Page 663 – Christianity Today (2024)

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If you assume America’s laboratories and research facilities are filled with people who believe in the laws of science but not in God, you’re not alone. You’re also not correct.

About 36 percent of evangelicals think scientists are hostile to religion, compared to 22 percent of Americans overall, according to a 2014 study released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Evangelicals who view science and religion in conflict are even more likely to see scientists as hostile to religion (42%) than those who view the two fields as collaborative (38%).

But there’s more to the story. It turns out perception weighs heavy in the science and religion debate, and many Christians are getting it wrong. Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociology professor at Rice University, and Christopher Scheitle, an assistant professor of sociology at West Virginia University, wanted to get to the bottom of this misunderstanding. After all, they’d found that scientists aren’t usually hostile to religion—even if they don’t believe.

They asked everyday people about how they viewed elite scientific thinkers, whether as the Richard Dawkins, God-is-a-delusion stereotype or as fellow believers who bring their faith into their fields.

Their new book out this month, Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think, synthesizes the results of data analyzed from the Religious Understandings of Science study, a nationally representative survey of 10,000 Americans. It’s the most comprehensive research to date on how Americans view religion and science, including hundreds of interviews with people of faith from 23 different organizations.

Ecklund and Scheitle found Americans in general are five times as likely to have heard of Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and vocal atheist, than other high-profile scientists like physicist-geneticist Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health and an outspoken Christian. Only 3 percent of Protestants, including evangelicals and mainline congregants, were familiar with Collins.

The Dawkins effect—the idea that the British scientist’s fame (and notoriety in some Christian circles) would impact evangelicals’ view of the entire profession—is possible but still perplexing. Scientists aren’t the most well-known public figures in the US: Only about 1 in 5 Americans surveyed had even heard of Dawkins.

So if “famous” scientists only have so much influence, can everyday people in the scientific community impact how their friends and neighbors think of the profession? Turns out, evangelicals are about as likely as Americans on average to be friends with scientists (nearly a third count one among their five closest friends), even though they hold a more negative perception of scientists as opposing Christian faith.

“At first we could not figure this out: If you have close friends who are members of the scientific community, why would you think that community is hostile to your belief system? Conversely, why would you be close friends with someone who you think is hostile to your most deeply held beliefs?” wrote Ecklund and Scheitle. “We came to the conclusion that our evangelical survey respondents may think their friends are the exceptions.”

The researchers also explored religious people in scientific jobs rather than confining their study to scientists at elite universities. While university scientists remain less likely than the average American to have a religious affiliation, those with “rank-and-file” science careers aren’t so different than those outside the field.

For professions like doctors, nurses, engineers, and others, Ecklund and Scheitle reported that the percentage of evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and Catholics working in those professions reaches about 3 percent or 4 percent, not much different from the general population. But when you look at the percentage of those working in science fields by religious identity, most are religious. Only 24 percent are unaffiliated, while 65 percent identify as Christians, with 24 percent being evangelicals.

The findings align with other data indicating that even though Protestants and Catholics would recommend students pursue careers to become physicians or high school chemistry teachers, they are much less likely than the general population to endorse a career in biology or physics.

Could it be that faith has a greater impact on how Christians view scientific research than how they apply that research in scientific careers? Research showed that believers tend to focus on practical application.

Only 12 percent of evangelicals and 16 percent of mainline Protestants strongly agreed with the statement, “Scientific research is valuable even when it doesn’t provide immediate tangible benefits.” Evangelicals report the lowest interest in new scientific discoveries (22%) compared to the general population (31.5%). When researchers changed the question to “new medical discoveries,” evangelicals were just as interested as the general population (around 40%).

Ecklund and Scheitle concluded that basic science doesn’t have as strong a connection to the values of their religious traditions.

“For instance, if your faith tradition emphasizes the importance of life or the importance of helping other people, then ‘physician’ might be more easily seen as a ‘spiritual’ profession than ‘biologist,’ even if both actually serve to promote the values of your faith,” they wrote.

“In the same way, it would be easier to see ‘new medical discoveries’ as spiritually connected to the ideals of faith than it would be to see ‘new scientific discoveries’ as promoting faith ideas.”

According to the study, evangelical scientists themselves are significantly more likely to view science and religion as being in a collaborative relationship than either of their identity groups: scientists or evangelicals.

For Christians to go beyond the prevailing narratives on the relationship between science and religion, it will start with these Bible-believing, research-believing scientists.

The church needs “faith leaders to celebrate the scientists within their congregations,” said Ecklund and Scheitle, “and they need these scientists to speak out about how scientific knowledge is not a threat to their faith.”

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Every Saturday, after evening church services, my husband and I open our home to friends—mostly unmarried ones. Sometimes it’s four or five friends, sometimes one, sometimes it’s just my husband and me and our housemate, a 24-year-old intern at our church. Whatever the number, we gather around the table in the nook of our kitchen, light candles, listen to one another, pray, sometimes play a game, sometimes mourn with each other, and usually laugh.

My husband and I practiced hospitality during our single years and when we got married, started this particular tradition together. For us, it’s more normal than not to have friends join us in our home for meals, celebrations, discussions, traditions, and especially holidays.

Nearly three years into our marriage, we are childless, and not by choice. Our inability to start a nuclear family has certainly fostered an urgency to create a broader family environment in our home, but our motivation goes much deeper. It’s based on the Christian call to provide a haven for those with whom we don’t share DNA. As the old song and the good book say: We are family. We invite singles over to our home not as a substitute family but because they are quite simply part of our extended Christian family.

In his book Redeeming Singleness, Barry Danylak writes about Jesus’s poignant statement in Mark 3:34–35, that “whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” “Jesus’ point is dramatic,” says Danylak. “The relational bond of Jesus with his ministry family was stronger than that with his physical family.”

In Danylak’s interpretation, the family structure was principal in the Old Testament, but in the New Testament, the church (both local and global) became principal. The whole of the New Testament is a drawing in, a reminder to the new followers of Jesus: You have a new family now. This is your mother. This is your father. Your brother. Your sister. Care for them as such.

Now, 2,000 years later, this language seems rote to us, but to new believers in the early church, it was radical language. This slave is my sister? This woman is my mother? This tax-collector is my brother? Yes.

Although the nuclear family was then and still is an essential part of a flourishing society, nonetheless, Christ calls us to expand our loyalties to the larger family of God and extend hospitality to those around us.

The need for this hospitality is everywhere, if only we’ll see and respond.

Minda Corso is a 33-year-old digital communications specialist who has lived in five states within the past seven years. She represents a plight familiar to many transient millennials. “I’ve found it incredibly difficult [to feel at home] the first year after my move,” Corso told me. “After that, I’ve been able to meet people and invite them into my traditions, but I’ve typically not had people invite me into theirs.”

Corso described the one time a family from her church invited her over for a meal. She was included in their dinner practices and the liturgy of the meal, partaking not only in the physical food but in the spiritual food of being family for one night. Their hospitality strengthened her sense of place and offered her the kind of personal healing where, as Wendell Berry says, “the body is restored to the self.”

“It was one of my favorite nights,” says Corso. “I still tear up thinking about that dinner.”

Cristi Antholz—32, single, and director of family ministry for a church in Denver—has experienced similar healing when she’s been invited to family celebrations or dinners. She sees the power of the gospel reflected in those experiences. “The gospel is about King Jesus establishing the kingdom and making a new people,” says Antholz. “He brings orphans into his family and sets them at his father’s table. When families invite singles into their homes, during the holidays or other times, they powerfully reflect this dynamic of family in the gospel.”

Antholz is right that the gospel is about making a new people, but it’s also about making new persons, restoring and drawing them into the family of God. Although we Christians have always been called to embrace the practice of hospitality, it’s not hyperbolic to say we need it in 2017 more than ever before. So much is fracturing in the world today, and the simple act of an open door, a place at the table, and an invitation into tradition can offer profound healing to others.

“In following [Christ], one can anticipate new family relationships that supersede the old,” says Danylak.

During this Advent season, my husband and I have been inviting our single friends over every Saturday to read Scripture and a book of liturgy and also light each Advent candle, one by one. The light from the first candle barely lit our space, but week by week, the room has grown brighter as we add more flames in the circle—which is perhaps a metaphor for expanding family.

On Christmas Day, there will be gifts aplenty under our tree, not only gifts for my husband and me but for the unmarried friends from our church who live far from home or simply can’t go home. We’ll probably stay in our pajamas all day and graze on cheese, meat, and apples for meals. We’ll drink eggnog and wassail and probably play a game or two. Although it might be messy and a little chaotic, it will be family, and no less family than if we shared the same genetics.

After all, we share a deeper DNA: the body and blood of Christ, our brother; the adoption and inheritance of our Father; and the love of the Spirit that binds us together, healing one body at a time.

Lore Ferguson Wilbert is a writer, thinker, and learner. She blogs at sayable.net and lives in Flower Mound, Texas, with her husband, Nathan. Follow her on Twitter.

It is singularly appropriate that R. C. Sproul would go home to be with the Lord in 2017, the year in which we are remembering Martin Luther’s posting of the 95 Theses on the church door in Wittenberg 500 years ago. Many thousands of people were introduced to the teaching ministry of R. C. Sproul through his book and teaching series “The Holiness of God.”

I first listened to it on audio cassette tapes (which dates me), in which he tells the story of Luther at the Diet of Worms. The chapter and lecture are called “The Insanity of Luther.” It is classic R. C. You can listen to it on the Ligonier Ministries website, and you should if you have the chance.

No figure in our generation has done more than R. C. to defend, proclaim, and expound Luther’s insights into the Bible’s teaching on justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. I have met young people on every continent who readily confess their indebtedness to R. C. Sproul (though they have never met him or heard him in person), through the various media of Ligonier Ministries, books, articles, magazines, audio, video, app, and conferences. He is responsible for introducing a generation to the authority of Scripture, the sovereignty of God, and the glory of the Gospel of justification by faith, salvation by grace, in Christ alone.

I started reading and listening to R. C. as a teenager. My father, a businessman and elder at our local church, served on a PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) denominational study committee with him in the 1980s. Dad was somewhat in awe of him after that experience.

My brother John later worked with him very closely as executive producer at Ligonier Ministries for a number of years. My brother Mel also served in church relations at Ligonier during a season. R. C. was unfailingly kind to my mother, whom he regarded, rightly, as the theological matriarch of the Duncan clan (she personally edited his multi-volume commentary on the Westminster Confession).

Mother did not hesitate to disagree with him on certain theological points, informing him of her dissent through her handwritten editorial notes to him in the initial drafts—which he loved! If you know anything about R. C., he loved a good theological debate and he craved riposte with those who dared to go at him toe-to-toe, which Mother, a modern-day Reformed Boadicea, happily obliged.

I began to know him (later than the rest of my family) personally, as friend and colleague, through Reformed Theological Seminary (RTS) almost 30 years ago. He and I held, at different times, the John R. Richardson Chair of Systematic Theology at RTS Jackson, before he became a founding professor at RTS Orlando.

Commitment and Conviction

R. C. was a force of nature. Everything he did, he did with all of himself, with every ounce of everything he was. I think that is one thing that congregations and conference attendees sensed in him.

He was a man of copious knowledge (he was an omnivore, after all!) and intellectual brilliance. He had an extraordinary ability to popularize theology and philosophy. He had a deep love for the Bible and his skills as a storyteller were spell-binding, especially when conveying important scenes and moments from church history.

But along with all this, his hearers sensed his passion for and belief in what he was saying. His teaching dripped with commitment and conviction. In a time characterized by cynicism, indifference, and uncertainty, R. C. was a category 5 hurricane of declaration, persuasion, and instruction.

When you heard him, you felt that truth mattered, and mattered to him down to his—and consequently your—bones. He was not playing. This was not an act or a shtick. Eternity hung the balance. Or, as he said, “right now counts forever.” You knew he believed the truth and that he wanted you to believe it like your life depended on it, because it did.

R. C. was also a man with a sense of humor. He loved to laugh, and I loved laughing with him and watching and listening to him laugh with others.

In the early days when I began doing conferences with him at Ligonier, he learned that my brother John and I both loved hip-hop music and had memorized many popular raps. Often in the green room or at speaker dinners, he would insist upon our doing a rap for those assembled. I think it gave him some special delight to watch his guests react with surprise at something they weren’t expecting to hear from a staid Presbyterian theologian.

On one occasion, as I walked up to the platform to give a message at a Ligonier National Conference on, of all things, the solemn, glorious doctrine of the atonement, I heard his distinctive voice call out from the front row: “Lig, do a rap!” I tried to ignore him. He persisted, not to be denied. When my brother John (who was emceeing the conference at the moment) and I obliged, the audience reacted first with shock, then approval, then started nodding along with the beat, while R. C. roared with infectious laughter and joy. I was not a little embarrassed, but I’ll always treasure his smile and happiness at that moment.

R. C. was a great friend and also cared enough about the gospel to lose friendships. During the controversy surrounding ECT (Evangelicals and Catholics Together), R. C. notably crossed swords with beloved and longtime friends J. I. Packer and Chuck Colson.

What the evangelical public may not know is that he retained a deep, personal affection for these brothers, while profoundly differing with them on matters which he felt compromised the gospel. He was willing to be heartbroken and friendless for the sake of the gospel. I will never forget that. The fear of God was in him.

I doubt that I will ever again, in this life, know the like of R. C. Sproul. He was sui generis. A gift of God. “God’s man, for God’s work, in God’s time.” But his legacy will continue, not because of him (extraordinary as he was) but because of what he believed and taught. Which is truth. And beyond that legacy, I now await (with increased longing) The Reunion.

Ligon Duncan is the chancellor/CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary and the John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology.

We made a Spotify playlist to accompany this article. It includes the recommendations below, along with a few other seasonal recommendations.

The Advent and Christmas seasons are filled with more than their share of paradoxes. We raid our basem*nts and attics for the nostalgia of Christmases past as we scour websites to buy the latest gadgets as gifts. As the daylight dwindles (at least in the northern hemisphere!) our belief in what we can accomplish in 24 hours reaches new heights. Meanwhile, recording artists are rushing to release their latest attempt to redefine the canon of seasonal classics. As preparations for Christmas productions reach new frenzied heights, I wonder if any church has ever preached Ecclesiastes for Christmas: “There is nothing new under the sun!” The paradoxes of this season can truly be wearying, but there is also endless wonder to be found in the Incarnation. Artists have been finding fresh creativity in meditating on the coming of the One through whom all things were made.

Songs for Advent

In my circles as a worship leader, there has been a growing eagerness to explore Advent and to explore it as more than just a contemplative season before Christmas. The Worship Sourcebook, a key resource for pastors and worship leaders for years, emphasizes Advent not just as a season of waiting but as one “designed to cultivate our awareness of God’s actions—past, present, and future. In Advent, we hear the prophecies of the Messiah’s coming as addressed to us—people who wait for the Second Coming.”

So it makes sense that most churches sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” which explores images of Christ from the Old Testament. But the musical repertoire is growing as more artists observe the season. The Welcome Wagon has a wonderful retune of the James Montgomery text based in Psalm 72, “Hail to the Lord’s Anointed,” which was originally written as part of a Christmas ode. The Brilliance (like the Welcome Wagon, a group from the New York City area), has an album exploring multiple themes of Advent. Its song “Open Up” is a sung prayer asking for help to be the light of Christ in a dark world. Pillar Church, from Holland, Michigan, retuned an old French carol, “O Come, Divine Messiah,” that speaks both to the birth and future reign of Christ. Josh Garrels’s new Christmas record includes “O Day of Peace,” a timely hymn (text by Carl Daw) looking toward the day of Christ’s return. A song that has rung out in our home this season is the groovy retune of “Heal Us, Emmanuel” by the Reformed University Fellowship group at Jackson State on the most recent Indelible Grace record.

Bonus Tracks:

• Sojourn – A Voice Is Sounding (retune of Edward Caswell’s “Hark! A Thrilling Voice Is Sounding”)
• PageCXVI – Comfort, Comfort, Now My People
• Norman Hutchins – Emmanuel
• Chicago Metro Presbytery – Prepare the Way of Zion
• Young Oceans – To Thee We Run

Songs for the Lukan Canticles

A few Christmases ago, my pastor decided to preach through the songs that surround the birth of Christ from the Gospel of Luke. Luke’s story is a musical, filled with songs celebrating Christ’s coming: Mary’s song (1:46–55), Zechariah’s song (1:67–79), the angels’ song (2:14), and Simeon’s song (2:25–35). But it was odd to me that as many songs as there are for Christmas, I had an impossible time finding many contemporary versions of the Bible’s own songs!

After my own group, Cardiphonia, produced a project on this topic, I found a number of other versions that will stay in heavy rotation this season. My favorite Magnificat belongs to The Gentle Wolves’ rootsy arrangement of the “Canticle of the Turning” and The Ordinary Time’s “Mary’s Song.” The version of Zechariah’s song on The Gospel Coalition’s Luke album is a must, especially if you have great backup singers! I also love the lyrical work of Wendell Kimbrough in his metrical “Dawning Light of Our Salvation” (shameless plug: I wrote the music.) Versions of Simeon’s song are a bit trickier, but Daniel Renstrom captures the tension of the text in his “Rise & Fall” and Greg Scheer’s “Lord God, Now Let Your Servant Depart in Peace” makes an excellent sung benediction. If you are searching for a song that grasps the moment where the angels rock their “Gloria in Excelsis” over the trembling shepherds, I suggest either Castle Island Hymns’ fifth-century retune “Gloria” or the simpler take from High Street Hymns.

Bonus Tracks:

• Brian Moss – Sing Out My Soul
• Melanie Penn – Great Things (Mary)
• Cardiphonia – Upon a Hill in Bethlehem
• Wendell Kimbrough – Mary’s Song (Our King of Peace)
• Sovereign Grace – He Who Is Mighty
• Sandra McCracken – This Is the Christ (retune of Martin Luther text)

Songs for the Incarnation

In a songwriting class I audited a few years ago with Duke Divinity professor Lester Ruth, we meditated on how theology more easily leads to awe and wonder—the bedrock of worship—as it moves from prose to poetic forms. One of my favorite quotes was from Charles Wesley in his collection of Hymns for the Nativity of our Lord,

Gaze on that helpless object
Of endless adoration!
Those infant-hands
Shall burst our bands,
And work out our salvation;

Sometimes songs on the Incarnation are thicker than the average praise song, but their richness nourishes our souls. The new hymn “Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery” by Matt Papa and Matt Boswell is one that welcomes you into the expansive story of Christ, singing his life from birth to second Advent. The new classic “Joy Has Dawned” from Keith Getty and Stuart Townend is one of the few Christmas songs to exalt the mystery of the Incarnation directly:

What a Saviour what a Friend
What a glorious mystery
Once a babe in Bethlehem
Now the Lord of history.

I am similarly grounded by Wen Reagan’s adaptation of the Naaman Wood text, “In Glorious Feasting,” which pulls no punches in its poetic descriptions of Christ’s birth:

Our Lord, from virgin womb He crowns
In majesties of blood,
He breathes his first, He cries aloud—
The Everlasting Word.

“Out of Heaven,” from the excellent Christmas record by Bifrost Arts Music, is another example that invites us to consider the newborn Christ as something more than a benign baby, but one that is both God and our brother. Finally, Sandra McCracken brings this text from William Walsham How to life in her retune for Indelible Grace:

Who is this, so weak and helpless,
Child of lowly Hebrew maid,
Rudely in a stable sheltered,
Coldly in a manger laid?
Tis the Lord of all creation,
Who this wondrous path has trod;
He is Lord from everlasting,
And to everlasting God.

There is rich fare here for the patient listener who desires to find something in Christmas music beyond sentimentality, and balm for those struggling with depression and the memories of loss. As we are reminded in Mary and Simeon’s songs, there are battles to be fought, corporal as well as spiritual. (Check out The Modern Post’s Christmas song, “This is War.”) In this season, the church needs to be a place where even the Beatitudes become our carols. We are a “weary world rejoicing.” So we sing joy to the world as far as the curse is found, singing the truth that Christ’s return will make all things new.

Bonus Tracks:

• Brittney Hope – Glory in the Darkest Place
• Lowland Hum – O Holy Night
• Resound Worship – What Kind of Throne
• Green Carpet Players – All Things New (retune of Horatius Bonar’s Advent text “Come, Lord, and Tarry Not.”)

Bonus-bonus tracks:

• Lowland Hum – Jesus Christ the Appletree
• Nathan Partain – Gathered ’Round Your Table (a communion song for Christmas Eve)
• Sister Sinjin – Magnificat

Bruce Benedict is the worship and arts chaplain at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and creative director for Cardiphonia Music.

American evangelicals rediscovered their brethren in the Middle East in recent years. The promise of the Arab Spring, followed by the threat of ISIS. Beheadings and other martyrdoms, followed by forgiveness.

Many decided we must become better friends, and work harder for the persecuted church’s flourishing in the land of its birth.

However, President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is putting that new friendship to the test, as Middle East Christian leaders have almost unanimously rallied against the decision.

Trump’s decision would “increase hatred, conflict, violence and suffering,” said the patriarchs and heads of churches in Jerusalem in a statement in advance of his anticipated announcement.

The Coptic Orthodox Church warned of “dangerous consequences.” The head of Egypt’s Protestant community said it was “against justice” and “not helpful.”

But the strongest testimony may have come from Jordan, where the national evangelical council pleaded against “uncalculated risks” that “may well expose Christians in this region to uncontrollable dangers.”

Despite these dire cries, many conservative US evangelicals rejoiced in Trump’s announcement. Support for Israel is a longstanding mark of much of the community.

“Evangelicals in the US don’t spend enough time thinking about Arab Christians,” said Joel Rosenberg, a dual US-Israeli citizen who last month led a friendship-seeking delegation of evangelical leaders to Egypt and Jordan. Many were members of Trump’s unofficial faith advisory team.

“People who love Jesus haven’t been talking to each other. But we should.”

But talking with Arab Christians didn’t change the US talking points.

“America is finally putting American interests and the interests of our key allies first,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “Policy is coming into alignment with biblical truth: Jerusalem is the eternal and indivisible capital of the Jewish state.”

Mario Bramnick of the Latino Coalition for Israel applauded. “God gave the land of Israel with Jerusalem as its undivided capital to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

And for Jim Garlow, senior pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego, “It is quite possible [this] is the single most important announcement regarding Israel by a US president since Harry Truman recognized Israel as a state.”

But the reaction from Palestinian evangelical leaders was visceral.

“Local Christians are sacrificed on the altar of imperial politics,” said Mitri Raheb, an evangelical Lutheran pastor and president of Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture in Bethlehem. He was outraged particularly by Vice President Mike Pence’s remarks.

“His God and our God seem to have nothing in common,” he said. “He worships a warrior, not the crucified one.”

Yohanna Katanacho, academic dean of Nazareth Evangelical College, was less angry but still dismayed.

“We are confused. What do we have to do to please their evangelical God?” he asked. “Should we abandon our homes, our culture, and our history? Should we betray our nation?

“They see us as enemies of Israel, and therefore as enemies of God.”

Bob Roberts, senior pastor of Northwood Church in Texas, was in Bethlehem with Christian leaders the day reactionary riots began.

“[Palestinian Christians] felt very alone and abandoned,” he said, noting his own mixed feelings about the announcement. “American evangelicals celebrated while totally ignorant as to how the Palestinians felt.

“The arrogance and insensitivity of Western believers was inexcusable to me.”

Rosenberg recently formed the Alliance for the Peace of Jerusalem with 25 US evangelical leaders, but on final status issues he has not taken a strong stand. He is sympathetic to all arguments on timing.

Wanting to “matchmake” between Christian Zionists and Arab evangelicals, his Middle East trip aimed to encourage conversation.

“It’s never been easy, and I suspect it won’t get easier,” he said. “I know there are things that pain them, and I don’t want to bring them pain.

“But if you have a friend who implores you to do something, and you listen, what if it doesn’t change your perspective? Are you no longer friends?”

Rosenberg rejects the either-or dichotomy expressed by many, and acknowledges that end-times theology too often divides believers.

He agrees with the warnings that Trump’s decision might increase tensions, and is especially worried about Jordan. Even so, he hopes that in God’s mercy it might jumpstart a path to peace.

And while he knows that members of the delegation were impacted by their experience, deeply held beliefs—on both sides—do not change overnight.

“I’m playing the long game,” he said. “As wonderful as those meetings were, it was only a month ago. The Christian leaders I brought began to see new perspectives, but I don’t want to overstate what it has accomplished so far.

“I have to absorb the disappointments when my friends don’t see eye to eye.”

One disappointment is that Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros cancelled a coming meeting with Pence. Scheduled for later this month, the patriarch followed the lead of Egypt’s top Muslim leader.

Sources now say Pence’s trip to Israel is postponed (due to US tax reform efforts), with the Christian mayor of Bethlehem also rejecting his visit. Billed initially as an effort to support the Christians of the Middle East, many of them are keeping their distance.

Rosenberg respectfully prays these leaders would reconsider, and speak directly and candidly of their frustration to the vice president. After all, he says, it is an opportunity to engage the highest levels of American government—and Pence is a fellow Christian, who cares.

But in the US, Rosenberg also is beginning to see some fruit from the delegation visit.

In a strongly pro-Israel op-ed in the Des Moines Register, Family Leader president Bob Vander Plaats sympathized with the Arab side.

“We must also recognize our calling to have compassion on all people in the region, including the Palestinians,” he wrote.

“Jesus’ love extends to all, and so must ours.”

Everyone can listen better, believes Johnnie Moore, chairman of Trump’s faith advisory board. Also a member of Rosenberg’s delegation to Egypt, he travels the world to engage local Christians (and Muslims) as a personal calling.

He promised a top Palestinian negotiator he would visit Ramallah, and recently visited Israel with a delegation of Bahraini religious leaders, helping the Muslim nation send a message of peace.

But within a relationship of friendship, one must also speak truth.

“Arab Christians need to ask themselves the degree to which their opinions are impacted by a low-grade anti-Semitism,” he said.

“These days represent a moment of truth for the Palestinians. They cannot leave the negotiating table every time something happens that they do not like.”

Despite the sound bites, Moore believes, Trump’s decision is not anti-Palestinian. But the reality of the Middle East makes believers unable to say so.

“Some Arab Christians who might desire a middle ground do not feel they can moderate their position at all,” Moore said, “because of the subtle but oppressive atmosphere in their societies.”

But in Jordan, reactions were prompted by Trump’s US evangelical support.

“Evangelicals in the West make statements,” said Imad Shehadeh, president of Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary, “but evangelicals in the East pay the price.”

A Palestinian born in Jordan, Shehadeh said US evangelical statements in support of Trump’s Jerusalem decision should have been worded more carefully.

But equally, though the Jordan Evangelical Council statement came as a great relief to the community, it could have had a different emphasis, he said. Local Muslim-Christian relations are generally positive, and it may have overstated the immediate danger.

There is wisdom in siding with countrymen, Shehadeh said, and the older generation is keen to do so, especially in public statements.

The younger generation of pastors tends to be more nuanced, having been trained in his seminary. But most people just want to stay silent, lamenting any disruption to a calm status quo.

Coming to Jordan as a guest of the king, Rosenberg requested his friend Shehadeh organize a meeting of 40 select evangelical leaders to engage with his delegation. Though it was a very positive meeting, it made some Jordanians nervous.

Any political message of solidarity must add the Christian message of grace, said Shehadeh. And without wisdom and care in both the Western and Eastern context, grace is easily lost.

“Be true to your beliefs,” he said. “Just say it differently so you don’t lose the other side.”

So, what next?

“Christian Zionist leaders are a hopeless case; the evangelicals in the pew can still be saved,” said Raheb. “I suggest that they come and see firsthand their fellow sisters and brothers in Christ suffering under Israeli occupation. This will give them a fresh insight into the Bible.”

Katanacho was also inviting, but differently.

“I disagree with many of my evangelical brothers and sisters, especially with their view on Jerusalem,” he said. “But they are my family. I will continue to seek ways to engage them.

“A relational blessing seeks to empower the other for God’s glory, even if it means suffering.”

Katanacho was honest that US evangelicals have contributed to this suffering. But grace demands he start with his own sins and lack of love.

“Love charges static people, provoking them to build new bridges,” he said, emphasizing empathy over consensus.

“From there, true love pursues justice to build a virtuous community.”

And for Rosenberg, the community of American and Arab evangelicals must humbly dialogue.

God has a purpose for modern Israel, he believes, and he knows many Arab Christians do not agree. But personal relationships do not demand you become an advocate for everything your friend believes in—no matter how important the issue.

“We as Christians have to figure out how to do this conversation right,” Rosenberg said.

“If we can’t do it as sons and daughters of the King of Kings, how can we expect the president of the United States, or anyone else, to do it better?”

Would you imagine that, with all of the cataloging technologies we have working around the clock, one could still discover unknown articles by a very well-known author? While doing research for my PhD, I discovered two such articles by C. S. Lewis. Although published in the 1940s, these articles have been overlooked ever since and don’t appear in the many lists of his works. The thrill of discovery has brought home a few points (of encouragement) in a time when it sometimes seems as though all the stones have been overturned.

In 2013, I was spending my days pouring over old journals and forgotten newspapers from the early 20th century. I wanted to understand just why Lewis had become a household name in Britain during the height of the Second World War for his Christian writings, and why, in the decades since, it has been Americans, rather than the British, who have continued to relish Lewis’s defenses of Christian doctrine.

On one particular, ordinary day, I made my way to the National Library of Scotland in the Edinburgh rain. I stored my dripping coat in a locker and settled myself among the industrious scholars. It was chilly underneath the fluorescent lights. Someone’s phone was chiming intermittently, disrupting the quiet and concentration. After a while, my back ached from hunching over the delicate pieces of paper spread across the table in front of me. I rose to stretch my legs and consult yet another index of British periodicals in the reference section. This small exertion set my blood moving a little freer through my veins. I took down an unfamiliar volume from a nearby shelf, an index to The Strand Magazine. From what was by then a reflex, I flipped to “Lewis, C. S.” To my surprise, there were two entries. I knew Lewis’s bibliography pretty well, but I didn’t recognize these articles. Could they be … new?

It’s easy to be nostalgic for a magazine like The Strand. As Winston Churchill, a frequent contributor, once remarked, in its heyday it looked “so very prosperous.” Begun in 1891, The Strand was a pioneer of a “picture on every page” policy and was illustrated by some of the best artists in Britain. It presented a pleasing variety of non-fiction pieces alongside fiction from the likes of H. G. Wells, E. Nesbit, P. G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, John Steinbeck, J. B. Priestly, and Rider Haggard, to name a few. The author most associated with the magazine, however, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” became popular through The Strand. A favorite among the British upper classes, The Strand was widely read and earned a devoted following at home and abroad. Its high standing kept the magazine afloat during the Second World War when many others were forced to cease printing due to paper shortages. Browsing Edwardian or Interwar issues of The Strand today, the weight of the pages feels good in one’s hands. One senses, too, that some higher mission lay behind its production.

The index to The Strand informed me that Lewis had published two articles in the magazine shortly after the close of the Second World War. While one was under his own name, the other was under a pseudonym he had used before, Clive Hamilton. In excitement, I paged the issues from some dusty recess of the library’s basem*nt, and they duly appeared, petite and cheerful, on my desk. I felt the thrill of being the first to read lost (to modern readers) creative works in light of Lewis’s subsequent spectacular and long-lived popularity.

The first piece was, as The Strand’s editor had observed in a short descriptor below the title, “a characteristic piece of writing by the Oxford don who has become the most entertaining missionary of our time.” Indeed, “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” is quintessential Lewis published at the height of his renown. It was even illustrated by the famous cartoonist, Ronald Searle, with a playful series of angels and devils wrestling in the margins. The topic of the article was suggested by The Strand, Lewis tells us, and he “accepted the job light heartedly enough.” However, he continued, “now that I sit down to tackle it I discover a difficulty. Are there any Pagans in England for me to write to?”

Lewis proceeded to use his Christmas “sermon” as an occasion to draw distinctions between the true Pagans or Heathens of old—“the backward people in the remote districts who had not yet been converted, who were still pre-Christian”—and modern people in Britain who have ceased to be Christians, who are sometimes referred to as “pagans.” To confuse these categories, Lewis says, is “like thinking … a street where the houses have been knocked down is the same as a field where no house has yet been built. … Rubble, dust, broken bottles, old bedsteads and stray cats are very different from grass, thyme, clover, buttercups and a lark singing overhead.”

Real Pagans differ from post-Christians, Lewis continued, firstly in that they were actually religious: “To [the Pagan] the earth was holy, the woods and waters were alive.” Secondly, they “believed in what we now call an ‘Objective’ Right or Wrong,” that is, that “the distinction between pious and impious acts was something which existed independently of human opinions.” Finally, Pagans, unlike “post-Christian man,” had “deep sadness” because of their knowledge that they did not obey the moral code perfectly. To compensate for this shortcoming, the Pagan developed a wealth of ceremonies to “take away guilt.”

Lewis went on to bemoan the modern loss of a certain gaiety held by people who lived in a more enchanted world. He described the “post-Christian” view of nature as a “kind of machine for us to exploit,” which has led to our abuse of the Earth. If correct, Lewis says, the post-Christian view means we have awakened into a true freedom from “the old fear, the old reverence, the old restraints,” even if the new reality is decidedly less “fun.” He continued:

A universe of colourless electrons (which is presently going to run down and annihilate all organic life everywhere and forever) is, perhaps, a little dreary compared with the earth-mother and the sky-father, the wood nymphs and the water nymphs, chaste Diana riding the night sky and homely Vesta flickering on the hearth. But one can’t have everything, and there are always the flicks and the radio: if the new view is correct, it has very solid advantages.

We can hear the sarcasm in Lewis’s voice here: Modernity is dreary when compared to a Pagan’s enchanted reality. Nature herself, Lewis says, may even be “hitting back” at the consequences of such a view, for in “country after country comes the same story of failing harvests: even the whales have less oil.” Even if this is not the case, he says, the modern irreverent conquest over nature by humans is disastrous; it “yields new means of propaganda to enslave them, new weapons to kill them, new power for the State and new weakness for the citizen.”

But where does that leave Christianity? Lewis is building to his point. And, as always, his prose invites quotation:

It looks to me, neighbours, as though we shall have to set about becoming true Pagans if only as a preliminary to becoming Christians. … For (in a sense) all that Christianity adds to Paganism is the cure. It confirms the old belief that in this universe we are up against Living Power: that there is a real Right and that we have failed to obey it: that existence is beautiful and terrifying. It adds a wonder of which Paganism had not distinctly heard—that the Mighty One has come down to help us, to remove our guilt, to reconcile us.

Indeed, a remedy has been provided for the “deep sadness” brought onto the world by sin. The very Pagan thing we do on December 25 of “singing and feasting because a God has been born” just may be, Lewis suggests, our “way back not only to Heaven, but to Earth too.”

The second article offered joy of a different kind: a puzzle. Was it, in fact, by Lewis? There were several indications that it was. First, there was the matter of the index identifying Lewis as the author, despite there being nothing in the magazine itself that definitively confirmed that fact. (The author of the index later assured me by email of the thoroughness of her research, which, she said, had led to her attributing the piece to Lewis). Secondly, as I mentioned before, Lewis had used this pseudonym elsewhere, most notably for his poem Dymer (1926) and for his first published work, Spirits in Bondage (1919). Then, there was the Lewis-y title “Cricketer’s Progress,” an allusion to one of Lewis’s favorite books, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; Lewis had modeled his allegory The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) upon this 17th-century text. Finally, there was a quote from G. K. Chesterton appended (by the editor Reginald Pound) to the close of the piece; Chesterton was an author to whom Lewis was often compared in the 1940s.

Yet, the article itself is wholly unlike anything else Lewis ever wrote. In fact, upon my first reading I thought, “No, this isn’t his.” The most obvious difference was the subject matter: cricket. In the thousands of pages that Lewis wrote over his lifetime, there is scant coverage of sports, and the few mentions of cricket recall his frustration at being forced to play as a boy. Yet the article, subtitled “A Famous Reputation and What Became of It,” follows the career of Maurice W. Tate, a real-life, famous cricketer and contemporary of Lewis, ostensibly in order to ponder the career prospects for servicemen with the recent end of the war.

“They may conceivably turn to sport as an occupation. What are the prospects?” the writer begins. This brings me to a second point weighing against the piece being Lewis’s: the authorial voice. It is written not only about cricket but from the perspective of one who has followed the game with interest for years. It is written, in other words, in the style of a sportswriter. Take, for example, the following excerpt: “Even then, Jardine was unable to give him a Test Match chance. The body-line controversy was at its height, and it was thought impolitic to add the insult of Tate to the injury of Larwood. Yet he could still take 7 Middlesex wickets for 28, despite his being thirty-three!” This is, to all appearances, a cricket fan talking to other cricket fans. But is that reason enough to conclude Lewis did not write it? My hunch—taken together with further evidence—is that Lewis, for whatever reason, wanted to play with the sports-writing genre and so wrote this piece under a pseudonym. But these are questions for another time.

You may be wondering why these articles were not identified before. After all, at least a dozen academics have made Lewis their primary subject, and many, many more have mined his work for something new to say about the medievalist turned Christian apologist and children’s book author. There are entire journals devoted to Lewis, not to mention many fan clubs. Furthermore, as we’ve seen, The Strand was no obscure, fleeting periodical. It was a beloved British institution, whose folding in 1950 was announced by a BBC broadcaster wearing a black armband. (And, indeed, I later learned [after writing this article] that “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” was found independently by scholar Christopher Marsh in 2015 and is due to be reprinted in VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center in January 2018).

Part of the reason that I found these articles in 2013 is timing. Soon after Lewis died in 1963, his posthumous editor Walter Hooper cataloged all of the Lewis publications he could find (Lewis not keeping a record of his own). The Strand, however, wasn’t indexed until 1983, well after Lewis’s official bibliography was published. Furthermore, the majority of people who have studied Lewis have been Americans, whose libraries less frequently keep indexes of British magazines on their shelves. I, too, am an American, but my PhD was a transatlantic study, and I lived in the UK for four years in order to compensate for the kind of shortcomings a removal from one’s subject’s context can bring.

That said, I think another important reason that I found these works was that I looked where I did not expect to find. This practice proved itself over and over again while I was writing my forthcoming book, The Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America (Oxford University Press). So indulge the admonition: Glance a little beyond where you have reason to, ask the open-ended questions, find moments for agenda-free wandering. We could all do with a little more faith that such habits will return good things, in libraries and perhaps even in the rain falling beyond their doors.

Stephanie L. Derrick is the author of the forthcoming The Fame of C. S. Lewis: A Controversialist’s Reception in Britain and America (Oxford University Press), which is based on her PhD thesis in history at the University of Stirling.

President Donald Trump’s biggest religious freedom policy promise to evangelicals—repealing the Johnson Amendment—will no longer take place via Republican tax reform.

A Democratic senator announced Thursday night that the repeal included in the House version of the tax bill, which would allow churches and other nonprofits to endorse candidates without losing their tax-exempt status, was removed during the reconciliation process with the Senate version, which did not include a repeal.

According to Senator Ron Wyden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, the Johnson Amendment repeal was blocked by the Senate parliamentarian. Because of a requirement called the Byrd Rule, reconciliation bills—which are passed through a simple Senate majority—cannot contain “extraneous” provisions that don’t primarily deal with fiscal policy, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Trump made political speech by churches a major part of his president platform, and since taking office has repeatedly brought up his pledge to “totally destroy” the 1954 tax code provision named for Lyndon B. Johnson. Trump saw the Johnson Amendment as a restriction on religious groups’ free speech rights, since it prevents any nonprofit from opposing or endorsing a political candidate—therefore keeping political contributions from becoming tax-deductible.

Democrats have opposed the measure, and Wyden said he was pleased they prevented the repeal and would “continue to fight all attempts to eliminate this critical provision.”

Republican Senator James Lankford, a Southern Baptist and religious liberty advocate, criticized the move to block the measure.

“The federal government and the IRS should never have the ability, through our tax code, to limit free speech; this tax reform bill was an appropriate place to address this historic tax problem,” the Oklahoma senator said in a statement to The Hill.

“Nonprofits are allowed to lobby Congress or their local elected officials, but the ambiguity of the current tax code keeps nonprofits in constant fear that they might have crossed a line that no other organization has to consider.”

The President assured evangelicals that the Johnson Amendment was dead in his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in February and the National Day of Prayer in May, when he unveiled an executive order addressing free speech and religious liberty.

“This financial threat against the faith community is over,” Trump said. “You’re now in a position to say what you want to say. … No one should be censoring sermons or targeting pastors.”

While campaigning, he had characterized the Johnson Amendment appeal as his greatest contribution to the faith. “My greatest contribution to Christianity—and other religions—is to allow you, when you talk religious liberty, to go and speak openly, and if you like somebody or want somebody to represent you, you should have the right to do it,” he said.

Some of Trump’s top evangelical backers, including Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, championed the change as a way to keep the government from controlling what pastors could say from their own pulpits. (Pastors are already free to endorse candidates outside of their official role at a religious nonprofit.)

The amendment’s main critic, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), is confident it would not withstand judicial scrutiny, and has ironically tried to make the IRS punish pastors in order to prove it. Their effort gained an unexpected ally in the Commission on Accountability and Policy for Religious Organizations, a congressional advisory panel led by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center has been surprised how many Americans want religion back in politics—including religious nones.

But overall, most evangelical leaders—and most people in the pews—did not want to see pastors endorsing politicians. Among the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), 90 percent of its board of directors, including the leaders of major denominations and ministries, said they opposed pulpit endorsem*nts in a survey conducted earlier this year.

A LifeWay Research survey conducted during the 2016 campaign found that 73 percent of Americans with evangelical beliefs said pastors should abstain from endorsing candidates, and about 65 percent said churches overall should abstain.

“Americans already argue about politics enough outside the church,” said LifeWay executive director Scott McConnell. “They don’t want pastors bringing those arguments into worship.”

Yet fewer than half of Americans—and just 33 percent of evangelicals—want churches to be punished if they do endorse candidates.

John Inazu, a professor at Washington University School of Law, told CT earlier this year, “When it comes to challenges to religious liberty, the Johnson Amendment is just about the least important issue I can think of.”

Though the Johnson Amendment has been in place for decades, the Internal Revenue Service very rarely uses it against churches—even when pastors blatantly violate the rule. ADF rallies more than a thousand pastors a year to bring political speech into their sermons on its annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday.

The Washington Post reported this week that opponents to the repeal were concerned about rich donors using religious institutions and nonprofits as a channel “to quietly funnel money to political candidates.” The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the government would miss out on $2 million due to write-offs for such donations.

Johnnie Moore, cochairman of Trump's evangelical advisory group, thinks concerns over “dark money” flooding into churches are misguided.

“This is actually not about money at all. Those who oppose the Johnson Amendment primarily do so not because they want to endorse candidates. They oppose it because they view this as a violation of freedom of speech,” he said. “Pastors can choose not to be political at all or otherwise, and people will go to whatever church they choose.”

Moore said that while the IRS rarely if ever enforced the Johnson Amendment, the provision was still used to threaten conservative groups. “I can’t tell you how many times Liberty University was threatened during my 13 years there because of this amendment,” he said. “Every time we had a Republican candidate speak on campus, we would receive tax-exemption threats on the basis of it—despite the fact that we never endorsed a candidate institutionally and had always invited ‘the other side’ though they almost never accepted our invitations.

“Pastors ought to be able to speak openly and freely without fear or intimidation,” he said. “In America, we believe in free speech and we foster a marketplace of ideas, and the pulpits of America—liberal or conservative—should not be any less free than the street corners.”

In 2008, Indiana pastor Ron Johnson Jr. explained for CT why he participated in Pulpit Freedom Sunday, while editor in chief Mark Galli editorialized why pastors are tempted to make such endorsem*nts.

Editor’s note: This blog has been updated to clarify that relevant surveys have focused on the issue of pastors endorsing politicians, and not specifically on the Johnson Amendment itself.

When Reformed theologian and Ligonier Ministries founder R. C. Sproul was once asked what he wanted written on his tombstone, he replied cheekily, “I told you I was sick.”That was in 2015, after the esteemed teacher and author’s health declined severely following a stroke. This December, the 78-year-old was hospitalized and was forced to rely on ventilator support to breathe during his 12-day stay, due to complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). He died on Thursday.

“His tombstone wouldn’t be able to hold the words of what he’s meant to so many,” tweeted Kansas pastor Gabriel Hughes. “Well done, good and faithful servant. Now great is your reward.”

Sproul’s legacy lives on in generations of laypeople and Reformed leaders whose theology was strengthened and shaped by Ligonier, the organization he founded in 1971 to fill the gap “between Sunday school and seminary.”

Ordained in the United Presbyterian Church before transferring to the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), Sproul brought theological education to the masses through his radio show Renewing Your Mind, his ministry’s Tabletalk magazine, over 300 lecture series, 90 books, and dozens of articles.

“Through his teaching ministry, many of us learned that God is bigger than we knew, our sin is more deeply rooted than we imagined, and the grace of God in Jesus Christ is overwhelming,” wrote Ligonier in a tribute.

The global organization shares 2 million “biblical and theological resources” annually, with hundreds of thousands of students, readers, and subscribers in 105 countries.

Earlier this year, Sproul said, “There are only two ways of dying. We can die in faith or we can die in our sins.” Now that he has died, his colleagues, students, and friends have spoken up to celebrate the faith he preached and passed on.

“It is hard to overestimate his influence on gospel-resurgent evangelicalism,” wrote Russell Moore, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president.

Reformed leaders such as Owen Strachan, Shai Linne, Tony Reinke, and Albert Mohler tweeted in tribute. Strachan called him, “A giant of the faith. A theologian of God's church. A man of wit, wisdom, and conviction.”

Sproul, co-pastor at St. Andrews Chapel in Sanford, Florida, was an expert in apologetics and philosophy, having taught at Knox Theological Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary.

The Pittsburgh native attended Westminster College for its football program—not its Presbyterian affiliation. But he ended up coming to faith early in his college career through the team’s captain. He shared his testimony with CT in 2002, saying:

[The football captain] quoted Ecclesiastes 11:3: “Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there will it lie.” I just feel certain I'm the only person in church history that was converted by that verse. God just took that verse and struck my soul with it. I saw myself as a log that was rotting in the woods. And I was going nowhere.

When I left that guy's table I went up to my room. And into my room by myself, in the dark, and got on my knees and cried out to God to forgive me.

He went on to attend Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, the Free University of Amsterdam, and Whitefield Theological Seminary.

Sproul founded Ligonier as a study center outside Pittsburgh in the early 1970s. By 1973, the ministry hosted its first conference, featuring John Gerstner, J. I. Packer, John Frame, and Clark Pinnock. The Gospel Coalition reports that out of that gathering came the Ligonier Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, which grew into the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

Ligonier moved to its Orlando headquarters in the mid-1980s, where its radio, magazine, and teaching outreach continued to grow, eventually adding online resources. Out of concern for biblical orthodoxy, Ligonier commissioned groundbreaking surveys in 2014 and 2016 on the theological beliefs (and misbeliefs) of American evangelicals.

CT reviewed Sproul’s 1998 book Willing to Believe: The Controversy Over Free Will, and featured The Reformation Study Bible, for which Sproul served as general editor.

The author of Chosen By God, The Holiness of God, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith, and many other books, Sproul wrote about passing away for Tabletalk magazine in 2011, exploring the gain for a believer to die and be with Christ.

“When we close our eyes in death, we do not cease to be alive; rather, we experience a continuation of personal consciousness. No person is more conscious, more aware, and more alert than when he passes through the veil from this world into the next,” he wrote, six years before passing away in a suburban Orlando hospital.

“Far from falling asleep, we are awakened to glory in all of its significance. For the believer, death does not have the last word. Death has surrendered to the conquering power of the One who was resurrected as the firstborn of many brethren.”

Editor’s note: This post has been updated to clarify that Sproul was first ordained in the United Presbyterian Church, prior to his PCA ordination.

The church has a long history of fiddling with the Lord’s Prayer and debating the right wording.

Scripture itself isn’t unified on the wording. The Bible gives us two versions of the prayer—often referred to as the Our Father—one from Matthew’s gospel (Matt. 6:9–13) and one from Luke’s gospel (Luke 11:2–4).

Additionally, today we often forget that the last two lines (“for thine is the kingdom…”) aren’t from Scripture but were added later by well-intentioned churchmen who felt that ending with sin didn’t tell the whole story.

Then there’s the question of translations and traditions. If Matthew’s wording probably borrows a term that refers to financial debts in the original Greek, is it okay that many traditions say “trespasses”?

Pope Francis recently waded into the wording of the Lord’s Prayer by supporting a decision by the French Catholic church to change the wording of a line in the French translation of the prayer.

In an interview last week, Francis agreed that the new wording adopted by the French Catholic church was theologically clearer, suggesting that the previous version was not a “good translation.”

The phrase, “Ne nous soumets pas à la tentation” (roughly “Don’t subject us to temptation”) was updated this Sunday to be “Ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation” (meaning “Don’t let us go into temptation.”) In English, the phrase is traditionally rendered “lead us not into temptation.” The concern for the French church and the pope is that the wording may suggest that God causes people to sin.

“It’s not about letting me fall into temptation. It’s I, the one who falls, not Him pushing me toward temptation, so as to then see how I fall,” Francis said, in an Italian interview with TV2000, a television channel owned by Italy’s conference of bishops. “No, well, a father won’t do that. A father will immediately help you pick yourself up. Satan’s the one leading you into temptation. That’s Satan’s task.”

The Lord’s Prayer is a deeply loved and familiar invocation memorized and recited by millions of Christians around the globe every week. The Roman Catholic Church considers it a brief paraphrase of the whole gospel, and for centuries theologians of various traditions have insisted that the way the church prays indicates what the church believes (“Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi”). So, it’s important to get the wording right.

But is this change a good one? We asked a group of experts for their take on this change:

“I think that the pope is correct in his concern about the way the English translation can be misconstrued. (Of course, this is not the only place it can be misunderstood by those who recite it without understanding it. As I recall, they still prayed this prayer in public schools when I was little, and I wondered what it meant to make a name ‘hollow.’) The most likely sense is for God to protect us from succumbing to testing (as is clear in the parallel text in Matthew 26), and in Matthew it is parallel to deliverance from the evil one. The liturgical problem would be that people accustomed to praying the prayer a particular way might not adapt well to the change in wording. But whether they change the wording or not, the public raising of the question will help people have a better understanding of what they mean—or should mean—when they pray this prayer.”~Craig S. Keener, professor of biblical studies, Asbury Theological Seminary

“It's very common for Bible teachers to note possible misunderstandings in the course of explaining a passage of Scripture. When I read the pope’s comments, I thought, ‘Yes, that’s exactly what a Bible teacher should do: ward off theologically and pastorally harmful misinterpretations.’ Furthermore, the pope’s perspective could be supported with an appeal to James 1:13: ‘No one, when tempted, should say, “I am being tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one’ (NRSV). On the other hand, there would seem to me to be less invasive ways to avoid the problem than what this new French translation does. The 1988 version from the ecumenical English Language Liturgical Consultation, for example, renders it more word-for-word literally as, “Save us from the time of trial.” Surely there's a similar middle way possible in French?”~Wesley Hill, assistant professor of biblical studies, Trinity School for Ministry

“The expression ‘do not lead us into temptation’ could suggest God might do this. Others texts say he never does (James 1:13–15). The rhetorical point of the request is the disciple knows that if one is to be protected from sin and temptation, God must take us there. So the sense of the request is very much ‘protect us from temptation.’ It is expressed negatively to make the point. It expresses a dependence of disciples on God for every area of life while recognizing who he is and affirming a desire for his will to take place. Interestingly we call it the Lord’s Prayer as it comes from the Lord, but it really is the Disciples’ Prayer, a prayer from Jesus we are to pray for each other. (Note all the plurals showing it is not a private prayer only but what we pray as a group for each other). I would prefer a rendering that says ‘protect us from temptation.’ The second part of the request is deliver us from the evil one, a point that underscores the protection idea. The one problem with ‘let us not fall into temptation’ is it suggests God is reacting to us. In fact, the request is the opposite. It is a request from the disciple to be responsive to God, recognize the need to be responsive, and ask him for a leading that does not take the believer into temptation, thus for protection that the disciples recognize God must do in order for things to go well.”~Darrell L. Bock, executive director of cultural engagement and senior research professor of New Testament studies, Dallas Theological Seminary

“This is newsworthy, in one sense, because it’s the pope trying to make changes to the tradition in yet another area, which will cause all the usual flutters (as indeed it already has). But in another sense, it’s as old as the hills. A member of my church made the exact same point about that line in the Lord’s Prayer a month ago: What Jesus actually said (‘lead us not’) is different from what he should have said (‘don't let us fall’). Personally, I think we should translate texts accurately and leave the strangeness as it is, although I can see why people and pastors (and popes) want to tidy it up. As to the meaning of the original, though, it’s pretty clear. I’m going to stick with ‘lead us not …’”~Andrew Wilson, teaching pastor at King’s Church London

“It is important at times for readers of the Bible to struggle with the same, often intentional, ambiguities found in the original text. Further, the notion that we can change the wording to fit the meaning that we find somewhere else might actually be doing a disservice to the biblical authors’ intentions. The Bible is full of paradoxes, figurative language, jolting imagery. To simplify and pacify such language cuts off the legs of its literary and even spiritual power. Pope Francis’ translation (‘do not let us fall into temptation’), however, subverts all this. The original text speaks clearly of God leading, not permitting. To tamper with the wording misses the connection with the Lord’s temptation. Matthew 4:1 compared with 6:13 reveals some fascinating parallels and major differences: Whereas the Spirit led Jesus to be tempted, Jesus asks the Father not to lead his disciples into temptation; whereas Jesus was delivered over to Satan for tempting (testing from the Father’s perspective), Jesus prays that his followers will be delivered from the evil one. It is precisely because of Jesus’ vicarious death and life that Christians can recite this prayer today with the full assurance that God will answer us.”~Daniel B. Wallace, executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts and senior research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary

Editor’s Note: These remarks have been edited for length and clarity.

Further discussion about this topic from Dr. Wallace can be found on his blog.