Aunque mi español de turista no daba para entender las referencias a lo divino, yo sentía el significado de la canción en mi alma. Las voces resonaban para la gloria de Dios. Las palabras que no podía traducir expresaban la profundidad de nuestra depravación envuelta en el amor incondicional de Dios.

Si bien no compartimos ni el idioma ni la etnia, mi experiencia en el culto con pastores y líderes latinos en Estados Unidos me recordó que esta comunidad, como cualquier otra cultura, es importante para el reino de Dios. Y la iglesia en general tiene mucho que aprender de estos hermanos en Cristo sobre la fe, la comunidad y la resiliencia.

En primer lugar, mientras que muchas iglesias estadounidenses sufren la incapacidad de llegar a las generaciones más jóvenes, las iglesias latinas están nadando contra esa corriente. Aaron Earls, de Lifeway Research, ha descrito a las congregaciones hispanas como «más nuevas, más jóvenes y más eficaces en la evangelización que la iglesia protestante típica en los Estados Unidos», y señala que «la mayoría realiza sus servicios únicamente en español (53 %), mientras que el 22 % son bilingües».

Los jóvenes de familias inmigrantes en Estados Unidos suelen ser maestros para sus padres de diversas maneras, desde ayudarles a aprender inglés hasta enfrentarse a las complejidades de sistemas desconocidos como el de salud y el de educación. Esta dinámica hace que los jóvenes también sean parte integral de la vida de la iglesia. Las congregaciones latinas tienden a estar dispuestas a acogerlos, no como receptores pasivos de la fe, sino como participantes activos en su formación. A los jóvenes cristianos se les pide desde pequeños que ayuden a dirigir el culto, enseñen y sirvan como traductores.

Este ministerio intergeneracional inverso, en el que los jóvenes suelen ser quienes traen a sus familias al redil, demuestra tanto el dinamismo como la complejidad de una fe que trasciende las barreras de la edad. Tener que afrontar tantos roles a una edad temprana puede equipar de manera única a los cristianos para el ministerio, pero también es agotador y puede ser traumático, especialmente cuando ha sido marcado por la pobreza, la pérdida y la injusticia.

«No es necesario llegar a la generación Z; es necesario rescatarla», me dijo un líder latino joven durante una reunión en el Seminario Teológico Fuller en Pasadena en agosto. «Va a ser complicado». Pero este proceso de integración de múltiples generaciones, tan hermoso y complejo como es, es exactamente lo que las comunidades cristianas latinas están dispuestas a hacer.

Los pastores Josh y Noemí Chávez conversaron conmigo sobre cómo se ve esto en su ministerio intergeneracional en Long Beach, California. «Cuando comencé a pastorear, tenía poco más de 20 años. Pensar en los jóvenes era fácil. Era a la generación mayor a la que tenía que considerar intencionalmente», reflexionó Noemí. «Ahora que tengo más de 40 años tengo que pensar intencionalmente tanto en los jóvenes como en los mayores. La Gran Comisión está en el centro de la visión y la misión de la iglesia y, por lo tanto, como líderes, debemos pastorear con amor los corazones de cada generación y encontrar gozo en la expresión del mensaje del evangelio».

Cuando esto se consigue con éxito, ese testimonio crea un rico tapiz de fe que honra la tradición y al mismo tiempo acoge la novedad y la innovación. Y muchas congregaciones de habla hispana también son un tapiz cultural que sirve como lugar de encuentro para personas que vienen de múltiples países, con diferencias reales en pensamiento, expresión y, especialmente, en opiniones políticas.

Contrariamente a la idea errónea que se tiene en la actualidad, la comunidad evangélica latina no es un bloque de votantes monolítico. Los votantes hispanos en Estados Unidos tienen una amplia gama de ideologías políticas, incluso en materia de inmigración. Si bien muchas iglesias predominantemente blancas son políticamente homogéneas, los ministros latinos me dijeron que ven una diversidad de opiniones políticas en sus congregaciones.

Esta capacidad de mantener la unidad en el culto es particularmente sorprendente y contracultural en el clima polarizado de hoy, y representa un modelo valioso de cómo priorizar la fe y la comunidad por encima de los desacuerdos políticos. Estas congregaciones hispanas son prueba de que es posible debatir sobre política y seguir partiendo el pan juntos.

«La iglesia enviada es una iglesia diversa», afirmó Gabriel Salguero. «Es un reflejo del Reino de Dios». Salguero, junto con su esposa Jeannette, son los fundadores de la Coalición Evangélica Latina Nacional y de la iglesia The Gathering Place en Orlando. Durante décadas, han guiado a pastores y miembros de iglesias de casi todos los continentes y ámbitos sociales, y él ve las diferencias ideológicas como una fortaleza, no simplemente como un obstáculo que superar.

«La iglesia necesita esta diversidad, incluso la diversidad de pensamiento», comentó Salguero en la cumbre de Orlando. «Si todos pensamos exactamente lo mismo, no estamos pensando todos».

Con una gran diversidad de generaciones y de opiniones, ¿qué podría mantener unidas a estas comunidades en Cristo? La respuesta corta es el Espíritu Santo… y el café.

Mientras que el servicio brinda inspiración, el café posterior brinda comunión. Al terminar el servicio de culto, las conversaciones acompañadas de un cafecito, un café con leche o un pan dulce brindan oportunidades cruciales para construir relaciones y formar una comunidad. Este es el lugar donde los nuevos miembros de la congregación pueden presentarse, los jóvenes pueden establecer vínculos, los mayores pueden recordar el pasado y los pastores pueden ofrecer una atención integral.

Este compromiso de estar presente con las personas en su vida cotidiana refleja una profunda comprensión del valor cultural de la familia, lo que conduce a un profundo cuidado de los demás.

Ese modelo de atención es cada vez más importante a medida que la iglesia en general enfrenta los desafíos de la disminución de la asistencia, las brechas generacionales y la relevancia cultural. La iglesia latina en Estados Unidos nos recuerda que el evangelio no es solo un mensaje para predicar, sino una vida para vivir: en comunidad, a través de las generaciones, abrazando la diversidad, superando los desafíos y siempre abiertos a las cosas nuevas que Dios está haciendo.

«Las iglesias hispanas siguen siendo una fuerza impulsora en la revitalización de la fe en Estados Unidos», me dijo Enid Almanzar, presidenta de la Coalición Evangélica Latina Nacional (National Latino Evangelical Coalition), después de la cumbre. Ninguna iglesia o grupo étnico es perfecto, por supuesto. Ninguna comunidad está exenta de las cicatrices que deja el esfuerzo por parecerse más a Cristo.

Sin embargo, en estos tiempos complejos, la iglesia latina ofrece ser un faro de esperanza a los creyentes en Estados Unidos y más allá, mientras se esfuerza por ser la iglesia que nuestro mundo necesita tan desesperadamente. Al igual que Pablo, al escribir a los corintios sobre las iglesias en Macedonia, quiero «que se enteren de la gracia que Dios ha dado» a estos hermanos creyentes (2 Corintios 8:1) para que puedan ser beneficiarios de su ejemplo de fe.

Nicole Massie Martín es la directora de impacto de Christianity Today.

The post El vibrante testimonio de las iglesias latinas appeared first on Christianity Today en español | Cristianismo hoy.

Though my tourist-level Spanish could not bear the weight of references to the divine, I knew the meaning of the song in my soul. Voices rang to the glory of God. Words I couldn’t translate expressed the depth of our depravity encompassed by his unconditional love. 

While we shared neither language nor ethnicity, my experience in worship with Latino pastors and leaders in America reminded me: This community, like every culture, is important to the kingdom of God. And the wider church has much to learn with and from these siblings in Christ about faith, community, and resilience. 

First, while many American churches are suffering from an inability to reach younger generations, Latino churches are swimming against that tide. Aaron Earls of Lifeway Research has described Hispanic congregations as “newer, younger, and more effectively evangelistic than the average US Protestant church,” and he notes that “a majority conduct their services only in Spanish (53%), while 22 percent are bilingual.”

Young people in immigrant families in America often serve as teachers for their parents in a variety of ways, ranging from learning English to navigating the complexities of unfamiliar health care and educational systems. This dynamic makes younger people integral to the life of the church too. Latino congregations tend to be willing to embrace them not as passive recipients of the faith but as active participants in shaping it. Young Christians are called upon early to help lead worship, teach, and serve as translators.

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This reverse intergenerational ministry, where young people tend to bring their families into the fold, demonstrates both the dynamism and complexity of faith that transcends age barriers. Having to navigate so many roles at young ages can uniquely equip Christians for ministry—but it’s also taxing and can be traumatic, marked by poverty, loss, and injustice.

“Gen Z doesn’t need to be reached; they need to be rescued,” one younger Latino leader told me during a gathering at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena in August. “It’s going to be messy.” This messy, beautiful process of integrating multiple generations is exactly what Latino Christian communities are willing to do. 

Pastors Josh and Noemi Chavez talked to me about what this looks like in their intergenerational ministry in Long Beach, California. “When I started pastoring, I was in my 20s. Thinking about young people was easy. I had to intentionally consider the older generation,” Noemi reflected. “Now, in my 40s, I have to intentionally think about the younger and the older. If the Great Commission is at the center of the vision and mission of the church, then as leaders we can lovingly shepherd the hearts of each generation and find joy in the expression of the gospel message.”

When successful, that witness creates a rich tapestry of faith that honors tradition while embracing newness and innovation. And many Spanish-speaking congregations are a cultural tapestry, too, serving as a gathering place for people from multiple countries with real differences in thought, expression, and, notably, political views. 

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Contrary to popular US misconceptions, the Latino evangelical community is not a monolithic voting bloc. Hispanic voters in America hold a wide spectrum of political ideologies, including on immigration. Yet while many predominantly white churches are politically homogenous, Latino clergy told me they see a diversity of political views in their congregations.

This ability to maintain unity in worship is particularly striking and countercultural in today’s polarized climate, a valuable model of prioritizing faith and community over political disagreements. These Hispanic congregations are proof that it’s possible to debate politics and keep breaking bread together.

“The sent church is a diverse church,” Gabriel Salguero shared. “It is a reflection of the Kingdom of God.” With his wife, Jeannette, Salguero is the founder of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition and The Gathering Place Church in Orlando. For decades, they have shepherded pastors and church members from nearly every continent and walk of life, and he sees ideological differences as a strength, not merely an obstacle to overcome.

“The church needs this diversity, even diversity of thought,” Salguero remarked at the summit in Orlando. “If we’re all thinking exactly the same, we’re not all thinking.”

With a tapestry of generations and a range of varying views, what could possibly hold these communities together in Christ? The short answer is the Holy Spirit—and coffee.

While the service provides inspiration, the coffee afterward provides communion. After-service conversations over a cafecito, a café con leche, or pan dulce provide crucial opportunities for relationship-building and community formation. This is the space where those new to the congregation can become known, the young can connect, the elders can reminisce, and the pastors can provide holistic care. 

This commitment to being present with people in their everyday lives reflects a deep understanding of the familia cultural value, leading to profound care for others.

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That model of care is ever more important as the broader church grapples with challenges of declining attendance, generational gaps, and cultural relevance. The Latino church in America reminds us that the gospel is not just a message to be preached but a life to be lived—in community, across generations, embracing diversity, overcoming challenges, and always open to the new things God is doing. 

“Hispanic churches continue to be a driving force in the revitalization of faith in the US,” Enid Almanzar, chair of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, told me after the summit. No church or ethnicity is perfect, of course. No community is free from the scars of striving to be more like Christ. 

Yet in these complex times, the Latino church provides a beacon of hope to believers in America and beyond as we seek to be the church that our world so desperately needs. Like Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the churches in Macedonia, I “want you to know about the grace that God has given” these fellow believers (2 Cor. 8:1) so you can benefit from their example of faith.

Nicole Massie Martin is the chief impact officer at Christianity Today.

The post Latino Churches’ Vibrant Testimony appeared first on Christianity Today.

Los seres, dijo, medían 2.5 o quizás 3 metros de altura, y tenían ojos grandes y brillantes.

«Pensamos que son extraterrestres. Ojos grandes. Tienen ojos grandes. Como… no puedo explicarlo, y la boca grande», dijo. «Son completamente no humanos» [enlaces en inglés].

La policía acudió al lugar, pero no encontraron extraterrestres ni naves espaciales: solo a una familia asustada. Al salir de la casa, uno de los agentes dijo: «Si esos seres de 3 metros vuelven, no nos llamen, ¿queda claro?».

Las historias de encuentros cercanos han recibido cierta credibilidad en los últimos días por los informes oficiales de que tanto el Pentágono como la NASA están estudiando «fenómenos anómalos no identificados», el elegante título alternativo para los objetos voladores no identificados. Recientemente, un informante denunció que el gobierno estadounidense ha recuperado y ocultado en secreto «naves de origen desconocido».

Si hay extraterrestres en nuestro patio trasero colectivo, me gustaría saber: ¿De dónde vienen? ¿Cómo llegaron hasta aquí? ¿Son amistosos?

Y como cristiano, tengo otra pregunta: ¿Debería compartir el Evangelio con ellos?

Puede parecer una pregunta que solo un teólogo del futuro podría abordar, sin embargo, C. S. Lewis ya se planteaba esa idea décadas antes de que Estados Unidos y la Unión Soviética empezaran a competir por enviar gente al espacio.

La investigación de Lewis sobre las preguntas teológicas que plantearía un encuentro con extraterrestres comenzó cuando era niño. Le cautivaron H. G. Wells y las aventuras espaciales de ciencia ficción.

«La idea de otros planetas ejercía sobre mí una atracción peculiar y embriagadora, muy distinta de cualquier otro de mis intereses literarios», escribió Lewis en su autobiografía espiritual Cautivado por la alegría. «Era algo más tosco y más fuerte».

Tras su conversión al cristianismo siendo adulto, mantuvo su fascinación por el espacio exterior. En 1937, él y J. R. R. Tolkien lamentaron la falta de buenas historias de ciencia ficción, por lo que se comprometieron a resolver el problema ellos mismos. Tolkien escribiría un libro sobre viajes en el tiempo, mientras que Lewis se ocuparía del espacio. Ese mismo año, Lewis tuvo una conversación con un estudiante ateo que decía que la importancia de la humanidad estaría ligada a nuestra evolución durante la siguiente fase de «salto de planetas».

Eso le hizo pensar en la concepción de Wells sobre la bondad humana en La guerra de los mundos. Se dio cuenta de que ni el estudiante ni Wells entendían el estado caído de la humanidad.

Mientras que Tolkien nunca concluyó su parte del acuerdo, Lewis escribió una trilogía sobre el espacio, empezando por Más allá del planeta silencioso [Out of the Silent Planet]. La Tierra es llamada «el planeta silencioso» porque en la historia aparece aislada del resto de los planetas no caídos del sistema solar.

En opinión de Lewis, no debemos presumir ninguna supremacía moral con respecto a la vida en otros planetas. Habló más de ello durante una presentación ante líderes anglicanos en 1945.

«Si la Tierra ha sido especialmente buscada por Dios (cosa que no sabemos) eso no implica que sea lo más importante del universo», dijo, «sino solo que se ha desviado».

Un año después de que la Unión Soviética pusiera el Sputnik 1 en órbita alrededor de la Tierra en 1957, Lewis argumentó que el descubrimiento de vida en otros planetas no supondría un gran desafío para la teología cristiana. Pero sí admitió que el descubrimiento de extraterrestres podría plantear preguntas sobre la Encarnación. La idea de que Dios se hizo humano para redimir al mundo podría no tener sentido si también hubiera vida inteligente en muchos otros mundos.

Planteó cinco preguntas para ayudarnos a reflexionar sobre este problema.

1. ¿Existe vida animal o vegetal en algún otro lugar aparte de la Tierra?

Encontrar algas o plantas creciendo en Marte o a través de la galaxia no tendría ramificaciones teológicas significativas relacionadas con la Encarnación.

2. ¿Poseen estas criaturas un «alma racional»?

Si las criaturas descubiertas no tuvieran capacidad moral, entonces no tendríamos que preocuparnos demasiado sobre si la encarnación de Jesús sería eficaz para ellas.

«No tendría sentido ofrecer a una criatura… un don que, por su naturaleza, esa criatura fuera incapaz de desear o de recibir», escribió. «Enseñamos a leer a nuestros hijos, pero no a nuestros perros. Los perros prefieren los huesos».

3. ¿Comparten los extraterrestres la condición caída de los seres humanos?

Podría ser que los humanos fueran las únicas «ovejas perdidas» que el Buen Pastor necesitaba salvar. Lewis observó que los no cristianos «parecen pensar que la Encarnación implica algún mérito o excelencia particular en la humanidad. Pero, por supuesto, implica justo lo contrario: un demérito y una depravación particulares». Cristo vino a salvar a los pecadores. Si los extraterrestres no fueran pecadores, entonces no necesitarían a Jesús como nosotros.

4. Si están caídos, ¿Cristo murió por ellos?

Es posible imaginar que Jesús murió en el Calvario para salvar también a los pecadores de otros planetas. Pero eso podría llevar demasiado lejos nuestras ideas sobre la Encarnación, ya que Cristo se encarnó específicamente como ser humano. Quizás Jesús «se encarnó en otros mundos además de la Tierra y así salvó a otras razas distintas de la nuestra», dijo Lewis. Sabemos que el amor de Dios se extendió hasta nuestras almas perdidas y no deberíamos suponer que no iría más allá.

5. ¿Es el modo de redención que conocemos el único posible para que Cristo redima?

Al mismo tiempo, Lewis argumentó que nuestra visión de la salvación está moldeada por nuestra experiencia limitada. ¿Podría haber otros planes de redención para otros planetas? «Tanto las condiciones espirituales como las físicas podrían diferir mucho en mundos distintos», afirmó.

Esta pregunta, según Lewis, parte de «lo que no es meramente desconocido, sino totalmente incognoscible a menos que Dios lo revele». Sin embargo, la pregunta teórica podría convertirse en real con el descubrimiento de ovnis en Las Vegas o en cualquier otro lugar.

Si la respuesta a las cinco preguntas de Lewis es «sí», entonces nos queda la conclusión de que la redención del cosmos viene a través de la Encarnación de Jesús, lo que significa que viene a través de la humanidad.

«Esto sin duda daría al hombre una posición central», escribe Lewis. «Pero tal posición no implicaría ninguna superioridad nuestra, ni ningún favoritismo de Dios».

Tampoco nos otorga la responsabilidad de la evangelización intergaláctica. Lewis advirtió que no deberíamos asumir inmediatamente la responsabilidad de convertir a criaturas de otros mundos, puesto que hemos demostrado no ser dignos de confianza en el único planeta que hemos conocido. En nuestro estado caído, comparable solo a una pesadilla, nosotros, como humanidad, inevitablemente maltratamos a los extraños.

«El hombre destruye o esclaviza a todas las especies que puede», escribió Lewis. «El hombre civilizado asesina, esclaviza, engaña y corrompe al hombre salvaje».

No todo el mundo, por supuesto, trata inmediatamente de subyugar a todo extraño con el que se encuentra. Pero la historia nos ha enseñado, dijo Lewis, que los que se aventuren a salir al espacio y a entrar en contacto con estos extraterrestres teóricos «serán el aventurero necesitado y codicioso, o el experto técnico despiadado».

Para establecer el primer contacto, podríamos unirnos como cristianos y enviar primero misioneros como mejores emisarios del mensaje evangélico. Pero tampoco podemos confiar tanto en ese enfoque.

«“Armas y evangelio” se han combinado horriblemente en el pasado», dijo Lewis. «El santo deseo del misionero de salvar almas no siempre se ha mantenido bien diferenciado del arrogante deseo… de (como él lo llama) “civilizar” a los (como él los llama) “nativos”».

A medida que la salud de Lewis se desvanecía, la idea de que podríamos llegar a otros planetas se hacía cada vez más tangible para la humanidad. Tanto Estados Unidos como la Unión Soviética lanzaron naves para explorar Venus, y cinco meses antes de la muerte de Lewis, la Unión Soviética envió su primera nave espacial alrededor de Marte.

Aquellos encuentros con otros mundos fueron apasionantes. Como lo son los posibles encuentros en nuestros días, desde la llamada al 911 en Las Vegas, el testimonio ante el Congreso, o los astronautas que averiguan cómo establecer un puesto de avanzada en la Luna.

Pero Lewis, pensando en este futuro como teólogo, nos recuerda que debemos preocuparnos primero por nuestras propias limitaciones morales, y que debemos reconocer que nuestra capacidad de exploración no se puede aislar de nuestra capacidad de explotación.

Si la Gran Comisión nos lleva al gran cosmos, Lewis nos recordaría que caminemos humildemente sobre la superficie de otros planetas.

Aaron Earls escribe sobre fe, cultura y C. S. Lewis en The Wardrobe Door. También es redactor jefe de Lifeway Research.

Traducción y edición en español por Livia Giselle Seidel.

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The post C.S. Lewis nos advirtió sobre los ‘encuentros cercanos’ del tipo evangélico appeared first on Christianity Today en español | Cristianismo hoy.

This pithy saying, attributed to the famed British writer C. S. Lewis, has widely circulated the internet in the last decade. The only problem is, he didn’t say it. It appeared in Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, and another version cropped up a few years earlier in This Was Your Life! Preparing to Meet God Face to Face by Rick Howard and Jamie Lash. “Real humility is not thinking less of ourselves; it is thinking of ourselves less,” they wrote before quoting Lewis on the topic.

Howard and Lash’s summary of Lewis’s thinking and Warren’s rephrasing has become one of the most common quotes wrongly attributed to Lewis.

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Numerous fake C. S. Lewis quotes have gone viral in recent years thanks to the power of social media. Many are pointedly applicable to the present cultural moment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a letter purporting to be from The Screwtape Letters filled Facebook feeds. In the false letter, a demon claims, “The world turned into a concentration camp, without forcing any of them into captivity.” And in recent election seasons, another fake Screwtape letter circulated, congratulating the junior demon on keeping a person “completely fixated on politics.”

Other false Lewis quotes can even make him appear to put forth theologically disputable claims, like this quote, referenced by big-name leaders and cycled with regularity: “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” It remains one of the most controversial.

Some popular misattributed Lewis quotes are even further removed from his actual words. Motivational phrases like “You are never too old to set another goal or dream a new dream” are frequently credited to Lewis. According to William O’Flaherty, author of The Misquotable C. S. Lewis, one of the more bizarre recent misattributions is “Be weird. Be random. Be who you are. Because you never know who would love the person you hide.”

O’Flaherty has become synonymous with debunking misquotes of C. S. Lewis ever since he began correcting them in his blog and on social media. His first experience with a misattributed Lewis quote, however, was his own.

“Despite the fact that I had read nearly all of his works at that point, I often did what people do now,” O’Flaherty said. “I’d see a quote credited to Lewis, liked what it said, and shared it without considering whether he was the author or not.”

In 2010, a Lewis scholar reached out to O’Flaherty about one of the inspiring quotes he’d shared on his blog. It wasn’t actually Lewis. “So I guess you could say I first noticed quotes misattributed to Lewis by being an offender.”

Today, O’Flaherty works to correct misattributed and out-of-context C. S. Lewis quotes, a role that increasingly seems never-ending, as Lewis quickly became one of the most misquoted writers. It appears the only thing social media and internet searches love more than a C. S. Lewis quote is a fake C. S. Lewis quote.

Michael Ward, C. S. Lewis scholar at Oxford University and author of Planet Narnia, said part of the reason Lewis is so misquoted is because he’s so quotable.

“He is a great writer who puts things pithily and memorably,” Ward said. “As soon as someone is recognized as ‘quotable,’ all sorts of quotes they didn’t say, and that perhaps nobody said, but which the speaker wishes someone had said, get attributed to them.”

Lewis wrote so widely and extensively that many simply assume any quote attributed to him could be from him. Ward said the false attributions can arise from laziness, ignorance, or simple guesswork. Quotes widely attributed to Lewis may range from paraphrases of his actual writing to the words of others that somehow became attached to him to quotes created to appear as if they belong to Lewis.

Our picture of his misquotes may be limited to misattributed words on X or a speciously claimed quote plastered over an image of Lewis on Instagram, but that’s not where they started. And unfortunately, they’re not limited to those spaces either.

Before he was himself quotable and misquotable, Lewis had already been exposed to the problem of misattribution. Ward noted that in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis mentions hearing his Irish father relay anecdotes about an Irish scholar. Later, at Oxford, he heard those same stories attached to a British scholar.

When Lewis began his writing and speaking career, criticism of his work occasionally veered into mischaracterization, according to Harry Lee Poe, author of a trilogy of C. S. Lewis biographies. “The problem of misrepresentation arose from time to time from those who attacked Lewis,” said Poe, “and he just as regularly replied or responded in an article or letter to the editor.”

That was the case when Lewis drew the ire of Norman Pittenger, a progressive Anglican theologian and professor of apologetics at General Theological Seminary in New York. In the October 1958 Christian Century, Pittenger wrote a piece attacking Lewis’s approach to apologetics and theology.

The magazine’s editor sent the piece to Lewis and offered to reprint his reply. In his response, Lewis granted a handful of Pittenger’s minor complaints but challenged most of what he wrote. Particularly, Lewis wrote that the American professor had misquoted and misunderstood what Lewis had said in Miracles.

Wheaton College professor Clyde Kilby wrote a defense of Lewis in the December 1958 issue of Christianity Today and sent his response to Lewis. In his letters to Kilby and others, Lewis was much more forceful in his criticism of Pittenger. In one, Lewis wrote that he found it “hard to stomach the fact that, while contradicting nearly every article of the Creed, he continues to receive money as a professor of Christian apologetics.” Elsewhere, he said, “While one can respect a straightforward atheist, it is hard not to hate a man who takes money for defending Christianity and spends his time attacking it.”

Lewis’s misquotes may have started with his ideological opponents, but they spread to his seeming admirers even before social media. When O’Flaherty began researching false attributions, he traced many to pre-internet sources. “I discovered that part of the problem originated from books and articles,” he said.

The problem of fake quotes remained somewhat isolated with printed text. However, C. S. Lewis misquotes grew exponentially with the explosion of social media in the early 2000s.

Not long after sharing his own fake Lewis quote, O’Flaherty said he began to make a list of misattributed quotes. “It went from five to ten rather quickly and kept growing,” he said. By late 2012, he noticed those fake quotes were becoming an issue. He wrote an article debunking some of the most popular misquotes he’d seen. By 2016, confusion around what Lewis actually said had only increased, leading O’Flaherty to write his book.

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William O’Flaherty

This problem has gotten even more tricky in the last couple years. Just as the rise of social media in the early 2000s allowed more quotes to spread divorced from their correct source, the advent of generative artificial intelligence has now made it possible for fake quotes to be simulated in Lewis’s own voice. Such deepfake videos provide new avenues for confusion and deception.

There are no known videos of Lewis, and only a few audio recordings of him remain. Yet several modern videos have been produced in the last couple years appearing to feature extended clips of Lewis offering self-help motivational advice. The description for one video reads, “Embrace C.S. Lewis’ advice and ‘learn to act as if nothing bothers you’—a skill that can unlock a deeper level of peace, joy, and fulfillment in your life.”

However, a few paragraphs further down in the description, the channel reveals the video was “created using a synthesized voice that does not belong to him.” Entire YouTube channels are dedicated to producing computer-generated content in the simulated voice of well-known thinkers like Lewis.

As Christians navigate a growing sea of misattribution, it helps to remember why Lewis became so quotable in the first place. His desire was to communicate truth, not try to be memorable. “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original,” he wrote in Mere Christianity, “whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

Part of his success in being original and memorable in how he communicated truth came from an area of his life that could be considered a failure. “Lewis had hoped to be a poet,” Poe said, “but his poetry tended to be technically well crafted but not quite what he regarded as great poetry. Yet Lewis’s prose has a remarkable poetic quality to it that rises above the mundane.”

As others quote and misquote Lewis, Ward said he might see it as an indirect compliment. “This is the almost predictable fate of any figure who achieves a certain stature, to serve as a convenient magnet for stories or quotations that other people want to perpetuate, however inaccurately,” he said. “But as a historian who respected source material, Lewis would also prefer it if people bothered to be accurate.”

In O’Flaherty’s eyes, the temptation to misquote Lewis or share quotes without checking the attribution often comes from a desire to use the cachet of someone respected simply to provide personal confirmation. “Frankly speaking, too many people have a bumper sticker attention span,” O’Flaherty wrote in his book. “And typically, they love quotes because quotes give them the ‘sound bite’ that confirms something they already believe.”

Modern forms of media for communication, like social media and YouTube videos, provide us with ample opportunity for both belief confirmation and affirmation. “Today, when a person shares a quote misattributed to Lewis, it may get several thousand likes and a thousand or more shares in less than a day,” O’Flaherty said. “The fake quote just spreads like wildfire.”

Whether people are intentionally deceptive in their misquoting of Lewis or lazily unaware, the man himself would argue that the pursuit of truth is always worth the extra effort.

As he wrote in Mere Christianity, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.” (That’s in Book I, Chapter 5—“We Have Cause to Be Uneasy”—page 39 in my edition, if you need to check.)

So the next time you hear someone say, “As C. S. Lewis once said,” make sure you ask them for a source.

Aaron Earls writes about faith, culture, and C. S. Lewis at The Wardrobe Door. He is also the senior writer for Lifeway Research.

The post Mere Misattribution? Why We Misquote C.S. Lewis appeared first on Christianity Today.

The beings, he said, were 8 feet or maybe 9 or 10 feet tall, with big, shiny eyes.

“They look like aliens to us. Big eyes. They have big eyes. Like, I can’t explain it, and big mouth,” he said. “They’re 100 percent not human.”

Police responded but they didn’t find aliens or spaceship—just one freaked-out family. Leaving the house, one of the officers said, “If those 9-foot beings come back, don’t call us alright?”

Stories of close encounters have been lent some credence in recent days by official reports that the Pentagon and NASA are both studying “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” the fancy alternative title for undefined flying objects. Recently a whistleblower came out with claims the US government has secretly recovered and hidden “craft of unknown origin.”

If there are aliens in our collective backyard, I want to know: Where are they from? How did they get here? Are they friendly?

And as a Christian, I have another question: Should I share the gospel with them?

That may seem like a question only a theologian from the future could address, but C. S. Lewis was wrestling with the idea decades before the United States and the Soviet Union began to compete to send people into space.

Lewis’s investigation of the theological questions that would be raised by an alien encounter began when he was a child. He was captivated by H. G. Wells and science fiction space adventures.

“The idea of other planets exercised upon me a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite different from any other of my literary interests,” Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy, his spiritual autobiography. “This was something coarser and stronger.”

After his Christian conversion as an adult, he maintained a fascination with outer space. In 1937, he and J. R. R. Tolkien lamented the lack of good science fiction stories, so they pledged to address the issue themselves. Tolkien would write a time-travel book, while Lewis tackled space. That same year, Lewis had a conversation with an atheist student who said the significance of humanity would be tied to our evolution during the next phase of “planet-jumping.”

That made him think back to Wells’s conception of human goodness in War of the Worlds. He realized neither the student nor Wells understood how humanity was fallen.

While Tolkien never finished his part of the agreement, Lewis wrote a space trilogy, starting with Out of the Silent Planet. Earth is called the “silent planet” because in the story it is cut off from the rest of the unfallen planets in the solar system.

In Lewis’s mind, we should not assume any moral supremacy to life from other planets. He explained this more during a presentation to Anglican leaders in 1945.

“If Earth has been specially sought by God (which we don’t know) that may not imply that it is the most important thing in the universe,” he said, “but only that it has strayed.”

NASA Astronaut Asks for Prayer for Moon Mission

Daniel Silliman

A year after the Soviet Union sent Sputnik 1 into orbit around the Earth in 1957, Lewis argued that discovery of life on other planets wouldn’t challenge Christian theology very much. He admitted the discovery of extraterrestrials could, however, raise questions about the Incarnation. The idea that God became human to redeem the world might not make sense if there was intelligent life on many other worlds as well.

He set out five questions to help us think through problem.

1. Is there animal life somewhere other than Earth?

Finding algae or plants growing on Mars or across the galaxy wouldn’t have significant theological ramifications related to the Incarnation.

2. Do these creatures possess a “rational soul”?

If the discovered creatures had no moral capacity, then we wouldn’t have to worry too much about whether Jesus’ incarnation would be efficacious for them.

“There would be no sense in offering to a creature … a gift which that creature was by its nature incapable either of desiring or of receiving,” he wrote. “We teach our sons to read but not our dogs. The dogs prefer bones.”

3. Are aliens, like humanity, fallen?

It could be that humans are the only “lost sheep” that the Good Shepherd needed to go save. Lewis noted that non-Christians “seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity.” Christ came to save sinners. If aliens aren’t sinners, then they would not need Jesus like we do.

4. If they are fallen, did Christ die for them?

It’s possible to imagine that Jesus died on Calvary to save sinners on other planets as well. That might stretch our ideas of the Incarnation too far, though, since Christ become incarnate specifically as a human. Perhaps, instead, Jesus has “been incarnate in other worlds than earth and so saved other races than ours,” Lewis said. We know the love of God stretched as far as our lost souls and shouldn’t assume it would go no further.

5. Is the mode of redemption we know the only possible way for Christ to redeem?

At the same time, Lewis argued, our view of salvation is shaped by our limited experience. Could there not be other redemptive plans for other planets? “Spiritual as well as physical conditions might differ widely in different worlds,” he said.

This question, according to Lewis, moves from “what is not merely unknown but, unless God should reveal it, wholly unknowable.” The theoretical question could become real, though, with the discovery of UFOs in Las Vegas or elsewhere.

If the answer to all five of Lewis’s questions is “yes,” then we are left with the conclusion that cosmic redemption comes through the Incarnation of Jesus, which means it comes through humanity.

“This would no doubt give man a pivotal position,” Lewis writes. “But such a position does not imply any superiority in ours or any favoritism in God.”

Nor does it grant us the responsibility for intergalactic evangelization. Lewis warned that we should not immediately take upon ourselves the responsibility for converting creatures from other worlds, because we have demonstrated ourselves untrustworthy on the only planet we’ve known. In our fallen nightmare state, we, as humanity, inevitably mistreat strangers.

Screwtape’s Practical Advice for Dealing with the Present

Gary S. Selby

“Man destroys or enslaves every species he can,” Lewis wrote. “Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man.”

Not everyone, of course, immediately tries to subjugate every stranger they meet. But history has taught us, Lewis said, that those who will venture into space and in contact with the theoretical aliens “will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert.”

We might band together as Christians and send missionaries first, as better emissaries of the gospel message, to make first contact. But let’s not be so confident in that approach, either.

“‘Guns and gospel’ have been horribly combined in the past,” Lewis said. “The missionary’s holy desire to save souls has not always been kept quite distinct from the arrogant desire … to (as he calls it) ‘civilize’ the (as he calls them) ‘natives.’”

As Lewis’s health faded, the idea that we might reach other planets became increasingly tangible for humanity. Both the US and the Soviet Union launched crafts to venture to Venus, and five months before Lewis died, the Soviet Union sent its first spaceship slingshotting around Mars.

Those encounters with other worlds were exciting. As are the potential encounters in our day, from the 911 call in Las Vegas to testimony before Congress to the astronauts figuring out how to establish an outpost on the moon.

But Lewis, thinking as a theologian of this future, reminds us to be concerned first about our own moral limitations, recognizing our capacity for exploration is never separable from our capacity for exploitation.

If the Great Commission takes us into the great cosmos, Lewis would remind us to walk humbly on the surface of other planets.

Aaron Earls writes about faith, culture, and C. S. Lewis at The Wardrobe Door. He is also the senior writer at Lifeway Research.

NASA Specialist Finds His Calling in Space Experiments

Adam MacInnis

The post C.S. Lewis Warned Us About Close Encounters of the Evangelical Kind appeared first on Christianity Today.

Directed by Brian Duffield and now streaming on Hulu, No One Will Save You is a mostly silent sci-fi horror film featuring only a single discernible line of dialogue. The film has already earned high praise from the likes of Stephen King and other horror genre heavyweights.

In it, a young woman named Brynn (played by Kaitlyn Dever) must fight off an alien invasion in her small town, from which she’s been ostracized for reasons we don’t find out until later. The movie’s extraterrestrials are archetypal “grey man” aliens, hauntingly recognizable to many a sci-fi fan.

But Duffield and his team wanted the alien takeover to be marked with spiritual overtones. “Having these religious aspects felt like a way to differentiate the aliens from other pop culture,” Duffield told Christianity Today. “I wanted there to be an aspect to them where you couldn’t debate [the aliens] because they had this faith that told them what to do.”

I was tipped off about some of these religious nuances early on by a thread on Twitter/X from director Guillermo del Toro. Known for horror films himself (such as Pan’s Labyrinth), del Toro praised No One Will Save You and said it embodies an “essential principle in Catholic dogma” where “grace and salvation emerge from pain and suffering.”

While that may not be quite what Duffield had in mind when crafting his film, he admits it’s “exciting that it could be read through a Catholic lens,” and that the film’s undeniable religious imagery was both a conscious and subconscious decision birthed from his own background as a missionary kid. As a pastor’s kid myself and a lover of horror films, I was fascinated by how he weaved together the spiritual and the horrific.

Duffield spoke to CT about crafting the liturgy and prayer lives of the extraterrestrial(s), how his Christian upbringing may have influenced the religious aspects of the film, and why he loves using the horror genre to explore themes of faith and spirituality. Spoiler warning: we discuss the film’s ending as well as some key scenes.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Congrats on the film! I saw that you shared that you were a missionary kid who grew up in Ireland. As much as you’re willing to put on the record, could you share your experience?

Well, in ’95 my family moved from Pennsylvania to Ireland to work at a church and start churches in Ireland. We started off in County Kildare. We were there for a while and then we moved to County Claire, where my parents started a church near the Shannon Airport. That was a lot of my childhood. I came back to the States and started off [in college] at what is now Messiah University. I also did some [studies] with Temple University, where Messiah had a sister school program. Then I went to Hollywood.

Tale as old as time. It’s funny because the Sunday that you shared briefly about your missionary background, I saw that it was in response to this thread that director Guillermo del Toro had posted, where he explained some of the theological themes in the film. After reading it, I was like, I guess I don’t need to go to church because I already got a sermon. I’m curious: What was your reaction when you saw his words, and did you agree with some of the ways he was reading the film?

Yeah, it was really cool. When very famous people promote the movie, I always assume there’s money under the table. He had posted about the movie the previous day, and I was like, Oh, that’s very cool, and then when I woke up to his thread where he really dug in and engaged with the film beyond just, Go watch this movie on Hulu—that was all very mind-blowing.

There’s definitely a lot of religion in the movie. I’m personally not a Catholic, but it was cool seeing how he engaged with the idea that the aliens were faith-based, especially when he was getting into the Eucharist stuff. That’s not at all what I brought to the table with the movie, but it was very exciting that it could be read through a Catholic lens.

I read in an interview that you shared how the weird religious aspects to the aliens is “probably the result of some childhood trauma” that you had. Did you find yourself consciously or more subconsciously drawing upon your missionary/faith background when you were constructing the imagery and themes of the film?

It’s a little bit of both. The aliens being faith-based was always a really big part of it for me. In human history, colonizers and explorers—whatever faith they have—never view themselves as the bad guys. They’re more like, We gotta raise these people up to our level.

For Brynn’s character, what’s terrifying is that she’s not just abducted by aliens but by an alien cult. She doesn’t know what the aliens’ strange gestures mean but she knows it’s not good for her.

Like when the little alien is chasing Brynn, I thought it’d be great if there was a scene where he took a break from chasing Brynn and just started praying—the daddy-longlegs-type alien we viewed as the priest alien, who is directly communing with the UFOs and is having these very ritualistic hand motions.

I was trying to build in these moments where even if Brynn couldn’t understand the aliens, she had this sense that they had this broader culture to them. That was intentional, as opposed to having the aliens just hiss like racoons.

That’s interesting to think about it. It makes me think of how in evangelical culture, we normalize so much that can look completely weird to people who are on the outside.

Yeah! In the film, when people are controlled by the aliens, we had them very specifically doing praise and worship hands to the UFO. I wanted to show in a simple way that there’s been a sort of “conversion” into this belief system at play.

If an alien walked into church or a mosque or anything, there’s going to be these ritualistic aspects that are completely bizarre. I think that’s been true in human history, where you have these guys come over on ships and they cannot be more different than the native people of the land. … But then also show how this is typically how these things have gone in human history.

Yeah, even though we can’t understand what the aliens are saying (there are no subtitles when the aliens are communicating), I felt like there were these interesting spiritual and theological notes that were apparent. I’m thinking of how you framed the alien abduction scenes as a twisted form of rapture, or how when the aliens “convert” people, they’re shoving the mind-controlling parasite down their victims’ throats. Insert shoving Scripture or the Bible down people’s throats, etc.

Some of those were specific. Even the light from the UFO when it abducts people is such a holy light in a way.

One of the questions I’ve talked with my nerdy friends about is: If aliens are real, why is the government hiding it? I get the economic impact. If Biden comes out tomorrow and says, “Aliens are real! They’re here!” I’m sure the economy would shatter.

But there’s also this aspect of how religions around the world would have a real look-in-the-mirror moment. What happens if aliens come and they say to us, “We’re here to tell you the Good Word”? It all becomes very complicated and interesting.

I pared back exploring some of this in the film, though, because it started to feel like a different movie. But it was intentional that the aliens had this belief system and something like a God that we see toward the end of the movie—and that being a terrifying aspect to Brynn. She has this sense that there’s no fighting this.

The cult-y setting of the film is interesting as well, because we know Brynn’s in a hostile community and in some form of danger even before the aliens show up. The ambiance reminded me of the vibes of an uptight and sheltered religious community. It’s interesting to think that she goes from one type of “cult” to another “cult” with the aliens.

Yes, that was very intentional. It’s the same with that scene where she visits the church [where Brynn avoids an alien attack and then flees to her town’s church, but when she tries to enter, the doors are locked].

That came from some of my frustrations with what feels like the lack of Jesus in modern American Christianity. You would hope that for Brynn in that instance, the church community would band together. Instead, she’s expelled like a splinter.

We even cut a scene due to pacing, where after she sees the UFO over the church, she tries to break in, but all these shrieking alarms go off. It was there just for the comment, not for the movie, so it was hard to justify.

I think my parents, to their immense credit, would be the ideal version of what church should bring to a community, but that hasn’t always been my experience in regard to what the church has been.

Yeah, the church shouldn’t be known primarily for who it ostracizes, but for some parts of evangelical American Christianity, that seems to be the case. This makes me also think of the ending. I’m a pastor’s kid, so I feel like I see everything in terms of a sermon illustration.

There’s that scene where we learn why Brynn has been rejected from her community: She unintentionally killed her close friend Maude when she was younger, after the two had an argument. Then she was exiled from her community in a way, which was sort of giving Cain and Abel vibes.

I was also thinking of how when Brynn was captured by the aliens, she was sent back to her town, back to the place that’s caused her so much pain. But then at the ending, there’s an element of restoration of community when she’s spent so much of the film alone. Perhaps contrary to the title, there is some “saving” here for her.

It’s been fun seeing people grapple with the end of the film. For me, I wanted to explore this idea of how these terrible experiences end up being inadvertently healing. The aliens don’t mean to heal her at all. They’re just kind of curious. Yet out of their curiosity, she’s able to weirdly make peace with some aspects of her past.

At the end of the film, she is transformed and different. Encountering the aliens, she has this holy moment with a higher being that is inexplicable to her. That felt very much like Saul turning into Paul. I’ve been seeing a lot of people be like, Why did the aliens let her go? I think there’s a big Christian element to salvation where it is inexplicable.

Like you can say, “It’s because [God] loves us,” but when you think about it, even that is inexplicable. And for the film, I liked sort of co-opting some of that because it is, you know, by grace we’re saved. I think that’s true for Brynn.

There so much [spiritual/Christian] stuff like that in the movie. Some of it I can’t articulate, and some of it my editor will point out.

Pivoting slightly, this is your second feature film, but you’ve written many scripts for a number of horror/monster films like Underwater and Love and Monsters. Do you find the horror genre (and perhaps the subset of the monster horror genre) a uniquely helpful one when exploring questions of faith and spirituality? What draws you to that? Because it seems to be your wheelhouse.

It’s a good question. I would love to have a First Reformed in my wheelhouse or a more out-of-left-field Christian movie like Black Snake Moan. I love those movies and what they say about faith, the struggle with faith, and the positivity of faith. I think where I’m age-wise, I understand things through genre better.

It’s like how it took Martin Scorsese 40 years to be able to make Silence. But if there was Godzilla in Silence it probably would have gone easier for him. I don’t think I would have gotten to talk about everything with Brynn’s character or the stuff about faith if there was no genre element. …

I think it’s about being able to selfishly use genre as a way to talk about what I want to talk about, but then also I just love the toys. It’s kind of a win-win. At some point, I would love to do something like The Fabelmans, but it’s really fun doing Jurassic Park right now.

I’m reading Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy right now, and she has this great line where she says, “Perhaps if I had been born in more secular circumstances, I would not think sunsets looked so Christian.” Hearing you share this process makes me think of that.

That’s so funny. That’s a really great quote, because I remember seeing sunsets with my dad and him being like, “God’s amazing,” and then you see it with someone else and they’re like, “Science is amazing.” I’m thinking that those two (science and God) probably go more hand in hand for a lot of people, but yeah, it is funny how you get the lenses you’re born into a lot of the time.

Zachary Lee is a freelance writer covering the intersection between faith and media.

How Horror Uncovers Our ‘Holy’ Hypocrisy

Sara Kyoungah White

What’s Your Favorite Scary Movie?

The post ‘No One Will Save You’ Has Evangelical Aliens appeared first on Christianity Today.

Prominent, as ever, is a headline that won’t go away: that the US government recovered crashed spacecraft with “nonhuman biologics.” There’s even a newly released book detailing, as the headline of a recent Time article suggests, “The Government’s Search for Aliens and Why They Probably Exist.”

Perhaps now is an ideal time for Christians to start asking some serious what-if questions, like “What if the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper carries news of evidence of life on another planet?” This question has led me into some of the most fascinating theological territory I’ve ever considered—some of which I explore in my recent book, Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe.

I was also one of two dozen theologians invited to participate in the NASA-funded research project on the societal implications of astrobiology at Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry. And in my research, I was surprised to discover that Christian thinkers have been pondering life beyond Earth for a long time. Why? One reason is that the Christian worldview has a unique set of prior assumptions that may make us more willing (not less willing, as some might assume) to believe in the likelihood of extraterrestrial life.

Alister McGrath: Both Science and Stories Declare God’s Glory

Interview by Christopher Reese

Let’s look, for example, at the reactions to one UAP in particular, which leading scientists seem most excited about. ‘Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “a messenger from afar arriving first”) entered our solar system and passed quite close to the sun (and not that far from Earth) on September 9, 2017, traveling at almost 200,000 miles per hour. This was the first “interstellar object” observed in our solar system—that is, an object that has traveled between stars, in contrast with a comet, for instance, which is bound by the sway of our sun’s gravity.

That’s notable enough, but ‘Oumuamua had some other unusual properties. We can’t be exactly sure about its shape, but it seems to have been either an oddly long and thin object, like a stretched cigar, or perhaps a disk (or even a saucer, as familiar from so many science-fiction films). It also took an unusual trajectory when it got near the sun.

Say It Ain’t So

What are we to make of this? Might those unusual properties suggest that it wasn’t any old object but rather an artifact from another civilization?

For Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, ‘Oumuamua is so odd that seeing it as an alien artifact makes the most sense. On the other hand, the philosopher Christopher Cowie has argued that even if there is other life in the galaxy, extraterrestrial artifacts would be too rare to be a plausible explanation for ‘Oumuamua.

What distinguishes Loeb and his critics is not whether ‘Oumuamua is odd—on that they agree—but whether that counts as evidence of other civilizations. Loeb’s critics think such civilizations are so unlikely that it makes better sense to say that while it’s odd for a natural object, it’s natural nonetheless. In contrast, Loeb thinks that such civilizations are probably widespread, so it’s more likely that ‘Oumuamua is alien workmanship than some freakish natural object.

Astrophysicist Charles H. Lineweaver examined ‘Oumuamua using Bayes’ theorem: what makes for a plausible explanation for evidence depends on our prior assumptions. That is, whether it’s credible to believe this was an alien spacecraft relies on what else we take for granted—such as how likely we think the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations might be.

The progenitor of Bayesian logic is Thomas Bayes, an English Presbyterian minister from the 1700s whose ground-breaking work was likely provoked by the attack on miracles by philosopher David Hume (in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). Hume argued that we shouldn’t accept stories about miracles since—as he saw it—there will always be a more likely, nonmiraculous explanation for any extraordinary event. Our interpretation depends on our assumptions, and his assumptions did not stretch far in the direction of God.

And while we don’t know for sure whether Bayes was, in fact, inspired by Hume’s book, his friend Richard Price made this connection. Price was a doctor of divinity and brought Bayes’ work on statistics to public attention following his death. His treatise against Hume’s skeptical take on miracles (On the Importance of Christianity, the Nature of Historical Evidence, and Miracles) followed a few years later. Bayes realised that we interpret events as likely or unlikely depending on our presuppositions, and Price applied that logic to miracles—in the very first application of “Bayesian” thinking, as far as we know.

Miracles Are Outlasting the Arguments Against Them

Interview by Christopher Reese

As a confirmed agnostic, Hume was skeptical about God. So, he considered a miraculous explanation of an unexpected event to be less likely than some natural explanation, even if he didn’t know what that might be. But a Christian, like Bayes or Price, comes at the same story from a different perspective. If you believe in God and in Jesus as God incarnate, it doesn’t seem at all far-fetched to suppose that Christ could turn water into wine or calm a storm.

Or, in this case, we may be more likely to believe in the possibility of life beyond Earth.

Turning from the 18th century to the 20th, there’s a common (but wrong) assumption that religions are unimaginative compared to science and that they need scientific discoveries to provoke them into thinking about life beyond Earth. Carl Sagan, a renowned astronomer, leveled this very charge when he asked:

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed”? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Yet Christian theologians have been thinking about life beyond Earth continuously since the middle of the 15th century (and Jewish and Islamic theologians for even longer). If there’s anything frustrating about how Christian sources address this topic, it’s that they don’t tend to be very long—the author mentions the prospect cheerfully and then moves on. It seems these thinkers just weren’t worried enough to write a great deal on the subject.

In the 15th century, we have a Franciscan friar, Guillaume de Vaurouillon, and Nicholas of Cusa, perhaps the greatest theologian of his age. In the 17th, there’s the Dominican Tommaso Campanella (writing in defense of Galileo). We could add English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter and Anglican John Ray, who wrote of the possibility of other solar systems with planets that were “in all likelihood furnished with as great variety of corporeal creatures, animate and inanimate, as the earth is, and all as different in nature as they are in place from the terrestrial, and from each other.”

Love Thy Extraterrestrial Neighbor

Douglas Estes

Nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon spoke of all creation as a “grand orchestra” with “the inhabitants of the divers worlds, which are perhaps countless in multitude, taking their places in the one harmonious song.” He believed there “may be tens of thousands of races of creatures all subject to him, and governed by the same law of immutable right and justice.”

In the 20th century, C. S. Lewis was fascinated with outer space, writing an essay (“Religion and Rocketry”) and three novels (the Cosmic Trilogy) on the topic. Lewis did not believe the discovery of life on other planets would challenge Christianity, although it would certainly raise some intriguing theological questions for us to consider.

One prominent writer, John Wilkins (Bishop of Chester and a founder of the Royal Society, England’s most prestigious scientific organization), thought he had evidence of life on the moon, but most theologians were speculating without evidence. That said, it’s striking how many theologians believed with strong conviction that there is life beyond Earth on theological grounds—those who took this as a certainty, not just a possibility.

As before, what you think is plausible depends on your prior assumptions. Many Christian theologians have operated with the assumption that God would create habitable places only so that they could be inhabited. And so, far from rejecting the idea that the universe may contain other life, we find theologians arguing that life beyond Earth is widespread. Indeed, they assumed that there will be life pretty much everywhere it could possibly survive.

If your assumption is that life is what matters, especially to God—and therefore that habitability is for the sake of habitation—you’ll find it implausible for habitable places to remain bare. Historically, then, Christian theologians have often likely overestimated how m uch life there might be in the universe. That followed plausibly from the assumption that God populates places and that places are valuable if they host living things.

I’m very open to the universe being full of life, but I’d say that some of the assumptions mentioned in the previous paragraph are faulty. There is a splendor in all sorts of different kinds of places in the universe, all bearing witness to the glory of God in their own way, whether they are inhabited or not.

C.S. Lewis Warned Us About Close Encounters of the Evangelical Kind

Aaron Earls

The 20th-century French Roman Catholic theologian Jean Guitton wrote that a vast universe, uninhabited other than Earth, was implausible because that would essentially make “the pedestal too big for the sculpture.” In other words, the universe would be like a picture frame so big that it overwhelmed the painting at its center.

I think that’s wrong twice over. First, even if the universe contained life only on Earth, an unimaginably large universe would not be too splendid a setting, frame, or pedestal for the glory of life on Earth—especially for human life, with its self-awareness and relation to God.

But second, is it even helpful to think about the rest of the universe as merely the stage for life? The universe has a glory and dignity of its own that isn’t to be judged merely in relation to us. After all, we’re not the only creatures with a vocation to praise God; the heavens do too (Ps. 148:3–6). The heavens themselves are alien and inscrutable—so much so that God brings them up when he puts Job in his place for questioning his sovereignty (Job 38:31–33).

When it comes to the place and prevalence of life in the universe, I’ll let the science inform me, as and when the data comes in. I won’t be perturbed whether we find a lot or none at all.

That said, I’ll be surprised if Earth’s is the only life. After all, we didn’t know until the end of the 20th century whether there are planets around other stars—and it turns out they’re everywhere. Finding evidence of extraterrestrial life might be quite a feat. Yet our ability to detect signs of life around other planets has taken a massive leap forward with the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope: It senses infrared light, which is ideal for measuring the balance of gases in the atmosphere of other planets and thus ascertaining some of the telltale signs of life.

Christian theologians have thought a good deal about what makes something alive and what counts as a living thing. For instance, angelic beings are an example of life beyond Earth mentioned in the Bible and featured in the Christian imagination—however different they might be from other biological life.

The Cosmos Is More Crowded Than You Think

Tish Harrison Warren

Does it matter that there’s no mention of extraterrestrial life in the universe in the Bible? I wouldn’t say so, especially as we consider what the Scriptures are for and what they’re not for.

In the Bible, God speaks to us in a human way. Does that make our understanding of God so human-shaped that other creatures wouldn’t think about God like we do? Plenty of theologians, such as Calvin, talked about divine “accommodation”—the fact that God speaks to creatures in a way they can understand. Knowledge of God and revelation from God would surely be “accommodated” differently for different creatures so that they could understand it, but it would be the same God who is revealed and known.

Then there’s the idea that human beings are made in the image of God. Is this premise undermined if there are other creatures that can also know and love and be made friends of God? I don’t think so. We would be no less wonderfully created and no less loved by God just because other things are also loved and wonderful—and probably wonderful in a different way from us. The more the merrier, I should think.

But what of sin and salvation? If there’s other sentient life, is a fall inevitable? And what about the Incarnation and redemption? Could Christ’s death and resurrection redeem the whole cosmos? Undoubtably, but would God limit himself to one Incarnation? That’s perhaps the most hotly contested question in the field. As Aaron Earls pointed out for CT, even C. S. Lewis thought it was at least worth considering the possibility that Jesus could have “been incarnate in other worlds than earth and so saved other races than ours.”

As for me, I believe one Incarnation is “enough,” but who says God must do what’s minimally necessary? In Jesus, we see God face to face as a human being. But I could see the beauty in other creatures also knowing God in their own flesh and blood.

In the early 20th century, English poet Alice Meynell wrote that only we know our story and that what God has done elsewhere remains elsewhere:

No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way
Or His bestowals there be manifest.

But she ended that poem, entitled “Christ in the Universe,” with the tantalizing idea that we can look forward to knowing the rest of the story of the cosmos in the life of the world to come:

O, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Ultimately, whatever lies beyond Earth, of this we can be sure: God will be gracious, and God will do something glorious.

Andrew Davison is the author of Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe. He is grateful to Cat Gillen at Durham University for discussing ‘Oumuamua from a Bayesian point of view.

Why Christmas Is Bigger Than Easter

Fred Sanders

The post We Believe in Miracles, So Why Not Aliens? appeared first on Christianity Today.

Las opiniones sobre la predicación estaban previsiblemente divididas, pero aproximadamente «9 de cada 10 pastores dicen que las mujeres pueden servir en el ministerio de niños (94 %), como líderes de comités (92 %), en el ministerio de adolescentes (89 %) o compartir espacios como maestras de estudios bíblicos para adultos (85 %) en sus iglesias», según Aaron Earls. Un porcentaje menor (64 %) dijo que las mujeres podían servir como diaconisas.

La cuestión de dónde puede servir una mujer en la iglesia «se ha debatido durante siglos con eruditos bíblicos de distintas denominaciones que han llegado a conclusiones diferentes sobre lo que significan las Escrituras», dijo Scott McConnell, director ejecutivo de Lifeway Research.

En particular, la primera parte de la Biblia desempeña un papel clave. Generaciones de cristianos han considerado los relatos de la creación de Génesis 1 a 3 como el paradigma de los roles de género. «Todo el debate bíblico gira en torno a Génesis 1–3», dice Raymond C. Ortlund Jr.

Las palabras «ayuda idónea» de Génesis 2:18 han sido durante mucho tiempo un punto de inflexión en estos debates. Algunos las utilizan para argumentar que el papel principal de la esposa es apoyar el liderazgo de su marido. Otros usan este argumento para justificar fuertes opiniones sobre la sumisión y el servicio femeninos. Y otros han interpretado la idea de la forma más suave posible, diciendo: «Dios hizo al hombre como un líder con gracia y a la mujer como una ayudante esencial en el matrimonio».

Pero, ¿y si nos hemos equivocado al interpretar esas palabras? El matiz de servilismo que a menudo conllevan no se encuentra en ninguna parte de las Escrituras. Y nuestra interpretación errónea nos ha metido en problemas en la forma en que vemos los roles masculino y femenino.

El punto de vista más exacto, al menos como yo lo veo, es significativo tanto para los que se encuentran en el campo complementario como en el campo igualitario. Todos tienen algo que ganar de prestar una mirada más cercana y cuidadosa al texto del Génesis y a lo que dice, a saber, que la «ayuda idónea» es, de hecho, una socia de pleno derecho en la obra que Dios le asignó a los humanos.

Es posible argumentar que el pasaje más importante para entender la condición de persona es Génesis 1:26-28. Dios crea al hombre y a la mujer como corona de la creación. Se nos designa como «imagen de Dios», un estatus que en un contexto del antiguo Cercano Oriente significa que los humanos representan físicamente la presencia de Dios en la tierra.

En Génesis 1, ese estatus se expresa a través del dominio, una tarea que se otorga al ser humano sin tener en cuenta el género. Los hombres y las mujeres deben dominar o gobernar juntos en nombre de Dios, manteniendo el orden y asegurando el florecimiento de la creación.

Resulta sorprendente, sin embargo, que Dios no le diga a los humanos que se dominen unos a otros. El trabajo en equipo es el modelo establecido.

Es esencial tener presente esta base al pasar la página de Génesis 2, donde se vuelve a contar la creación de los humanos de una forma más íntima. Al hombre colocado en el jardín de Dios se le asigna un trabajo: cultivarlo y cuidarlo (Génesis 2:15).

Pero ese hombre tiene un problema: está solo. Aunque muchos animales pueblan el jardín, ninguno de ellos es adecuado para brindarle compañía. Si el hombre hubiera necesitado a alguien que recibiera órdenes, podría haber elegido un buey o una mula. Si hubiera necesitado una sombra, podría haber elegido un perro. Pero ninguno de ellos puede ayudarle a cumplir sus responsabilidades en calidad de compañero de pleno derecho, y ninguno de ellos puede hacerle rendir cuentas con respecto a mantener los límites que Dios ha establecido.

Lo que le falta al hombre es, pues, un ʿēzer kenegdô, «una ayuda adecuada».

Entra la mujer en escena. Ella resuelve el conflicto argumental de Génesis 2 ofreciendo lo que ningún animal del jardín podía ofrecer: una compañía plena. Para algunos cristianos, esta sección ofrece evidencia para dos afirmaciones clave:

Primero: Dios designó a los hombres para dirigir y tener autoridad sobre las mujeres.

Segundo: Las mujeres están hechas para apoyar el liderazgo de los hombres al seguirlos.

Sin embargo, estas suposiciones comunes no resisten el escrutinio. El aspecto central de la historia no son las diferencias entre el hombre y la mujer —si bien son importantes— sino su similitud esencial y su condición de igualdad ante Dios.

La mujer es como el hombre de una manera que ninguna otra criatura lo es. Ella procede de su propio cuerpo —así como todo hombre futuro procederá del cuerpo de una mujer—, lo que sugiere su misteriosa conexión. Ella «es adecuada» para él (hebreo kenegdô, Génesis 2:18, 20). Y ella cumple el papel de compañera para apoyar lo que Dios le encargó al hombre hacer. Juntos poblarán la tierra y juntos la gobernarán.

Entonces, ¿por qué llamarla «ayuda» del hombre? ¿No implica eso que él es el jefe?

En las traducciones al inglés de Génesis 2:18 (NIV, NLT, ESV, NRSV, NASB), la palabra usada es «ayudante», y sugiere que el hombre toma la iniciativa y la mujer está presente en un papel de apoyo. Es la recepcionista del director general, la animadora del quarterback o la enfermera del cirujano.

A lo largo de la historia, a menudo las mujeres han desempeñado papeles como estos, y han aportado mucho al hacerlo. Sin embargo, este modelo pasa por alto algo de la palabra hebrea ʿēzer.

¿Qué tipo de ayuda ofrece ʿēzer? ¿Quiénes son los ʿēzers en la Biblia?

El resto del Antiguo Testamento utiliza la palabra ʿēzer principalmente de dos maneras. En primer lugar, se refiere a los soldados aliados que ayudan en la batalla. (Véase, por ejemplo, Josué 1:14 o 1 Crónicas 12:1-22.) En segundo lugar, se refiere a Dios como la ayuda de Israel. (Véase Génesis 49:25; 2 Crónicas 32:8; Salmo 10:14; Isaías 41:10-14).

Claramente, en esos pasajes, aquel que «ayuda» no tiene un papel servil. En todo caso, es lo contrario. Dios suministra lo que le falta a Israel. Como explica la estudiosa del Antiguo Testamento Mary Conway, «la frase kenegdo se traduce mejor como “correspondiente a él”, un término que implica habilidad e igualdad, más que subordinación o inferioridad».

De hecho, la palabra ʿēzer aparece como sustantivo común más de 90 veces en el Antiguo Testamento, pero nunca se refiere a lo que los siervos o subordinados hacen por sus amos.

Si estás en peligro de perder una batalla, lo que necesitas es un ʿēzer, es decir, otro escuadrón de tropas o una intervención divina que venga a ponerse a tu lado para reforzar a tu debilitado ejército.

¿Qué significa esto para las mujeres? El hombre no necesita una secretaria, una compañera o alguien que cumpla sus órdenes. Más bien necesita una compañera de pleno derecho en el trabajo de dominar la creación, así como para dar mantenimiento al jardín y protegerlo de los intrusos. Él necesita una mujer.

La palabra «ayudante» no hace justicia al papel que Dios diseñó para la mujer en Génesis 2. «Aliada necesaria» o «compañera esencial» podrían ser mejores formas de traducir esta palabra.

Como miembro de pleno derecho del movimiento evangélico, es un misterio para mí cómo muchos segmentos de nuestra comunidad han arraigado en general su doctrina sobre los roles de género de Génesis 3 y no en Génesis 2. Es cierto que Génesis 3 presenta la jerarquía de género: «… tu deseo será para tu marido, y él tendrá dominio sobre ti» (Génesis 3:16, NBLA).

Pero esa dinámica proviene de las terribles consecuencias de la rebelión humana. Eva fracasó en su tarea de ayudar a Adán a cumplir su encargo de cuidar y vigilar el jardín. Un intruso astuto puso en duda la idoneidad de las órdenes de Dios, y marido y mujer se tragaron la mentira: anzuelo, sedal y plomada. El resultado fue una relación con Dios gravemente fracturada, al igual que su relación de pareja y su relación con la tierra que debían cuidar.

Sin embargo, nótese que la mujer era totalmente responsable de su propio pecado, y el hombre del suyo. Si Eva fuera una mera comparsa, Dios no se dirigiría a ella como agente moral pleno, responsable de su propia obediencia al mandato de Dios. Y si la culpa fuera únicamente de ella, el hombre no cargaría también con la culpa.

Mi punto es este: es un error ver Génesis 3 como un paradigma de las relaciones humanas y, especialmente, de las relaciones entre hombre y mujer. Este texto describe las consecuencias de la rebelión humana, no la intención original de Dios.

Dios anuncia que la mujer lo pasará mal porque su marido tendrá el dominio, no porque las cosas deban ser así, sino porque el pecado los llevó a un lugar de disfunción. Decidieron confiar en su propia sabiduría y no en la de Dios, y el resultado de ese error no fue nada bueno.

Dios no deseaba espinas, cardos y dominación masculina, como tampoco los futuros padres diseñan cuidadosamente un rincón de castigo para sus hijos antes de que nazcan. Por tanto, si queremos recuperar la visión de Dios sobre la creación, tenemos que apoyarnos en Génesis 1 y 2, donde hombres y mujeres están codo con codo como aliados en el trabajo que Dios diseñó.

¿Pero no fue Adán quien le dio su nombre a Eva? ¿Y nombrar no implica una jerarquía? No tengo plena certeza de que nombrar implique jerarquía. (Por ejemplo, Agar le da un nombre a Dios en Génesis 16:13.) Pero incluso si lo hace, como lo señala el profesor de teología Glenn Kreider, Adán nombra a Eva después de la caída, no antes (Génesis 3:20).

Con todo esto en mente, revisemos las dos suposiciones comunes sobre lo que enseñan estos capítulos:

Dios designó a los hombres y a las mujeres para dirigir juntos.

Las mujeres están hechas para apoyar el liderazgo de los hombres liderando con ellos.

No escuches lo que no estoy diciendo. No estoy negando que las mujeres deban ser siervas. La Biblia es muy clara al afirmar que todos nosotros, independientemente del sexo, debemos adoptar una postura de servicio en relación con los demás. Jesús fue el servidor de todos, y nos llama a todos a imitarlo.

Según el Libro del Éxodo, el servicio es la expresión esencial de la vocación de Israel. Toda esa historia se enmarca en el cambio significativo de pasar de servir al Faraón a servir a Yaveh (Éxodo 7:16).

Si pensamos en nuestra vida actual, esa vocación no ha caducado. El problema viene cuando volvemos a leer «servicio» en la palabra «ayuda» de Génesis 2:18 y lo aplicamos de forma desigual en función del género. Eso no se encuentra en Génesis 2. Decir lo contrario es violentar el texto.

Aunque estas ideas no son la última palabra de la Biblia sobre los roles de género, proporcionan un buen lugar para iniciar la conversación. Y es un lugar muy útil para empezar.

Carmen Joy Imes es profesora asociada de Antiguo Testamento en la Escuela de Teología Talbot de la Universidad de Biola y autora de Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters.

Partes de este artículo han sido adaptadas de Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters de Carmen Joy Imes (InterVarsity Academic, 2023). Copyright © por Carmen Joy Imes. Publicado y traducido con permiso de InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400,Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com.

Speaking Out es una columna de opinión para invitados de Christianity Today y (a diferencia de un editorial) no representa necesariamente la opinión de la publicación.

Traducción y edición en español por Livia Giselle Seidel.

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The post Ayuda idónea: la interpretación más común de estas palabras es imprecisa appeared first on Christianity Today en español | Cristianismo hoy.

A Lifeway Research study explores US Protestant pastors’ experiences with mental illness and how well their churches are equipped to respond to those who need help.

A majority of pastors (54%) say in the churches where they have served on staff, they have known at least one church member who has been diagnosed with a severe mental illness such as clinical depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia.

Most of those pastors had experience with a small number of members: 18 percent say one or two and another 18 percent say three to five. Fewer pastors say they’ve known 6-10 (8%), 11-20 (5%) or more than 20 (6%). Around a third (34%) say none of their church members have been diagnosed with a severe mental illness, while 12 percent don’t know.

“There is a healthy generational shift occurring as younger and middle-aged pastors are much more likely to have encountered people in church with severe mental illness than the oldest pastors,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research.

“However, it is not clear whether the presence of those with difficult mental illnesses is increasing among church members or if they have simply felt more comfortable sharing their diagnosis with younger pastors.”

Pastors 65 and older (46%) and those with no college degree (52%) are more likely to say they haven’t known any church members with a severe mental illness.

Twenty-six percent of US Protestant pastors say they have personally struggled with some type of mental illness, including 17 percent who say it was diagnosed and 9 percent who say they experienced it but were never diagnosed. Three-quarters (74%) say they’ve never dealt with a mental illness.

Compared to a 2014 Lifeway Research study, a similar number of pastors today say they have endured mental illness themselves (26% v. 23%). More pastors now, however, say they have been diagnosed (17% v. 12%).

“During the COVID-19 pandemic many Americans have faced challenges to their mental health,” said McConnell. “More pastors today are seeking professional help as evidenced by more having been diagnosed with mental illness. Younger pastors are the most likely to say they have endured mental illness.”

Pastors under 45 (37%) are most likely to say they have struggled with some form of mental illness.

Church help

Churchgoers may not hear about mental illness frequently from the pulpit, but most churches will hear about the subject at least once a year from their pastor.

Six in 10 US Protestant pastors say they speak to their churches about acute or chronic mental illness in sermons or large group messages at least once a year, including 17 percent who bring up the subject about once a year. For more than 2 in 5 pastors, the issue comes up multiple times a year, with 30 percent saying they talk about it several times a year, 9 percent saying about once a month and 4 percent saying several times a month.

Other pastors cover the topic much less frequently, with 26 percent saying they rarely bring it up and 11 percent saying they never talk about it. Another 3 percent aren’t sure.

Pastors are more likely to broach the subject in a large group setting today than 2014, when 49 percent said they rarely or never spoke about it. Eight years ago, 33 percent mentioned the issue several times a year or more compared to 43 percent today.

“While the typical pastor hasn’t experienced mental illness themselves, they are proactively teaching about this need and feel a responsibility to help,” said McConnell. “While preaching on mental illness is the norm and even more pastors feel their church is responsible to help the mentally ill, still 37 percent of pastors rarely or never bring it up from the pulpit.”

Beyond talking about it from the pulpit, 9 in 10 US Protestant pastors (89%) say local churches have a responsibility to provide resources and support for individuals with mental illness and their families. Few pastors (10%) disagree.

When asked about specific types of care their churches provide for those suffering from mental illness or their families, more than 4 in 5 pastors say they offer something. Almost 7 in 10 (68%) say their church maintains a list of experts to whom they can refer people. Two in 5 (40%) have a plan for supporting families of those with mental illness.

Around a quarter say they provide training for encouraging people with mental illness (26%), offer programs like Celebrate Recovery (26%) or offer topical seminars on depression or anxiety (23%). Close to 1 in 5 provide training for leaders to identify symptoms of mental illness (20%), host groups in their community that help those with mental illness (20%) or have a counselor on staff skilled in mental illness (18%). Another 7 percent say they provide another resource.

“In the years between studies, more churches have developed plans for supporting families of those with mental illness. A few more are offering training for leaders to identify symptoms of mental illness and hosting groups such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness,” said McConnell. “The most common and earliest way for a church to care for someone with mental illness is to have a list of mental health experts to refer people to. Yet almost a third of churches don’t have such a list.”

Younger pastors, age 18–44, (9%) are the least likely to say they don’t provide any of the potential resources. Pastors at churches with fewer than 50 in attendance (24%) are the most likely.

As pastors are most likely to say they have a referral list at their church, most say they’re prepared to identify when someone needs to be referred to an expert. Almost 9 in 10 pastors (86%) agree they feel equipped to identify when a person is dealing with acute or chronic mental illness that may require a referral to a medical professional, with 34 percent strongly agreeing. Few (12%) don’t feel equipped, and 1 percent aren’t sure.

The percentage of pastors who feel equipped is up slightly from 2014 when 81 percent said they felt capable of making the identification and referral.

Aaron Earls is a writer for Lifeway Christian Resources. Survey was conducted September 2021, involving a stratified random sample of 1,000 Protestant pastors. The sample provides 95 percent confidence the sampling error does not exceed plus or minus 3.2 percent.

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The post Younger Pastors More Likely to Say They Struggle With Mental Illness appeared first on Christianity Today.

Views on preaching were predictably split, but roughly “9 in 10 pastors say women could be ministers to children (94%), committee leaders (92%), ministers to teenagers (89%), or coed adult Bible study teachers (85%) in their churches,” according to Aaron Earls. Fewer (64%) said women could be deacons.

The question of where a woman can serve in church “has been debated for centuries with biblical scholars in different denominations coming to different conclusions about what Scripture means,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research.

The first part of the Bible, in particular, plays a key part. Generations of Christians have looked to the creation stories in Genesis 1 through 3 as the paradigm for gender roles. “As Genesis 1–3 go, so goes the whole Biblical debate,” says Raymond C. Ortlund Jr.

The word “helper” from Genesis 2:18 has long been a hinge-point in these debates. Some use it to argue that a wife’s main role is to support her husband’s leadership. Others deploy it to justify strong views on female submission and service. And still others have construed the idea as softly as possible, saying, “God made man as a gracious leader and woman as an essential helper in marriage.”

But what if we’ve gotten that word wrong? The subservient overtones that often come with it are nowhere to be found in Scripture. And our misinterpretation has gotten us into trouble in how we view male and female roles.

The more accurate take, at least as I see it, is significant to those in both the complementarian and egalitarian camps. Everyone has something to gain from a closer, more careful look at the Genesis text and what it says: That a “helper” is in fact a full partner in the work God assigned to humans.

Old Testament Law Is a Gracious Invitation to Intimacy with God

Interview by Jen Pollock Michel

Arguably the most important passage for understanding personhood is Genesis 1:26–28. God makes both male and female as the crown of creation. We are designated as “God’s image,” a status that in an ancient Near Eastern context means that humans physically represent the presence of God on earth.

In Genesis 1, that status is expressed through rulership—a task given without regard to gender. Men and women are to rule together on God’s behalf by maintaining order and ensuring the flourishing of creation.

Strikingly, however, humans are not told to rule over each other. Teamwork is the model set forth.

This groundwork is essential to keep in mind as we turn the page to Genesis 2, where the creation of humans is retold in a more intimate key. The man placed in God’s garden is given a job to do: cultivating it and guarding it (Gen. 2:15).

But that man has a problem: He’s alone. While many animals populate the garden, none of them is suitable for companionship. If the man needed someone to take orders, he could have chosen an ox or a mule. If he needed a shadow, he could have chosen a dog. But none of them can help him carry out his responsibilities as a full partner, and none can hold him accountable to maintain the boundaries God set.

What the man lacks, then, is an ʿēzer kenegdô, “a helper corresponding to him.”

Enter woman. She resolves the plot conflict of Genesis 2 by offering what no animal in the garden could offer: full-fledged companionship. For some Christians, this section offers evidence for two key claims:

First: God appointed men to lead and have authority over women.

Second: Women are made to support men’s leadership by following.

However, these common assumptions don’t stand up to scrutiny. The point of the story is not primarily the differences between male and female, although those matter, but their essential similarity and equal status before God.

The woman is like the man in a way that no other creature is. She comes from his own body—just as every future man will come from the body of a woman—which suggests their mysterious connection. She “corresponds to him” (Hebrew kenegdô, Genesis 2:18, 20). And she fulfills the role of a partner to support what God appointed the man to do. Together they will populate the earth, and together they will rule over it.

Then why call her the man’s “helper”? Doesn’t that imply he’s the boss?

In English translations of Genesis 2:18 (NIV, NLT, ESV, NRSV, NASB), the word “helper” suggests the man takes the lead and the woman is present in a support role. She is the receptionist for the CEO, the cheerleader for the quarterback, or the nurse for the surgeon.

Throughout history, women have often filled roles like these, and they have contributed much by doing so. However, this model misses something about the Hebrew word ʿēzer.

What kind of help does an ʿēzer offer? Who are the ʿēzers in the Bible?

The rest of the Old Testament uses the word ʿēzer in two main ways. First, it refers to allied soldiers who assist in battle. (See, for example, Joshua 1:14 or 1 Chronicles 12:1–22.) Second, it refers to God as Israel’s helper. (See Genesis 49:25; 2 Chronicles 32:8; Psalm 10:14; Isaiah 41:10–14.)

Blame David, Not Bathsheba. The Prophet Nathan Did.

Carmen Joy Imes

Clearly, in those passages, the “helper” does not have a subservient role. If anything, it’s the opposite. God supplies what Israel lacks. As Old Testament scholar Mary Conway explains, “the phrase kenegdo is best translated as ‘corresponding to him,’ a term that implies competence and equality, rather than subordination or inferiority.”

In fact, the word ʿēzer occurs as a common noun over 90 times in the Old Testament but never refers to what servants or subordinates do for their masters.

If you are in danger of losing a battle, what you need is an ʿēzer—another squadron of troops or divine intervention—to come alongside and bolster your flagging army.

What does this mean for women? The man is not in need of a secretary, a sidekick, or someone to carry out his orders. Rather, he needs a full partner in the work of ruling creation, maintaining the garden, and guarding it from intruders. He needs a woman.

The word “helper” does not do justice to the role God designed for women to fill in Genesis 2. “Necessary ally” or “essential partner” might be better ways to translate this word.

As a card-carrying member of the evangelical movement, it’s a mystery to me how many segments of our community have by and large rooted their doctrine of gender roles in Genesis 3 rather than in Genesis 2. It’s true that Genesis 3 presents gender hierarchy: “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” (Gen. 3:16).

But that dynamic comes from the terrible consequences of human rebellion. Eve ultimately failed in her job to help Adam carry out their commission to guard the garden. A shrewd intruder cast doubt on the suitability of God’s command, and husband and wife bought the lie—hook, line, and sinker. As a result, their relationship with God was badly fractured, as was their relationship with each other and the earth they were supposed to steward.

Notice, though, that the woman was held fully accountable for her own sin and the man for his. If Eve were merely a sidekick, God would not address her as a full moral agent—responsible for her own obedience to God’s command. And if the fault were solely hers, then the man would not also bear guilt.

Here’s my point: It’s a mistake to see Genesis 3 as a paradigm for human relationships and especially male-female ones. This text is describing the consequences of human rebellion, not God’s original intention.

God announces that the woman will have a hard time because her husband will dominate, not because things should be this way but because human sin led them to a place of dysfunction. They elected to trust their own wisdom rather than God’s, and that mistake didn’t end well.

God didn’t desire thorns, thistles, and male domination any more than expectant parents carefully design a time-out corner for their children before they’re born. If we want to recapture God’s vision for creation, then, we need to lean into Genesis 1 and 2 instead, where men and women stand side by side as allies in the work God designed for us to do.

But doesn’t Adam name Eve? And doesn’t naming imply hierarchy? I’m not at all sure that naming implies hierarchy. (For example, Hagar names God in Genesis 16:13.) But even if it does, as theology professor Glenn Kreider points out, Adam names Eve after the fall, not before (Gen. 3:20).

With all this in mind, let’s revise the two common assumptions about what these chapters teach:

God appointed men and women to lead together.

Women are made to support men’s leadership by leading with them.

Don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not denying that women should be servants. The Bible is very clear that all of us, regardless of gender, ought to take a posture of servanthood in relation to one another. Jesus was the servant of all, and he calls all of us to imitate him.

According to the Book of Exodus, service is the essential expression of Israel’s vocation. That whole story is framed as a major shift from serving Pharaoh to serving Yahweh (Ex. 7:16).

As we think about our lives today, that calling hasn’t expired. The problem comes when we read “service” back into the word “helper” in Genesis 2:18 and apply it unevenly on the basis of gender. It’s not there in Genesis 2. To say otherwise is to do violence to the text.

While these ideas are not the Bible’s final word on gender roles, they do provide an important place to start the conversation. And it’s a very helpful place to begin.

Carmen Joy Imes is an associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology and the author of Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters.

Parts of this article were adapted from Being God’s Image: Why Creation Still Matters by Carmen Joy Imes (InterVarsity Academic, 2023). Published with permission.

Speaking Out is Christianity Today’s guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the publication.

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