Is the Story of the Virgin Birth a Historical Fraud?

Of all the traditional doctrines of Christianity, none elicits quite as much eye-rolling scorn from "the cultured despisers of religion" (as Schleiermacher put it) as the story of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. This is not surprising; to the crude and disenchanted minds of modern skeptics, anything that calls upon the supernatural is a target for derision--and even more so a supernatural act that turns the messiest, most carnal of human experiences (conception and birth) into something unutterably holy. A Christian can easily (and rightly) reply that with God, all things are possible. But to many doubters, the virgin birth smacks too much of the kind of religious fabulism that was common all across the ancient Mediterranean world. Why, then, should Christians believe the Gospels' story of the virgin birth? 

I recently preached on the prophecy of the virgin birth found in Isaiah 7:14. There I noted that the Hebrew word used, 'almah, was not a word that specifically meant "virgin" in the same way that our word does. Rather, it means "young woman," used of a woman of marriageable age until the birth of her first child. There is another word for an unbetrothed young woman, still in her father's care, which one might more readily go for if "virgin" is specifically what was meant. For this reason, some skeptics suggest that the Isaiah 7 passage was simply meant to refer to a contemporaneous event--the birth of a baby into either Isaiah's family or the royal household in Isaiah's time--but that it held no import for a future messianic figure. The problem with that, however, is that the text clearly implies something stunning is about to happen--indeed, something miraculous, which the birth of an ordinary baby would not fulfill. Further, the candidates often proposed (Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz? Hezekiah?) simply do not match all of the data in the text (the former does not appear to be the first child of its mother, and according to biblical chronologies, the latter would have already been born). Even more, the overriding context of the prophecy, as the prophetic hinge on which the whole section of Isaiah 7-12 turns, suggests a future Messianic connection--Isaiah 9 and 11 especially so.

So why did Isaiah use this particular Hebrew word, if a virgin birth was in view? Importantly, there is no single specific word for "virgin" in ancient Hebrew to call upon, merely the two terms applied to young women of marriageable age--and when one considers this, and Mary as a possible referent, then it immediately becomes clear that 'almah was the correct choice: Mary was betrothed and no longer under her father's care, so she could not have fallen under the semantic range of the other word; and further, in a case like hers, virginity would absolutely have been assumed. The word 'almah itself might lean ever so slightly in this direction, etymologically appearing to refer to a marriageable woman who is somehow "hidden" or "enclosed." All of this is worth knowing, but it still doesn't make for an open-and-shut case that Isaiah 7 makes reference to Jesus and Mary. The Christian argument is bolstered, however, by the fact that the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint (LXX), translates 'almah as parthenos--that is, virgin (at the very least, it leans much more heavily toward that part of the semantic range). This means that two centuries before Christ, the best Jewish textual scholars were interpreting Isaiah 7 as indicating a miraculous, virgin birth. (There's even a charming apocryphal story from later tradition--likely untrue, to be sure--which says that Simeon, of Luke 2 fame, was one of the LXX translators, who was told by an angel that he would remain alive until he saw Isaiah 7 come to pass--which would make him something like a quarter of a millennium old in the Gospel, and which gives some added poignancy, and even a little humor, to his great "Nunc Dimittis" canticle.)

Anyway, after my sermon, I encountered a question relayed from a skeptical family member of one of my parishioners. They enumerated several reasons why a skeptic might legitimately think that the virgin birth story in the Gospels was an early Christian fraud, dreamed up because the Gospel-writers thought (maybe erroneously, thanks to the LXX translation) that the Messiah had to be born of a virgin. Why doesn't Paul mention it? Why isn't it prophesied in other places in the OT? Why do only two of the four Gospels mention it? This got me thinking about the solid textual and historical reasons that Christians have for believing this wild and beautiful story, so I wrote out a few notes in response, which might prove helpful to others, too.

While in strict historical terms, one cannot definitively rule out a possible interpretation of the virgin birth tradition as being an invention of early Christians in response to a misunderstanding of Isaiah 7:14, there are several quite good reasons for thinking otherwise:

 Old Testament foreshadowings: While only explicitly prophesied in Isaiah 7, there are several other possible allusions to the virgin birth throughout the Old Testament.

-   These begin as early as Genesis 3, in the “curse” narrative, where the prophesied “seed” who will crush the serpent’s head is said to be the seed of the woman. This is extremely unusual language; in almost every parallel construction referring to biological descent, reference is made to the seed of the man, not the woman (for cultural and, frankly, biological reasons—women didn’t have “seed”). To have the Messianic figure identified as the seed of the woman implies that the identity of his mother and the nature of his birth—presumably lacking a biologically male father-figure—will be exceptional.

-   In Jer. 31:22, as part of a longer section which refers to the coming of the new covenant, there is this intriguing line: “For the Lord has created something new on earth: a woman shall encompass a man.” [This is sometimes translated differently in modern versions, because the literal meaning of the Hebrew words makes almost no sense given the surrounding context (unless, that is, it’s a reference to the virgin birth), so some versions stretch the translation to try to make it fit other themes in Jeremiah.] The word for woman here is the term for the specifically biological/gynecological aspect of female identity, while the word for man is the word for a hero, a strong one, a mighty man. This appears to indicate, then, that in bringing forth his new covenant, God will do something new, something never before seen on earth, and that the miracle will center on a woman’s physical body encompassing (as in pregnancy) a mighty hero. If the virgin birth story is not true, then this is an exceptionally weird verse that makes little sense in its broader context; but if the virgin birth story is true, then it makes perfect sense and would seem to be a reference to that very event. Since this verse’s Messianic meaning is most clearly seen in the Hebrew, not in Greek translations like the Septuagint, the earliest Christians did not seize on this as a proof-text for the virgin birth; it went pretty much unnoticed until Jerome’s time in the early fifth century. This is important, because it means that here we have a plausible prophecy of the virgin birth that cannot be accused as having been a misunderstood passage that motivated early Christians to invent a virgin birth story for Jesus; rather, it stands as an independent witness to the plausibility of the traditional reading of Isaiah 7.

-   Other possible allusions to the virgin birth also exist: for example, the fact that Jesus’s progenitor David regularly uses references to his mother’s womb in his psalmic prophecies (rather than, as would be more culturally normal, references to his father’s house); and the Messianic “Servant” character in Isaiah 49 giving emphasis to divine action in fashioning him in the womb. None of these are definitive, of course, nor as clear as Isaiah 7, but there enough hints strung out throughout the OT canon that they give some support to the plausible reading of Isaiah 7 as pointing toward the virgin birth of Christ.

 Paul: While it’s true that Paul makes no direct reference to the virgin birth, to take this as evidence against the virgin birth is an argument from silence, so not particularly strong. An argument from silence is only compelling if there is silence where one would reasonably have expected something else. In Paul’s case, this is not so—Paul’s writings are not interested in providing a narrative of Jesus’s life—where they mention it, they focus only on the Lord’s Supper, the cross, and the resurrection (Paul also mention’s Jesus’s ancestral pedigree at least once, but there his main concern is about Jesus’s connection to the Davidic line). Paul’s silence would only be instructive if it came as part of a passage in which Paul was mentioning Jesus’s birth or his early life.

-   Many scholars think that Paul does make reference to it obliquely, even if not directly. In Gal. 4:4 he writes that Jesus was “born of a woman,” which would be a strange way of putting it in that culture unless he believed there was something exceptional with regard to Jesus’s parentage and birth.

-   Acts shows that Paul is also intimately acquainted with the evangelist Luke (and in a couple places he even quotes lines that match exactly with Luke’s Gospel), so given the prominence of Mary and the virgin birth in Luke’s writings it’s hard to imagine that Paul would somehow be unaware of that tradition.

-   Furthermore, the doctrine of the virgin birth is usually tied to a high Christology—i.e., seeing Jesus as divine. Some of Paul’s letters are usually counted as the earliest NT writings we have, and yet Paul’s Christology is remarkably high, which suggests that a high Christology was part of the early Christian movement from the beginning. The argument that Paul’s failure to mention the virgin birth says anything that would cast doubt on the traditional Christian view of Jesus is therefore highly questionable.

Gospels: Some skeptics will point out that the earliest Gospel, Mark, also has no narrative about the virgin birth (nor does John, which, although probably later, is the only “independent” Gospel account in the canon, while the other three lean on each other in various ways). Nevertheless, Mark seems to assume that knowledge on the part of the audience—in Mark 6:3, Jesus is called “the son of Mary,” which is a very unusual way of speaking of someone in that culture; reference would usually be made to the father. It’s also the only reference to Mary in Mark’s Gospel, which probably means that her place was so well-known in the early Christian community that no further comment was needed. And, like Paul, Mark seems to portray a higher Christology than one would expect if Jesus’s origin was merely human. John, for its part, has a wildly high Christology, and while it doesn’t reference the virgin birth directly, some take the verbal escalation in the conversation in John 8:41 as implying that the crowds had some questions about the legitimacy of Jesus’s parentage from Joseph (as one would expect if the virgin birth story were true), to say nothing of Jesus’s repeated insistence throughout the Gospel of John that he has come down from heaven and that God alone is his Father. Matthew and Luke, of course, form the main source material for the virgin birth narrative, and it’s worth pointing out that Luke tells us that some significant research went into the Gospel, and the content of chapters 1-2 suggests that one of Luke’s sources might very well have been Mary herself. All that to say, while the Gospels may not be as early as Paul’s earliest documents, they are still the earliest narratives of Christ’s life available, and all appear to testify to a unanimous conception in early Christianity that Jesus’s birth was miraculous and that he himself was divine.

Early Christian Unanimity: The other early Christian documents also appear to be unanimous in holding to the virgin birth narrative, which is not necessarily what one would expect if it were an invented story. If it had been invented, one would expect pushback from alternative traditions in the earliest sources, such as by James or Jude, who certainly would have been in a position to speak on the matter if an erroneous version of their own family’s history was being circulated. Yet James and Jude make no attempt to rebut the virgin birth narrative, nor even to cast doubt on Jesus’s identity in any way (an argument from silence, to be sure, but one where the silence may be telling). The immediate post-NT documents attest to this unanimity and deepen it, with specific references to Mary and the virgin birth in ways that affirm and expand upon the traditions in Matthew and Luke. This can be seen in the letters of Ignatius, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Odes of Solomon, the Protoevangelium of James, and the writings of Aristides, Melito, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus (all first- or second-century sources). To my knowledge, the earliest alternative narrative does not show up until the late second century, some hundred and fifty years after Christ, when the critic Celsus brings up a rumor that Jesus was fathered by a Roman soldier, Pantera. The lateness of that alternative theory, compared to the unanimity of the earlier Christian tradition, does not give it much of an air of credence. Further, the very fact that the alternative theory was a theory of illegitimacy, suggests that even the early skeptics accepted as common knowledge that there was something unusual about Jesus’s parentage. The first appearance of the more obvious alternative theory—that Jesus could have been Joseph’s biological son—comes into view just a few years later, when Irenaeus castigates the heretical Ebionites for holding that theory. (The Ebionites were a schismatic sect that appears to have broken away from the orthodox Jewish-Christian group known as Nazarenes; for their part, the Nazarenes are believed to have descended in continuity from the original Jerusalem church, and patristic writings show that they held a high Christology, including the virgin birth). All told, then, the evidence for compelling alternative theories of Jesus’s parentage in the earliest sources is severely lacking, and the unanimity of the traditional Christian reading is significant.

Evangeliad News!

Regular readers of my blog will have noticed that things have slowed down considerably for me here in recent months, so I thought I'd give a quick note of explanation for why that is, and what comes next.

- In addition to a new book on historical missiology coming out this December, my Evangeliad is now also on the road to publication! This is big news, because I never really knew for sure if my longstanding poetry project would ever be more than something I did for my own joy (and the enjoyment of a select few blog-readers). Poetry books do not command a large market at all these days, so it's rare to find a publisher or literary agent who will even give such a thing a glance. But I'm happy to report that I'll be putting out the completed text next year through Resource Publications (an imprint of the major Christian publisher Wipf & Stock). This means that I'll be able to get it out less than a decade after I started, which at this point feels like a real win.

- For this blog, that means that my regular posts from the Evangeliad will cease for the time being. I'm planning, however, to bring back a regular cycle of articles dealing with various topics of interest in culture and theology. In my midweek Bible study at my church, I'll shortly be shifting over to soliciting questions from my parishioners on any matter they would like an answer on (probably starting in less than a month), and my intent is to answer worthwhile questions both here, in writing, as well as in the Bible study sessions themselves. Hopefully some good fruit will come of that. Even if no substantial questions are forthcoming, I have a few of my own that I'll be bringing out on the blog in the next few weeks: reflections on how to approach the culture of skepticism in some circles of New Testament studies (e.g., Bart Ehrman and his ilk), and an exploration of the hiddenness of God, especially with regard to the lived experience of Christians.

Anyway, that's what's coming. I've been told by some that perhaps I should switch over to one of the sleek new blogging venues like Substack ("blogging" is itself, I'm told, too old-school of a term), but I think I'll stick it out here in the pre-2010 corner of the Internet for awhile yet, if only because most of online life after that point has not been worth keeping up with. Besides, if readers come away with the sense that I'm some sort of Luddite dinosaur because I'm clinging to an antiquarian way of presenting my writing to the world, well...they'd probably be right, so there's no harm in properly representing myself. So for the faithful few that keep wandering over to this dusty old corner of cyberspace, keep the faith: at the very least, you'll still have randomly infrequent articles to look forward to. 

The Evangeliad (30:35-39)

(Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:35-39 (corresponding to Luke 17:15-19)

The ten men, as one, obeyed this command--

They tuned and went back; they hurried; they ran;

Then as they hastened, the miracle came,

And no sign of leprosy on them remained.

And then amid all their joy, one man paused,

Turned back again, shouting glory to God;

He ran back to Jesus, fell on his face,

Filling the air with thanksgiving and praise.

This man, a Samaritan, lay there alone,

Prostrate in wonder on the pilgrimage road.

Jesus received the man's thanks and his praise,

But there remained more for the Savior to say:

"How many were healed--wasn't it ten?

And where are the other nine lepers, then?

They've kept my command, but this shows their thoughts

Are all for themselves, not the glory of God.

For none of the nine came back to give praise,

Nor to turn their hearts to gratitude's ways,

But only this one, a stranger to us,

Whose faith has rendered to God all his trust."

And Jesus said to the Samaritan man,

"Arise, my friend, give thanks once again,

For your faith has made you well; go your way."

And the man went off, still shouting his praise.

Update

 Just a quick update on a few things:

- My series of low-video-quality (but hopefully decent teaching quality!) studies on the Book of Revelation is complete. You can access it by clicking here.

- With several weeks of wonderful family vacations behind me, I'm currently in the midst of some book-related projects: my next work of historical missiology, Let the Earth Rejoice, will be coming out in December, so I'll be sharing some details about that in the coming months. I'm also in the process of finding publishers for a couple other projects, too, so keep me in your prayers as I discern whether the Lord has a place for those writings in a wider context.

- With the school year resuming, I'll be back to more of a regular schedule for my study and writing, so expect to see posts here with a bit more regularity.

The Evangeliad (30:31-34)

(Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:31-34 (corresponding to John 5:1; Luke 17:11-14)

And now it had come to that time of year

When Jews in Jerusalem all should appear,

So out on the pilgrims' festival road

Did Jesus and all his followers go.

And as he was walking, making his way,

He came on ten lepers shouting his name.

These men stood far off, well back from the road,

Girded with grime and with tatters of clothes.

For they knew Jesus, had heard of his fame,

So when he was passing, they cried out his name:

'Jesus, our master, have mercy on us!'

And there Jesus' feet stood still in the dust.

He turned to the lepers, all ten of them there,

And gave the command for the blemished-made-fair,

The law to confirm one's leprosy cleansed:

'Go and show yourselves to the priests, my friends.'

How Jesus Explains One of the Weirdest Stories in the Old Testament

(Note: This is an original piece of biblical exposition. I've written and spoken about it on a couple of occasions, but never in a full article like this. It's an interpretation that has not been noted before in the history of Christian exposition so far as I can tell, but I believe it holds up. I'm working toward producing an article on this topic for a peer-reviewed theological journal, and I'll certainly post here if that happens.)

Tucked away in Genesis 15 is one of the strangest stories in the Bible—a bizarre theophany in which God appears to Abram as a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch, together making their way down a blood-soaked avenue between bisected animal corpses. This story is easy to overlook, both for its strangeness and for the fact that it falls between the Melchizedek story on the one hand, and the Hagar/Ishmael story on the other, and so is obscured by better-known arcs in the Abrahamic narrative. But this curiously unsettling story is actually something quite important—something that, if we had eyes to see, would unveil for us an enacted parable of the gospel itself. Its imagery, passing before Abram’s wondering eyes some two millennia before the Incarnation, portrays in visible form the very ideas that later Christians would call upon to articulate the mystery of Christ. The strange story of Abram’s covenant shows the gospel of Jesus Christ, painted in terms that would later find their echo in the great creed of Nicaea.

To careful readers of Scripture, the importance of Genesis 15 is plain to see. It ritually establishes the covenant between God and Abram, and it includes repetitions of the divine promises: to give Abram an heir and possession of the land of Canaan, as well as to redeem his descendants from their future bondage in Egypt.

Truth be told, some of the story’s strangeness finds easy explanation in our knowledge of the biblical world. While the rite which is portrayed seems both curious and macabre to modern readers, it is not unknown. God asks Abram to take one of each of the main kinds of sacrificial animals—bull, goat, and sheep (as well as some doves)—and to cut their bodies in two, arranging the bisected sections so that they are lined up on opposite sides of each other. This creates a blood-soaked pathway between the corpses.

To ancient readers of this passage, this would be a recognizable scene. We have evidence of a similar (though much later rite) described in Jeremiah 34:18-20, as well as contemporary attestations from elsewhere in the ancient Near East. This was the act of “cutting a covenant,” the solemn rite in which the two parties of a covenant would pledge themselves to the covenant stipulations. Each party to the covenant was to walk down the bloody pathway, with the implication being that if either party broke those stipulations, the penalty was the very one depicted by the outpoured blood at their feet.

This brings us back to Genesis 15, in which Abram has set up the scene of the covenant rite just as God requested it, and then—presumably waiting for God to show up so they could proceed with the ritual—Abram falls into a deep sleep, and a great darkness comes upon him. These are clues that the theophany is at hand: the deep sleep echoes Adam’s deep sleep as God was bringing forth Eve from his side, and the darkness foretells a similar darkness that enshrouds Mount Sinai when the presence of God is there. When the narrative of the ritual scene resumes, we come to the strangest part of all: “When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces” (Gen. 15:17, ESV).

There are two unexpected and curious things about this. First, there’s the fact that Abram is not a party in the covenant rite. He does not walk the bloodied pathway. And second, the symbols themselves are bizarre: a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch. What could this mean? Any good set of commentaries will tell you that the basic symbology of these items—both related to fire—show them to be a theophany. Fire is a frequent image of God’s presence throughout the biblical narratives, from the pillar of fire in Exodus to the tongues of flame at Pentecost. The fire pot and the torch are thus both meant to represent God.

The fact that there are two such symbols seems to indicate that God is taking the place of both parties in this covenant rite. Remember, it was supposed to be the two persons entering the covenant with one another who would pass between the animal corpses: in this case, God and Abram. But instead, it is God and God, even as Abram and his descendants are declared to be the heirs of the covenant promise. And here we come to the first wondrous insight, which thunders with the message of the gospel: by playing both roles, God is pledging to take upon himself the punishment for any transgression of the covenant. Should Abram or his heirs violate this covenant of promise in any way, it is not Abram on whom the penalty will descend, but it will fall on God himself, for he is one who walked the avenue of sacrifice in Abram’s place. The punishment that should have fallen on the rebellious covenant-heirs will fall instead on God. This is nothing less than the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Yet we still have to reckon with the specificity of the images involved. God could have appeared in a plainer and more obvious form—say, as two pillars of flame—but instead he chooses a smoking fire pot and a burning torch. Why? These are two common household objects, which everyone in the ancient world would recognize. The element of fire certainly binds the two together, but there is another aspect by which these images are related: the burning torch is drawn from the fire pot’s flame. The first image, that of the fire pot, is the central source of fire for an entire household, used for cooking and heat and always kept alive in a bed of glowing embers. Every other fire-bearing implement, in one way or another, draws its flame from there. The torch, then, shares the very same nature as the fire pot does—the flame itself—but it is customarily lit from the fire pot, and not the other way around.

What we have here, then, are two divine images, which share the exact same nature in all of its qualities, but one is the Begetter and the other is the Begotten. This is not only the way that the New Testament describes the relationship between the Father and the Son; it is also the way that the Nicene Creed articulates the divine nature of Christ: “Light from Light.” It is perhaps no accident that the very function of a torch was as a bearer of light, bringing the flame from the fire pot’s heart out into the darkness of a benighted world. The mystery of the Trinity, which we still speak forth in the words of Nicaea, written seventeen hundred years ago, was played out before the patriarch’s eyes all the way back in the pages of Genesis.

Come back once more to the story of Abram’s covenant, then. We not only have a double theophany, in which God himself takes Abram’s spot. We can now describe the scene in even greater detail: the person of the Godhead who takes Abram’s spot in the ritual is none other than the Son of God. Here God the Father and God the Son walk the covenant pathway together, pledging themselves forever to Abram and his heirs, and it is the Son, moving second through the pieces, who assigns the penalty to himself should any of the human parties fail. Jesus pledges to take the punishment that should have fallen on us. This is a passion-play of Calvary, acted out by God himself two thousand years before the fact. Is it a strange story? Certainly. But even in its strangeness, we catch clear-eyed glimpses of a stranger story still to come: that the eternal Son of God, the Light from the Father’s own Light, would bear the curse of our darkness so that we might inherit the promises of God.

The Evangeliad (30:26-30)

(Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:26-20 (corresponding to Matt. 22:10-14)

So the servants go out, the banquet is set,

All those brought in, in the King's hall are met;

They've responded in joy to His gracious call,

Arrayed in obedience, one and all.

Except, as the King comes, He sees one man,

Who gives no regard to the wedding-feast plan;

That man is not wearing the feast's festive robes,

No garment to answer the grace of the host.

The King says to him, 'Friend, how came you here,

Without the robes in which my guests should appear?'

But the man is silent; he gives no response;

So the King tells his servants, 'Tie him in bonds.

Yes, bind up his hands and bind up his feet,

And then toss him right back out in the street--

Out in the darkness, where grief is profuse,

For the called are many, but the chosen are few.'"

The Radical Danger of Christian Celebrity

I'm going to begin this piece with a thesis that will sound perhaps a little radical:

- Any person in a public-facing Christian vocation should hope that they do not reach large-scale success or acclaim.

Musical artists? Give thanks for poor sales on your recent projects and at the difficulty of building any momentum in the touring industry. Pastors? Give thanks that your church does not grow to megachurch proportions (or even anything approaching that). Authors? Give thanks that your books sell poorly and that the publishing industry is stacked against you from the outset (I have a little personal experience of my own with that one).

A little radical, no? So much so, probably, that many people have already clicked away from this article because it sounds so off-kilter. "Why would I hope not to have success? Doesn't my success mean that more people are hearing about Jesus?" Well, maybe, but only in a very limited sense. Think of it this way: if you weren't successful, doesn't God have other means and other people by which he could also make the gospel known (1 Kings 19:14, 18)? Doesn't God have even greater resources for doing that than you have? If you fall short of celebrity status, it does not mean that the Kingdom of God has fallen short of its potential for growth.

My thesis is put in striking terms to make a point, but it's not really that different from the apostle Paul's counsel: "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life" (1 Thess. 4:11). And with regard to giving thanks for a lack of success? - "Give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thess. 5:16). Nor is this thesis different from the actual practice of our Lord Jesus, who based his ministry in what was essentially a rural backwater province and who invariably slipped away from the crowds whenever the specter of celebrity raised its head; in one instance he even seems intent on whittling his core of followers down in numbers, not building it up (John 6:60-66). The picture of ministry that emerges from the New Testament is small, communal, and local. This is true even in the exciting days after Pentecost--the church of Jerusalem, from what we can discern, was not today what we would call a megachurch, but seems to have operated on a flexible model as a network of house churches (see Acts 2:46). Further, the "celebrity" leaders of the early church lived lives more marked by persecution, imprisonment, and martyrdom than by any kind of popular acclaim. Indeed, that seems to be more along the lines of what Jesus expects a "successful" ministry to look like, rather than high sales and surging crowds. 

With that thesis in place, let's go back to what prompted this train of thought. Why am I up on this particular soap box right now? This week has seen another grievous set of revelations from the contemporary Christian music world (CCM)--Michael Tait, the frontman for the Newsboys (and former member of DC Talk), has been outed for a long-running double life while on tour, a story marked with drug abuse, alcohol-fueled parties, and sex abuse. A few other voices who know the CCM world well have spoken up to say that this was something of an open secret and a pattern that is not infrequent in the industry. This news hits hard to someone of my generation, who grew up loving Christian music in the '90s and early 2000s, when the Newsboys and DC Talk were at the forefront of it all. But is it surprising? No, it's not.

CCM has consistently shown itself to be a remarkably poor subculture for promoting spiritual maturity. This should have been obvious all along: to take musically gifted young men and women and dump obscene levels of popularity and acclaim on their heads, set them in front of roaring crowds, interview them as if they have deep personal insights on Christian living, put them on tour where they are disconnected from their own families and churches for large chunks of the year--this is a recipe for almost certain failure. We are uprooting them from their support networks and surrounding them with pitfalls and temptations. It is not a favor we do them by making them celebrities; it is an act of thrusting them into grave spiritual danger. I grieve for them, and I regularly remind myself and others that these are among the last people we should look to for teaching on the gospel or wisdom about the Christian life. They are in a place of dangerous prominence, both for themselves and others.

And it's not just Michael Tait; this is a story we've seen played out several times. Another of my favorite bands, NeedtoBreathe, has also been pierced by accusations of sex abuse and betrayal. Other prominent Christian musicians have gone apostate, either leaving the Christian faith entirely or "deconstructing" their faith--Hawk Nelson, Kevin Max (another DC Talk member), a Hillsong frontman, Audrey Assad, and others. Now, that's not to say that every CCM artist or band falls in this category--the majority, by all appearances, are well-rooted enough and put enough safeguards in the practice of their vocation so as to handle it well. But the dangers are very real, and we should be aware of them.

We can go further, and say that it's also not just a CCM problem. It's a pastor problem, too. This is especially the case in megachurches, but it really applies anywhere, even in small churches, if a pastor is surrounded by people who prefer to pretend he's not a sinner. Every Christian communion deals with this issue at some level--it's something we saw in the shockingly public outing of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy (and the continuing echoes of it, both in their communion and those of other denominations, from the Eastern Orthodox to the Southern Baptists). It's something we see even in small ministries, where too much trust is given to fallible, broken, sinful human beings (a category which includes all of us). And it's something we see in a grossly inflated form in evangelical megachurches (the list of megachurch leaders and celebrity pastors that have fallen from grace for sexual misconduct, abusive leadership practices, financial crimes, and other reasons would run for pages). 

Megachurches are perhaps the easiest target for this critique. And I'll say up front that I don't mean to imply that God doesn't use megachurches to accomplish great good--He certainly does, just as he's used CCM artists to do the same. But the leaders in these ministries must always be aware that they are walking through valleys where temptation is going to be on every side, temptations that have mastered and overpowered better Christians than they themselves are. They need to resolve to live radically self-effacing lives, to reject celebrity status with their words and their deeds, and to surround themselves with strong networks of support and rigorous accountability. Otherwise, they are very likely to find themselves in the category of those who have gained the whole world and lost their own soul. I know a man whose side-ministry was, for decades, to serve as a pastoral counselor to megachurch pastors in crisis, many of whom were still in active ministry, and his conclusion is that megachurches are bad for the spiritual health of pastors, period. 

And I include myself in this critique too, by the way. Praise the Lord, I live in an area which, demographically speaking, is unlikely to produce a megachurch. My church draws attendance at a higher percentage of the population of my city (about 3.5%) than most megachurches do of their cities, and yet we're just a bit above 100 on a good day. I honestly wouldn't want to be in another context; bigger churches have come courting on occasion and I've turned them down. If it sounds like I'm wagging my finger at megachurch pastors, it's actually much more of a sense of "There but for the grace of God go I"--I sincerely thank God that he has put me in a place where I can't become a celebrity, because it would probably be my downfall, too.

But the issue isn't just a problem with the size of the church, either. There are dangers associated with the levels of money and elite status-brokering which come with the celebrity life. We don't take seriously enough just how frequently an attachment to money is presented as a tremendous spiritual danger in the gospels. Having more money than you need is perilous for the soul. Even if you can handle it well, living a life of simplicity and generosity, just having it there keeps alive its cancerous potential to befoul the spiritual growth of your children and grandchildren (and I actually know a few Christian families for whom, sadly, that has been the story). As for the status-brokering--getting into social circles with other influential people--our culture has decided to call this "networking" as if it's something good rather than an amplification of the dangers involved, most frequently leading to the sin of pride and a sense of apathy regarding one's own perilous spiritual condition. Remember that we follow a Lord who networked with the ones that nobody else even bothered to care about, and shunned the company of influential people.

Further, the whole nature of evangelical church life has, unfortunately, set up the pastorate as a vocation founded not on spiritual maturity, but on the exercise of natural gifts. A charismatic communicator can draw thousands, even if he is in a wretched spiritual state. Evangelical worship, unfortunately, has degenerated to the place where many people come to church to enjoy the exercise of natural talents--primarily, musical abilities and public speaking--and not to encounter the living presence of the Lord in their midst. I'm not suggesting this is an easy problem to solve; it's not. The exercise of natural gifts is part of this vocation, and one that God has ordained. But there is a danger involved which we must always be aware of--are the people coming to hear me, or to meet with God? That ought to be a conscience-striking question for any pastor with gifted communication skills. 

As I said, I don't have easy answers, other than to say we need two things: a way of grounding our worship services less in the natural gifts of those up front, and more in the presence of God; and a way of seriously ensuring that we are cultivating deep-rooted spiritual maturity for anyone placed in a position of leadership or trust. For me, a lover of the early church, I would say we should bring back the Eucharist as a celebration of our weekly participation in Christ the Great High Priest's eternal presentation of his sacrifice in heaven (thus putting the focus squarely on him), and we should make prospective Christian leaders spend significant seasons before their ministries (and probably during their ministries, too) in places of complete self-renunciation, like a monastery. But I acknowledge that probably won't work for everyone.

My guess is that, in the end, our celebrity culture in American Christianity has almost no grounding in reality. When we look back at this age of the church, viewing it from the perspective of eternity, almost all of the true giants of God's Kingdom will be names we won't recognize at all. I expect that megachurch pastors and Christian music artists will be very poorly represented, except for those few who were able to survive the dangers of their vocations by a sustained practice of humble self-renunciation. The saints who knew God best and were of greatest use to his Kingdom will be, in large part, ordinary people that were unknown beyond their own hometowns, people whose examples of virtue rang out so loudly in the courts of heaven that their smallest, most unnoticed acts will resound through eternity. Those ranks will be especially filled with workers for the Kingdom who labored in almost complete anonymity from the world's gaze, people serving the Lord in places of persecution and suffering, living lives marked by the quiet, patient work of planting seeds in the darkness. I've known a few in my travels, and I did not deserve to stand in their presence. Those are the ones who deserve the acclaim, and one day they will get it, and we who received too much acclaim here on earth will probably just make it to the other side "as one passing through the flames" (1 Cor. 3:15). 

The Evangeliad (30:21-25)

 (Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:21-25 (corresponding to Luke 14:21-23; Matt. 22:8-10)

Then to all of his servants who still remain,

The King, with renewed resolution, will say:

'Those I invited, unworthy have proved,

Yet still there's a feast, the finest of food!

Go out to the markets, alleys and streets,

Call in the outcasts to come and to eat!

Go bring in the poor, the blind, and the lame,

Call in those burdened with heartache and pain.'

So the servants go out, in come the crowds,

But still there is room to gather around.

'Look, Lord,' they say, 'we've done as you asked,

Yet still seats are empty at your repast.'

'Then go further out,' their Master replies,

'Yes, out to the paths of the countryside,

And call everyone, all those whom you meet;

Constrain them to come to the joy of my feast!

My house shall be full, in spite of the fact

That those I invited have all turned their backs.

Of them, at my table, shall none get to feast,

For my joy goes out to the least of the least.'

The Evangeliad (30:16-20)

(This is the first Evangeliad portion I've posted in months; forgive my lassitude. Evangeliad posts, along with occasional essays, should resume with a more-or-less weekly frequency now that my patristics article and the greater part of my book-editing are done. The stanzas below continue a parable of Jesus, begun in the previous sections: Part 1 / Part 2.)

(Click here for an introduction and previous installments of the Evangeliad)

Section 30:16-20 (corresponding to Matt. 22:4-7; cf. Luke 14:21)

But the good king sends even more servants out,

To deliver another message about

The joy of his son, the table prepared,

The lavish event he was longing to share.

But instead of the righteous deference they owe,

The invited ones all contempt start to show.

Some laugh at the servants, some walk away,

Some murder them rather than hear what they say.

Then what will the king, in all his wrath, do?

He'll send armies to where his servants went through,

Root out the murderers, burn down their homes,

Wreak judgment on all the cruelty they've shown.

The Danger of Making Revival an Idol

Across a broad swath of evangelical and Pentecostal churches, there is a fixation on the idea of revival. The term itself can be used in several different ways, some of which are useful or even laudable, but one sense in which--I've now come to believe--it tends to be more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to the church's experience of life in Christ. The hope and expectation of a future revival, perhaps just around the corner--when this is meant to refer to a period of breathless fervor, high emotion, and mystical experiences--has the danger of becoming an idolatrous affectation for both churches and individual Christians. 

Picture in your mind the stories you may have heard of previous revivals: massive public crowds gathered to hear the gospel preached during the Great Awakening; attenders falling down weeping under their conviction of sin during the Second Great Awakening; prolonged sequences of worship in the presence of God that might stretch on for days. For many Christians today, these extraordinary scenes have consolidated into a desire that such times would come again, and in doing so, this sensibility has taken a new form: the idea that these things ought not to be extraordinary, but ordinary; that "revival" should be the normative state of the Christian life, and if it isn't, then one's church is doing something wrong.

But is that sensibility actually true? I'm not so sure. Before I go into why that is, it's worth noting that there are certainly cases in which the hope and expectation for revival can represent something healthy in a church's life. Revival need not mean a full-on outpouring of dynamic spiritual experiences in corporate worship as the normative Christian experience; some people use the term simply to mean a large-scale societal return to Christian faith, or a state in which a church's members regain a sense of abiding earnestness and zeal in their everyday practices of faith and devotion. I have folks in my church who pray and yearn for revival in these terms, which I find not only appropriate but commendable. Both of these senses of "revival" are, I think, something that we should hope for and pray that God brings about. In most of my usages in writing and sermons, I think I tend to lean toward the idea of revival as society-wide swing of the pendulum away from secular atheism and back toward the historic Christian faith. That's something that might include vast outpourings of spiritual fervor, but not necessarily so: such a revival might also happen very quietly, under the radar (as I would argue is even now happening across much of the West). But in many evangelical and Pentecostal circles, a broad social return to faith is only one small aspect of what is meant by "revival," and what many (perhaps most) people have in their heads is a scene of impassioned spiritual excitement that sweeps up enormous numbers of people in its fervor. 

This disjunction in meaning is one that has come up in my own church life. Some years ago, I felt a prompting in my spirit to devote a year to daily prayer for revival, and I shared that prompting with my church. Some of our folks excitedly grasped onto it, and I got the sense that, for at least a few of them, the expectation was that a promised revival would come upon the fulfillment of our year of prayer. That year--from early fall of 2019 to early fall of 2020--came and went, and the results were...well, let's just say that it was definitely not a massive outpouring of spiritual excitement through our town. Instead, what followed (in the very week we finished our year of prayer) was the first major outbreak of the Covid pandemic in our area, after having already had to re-imagine our practices of doing church thanks to society's efforts to "flatten the curve." This was swiftly followed by an outbreak in our own church, which (since it was still early in Maine's story of experiencing the pandemic) made headlines across the state, cast our church unfairly in a poor light to many of our neighbors, and resulted in several months of our church trying to connect online rather than in person. Instead of a revival, our year of prayer resulted in our church standing empty, week after week after week.

Where was the promised revival? Well, for anyone who might have been expecting crowds of people shrieking with excitement in a new Great Awakening (and I'm not actually sure we had too many of those), it hadn't happened. No doubt the Lord had used our prayers to prepare us for what was probably the hardest year in the history of our congregation, but no "revival" of that kind. Except...something peculiar is starting to be noticeable now, five years later. That time of transition in 2020 led into a new season in our church life marked by the vibrancy and joy of a growing faith-community that spans all the age groups in our town, who delight in spending time in fellowship and devoting their hearts to the worship of God. Even more strikingly, some experts in the wider world are now pointing to 2020 (the year we completed our season of prayer for revival) as the point at which a new and surprising upswelling of faith started to become visible, and which is now making headlines across the West: public intellectuals coming out as new Christian converts, high-church communions seeing crowds of new catechumens, and Gen Z swinging the pendulum away from agnosticism and back toward faith. And it's not just the West, either--these early decades of the twenty-first century have seen an acceleration of movements to Christ among people of other faiths around the globe (and especially among Muslims and Jews), and that acceleration shows no signs of slowing down. But apart from a few little hotspots that pop up here and there for a time, this hasn't been a "revival" of the emotional-outpouring variety; it has been a broad, quiet, grassroots work of God taking shape in the background of our daily lives. This quiet revival has the potential to be one of the biggest things to happen in the entire history of Christianity if it continues along its present course, and lots of people are still unaware that they are living in the midst of it.

What has this experience taught me? Well, it's taught me to keep praying for revival!--so long as we're aware of what we're really praying for. But it has also made me a little wary of the fixation on a Great-Awakening-style revival that persists in the hopes and expectations of our churches. There are two main downfalls to that fixation that I can see. First, it can leave Christians in a place of perpetual sadness and disillusionment. While there is certainly a sense of hope in some future great work of God that might raise one's spirits, the continued absence of a visible, emotional outpouring of the Spirit on a broad scale is something that gnaws away at a person's faith, raising questions about God's willingness to act. It also builds up a sense that our normal Christian life is somehow insufficient, and that we (or our church's leadership) are doing something wrong. Is it any wonder that pastors and leaders in these traditions seem so often to fall from grace, often into sexual sin or abusive leadership practices? They have been conditioned to provide a sense of visionary excitement that God is at work, in answer to the hopes and expectations of their congregants, but in the end that excitement very often turns out to be little more than a cult of their personal charisma, and the perpetuation of that cult bears the fruit of its own consequences.

Second, this fixation on "revival" can lead to a kind of idolatry, which replaces the very real work of God that is going on in our lives right now with a wished-for substitute. Much of what we're called to as Christians is faithfulness and obedience amid the normalcy of everyday life. The mountaintop experience of the post-Pentecost church in Acts quickly makes way for the patient rhythms of simply figuring out how to live life together as faithful followers of Jesus, marked less by ecstatic wonder and more by "making it [their] ambition to live a quiet life" (1 Thess. 4:11). The whole Christian tradition, from the monastic fathers of the early church to the mystics of the Middle Ages to the leading pastors of twentieth-century evangelicalism, have tried to remind us that real Christianity is less flash and more substance, less of ecstasy and more of humble simplicity. As Oswald Chambers put it, "The snare in the Christian life is in looking for gilt-edged moments, the thrilling times; there are times when there is no thrill, when God's [blessing] is in the routine of drudgery on the level of towels and washing feet." The great Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross (who knew something about amazing experiences of closeness to God), advised other Christians not to seek out visions or ecstatic manifestations or special words from the Lord as the normal course of one's Christian life. Such things were always meant to be extraordinary, not normative. If one got caught up in pursuing them, one would lose sight of the greater part of the work of God in one's life. 

And that, I fear, is exactly what has happened with those Christians who are fixated on the idea of a future revival--they are missing out on what God is actually doing right under their noses. That's not to say that revivals of that sort can never come, of course. They do--we know they do, and they are great gifts of God when they do come. But we should treat them as St John of the Cross treated personal visions--accept them as a special gift of God, a blessing of precious value, and then move on. They are a gift to be appreciated, not an idol to be mounted on the altar of one's heart. We must always ask what comes next after the vision, after the revival, after the outpouring. And in most cases, like with the post-Pentecost church, it's things like patiently suffering persecution (Acts 4), dealing with matters of sin and holiness in our lives (Acts 5), congregational administration and dealing with church conflict (Acts 6), and other non-glamorous practices of ordinary Christian discipleship. These are things that God wants us to attend to, just as much as the mountaintop experiences of a Great-Awakening-style revival. God can work just as readily through slow, patient, quiet means as he can through big, showy, flashy means. It is perhaps no accident that Jesus describes the growth of the church in analogies of things that grow so slowly that one would almost die of boredom of one watched them from beginning to end: yeast spreading through dough, crops growing in a field, and so on. And yet, in the end, those slow, patient, quiet things are what make all the difference. So don't get lost in waiting and wishing for the next great revival. Pray for God's work in the world and then get to work yourself. Be faithful, proclaim the gospel, and give thanks for all things. Our Master is doing far more right now than we can even imagine, and perhaps what we are most in need of is simply to have eyes to see it.

Bible Study Series on the Book of Revelation

This page offers a new Bible study resource, with links to videos of studies in the Book of Revelation, as originally offered to my local church. These videos are not polished or high-level productions; they are simply the recorded livestreams of my in-person midweek Bible studies. With Facebook no longer hosting archived recordings of livestreams for more than a month, I needed a new place to offer these files, and demand was high for this particular series. (The first three chapters of Revelation are unrepresented in the videos below because those Facebook files had already been removed by the time I realized I needed to download them, but I've uploaded a few old audio sermons on those passages to represent that material.) This page will continue populating with new links to Bible study videos on a weekly or biweekly basis, until the series is complete.

Audio sermons on Rev. 1-3 (from a different sermon series of mine): 

Rev. 1; Rev. 2 (Letter 1); Rev. 2 (Letter 2); Rev. 2 (Letter 3); Rev. 2 (Letter 4); Rev. 3 (Letter 5); Rev. 3 (Letter 6); Rev. 3 (Letter 7)

Revelation 4

Revelation 5

Rev. 6 - Eschatology Intro

(Eschatology Handout)

Revelation 6

(Whiteboard display)

Revelation 7

Revelation 8

Revelation 9

Revelation 10-11

Revelation 11-12

Revelation 13

Revelation 14

Revelation 15-16

Revelation 17

Revelation 18

Revelation 19

Revelation 20 (the Millennium)

(Millennium handout & whiteboard display)

Revelation 20 (Final Judgment)

(Whiteboard display)

Revelation 21

Revelation 22