Doubt seems to be the pervasive doctrine of the young “evangelicals,” many who self-identify as emergent. As appropriated by this group, doubt is probably better described as a virtue, because to have doubt means not having answers, and not having answers means not being right (or wrong). By not being right about anything means we can continue to converse about the questions and develop relationships around the common ally of curiosity. Doubt should be a welcome guest in the life of faith, but doubt should not be a permanent disposition.

I Doubt, Therefore I Am
Over the weekend, Jay Bakker (son of Jim and the late Tammy Faye Bakker & gay-affirming pastor) appeared on CNN discussing the latest Pew Research report on belief in God. According to their 2012 findings, 68% of Millennials indicate they never doubt the existence of God while only 5 years ago that number was 76%.

Early in the interview, host Don Lemon posed the challenge “If God exists, prove it.” The point of the question was to elevate the reasonableness of doubt because if God can not be empirically verified then unbelief or doubt is rational. The question felt like someone knocked the wind out of me. Certainly Lemon wasn’t suggesting that our knowledge of God starts with us? Skepticism is not the result of investigation but the ultimate assumption, so its no surprise special revelation serves as no answer to the dilemma of knowledge of God. No wonder so much doubt prevails among the Millennial age group.

After catching my breath, Lemon continued his conversation with Jay Bakker, venturing into some areas even Lemon could not avoid describing as subversive. Bakker stated that even on the cross, Jesus doubted–”Christ was an atheist.”

I lost my capacity to breathe again. God didn’t believe in God (as Bakker put it). And this is based on what?

“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46 ESV)

In paying the penalty for our sin, Jesus had to be be separated from the favor of and fellowship with the Father that was eternally his. In quoting Ps. 22:1 Jesus probably had in mind the remaining passages of the psalm which moves on to a cry of victory. He may have quoted a question, but the doubt and unbelief attributed to Christ is nonexistent as he expresses belief quite clearly with the words “my God.” He knows why he must die–the ultimate purpose of the incarnation. In his cries he is not expressing confusion over the purposes of God the Father, but a message to those who are watching, that being forsaken was for the salvation of others. We can’t wrap our mind around this fully, what it was like for God the Son to experience a form of separation from God the Father, but to justify human doubt and unbelief on the basis of theistic-atheism is nothing short of tragic.

Bakker quoted Paul Tillich in the interview, asserting that doubt is not the opposite of faith but an element of it–a topic I will take up in a forthcoming post. Certainly doubt is a part of our journey in the faith and is something that each of us experience to varying degrees. But let’s not ordain doubt as the shepherd of our thoughts and allow it to lead us away from the possibility of knowing the God who has made himself plainly knowable. We need to challenge the distortion that somehow doubt is a neutral assessment. Doubt is not always innocent. It is often the starting point intended to challenge the truths that have already been revealed and redefine the gospel that fails the expectations of doubt.

On my book shelves are collections of great writings from early and contemporary Reformed theologians, books on women’s ministry, great biblical expositions, bioethics texts….and then there are the feminist writers. These are books I studied while in seminary, primarily for the purpose of completing my master’s thesis, though eventually I chose a different topic related to bioethics and presuppositional apologetics. (I feel like I have to explain why I have them!) But last week I decided to see if I could learn something about come present conversations from the writings of some of these clearly liberal feminist thinkers. Enter Carter Heyward.

At the time her book “Saving Jesus from Those Who are Right” (SJTWR) was published, Carter Heyward was a professor of theology at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1974, she was one of 11 women whose ordinations eventually paved the way for the recognition of women as priests in the Episcopal Church in 1976 ( “The Women Priests”. Time Magazine. August 26, 1974). She retired in 2006.

Aspects of her writing strike in me an odd familiarity:

“In this study, I am especially attentive to the theological claims of ‘those who are right’ and to presenting an alternative way of thinking about what it means to be a Christian” (p 1).

“…Christians who are right often imagine that Jesus is an authoritarian Lord…In this book, I offer alternative images…I suggest that mutuality, passion, compassion, and forgiveness are more genuinely moral relational possibilities for our life together” (p 1).

“We are drawn selectively to certain images and stories of Jesus (and ourselves) on the basis of our cultures and communities, faith journeys, personal needs, and political commitments. The Jesus images in this book reflect such a selective process” (p 3-4).

But do I assume that “my” Jesus is the only true Jesus? I do not make such a claim…I can only tell you what I believe and am thinking about Jesus these days and invite you to think with me” (p 4)

Throughout her writings, it becomes clear that she has a view of God and scripture that doesn’t exactly cohere with a historical-grammatical reading of the Bible. In her work, God is defined as our power in mutual relation. In SJTWR, Heyward writes

Lifting Jesus up above us, giving him authority over us that he didn’t ask for and cannot bear, we miss the point of his life, of our lives and of the life of God.

Am I denying the divinity of Jesus? No I am denying the singularity of his status as Son of God. I am affirming the presence of divinity in him and moving through him…I have no doubt that you and I are as much God’s daughters and sons as Jesus was and, moreover, that this has been true not only human beings but of other creatures too, from the beginning.

Clearly problematic is her conception of God’s nature and being. Heyward may believe she retains Jesus’ divinity in her theological framework, but by elevating fallen humanity and “other creatures” to equality with Jesus when she writes “you and I are as much…as Jesus was…” we have a significant problem. You can’t escape Heywards problem with authority through the pages of SJTWR and that it serves as the basis for undermining the authority of scripture and the status of the second person of the Trinity.

My interest was especially piqued in terms of the influence of theological feminism in evangelical circles when I stumbled upon this in SJTWR:

We must give authority to our experiences as relational beings who share this planet as home. It is hard for most Christian readers to take human experience seriously as sacred source because our religious tradition has promulgated a strange notion that God and Jesus Christ are “above” or otherwise “outside” of human experience, life, history. We have learned that God and Jesus Christ have spiritual authority “over” us, as if they are Persons to whom we must look not only “outside” our bodyselves but over and against us in order to know what is right or wrong and even to know what or who we are. For us to be in right relation to such a God or His Son is to put our experiences, our lives and history, under His rule and will, subject to His authority.

For this reason, “good Christians” in general and good Christian women in particular have not on the whole experienced our bodyselves as bearing our own spiritual truths. Yet we do bear our own spiritual truths to the extent that our spiritualities are truly of the God whom Jesus loved. (SJTWR, p 34)

So what exactly does this mean? This implications are serious. Spiritual authority of God and Jesus over humanity in general is problemantic the Heywards pardigm given that spiritual authority resides at least in equal proportion to the authority of God or Jesus, and she continues “good Christian women in particular” have been deprived “considerable spiritual authority.”

If you were to continue reading, Heyward disputes the notion that sacred truth is universally applicable, “as if theology can be carried around and imposed on others, irrespective of their embodied cultures, experiences, lives, and histories…” She says this is “intellectual arrogance and theological stupidity.” It does not matter whether you are a Christian, atheist, “prince nor homeless mother,”

None of us…knows what is absolutely true about him or herself, much less about God, Jesus, or the rest of us. There is a way to know and love ourselves, the world, and God: We can truly know only that which we are not afraid to love, and we can truly love only that which we are not afraid to see. Only in relation to one another can we know and love what is true. (emphasis hers) (SJTWR, p 35)

The Body of Christ cannot fulfill its gospel-centered mission to make disciples if God’s authority is challenged by the authority of human experience, if truth isn’t universally applicable, and if we can make no claims to knowledge about God or anything else. Without knowledge, human existence is hampered, and in this case, its hampered by an epistemological generosity that wants to embrace its own selectivity while encouraging the same in others. The desire to ‘save Jesus from those who are right’ is a mission that continues within the boundaries of evangelicalism and at some point someone needs to step up under the authority of scripture and say no more. Saving Jesus from those who are right means, for Heyward and others of a similar mindset, that no one is right…or at least we simply cannot know. This is not a faith that can be lived out in any meaningful sense. It is a faith that’s a fraud.

Gayle recently spoke with Timothy S. Goeglein, author of The Man in the Middle: An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era.  Mr. Goeglein was a Special Assistant to the President and the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison.

Gayle Trotter: This is Gayle Trotter, and today I’m speaking with Timothy Goeglein, former Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison under President George W. Bush and author of The Man in the Middle. Thank you for talking with me today, Tim.

Timothy Goeglein: Thank you so much, Gayle. It’s great to be with you.

GT: How much courage does it take to write a book after being publicly exposed as a plagiarizer?

TG: Because I showed no courage initially and did the wrong thing, I think it was very important and could potentially be a contribution to do the right thing. I came to see that there are a host of biographies and histories which are done by people who have worked at very senior positions in the White House. They’re all important, simply because of who they were during those years. But I came to see, Gayle, that there was another genre of biographies and histories. These were written not by the senior-most people, but they were written by people who were a little bit more removed from power. And I want to be very clear that I was not a senior-most person, and I was not a confidant of the president. But I came to see this genre as very important. I did not set out to write a biography or a history. It is a memoir. It’s a series of snapshots of the president. And to go to the heart of your question, I wanted to write a book that really evoked the character of George W. Bush. And I thought that one of the ways that I could evoke the character of the president, from a very personal and firsthand account, was to show the grace and mercy that he extended to me at the absolute nadir of my life. And I begin the memoir in that regard.

GT: How did President Bush treat you after the story broke?

TG: I think it is fair to say that in my life I have never known that kind of grace or mercy personified. Because in the political classes, when you embarrass the president or the senator or the congressman, there is a kind of divorce that takes place. You are persona non grata, and you are cut off. And I fully expected that would be my fate. When I resigned from my position and I drove home, I felt my world had caved in, and I was certain that that was the end of the end. When I came back to the White House on Monday to begin clearing out my desk and taking the pictures off the wall, I heard those words that nobody in the White House ever wants to hear from the chief of staff, which is, “The boss wants to see you.” I went to see the president, and he looked me in the eyes after I could barely get an apology out, and he said, “Tim, I forgive you.” I was really shocked, and I tried a second time to apologize for what I had done. He said to me, “I’ve known grace and mercy in my life, and I’m extending it to you. You’re forgiven.” I said to the president, “You should have taken me by the lapels and tossed me onto Pennsylvania Avenue for what I have done.” He said to me, “I forgive you. You’re forgiven. Grace and mercy are real. Now, we can talk about all this, or we can talk about the last eight years.” We prayed together. We embraced. As I prepared to leave the Oval Office, he turned to me, and he said, “And, by the way, I want you to bring your wife and children here, so I can tell them what a great husband and father you’ve been.” Now that kind of validation by the leader of the free world, before my wife and children, I think is…

In the whole of the American presidency, I’m sure there are great acts of mercy and grace on a personal level from other presidents. I don’t doubt that. But I can honestly say that in my life and in the nature of what I was doing for the president, it was pretty spectacular.

GT: What chair did he seat you in while you talked?

TG: This was the amazing point because after we had our initial exchange, he suggested that we should talk about the last eight years which I was eager to do, quite honestly, after two hard-fought presidential elections and the work that we did together. So I went to go sit on one of the White House couches and instead, he signaled me to sit in the place of honor which is where the vice president or the visiting head of state sits, in front of the fireplace and below the portrait of George Washington. It was all surreal. But this was again an act of what I consider to be a president who was really — was and is — a great-souled man. This, again, speaks to his character and his integrity, but above all to his Christianity. To him, grace and mercy and forgiveness are real, and he was extending it to me.

GT: How did you pick up the pieces of your professional and personal life after this incident?

TG: I will confess to you from a spirit of humility that I don’t think that I did anything and that God himself took a very poor, miserable sinner, who had been given one of the most spectacular professional opportunities of a lifetime and I believe that I owe, really, God all the glory and the thanks for what he did. I recount in the book that I really felt that I had embarrassed the president, embarrassed my wife and children, embarrassed all my White House colleagues, my mentors, my friends, et cetera. And I describe my life as a house of cards that just fell in. That was really the case. This was a mental and physical, but above all, a spiritual anguish of a very deep order. Just when you think you’re at the end of your rope, Christ is there to help you. Where I would need to spend another one hundred years internalizing it, he used people as instruments of his grace to minister to me and to help me. And I owe so much to so many people that it would be impossible to begin starting naming names. But I’m very eager not to take any of the credit — and I know that’s not what you’re asking me — but I’m very eager not to give a Horatio Alger story, although I have great regard for Horatio Alger, but in my life I really give the praise to Jesus Christ because I look back and I see how he used different people to point me back spiritually and to point me back personally and to point me back professionally. Now these are very good days.

GT: What was your primary responsibility in the Bush White House?

TG: I had a very long title which means I had no influence. I was Special Assistant to the President and the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison. When Karl Rove, who did the forward to this book, offered me this job, I said, “Can you translate that into the English language?” He said, “You will be the man in the middle.” Therefore that’s the name of my memoir. The man in the middle which was that I would be the president’s point man for all of my fellow Christians and conservatives. And I was; I was the president’s outreach man for nearly eight years with those very key constituencies. I also was the outreach person for all the veterans, for the think tanks and public policy groups and probably a quarter to a third of what most people would say are some of the most important cultural institutions in the country.

GT: How would you define conservatism?

TG: This is one of the principal reasons I wrote the book because I have a whole chapter on conservatism. And I do so because there have been these very important debates, and many of them have been very serious debates over many years, about what is conservatism. And what I say in the book is that conservatism is not a political program. Conservatism has a political avenue, and on that political avenue is a smaller, limited government, low taxes, less regulations, a strong national defense and what most people would say are a defense of traditional values, which spring from the Judeo-Christian tradition. So I think that elementally, that’s a pretty good working definition of 21^st century political conservatism. But I argue in the book, Gayle, that conservatism is not, above all, an ideology. It is a way of life. And I believe that while politics is very important and in fact does have consequences, I believe that culture is really preeminent.  Richard Weaver famously said, “Ideas have consequences.” Bill Buckley many years later famously said, “And only ideas have consequences.” I believe that conservatism is a way of life. It defends an enduring, moral order which it believes to be true and above all conservatism, rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition, rooted in orthodoxy, believes that some traditions are worth defending, and it says other traditions are not worth defending. But that justice is always the point of it all. And for me, as a Christian and a conservative, I find it a very good way to live.

GT: You identify yourself as a strong conservative, but you support and defend Bush’s decidedly not conservative programs and positions like PEPFAR, prescription drug entitlements, federal funding for stem cell research and limits to pure political speech. Can you explain that?

TG: The answer is that in my book, I choose to defend some of the things that you mentioned, and I choose to defend them very strongly. But in my book, I choose not to defend other things. I recognize that when you go to work for a U.S. president, nobody elects you to anything. At least whatever percentage or numbers of people do elect him to the highest office in the country. What I say in the book is that there are all kinds of issues, some of which you mentioned, which I believe rightfully conservatives will be debating from now until kingdom come. So I do not choose to spend a lot of time in this book on some of those issues, but on some of them I do. I have a very large part of the book on the faith-based office. A lot of conservatives disagreed with that office, and a number of them agreed with it. So what I choose to do in the book is to look at the achievements that I think are conservative achievements. I defend the war for national security purposes, and I say that George W. Bush’s greatest achievement is that we were never attacked again in the seven years after what Charles Krauthammer has called the Pearl Harbor of our generation, 9/11. I choose his nomination and confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts and Sam Alito and 35 percent of all sitting federal judges. I also say that he is without peer in the contemporary presidency the most pro-life, pro-family, pro-marriage, pro-religious liberty, pro-individual conscience president, and I think those things really count. And I have a very large chapter on stem-cell research and I have a very large chapter on the pro-life movement. So I want to be careful about this because there are a number of things in the book that I do not write about, that as a conservative and as a Reaganite — and that’s where I come from, politically — but I choose not to write about certain things, but to emphasize other things because I think in many ways they’ve been forgotten or overlooked.

GT: You wrote in the book, “Too often conservatism has been silent on culture, ceding it to the left and others.” How would you like to see conservatives re-engage the culture?

TG: This is really the heart of one part of this book because I believe that civilization and culture really matter. And that a hundred years from now, when big historical judgments are made about a country that’s soon going to be four hundred years old, ultimately you make these decisions, rooted in the question of: What is the purpose of a government? The purpose is justice. How did the government advance justice? That’s very important, and I concede that. The most important job that a government plays — it’s why God constituted government. But I also believe very strongly that we should be judged and deserve to be judged on the relative health and contribution and excellence of our culture, and I believe that too often conservatives have ceded the culture leadership of America to the left. I don’t know how intentional we have been about advancing the beautiful, the true and the just. That those ought to be the narrative of excellent music, excellent sculpture, excellent architecture, excellent painting, excellent poetry, the heart of what it means to be an educated man or woman. What kind of a literature did we leave? Are we morally imaginative? Burke has this great phrase about the unbought grace of life. That to me is a very Anglo-American view. How are we integrating the great Judeo-Christian inheritance that we have in the whole of American life? In my view, these are only at one level governmental questions. I think they are predominantly cultural questions.

GT: What were your thoughts as you watched President Bush kneel at the casket of Pope John Paul II?

TG: I was in Rome with the president, and I was very deeply moved. I believe that George W. Bush is an evangelical, but with a Catholic sensibility. He really connected with Pope John Paul II, although — and I probably should have fleshed this out more in the book — I believe that before he ever met Pope John Paul II, that it was the influence and the impact of John Paul II’s culture of life narrative that really fired the imagination of George W. Bush. So to be in Rome with the president was very important — it was the first Papal funeral any president has ever been to. So I was very deeply moved by that because I knew by that point that the two men had met three times, the president had conferred the Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian honor that the president can bestow, upon John Paul II. The answer is that it was very humbling.

GT: You have some harsh words for the culture of Washington, including, “The emphasis on the professional is the thing in Washington,” and, “The supreme satisfaction of such professional success can be a subterfuge for the things in life that really matter.” Do you think that Washington is beyond hope?

TG: No, I don’t. In fact, I believe that Washington is not beyond hope. I think America is not beyond hope. So often there are these recurring conversations about decline. I am not a declinist. I think decline is a choice, and I think incline is a choice. So when these conversations of decline begin, I always say, “Count me out.” No, Washington is not beyond hope, but we have a generation of young Americans — and Washington is full of young, bright, smart Americans — they’ve lived through a historic brokenness. The divorce levels in America are too high. The illegitimacy levels in America are too high. George W. Bush once called the nuclear family the “unseen pillar of civilization.” I like that phrase very much. Because I believe that if you want a healthy, flourishing, confident country, you have to have healthy, flourishing, confident families. I believe that in an era when so many young people are flooding into Washington, they’ve come from this broken sociology that very often, in their own backgrounds, they don’t get up in the morning and naturally say, “My real goal is to be married, to have a family, and to raise them in and around Washington.” That’s not what they say. Often. Some do, many do — I’ve talked to many of them.

GT: We’re unusual.

TG: I spend a lot of time around young people because I like young people very much. So I am very hopeful and I’m very hopeful for this reason, because when you actually talk to young Americans in Washington who are in their twenties, and I’ve done it a lot, and I understand that anecdotes are not statistics, as they say — what I have found is that they tell me that they enjoy spending lots of time with their family. They tell me they want to be married, but many of them have lived through a difficult circumstance. And they’re a little cautious because they want to get it right. They want to be married, but they want it to be the right person. And so I think they’re putting off marriage longer perhaps than their parents or grandparents or even great-grandparents did. So I’m hesitant, as I was in the book, to make a large pronouncement about one generation. But I do think that in Washington very often career becomes the center, and family does not. I think that that’s something to be cautious about.

GT: You wrote in your book that, “ I missed a lot of key moments in the White House years because of my job. Was the sacrifice worth it?” That ties in to what you were just saying. How would you answer that question today?

TG: I have just celebrated, with my wonderful wife who is my best friend, twenty years of marriage.

GT: Congratulations.

TG: All of it has been in Washington D.C. We were married in the Midwest but have lived here our entire married life. The reason I wrote that, Gayle, is because we have had to be intentional. And I’m very careful in the book to not espouse advice or judgment on or for other people. It’s not that I don’t think there is right and wrong or that there is a good way to do things in life, but I wanted to be very cautious about being Solomonic on anything but especially this question. The answer is that when you work in the White House, whether you’re the most junior staffer or you’re the chief of staff, you’re going to miss things with your spouse if you’re married, and you’re going to miss things with your kids if you have them. Our boys were very young at the time. So the answer is I did miss things. I naturally regret that. But I also can say, as I say in the book, that the president, from the very beginning of the administration, wanted us to put families first. He found, and Mrs. Bush found, all kinds of reasons to have the family at the White House which we did many times as a family. And also, unless I absolutely had to be there for an evening event or somewhere else, on the road or in Washington, I was home. My wife and I made that decision because that was a good decision for us at the time.

GT: In what way did religion most influence Bush’s presidency?

TG: I love that question because even before there was a Bush presidency, he was in a famous debate in Iowa, and all of the candidates were asked who their favorite philosopher was and he said, “Jesus Christ because he changed my life.”

GT: And was ridiculed for that response.

TG: He was. He was indeed. And I, as I say in the book, I had this very strong sense that this is a man who meant what he said and he said what he meant. So before the Bush administration ever commenced, I knew who I was working for. And, of course, when the administration commenced, I was working for a peace and prosperity president. And if you read the first inaugural, as I have many times, that’s the sense of where we’re going. Less than a year later, it was a war presidency. For all of the tumultuous changes in the country, in the organization of the agencies, in the organization of the federal government, not since World War II have we had such a big change in the organizational structure of the federal government as we did in the Bush administration as a result of 9/11. Through all of that, through the best and through the most impossibly difficult days, I saw a continuity in George W. Bush and the continuity, I feel very confident in saying, was rooted in his Christianity. That was the source of his confidence. That was the source of his hope and his faith and his trust. And I think it’s the same in the post-Bush presidency. There’s been a remarkable statement of humility by not feeling like he has to comment on all or most of the happenings of the day. I find that refreshing.

GT: Who do you think would be a better president for the United States — a politically conservative Hindu or a liberal Christian?

TG: I am very confident that the founders made the right decision when they said there should be no religious test for high office in the country. As a Lutheran I can say that Luther famously once said that he would rather be ruled by a Turk or a Muslim than he would by an incompetent Christian. My view is that we are looking for competence in the highest office in the country. And that it’s okay in America — in fact it’s constitutionally protected — that if you wish to have a view on a candidate or a president rooted in your religious belief, you may do that. That to me is a healthy and a good thing. I was fortunate in working for President Bush, that I worked for a man who shared my faith. And for me, that was extremely important. But I believe that as we go forward in America, we are probably going to have Christians who are presidents, and it’s possible that we will have someone from another faith tradition. This is not new in American politics. When Taft was running for the presidency as a Unitarian, he understood that as a Unitarian, he was running in a country and a culture that was very different than Unitarianism. Of course, John Adams was the same. In 1928, when Al Smith ran for the nomination as a Catholic, yes, he was a Christian, but he also understood that in the long life of American history we had never elected a Catholic president, and it was the same for John Kennedy.

GT: How did your friendship with Bill Buckley of National Review affect you?

TG: I write in the book a chapter called, “Fortunate Friendships” because the two friendships of my lifetime that shaped me most in the way that I view life from the standpoint of being rooted in ideas were the friendships that I developed with Russell Kirk, which was largely a friendship by letters, although we saw each other at least once a year in Washington when he was here in the latter part of his life, but most expressly by Bill Buckley. Our friendship began, as I say in the book, in a way I think neither of us could have predicted. But I came to see in Bill somebody who loved and valued the first principles: faith, family, freedom. Those were really central to who Bill was. He was a conservative second. In a way, as different as Russell Kirk and Bill Buckley were, they had that in common. And it goes back to the question that you asked me about conservatism. Yes, it has a political expression, and certainly Russell and Bill believed that, but there’s something in their lives as conservatives that preceded politics, and that was what I was getting at in my chapter on my friendship with Bill Buckley.

GT: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today about these compelling issues, Tim.

TG: Thank you, Gayle, I appreciate it very much, and I hope everybody will read “The Man in the Middle.”

I have to admit, I was very intrigued by the idea of an evangelical feminist woman living out a year of biblical womanhood even as just a thought experiment. But what Rachel Held Evans has done is not that.This could have been an opportunity to discover and experience some aspects of complementarianism not otherwise understood. Her experiment, however, was little more than a piecemeal approach. As I understand it, she didn’t not live the year consistently (as in every waking moment) with this as her newly adopted (though temporary) view of women’s roles. Not only did she not live it consistently, she added practices that don’t belong (camping out in her front yard, for example). She was not faithful to biblical womanhood as taught by its adherents.
Evans’ Year of Biblical Womanhood has actually been a year of an erroneous hermeneutic resulting in misrepresentation to the church and the public at large of what biblical womanhood actually looks like. She expanded on the literal approach of scripture practiced by complementarians by flattening scripture such that systematic theology is of no consequence. An initial statement at the front end of her post titled A Year of Biblical Womanhood is evidence enough of this.

On October 1, 2010, I committed one year of my life to following all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible—from the Old Testament to the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, from the Levitical purity codes to the letters of Paul.

The problem with this is that no evangelical expression of biblical womanhood demands women follow “all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible”–at least in terms of how she is using the term “literally.” This has nothing to do with any arbitrary decision–the “pick and choose” methodology–by complementarianism as she asserts on her website.  This is a hermeneutical matter that Evans has failed to devote any serious time to. In her post, Complementarians Are Selective Too,  she argues that proponents of the biblical womanhood model are sacrificing scripture’s meaning by picking an choosing in order preserve patriarchy. To be fair, she suggests egalitarians are also guilty of picking and choosing to make their case as well, but egalitarianism isn’t the target of contempt with her Year of Biblical Womanhood project.

Evans has failed to properly represent the teachings of biblical womanhood in what she has so for divulged of her one year experiment. If it is the case, in fact, that her issue is with the way complementarians handle scripture, she ought to have written a series of posts simply dealing with the hermeneutical problem she identifies, showing how proponents of biblical womanhood err in their literal handling of the biblical text.  Here, she might have shown systematic theology to work to her benefit while engaging the systematic theology foundational to the biblical womanhood model. But this requires a lot more work and doesn’t yield as many winsome blog posts. Instead, she created a straw woman by packaging together every biblical command having to do with women (whether it has anything to do with the theological structure of biblical womanhood), leaving readers with the impression that biblical womanhood demands the observance of Levitical purity laws among other practices.

An apology is owed to the evangelical community for an unfair representation of a view that can be argued from the biblical text in both scholarly and generous manner for all sides. But  now that our culture has been provided a skewed view of biblical womanhood from the inside,  they have no reason to work any harder to move beyond their present perceptions. At the end of Evans’ post on her Year of Biblical Womanhood, she writes

My purpose in embarking on this project is not to belittle or make fun of the Bible, nor is it to glorify its patriarchal elements. It is simply to start a conversation about how we interpret and apply the Bible to our lives.

A conversation has certainly been started. It would be nice, however, if we were all talking about the same thing.

If you’re unfamiliar with her work, Rita Charon is Professor of Clinical Medicine and founding Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. A general internist, she earned a Ph.D. in English when she realized the centrality of stories in medical practice. She directs the Narrative Medicine curriculum for Columbia’s medical school and teaches literature, narrative ethics, and life-telling (more info).

Charon is also the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. In it, she describes the narrative approach to health care and its relationship to bioethics.

“Those who assist individual patients to navigate the moral channels of illness have discovered that training in health law and knowledge of moral principles do not suffice to fulfill ethical duties toward the sick…they also must equip themselves with sophisticated skills in absorbing and interpreting complex narratives of illness—the better to hear their patients, to accompany them on their journeys, and to assist them in making health care choices consonant with their values [emphasis mine]. Echoing its transformative force in other disciplines and professions, narrative practice has renewed and redefined the very enterprise of what used to be called bioethics.”[1]

The goal of narrative ethics is a noble one—to create an environment conducive to showing value to the patient and patient’s family by listening to and honoring their story of illness. In agreement, Charon appeals to the thought of a bioethicist whose work[2] I am intimately familiar with, H. Tristram Engelhardt,

“When health care professionals and patients meet as strangers … disclosures and safeguards must frequently be explicit and often detailed. … [O]ne needs a disinterested application of the rules to protect against misunderstandings and to guard against abuses of power.”[3]

Like Charon, Engelhardt holds that rules simply complicate things when the task is to be more focused on “accompany[ing] them on their journeys.” The communication of moral principles apparently shortens this excursion.

We can have a qualified agreement with Charon that “moral principles do not suffice to fulfill ethical duties toward the sick” because this work should encompass a ministerial component obvious to so many of us engaged in theological ethics. We should listen, we should discuss, but eventually we do need to advise and this involves the communication of moral principles as understood through scripture. As Christians with particular theological commitments, no good reason exists to avoid sharing ethical principles derivative of our theology in answering difficult life and death questions.

What is it then that narrative ethics is really proposing? This we need to ask because as a system, narrative ethics doesn’t fully resist principles. Rather, it insists that the principles that matter are ultimately those that line up with the values of the patient, and it is through discourse that those values are discovered. In other words, the task of the doctor, nurse, pastor, bioethicist, or family friend practicing narrative ethics does not involve bringing a normative moral framework into the discourse as a way that advises the individual, couple or family toward a decision. For Charon and Engelhardt, the pluralistic context rejects such a proposal, but within the context of Christianity, the communication of moral norms should not be problematic. We have been given the tools to minister to the whole person.

At CT’s Her.meneutics blog, the floodgates on this topic have opened wide, pouring forth the narrative ethic position of Ellen Painter Dollar. To give you a bit of background on Dollar, she is a “Christian woman with a genetic disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta (OI).”[4] This is a condition that causes extremely fragile bones. Because Dollar’s OI is caused by a defect in a gene, she and her husband opted for IVF and PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) in an effort to conceive children without OI. PGD is the process of sorting “good” embryos from the “bad” embryos, leading ultimately to the destruction of the “bad” ones. But for them, this was a morally legitimate option because they were aware of the chances of genetic transmission—their first child is also afflicted with OI.

“After one failed PGD cycle, we decided to conceive our second child, and eventually a third, the old-fashioned way. Neither our second daughter nor our son inherited OI.”[5]

Dollar is an advocate of “narrative ethics” because of what she sees as the limitations of an approach she believes if focused exclusively on principles, a straw man she has created. She has been writing on reproductive technology for awhile, emphasizing this narrative ethic approach and even citing Rita Charon as someone who shares her belief that stories matter significantly in ethical discourse.[6]  At Her.meneutics, Dollar wrote,

“Traditional ethics uses a juridical process, in which experts consider the moral questions raised by a situation, explore those questions using established ethical principles, and render a judgment based on which principles are most applicable. Narrative ethics is less cut-and-dried. It allows room for amateurs to weigh and discuss the complexities of a particular person’s story, acknowledging that such factors as the person’s intentions and past experience are relevant.”

Not only has she created a false distinction between “traditional” ethics and the narrative approach, but she says that “traditional” ethics is too complicated for the “amateurs.” What she means by “traditional” ethics is what she perceives to be a cold-hearted principlism that never reaches into the life of the person entertaining the moral dilemma, whatever it may be. Moral imperialism, perhaps. What she is ignoring is that Christian ethics can be informed by scripture in both the content and method of delivery (because doing good theology isn’t just about moral correctness, but ministry to the whole person which involves listening). This, however, doesn’t preclude the responsibility to, when the situation demands, simply state that some of our moral choices are completely misguided and morally unadvisable.

In the comments on her piece at Her.meneutics, she indicates that taking a position on the moral status of the embryo is a “deliberate omission.” She says “But the moral status of embryos is, for me, not the central issue with reproductive technology, and I’ve observed that a focus on this one issue often blinds people to other concerns that are equally or more troubling.” Apart from the fact that this is an excellent point—that there are other troubling issues related to reproductive technology, it is impossible to agree that anything could be more troubling than what the industry (and those participating in it) is doing to the smallest of our kind. Only the exploitation of young women, risking their life, health, and fertility in order to harvest their eggs, can compare to the risk to and destruction of embryos. Can there possibly be concerns in reproductive technology greater than the protections of innocent human life? Indeed, she easily is placing the other values learned through “ethical discourse” as greater in importance than those concerned with the human life and dignity.

(If the Her.meneutics piece I’m linking to in this article is your only knowledge of Dollar’s views and you wonder if I’m taking her out of context, I challenge you to read more of her writings here.)

In the same piece (in the comments), she continues to defend her position on the primacy of narrative ethics over the straw man she created.

“But my experience has been that, when we raise ethical concerns with repro tech in a way that honors people’s experiences, recognizes diversity of theological interpretation, and doesn’t rest solely on one principle (such as embryos or choice), people are actually quite open to discussing these very hard and complex issues.”

When I first read this, I thought perhaps she was building a case for an open door to conversation that might eventually lead the person, with some gentle prompting, to make decisions in accordance with a high view of the embryo. And if she hadn’t written elsewhere that she is a proponent of abortion rights, I might still be generous in my understanding of this statement.

Also note that in order for ethical discourse to ensue, she calls us to adopt more of the Charon/Engelhardt model that calls us to give respect to or “recognizes diversity of theological interpretation.” Recognize is an interesting term here, because she’s talking more about seeing it. Narrow theological commitments are going to produce principles. Theologies with a lower view of scripture, a skewed sense of authority and a distorted view of humanity will produce a more “open-minded” approach to ethics that will allow the patient to not necessarily discover moral truth, but actually invent it. Charon and Engelhardt are disinterested in the imposition of values in a pluralistic context, and it appears Dollar has the same problem in a theologically diverse context.

But Dollar rejects this assessment.  She states,

“But there’s a problem with focusing exclusively on our and others’ stories: Humans are prone to self-absorption, self-pity, and a tunnel vision that puts our own pain, problems, and desire for happiness front and center. We are all too capable of justifying poor decisions and bending or obscuring the truth to suit our needs. In short, we are all sinful and overly caught up in the self.

So practicing narrative ethics does not mean that anything goes, that people have unlimited freedom to pursue whatever they want in isolation from moral, cultural, and emotional consequences. Rather, practicing narrative ethics means that we give weight to the myriad and significant circumstances that lead people to make ethically fraught decisions, and allow people’s stories to influence our dialogue and our language.”

The question remains, how much weight is to be given to individual circumstances? With the theological flexibility she insists upon as well as her own views on abortion rights and her own unqualified use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, it seems that the moral principles she’s willing to embrace are similar to those of Charon and Engelhardt, those that belong to the individual.

While God sent his son to pay the debt for our own sin, each of us entered into his story of redemption. But even within the story, God has provided moral guard rails, principles, that help us to become more like him and even protect us from the every day consequences of sin. The narrative ethics of Ellen Painter Dollar appear to be more interested in the experience of the story rather than the moral of the story.

Gayle Trotter: This is Gayle Trotter. Today I’m speaking with Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. Dr. Lindsay is also the newly installed president of Gordon College. Dr. Lindsay is a sociologist, and he has done some important work in the area of faith and power. Dr. Lindsay, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Dr. Michael Lindsay: Great to be with you. Thanks very much, Gayle.

GT: Why did you want to research faith and power?

ML: It seemed to me that there’s been a lot of stuff that’s been written about religion in America, but there have been very few projects that talk to people who hold powerful positions who are also deeply committed to their faith. It’s interesting because I’ve particularly focused on American evangelicalism, which is the most discussed but least understood constituency in American politics. And so I set out to try and interview a hundred or so senior leaders who are associated with evangelicalism, and in the end, I was able to do about 350. It was a great project, and the main thing that I got out of this study was a chance to hear directly from the people who are in powerful positions about the relevance of their faith in public life.

GT: What is an evangelical?

ML: Evangelicals are characterized by three big items. They believe in the importance of a personal relationship to God through a conversion to Jesus Christ which can be a dramatic experience. That’s what some refer to as a “born again” experience. Or it can be a gradual process of renewing one’s faith or coming to faith. Second is that they believe in the importance of the Bible. It’s more important than church teaching or church tradition, which is why evangelicals differ from faithful Roman Catholics in some significant ways. And they have an activist approach to faith. So faith compels them to lead their life a certain way, and they try to bear witness to their faith in both word and deed.

GT: What is populist evangelicalism versus cosmopolitan evangelicalism?

ML: This is one of the things that I encountered when I was working on Faith in the Halls of Power. Most of the time when people study evangelicals they say, “Oh, it’s a generational difference.” The old evangelicals are very conservative. The younger evangelicals are more progressive or liberal. Or they say it’s fundamentally about political division, so you have evangelicals on the left and evangelicals on the right. What I found is that actually the dividing lines don’t work nearly that neatly. I found that there was a whole group of evangelicals who had this sort of worldliness about them — worldly in a very positive sense. They were people who were rubbing shoulders day in and day out with people of other faiths and people who have no faith at all. They were people who read the New York Times, but they also read Christianity Today. They could listen to contemporary Christian music but also were big fans of NPR. And this worldliness influenced the way that they approached their faith. It shaped their understanding about evangelism and about church involvement. It shaped their priorities in their life of faith. You compare that with what I call populist evangelicalism which is principally the image that most people have when they think of evangelicals. This is the arena of the megachurch, of the Christian subculture, and that’s a very vibrant and important dimension of contemporary religious life, but I actually find that many of the people that I interviewed fit into the cosmopolitan category as opposed to these more populist evangelicals.

GT: You interviewed former White House power player Karen Hughes. How is Karen Hughes representative of other evangelicals in public life?

ML: She’s an interesting figure because when I sat down to interview her, she talked about how she had been very involved with President George W. Bush’s political career, had worked for him as a close aide when he was governor of Texas, and she was very committed to his election in 2000. But she said, “I had a bit of a crisis moment when I realized that he was inviting me to come work at the White House because I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing for me to do.” And you’d think this is the kind of obvious thing that people would be thinking about. But I think for her and for many other public leaders, it’s a more evolutionary process, and she felt conflicted about moving to Washington in particular because she had a teenage son, and she knew that he was happy in Austin and was concerned that the pace of life in D.C. would be difficult on her family life. And this is probably one of the biggest struggles that everybody faces, but it’s particularly challenging for women and even more challenging for religiously conservative women because for them motherhood is not just a calling, it’s a deep, deep commitment. And when you’re working the hours that people work if you’re in a senior position in the White House — oftentimes getting to work at 6:30 or 6:45 in the morning, which means that they had to wake up at 5 or 5:15 and not getting home sometimes until 9 or 10 o’clock at night and keeping that pace up five, six days a week and often working on the seventh day — it’s corrosive to building a close relationship with your spouse and with your kids. So I think that Karen Hughes represents this whole cohort of people who now find themselves in positions of power who are also deeply committed to their faith and oftentimes feel quite conflicted about the different allegiances those two require.

GT: How have evangelicals modeled the gay and lesbian community in the workplace and entertainment industry? How is “Christian” the new “gay”?

ML: This comes from a quote that one woman who I interviewed in Hollywood recounted to me a story that she had where the conversation basically was a Hollywood producer telling her that it had become new and interesting for committed Christians to “come out” in Hollywood. And they actually used that language of “coming out” where one publicly identifies in this way. I think what it really reflects is although historically Christianity has been a very powerful force in this country, within the pockets of elite cultural life — in Hollywood, at universities like Harvard and Yale and the rarefied heights of arts and entertainment — being a deeply committed person of faith, whatever that faith tradition may be, is seen as unusual or odd. There’s pressure when you’re in those high positions not to be too public about your faith and certainly not a faith that is evangelistic in approach because that’s seen as overbearing or narrow-minded. And so that has been the framework for the last 20 to 30 years. Over the last 10 years, however, there has been a gradual opening up of opportunities for committed Christians to become more open about how their faith is relevant to what they do in public life. So you have journalists, Hollywood writers, directors, as well as other public figures who are willing to talk about the relevance of their faith. You can think of Patricia Heaton, the actress who co-starred on Everybody Loves Raymond. She’s a committed Christian, and there are more possibilities for someone like her to be public about their faith. In the same way, folks who are gay and lesbian once felt they couldn’t be public about their identity, but now are feeling a little bit freer, so also are Christians in public life.

GT: What is signaling behavior by evangelicals in leadership positions?

ML: This was a very surprising phenomenon. What I found was that very few of the evangelicals that I interviewed would be evangelistic about their faith in the sense that they would turn to a colleague and say, “Let me tell you about Jesus.” They were uncomfortable with being that overt or direct. Instead, they oftentimes employed these signals that were sent out whereby fellow believers would recognize their faith but those people who didn’t recognize the signals, it would just pass them by. For example, I was at Renaissance Weekend, which is a gathering held several times a year for leaders from different walks of life, and I was at one particular gathering in Charleston, South Carolina. The Renaissance Weekend became really prominent because Bill and Hillary Clinton had attended it for a number of years. They were at some at the very beginning. There was a senator speaking before this group of probably 1,000 people, and in the course of the conversation he was being asked what were meaningful influences in his life. He didn’t say Jesus or God, but he said, “You know, I’ve found a great deal of solace in the writings of C.S. Lewis,” and then he described some of the things that he’d read by Lewis and why it had made such a difference in his life. Now, for every other committed evangelical in the crowd, mentioning the name of C.S. Lewis is a way of alluding to one’s faith because Lewis was a professor at Oxford and Cambridge and is known as an apologist of the Christian faith in the mid-20th century. But for those people who don’t know that part of Lewis’ life, they just think the senator was quoting from some particular writer from England. So these signals I found to be all over the place. I had a very good faculty friend who was a secular Jew, and she also was at Renaissance Weekend and she said, “I think there’s lots of God talk going on but I don’t always recognize it.” That’s pointing to this phenomenon of signaling behavior.

GT: What do you think of Peter Wehner’s book, City of Man, and his view of the changing nature of evangelical political involvement over the years?

ML: Pete Wehner and Mike Gerson are two very smart folks. They are both committed evangelicals, and both were involved in the George W. Bush administration. And Pete and Mike talk about how evangelicals throughout the 1970s were trying to get a seat at the table, to feel like they had significant political muscle. It wasn’t really until the beginnings of the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s activities in the late seventies which coincided with the administration of Jimmy Carter who is a fellow evangelical, but who did not always share the policy positions of Falwell and Robertson. Wehner’s book looks at this process by which evangelicals who for many years were clamoring for a seat at the table and then finally realized that they actually had that seat at the table. There was one incident where Jody Powell, who was head of communications in the White House for President Carter, reaches out to Jerry Falwell and asks him not to oppose President Carter’s agenda. And Falwell realizes at that moment, “I’ve finally arrived. The White House is now calling me for political cover and support.” Carry that process forward 20 and 30 years later and with the administration of George W. Bush, you have more evangelicals in senior positions in the federal government than at any other time in the last 50 years. The difference between President Carter and President Bush is not one of theology. They actually agree on most of the important theological questions. It’s on strategy. President Carter had very few people who shared his faith commitment in senior positions whereas President Bush had a number of people — including Pete Wehner and Mike Gerson — in the inner circle of political power, who shared the president’s faith commitment. And I think that also reflects a maturation of evangelical political activity, so that whereas in the seventies, evangelicals are just begging to get the scraps from the table in D.C. — they just wanted to be part of the conversation — whereas by 2002, 2003, they are actually setting significant policy agendas. And you think about PEPFAR, for example, which resulted in the largest allocation of U.S. government aid in history for a nonmilitary action which was allocating $15 billion for AIDS relief in Africa. That really came as a result of two people working together and building a coalition within the administration and then eventually in Congress: Michael Gerson, who was President Bush’s speechwriter and a committed evangelical, and Josh Bolton, who’s actually Jewish but who also shared a deep commitment to ending human suffering in Africa. The two of them worked together and were able to build a coalition, and this is an example of how evangelicals work together with people of different faiths or no faith at all in order to get their policy agenda. In the seventies, working with people who didn’t share their religious conviction would have been unthinkable to most evangelicals in politics.

GT: Right. You learned that President Jimmy Carter, while in office, evangelized world leaders. How does evangelicalism influence U.S. foreign policy?

ML: It’s a much more significant influence than most people realize. When most people think about evangelicals in politics, they think about abortion and same-sex marriage, which are largely domestic policy issues. I’ve found there is much greater latitude given to a president and his administration in foreign affairs, and that’s because the national media doesn’t cover the topic nearly as deeply and the general American public isn’t as interested in foreign affairs. So President Carter, for example, in opening up more relations with China, he was able to take some of his Christian convictions and bring that into the conversation with the Chinese premier when he came to Washington, I think it was in 1978. And you can see it carried all the way through to President Bush or even President Obama, both of whom are committed Christians. Foreign policy is the domain where there is a little bit more flexibility for the relevance of faith. International religious freedom being seen as a basic human right: that’s probably one of the most important developments in religion and public policy in the last 25 years. It came through a bill passed by Congress in 1997 and signed into law by President Clinton: the Religious Freedom Act which said that because freedom of religion is a basic human right, we’re going to have the State Department monitor religious freedom around the world. We’ll set up an independent commission which will identify countries that are not allowing religious freedom, and we will work to strongly urge those countries to reverse course. In some of those countries it works and in some it does not. We’ve seen in Southeast Asia, for example, there’s been some real significant movement, and that’s something that’s come as a direct result of this legislation. Foreign affairs is the arena that I think is a more interesting place where you can really see the relevance of faith to public policy.

GT: After all of your extensive research, do you find that evangelicals are effective leaders?

ML: Being an evangelical does not necessarily make you a more effective leader compared to other religious traditions, but I do think that being an evangelical makes one have a deeper sense of purpose and mission in life. It gives you an opportunity to be concerned about issues that go beyond the near term and helps you to see that, at its very finest, Christianity is a message of hope and renewal for the flourishing of our world. And that’s a fundamental framework that people of all faith traditions and of no faith tradition can embrace. To the extent that evangelicals can be involved in business, the arts, public policy, law, entertainment and media, to the extent that their activities can help lead to the flourishing of our society, a place where religious freedom is allowed, a place where people suffering from AIDS are given medicine that can lead to the extension of their lives, to the extent that scientific discovery can occur and be informed by people who are deeply committed to ending human suffering: These are all good and important things, and I found them time and time again while I was researching Faith in the Halls of Power. Evangelicals can be enormously effective leaders, and ones who can draw upon their faith to advance not only their particular agendas or their religious identities but, perhaps even more significantly, can work for the common good.

GT: Thank you so much for speaking with me today, Dr. Lindsay.

ML: Great to be with you Gayle.

At one point in my own life, I was seduced by the idea that maybe my views represented the truest form of feminism. After all, my view of humanity is one that embraces ontological gender equality. There is no qualitative difference between men and women and God’s love isn’t gender specific in application. Of course, my position as a complementarian is the cause for colleagues and acquaintances to wonder how I could actually claim the feminist moniker, because no one could possibly hold that there are different roles for the sexes while still holding a strong view on equality. But if complementarianism feels like inequality, it’s because feelings are the barometer.

As a seminary grad, I was proud to say I could play with the “big boys” in the world of evangelical theology. While many of my male peers in seminary were primarily focused on getting into the field to pastor without much concern for their grades, my desire and ability to excel academically proved that I was far from intellectually deficient. My appreciation for the authority of God and Scripture, however, set me apart from first wave feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton who struggled with the idea spiritual authority to the point of believing that the Bible was the primary cause of the subjugation of women. This sad legacy from the first wave of feminism gets little acknowledgement from any kind of feminist today but certainly deserves bold rejection.

My claim to feminism also depended on my unapologetic pro-life stance with derivative positions against the use of IVF, egg donation, surrogacy, etc. If women have ever been the target of objectification before, what the fertility industry is doing at the risk of women’s health is sinister and hardly pro-woman because each year billions of dollars are made on the backs of financially and emotionally vulnerable women. The irony of it all is that the fertility industry finds its justification through the cultural legacy of secular feminism. If women had not been encouraged to aspire to career before or in place of family, or if women had not come to embrace the new concept of family without father, likely science would not have had the market motivation to provide for every possible situation of childlessness (at this point, not necessarily infertility). Certainly rejecting anything harmful to women in any manner makes me a “true” feminist.

After seeing the recent discussions on the rise of “evangelical feminism,” I have finally concluded that evangelical women are being taken for a ride in this conversation on who is the true feminist. To take cultural ownership of the term “feminist” seems to suggest that secular feminism has been disarmed and left powerless. Maybe this is some of what’s going on—women are wising up and finding the virtues of secular feminism really aren’t so virtuous after all. But perhaps in this conversation there’s been too much emphasis on “feminist” and not enough on “evangelical.” There is a sense of credibility with culture tied to who actually has the most right to the term “feminist,” but that plays into the hand of secular culture entirely. While the gospel-centered ministry of the church cares about conversations with culture, we ought not actively make secular culture more alluring through our dependence on language and definitions rooted in secularism.

While I don’t know anything about the spiritual lives of Bachman or Palin, I am pretty sure they are Christian based on things they have said or I have heard said about them. Whether they claim to be “evangelical feminists” is also unclear to me. But they are merely a blip in history and the course of women’s lives is not best impacted by the best representations of feminism, but rather the best representations of Christianity. I’m not sure that Bachman or Palin are the best representatives of either, but I do know that evangelicalism with a respect for the authority of scripture is the best there is to offer to any woman.

On a larger scale in our contemporary context, women are seeking other women’s voices to speak wisdom and insight into their lives. Though we don’t endorse them, this is why organizations like NOW and other feminist student organizations continue to make such an impact on younger, college-age women. It isn’t necessarily because these women are open to their ideologies from the start, but these organizations present themselves as a resource to fill the emotional, intellectual, and professional needs of women at this particular stage in their life, no matter the faulty philosophy they seek to advance. This is one of the reasons I started The Center for Women of Faith in Culture, and since its founding I’ve had the blessing, from a biblical worldview, to speak into the lives of women across the country on a wide range of issues including marriage, family, and career to questions in bioethics and theology. Recently, however, I’ve been disappointed to learn of a women’s center in Denver that could have a similar influence on the lives of women in their vicinity, being a source for wisdom from a Christian worldview, explicit or implicit. After all, their founder at the helm professes to be a Christian and has earned a Christian studies degree at a top-notch evangelical seminary. However, while receiving endorsements from other evangelical entities, this particular organization has opted for a pluralistic approach in its mission to women.

Allow me to introduce you to Pomegranate Place. Pomegranate Place is located in Denver, Colorado and is self-described as an “oasis for women.” From their website:

Everything we do at Pomegranate Place flows from our core values of compassion, justice, freedom and transcendence. We believe that women who embrace these core values and put into practice the character strengths associated with them, will live happier, more meaningful lives, and ultimately discover and live out the purposes for which they were created. We don’t always have control over what hand we are dealt in life. We can, however, choose how we respond. It is in the little choices that we make each day that our character develops and we move toward becoming all that we can be. We hope to encourage each other to make wise choices.

This doesn’t seem terribly alarming. In fact, Pomegranate Place looks like the kind of organization that could be a healthy resource for women all over the Denver area. Currently, resources available are in the form of classes and events led by professional women with varying backgrounds including those trained in counseling, psychology and religious studies. Beware, however, because looks can be deceiving. What appears to be an oasis for women may actually be a mirage. A closer examination reveals its proactive pluralistic agenda. As stated on their website, this is made abundantly clear—Pomegranate Place seeks to “embrace and honor diversity of views. We will celebrate differences and look with deep curiosity to respect and learn from one another.” [1]

Vaun Swanson is the founder and “catalyst” behind Pomegranate Place. To be clear, a catalyst is an agent that provokes or speeds significant change or action. Her biography describes her as having “served in helping professions for the past 30 years” and that she “recognizes both the challenges women face and the potential they have for changing our world for the better.” Swanson was been inspired “by women in history, awakened by sisters in third-world countries, and grateful for awesome mentors” so through Pomegranate Place, “she offers opportunities for women to connect and grow.”

A noble vision, I resonate with the desire to help women flourish in today’s world—spiritually, intellectually and professionally. I believe this same desire may be what motivated FullFill magazine to interview Swanson in their April 2011 issue, promoting Pomegranate Place and Swanson’s work as its leader. If you are unfamiliar with FullFill, this is an evangelical women’s magazine whose alliances include MOPS, Christian Leadership Alliance, Stonecroft Ministries, Moms In Touch International and Synergy. I’m not convinced at this point that Swanson’s work at Pomegranate Place was properly vetted by the editors at FullFill, and if this is indeed the case, that would explain why an organization that so prominently promotes pagan spirituality would be given that kind of real estate in an evangelical women’s publication. So what did Swanson tell Fullfill? The interview contained very little about Pomegranate Place itself and more about Swanson’s role as a leader, but she was asked “What challenges you as the founder and leader of Pomegranate Place?” She responded:

One of the most unexpected challenges has been a handful of neighbors and the city’s zoning and building codes. I know that sounds crazy, but it has consumed a tremendous amount of time and energy and the issues are still not resolved. What we are doing here does not fit neatly into any of the categories the city has on its books. We also don’t fit neatly into “faith-based” or “secular” categories. All women are welcome at Pomegranate Place and while Christian faith is not a prerequisite for teaching classes or leading, we hold a Judeo-Christian spirituality in our holistic approach to empowering women and helping them find their purpose in life. Fleshing this out from day to day can be challenging and requires a lot of conversations that go to the heart of women’s worldviews.

What exactly is a Judeo-Christian spirituality? She fails to explain further in the article and the only other specific reference to Pomegranate Place occurs at the end of the piece where she explains how she sees God at work:

There is a warm, calming, welcoming feeling that people get when they walk in the front door. Almost everyone mentions it. I believe it is the Spirit of God in this place. The conversations here are incredible. There are no taboo topics and women readily open up to share their lives and their struggles. I see Christian women laughing with neo-pagan women. Young lesbian women partner with older married women to raise funds for women in the Congo. A 78-year old woman reads her own poetry out loud for the first time. Hearts are softened, hope is renewed, understanding is fostered, hurts are healed and God is definitely at work here!

If a “Judeo-Christian spirituality” implies a Judeo-Christian ethic, then certainly this last paragraph of the interview shows kindness and generosity occurring in a pluralistic environment—as it should—though this version of spirituality is unable to account for the foundations for kindness and generosity. The core of biblical Christianity is what accounts for both the ability and desire to live as Jesus lived, and outside of Christianity individuals are left trying to reconcile the bits and pieces of various worldviews which are ultimately irreconcilable. For Pomegranate Place, there is nothing vague about their spiritual practices including the fact that they lack coherence with biblical Christianity.

No indication is given at the Pomegranate Place website that the women who enter into their presence will ever be presented with the gospel, or at the very least with a worldview outlook consistent with biblical Christianity. How can we know this? As stated in the Fullfill interview, Swanson indicates that the Christian faith “is not a prerequisite for teaching classes or leading.” So who are those that lead? What is their background?

The “Guiding Council” at Pomegranate Place is composed of women from a variety of professional backgrounds and traditions. They include IT professionals, business women, college professors, clergy (of unknown tradition), life coaches, therapists, and those with theological degrees. With all of this collective wisdom, one of the council’s primary responsibilities is the vetting of the “Affiliate Guides.” These Affiliate Guides serve the vision of Pomegranate Place by making their services available to women who seek them out. Who are they? Let’s look at a couple.

“Sue Burdette is a Certified Teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. She was introduced to the Enneagram 16 years ago and has been a student ever since. The Enneagram is a system of nine personality types describing nine distinct ways of viewing and interacting in the world. Sue has a heart felt desire to share the wisdom of the Enneagram so that others might benefit from this dynamic yet practical tool that can have a profound effect on the way we live our lives.”[2]

But the enneagram is certainly not considered part and parcel of traditional biblical Christianity and, in fact, is viewed entirely counter to it.

The roots of the enneagram can be traced to two men: George Gurdjieff and Oscar Ichazo. Both men were involved in occultic pursuits. Guurdjiieff learned of the enneagram from a sect of Sufis (mystical Islam). The Sufis used the enneagram for numerological divination. Oscar Ichazo later developed a personality theory around the enneagram and added it.

Ichazo was deeply involved in psychedelic drugs, shamanism, yoga, even studying mysticism in India and Tibet. Ichazo has received instructions from a higher entity called Metatron and members of his group are guided by an interior master, the Green Qu’Tub.

Another leading figure in the enneagram movement was psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, associated with theNew Age experimental Esalen Institute.

There are many myths associated with the enneagram. One myth has to do with the alleged antiquity of the program when it actually dates in the 1960′s. Another is that it is scientific. Like many New Agepractices, its leaders are always trying to assign scientific credentials, but none exists.[3]

“Lizanne Corbit M.A. Lizanne has been in private practice as a psychotherapist since 1990. She creates tranformative [sic] space and sacred containers for women to be met as individuals or as they gather in community for the purposes of birthing their hidden potential, deepening their journeys, embodying their truth and celebrating their “instatus nascendi” [sic] jewels hidden with in matter. Described as a “midwife to the spirit” Lizanne’s compassionate and creative approaches help women know, own and claim their deepest essential selves and live with their full presence in the world.”

Lizanne’s personal website also indicates that included in her retreat themes is “Altered States & Shamanic Journeying.”[4] To better understand her worldview one needs to better understand what she means by this particular retreat theme. Here is a brief explanation of shamanism and what Corbit is bringing with her to Pomegranate Place.

In shamanism everything has a spirit (animism) and is alive, including rocks, clouds, trees, rivers, as well as animals and people. This means that all things that have spirits are equal with us. These spirits are everywhere, permeate our world, and can affect our lives. Shamans use altered states of consciousness to contact spirits which can be either good or bad in order to learn the future, make decisions, or attempt healings of people who might be oppressed by bad spirits. Shamanism uses spirit guides, contacting these guides in order to have them direct your life. Shamans use astral projection, where the spirit of a person leaves the body and travels into the spirit world, and various means of predicting the future such as throwing bones.[5]

Either the vetting system of Pomegranate Place has failed or the organization simply chooses to draw no lines in terms of what ought to be offered to women searching for encouragement in this complex world. Unimportant to their vision is consideration for the truth of any particular spiritual path. While this may seem to be a noble, generous approach to engaging the women in their community, it actually has another unintended consequence—the idea that no worldview makes any real difference in the every day lives of women. As Christians, we know this to be patently false.

Ironically, while women who venture through the doors of Pomegranate Place are in search of something, the expectation is that they are actually discerning enough to know what resources at Pomegranate Place they may or may not want to entertain.

Pomegranate Place, while feeling confident about its Affiliate Guides, is not responsible for issues that may arise in fulfilling their obligation to you. We trust in your ability to make wise decisions in choosing services and methods for your development and also in taking responsibility for those choices.

So the women seeking the support of Pomegranate Place need to at least have the means to discern properly whose services they should seek? What role does Pomegranate Place really then have as a resource to the women of Denver?

Denver Seminary has also lent their support to the work and mission of Pomegranate Place. On their homepage you can view the video featuring Pomegranate Place founder, Vaun Swanson (and Denver Seminary grad), discussing the purposes of Pomegranate Place as it is situated in the heart of Denver. As of today, May 19^th, 2011, this video is still posted, but you can also view it here. Why Denver Seminary, historically a solid evangelical academic institution, chooses to give voice to an organization with pluralistic intentions, where the gospel will likely never penetrate the life of a single woman, is beyond all understanding.

At the recent God, Faith & Culture women’s conference, one of the values we discussed is the importance of churches vetting all of the materials being utilized in the context of women’s ministry, because not for one moment do we want to give a platform to teachings that somehow compromise scripture. This is a value we urge every Christian to adopt, and is why today we urge Christians to take another look at any endorsement offered for the work of Pomegranate Place. The Center for Women of Faith in Culture embraces all positive efforts in reaching into women’s lives in both church and culture. But when the line is crossed in embracing other worldview perspectives with eyes wide open, we believe the core of biblical Christianity has been abandoned and no good can come from this.

When an Oasis is Really a Mirage (PDF)

Invited to St. George’s Anglican Church in Colorado Springs to teach women core Christian worldview content to launch their season of Lent with a renewed focus on the life of the mind, I came home with a longing for Lent and liturgy. As I prepared for the conference, I focused on ways to communicate that Lent is about orienting the whole life toward  sacrificial living, not simply a small sacrifice for a short season to launch diets or meet personal challenges. This I had always known, but as a generic-sort of Baptist, Lent is not a part of our calendar and, frankly, fairly easy to ignore. Prior to the conference, my new Anglican friends were reminding themselves that Lent is not just a time to remove something from their daily routine, but an opportunity for greater sacrifice by replacing one or more things with other things that will nourish them in the immediate and longterm. We all seemed to be on the same page…but in different books?

The richness of Lent and the Anglican liturgy was unmistakably rich, offering an opportunity for a deliberate reverence that was impossible to not be fully engaged in. I’m inspired to a new way of embracing my faith as I return to my life this week and to church on Sunday…with another perspective on worship and sacrifice.

For there to be a scandal of the evangelical mind, there must not be just a mind, but also a readily identifiable thing called ‘evangelical’ and a movement called ‘evangelicalism’–and the existence of such is increasingly in doubt.

In evangelical churches today, a great deal of ministry focus is grounded in what we call the doctrinal essentials because these essentials have historically been the foundation for the meaning of evangelical. These essentials include personal conversion, sharing the gospel, biblical authority and inerrancy, and the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Among these essentials, is there truly agreement on those who identify as evangelicals? At the most basic level, while there is agreement on the need for salvation, how salvation occurs is the never-ending debate. Surely we can come to some agreement on the doctrine of election and the age-of-accountability…or can we?

This will definitely be a topic of discussion among evangelicals and non-evangelicals for some time, but it raises an important question for us as a church that we need to consider now. How important are doctrinal distinctives among Christians? Does it matter what we believe about baptism, the meaning of communion, or when/if Christians will be raptured? I believe that by not answering the question, we are answering the question: doctrinal distinctives are of little importance. While these are complicated doctrinal questions, we run the risk of not standing for anything at all as 21st century, not evangelicals, but Christians. Perhaps the term “evangelical” has served as an umbrella term to provide unity among Christ followers, but has actually been a detriment and caused us to compromise our doctrinal reality.

April 30, 2011 marks the first annual God, Faith & Culture Evangelical Women’s Conference hosted by The Center for Women of Faith in Culture.  To be held at the Arlington Countryside Church in Arlington Heights, IL, the speakers are excited about this opportunity to impact women’s minds with theological truth, developing them in areas including apologetics, bioethics, worldview, and theology proper. Check out the speakers here. Because this is the first time an event for CWFC–where we’re not focused on our emotions or our gender–we’re not entirely sure what to expect. Many of the speakers are sacrificing their own time and expense for this event–this movement–because they believe that there is a segment of women in the church that are missing out on some important theological conversations, and that the God, Faith & Culture Evangelical Women’s Conference can be an important resource them. We’re very excited, because it doesn’t end with the Conference, either. At the same time, we are launching Intersect: The Journal of The Center for Women of Faith in Culture. No pictures of flowers or crying ladies hugging each other in this journal…from the website:

Intersect: The Journal of The Center for Women of Faith in Culture is an evangelical publication written for women by women. It exists to encourage today’s Christian women as present and future theologians, apologists and philosophers, bringing faith and reason to their own sphere of influence. Each journal will feature established and emerging thinkers from church, the academy, business, etc with articles reflective of intersecting theological themes including Faith and Reason, Church, Culture, and the Academy, and the theological influence of women in all parts of society.

Please consider being part of this movement by making a contribution. If you are interested in being an official sponsor of this conference, please click here. But if you can make a contribution–no matter how big or small, your gift will go directly to conference expenses with priority given to speaker compensation. The Center for Women of Faith in Culture is incorporated in the State of Illinois but is not yet a 501c3.  Obviously, if you are a woman and interested in attending the conference, don’t forget to register! Media are also welcome and need to contact me directly.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

I’d like to follow up on that in this post with a couple of more quotes.  One of the things that mitigates against love for the church in our day is our obsessive individualism.  It’s difficult to escape, individualism is the air we breathe and we import individualistic ways of thinking into how we relate to the church.  Our personal, individual spiritual growth is our top priority. Here’s a quote from Mike Horton’s book “Made in America” which points to at least one prior generation that understood that corporate piety is more important than personal piety, that the church takes priority over the individual.

The Puritan was concerned that even his calling served the neighborhood or commonwealth rather than himself.  He hardly doted on himself.  Even religious activities were not to be done from selfish motives.  God has justified him, having punished Christ in his place.  Acceptance has been freely given, not achieved.  Therefore, even developing one’s personal relationship with Christ at the expense of the community was viewed as antisocial and, consequently, anti-Christian behavior.  One no longer had to work for his own salvation (for instance, by helping   others), so he could give himself to the good of others from unselfish motives.  Puritan William Gurnall insisted that the one who was truly pious “did others more good in this world than himself in the next.”

It’s not that personal piety is unimportant, it’s just that personal piety is for the sake of the church.  Along the same lines, in his article “An Unmessianic Sense of Nondestiny,” Carl Trueman illustrates that our individualism is combined with a sense of terminal uniqueness and specialness.

As I look round the church, it strikes me that this zen-like condition of a lack of ambition is much to be desired because far too many Christians have senses of destiny which verge on the messianic. The confidence that the Lord has a special plan and purpose just for them shapes the way they act and move.  Now, just for the record, I am a good Calvinist, and I certainly believe each individual has a destiny; what concerns me is the way in which our tendency to think of ourselves as special and unique (which we all are in some ways – D.N.A. etc.) bleeds over into a sense of special destiny whereby the future, or at least the future of myself, comes to be the priority and to trump all else.

Put bluntly, when I read the Bible it seems to me that the church is the meaning of human history; but it is the church, a corporate body, not the distinct individuals who go to make up her membership.  Of course, all of us individuals have our gifts and our roles to play: the Lord calls us each by name and numbers the very hairs of our heads; but, to borrow Paul’s analogy of the body, we have no special destiny in ourselves taken as isolated units, any more than bits of our own bodies do in isolation from each other.   When I act, I act as a whole person; my hand has no special role of its own; it acts only in the context of being part of my overall body.  With the church, the destiny of the whole is greater than the sum of the destinies of individual Christians.

This is an important insight which should profoundly shape our thinking and, indeed, our praying.  My special destiny as a believer is to be part of the church; and it is the church that is the big player in God’s wider plan, not me.  That puts me, my uniqueness, my importance, my role, in definite perspective.  The problem today is that too many have the idea that God’s primary plan is for them, and the church is secondary, the instrument to the realization of their individual significance.    They may not even realize they think that way but, like those involuntary `tells’ at a poker game, so certain unconscious spiritual behaviours give the game away.

Conservative Bible teachers like Shirer have built a new paradigm for feminine preaching, an ingenious blend of traditional revivalism, modern therapeutic culture and the gabby intimacy of Oprah.

What Worthen has observed about the essence of the women’s ministry paradigm is precisely what many women in the evangelical community are resisting, both complementarian and egalitarian. I’m not so sure, however, that contemporary teachers like Priscilla Shirer have “built” anything as Worthen suggests, but are simply expanding on what was passed down to them from the existing women’s ministry culture. What use to be the church women’s ministry brunch or tea party with an inspirational speaker has evolved into conferences of a much larger scale, but little has really changed. They are so noticeably an amalgamation of an immediate emotional experience (revivalism), pop psychology (modern therapeutic culture) and girl-talk (gabby intimacy). Worthen continues,

This is the biblical-womanhood-industrial complex: a self-conscious alternative to secular feminism that preaches wifely submission while co-opting some feminist ideas to nurture women like Shirer to take the lead, within limits.

Here is where we need to firmly disagree with Worthen. Nothing about a woman taking the lead to teach and mentor other women is a co-opting of “feminist ideas” but rather a fulfillment of the Titus 2 mandate and the Great Commission. There is nothing unbiblical or even extra-biblical in this context. As well, there is no claim to the office of pastor and—I’ll go out on a limb here—women speakers who identify as complementarians are also willingly submitting the content of their teaching to the authority of their own pastoral leadership.

But while Shirer’s brand of women’s ministry may be an alternative to secular feminism, it certainly is not—even for complementarian women—the only alternative to secular feminism. The women’s ministry paradigm has been undergoing a subtle but important shift over the last few years. Many evangelical women are now discussing and operating according to an alternative to the emotional, therapeutic, and pretty-in-pink cliché that has dominated for so long, encouraging women to think beyond the contours of the current paradigm and develop a vision for women’s ministry that more actively and intentionally involves the life of the mind. They are identifying and rejecting the experience-driven model as insufficient because without theological substance any impact is merely temporary.

While many evangelical women’s conferences involve less Scripture and more girl talk, at this conference…Shirer and the other speakers joked about makeup and kidded about long-suffering husbands just to break the ice before preaching messages of sovereignty, sin and repentance that would not have sounded much different had the audience been male.

It’s not so much that evangelical women’s conferences offer little or no scriptural content—I tend to think Worthen is exaggerating this claim—but often what is offered targets the lowest-common denominator or is consistently limited in scope. It is difficult to speak of women’s conferences across the board because I have attended some that have offered excellent theological content for women in different places on her spiritual journey. No two conferences are exactly the same. But a speaker will generally reflect the content of her writing, and there is much to be desired in the what publishers are marketing to women—and the conference circuit is inextricably tied to book promotions. To put it simply, when personal experience or self-esteem is elevated above a proper biblical hermeneutic, or when theological rigor is abandoned because it lacks an entertainment component or is perceived to be the domain of men, then we need to reconsider the conference opportunities we are making available to women.

There is more to the story of women in ministry to women, much more. In the evangelical community, there is a segment of women who desire to know God beyond the emotional encounter. They are seeking theological understanding, desiring to develop a Christian worldview that will permeate every nook and cranny of their life. Some of these women are college or seminary students, some are stay-at-home moms who are reading theologians of the past and teaching their children to understand the doctrines of the church. Some of these women are in a range of professions that aren’t directly connected to church ministry, but they want to know what they believe and why they believe it. They want to be in an active process of developing a Christian worldview and filter their entire life through it. For many of these women, they could care less about the gender debate or they are simply ready to discuss other areas of theology. While cherishing that God has made her woman, she is also asking the questions about her humanity as an image bearer. She isn’t interested in reading Scripture as a woman—an error also made feminist theologians—she wants to read it as a child of God. Many of these women will never attend a women’s conference because the theological conferences generally attended by men primarily offer the depth of content they desire. While Worthen’s article picks up on some truths of the women’s ministry conference circuit, she also misses the issue being raised by evangelical women between the pulpit and the kitchen. There’s more to the story.

G.K. Chesterton, with his usual gentle audacity, once criticized Rudyard Kipling for his “lack of patriotism.” Since Kipling was renowned for glorifying the British Empire, this might have seemed one of Chesterton’s “paradoxes”; but it was no such thing, except in the sense that it denied what most readers thought was obvious and incontrovertible.

Chesterton, himself a “Little Englander” and opponent of empire, explained what was wrong with Kipling’s view: “He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reason. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.” Which implies there would be nothing to love her for if she were weak.

The analogy I am making here is probably pretty obvious – substitute the church for England.  In our current climate few admire the church, but many claim to love the church.  Yet I wonder if most of those who claim to love the church aren’t like Chesterton’s Kipling – trying to find reasons to love an institution they can’t admire.

The church’s critics today are legion, sadly I have been one.  These days I’ve come more to see my obligation to simply be a faithful son of the church and not it’s critic.  Most of us would, at least in some vague theoretical sense, acknowledge that if the church is Christ’s bride then she is our mother.  But does anyone criticize their earthly mothers the way professing Christians criticize the church?

Well, I suppose I know the answer that last question and it’s a legitimate one – the church as Christ’s bride and the Christian’s mother is only one metaphor for it, there are plenty of other metaphors and descriptions of the church that give us grounds for critical engagement.  Where there is sin in the church, it’s most faithful sons must be willing to confront that sin.  Still, it ought to be sin that we confront.  Much of the criticism we level at the church isn’t because she is obviously sinning, it’s because she isn’t living up to those worldly standards her children have adopted.

Lately I find myself asking “what if the church never gets better?”  I mean this for the local church I pastor and for local churches everywhere and for the universal church in general.  What if the church never gets better?  Will God’s love for her diminish?  Will the efficacy of Christ’s shed blood be diminished? If God loves the church why can’t we?  Or, to put it another way, what grounds do we have for rejecting what God loves?

And please understand here that I am not speaking of those churches that obviously have forsaken the true preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments.  What if your average old run of the mill local church that gives you the Word and sacraments, never gets better, whatever “better” means?  Will you still love her and be faithful to her, even if she appears so “weak” that there seems no good reason to continue loving her?

Why you’ve heard of him: Colson was Richard Nixon’s “hatchet man” and spent seven months in prison for Watergate-related charges. Entered Alabama’s Maxwell Prison in 1974 as a new Christian and became a staunch advocate for prisoners. After telling his story in the bestselling book Born Again, Colson used the royalties to found Prison Fellowship, the world’s largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners, crime victims, and their families.

Position: Founder and Chairman of the Board for Prison Fellowship and Prison Fellowship International (1976 to present); Commentator for Breakpoint

Previous career:
Captain, U.S. Marine Corps (1953-55)
Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (1955-56)
Admin. Asst. to U.S. Sen. Leverett Saltonstall (R-Mass.) (1956-61)
Partner, Gadsby and Hannah Law Firm (1961-69)
Special Counsel to President Richard M. Nixon (1969-73)
Partner, Colson and Shapiro Law Firm (1973-74)

Education:
B.A., Brown University (1953)
J.D. with honors, George Washington University (1959)

Area of expertise/interest: Restorative justice; worldview analysis and cultural criticism

Honors: Won the $1 million dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (the prize money was donated to Prison Fellowship); Born Again was made into a movie in 1978

Books: Colson has written over 20 books, including Born Again (1976), Kingdoms in Conflict (later reissued as God and Government) (1987), The Body (1994), Loving God (1997), and How Now Shall We Live (w/ Nancy Pearcey) (2000)

Assessment: Other than St. Paul, there are few ex-prisoners who have done more to fulfill the duties of a Christian like Charles Colson. Along with Prison Fellowship, he has overseen the founding of Justice Fellowship (the nation’s largest faith-based criminal justice reform group) and Angel Tree (a program that provides Christmas presents to more than 500,000 children of inmates annually on behalf of their incarcerated parents). The ministries now reach over 40,000 prisoners in 100 countries around the world.

As an author, Colson has written some of the most influential books in the evangelical community, including The Body and How Now Shall We Live? (both co-written with Nancy Pearcey). His Kingdoms in Conflict (1987), a centrist view of the relationship between church and state, is one of my personal favorites. He is also the co-author, along with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together“, a seminal document that highlights how the two groups can work together while still respecting their profound theological differences.

While others have used the infamy of Watergate to line their own pockets, Colson donated all of his speaking honoraria and book royalties to Prison Fellowship and accepts only the salary of a mid-range ministry executive as compensation. The man who was once considered “Nixon’s evil genius” has become a model of Christian charity and service. Colson is truly a prime example of how God can transform a person’s life and use them for His purposes.