Letters

We welcome letters to the­ editor. Letters appear two issues after the article to which they are responding. Letters under three hundred words are preferred, and they may be edited for length and clarity.

Letters responding to ­articles published in this issue should be received by January 5 for publication in the March issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.

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Confessing Differences

As a Protestant, I began ­Valerie Stivers’s “How I Learned to Love Confession” (November 2025) mentally recalling the catechetical rebuttals that have come to characterize interdenominational debate, but by the end, I abandoned the desire to disprove and instead found myself deeply moved by her experiences and their similarities to my own. While we still have much to disagree about, Stivers’s article resurfaced my own first encounters with God’s Word and sacrament.

I am also a convert to the Christian faith, and I recall the first Sundays I spent sitting in the pews, yet to make sense of much of the liturgy, reading the rubric aloud while everyone else was silent or struggling to find the right hymn before the singing started. Those early Sundays were awkward and often mentally demanding, but what drew me back was always the service of the sacrament. For all my confusion, when the elements were raised, I felt as though I was witnessing Christ’s standard raised over his victorious battlefield, a signal for his faithful. Come. Be with him. Though I didn’t yet possess the understanding necessary to approach the altar, I knew I was a bystander to one of God’s greatest acts. As Luther says, “The Mass is nothing else than the divine promise or testament of Christ, sealed with the sacrament of his body and blood.” With enough contemplation, my desire to witness God’s forgiveness became a desire to experience it, to partake in communion with other Christians, to become a Christian.

Stivers says something blunt yet revealing: “I started modifying my behavior, not because I was fully convinced, but because I wanted to take the Eucharist.” After all, God calls us to his table to be reconciled with him, however far we may have strayed. Likewise, we long to be near to him, and so we continue to pray, like the travelers on the road to Emmaus, for him to “abide with us.”

“And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.”

Nathan A. West
columbus, georgia

I am an Orthodox Christian—Russian Orthodox—and “How I Learned to Love Confession” jumped out at me because confession is one of the most important parts of my faith. It is a cleansing of my being, followed by receiving the body and blood of Christ. 

In Orthodoxy, we do not distinguish between mortal and venial sins. We just pour out what we feel guilty about, to the best of our ability. Confession is face-to-face with the priest, who knows us well. This, of course, can be embarrassing, but for that reason, all the more beneficial. In Orthodoxy, there is also no prohibition on remarriage or barriers preventing a divorced person from receiving communion. Fairly recently (by millennial standards), the Catholic Church has introduced, in some cases, face-to-face confession and the opportunity to receive both bread and wine in Communion (which have always been inseparable in Orthodoxy). Maybe the Catholic Church could also reconsider permitting remarriage and divorced persons receiving the Eucharist as well?

Dimitry Zarechnak
silver spring, maryland

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Tortured Text

Although fascinating, ­“Voyages to the End of the World” by Peter Thiel and Sam Wolfe (November 2025) badly miscasts Francis Bacon. 

Thomas More, another Lord Chancellor of England, also wrote a fictional account of a flourishing island society. The two great lawyers, although separated by the Reformation, wrote for Christian readers using words carefully, knowing they would be closely parsed. Attacked with the hermeneutics of suspicion, however, either book may be tortured to yield subversive themes. Thus tolerance of sun and moon worship in Utopia could be dressed up to be more shocking than anything in Bensalem. But the charge made by Thiel and Wolfe against Bacon is not of mere heterodoxy but of purposive atheism.

Is it likely that Bacon’s secret anti-­Christian meaning would escape the attention of Bishop Lancelot Andrews and other scholarly Christians who were his close friends? Is it likely that Chief Justice Coke, his professional and personal rival, and other powerful enemies, failed to scour his words for such damning matter? Why is there no matching hint of anti-Christian meaning in the huge corpus of his Latin works? And why has Bacon’s atheism only come to light in the post-Christian world?

It is Bensalem’s “Christian Jew,” Joabin, who draws Thiel and Wolfe’s suspicions. They forget that Bacon lived in the great age of Christian Hebraism, which valued rabbinic and Hebrew literature far more than our so-called Judeo-Christian era. More, an early proponent of religious tolerance, would have approved Joabin’s role. It is thus easy to admire More’s humanism, but it was Bacon’s vision of empirically grounded natural theology that ­triumphed. He promoted the alliance of science and faith, believing in a close reading of God’s two books—Scripture and nature. Bacon (with Locke and Newton) was a forerunner of the British ­Enlightenment, which rejected the atheistic worship of autonomous reason. The Antichrist had a great enemy in ­Bacon.

Alan Heslop
pomona, california

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When Theology Intrudes

Hans Boersma argued in “­Modernity and God-Talk” (November 2025) that the West’s understanding of divine simplicity is (at least in part) to blame for the exclusion of God from the modern world. Instead, Boersma says, we must ­­­re-enchant the world by becoming Christian panentheists and adopting the Eastern essence-energies distinction, specifically a Plotinian hierarchy of being emanating from (or within) the divine essence in which creatures participate at varying levels. Only then, says Boersma, will our world be so charged with the glory of God that it will be impossible to live “as if God did not exist.”

I see several problems with Boersma’s thesis. First, it is not apparent that simplicity (understood as God’s being identical with himself) entails an unbridgeable distance between God and the world, nor does Boersma provide much in the way of evidence for this claim. Classical theists have always understood that God, though absolutely simple, is nonetheless present and active in the world. Despite being spaceless, God fills all space. Despite being eternal, God is fully present at every moment in time. Indeed, simplicity safeguards divine immanence because it means that God is present and active at every moment in time and point in space without extension—that is, with the very fullness of his being. The essence-energies distinction, by contrast, makes extension part of the being of God and limits God’s presence in the world merely to this extension (the energies).

A second and deeper problem is that Scripture nowhere connects God’s presence in the world with the kind of panentheistic mutualism Boersma suggests. Scripture is clear that God is the creator of all things, that he sustains all things, that he ordains all things, and that he is Lord of all things. Thus ­creation reflects his goodness and glory. Yet nowhere is creation itself seen as a mode of divine being or an embodiment of God himself (even at the level of the energies). There are certainly special manifestations of divine presence in Scripture (the tabernacle, the glory cloud, the tongues of fire, etc.) yet in all these, Scripture indicates that God is making himself present in a special way by means of his Word and covenantal/redemptive activity—not by means of divine embodiment.

Finally, while Scripture does present God as bridging a chasm between himself and creation, this chasm is moral not metaphysical. That is, God sent his Son to bear our sin, not simply to express the archetype of divine embodiment in creation. Christ unites us to God by washing our sins in his blood and clothing us in his own perfect righteousness so that morally we may be fit for the presence of God. I fear that in ­Boersma’s panentheistic proposal, Christ’s mission is reduced to uniting us with God metaphysically—that is, Christ takes what was already a divine embodiment (us/creation) and merely raises it to a higher level of divine embodiment by virtue of the incarnation. For these reasons, I believe divine simplicity ought to be maintained and the essence-­energies distinction, especially understood as divine embodiment, must be rejected.

Andrew Knox Brown
louisville, kentucky

Hans Boersma raises an important question about how our worldview affects how we live. His answer is unconvincing. When I find myself living “as if God does not exist,” it is because of my sins, not mistakes in doctrine. Back when I was an atheist, it was sin that brought me to my knees, not a worldview. 

Perhaps “divine simplicity” and “uncreated energies” can be clarified and reconciled using Duns Scotus’s formal distinction, but St. Basil’s diagnosis reaches deeper: These controversies continue because iniquities abound, and our love grows cold. When Boersma frames his argument around an allegedly Western misinterpretation of divine simplicity, is he not giving in to the self-hatred that infects the secular West today? 

Hesychasm was a technique of contemplative prayer, but its critics attacked the term, “uncreated energies,” used to explain the experience. Proceeding in the opposite direction, Boersma thinks a change in doctrine will fix a devotional problem. Yet even his proposed change is suspect. Bypassing the Hesychasts, he appeals to Plotinus, whose notion of three primary hypostases—One, Intellect, and Soul—helped the Cappadocians articulate the doctrine of the Trinity, but only after Pagan elements are expunged: If God (the One) is beyond being, Intellect and Soul are beings who only participate in him; they are not consubstantial with him.

At bottom, Plotinus’s trinity stops at Soul; the “energies” are too attenuated to extend down to matter, which must be left behind as we climb the ladder to beatitude. Without noting these problems, Boersma identifies the Incarnate Christ, not the Eternal Son, with the Intellect. Maybe it’s a moot point, since he hasn’t established that Intellect is consubstantial with the One.

Clearly we need well-articulated doctrine to exclude heresy. But we are not saved by doctrine. Boersma asks, “What conception of the divine allows us to speak of drawing ‘closer’ to God?” Do I need a concept of my wife that will allow me to speak of drawing close to her? Maybe I should just listen to her first.

Dane Waterman
irving, texas

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Gifts Without Strings

Justin Lee (“The Death of Halloween,” November 2025) misses the target audience and the contemporary purpose of the holiday. Halloween is for young children and shows them that there is some good in the world worth walking around the block for. Christmas cannot compete—Santa’s gifts are conditional on good behavior (year-long!) from an omniscient but invisible gift giver.

Halloween candy is something children want, but their parents at best ration and at worst deny. Given to them by neighbors and strangers, for nothing more than showing up at their door with a costume and a bag and saying “trick or treat,” what could be more glorious or demonstrative of love?

Robert Zeh
river forest, illinois

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Evolution Is Not God

Thank you to R. R. Reno for “Agonistic End Times” (November 2025), in which he highlighted Teilhard de Chardin’s role “as the spiritual custodian of a very modern belief in progress.” The fundamental difference between Teilhard’s theistic evolutionary concept of God and the true Catholic doctrine on the divine nature is that the god of evolution is identified with the world. He did not create a perfectly harmonious world out of nothing for man in the beginning of time—nor did the character of that world change because of the original sin of ­Adam, requiring the transcendent God to assume a human nature and atone for the sins of the world. On the contrary, according to theistic evolution, God intentionally used demons, death, destruction, mutation, struggle for existence, and extinctions to evolve his handiwork.

When I was an undergraduate at Princeton University fifty years ago, the consensus view in biology held that 98 percent of human DNA was “junk” left over from the millions of years of human evolution. Yet when Project Encode studied the so-called “non-coding” DNA, scientists discovered that it is not junk. It operates at a higher level of functioning than the DNA that codes for protein, often switching on and off the genetic programs that enable plants and animals to adapt to changing environments.

We now know that the DNA sequences in the cells of all living things can be read in one direction to give a meaningful set of instructions; read in the opposite direction to give a different meaningful set of instructions; read according to a pattern whereby every so many letters can be read to give a third set of meaningful instructions; and the sequence can be translated into another language to give a fourth set of meaningful instructions.

No human being can create information at this level of density and complexity—and, as plant geneticist Dr. John Sanford has demonstrated, information this dense and complex cannot be improved by mutations. It can only degenerate. Thus, we know for certain that we are not evolving into Superman. We are devolving from an original state of perfection, just as God revealed in the sacred history of Genesis.

Hugh Owen
mount jackson, virginia

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Digital Lies

I agree with R. R. Reno; AI is being vastly oversold (“The ­Mediocrity of AI,” November 2025). My search engine offers me AI answers automatically. It’s annoying, but I can’t help but look. Recently, I did a search as to whether a ballistics test had been done on the Mauser 98 “found” near the site of the Kirk shooting. The AI said “Yes.” This was news. However, further review of the answer revealed that it regarded “ballistics test” to be encompassed by “forensic tests,” which had been done and found inculpatory DNA. It equated DNA with ballistics. An actual search determined that no ballistics test had been done and still has not been done. Last May, Open AI was found to “hallucinate” 33 percent of the time. Hallucinate means “make things up.”

Robert Byron
simsbury, connecticut