevance.” Forty years later, we still have TV—albeit hundreds more channels and a growing number of streaming TV platforms. But we also have YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and other always-on pipelines of content, algorithmically designed to grab our attention and keep us watching and scrolling, eyes glued to screens.
“Amusing ourselves to death” is still a highly accurate descriptor of what mass media does to us. But now the dominant form it takes is scrolling. And while Postman, who died in 2003, never lived to see the way smartphones, streaming, and social media would transform the world, his wisdom and warnings ring out with potent relevance.
Just as Huxley helped Postman make sense of his world in 1985, Postman can help us make sense of ours.
Notes:
See especially Jean Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (New York: Atria Books, 2017) and Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future (New York: Atria Books, 2023); and Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin, 2024).
Sally C. Curtin and Matthew F. Garnett, “Suicide and Homicide Death Rates among Youth and Young Adults Aged 10–24: United States, 2001–2021,” NCHS Data Brief, no. 471, June 2023, https://www.cdc.gov.
Tatum Hunter, “Technology’s Role in the ‘Loneliness Epidemic,’ ” Washington Post, April 11, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/.
Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 15.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 20th anniversary ed. (1985; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2005), xxi–xxii.
Brett McCracken is a senior editor for the Gospel Coalition and the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World and Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community. He lives with his family in Southern California.
Skeptical scholars have claimed close connections between the resurrection of Jesus and the dying and rising of other religious and mythic figures. Why should anyone see Jesus as being distinct from such deities?
How the Resurrection of Jesus Is Different Than the Ones in Pagan Myths
Even in ancient times, critics of Christianity noticed some parallels between Christian beliefs and pre-Christian myths. In the late second century, a philosopher named Celsus charged, “The Christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, of the Auge and Antiope in fabricating this story of virgin birth.” The same philosopher compared the resurrection of Jesus to the mysterious disappearance and return of a well-known poet. In more recent times, skeptical scholars such as Marvin Meyer and Robert Price have claimed close connections between the resurrection of Jesus and the myths of dying and rising deities that marked many ancient myths and mystery cults. Here’s what these critics contend: The most marvelous claims in the Gospels—a miraculous birth, for example, as well as the idea of a deity who dies and rises again—are paralleled in religions that predate Christianity; therefore, early Christians must have fabricated these miracles based on their knowledge of other religions.
I admit there are some surface-level similarities between ancient myths and certain events in the Gospels. Long before the first century AD, the myths of Egyptians deities such as Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Horus included tales of death and rebirth. So why should anyone see Jesus as being distinct from such deities? Could it be that the New Testament stories of Jesus represent the fictive myth of an ancient mystery cult that’s managed to outlive other mystery cults by nearly two millennia? Or is there something different about the accounts of Jesus’s time on planet earth?
When these claims are compared carefully with the New Testament Gospels, the distinction between Jesus and the supposed parallels becomes quite distinct, for at least three reasons:
(1) The parallels aren’t as parallel as the proponents claims.
(2) Many of the supposed parallels confuse affirmations in the New Testament Gospels with later Christian traditions.
(3) Even if some parallels do exist, the sources of these parallels could be practices that are common features of human cultures.
1. Are the Parallels Really Parallel?
When ancient texts and artifacts are analyzed, the parallels are not as parallel as the skeptics claim. Despite widespread claims that gods like Horus were crucified and resurrected, no such story can be located in any pre-Christian depiction or descriptions. For example, a monument illustrating the story of Horus does not depict him as crucified or resurrected, as some skeptics suggest. Instead, Horus was thought by the Egyptians to have been stung by a poisonous creature and revived by his mother and a moon god—a fate very different from crucifixion followed by resurrection. A close examination of the stories of other gods reveals similar gaps. The theme of dying and rising in other religions was an annual event, connected to the seasons. Unlike the metaphorical returns of dying-and-rising gods, the resurrection described by Christians was a one-time event that took place at one specific point in the earth’s topography, with no relationship to seasonal changes or agricultural cycles.
According to some reconstructions of sources that depict the birth of a mystery cult deity called Mithras, Mithras was birthed from solid stone. A few skeptics have connected this birth to the birth of Jesus in a stable, since caves were sometimes used to shelter animals; some of them have even referred to this birth of Mithras as a “virgin birth.” And yet, parallels of this sort are too vague and too dissimilar to support the claim that Christians borrowed their beliefs from pagans of previous generations. James Tabor, professor of early Christianity at University of North Carolina in Charlotte, doesn’t believe in the virginal conception of Jesus, and he denies that Jesus rose from the dead. Yet even he recognizes how radically the birth of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels differs from any supposed parallels. According to Tabor,
When you read the accounts of Mary’s unsuspected pregnancy, what is particularly notable . . . is an underlying tone of realism that runs through the narratives. These seem to be real people, living in real times and places. In contrast, the birth stories in Greco-Roman literature have a decidedly legendary flavor to them. For example, in Plutarch’s account of the birth of Alexander the Great, mother Olympias got pregnant from a snake; it was announced by a bolt of lightning that sealed her womb so that her husband Philip could not have sex with her. Granted, both Matthew and Luke include dreams and visions of angels but the core story itself—that of a man who discovers that his bride-to-be is pregnant and knows he is not the father—has a realistic and thoroughly human quality to it. The narrative, despite its miraculous elements, “rings true.”
2. Do the Supposed Parallels Appear in the New Testament or in Later Christian Literature?
Many of the supposed parallels confuse affirmations in the New Testament Gospels with later Christian traditions. For example, some individuals have claimed the word “Easter” comes from “Ishtar,” a Sumerian goddess who died and returned to life. In the first place, the word “Easter” seems more likely to have derived not from “Ishtar” but from an Indo-European root that has to do with “rising.” Far more important, the term “Easter” never appears in the text of Scripture, and Christians didn’t begin using the term to describe celebrations of the resurrection until many years after the Bible was written. As such, the origins of the word “Easter” have nothing to do with the historicity of any event in the New Testament.
3. Where Do Parallels Come From?
Even if some clear parallel did exist between the story of Jesus and previous religious expectations, this wouldn’t warrant the belief that the apostle Paul or the authors of the New Testament Gospels “borrowed” these tenets from other faiths. It might mean that God chose to reveal himself in ways that the people in that particular culture could comprehend. Although earlier religions may have twisted and distorted the human yearning for resurrection, these motifs are rooted in a God-given yearning for redemption through sacrifice that makes the world right and new. C. S. Lewis addressed this possibility with these words:
In the New Testament, the thing really happens. The Dying God really appears — as a historical Person, living in a definite place and time. . . . The old myth of the Dying God . . . comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We must not be nervous about “parallels” [in other religions]. . . : they ought to be there — it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.
Timothy Paul Jones (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is vice president for doctoral studies; professor of Christian family ministry; and chair of the department of apologetics, ethics, and philosophy at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Jones is the author of numerous books including How We Got the Bible and In Church as It Is in Heaven. He also serves as a preaching pastor at Sojourn Church Midtown in Louisville, Kentucky, and cohosts The Apologetics Podcast. Timothy and his wife, Rayann, have four daughters, Hannah, Skylar, Kylinn, and Katrisha.
A Historical Person Maybe you have never really thought about who Jesus is, or whether his claims have any implications for your life. After all, we’re talking about a man who was born in the …
Some claim that Christianity is oppressive and toxic, but in this video, Dr. Sharon James argues that a biblical worldview is essential for human freedom, flourishing, and fulfillment.
Francis Grimké’s understanding of personal identity drew deeply from his conviction that all human beings are created in the image of God and therefore worthy of equal honor and respect.
Francis Grimké’s understanding of personal identity drew deeply from his conviction that all human beings are created in the image of God and therefore worthy of equal honor and respect. The beauty of God’s image in all humanity was one of the most frequent themes in both his public writings and his personal reflections. At the same time, he also saw the benefits of familial and ethnic ties. Such relationships, he argued, also could contribute positively to a personal sense of self.
In fact, Grimké taught that the formation of a healthy self-concept demands that people hold on simultaneously to both the universal and the particular aspects of their identity. Self-respect and contentment depend upon a strong sense of self shaped by a commitment to the human race as a whole and also working for the good of one’s ethnic and familial community. The two must go together. While Grimké believed that particular obligations to family and community hold a special place, especially for the oppressed, he also refused to place these obligations in tension with more universal obligations. Throughout his life and ministry, he remained committed even to the nation that oppressed him and the denomination that marginalized him. Yet these same commitments crucially enabled the kind of righteous discontentment that could fuel the perseverance necessary to effect long-term social change in the face of otherwise discouraging circumstances.
God’s Image
The year 1899 in many ways marked the beginning of a period of unprecedented prosperity and influence for the United States on the global stage. The US Senate ratified the Treaty of Paris in February of that year, which brought a formal end to the Spanish-American War. Yet, just as the Black soldiers were clipped out of photographs in the press stories depicting Teddy Roosevelt’s victory, Grimké worried that the “strained relations” between the races in the South reflected unacceptable attitudes on the part of White people toward Black people.1 In June of that year he gave an address in which he appealed to the image of God as the foundation for understanding human identity.2
In that address, Grimké lamented that southerners viewed Black people as their inferiors, and he called upon people to bring their views in line with the teaching of Scripture. As he put it, “According to this book, which we receive as the word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice, God ‘hath made of one blood all nations of men’ [Acts 17:26].” All people share the same blood, and this reality reflects the teaching of Genesis that God created all human beings in his image. Therefore, there “isn’t a hint or suggestion” of, or even anything that could be “twisted” into an argument for, the superiority of one race over another. Grimké rejected the attempt of southern Whites to make such an argument in “dealing with the race question.”3
After laying this foundation, he proceeded to connect the image of God to both the law and the gospel. If all people were created in God’s image, then the same “moral standard” applies to all races. The Ten Command ments, the Sermon on the Mount, and Paul’s teaching on the centrality of love in 1 Corinthians 13 apply equally to all. Even more importantly, the gospel “plan of salvation” is the same for all of God’s people. People of “all races stand upon precisely the same footing.” All are “invited,” and, similarly, all are “equally welcomed.” The apostles were directed to disciple all nations. Citing Galatians 3:28, Grimké drew the obvious conclusion that “the same gospel is to be preached to all.” Drawing from the parable of the good Samaritan, he pointed out that if both the same moral standards and the same gospel message are for all people, then it is not enough for “white men to treat white men as they would like to be treated” or “black men to treat black men as they would like to be treated.” As those created in God’s image, all people stand in relation to all other people by the same rules, and all people stand in desperate need of the same grace.4
Grimké applied this twofold biblical affirmation of the equality of all people with reference to law and gospel to both temporal governance and evangelism. Regarding temporal concerns, he pointed out that the Declaration of Independence of the United States mirrored the biblical teaching that all people “are created equal” and therefore “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights [sic].” The US Constitution also reflected these same principles in guaranteeing to all its citizens the right to vote. These documents echoed the biblical teaching, as Grimké put it, that “civil and political rights” should be shared equally by members of all races. The failures of the United States and of White southerners were “contrary to the Word of God” and contrary to the “expressed provisions and declarations of the Constitution.”5
This multifaceted temporal failure required multifaceted solutions, and one of the most important remedies involved education that needed to be “social, political, moral, and religious.”6 Here it is important to emphasize that this temporal concern needed to be addressed both politically and religiously. Grimké carefully distinguished these facets, but he also refused to separate them. He observed that though editors and teachers certainly had a role to play, “ministers especially” possessed a crucial role as they proclaimed God’s moral law. Ministers, of all people, were aware that racial failures in society and the mistreatment of Black people in the South were “not in harmony with the letter or spirit” of God’s word. Therefore, Grimké wrote, “It is their duty to bring the teaching of that Word to bear upon present conditions, however unpopular it may be to do so.” Having treated the roles of ministers, he then went on to describe the roles of teachers and editors, observing the needed effect of these three forces working together.7
It also is important to emphasize that the role belonged to all Christians as members of the church and not just to Christian ministers.
The family of Christ shares the same Holy Spirit and therefore constitutes one united body.
In addition to “ministers, and elders, and deacons,” “members” also possessed a duty to model these principles as an example for others. The “Ten Commandments” and the “Sermon on the Mount” may be solutions for the “race problem,” but they “must have in back of them a living church—a church made up of men and women who are willing to take them up, and put them on their hearts, and live them out.”8 The duty belonged to all the members of the church in their various roles, and therefore Grimké could say that if the situation in the South failed to improve, the failure would largely belong to the church.9 In addition to these temporal concerns, which belonged to believers and to unbelievers alike, and which should be addressed through the preaching of God’s moral law by church leaders and through the living example of church members, Grimké also applied the doctrine of God’s image to more properly spiritual concerns, including evangelism. In 1916, he gave a provocative address, subsequently printed and distributed in the form of a tract, sensitive to the fact that “it is now almost impossible to get a matter like this into the [mainstream] religious press.”10 Proper evangelism required the whole preaching of the law and the gospel. It also needed direction—namely, the renewal of the person evangelized. Those created in God’s image needed the salvation of Jesus to be “renewed after the image of Him that created” them.11
The failure to see all people as God’s image bearers and the failure to pursue the renewal of all people in God’s image through evangelism were nothing less than fatal to work of evangelism in general and the ministry of the Institute for Evangelism in particular. Such failures contributed to a form of evangelism that was not just flawed but a hypocritical reproduction of false religion. As Grimké preached against such false evangelism, the doctrine of the image of God shaped his conception of the relationship between law and the gospel and its application to both temporal and spiritual concerns.
Narrowing the picture, Grimké also focused his doctrine of the image of God more particularly on other important implications. In his wellknown 1910 address “Christianity and Race Prejudice,” he emphasized the universally shared identity of all human beings. God created all humans in his image, and in that sense all people were created by the same Father. So also, in that same sense, all human beings are siblings. Though he carefully taught the unique relationship of brothers and sisters in Christ, Grimké was comfortable affirming the language of the universal “Fatherhood of God” (as the Creator of all) and the correlated “brotherhood of man.” He put it quite bluntly, in fact, stating, “Literally this is true—men are brothers— the human race is one.” Furthermore, this is not merely an abstract principle but one for daily life. Not only should all people believe that they are blood brothers, but they should also “feel toward each other as brothers” and “treat each other as brothers.” In this regard, Grimké freely admitted his own shortcomings: “I used to speak of the cracker element of the South” as “poor white trash,” he admitted, “but I never do it any more.”12
In addition to the universal, natural bonds that all human beings should recognize, considering their creation in the image of God, Grimké emphasized another sense in which Christians of all races constitute one family. Referring to Ephesians 4:4–6, Colossians 3:11, and 1 Corinthians 12:12–13, he stressed that Christians have been baptized into one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. These realities mean that unity in the family of Christ supersedes other national, ethnic, and class distinctions. The family of Christ shares the same Holy Spirit and therefore constitutes one united body. As a result, Christians share a twofold unity. First, as human beings their family includes all other human beings. Second, as believers in Christ their family includes all other Christians.
It is crucial to pay close attention to Grimké’s twofold understanding of “the Fatherhood of God” and the “brotherhood of man.” Whereas some other proponents of the social aspects of the gospel collapsed these two senses, Grimké’s approach differed sharply from such modernist approaches. For Grimké, unlike the modernists, the image of God shared by all humanity and the special relation shared by Christians are both important and yet always distinguishable. While all human beings are one family according to the first principle, Christians possess an even greater unity with their fellow believers resulting from union with Christ and their shared possession of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the failure of self-professing White Christians to embrace their Black brothers and sisters was a double failure, and because of this it was even more lamentable.13
Grimké also notably relied on the “organic” language so popular in that era, and he connected it with biblical teaching to reject race prejudice and separation. Unity in Christ and the shared possession of the Holy Spirit constitute believers as “one organism.”14 Relying on the imagery of the vine and the branches in John 15, he emphasized that believers in Christ “are all branches of the true vine,” which therefore share the “same life-force.” In other words, “unity with Christ” is inseparable from “unity with one another.” As a result, the American tendency to allow race to lead to “separate churches and separate pews, and separate presbyteries, and separate conferences, and separate cemeteries, and separate every thing” was an affront to the unifying work of Christ and the shared possession of the Holy Spirit. Christian unity included “all races and colors and nationalities,” and Grimké was adamant that this organic unity ought to be expressed in the regular institutional life of the body of Christ.15
Francis Grimké made the biblical teaching of the shared possession of the image of God central to his teaching on personal identity. All human beings created in God’s image are worthy of dignity and respect. Believers in Christ not only share this image with all human beings, but as those redeemed in Christ they possess an additional unity that demands respect. The failure of the American church, and White Christians in particular, to celebrate and pursue the unity clearly taught by Jesus and all the Scriptures was legitimate grounds for righteous discontent.
Notes:
Amy Kaplan, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 219–36. For the history of the “Buffalo Soldiers,” see Bruce A. Galsrud, ed., Brothers to the Buffalo Soldiers: Perspectives on the African American Militia and Volunteers, 1865–1917 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2011).
Francis J. Grimké, “The Remedy for the Present Strained Relations between the Races in the South” (1899), in Works, 1:317–33.
Grimké, “The Remedy for the Present Strained Relations,” 319, 320
Grimké, “The Remedy for the Present Strained Relations,” 320–22.
Grimké, “The Remedy for the Present Strained Relations,” 322–23.
Grimké, “The Remedy for the Present Strained Relations,” 324.
Grimké, “The Remedy for the Present Strained Relations,” 328.
Grimké, “The Remedy for the Present Strained Relations,” 328. Grimké’s explicit inclusion of women with men is notable, especially because this talk came twenty years prior to the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which gave women the right to vote.
Grimké, “The Remedy for the Present Strained Relations,” 331.
Francis J. Grimké, “Evangelism and the Institutes of Evangelism” (1916), in Works, 1:523–28; his reasons for printing the address as a tract appear on p. 527. For more on the context of this address, see chap. 2.
Grimké, “Evangelism and the Institutes of Evangelism,” 524.
Francis J. Grimké, “Christianity and Race Prejudice” (1910), in Works, 1:448. The use of the word “cracker” by Black people as a racial epithet to describe White people began in the 1800s and was common by the end of the century, certainly well before Grimké delivered this address in 1910. The word also carried class connotations as a reference to poor White people, though the racial connotation gradually became more predominant. It is not clear to what extent Grimké had in mind poverty in addition to race. But his awareness that the term carried negative, racialized connotations is clear, as is his regret for using the word. For the developing sense of the word, see Dana Ste. Claire, The Cracker Culture in Florida History (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2006), and especially John Solomon Otto, “Cracker: The History of a Southeastern, Ethnic, Economic, and Racial Epithet,” Names: A Journal of Onomastics 35, no. 1 (1987): 28–39.
Grimké, “Christianity and Race Prejudice,” 450.
Grimké, “Christianity and Race Prejudice,” 452.
Grimké, “Christianity and Race Prejudice,” 452–53.
Drew Martin (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is associate professor of systematic theology at Covenant Theological Seminary. He has served several churches as a pastor and as a church planter, is the author of The Covenant with Moses and the Kingdom of God, and writes on the history of Christian theology.
If we live in the West, we often take freedom for granted. But the idea that every human is of equal dignity and should be afforded liberty has not been obvious to most cultures.
It’s one of the great tragic notes in all of church history that when African slavery came into view and such prominence, the church did not take a clear stand against it.
Francis Grimké, born enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina in 1850, was one of the most remarkable pastor-theologians of American history. He ministered from 1878–1928, mainly in the nation’s capital, and his story is worth knowing.
Though he endured a difficult childhood filled with injustice at the hands of his enslavers, he had a remarkable mother, Nancy Weston, who made great sacrifices for his education and spiritual growth.1 Following the Civil War, he attended Lincoln University, where he graduated as Valedictorian. After briefly considering a career in law and studying at Howard University, the spiritual awakening he began to experience as a college student eventually led him to Princeton Theological Seminary. There, his theological aptitude earned the respect of both Charles Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield.2 Upon graduation from seminary, he received a call in 1878 to Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, where he served faithfully for the better part of fifty years. That same year, he also married Charlotte Forten of Philadelphia. Her family was well known for their social activism, and her life is another remarkable story also worth knowing.
Perhaps one of the most notable features of Francis Grimké’s ministry relates to his ability to distinguish between the law of God and the gospel of God without separating them. He expressed his views on this matter powerfully in a letter he wrote to the alumni of Princeton Theological, summarizing his many years of ministry:
During these forty years two things I have tried to do with all my might: (1) To preach the gospel of the grace of God, to get men to see their need of a savior, and to accept of Jesus Christ as the way, the truth, the life. If I had to live my life over again I would still choose the ministry, I could not be satisfied in any other calling. (2) I have sought with all my might to fight race prejudice, because I believe it is utterly un-Christian, and that it is doing almost more than anything else to curse our own land and country and the world at large. Christianity, in its teachings, and in the spirit of its founder, stands for the brotherhood of man, calls us to do by others as we would be done by, to love our neighbor as ourselves.3
In these memorable words, Grimké simultaneously distinguished and affirmed the importance of preaching the gospel and fighting race prejudice. He did not treat them as if they were the same thing. Neither did he separate them. This holistic yet differentiated approach to Christian life and ministry is worth knowing.
Civil Rights
Grimké’s commitment to fighting race prejudice led him to a prominent role in the early civil rights movement. He was close to the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who frequently attended Fifteenth Street Presbyterian and asked Grimké to officiate his marriage in 18844. In 1893, he co-founded the Afro-American Council to assist Black clergy who were excluded from the networks that came more naturally to White ministers in the denomination. Alongside Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he was heavily involved with the Hampton Institute, preaching at its inaugural conference and serving as chair of its Committee on Religion and Ethics from 1898 to 1902. He also served as treasurer and on the executive board of the American Negro Academy, founded by Alexander Crummell to promote African American scholarship and advance the fields of literature, science, art, and higher education. Grimké’s long tenure on the Board of Trustees at Howard University led to an offer to become its president—a role he declined in favor of his pastoral duties.5
Most notably, Grimké played a key role in the Niagara Movement and the founding of the NAACP. He, along with Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Du Bois, was one of six African American signers of the call for the Emancipation Conference, which led to the NAACP's creation.6 Although Grimké chose not to take a leadership role in the organization, he arranged for his brother, Archibald, to serve on the founding committee and later as a vice president.7 Throughout his life, Francis Grimké consistently seized opportunities to advocate for civil rights and speak out prophetically. The essential role of theologically conservative Black ministers like Francis Grimké in the early civil rights movement is underappreciated in both academic scholarship and popular histories. This is a story worth knowing.8
While it may be surprising to some, Francis Grimké’s important role in the early civil rights movement did not prevent him from simultaneously championing the “spiritual nature” of the church’s mission. He frequently taught on this topic, and he also practiced what he preached. The title of one of his most widely circulated and commented upon sermons was based upon the Great Commission of Matthew 28 and entitled “Christ’s Program for the Saving the World.” In that sermon he declared that Jesus Christ would build his kingdom by calling people to repentance for their sins and faith in him as the Son of God and savior of sinners. Grimké acknowledged that some people think a ministry centered upon preaching this gospel message is “foolishness” and should be replaced by other “schemes.” However, he boldly declared that salvation does not come through personal obedience, social improvement, or “secular” knowledge, however useful it might be. Salvation can only come by preaching Christ from both the Old and New Testament Scriptures and calling people to personal faith.9
Faithful Ministry
Grimké’s firm commitment to the spiritual nature of the church’s ministry and his theological commitments to traditional Christian views on the nature of Scripture and the person and work of Christ led him to make careful theological distinctions and thoughtful decisions in his personal ministry. He distinguished between preaching the gospel and fighting race prejudice, but he devoted his life to both. He distinguished between sacred and secular knowledge, vocations, and issues, but he did not place them in opposition. He highly valued individual, corporate, and social aspects of Christian life and piety.
Along these lines, he saw the importance of Christian work in the church, in society, and in the state, but he did not confuse or collapse the different spheres. He also distinguished between his personal and public life and his roles as a Christian and as a Christian minister. He did not place these roles in competition, but he did distinguish them. Practically speaking, this meant that he encouraged his brother, an attorney, to serve formally with the NAACP. As a pastor, he believed his primary role was in teaching the word of God. His preaching frequently touched on moral and social issues, but he also warned Christian ministers not to engage in partisan politics by endorsing specific candidates or policies.10 These are complicated subjects, and Grimké’s passionate, thoughtful, careful example is thought provoking and worth knowing.
Francis Grimké’s fifty years of faithful ministry brought hope and light during one of the darkest periods of American history. The post-Reconstruction years of lynching, Jim Crow, race riots, attempts to make interracial marriage illegal, and countless other moral and cultural failures left a toll on the nation, and too often Christians not only failed to fight such moral tragedies but they perpetuated and condoned them.
Grimké was honest about these realities, and he frequently expressed concern regarding the moral trajectory of the nation. Yet he never gave up hope. His hope, however, was not placed on any experience or even expectation of moral progress. Grimké continued his efforts not because he expected immediate social progress but because he believed that God is ultimate. While he saw no grounds for naive optimism, premature claims about the end of racism or other moral evils, or simplistic assertions that the gospel alone could resolve all social issues in the present age, he also saw no reason for pessimism, despair, or dismissing the power of God working through the gospel. As he wrote, there is “no reason to become discouraged, though at times things may look pretty dark.” Instead, “we are hopeful, and will ever be” because “Jesus Christ has set his kingdom up in the world,” and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.11 He was honest and hopeful at the same time, and his story is worth knowing.
Despite his profound impact, Grimké is often overlooked in discussions of American religious and civil rights history. Yet he was a prominent leader in both the church and the early civil rights movement for over fifty years. The neglect of his legacy is noteworthy, especially considering his influential role as a pastor and his vital contributions to the civil rights movement. Grimké’s life highlights the need for a more inclusive recounting of American church history—one that recognizes the crucial role of Black religious leaders in shaping the nation’s spiritual and social fabric. His writings and activism offer valuable insights into the intersection of faith, race, and justice. His story is worth knowing.
Notes:
Archibald H. Grimké, “A Madonna of the South,” The Southern Workman 29, no. 7 (1900): 392.
James McCosh to unnamed addressee, October 18, 1879, in The Works of Francis J. Grimké, ed. Carter G. Woodson, 4 vols. (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1942), 1:x; Ethelbert D. Warfield to Francis J. Grimké, December 28, 1922, in Works, 4:357.
Grimké to the class of 1878 of Princeton Theological Seminary, April 27, 1918, in Works, 4:215.
Francis J. Grimké, “The Second Marriage of Frederick Douglass,” Journal of Negro History 19, no. 3 (1934): 324-329.
Henry Justin Ferry, “Francis James Grimké: Portrait of a Black Puritan” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1970), 195, 204, 207, 214-215, 267.
Drew Martin, Grimké on the Christian Life: Christian Vitality for the Church and World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2025), chapter 10.
Dickson D. Bruce, Archibald Grimké: Portrait of a Black Independent (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 104–105; Mark Perry, Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders (New York: Viking, 2001), 332–333.
Daniel R. Bare, Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era (New York: New York University Press, 2021); Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews, African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017).
Francis J. Grimké, “Christ’s Program for the Saving of the World” (1936), box 40-6, folder 309, Francis J. Grimké Papers, Howard University Library, 1-5. See also Francis J. Grimké, “The Nature and Mission of the Christian Church” (ca. 1889), box 40-8, folder 415, Francis J. Grimké Papers, Howard University Library.
Drew Martin (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is associate professor of systematic theology at Covenant Theological Seminary. He has served several churches as a pastor and as a church planter, is the author of The Covenant with Moses and the Kingdom of God, and writes on the history of Christian theology.
We are pleased to offer a special preview of the new book, Selected Sermons, featuring important yet rarely published sermons from black Puritan minister Lemuel Haynes.
In this episode, Kevin DeYoung shows us how the Nicene Creed allows us to learn from the great accomplishments that the Christians before us have fought so hard to establish and defend. Dr. DeYoung also clarifies confusing aspects of this creed and highlights how it has played a central role throughout much of church history.
Matt Tully
Kevin, thanks so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.
Kevin DeYoung
Great to be with you.
Matt Tully
The Council of Nicaea happened in the city of Nicaea in AD 325, and we’re going to jump into a lot of the details there of what happened, who was there, why it all happened, and how it ultimately led to this thing called the Nicene Creed. But I wonder, as a first question, about terminology. The creed that came from the council in the city of Nicaea is called the Nicene Creed. I don’t know if our listeners can hear the difference there. Nicaea was the city, and that was the council, but the creed is called the Nicene Creed. Why isn’t it the Nicaean Creed, which is probably actually what often we refer to it as?
Kevin DeYoung
And it’s even more confusing than that, as you know, because the council that met in 325, the statement that they came up with we sometimes call the creed of Nicaea. And then what we call the Nicene creed, which I guess is just a way of taking the noun, the place named Nicaea, and turning it into an adjective. What kind of creed is it? It’s the Nicene. I never thought about how the derivation worked there. But that Nicene Creed, which we’re talking about and what the book is about, is from the Council of Constantinople in 381. So some people, to be very technically correct, call it the (and I don’t even know if I can get it all right) the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. But that’s going to be very difficult for people to say. “And now, congregation, let’s recite together this whole thing.” But it’s important because, and I’m sure we’ll talk about it, but the council in Constantinople understood that what they were doing, though it was a significant revision, was the same faith and the same truth of the Council of Nicaea. So we call that 381 document the Nicene Creed, which has its origin in the Council of Nicaea (325), and this, of course, is the 1,700 year anniversary. And you don’t get 1,700 year anniversaries very often.
Matt Tully
Already there are some people listening right now and they’re feeling a little bit of, Oh man, this is so technical and nuanced and they’re talking about things that happened almost 2,000 years ago, and maybe they’re wondering, Is this really that central? We have the Bible. We have God’s word. Do we really need to be too worried about this creed or that confession happening at this conference or council back a long time ago? But I wanted to highlight one thing that you write in your new book. You write, “After the Bible, the Nicene Creed may be the most important Christian text ever written.” So I wonder if you can unpack that. You just raised the stakes for us and made a pretty bold statement, that this actually does matter. So I wonder if you can just, in a couple sentences, start to explain why you view this document as so central to our faith.
Kevin DeYoung
I’ll try a couple paragraphs if I can’t get it in a couple sentences. And in that sentence that you quoted, I think I used the words “may be,” so there’s a little hedging. But I probably should take out the “may be.” I’m not sure what would qualify as a more important, non-inspired text than the Nicene Creed, because it has served as the definitional boundary for every branch of the Christian church. The Protestant Church owns this, the Roman Catholic Church owns this, the Eastern Orthodox Church owns it. Now, there’s a word that gets added later that becomes a source of division between the Western and the Eastern Church, but all three of these major branches of Christendom say, “Yes, we are Nicene Christians.” It gave us the vocabulary to talk about the person of the Son in relation to the person of the Father. It helped to define Trinitarian orthodoxy—it gave us the language—and it has served the church for 1,700 years. People are still—and if you’re just hearing about it for the first time, then it’s not too late to learn about it. But hopefully many of us are in churches where this has at least been said on some occasion. Now, I know I grew up in the Reformed Church in America, and so we would say this sometimes. And I can’t remember a series on it, but I remember it being there. Matt, I was surprised. I gave a talk on this at the Cross Conference in January. There were maybe 500 or 600 people at this breakout, and I asked, “How many of you ever grew up in church hearing about the Nicene Creed?” And it was very paltry. There were 500 people in that room, and I bet there were twenty-five hands that went up. So not very many people in our general evangelical, maybe it’s more in Presbyterian and more confessional traditions than low church Baptist folks. But you should know it if you don’t, because not only does it give us the shape of Trinitarian Orthodoxy and the language of Trinitarian Orthodoxy but it establishes what kind of church the Christian church is. To say that to be a Christian church is to believe certain things. That may sound just obvious to us, but that’s not how Roman religion worked. You didn’t have to have certain doctrinal parameters. It was about ritual and a number of other things. So it is really impossible to overstate the importance of the Nicene Creed for the 2,000-year-history of the Church.
Matt Tully
Let me play a little devil’s advocate here. I’ll come at it from a “lower church position,” where someone who has not grown up reciting the creed, perhaps. And maybe, again, the pushback would be that that’s all well and good. The Roman Christians of their day needed to have this meeting to figure some things out. But ultimately, the definition of the church or an understanding of the Trinity, that’s got to be rooted in Scripture. That comes from Scripture. And so is there really that much value in a man-made document that summarizes Scripture, maybe helpfully, but really that’s all it’s doing? And if we don’t need that today, if my understanding or my church’s understanding of the Trinity is sound from Scripture, then that’s totally sufficient.
Kevin DeYoung
Very good and very bad objections. Very good in that they’re common, and they need to be dealt with fairly, and people feel them honestly. Someone wants to honor the Bible, and they say, “No creed but the Bible,” well, of course, that sentence in itself is a creed, which states something. And almost every church that might say, “Hey, we got no creed but the Bible,” they probably have a statement of faith somewhere on their website. They probably have something that says, “Well, we’re this kind of Christian. We’re not a liberal Christian.” Or as soon as somebody says, “Why do we need man made creeds? Why don’t we just all quote the Bible together?” Okay, well, there are people who quote the Bible and believe that gay marriage is okay. That person’s probably going to say, “Well, obviously that’s not what the Bible really teaches, so we better be clear about that.” Yep, you’re right. So in order to protect what the Bible teaches, sometimes, oftentimes, we need words outside the Bible to say that. And that was one of the main things that Athanasius, who’s one of the defenders of Nicene Orthodoxy, was arguing. Because it was the Aryans, and we’ll say more about that, but it was the rival party, it was the Aryans sometimes who said, “Can’t we just say what we all agree from Scripture? Because everybody believes the Bible, why don’t we just quote the Bible?” Because they understood that they don’t mean the same thing by those Bible passages. And even though it sounds pious on a surface level—“Let’s just quote the Bible. Let’s just be Bible Christians. Let’s just use Bible language to say what we believe.”—every one of us at some point is going to say, “Well, but what do we really mean by the kingdom? And what do I really mean that Jesus died on the cross? And how do we really interpret this verse?” At which point you have to do some systematic theology. You have to try to answer big questions by testing Scripture against Scripture, and you need to use some other words in order to defend what the Bible really says. And though it sounds humble on one level to say, “I’m just a Bible-only guy,” it really is a mark of hubris to think that we’re going to come up with something that’s better than the formula that has served the church for 1,700 years. Now, everything needs to be tested against Scripture. No one was inerrant at that council, and the Nicene Creed is not inerrant. To think that anyone alive today is spending more time than they were—as a collective unit, let alone the ordinary Christian in the pew—they were giving such finely tuned, theological, philosophical reflection to these categories. And we also believe that that’s how the Holy Spirit works in the church. The church isn’t infallible, but it is the buttress and pillar of truth. It’s the Spirit working through the church to help define these things and to give us the language to talk about them. And so it’s really an aspect of humility to say, “Let’s learn from the great accomplishments that the Christians before us have fought so hard to establish and defend.”
Matt Tully
It also seems true to me that if you consider a very solid, theologically conservative Bible church that has a really strong orthodox understanding of the Trinity, they are indebted to things like the Nicene Creed in ways that maybe they don’t even realize. They just assume truths from the creed or formulations or an understanding of God that that really is indebted to the work that these people did.
Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, that’s a really good point. Sometimes it’s like climbing up to the second story and then you kick the ladder down and you forget, “Oh, I needed that ladder.”
Matt Tully
We didn’t need that ladder!
Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, we don’t need that ladder. No, that’s how you got up there. The person who says, “Look, we don’t need the Nicene Creed. We all believe God is one God in three persons.” Well, time out right there. That’s using some language that the church developed in the third and fourth and fifth centuries to talk about it. And Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, these issues have not gone away. There are still these same questions in different form, but how do we understand the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Oneness Pentecostals. Prominent prosperity gospel preachers are Oneness Pentecostals—so these Trinitarian issues. And then the last thing I would say is if this is about knowing God, why wouldn’t we want to learn from those who have gone before and know as much about God as we can? So I’m just thinking of the person who very honestly says, “Hey, I just love Jesus. It’s me and Jesus,” or “I read my Bible.” Well, don’t you want to see more of those mountain peaks? Don’t you want more of those heights? I think a verse that gives us warrant for this is that, in Ephesians 4, that Jesus gifts to the church teachers. Think about that. Not only the Holy Spirit, which will lead you into all the truth (that is all the truth about Jesus and who he was and what he accomplished, he promised), but he gives to the church teachers. So Christ established that the way in which he is going to guard and guide and govern his church are through human teachers. Yes, the word and the Spirit, ultimately, but through teachers. And so this is a way of saying, okay, God has given to us teachers in the history of the church, and some of those teachers have put down statements that have served us well for centuries. So let’s learn about them and seek to understand them.
Matt Tully
Let’s dig into some of the issues that were at play here and the people who were involved with this. I wonder if you can set the stage for us when it comes to this council at Nicaea. What was going on in the church at the time? What was the major issue that was being discussed? You’ve already alluded to this a little bit. And who were some of the key figures?
Kevin DeYoung
So there’s a presbyter in Alexandria in Egypt named Arius. This is where the the Darth Vader music, the Imperial March, would come in. So Arius comes down to history as a bad guy to us, but it’s important to remember that when these things happened, it’s not like the heretics are always, or even often, are rotten, terrible people, and they would say, “Well, that guy’s obviously a jerk, and he doesn’t care about the Bible.” No, often they’re very serious about the Bible. They’re intent on what they’re doing and trying to do the best they can. So you can’t just say, “Well, the bad guys will always look bad. It will be obvious, and they’re really terrible people.” So Arius starts airing his opinions publicly in Alexandria, which gets the attention of the bishop there, Alexander, who is concerned.
Matt Tully
So Alexander is the Bishop in Alexandria, right?
Kevin DeYoung
Yes. Just to make it difficult. Arius is a presbyter, which now we know as a presbytery. Presbyter just means elder, but in that hierarchy, he’s a lower position in the church, but he’s an ordained person in the church. So he starts airing these opinions. What we know about Arius comes to us from his opponents—those who quote him and include some of his writings—and some of it from letters. But insofar as we think we’re getting an accurate view of what Arius was teaching, one of the pregnant phrases that he used was, referencing the Son: “There was when he was not.” Now, notice sometimes it gets translated as “There was a time when the Son was not.” But he’s not even saying time. He’s saying “there was.” There was some thing even before time as we know it before creation. So when he says “There was when the Son was not,” he’s not saying God made the world on Monday, and then he created Jesus on Tuesday. He’s just saying there’s some eon past in the mystery of eternity when there was a time when the Son did not exist. He understands that “begotten” has to mean a beginning. The Nicene Creed has “only begotten,” and that’s an important phrase, but that itself wasn’t the issue. Everyone understood the Son is begotten of the Father. The question was, What does it mean that the Son is begotten of the Father? You can understand Arius is thinking, Well, for every human that we know, and the incarnate Son was human, so every human son to be begotten of a father means that he was created. He had a beginning. You and I were begotten. There was a time when Kevin DeYoung was not. That’s what it means to be begotten. So Arius says if he’s a son and he’s begotten of the father, then by definition, begottenness implies a beginning. That’s what it means—“There was when he was not.” Now, this has massive ramifications, because this means however special the Son of God is—the divine logos and the incarnate word, Jesus of Nazareth—however special he was, and Arius might even call him God. So that’s why we have to be really careful, because there are groups today that will call Jesus God, but then you look carefully and Mormons will say he’s God the second. Or Jehovah’s Witnesses say he’s a god. So Arius would say, yeah, he’s God. But when you really press in, if he had a beginning and the Father did not have a beginning, then he’s not God in exactly the same way the Father is. He’s not made of the same god-ness. So this is where we get into terms like essence, and being, and ousia. How do we explain the stuff of God, and is the Son of the same God’s stuff (now, that puts it materially, but just trying to get it in our heads) as the Father? So Arius has this poem, or maybe a hymn, it’s called “Talia,” which means banquet or feast. And you can look at translations of it. It’s not very catchy, it doesn’t rhyme, it’s very deep and philosophical. But at one part he talks about the Trinity, and he says, “a Trinity of unequal glories.” So this is where the rubber meets the road. He’s got Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but because of his understanding of the Son, and this all is going to relate to the Spirit, he sees, yes, Father, Son, Holy Spirit; they share in unequal glories. Well, this really strikes at the heart of the Christian faith. Who is the Son of God? And as so often happens, orthodoxy and orthopraxy come together, and part of what alarms the church, even if you don’t have a sophisticated understanding of the theology, people are saying, “Now wait a minute. I pray to Jesus. I pray to the Father in the name of the Son. Don’t we sing songs of worship to the Son? So how can it be that the Son is something less than the Father?” So that is part of what makes it such a big deal. The whole empire—Constantine’s conversion is less than a decade earlier when this starts erupting—
Matt Tully
Constantine is the emperor of the Roman Empire.
Kevin DeYoung
He’s the emperor of the Roman Empire who famously converts and becomes a Christian and then favors Christianity and is going to figure prominently in this story and then summoning the council in 325. So bishop against bishop and empire against empire. It’s hard for us to think of this, because we think of theology as, oh, it’s really important, but is a civil war going to happen? But that’s how seriously they took these matters and how intertwined it was with the operation of the realm and the bishoprics, which maintain a lot of the positions of key authority throughout the empire—and it’s especially in the East, because Alexandria is more in the Eastern part. So it becomes a huge controversy, and the empire is threatening to implode over it, and something needs to be done. And hence, a council.
Matt Tully
It strikes me that Arius’s position, what he was arguing for, there is a certain logic to it. It makes sense on a certain level. So how would you summarize the core wrong assumption or wrong perspective that he had that then led him down this road towards ultimately heresy?
Kevin DeYoung
The key mistake is his central assumption that a begottenness implies beginning—begetting must mean beginning. That’s why the eternal begottenness of the Son is so important. And that defies complete human comprehension, but that in eternity, God the Father is communicating the essence to God the Son. Often what makes heresy implausible initially is it often is too neat and tidy and cuts through the difficulties of holding together, not contradictory ever, but truths that are beyond our comprehension. So this is really important. When we talk about theology and we talk about God’s word, it’s never irrational. God is not asking us to say two plus two equals five. He’s never telling us flat contradictions. But there are things we have to believe that are suprarational, meaning they are beyond our ability to completely understand or comprehend. And it’s important to say that the debate came down to Scripture. So one is the assumption Arius made about how begotten means beginning, and then the other, because you might say, well, then the orthodox side was just imposing a theology on Arius. Well, no, the orthodox side had the Bible on their side. They had all of these passages where Thomas will say, “My Lord and my God,” and of course John 1 is key, the worship that he receives, the attributes that we ascribe to God are the same attributes that we can see belonging to the Son. So it becomes an argument of Scripture. And Arius is the one who comes with certain philosophical assumptions. So here’s the last thing to answer your good question, Matt. Part of what he has, and it’s not quite dualism, but he has this very common Greek understanding that matter and physical stuff is bad, less than, dirty, taints you. So part of what he’s coming in with is how can God as God—I mean fully, eternally, impassively, omnipotent, immutable God—take on human flesh? For him that’s a contradiction. God cannot do that. So he thinks, Well, it has to be something a little bit less than God. It has to be one even tiny step removed from God in all of his Godness for this to happen. And so he cuts that mystery and majesty and wonder that is the incarnation. As Charles Wesley will write years later, “‘Tis mystery all! The immortal dies.”
Matt Tully
I’m just struck hearing you explain this and helping us understand Arius’s thinking here, how seriously he was wrestling with the implications of what we see in the New Testament. We see Jesus taking on human flesh. And sometimes I think for us as Christians today, because we assume so much of these formulations, we maybe actually don’t think about them always very deeply. We don’t feel internally the challenge of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the doctrine of the hypostatic union. We don’t feel the, “Wow! This actually really does go beyond my understanding.” We just casually accept the formulation, and maybe that’s a good thing in some ways, but I’m just struck that Arius was really trying to make sense of something that really does go beyond us, and that was where he, unfortunately, erred.
Kevin DeYoung
And it brings up an important point that part of the reason why it was so immediately controversial is because what he was saying was novel. It was new. It’s not that the church had everything formulated in the way that they would over the next few generations. But we really want to make sure people don’t think of it as, well, until 325, it was sort of 50/50. People were just taking votes. What do you think? Jesus is God, yay or nay? What do you think? Well, and then Nicaea comes along, and then the kind of Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code slant, which is not historically accurate. So we always want to be fair with the historical record, and it is possible for some Christians to get turned sideways when they say, “Oh wow! There were a lot of these controversies.” And so we want to be honest about that. We don't want to hide from any truths. At the same time, we don’t want people to think that this was an open question of whether or not Jesus was really God, and there were a bunch of churches that said, “Nope. Jesus is God, Jesus is not God.” No. As I said at the beginning, because people were already praying to the Son and worshiping the Son, that was obvious. And the Eucharist was, along with the preaching, the center of the worship, where you take the body and the blood and the bread and the cup of the Son, and you pray to him. It was instinctive. Yes, this is One that we worship. Irenaeus, in the second century, is already talking about the rule of faith. There’s already this understanding that you believe certain things about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So this is from the very earliest days. So Irenaeus is taught by Polycarp, who’s taught by John, so you’re a couple generations away from the apostles themselves. We’re going back a couple centuries here, but just to point out that these things were already talked about. Arius, in God’s providence, brings up a new and wrong way, which God is going to use through the church to add clarity to it. But there were baptismal formulas that go back to the very beginning of the church that adult converts who are coming for baptism are asked, What do you believe about the Father? What do you believe about the Son? What do you believe about the Holy Spirit? And the seeds of that become the Apostles’ Creed, which isn’t written by the apostles, but is a summary of their teaching. And then it gets put forward for the council. The Creed of Nicaea, which becomes the Nicene Creed, was likely a confession that another part of the church was already using. At least that’s a starting point, and many people have thought that Eusebius of Caesarea—so there’s a couple of Eusebius’s here. One is on the Arius side at first, and then Eusebius of Caesarea is in the middle. But he brings a confession that gets used. So these things are already developed and established, and it falls upon the church at different times to clarify and come up with the right language to describe what is already there in practice. So I don’t want to exaggerate and say that people weren’t sure if Jesus was God. In fact, Arius would have said, if you would have asked him, “Is Jesus God?” “Yeah.” “What kind of God?” Oh, okay. Well, that’s the debate.
Matt Tully
I want to go back a little bit to emperor Constantine. You’ve mentioned him already once, and again, anyone who knows a little bit of the history will know that, as you said, he calls this council together in 325 in Nicaea for the purpose of hashing through this idea, hashing through Arius’s ideas that he’s presented to the church and really trying to figure out what they actually believe. And I think some people— modern scholars or historians—have looked back on that council and what Constantine did there and maybe cast it in a more political light. Rather than him being interested in coming to some kind of pure theological orthodoxy, they would argue that Constantine’s real purpose there was just empire unity. He’s just trying to make sure that there isn’t political division in his empire, and so he’s going to just side with the stronger theological camp and push that through and use the power of the sword to enforce conformity. And that would be a critique. I think there are Christians, and I know people myself, who, as they came to understand the history a little bit more, it just felt messy. It felt non-theological. It felt like there were a lot of other motives at play beyond just a desire to know the truth about God. So how do you think about that dynamic and Constantine’s role when it comes to this whole council?
Kevin DeYoung
It is messy. There were other motives. And it’s important to say that saying there were other motives or it’s messy is not to say that there weren’t also really good motives and true theological, pious motives. So both need some correction. Yes, if someone thinks that to go back to these councils, or at any time in the history of the church, it was simply just pious hand holding and, especially in these empire-wide skirmishes, that you’re not going to find a lot of messy politics, you’re going to be disabused of that. And so it’s good to help people see that. At the same time, to make it as if this was only a political calculation is undeniably not the case. By tradition, there were 318 bishops, mostly from the East, and you just have to put yourself a little bit in what this must have been like. So you’re getting called by the emperor in 325, and you’re coming to this palace resort, and you’re being provided for, and he comes in, if Eusebius of Caesarea, who’s one of the first church historians is right. Now, Eusebius lays it on pretty thick.
Matt Tully
He loves Constantine.
Kevin DeYoung
He loves Constantine. He thinks Constantine is God’s man. And we can take it with a little grain of salt, but you have to understand there are bishops there who literally bear the scars of persecution. The last wave of persecution just happened at the beginning of the fourth century. This is in their lifetime. They saw it. Eusebius of Caesarea saw persecution in Caesarea and in Palestine, the area where he was. So they may be missing eyes. They may have burnished brand marks on them. So of course they’re going to think, This is the man who put an end to our persecution. Their head must have been spinning. And now we’re being called in, we’re being provided for, he’s paying for us, we’re here in the presence of the emperor. But it’s not as if everyone was starry eyed and just fawning over Constantine. There were some also who were worried, Might we be too close to the emperor? It was a little clearer who the good guys and the bad guys were when it cost you your life for standing up for. And these are going to be the same things that are going to be a part of the tension in Christianity until the very present. One of the ways I put it is, Are we (the church) better when it’s very hard to be a Christian or very easy to be a Christian? And even some of the debates in our own day over church and state, Christian nationalism, cultural Christianity, they come back to those kind of things. Well, no, the church is better when you get persecuted and you have to stand up for it and you might die. That’s when the church is pure. And someone else says, “Now wait a minute. A lot of people capitulate when that happens. And it’s really hard for the church to evangelize and to plant churches and to have buildings. So nominalism is a danger, but overall we’re better when there’s some momentum. Is it better to have to opt in to be a Christian or opt out?” Now, ultimately and theologically, we all need to opt in, and yet a covenant understanding, even Baptists or Presbyterians, that in some sense, we also have these privileges. So that’s getting far afield from your question, but it’s just to illustrate that the dynamic with Constantine is going to be conversation for Christians to have right up to the present. And Constantine, yes, undoubtedly, he is concerned about unity in his empire. What emperor wouldn’t be? And there are all sorts of questions about his conversion and how serious was it. I think that he probably was a Christian. Not a very good one in some ways. Some things he, like the kings of old, had high places that he never tore down, and he certainly seemed to be full of himself. But as somebody has pointed out, even though he didn’t talk about Jesus very much in his official correspondence, he probably talked about Jesus more than James Madison did in his official writings. And James Madison studied with John Witherspoon, and that’s my guy. So I think there’s even the possibility that Constantine was the one who proposed the homoousios solution. Homoousios, same essence, that the Son is the same essence of the Father. That becomes the key phrase. And if it came from Constantine, then it certainly came from one of his theological advisors, Hosius of Cordova. So give it up to Spain for Hosius there, who would have given it to him. So it wasn’t that Constantine was this great theologian, but with these advisors, it’s quite possible he was the one, at least according to some accounts, who proposed what will become the most important word in the entire creed.
Matt Tully
You mentioned the church today and just some of the connections and the similar dynamics that we face as Christians living today, and there’s one more that I wanted to ask you about. You argue in this book that throughout church history, the Holy Spirit has used—and the Holy Spirit, not just that this has happened this way, but the Spirit himself—has often used controversy in the church to help bring clarity on orthodoxy. And you reference 1 Corinthians 11:19 and then write, “Sometimes there must be arguments and factions in order for the truth to be more fully known and articulated.” So my first question is why do you think (and this is speculative) why does God allow conflict to play such a major role in shaping and developing and clarifying Christian theology? And then number two, does the fact that he does that affect how you think about the controversies that swirl around the evangelical church today?
Kevin DeYoung
It takes a lot of wisdom, because as soon as someone says heresy or factions are how God guides the church, then, therefore, I’m fighting with everyone, so I must be right, because I’m just trying to protect the church and prove what is true. On the other hand, the person who points to all sorts of passages about unity and says, “Jesus’s last prayer, the high priestly prayer, is for unity. Why are you fighting about it?” Well, the Bible is a big book and there are a lot of things in it, and what we find is some things are worth fighting about and some things aren’t. Paul clearly says that in the pastoral epistles. You’re making war about words, you’re quarreling about things that don’t matter, you’re fighting over genealogies. So we absolutely need the category of—and this is social media so often—you’re arguing about things that don’t matter. This is not producing. This is all heat, no light. There’s nothing at stake here. So that’s true. And we see from the pastoral epistles, Paul is all over the place there, saying, “Guard the good deposit. What I received, I passed on to you” (1 Cor. 15). He absolutely thinks there is this core deposit of apostolic truth. It must be protected. It must be defended. And in that passage you quoted from 1 Corinthians 11, he even says, hey, sometimes factions are God’s way of bringing clarity, because God uses means. He can work miracles. He could just drop down leaflets of creeds to us, but he guides by his Spirit in the church. That’s how he always works. That’s how he worked with Israel, through prophets, and it’s how he continues to work through the church, through teachers. So yes, it is controversy. I think about in my own denominations, the PCA. Some people will know we had this Revoice conference that came up in 2018, and it stirred up a lot of controversy about how we understand same sex attraction and gay identity.
And now, seven years later, I think God used it to provide a lot of clarity. I had my thinking sharpened in some areas, because controversy is what drives a bunch of people to say, “What have people said about this before? What are the most careful arguments we can make?”
Turretin. I love Turretin. He’ll always say, “We distinguish . . .”—that’s what good theologians need to say. “We distinguish.” I’m making a careful point to say not this but that. And I’m sure people have thought of this before, but it just does seem like in our digital age, people have lost the ability to think. They’ve lost any patience to follow an argument. If somebody tries to say, “We need to distinguish . . . I’m not saying this, I’m saying that,” then you’re effeminate, you don’t know what time it is, you’re not fighting. Well, praise God, on the one hand, that the bishops at Nicaea were willing to fight. Edward Gibbon, the Enlightenment historian, who’s a skeptic, but he famously said that they fought over a diphthong—homoousios or homoiousios. Now, that’s a little bit anachronistic, because that comes out later in the century. But he’s right. Is Christ of the same essence of the Father or just a similar, like essence? Praise God that they cared enough about theology to fight over a diphthong. And at the same time, they were patient enough to want to make very fine arguments. And it wasn’t like 325 tied it up in a bow. This is the peril of having the emperor on your side. When the emperor’s on your side, the next emperor might not be on your side. And then what? And so we see the blessings and curses of being very tied to the Roman apparatus as emperors come and go. Then the Arians will have the upper hand, and then the Orthodox in Nicaea will have the upper hand. And that’s why in 381, Constantinople, the Nicene Creed, as we know it today, is having to reassert various other arguments and clarify and try to tidy up what exactly they meant by that creed in 325.
Matt Tully
Let’s talk a little bit about the creed itself now. We can’t go into all the detail—every line like you do in your book, where you really walk through it in a lot of detail. But the English translation of the creed that you include in the book is a mere 226 words, and 132 of those words are about the Son in some way, thirty-eight are about the Holy Spirit, and just nineteen concern the Father directly. And then there are thirty-seven other words at the end that talk about the church and baptism and the end times. What do you make of that balance of just word count given to the Son compared to the other two members of the Trinity and anything else that has to do with our faith?
Kevin DeYoung
I think there’s a historical and a theological answer. The historical answer is simply that that was the issue that they had to deal with. That’s what Arius kicked up. That’s what then in the subsequent years the Cappadocian fathers, so these are different theologians from that area, are wrestling with. The questions of the day had to deal with the person of the Son—his two natures and then his relation to the Father. So you’re going to have two more of these ecumenical creeds. You’re going to have Ephesus in 431 and then Chalcedon in 451, which are then dealing more with the two natures of the Son. It’s because for this century and a plus, this is the main thing they’ve got to not figure out like they didn’t know, but they have to clarify what’s the language to protect what we see in Scripture. So there’s a historical reason, just like today we’d want to affirm all those things. But for the most part, that’s not where the heat is. It’s anthropology, it’s the human person, it’s sexuality, those, it’s gender. Every age has different things. So there’s a historical reason, but theologically, it’s true, too, that you never say the Son is the most important person of the Trinity. That would be heretical. We can say that God has chosen to reveal himself in the Son as one of us, and that the Old Testament is all looking forward to the revelation of God on earth, and then the New Testament is the revelation of God on earth, and then the epistles are pointing back to that. So we are right that though we pray to the Father through the Son by the Spirit (that’s usually how we think of it), that the focus of our faith, our worship, and what the Bible spends most of its time about is the revelation of the Son and the anticipation of the Son. So it’s not at all any ranking of the three persons of the Trinity, but it is a measure of the historical moment and also what we see there. There’s a reason why, if churches are going to have a cross (and Puritans would say maybe you shouldn’t), but that the cross is a better symbol than the dove. It’s not because we don’t believe in the dove and we don’t believe in the Holy Spirit. The Nicene Creed confesses, “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” But the work of the Holy Spirit is to throw a spotlight on Christ, to magnify Christ, to lead people to believe in Christ. So the Holy Spirit is to show us who Jesus is. So if you have a church that’s got a dove up in the front of your sanctuary, you should probably think about whether or not that is what the Holy Spirit would even want. So the Spirit shows us Christ and gives us an understanding of Christ, so that when we know Christ, we are seeing the image of the Father. That's the logic of the Bible.
Matt Tully
There’s a certain visibility both literally in human history but even theologically that the Son seems to enjoy that the Father and the Spirit don’t quite enjoy to the same extent.
Kevin DeYoung
Yeah, and it’s what you said. It’s because of the incarnation, the visible God come to earth. You could touch, you could hear, you could see with your own eyes he is the Son.
Matt Tully
So I wonder if you can point us to, and this is, again, probably a hard thing to do, but what would you say is your favorite line in the creed? If you could pick one line, can you highlight what that might be and even read that for us?
Kevin DeYoung
Well, I don’t have the Nicene Creed in front of me, but one of the lines that I always love is in the middle there. After the focus is on homoousios and what it means to be begotten but no beginning, “For us and our salvation, he came down.” So I love the connection there between, you might say, the person of Christ and the work of Christ, or the benefits of Christ. The whole point, the whole reason why we are wanting to be so precise about the Son is because this is the one who for us and for our salvation came down. So there’s a soteriological aim in the whole creed, lest we think this is rarefied. No, it is rarefied. It is theological precision. But lest we think this is just ivory tower speculation on things that don’t matter, theologians have too much time, no, it really matters because we’re talking about how are you saved? How can someone who’s not fully God as God save you? And yet how can he save men if he’s not fully man? A century later the Creed of Chalcedon will affirm that the Son is not only consubstantial with the Father (of the same substance or essence with the Father) but in the incarnation, consubstantial with us. He also shares our humanity. So it’s that line that I often think of as the most precious, because it connects all of that. I’m at a Presbyterian church and most of our folks, myself included, are not super expressive in worship. When John Piper was here, he was probably saying, “What’s wrong with you people?” No, he was gracious. He wasn’t. But for those who are expressive and raise their hands in a great worship song, I always say we ought to feel that same thing when we read the Nicene Creed. I know the music God inspires or uses music to touch affections in that way. If we’re touched by truth and we’re touched by the precious realities of who Christ is and what he did for us, then the Nicene Creed ought to have that same visceral response in the believer.
Matt Tully
And as anyone who has read the creed, or I encourage anyone listening to read the creed this year, 2025 is the 700th anniversary of this incredible document. So it’s worth taking some time out to dig in. You’ll find it’s beautifully written. It has almost a poetic quality to it. It’s not dry theologizing. It’s beautiful. So Kevin, maybe as a final question for you, this is one that many of our listeners have been clamoring to hear your opinion on when it comes to the Nicene Creed and the Council of Nicaea. Legend has it that Saint Nicholas, yes, that Saint Nicholas, slapped Arius on the face because of his position on this particular doctrine that we’ve been talking about. If people were wondering where the connection to their lives came, maybe this is it. Christmas and the Council of Nicaea come together. What do you think of that traditional idea or that legend that’s come down to us?
Kevin DeYoung
I hope it’s true. There are some stories that don’t even fit the right time. No, Nicholas of Myra, he was a bishop, and according to later sources, he was at the Council of Nicaea. I think that seems very likely. Whether he slapped Arius or punched him in the face, a skeptical reading could say that’s not a contemporaneous account. And obviously they’re trying to make him seem as good as possible. And yet there’s no corroborating evidence. And yet there’s no historical evidence to say why that couldn’t be true. So I’m going to say we can’t be sure, but we got some historical records that say it, and I’m going to believe it.
Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s great. Santa Claus slapping Arius was not where we thought this was going.
Kevin DeYoung
But that’s where it ends up.
Matt Tully
Kevin, thank you so much for walking us through this incredible document and the context and the history behind the creation of this resource for us. We just appreciate you helping us make the connection to something that happened almost two millennia ago and the church today.
Kevin DeYoung
Well, thanks for having me. I’m grateful to Crossway for publishing the book. It’s under 100 pages. There’s going to be a lot of good stuff that’s already come out and will come out this year, so by all means read longer stuff. But hopefully, at just under 100 pages, it’s something that everybody in the church can read. It’s going to go deep, and you can probably hear some of that in just this conversation, but this can be read fairly quickly, and hopefully if it gets people loving God more and loving the truth of the Nicene Creed, it’ll be wonderful.
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.
Jesus’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matt. 16:18) was not given to any particular church but to the church universal.
Jesus’s promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against his church (Matt. 16:18) was not given to any particular church but to the church universal. No local church is promised that it will remain until Christ’s return. Rather, from the days of the apostles, new churches have been birthed and rebirthed, died and disappeared to this day. But though not given to any particular church, Jesus’s promise to the church universal will not be fulfilled apart from the local church as members faithfully pass the torch of the gospel from one generation to the next.
Oftentimes, however, our zeal for gospel advance exceeds our wisdom and our trust in God’s ordinary means. Like the Israelites of old, we are more impressed with the height of Saul than the heart of David. So we overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what God can do in the long run. We settle for new programs rather than investing in people. And we operate in fear rather than by faith in God’s promises. In a dizzying world of distractions and new methods, where do we look for models of quiet faithfulness that endures?
From Celestia A. Ferris’s first prayer meeting in November 1867 onward, the story of Capitol Hill Baptist Church reminds us that the work of God has been carried on by ordinary people who lived hidden lives and who rest in unvisited tombs. Some, such as Celestia’s husband, Abraham Ferris, did not even live to see the church planted in 1878. But they believed that the local church was a cause worth giving their lives for, even if they did not see the results in their own lifetimes. And it is only because of their quiet faithfulness that the church is what it is today. As Francis McLean wrote in 1886, “We are working partly for those who come after us.”1 Or as Matt Schmucker told his wife at one of the church’s lowest moments in 1992, “We’re here for the people who will come.”2
In our age of megachurches and celebrity pastors who burn hot and fast and rarely last, the idea of unpaid lay members spending their lives for local churches sounds absurd. But the fruit speaks for itself, and 150 years later, the gospel is still being proclaimed from the pulpit of Capitol Hill Baptist Church. What factors and conditions contribute to gospel faithfulness? How does a church preserve the gospel? What factors contribute to church health? How does a healthy church steward success and grow without becoming unhealthy?
The relevance of these questions is nowhere more clearly indicated than in the alarming rate that churches are closing their doors around our nation and cities today. In their 2023 book The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge describe a religious shift in the last twenty-five years greater than at any other time in American history, as more people have left the church than all those who became Christians during the First and Second Great Awakenings and the Billy Graham crusades combined.3 Many of these empty pews indicate churches that abandoned the gospel and ceased to be churches long before their buildings were converted to condominiums. Others left the city due to rising rates of crime and have yet to return to their neighborhoods of origin. To this day, few of Washington’s oldest churches remain centered on the gospel and present in their neighborhoods.
Though hardly the oldest Baptist church in Washington, DC, Capitol Hill Baptist Church has not moved on from the gospel nor moved on from its location. Ultimately, the church stayed centered on the gospel and present in the place God planted it because of the ordinary people who worked, prayed, sowed, and stayed. This is the story of the church that stayed.
What will it take for the torch of the gospel to be passed to another generation?
This is not a story of a perfect church. It contains as many warnings as it does positive examples. There were fights, splits, conflicts, and dissensions. There were contentious members’ meetings filled with vitriol and spite. There were as many nights of tearful sowing as there were days of joyful reaping. But throughout seasons of plenty and seasons of scarcity, the light of the gospel has continued to shine on Capitol Hill.
Early in the life of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, the bulletins often contained this prayer: “May the Metropolitan Baptist Church continue to be ‘A Light Set on a Hill.’”4 The prayer combines the two images from Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:14: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” From its earliest days, Capitol Hill Baptist Church understood itself to be a light on the Hill. Not the light but a light. As the church’s music director wrote in 1963, “Therefore we will look to the future and work in the present and those future generations shall look back on us and say, ‘Yes, the light still burned brightly on Capitol Hill.’”5
Capitol Hill Baptist Church has navigated the past century and a half as an evangelical witness in Washington. Through wars and pandemics, racial unrest and church splits, God has kept the light of the gospel shining on Capitol Hill. Along the way, we are introduced to the ordinary people who made history, as Capitol Hill Baptist Church was transformed from a small congregation in sleepy East Washington to a thriving congregation just blocks away from the center of world power.
Behind all of the events and figures through the history of Capitol Hill Baptist Church is the eternal God and Lord of history who is writing the story of this church, and of every church, into a tapestry of grace that will stretch through eternity.
Is the light of the gospel still shining in your church? What will it take for the torch of the gospel to be passed to another generation? It will take ordinary men and women who share the conviction of missionary Jim Elliot, whose immortal words are etched into a pillar on the edge of CHBC’s property: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”6 It will take patience, perseverance, and—above all—prayer so that if the Lord tarries, it will yet be said, “The light still burns brightly on Capitol Hill.”
Notes:
Clerk’s Annual Report, December 31, 1886, MS 1583b, box 6, folder 5, CHBC Archives.
Matt Schmucker, interview with the author, September 7, 2022, part 1, Washington, DC.
Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2023), 5.
Fortieth Anniversary Celebration of Gilbert A. Clark’s Class, March 4, 1938, MS 1360, box 5, folder 25, CHBC Archives.
John D. Cochran, “85 Years on Capitol Hill,” February 24, 1963, MS 1371, box 5, folder 27, CHBC Archives.
Quoted in Elisabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1981), 172.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
