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A few people recently posed to me a question about the Nephilim in the Bible, which are often identified as giants. Fortunately, I have actually written something about these characters. The following is an excerpt from chapter 11 of my book Satan and His Friends, published last year by ACU Press. The chapter as a whole deals with the theme of rebel angels, mentioned in the New Testament and often identified with the “sons of God” in Genesis 6:1–4. The section excerpted here is called “What about the Giants?” This is just the main text of that section; if you want the footnotes, you’ll have to get the book. If the “sons of God” in Genesis 6:2 were just human beings and not angels, why would their offspring be gigantic? Or, actually, was the offspring gigantic? Is that the right way to interpret the terminology in Genesis 6:4? And, for that matter, are the beings that are (possibly) described as giants in Genesis 6:4 the offspring of the unions mentioned two verses earlier? I already admitted at the beginning of this discussion of Genesis 6 that I do not know the answers to these questions, but it might be valuable to explore the possibilities, the evidence, and the proposed interpretations. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. The word “giant” doesn’t appear in most English versions, I think. (The KJV and NKJV are exceptions.) That interpretation goes back to the LXX, which has the Greek word “giant” (γίγας) twice in verse 4, where the KJV has the word “giants” and where it has the term “mighty men.” For the LXX, the offspring of the sons of God and daughters of men were giants, but the Hebrew text reads differently. The NRSV represents the Hebrew well: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.” No giants here, unless the Nephilim are giants. It’s also not clear from the Hebrew whether the Nephilim were the offspring of the sons of God or whether they were just around back then at the time of the sons of God. Also, are the Nephilim the same as the “heroes”—the Hebrew term is gibborim—later in the verse, or are the offspring of the sons of God the heroes? Or are they all one and the same? The Hebrew allows for these possibilities: * nephilim = gibborim = children of sons of God with daughters of men * nephilim = gibborim ≠ children of sons of God with daughters of men * nephilim ≠ gibborim = children of sons of God with daughters of men The first option seems to be the interpretation of both the LXX and the targumim. The LXX is often interpreted as indicating more clearly than the Hebrew that the offspring of the marriages are giants. Certainly Philo (Questions on Genesis 1.92), our earliest interpreter of the LXX version of this story, regarded the giants as offspring of the marriages, as did Josephus (Antiquities 1.73). What are nephilim, anyway? The Hebrew word seems to be related to the verb naphal, “to fall,” and so perhaps the nephilim are “fallen ones.” That is the interpretation of Aquila, the second-century Jewish Greek translator (οἱ ἐπιπίπτοντες). Aquila rendered gibborim as δυνατοί, “strong ones,” or, according to a different report, δυσίατοι, “incurable ones.” The slightly later translator, Symmachus, used the word οἱ βίαιοι, “violent ones,” for both nephilim and gibborim. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate has “giants” (gigantes) for nephilim and “strong ones” (potentes) for gibborim. Despite his translation, Jerome understood that the Hebrew nephilim is more easily understood as “fallen ones,” which, he pointed out, would work well as a description of the offspring of angels or righteous men who sinned. In other words, for Jerome, the description of the offspring as “fallen ones” lends no support to the angel-interpretation. But even if the word nephilim doesn’t mean “giants,” it may be that the nephilim (whatever the word itself means) were, in fact, gigantic. At least, their incredible height is implied in the only other passage in the Bible that uses the term. When the twelve spies returned to the camp after having scouted out the land of Canaan, they reported having encountered Nephilim. There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakites come from the Nephilim); and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them. (Num 13:33) For this verse also, the LXX renders nephilim as “giants.” Whatever the word means, it seems that the Nephilim in Canaan were really big people, and that the spies expected the other Israelites to be familiar with the group of people called Nephilim and to know that they are big people. The verse also connects the Nephilim to another label, the Anakites, the descendants of Anak. Another reference to Anak appears in Deuteronomy, where Moses reminds the Israelites about the land of Moab. The Emim—a large and numerous people, as tall as the Anakim—had formerly inhabited it. Like the Anakim, they are usually reckoned as Rephaim, though the Moabites call them Emim. (Deut 2:10–11) Again, the Anakim are tall, and other names associated with them are Emim (the Moabite name) and Rephaim. That last group comes up again later in the same chapter, again, in reference to Moab. It also is usually reckoned as a land of Rephaim. Rephaim formerly inhabited it, though the Ammonites call them Zamzummim, a strong and numerous people, as tall as the Anakim. (Deut 2:20–21) Moreover, there was a king named Og who was one of the Rephaim, in fact, their last surviving member (cf. Josh 13:12). And Og was big—or, at least, he had a big bed, so big it became a tourist attraction. Now only King Og of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. In fact his bed, an iron bed, can still be seen in Rabbah of the Ammonites. By the common cubit it is nine cubits long and four cubits wide. (Deut 3:11) There is also a valley called several times in Scripture “the valley of the Rephaim,” a term translated in the LXX as “valley of the Titans” (2 Sam 5:18) or “valley of giants” (1 Chron 11:15; 14:9). So, again, Rephaim had the reputation of being tall. If we put all these verses together, we can construct the following equivalencies. Nephilim > Anakim = Rephaim = Emim (Moabite name) = Zamzummim (Ammonite name) They are all very tall. It may be these tall people, and not all Amorites (= Canaanites; but see Gen 14:5; 15:20), that Amos has in mind when he describes the Amorites as very tall. Yet I destroyed the Amorite before them,whose height was like the height of cedars,and who was as strong as oaks;I destroyed his fruit above,and his roots beneath. (Amos 2:9) What happened to the Nephilim (or the Anakim or Rephaim or whatever)? The Israelite conquest reduced their number (cf. Num 13:22; Josh 15:14; Judg 1:10). While Joshua made war on the Anakim (Josh 11:21–23), he did not eliminate them completely; some remained in towns such as Gath (Josh 11:22). Have you heard of Gath before? That’s Goliath’s hometown (1 Sam 17:4). Gath was also the home of other words associated with a certain “Rapha” (= the Hebrew word; think: Rephaim) often translated “giant” (2 Sam 21:16–22; 1 Chron 20:4–8). So, were the Nephilim giants? According to biblical scholar John Day, “It is clear that the Nephilim are to be understood as giants” (p. 81), an interpretation arising from the evidence we have just examined, particularly the appearance of the Nephilim in the Promised Land (Num 13:33) and the association of the inhabitants of the Promised Land with great height (Amos 2:9), along with the association of the Nephilim with other tall people (Anakim, Rephaim, etc.; Deut 2:10, 20–21; 3:11). Of course, the problem with associating the Nephilim with the descendants of the sons of God in Genesis 6 is that there were still Nephilim in the land of Canaan in the time of the Israelite conquest. Why wouldn’t they be destroyed by the flood?… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

I was telling you why I love the 1897 novel Dracula so much, and what lessons I think a Christian might learn from Bram Stoker. Last time I introduced the novel and ended my thoughts with a focus on the eucharist. I myself have cited Dracula several times during communion meditations at church, and people tell me that those meditations are … um … memorable. But there is more to say about this book. Before getting to the moral qualities of the novel, some scattered thoughts— Money We’ll start with money: our heroes are all rich, and this is necessary for the story. One of them is a member of the British nobility, and along with his title, Lord Godalming also has a large fortune made larger by the will that Mrs. Westenra insisted her solicitor produce. Jonathan Harker starts the novel as middle class but inherits a sizeable fortune from Mr. Hawkins. Dr. Seward and Prof. Van Helsing seem to live comfortably, while the American Mr. Morris is very well-off. At one point in the novel (ch. 26), Mina expresses her gratitude that especially Godalming and Morris have so much money and spend it so generously. Their wealth allows them the time and resources to mount an effective challenge to the Count. Dracula does not discriminate; he targets rich and poor. Early in the novel we meet a woman who comes to Castle Dracula to accuse its master of taking her child, but she has no means of fighting back. She is merely one of the many nameless victims of this evil. To oppose such a powerful enemy requires money. As Jonathan Harker says in ch. 25, “Judge Moneybag will settle this case, I think!” Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Knowledge and Belief But there is also need of knowledge, and early in the novel most of its characters have no understanding of vampires. They do not believe in such nonsense. Jonathan Harker becomes acquainted with vampires during his stay at Castle Dracula, but he doesn’t have a name for what it is that he is witnessing. It is with the coming to England of the Dutchman Abraham Van Helsing in ch. 9 that light begins to dawn. He doesn’t save Lucy Westenra’s life, and he doesn’t fully understand the cause of her malady during her illness, but he has suspicions. In fact, after his very first interview with Lucy, Van Helsing says to his friend John, “This is no jest, but life and death, perhaps more” (Sept. 3). Take note: it is Van Helsing, the most elderly of the characters of the novel, who is the most open-minded. How old is Van Helsing? I think we are never told, but perhaps in his 60s. We are told that Dr. Seward is 29-years-old (ch. 5), and that the other men are all younger (ch. 25), so I suppose they are all around 23 or 24. Lucy apparently dies just before her twentieth birthday. Van Helsing is by far the oldest and wisest, and his wisdom is tied to his open mind. Are we accustomed to the elderly having an open mind? I’m not sure I’m accustomed to anyone, these days, having an open mind. It is reminiscent to me of the narrative about the blind man in John 9, and especially the efforts to convince the Pharisees that just maybe they don’t know everything about the ways of God. Less than a month after first meeting most of these people, Van Helsing makes this speech to the group, as recorded by Mina Harker on Sept 30 (ch. 18). There are such beings as vampires; some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples. I admit that at the first I was sceptic. Were it not that through long years I have train myself to keep an open mind, I could not have believe until such time as that fact thunder on my ear. ‘See! see! I prove; I prove.’ Alas! Had I known at the first what now I know—nay, had I even guess at him—one so precious life had been spared to many of us who did love her. But that is gone; and we must so work, that other poor souls perish not, whilst we can save. Again, the old one has to convince the younger ones to believe. I’ll let you read how he goes about doing that, except for one comment he makes to his friend, John Seward, while trying to convince him that he does not know everything about the world. This is before Van Helsing has mentioned the word “vampire.” What does Van Helsing want Seward to do? Van Helsing answers: To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once of an American who so defined faith: ‘that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.’ For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe. (ch. 14) I don’t particularly like the quotation from the American who said that faith was about believing things that you know to be untrue—that’s not how I would put it—but I like Van Helsing’s explanation, and I think such concepts always relevant, both to Christians and non-Christians. Just because we understand one truth doesn’t mean we understand all truth. I find this idea to be relevant to biblical interpretation, to politics, to many areas of life. This is a problem with the systematizers, I think; they want to press one truth to be the ruling truth, the most important truth, maybe the only truth, thereby simplifying things that ought not be simplified. Some things are, in fact, complex, and they should not be made easy. Hate Now, to the second aspect of the novel that I find helpful from a Christian perspective: hate. Count Dracula is responsible for the death of the young and beautiful and beloved Lucy Westenra, and he attempts to make a vampire out of Mina Harker. Our heroes have good reason to hate him—but Mina, of all people, won’t allow it. The scene is described in Dr. Seward’s diary entry for October 3 (ch. 23), when Mina speaks to the five men assembled in her room. She refers to the work of destroying Dracula as they destroyed the vampire version of Lucy. I won’t describe how they went about killing the undead Lucy; you’ve seen enough vampire movies to know how such things are usually done. The point that Mina makes is that the death of the undead Lucy released the real Lucy’s soul from the vampire curse and gave it rest, a point that she doesn’t need to drive home because all the men believe it; indeed, most of them would say that they witnessed it. But Mina makes the same point in reference to Dracula, whom no one loves as they had loved Lucy. I know that you must fight—that you must destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he, too, is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him, too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction. This counsel from Mina, that they should not hate Dracula, fails to have an immediate effect even on her husband, Jonathan, who responds: “May God give him into my hand just for long enough to destroy that earthly life of him which we are aiming at. If beyond it I could send his soul for ever and ever to burning hell I would do it!” Who among us does not feel the hatred inspiring Harker? Mere death is not good enough for one who intentionally causes pain to others, who not only took the life of dear, sweet Lucy, but also—and more to the point for Jonathan Harker—took the innocence of Mina Harker. Not death, but suffering—that’s what Dracula deserves! How much suffering? Eternal. May he burn in hell for ever and ever! But here Mina return… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

On the morning of May 16, Jonathan Harker began his diary entry with the following words: God preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane, then surely it is maddening to think that of all the foul things that lurk in this hateful place the Count is the least dreadful to me; that to him alone I can look for safety, even though this be only whilst I can serve his purpose. Great God! merciful God! Let me be calm, for out of that way lies madness indeed. As is clear from this diary entry, Mr. Harker is in desperate straits indeed, less than two weeks into his journey into unfamiliar regions. He is an English solicitor, sent by his employer, Mr. Hawkins, on a business journey to eastern Europe, to the old stately home of a foreign gentleman in order to explain the recent purchase of a home on the outskirts of London. The foreign gentleman is a tall, thin man, pale, with aquiline features. As the entry from Harker’s journal has already alerted us, this gentleman was a count, and his family name was Dracula. When Jonathan Harker received the commission to travel to Transylvania to be the guest of Count Dracula, the name raised no suspicions in him—nor, presumably, in the first readers of the 1897 novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. It was Stoker who introduced the name “Dracula” into the world of vampires. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Harker arrived at Castle Dracula on the 5th of May, and after a week as a guest in this old, drab castle, that seems to house only himself and his host, he writes the following: “What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?” (May 12). I’ll let you discover for yourself in the pages of the novel what leads to this despairing query. But even without knowing the specifics, you can guess in general what has happened. In a week with this Transylvanian count, Harker has gone from considering Dracula a charming if odd nobleman to now recognizing him as sinister and perhaps not human. Unfortunately he will spend several more weeks in the castle, unable to find an exit, and constantly fearful of the Count, but not only the Count. Will Harker survive? Can he escape the castle? Will he be reunited with his fiancee, Mina Murray? I love Dracula because it is one of the most Christian novels I have ever read. The novel Dracula is structured as a collection of contemporary accounts documenting some strange events over the course of a summer and fall in some year late in the nineteenth century. The opening item is a journal entry dated to May 3, and the last entry is dated November 6. There is no narrator; instead, we have diaries, or letters, or newspaper articles. Someone has collected these disparate materials in order to chronicle the facts concerning Count Dracula, as those facts became known to a few friends dedicated to destroying him. These friends are, first of all, Jonathan Harker and his fiance, Mina Murray, as well as Mina’s friend, the ill-fated Lucy Westenra, and also the three men who are in love with Lucy, namely, Dr. John Seward, Quincey P. Morris, and Arthur Holmwood, the future Lord Godalming. And then, of course, there is the friend of Dr. Seward, and his former teacher, from Amsterdam, Prof. Abraham Van Helsing. These five men—Harker, Seward, Van Helsing, Morris, and Godalming—along Harker’s wife, Mina, bind themselves by oath to avenge the death of their beloved Lucy. The collection of papers assembled in this novel—the diary entries and letters and newspaper clippings—describe Lucy’s death and the process of avenging her. We learn near the end of the novel that it was Mina Harker who assembled these documents. Why do I love the novel Dracula? Because it is one of the most Christian novels I have ever read, one of the most virtuous, one of the most noble. I love the novel because the characters bravely entrust themselves to God in their fight against evil. I love it because it inspires me to be a better person, to imitate Jesus more closely. Actually, I have never read the novel Dracula, not in the normal sense of the term “read.” About twenty years ago, before I moved to Alabama, I think, I tried to read it, but after about a hundred pages, I was so bored I put it down, and I have never picked it up again. But a few years later, I was in the local public library and came across a Recorded Books version of Dracula, one read by Alexander Spencer and Susan Adams, and I thought I would give it a try. I loved it. A few years later, I listened to it again, in October, and most years in October I decide to re-listen to that version of Dracula. I have found this version available on YouTube. Highly recommended. I cannot recommend the experience of reading the novel Dracula: I’ve never done it. And I won’t recommend to you any particular film version of the story. I’ve seen a few Dracula films, including the classic 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi, which is a must-see for movie-lovers. But it is not much like the novel at all, and contains little of what I love in the story. But I can recommend the Recorded Books version that I mentioned; I’ve listened to it perhaps a couple dozen times. What about Dracula vs. Frankenstein? I don’t know who would win in a battle, but as for which book is better, that’s easy—Dracula. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel about a scientist who assembles a man out of random body parts and then manages to create life is, I am sorry to say, pretty boring. The monster does a lot of whining in that novel. It doesn’t even come close to being scary. The recent film version on Netflix directed by Guillermo del Toro is excellent and much better than its source material. Back to Dracula: is it scary? Um, yes, some of it is, or was. Now at this late date, after having experienced the novel so many times, its power to frighten has diminished, though I still anticipate the thrill of certain sections: Jonathan Harker’s growing realization of his dangerous predicament at Castle Dracula early in the novel, and in chapter 7, the captain’s log found in the hands of the dead captain of the ship called the Demeter, who had lashed his own hands to the wheel of the vessel. But most of the novel is not scary exactly, more of a thriller. And I know you also are curious how much sex is in the novel. The answer: not much, certainly not as much as in the film versions. Is there any sex? Well, the sexiest part of the novel is near the beginning, at Castle Dracula in Transylvania, when Jonathan Harker, in a hypnotic state, encounters three women who materialize out of particles or dust in the air. While Harker is vaguely asleep on a couch, one of the women bends over him to—as he thinks—kiss his neck, and Harker admits that her approach excited him, but he also observed that as her mouth drew closer to his neck she strangely licked her lips. As it turned out, the two never made contact. So, like I said, no sex. Dracula moves to London, and there he does shenanigans. Let me tell you very briefly what the novel is about: Dracula moves to London, and there he does shenanigans. I’ve already introduced you to the main characters, including the woman Dracula kills upon first taking up residence in England, Lucy Westenra—or, he does not kill her exactly, but he slowly drains her blood until she becomes no longer alive, but not dead; she is undead. Lucy happens to be best friends with Mina Murray, and the two were on holiday together at the seaside resort of Whitby when the Demeter arrives into port, covered in fog and apparently completely unmanned except for the corpse at the wheel, and carrying only fifty boxes of earth. The local newspaper features a report on the arrival of… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

When ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe. (1 Thess 2:13) We should approach the Bible as Scripture. You might think, “Duh, the Bible is Scripture.” True, but let’s be more specific. The Bible is our Scripture because we’re Christians. The Quran is also Scripture, but I would not advise us to approach the Quran as Scripture because the Quran is not our Scripture since we’re not Muslims. How would we approach the Quran? We would read it with some critical distance, as a source of information on Muslim beliefs. We would not read it as a source of divine revelation, as a text through which God addresses us. That description needs nuance. God might address us through the Quran, just as he might address us through any literature, whether Plato’s Republic or Paradise Lost or Pride and Prejudice. Not just literature, but also great films or other media (e.g., the heavens, as we’ll see in a moment). One of my projects in life is to hear what God wants to tell me through all of these works. All truth is God’s truth. Is there truth in the Quran? I presume, though I have not read much of it. And yet, Christians have not regarded any of these works to be “the word of God” in the technical sense used for Christian Scripture. Perhaps God addresses people through the Quran or Paradise Lost, especially if they are seeking such divine communication, but Christians regard their Scriptures as the site from which we can anticipate hearing God’s voice most often and most directly. Indeed, it is the Christian Scriptures that should offer the training to the reader to discern the voice of God, so that his voice can be most fruitfully detected in other media. That’s what it means to call the Scriptures “canonical,” normative. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. There is more to say about all of this, such as the role of the Old Testament as canonical Scripture within a Christian theological system, and about differences in the biblical canon (e.g., does God speak through Tobit?). And at some point perhaps I will address these topics on this Substack, as I have done in my conventional academic publications. But for now let’s return to the subject of the present essay. A lot of people read the Bible not-as-Scripture. That’s what scholars do. In large measure, that’s what academic biblical studies is all about. I would argue, and I will argue in a later post (deo volente), that such a reading strategy is incredibly helpful for the purpose of reading the Bible as Scripture. I work at a school that exists to train Christian ministers, and a big part of how we do that is by training students in academic biblical studies. Now the value of academic biblical studies to ministers is variegated, not simply in helping them read the Bible as Scripture, but that is one way it is helpful to them. Listen: reading the Bible not-as-Scripture means that you cultivate critical distance toward the text, and you read it as a source of information on Christian beliefs. It seems obvious to me that such a reading strategy would be helpful to a Christian reading of Scripture, but it is certainly incomplete toward that end. At some point that critical distance that academic biblical studies requires needs to evaporate for a fully Christian reading. To read the Bible as Scripture requires that we not only read it as a statement of beliefs from people long ago in a foreign culture but also that we read it as a revelation from God to us. By the way, this matter of reading the Bible as Scripture is very in vogue right now; a lot of people like talking about it. A few times a year, it seems like, a book comes out promising to look at a portion of the Bible as Scripture. Maybe it started with Brevard Childs. In 1979 Fortress Press published his seminal book Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. But now you can find books on Reading the Gospels as Christian Scripture (by Joshua Jipp, Baker, 2024), or Reading the Prophets as Christian Scripture (by Eric Tully, Baker, 2022), or 1 Samuel as Christian Scripture (by Stephen Chapman, Eerdmans, 2016), or Theological Hermeneutics and the Book of Numbers as Christian Scripture (by Richard Briggs, Notre Dame, 2018), or Reading the Psalms as Scripture (by James Hamilton and Matthew Damico, Lexham, 2024), or Reading the Psalms and Wisdom as Christian Scripture (by Christopher Ansberry, Baker, 2024). There is also the classic book by Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (2d ed., Liturgical Press, 1999). Now, as helpful as these books sound, I haven’t read many of them, though I have read the book by Childs that, I guess, got it all started. Let me nuance that statement a little: what Childs got started was not reading the Bible as Scripture—Christians have been doing that since Jesus—but academics talking about reading the Bible as Scripture. Since I haven’t read most of the books that claim to be doing it, I don’t really know how they think we ought to go about the project of reading the Bible as Scripture, or even what they think it means to do so. But here, again, is my understanding of the goal of a Christian reading of the biblical text: it means to attend to the divine voice in the text, to desire and seek to read the Bible for the purpose of hearing God speak, to encounter the living and active word of God. That is what I mean by approaching the Bible as Scripture To read the Bible not-as-Scripture is to read without this purpose. It is to read the Bible like any other book, in the phrase made famous by the Anglican clergyman Benjamin Jowett in 1860. We’ll get to Jowett some other time, and how reading the Bible like any other book might be good and helpful, indeed invigorating, spiritually edifying. But for now we want to know how to read the Bible like no other book. What is it that we want from the Bible when we read it as Christian Scripture? I have already given my answer a few times: we want to hear the voice of God. (Many writers say the same thing; this formulation is not at all unique to me.) As I have mapped out a path toward spiritual growth, the first step is “hear,” and the voice of God is my way of formulating what it is that we want to hear. You could say that people should hear the gospel, or the message of Christ, or Scripture. But I prefer to say that people should hear the voice of God, because it suggests that God mystically continues speaking through the ancient text, that the word of God is truly living and active, that God is, indeed, speaking directly to us in our own situation, if only we had ears to hear, if only our hearts were softened. As the psalmist said, “Today if ye will hear his voice, harden not your heart.” In Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline, the very first discipline discussed is meditation, which is presented as a sine qua non of the Christian. Foster quotes Bonhoeffer’s explanation for the reason he meditates: “Because I am a Christian,” Bonhoeffer said. (I quoted Bonhoeffer last time; his guide to meditation can be found at DBWE 14, pp. 931–36.) But what is meditation? Foster answers (p. 17): “Christian meditation … is the ability to hear God’s voice and obey his word.” So maybe what I’m talking about is a meditative or contemplative approach to the Bible. Meditating on Scripture is for those who want to be like God. Now, Foster briefly explores other forms of meditation, other ways of hearing God’s voice, besides meditation on Scripture. We might think of Scripture that substantiates the point. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handywork. (Psa 19:1) The voice of the Lord is upon the waters. (Psa 29:3) The earth, nature, creation, provides testi… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

One of Abraham Lincoln’s famous quotations is “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.” This excellent advice from our sixteenth president helpfully introduces our topic, which is tracking down sources. As Honest Abe, would tell us, when you find an interesting quotation or bit of information, you need to confirm it, trace it back to its origin, see if it’s true. When you are doing research on the Bible, for instance, a research paper, one of the tasks that you have to do is track down sources. You need to see the evidence for yourself. Let’s say you have a question about what kinds of things women would do in the first century. This is a question about which some people have much to say today, and they will offer a variety of opinions. These opinions might be interesting, but they are not evidence. What you really want is information deriving from the first century, first-hand information, from writers in the first century, or from archaeological artifacts dating to the first century. A good guide to such evidence on the topic of women in the first century is Susan Hylen, a New Testament professor at Emory. She has several books on the topic (for instance), and I have always found her work to be careful both in its citation of ancient evidence and in the conclusions drawn from that evidence. I trust her to be careful, because she has proven herself worthy of that trust—but, I do not trust her to provide the correct citation in any given instance. Everybody makes mistakes. Susan Hylen is great, but you still need to track down the sources, make sure that she cites Josephus correctly, that the paragraph number she provided is the correct one, and that Josephus really does say what she attributes to him, and that she has interpreted his meaning correctly. The only way to do that is to find the original passage in Josephus, read the passage, and read a little bit before it and a little bit after it to get the context. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. It has never been so easy to track down sources. Most of the ancient sources are freely available online in English translation, so that, as the apostle Paul might say, one is without excuse; there is no reason not to look up the original passage. And it must be done. Why? Why should we care so much about tracking down sources? Because … umm … you know … we are people who value truth. We have committed ourselves to guiding people into a deeper knowledge of matters divine, a sacred responsibility that should compel us to know what we’re talking about, and to refuse to affirm things that we don’t know. Oftentimes we are going to get into arguments that are finely nuanced, that turn on the meaning of particular Greek or Hebrew words, or that are affected by the proper interpretation of some extra-biblical source. And we should, you know, look at such evidence for ourselves so that we can help people work through the issues. Especially at HCU, an academic institution, we pursue academic excellence as a facet of Christian virtue, developing skills both practical and scholarly in order to help people and to glorify God. We are God’s images, and we have been created in Christ Jesus unto good works, and those good works are many and manifold. Doing our academic work in an excellent fashion is, in part, what we have been created in Christ Jesus to do. We need to take this stuff seriously. By the way, this is the reason I cite Wikipedia so frequently on Substack and in chapel speeches, and even in sermons. I would never—never!—rely on Wikipedia as an actual research source; I would never cite it in an academic paper. I cite it in speeches for two main reasons: to let you know where to find more information about a topic; and, even more importantly, to tell you that I have not done research on the topic. If I’m relying on Wikipedia, that means I don’t know what I’m talking about. I have done only the easiest, laziest, most basic amount of research; I wouldn’t even call it research, but “poking around.” No, it’s not even poking around; that’s the term I use for looking at a few books in the library to see what scholars are saying on a topic; it doesn’t rise to the level of research because it’s only a few books that I look at, and maybe a few primary sources. That’s poking around. Research is when I’m actually in the pursuit of a question, and I’m going to be pretty exhaustive in my search for the answer. Oftentimes for a Bible class or sermon or even a class at HCU, I don’t have time for real research, just some poking around down in the library. And a lot of times I don’t have time even to poke around, or I don’t have the interest, and so I just google something and read a Wikipedia article. But I almost always tell people when I’m relying on Wikipedia. When I do cite Wikipedia, I don’t mean to communicate that Wikipedia is a good research tool, but the exact opposite. Wikipedia is where you go before you start the process of research. And now I give you three bad examples, all from the published work of biblical scholars and theologians, people who should know better. Hippocrates on Women In the year 2020, a book called Women in the Bible was published by Westminster John Knox, written by Jamie Clark-Soles, a professor at Perkins School of Theology, the seminary attached to SMU in Dallas. On page 2 of her book, she presents a chart exhibiting eight quotations from historical sources, ranging from Hippocrates in the classical Greek period to Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth century. This chart is designed to illustrate, in the words of Clark-Soles, the availability of “an endless collection of choice quotations to prove that women have been considered inferior to men.” Now, let me say, I have no doubt that one can easily demonstrate such a thing, that throughout world history, in perhaps all societies, women have been considered inferior to men. I agree with Clark-Soles that this has been a common attitude, and I join with her in condemning it. I just wish she had done a better job of demonstrating it. To emphasize the pedantic point that is the subject of this essay, you should not rely on her chart, but use her chart as a guide to the sources, by all means go tracking down the sources yourself, and you’ll find that Clark-Soles has not always excerpted these quotations accurately. As I said, there are eight quotations, attributed to the following sources: * Hippocrates * Aristotle * Josephus * Philo * the Tosefta, a rabbinic document from the third century * Origen, a third-century Greek Christian * Martin Luther * John Calvin The first quotation is from Hippocrates, a Greek medical writer from around the time of Socrates. Clark-Soles attributes to Hippocrates these words, in quotation marks: “Males are warm, dry, and firm, and this is the norm. Females are cool, moist and spongy, these being defects.” That’s an interesting statement, and I have read enough about ancient views of women to say that it sounds plausible that Hippocrates said it. But where did he say it? It would be nice if Clark-Soles would tell us where Hippocrates made this statement, but she doesn’t; instead she cites a scholarly article written in 1991. You know what to do next, right? Go get the article. Under no circumstances are you to trust a scholar, and in this case thou shalt not assume that Clark-Soles has correctly cited the article, or that the 1991 article says what Clark-Soles attributes to it. Best case scenario here is that the 1991 article provides a quote from Hippocrates that is word-for-word what Clark-Soles quoted, and provides the reference to Hippocrates. That is not what the 1991 article provides. It turns out that the words presented by Clark-Soles in quotation marks are not a direct quotation at all, and not even a quotation from the scholarly article, but more of a summary from the article. The 1991 article was written by Lesley Dean-Jones ( This is a public episode. 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Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. (Joshua 1:7–9) Should Christians read the Bible? Well, yes, of course, and they can hardly avoid it if they are pious and go to church and Bible class. But I don’t mean to ask about Christians reading the Bible in group settings: public worship or Bible class or whatever. Should individual Christians read the Bible for private devotion? Yes, and no. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Or, actually, no and yes, and, again, no. Let’s talk about it. Ancient Believers Didn’t Read the Bible We’ll approach the question through the side door. Should individual Christians pray? Yes, that’s an easy one. The Bible talks a great deal about people of faith praying. “Pray without ceasing,” said the Apostle. Jesus gave much instruction on prayer. In the Old Testament, there’s an entire book, a long book, comprising 150 prayers. Next question, should Christians go to church? Let’s reword that: should Christians routinely gather with the saints to worship God? Yes, another easy question. The Bible has a great deal to say about corporate worship, in the Old and New Testament—or, at least, gathering and doing the activities we tend to associate with worship: singing, praying, exploring Scripture. (Maybe Tom Wadsworth would agree with that description.) Let me just remind you about the verse in Hebrews that says, “not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together.” What about Bible reading? Does the Bible tell people to read the Bible? We find instructions to listen to, or to hear, the word of God, or the message of the gospel. The prophets often call on the ancient Israelites and Judeans to pay attention, to listen, but they never tell them to read. Such a command would make no sense, because there was nothing to read, and even if there were, the common Israelite couldn’t read it. When I say there was nothing to read, I mean the Bible hadn’t been written yet. Isaiah certainly couldn’t tell people to read his book; his life was taken up with delivering the oracles that would eventually constitute the contents of the book of Isaiah. Some things were written—the Ten Commandments, for instance, but the only copy about which we know was stored in the Most Holy Place of the Tabernacle or Temple, and therefore not available for reading. We could assume that multiple copies of the Ten Commandments were made, chiseled in stone and displayed prominently in various spots of ancient Israel, just as in modern America. But then you have the problem of literacy. It is impossible to be very precise about ancient literacy, but a pretty common guess for the ancient world is that about ten percent of the population could read. It is almost precisely the reverse in modern America, with about ten percent of the population considered illiterate. How has it come about that so many people in modern America can read? It’s because for about two hundred years or more, American society has invested a great deal of money and effort on public education, with the fundamental goal of teaching people how to read. Learning to read is not easy. You don’t graduate first grade considered “literate,” even if you can read Dr. Seuss books. It takes years of training to be proficient to read complicated texts. And the Bible is most definitely a complicated text. Absent a well-funded public education program, widespread literacy is not going to just happen, not at the levels familiar to us. That’s a pretty good reason why a general requirement that Christians should read the Bible would have made no sense prior to the modern period. As Keith Stanglin (p. 159) has mentioned, at the time of the Reformation and following the invention of the printing press, early “Protestants usually stressed the obligation of all Christians to read their Bibles.” This was a new phenomenon. But there’s another reason we never find Jesus or Paul telling believers that they need to read the Bible. It’s not just that the concept of “Bible”—as in a collection of sacred books that you could hold in your hand—is an anachronism for the first century, but also because the individual books themselves were enormously expensive. Of course, everything was handmade: the leather or papyrus upon which the text was written, and the ink, and the process of writing itself, all done by hand. I have seen the plausible estimate that in the first century a scroll of the book of Isaiah would have cost about a month’s wages. Most believers did not have ready access to copies of the biblical books even if they had been trained to read them. That’s why the Bible contains no general command to believers to read the Bible as a regular habit, like prayer or the assembling of believers. Such instruction would make no sense in their world; it would have been impossible to carry out. General Bible reading is a very recent phenomenon. (For similar thoughts, see Brad East, pp. 119–20.) Christians Should Read the Bible But, yes, Christians should definitely read the Bible. I mean, Christians now, with the opportunity and the ability. The fact is, by this point, the Bible has been written down and collected together. There are a plethora of cheap Bibles available, and you can easily find an organization giving Bibles away if you need that. And we have all been trained to read at a very high level, at great expense in money and time. We are judged by God according to what we do with our opportunities, and we—Christians in twenty-first century America—have been granted the opportunity—almost unique in the history of the world—of reading the Bible for ourselves. Yes, we should read the Bible. This is especially true for church leaders: if any believers should be reading the Bible, it should be church leaders. They will be judged by God not only according to their opportunities but also in how they have led God’s people, and so they need humbly to seek the will of God through constant devotion to Scripture. Or Maybe Not? But do Christians need to read the Bible? Is that what God wants for us? Maybe not. Maybe the point is not reading but something else. Could reading the Bible be a distraction from what God wants us to do with Scripture? I’m asking these questions conscious of two influences: history and Socrates. The history we’ve already mentioned. Before the modern period, it would have made no sense to tell Christians generally that they need to read the Bible. What did such Christians do? Were they just not spiritual? Or did they do something with the Bible besides read it? That brings me to Socrates. The famous philosopher was not a big fan of writing. Yes, I get the irony that the only way I know about the opinion of Socrates is that his student Plato wrote it down. I’m sure Plato got the irony too. But still, listen to Socrates: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when th… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

Communication is difficult. The point is proven time and again, and perhaps the people that are most familiar with the difficulty of communication are, on the one hand, parents, and on the other hand, preachers. Both groups of people, parents and preachers, frequently find themselves in the situation where they need the phrase, “no, that’s not what I meant.” There are, no doubt, several reasons why communication is difficult, but one of them is that the speaker and the hearer do not necessarily share presuppositions. Let me give you an example of this. I recall several years ago giving a sermon on the Lord’s Supper, in which I was trying to explain part of the deep significance of this meal, how it helps us conform to Christ since we are consuming his body and blood. It’s not the kind of lesson on communion that I had ever heard, certainly not in churches of Christ. To top if off, I delivered the sermon on Christmas Day, which happened to fall on a Sunday that year. I called the sermon “Incarnation and Reincarnation,” meaning just as the Word became flesh—incarnation—so also the Word takes on flesh in our lives—reincarnation—as represented in the Lord’s Supper, as our flesh and blood mingles with and is transformed by the flesh and blood of our Lord. I thought I was presenting a new and helpful way of thinking about this weekly ritual for the members of the very traditional congregation for which I was preaching. I was trying to be deep. So I was a little confused afterwards when one old man complimented my lesson by saying, “That’s what we need more of, the first principles.” Either he didn’t hear what I said, or I didn’t say what I thought I said. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. As I have reflected on that comment over the years, I have decided that this old man, who knew me and liked me, came into the sermon expecting to like the sermon. And the kinds of sermons he liked were “first principles” kinds of sermons. He heard what he wanted to hear. His expectations did not align with what I was trying to do. I take my share of the blame here; obviously I was not clear enough in my presentation. Communication is difficult. Or, let’s talk about politics for just a moment. I have a political point of view, a fundamental understanding about the nature of the country in which I live—America—and of the direction it ought to go. And I recognize that the country is highly polarized politically at the moment. There are people I enjoy listening to because they share my fundamental beliefs about America, and there are people I do not enjoy listening to. So recently I forced myself to listen to a podcast by people who do not align with my political views, but people that I consider intelligent. And it was hard to listen to that podcast. And it was helpful. And there were multiple times in that 45-minute podcast when I simply could not make sense out of what the person was saying. I mean, I heard the words, and I could get meaning out of those words, but I was convinced that the person could not have meant what I understood those words to mean, because that would be so stupid, so obviously incorrect. And these were intelligent people I was listening to. I wasn’t hearing something that made sense to me, partly, I think, because my political expectations were different from those of the people on the podcast. What is Scripture about? It’s about a lot of things, isn’t it? What are those statistics we often hear about the Bible? 66 books written by 40 different people in multiple languages over a period of more than a millennium, in several different cultures. There’s a lot in there. There’s history and law and parables and apocalypse and poetry and prophetic oracles and letters, and each of those genres can be further subdivided, and some biblical books attest multiple genres. So the Bible has a lot of stuff in it—which is part of the reason that the Bible is so difficult to read. What is the point of Scripture? What is it about? The Bible is not about me. I think it is true to say that Christians often open the Bible hoping to find it talking about them—and it does, sometimes, and in some ways. A little later we’ll talk about how the Bible addresses Christians. But in our culture the expectation that a Christian will have is very individualistic. I have a problem, and I want the Bible to address my problem. If a therapist can address an individual person’s problems, then surely my problem can be directly addressed in Scripture by God—who is basically an all-knowing therapist, right? When Bible-readers have this expectation, they are sure to be disappointed by most of the Bible, which they simply cannot understand through this paradigm. Again, it’s sorta understandable that modern Christians would approach the Bible with this paradigm, because they have been told ad infinitum that God loves me and longs for a personal relationship with me. Seems like the Bible ought to talk about that. So what is the point of Ezekiel? Or Leviticus? Or most of the Old Testament, really? Some of the psalms are nice, and the proverbs are relatively straightforward, though they aren’t very comforting. Did Paul really say that all Scripture is profitable? Maybe he was exaggerating just a little bit? So here’s the deal: the Bible is not about me. It is not about you. If you approach Scripture with that expectation, you will most definitely be disappointed. Let me tell you what the Bible is about: it’s about God, and it’s about us. Let’s talk about both of these in turn. Not Me, But God The Bible is about God. Wow, that’s profound, isn’t it. You might need to write that one on your hand so that you’ll remember it. I’ll wait. Let me be a little more specific: The Bible is not about me, it’s about God. When I turn to the Bible, what am I looking for? What do I think I’m going to be reading? What are my expectations? If you open Ezekiel with the idea that you’re going to read something immediately relevant for your daily life—well, yes, I would argue that you can find in Ezekiel passages relevant to your daily life, but that’s because I am convinced that knowledge of God is relevant to your daily life. It might not have an obvious, straightforward application to the particular problem you’re facing right now, but it will most definitely display to you the big-picture reality in which your entire life takes place. Not just Ezekiel, of course, but the entire Bible does that, because the Bible is about God. If you turn to Ezekiel looking to get out of the doldrums, or how to be compassionate, or how to have less stress—if you turn to Ezekiel expecting it to address you right now, you probably won’t find what you’re seeking. Listen, there is a correlation between the text of Ezekiel and the Christian life today, but it’s not a direct correlation. If you imagine that what God wants to do in Scripture is talk to you about you, many books of the Bible are going to confuse you, most definitely including Ezekiel. And you may decide that Ezekiel is not profitable, after all, no matter what Paul says about all Scripture. In Scripture, God wants to talk to you not about you but about himself. One of the most basic ideas in the Christian life is that you need to take the focus off of yourself and fill your mind with God, be led by the Spirit of God, squash your own will so that you can take on God’s will, so that you can say with our Lord, “not my will but yours be done.” That is how the Bible addresses you—by not addressing you, by telling you about God. And let me tell you something: if you open Ezekiel expecting to read something about God, you will find what you seek. God is all over that book. Christians have known this all along, of course, that the Bible is about God. The early church had a reading strategy for the Bible, and they called it the Rule of Faith. I’m talking about the church of the second … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

I have previously proposed the use of the so-called “steps of salvation” as an avenue for spiritual growth. The first step is “hear,” and this essay is a first reflection on how to go about doing that. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the Evangelist Matthew records a story told by Jesus about two builders. You probably remember singing a song about them. The wise man built his house upon the rock, and when the rains came tumbling down, the house stood firm; but the foolish man built his house upon the sand, and the torrential rains caused his house to go splat. The point of this story, according to the song, is to encourage us to build our house on the Lord Jesus Christ, and what does that mean? Jesus himself explained the difference between the two builders: the wise builder exemplifies, according to Matthew 7, “whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them”; whereas the foolish builder illustrates “every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not.” The common element between both builders is hearing. If I may extend our Lord’s metaphor, they both receive the blueprints for the house, and they both study those blueprints, but only one of them builds his house according to the blueprints. To change images, only one of them follows the recipe. Only one of them executes the instructions of Jesus that they both hear. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Hearing is not the problem. The problem is doing. What distinguishes these two men is action. And no wonder, for the words that they are being asked to perform are, as Jesus says, “these sayings of mine.” Which sayings exactly? Why, the Sermon on the Mount, of course, of which the conclusion is this very parable about the two builders. Hearing the Sermon on the Mount is fine, necessary, essential, but ultimately insufficient. Doing the Sermon on the Mount, now that’s what matters. And that’s hard. I completely understand the guy who wants to build his house not up to code, because building your house according to the code of Jesus is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. The code of Jesus, the Sermon on the Mount, is filled with stuff I don’t want to do. And I don’t mean avoiding anxiety. Yes, naturally, it would be nice to do such a thing, to avoid anxiety, but, as Jesus knew, that’s easier said than done. At least we all want to try that one. But what about the Golden Rule? or the prohibition on judging others? or the instructions on fasting? or the command to store up treasures in heaven and not on earth? or the command to turn the other check or to go the second mile or to pray for one’s enemies? I don’t really even want to try to follow that recipe, and the way my fellow church-goers talk makes me suspect that they have no interest in trying it either. Which means that we are the fools in Jesus’ parable, building our house without a foundation, counting on good weather. What is Scripture for? It’s for doing. Later in the Gospel of Matthew (16:24), we read these words, also in red: “For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.” Doing is important. How does this concept relate to the grace of God? And is doing really all that important? Doesn’t the grace of God mean that doing is not important? Yes, I see the tension. Take it up with Jesus. He’s the one that said that the son of man “shall reward every man according to his works.” The point I’m trying to make is that hearing is not the problem. Doing is the problem. Both builders heard, the wise builder and the foolish builder. Only one of them executed what they heard. Hearing is not the problem. Hearing is sometimes the problem. In the Gospel of Luke (8:18), Jesus says, “Take heed therefore how ye hear.” There are better and worse ways of hearing. This concept is illustrated for us in the Parable of the Sower, which is the immediate prelude to this saying of Jesus in the Third Gospel. When Jesus says “take heed how ye hear,” he is thinking about the Parable of the Sower. Remember that the seed represents the word of God that is distributed liberally, but people respond to that message in different ways, some better than others. Different kinds of people hear in different ways. “Take heed therefore how ye hear.” We might also think about the disciples of Jesus and how they struggled to hear Jesus. At one point, a group of Jesus’ disciples actually said about one of Jesus’ messages, “this is a hard saying, who can hear it?” (John 6:60). Even Jesus’ closest disciples routinely misunderstood him. One time he warned them about the leaven of the Pharisees, and the disciples thought Jesus was reprimanding them for not bringing bread (Mark 8:14–21). Their years spent with Jesus could be understood as training for how to hear. I want to talk to you about hearing, but I need to tell you that the point of Scripture is not hearing but doing. Scripture calls on its readers or hearers to respond to the message. There are some literary works that are, I guess, merely for reading or hearing—maybe a John Grisham book or something. I enjoy the TV show Monk, and part of what I enjoy is that it is empty calories; it’s fun, but there’s not much there that I take with me once the TV is off. Of course, many great works of art, whether literature or movies or whatever, do stick with a person and even encourage a particular behavior. I would say the movie It’s a Wonderful Life has a very clear message about how we the viewer ought to live. Same for Groundhog Day. Same for To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s maybe less true for many Shakespeare plays, that is, less true that these plays have a clear message about how people ought to live, but certainly the plays do force the audience who hears well to reflect on various aspects of life. These examples of great works of art get close to what Scripture is doing in calling for a response. A John Grisham novel is for reading and enjoying. Groundhog Day is for watching and enjoying but also for reflecting on life and perhaps encouraging better behavior. Scripture is for reading or hearing and enjoying and for reflecting on life and for repenting and for enacting in life. The point of a John Grisham novel has been achieved when you read it and enjoy it. That is not true of Scripture. Scripture is for doing. Just think for a moment about the premier passage on Scripture in the Christian Scriptures, Paul’s description of Scripture in his second letter to Timothy. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God”—or, we might say the person of God, anthrōpos—“may be perfect, throughly”—or completely—“furnished unto all good works.” Where does the profit of Scripture lie? Wherein is its usefulness? The Apostle supplies the answer: Scripture is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness. Scripture is for doing, not just hearing. Think back to the greatness that was Christian America, before the culture turned away from traditional values announced from America’s pulpits: before abortion on demand, before the sexual revolution, before prayer was removed from public schools. Think back to America in the 1950s, when placing the Ten Commandments in public spaces was uncontroversial. This was the decade when the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance by an act of Congress, and when “In God We Trust” became the official national motto. Was America a more Christian nation in the 1950s? This was the decade when the Little Rock Nine walked to school amid a howling mob of Christians. I have no doubt that people heard the word of God, but the point of Scripture is not hearing but doing. May we avoid sharing the guilt of our ancestors. As Thomas à Kempis wrote six c… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

Some people think the apostle Paul might have been married at one point in his life. In fact, there was an early Christian tradition about it. Eusebius the church historian in the early fourth century quoted Clement of Alexandria, who wrote at the turn of the third century. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Clement, whose words we cited recently in the context of the previous quotation, enumerates, on account of those who reject marriage, those of the Apostles who were married, saying, “Or will they disapprove even of the Apostles? For Peter and Philip begat children, and Philip even gave his daughters to husbands, while Paul himself does not hesitate in one of his letters to address his wife whom he did not take about with him in order to facilitate his mission.” (Eusebius, Church History 3.30.1 [Loeb], quoting Clement, Stromata 3.52–53; see here, p. 289) What is Clement talking about? Paul addressed his wife in one of his letters? He is referring to the “true yokefellow” of Philippians 4:3. For some reason, Clement thinks this is Paul’s wife. Origen knows this same tradition about Paul’s marriage. Paul, then, if certain traditions are true, was called while in possession of a wife, concerning whom he speaks when writing to the Philippians, “I ask you also, my loyal mate, help these women.” Since he had become free by mutual consent with her, he calls himself a slave of Christ. But if, as others think, he had no wife, nonetheless he who was free when he was called is yet a slave of Christ. (Commentary on Romans 1:1(3), trans. Scheck, p. 62) If Paul had a wife at one time, what happened to her? Well, we can think of the options: death and divorce. Maybe the apostle was a widower, as some people think based on the Greek of 1 Corinthians 7:8, as we will discuss in a moment. Or maybe there was a divorce. We could imagine a couple scenarios. The Pharisee Saul of Tarsus might have divorced his wife for any number of reasons, assuming he adhered to the views of R. Hillel, who was pretty lenient on such matters. Or, maybe after the up-and-coming Jewish leader became an adherent to the way of Jesus, his wife left him. What sort of evidence might suggest that Paul was at one time married? It may also be that Paul was married prior to the time that he wrote 1 Corinthians in the mid-50s. In that letter, he indicates he was not married (7:7, 9, 38, 40; 9:4). Some scholars have noted, however, that Paul employs the term agamoi, which may be rendered “widowers,” in 1 Cor 7:8 and suggest that the apostle included himself among that group. If Paul were at one time married, this would coincide with Jewish traditions that praised and even stipulated marriage. Such an expectation was probably present among Pharisaic Jews in the first century. As a result, Paul might well have thought it both appropriate and prudent to marry. (Longenecker and Still, 2014, p. 27) So, possibly Paul called himself a “widower” in 1 Corinthians 7:8. Here’s the verse in the ESV: “To the unmarried (agamos) and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am.” Some interpreters think Paul included himself in the categories of “agamos and widows,” and since he cannot be calling himself a widow, he must be calling himself an agamos—but what does this word mean? According to Danker, it means “an unmarried man/woman,” but some people think that in the context of 1 Corinthians it must mean widower, since it is contrasted with the widow. So, if the word suggests “widower” and if Paul is including himself in the categories mentioned at 1 Corinthians 7:8, then Paul would be self-identifying as a widower. I think this argument fairly weak. But maybe there’s another rout to a married Paul. What if it was expected of Jews in the first century? Here’s F. F. Bruce: It may be pointed out that marriage was normal and, indeed, expected in pious Jews when they came of age. [He cites Avot 5.21.] True, Jesus had spoken of certain exceptions – those who, as he said, had “made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12) – among whom he may have included John the Baptist himself. But Paul was not presumably influenced by considerations of this kind in his pre-Christian days. What then? Was he a widower? Perhaps he was: the question has received a positive answer from Joachim Jeremias, for example. Rather more probable is the view that his wife left him when he became a Christian: that when he “suffered the loss of all things” [Philippians 3:8] for the sake of Christ he lost his wife too. This cannot be proved, of course, but if something like this did happen it might explain Paul’s specially sympathetic understanding of the domestic situation in which the unconverted partner walks out on the husband or wife who has become a Christian: “in such a case the brother or sister is not bound” (1 Corinthians 7:15). Paul, for his part, was not “bound” either way: he knew that he could fulfil his commission more wholeheartedly if he remained free from the marriage bond. (Bruce, 1977, pp. 269–70) (For another argument for a married Paul, see Jerome Murphy-O’Connor (1996). I don’t see that E. P. Sanders (2015) mentions it.) The idea that Jews in the first-century—pious, Torah-observant Jews—were generally expected to marry was argued a century ago by Joachim Jeremias in two very brief articles in the journal Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft. Here are the references. Jeremias, “War Paulus Witwer,” ZNW 25 (1926): 310–12; “Nochmals: War Paulus Witwer?” ZNW 28 (1929): 321–22. Jeremias is pretty confident in his interpretation. He says that a unanimous rabbinic teaching regarded marriage as a religious obligation. Here’s the evidence as he cites it. The Mishnah (Yevamot 6.6) states that Jewish men—and, maybe, Jewish women—are under obligation to fulfill the commandment of Genesis 1:28 to “be fruitful and multiply” (on the history of interpretation of this verse, see Jeremy Cohen’s 1989 monograph), and the sages suggest that a person can consider himself to have performed the mitzvah if he has produced two children, at least one of whom is male. Indeed, so important is the mitzvah that after ten years of marriage with no children, a man needs to seek a different wife. This mishnah is quoted in the Babylonian Talmud at Yevamot 61b §15, which then leads to a long discussion, but at the very beginning of the discussion it becomes clear that some Rabbis thought that a Jewish man was obligated to have a wife irrespective of children—in other words, even if he already had children, he still needed a wife. Being married was a separate obligation. In another part of the Talmud, at Pesachim 113b §14, there is a list of seven categories of people who are “ostracized by Heaven,” and first on the list is a Jew without a wife. This all seems pretty clear, but there are two problems with the argument of Jeremias that I want to mention. First, we’re using the Talmud for evidence for a first century Jew (Paul). The Talmud is not first century, it’s from some centuries later, maybe around AD 600. It definitely contains traditions from the first century, but the trick is knowing how to identify them, and I cannot do it. Scholars these days are much more reticent than in the days of Jeremias to use the Talmud to establish something in the first century. The same basic issue applies also to the Mishnah, though to a smaller degree, since the Mishnah is much closer to the New Testament (around AD 200). Second, there is another lifestyle that some faithful Jews pursued: they avoided marriage to devote themselves to God. Philo (Hypothetica 11.14) and Josephus (War 2.120; Antiquities 18.21) both mention celibacy in regard to the Essenes. (The extracts of Philo’s Hypothetica are preserved in the Preparation of the Gospel by Eusebius, book 8, but also printed in the Loeb edition of Philo, … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

“There were two subjects we never heard about in church,” Joy Winn told me one evening. She was referring to her childhood and young adulthood, decades earlier (roughly, the 1960s), in a church of Christ in Alabama. I’m pretty sure this conversation took place on a Wednesday evening because we were at church, which narrows down the possibilities. For my entire life, I have gone to church every Sunday and Wednesday and no other day of the week (except for special events). I think I spoke to Joy on a Wednesday evening because what prompted her comment to me was the talk I had just delivered on the Holy Spirit, and I seem to recall making that presentation in the middle of the week in about the year 2017. I asked her which two subjects the church of her youth failed to cover, and she replied: “The Holy Spirit and grace.” Readers with a deep association with conservative churches in America (or, maybe, elsewhere) will understand Joy’s comment. I don’t think its application is limited to churches of Christ, but it definitely includes them, as she intended. I myself am a lifelong member of churches of Christ in the (mostly southern) United States—Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Alabama. My experience in churches confirms the truth of Joy’s comment: many churches have had little to say about the Holy Spirit or grace. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Ignoring the Holy Spirit Why these two topics? I think the Holy Spirit is perceived by some conservative Christians as too mysterious—maybe too nebulous—to provide anything firm or concrete to say, so they mostly avoid the subject. I understand this concern; I feel the same pressure. My experience of churches is among those who emphasize the Christian Bible over Christian tradition—or, rather, who emphasize the Bible against tradition. The idea is that Christian tradition largely went off the rails in the centuries after the New Testament, adding all kinds of extraneous doctrines and practices to the simple message of the gospel as attested in the Scriptures. And it is true, I think, that whereas there are well developed doctrines regarding the Holy Spirit among some Christian groups, these are in many ways add-ons, later developments, not clearly articulated in the New Testament. If we’re going to stick with the Bible rather than later traditions developing from it, that’s going to limit what we can say with confidence about the Holy Spirit. You may have noticed some problems with this explanation for Christian reticence regarding the Holy Spirit. Surely there are all kinds of ways in which even very conservative, sola-Scriptura-kinds of Christians accept as true things that are not directly said in Scripture—not to mention denying or downplaying things that are directly said in Scripture. Yes, guilty. Just think about the doctrine of the Trinity for a moment. Or whatever other doctrine you want to know. There’s what the Bible says, and then there’s your way of explaining those biblical statements, putting them together into a coherent system. With regard to the Holy Spirit, what I can say is that church leaders I have known have tended to take a rather high view of the status or person of the Holy Spirit, and they will even occasionally address their worship toward the Holy Spirit (“Spirit, we love you, we worship and adore you…”), but they get cagey when you ask them what the Holy Spirit actually does now. They do think he—and they often insist on the “he,” not “it”—dwells in Christians, but they’re not sure how he does this, or what he does in us or for us. And that is because they want their thoughts on divine matters to be based on a biblical prooftext, and while the Bible (especially the New Testament) is very interested in talking about the Holy Spirit, many non-charismatic conservative Christians are dubious that the things the Holy Spirit does in the New Testament (prophecy, speaking in tongues, healings, etc.) are still happening. If he’s not doing those things, what is he doing? The Bible says some things, but not much, so some churches prefer to talk about other things. I know, the Holy Spirit seems like an awfully important element of Christianity to be ignored by Christians. I’m just trying to explain the thought process. Ignoring Grace And grace? That one is a little different. The New Testament (and especially Paul) talks a lot about grace in such a way that it’s obvious that it’s supposed to apply to all believers for all time. Grace is the basis of human salvation from sin. Humans could not achieve that salvation through any of their own activity or brilliance, so God simply gave it to them. That gift is grace. “For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). How could a Christian ignore grace? Grace is everything; it is the entirety of Christianity! I’ll try to explain. Even in that verse I just quoted from Ephesians, written in the name of the apostle Paul, the gift of salvation comes not to everyone in the world but to certain people based on a condition—the condition of faith. It’s believers who receive grace. What does it mean to believe? Let’s bring in the testimony from another well-known passage in the New Testament, this one attributed to a certain James, who may be (and traditionally has been taken to be) the brother of Jesus mentioned in the Gospels (e.g., Mark 6:3) and by Paul (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:7). “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder” (James 2:19). Okay, wait: the demons believe? But they are obviously not recipients of God’s grace. Is mere “belief” enough to enjoy salvation from God? Uh, big issues. For now I offer this suggestion: though the demons know about God and Jesus and they are perfectly confident in the basic facts of the gospel, they refuse to submit to the authority of God. When Paul in Ephesians says that grace comes to believers, he means by “believers” people who accept Jesus as their Lord, who love God and submit to him. That means that “believing” is not just about something happening in a person’s head, like whether they believe in evolution or whatever, or in UFOs, or Bigfoot. It’s more like whether you believe in spending time with your kids; if you do, then prove it—spend time with your kids. There’s a behavioral element here. If you believe that Jesus is Lord, then do what he says. “If you love me,” Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “then you will keep my commandments” (14:15). If you’ve got to prove your faith or love through your actions, then what does that entail? It turns out that there is a significant tension between faith and works—or between grace and works—in the New Testament, which has led to longstanding debates within Christian history among and within various churches. While all churches would affirm Paul’s statement of the situation in Ephesians 2:8, all would say humans are saved only by grace, not works, most churches would also want to set alongside that verse other New Testament statements affirming the value of works, or, rather, the necessity of ethics. What Joy meant on that Wednesday evening a decade ago was that the churches of her youth had spent more time talking about human responsibility and less time rejoicing in God’s mercy. I understand that impulse, though I think it has often gone too far and most certainly needs balance. The Churches of Christ What are the churches that I’ve been talking about, the churches of Christ? Let’s start with terminology. Some people in these churches self-identify as members of “the churches of Christ,” others of “the Churches of Christ,” and others of “the Church of Christ.” In that sense, there is no official name (“denomination”) for a collection of congregations sharing the peculiar set of beliefs and practices that I’ll describe later… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

Is Artificial Intelligence going to kill us all in just a few years? That is a question making the news now, because some bigwigs in the AI world have claimed that the apocalypse is coming and it’s almost here. These are people working at the companies making AI, not the mom-and-pop AI companies, but companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. And these are bigwigs at these companies, like, the biggest of wigs, like the CEOs of the company, saying that what they are doing is going to end humanity, kill us all. Of course, we shouldn’t worry about this because our politicians are going to do something about it. What should a Christian think about such news? The end of humanity by the end of the decade? Let’s talk about it. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. First, we need to understand something about AI. Let me explain the technology to you. It has something to do with computers, I think. I believe the internet might come into play somehow. There are microchips, maybe in the computers, or in the internet, or something. You mix them all together and you get robot armies. I think that’s how it works. What if these companies make some sort of superintelligence that we cannot control, which is, I think, their explicit aim? There are a few ways that might play out. I’ve heard some people say that if AI takes over the world, humans will be free, liberated from the tyranny of work, and able to pursue our passions and hobbies. In that scenario, I think that some people will probably be on a space ship, and they’ll have a mission to explore strange new worlds, and to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly split infinitives. Of course, another possibility, less positive, is that the AI will try to turn us into robots or some sort of cyborgs, that is, they’ll try to assimilate us, and it may be that resistance is futile. Maybe the AI will try to harvest our bodies’ energy while we live in a dreamlike state in some sort of pod, or maybe humans and machines will fight an apocalyptic war. I think that covers the main possibilities. Let’s assume it’s the Terminator scenario: robots versus humans, and robots win. I figure that it’s not actually going to be a shooting war, but that the robots will get us in some other way: affecting the food supply, or tampering with medicine, but whatever—death comes; maybe very painful death, maybe quick death, but definitely death. My first thought is: what’s the problem? Robots or not, death is coming; we can’t stop that. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be someone who is designing technology that would result in massive death or perhaps human extinction, but I’m not that person. I am someone who is potentially facing death as a part of human extinction, and it just doesn’t strike me as all that big of a deal. I guess I find it implausible that it’s going to happen, but not that troublesome if it does happen. I would find it much more problematic if the technology were being designed to annihilate a selection of humans, like poor people, or disabled people, or Asians, or something. In that case, we should definitely work to stop it, and we should probably put some people in prison. But the annihilation of all humans? Ok. There are worse things. How plausible is this doomsday scenario? I don’t know. I have described to you the technology as I understand it, which should alert you to my complete ignorance in this realm. Some people very much involved in the AI world consider it plausible that machines will destroy humans during our lifetimes. Is that plausible from a Christian point of view? I don’t see why not. Now I know some Christians would push back on that statement; they would insist that it cannot happen, that machines cannot destroy humanity. I have not heard people say this, but I’m guessing from analogous situations. I recall some years ago hearing Christians talk about global warming and the doomsday scenarios associated with it. As an aside, I note that we have been under a heat advisory all week as temperatures in the third week of September hover close to triple digits. But anyway I would hear Christians declare that global warming cannot result in human extinction because the Bible says so, and they would make this comment: “I’ve read the end and that’s not how it goes.” This is silliness. We do not know how the world will come to an end. There is a description in 2 Peter 3 of a coming conflagration that will dissolve heaven and earth, but I’m not sure why that would invalidate global warming—it would seem to confirm it, in fact, since Peter says that the globe will warm—or the destruction of humanity through a robot army. There’s also a description of the return of Jesus in 1 Thessalonians 4, where we read about a trumpet and a shout and such like—but, again, I myself have enough imagination to conceive of how Paul’s description could be fulfilled literally, word for word, after humans make the planet uninhabitable, at least for human life, whether through carbon emissions or designing deadly AI. There are other biblical passages that could be considered, such as at the end of the book of Revelation, but it is difficult to know how far to press the details of passages that might well be symbolic. And there’s the problem for any biblical interpretation addressing events or ideas about which we have no knowledge outside Scripture: how literally do we take the descriptions? Because the Bible likes to speak in symbolic language. That should be clear enough from the Gospels, where Jesus enjoyed teaching in parables, and we should remember that these parables gave his listeners fits, including his disciples, and that was entirely the point. Jesus adopted Isaiah’s mission as his own, when he explained to his disciples: “The reason I speak to them in parables is that seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand” (Matt 13:13). We should also remember how common it was for very religious Jews who encountered Jesus to insist that he, Jesus, could not be the fulfillment of the prophecies because they interpreted those prophecies in a way that excluded someone like Jesus. Obviously the Messiah would not die on a Roman cross because the Messiah was a warrior. How do we know the Messiah is a warrior? Because the prophecies say it. Psalm 2: “You shall break [the nations] with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Isaiah 11: “he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.” Daniel 2: “And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end.” And then think about all the times in the Jewish Scriptures that the Messiah, the coming king, is said to be the son of David or even the new David, and if we know anything about David it’s that he was a warrior. Now you’re going to tell me that I’m misinterpreting these passages, but that is exactly the point. Everyone misinterpreted them until they saw their fulfillment. They were unable to interpret them correctly until they saw Jesus. And he completely blew a hole through the way they thought it was going to go. Too often we are like Amelia Bedelia insisting on a literal interpretation of things that we cannot possibly know about—things like heaven and hell. What will these realities be like? Who knows?! But I am pretty sure that God has little interest in making sure we, right now, understand the details of heaven and hell. And so also for the end of the world. If every religious leader completely whiffed on their interpretation of the first advent of the Messiah, what would make us confident in our interpretation of the second advent of the Messiah? Should we not take the lesson and be more open and … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

Some Christians are Bible people, and others are prayer people. This classification is my invention. I am not completely sure that it’s original with me, but I did not read about it in Scripture and I have not encountered anyone else who makes the same distinction. Let me tell you what I mean by it. My impression is that some Christians gravitate more toward Bible study and others gravitate more toward prayer. There might be some Christians who enjoy both disciplines, but it seems to me that the overlap is small. There is probably a much bigger overlap for those Christians who enjoy neither prayer nor Bible study. So, which are you? If you could choose one or the other, prayer or Bible study, which would you choose? Or if you have time to do only one of these before you’ve got to take the kids to school, which one? Or, which of these comes more naturally to you, or gives you more comfort? Or, which one excites you more, or intimidates you less? They are both essential Christian acts, and we can grow in either one, but chances are one of them is going to appeal to us more. I’m a Bible person. In my experience, most Christians are prayer people. I am jealous of the prayer people. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Let me circle back to the absence of this classification in Scripture. It would not be true to say that Jesus was a prayer person more than a Bible person. It is true that we catch him praying several times in the Gospels and hardly ever reading Scripture (cf. Luke 4:16–21), but the Evangelists depict Jesus as having a great deal of Scripture stuck in his head. Maybe he didn’t read Scripture often, but it does seem that he meditated on it routinely. His accusation that the Sadducees knew not the Scriptures (Mark 12:24) could not have been lobbed at him. So also the apostle Paul cannot be categorized as one or the other—a prayer person or a Bible person—but both. The New Testament does not present this distinction as an inevitability, certainly not as desirable. It seems to me to articulate an obvious characteristic of both myself and many of the Christians I have known most intimately, but I wonder if the distinction would make less sense in an ecclesial context different from mine. At any rate, if we find one of these practices (prayer or study/meditation) more difficult than the other, we are in good company and, as always, practice makes perfect. I want to be a prayer person because I want to be a person who gives myself wholly over to God. I want to be the kind of person who directs everything in my life to God. It seems like that’s what prayer represents. I want to be the kind of person who prays without ceasing. I want to say the words of Psalm 143:6 with full sincerity: “I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land.” After all, this is how my Christian life began when I was baptized. Whether I realized it at the time or not, my baptism marked the death of one lifestyle and the beginning of a new one, so that I am not a slave of sin, and certainly not a slave to myself, but, as Paul says in Romans 6:18, a slave to righteousness. I buried in those waters my selfishness, my pride, my anger, my impatience, and every other work of the flesh, and I rose up to walk in newness of life. Just as Paul was crucified with Christ (Gal 2:20), so also he says that I have been (Rom 6:6), so that I am now “alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (6:11). Which means—if we can skip forward to Romans 8—that I am not led by the flesh but by the Spirit. Since I have received the Spirit of adoption, I cry out Abba, Father (8:15). When I reflect on the significance of my baptism, I want to be a prayer person, someone in constant communication with God, someone who recognizes with Augustine, and even earlier with David, that my soul is restless until it finds rest in God. As Evagrius said in the fourth century, a theologian is one who prays, and I would like to be such a theologian. But, I’m not a prayer person, I’m a Bible person. Or does that distinction even make any sense? Like I said, I think the distinction does make sense of my experience, and the experience of other Christians I have known, Christians I’ve gone to church with. And, I will say, since I’m a Bible person, I can testify that there are a lot of prayers in the Bible—I mean, a lot. And in some religious contexts, prayer and Bible go together more intimately than I am accustomed to. I was thinking about these issues at the end of 2024 when I heard about a new podcast that would start at the beginning of the year, The Rosary in a Year. Obviously this is a Catholic podcast. I had heard about the Rosary, but I didn’t know much about it. A string of beads popped into my head. I decided to investigate. The point of the beads is to aid in counting the prayers, because there’s a lot of repetition in the Rosary, and so keeping your fingers on the appropriate bead helps you to remember, “am I on prayer #6 or #7?” I watched a video showing people praying the Rosary, and you can get the basic idea from the Wikipedia article. The whole prayer usually takes about 15 minutes. Here’s how it goes, or at least how it begins: you start by making the sign of the cross, and then you recite the Apostles’ Creed, and then you say the Lord’s Prayer, and then you say three Hail Marys, and then the Glory Be. And then you say a whole bunch more Hail Marys. (Here’s especially where you need the beads.) Anyway, I’m not going to be praying the Rosary. And I ended up not subscribing to that podcast, the Rosary in a Year. But I’m glad to see that a lot of the prayer is taken directly from Scripture. Maybe I shouldn’t make a distinction between prayer people and Bible people. Maybe a Catholic would say it’s all just one and the same. (For instance, familiarize yourself with lectio divina or the Liturgy of the Hours.) In fact, Catholics basically do say that: according to The Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The catechesis of children, young people, and adults aims at teaching them to meditate on The Word of God in personal prayer, practicing it in liturgical prayer, and internalizing it at all times in order to bear fruit in a new life” (CCC 2688). Did you hear that? “Meditate on the Word of God in personal prayer.” Prayer and Scripture go hand in hand. Jews might say that, too. I guess the most famous Jewish prayer is called the Shema, which observant Jews have been saying twice every day, morning and evening, for thousands of years by now. Do you know where that prayer comes from? It’s Scripture. Deuteronomy 6:4 (and other passages). The prayer is essentially a recitation of Scripture. The same sort of thing, Scripture and prayer combined, describes some form of prayers in monasteries. Did you know there are monks who pray through the entire Psalter—all 150 Psalms—every single week. The Rule of Saint Benedict from the sixth century says that any monk that doesn’t recite the entire Psalter every week is slothful. Think about the benefits here. Not only do you fill your mind with Scripture, and specifically with the book of Scripture that is almost entirely addressed to God, but also you fill your time with meditation on God. It doesn’t give you much time for sin. If the idle mind is the devil’s playground, a mind committed to going through the Psalter weekly, in addition to other reading and praying, gives the devil little opportunity to play. Jesus tells a story about an unclean spirit (Matt 12:43–45). A common way of getting an application out of that parable is to say that you should not just clean up your life, but you need to fill it with good things. Don’t just sweep your house and put it in order. If you’re praying through the Psalter weekly, the amount of time that you can dedicate to porn is very limited. Or to go out drinking with your friends. So if prayer is the … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

In my lifetime, I have done only one good thing. Maybe two. Definitely not three. When I stand before God and he asks for an account of my life—interrogating me on what I have done with the tremendous resources I have enjoyed, the peace and comfort that have characterized my life—how shall I reply? I wouldn’t dream of saying that I had fun with the money and leisure that have characterized my life. I want to say that I have done something useful with these blessings. Something good. When the Lord asks me, “have you been good,” I want to be able to say yes, but I suspect he’ll ask, “how have you been good,” and then what should I respond? Let me pause right here to clarify that I am not worried about going to heaven, or—to put it another way—whether God will save me. Christian Scripture assures readers in no uncertain terms that God saves sinners, and I believe it. Christian Scripture tells me that everyone is a sinner, that no one is good, and I believe it. Christian Scripture tells me that those who accept the offer of grace through the name of Jesus need fear no condemnation, and I believe it. And Christian Scripture tells me that once I have committed to living for Jesus, I should walk in newness of life, I should become more like Christ, I should put into practice the teachings of Jesus contained in the New Testament—not for the purpose of gaining salvation, which has already been gained, but because it is the path of truth and joy, and I believe it. I don’t mean in this paragraph to solve all the problems about the relationship between faith and works in Christian theology; I just mean to say that I feel perfectly assured of my eternal salvation while at the same time recognizing that I’m not a very good person, or I haven’t done very many good deeds in my life. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. What do I mean by “good”? I don’t know, but it entails something special. Not the normal life, I think. I’m thinking about Romans 5:7, “For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die.” Goodness is something beyond righteousness. At first blush, I’d say that a righteous person is a normal person who doesn’t cause trouble, doesn’t break the law, pays his taxes and minds his own business. The good person is a step beyond that. Hardly anyone would ever die for a normal person who doesn’t cause trouble, but we wouldn’t be too surprised, thinks Paul, if we hear about someone who gave up his life for a good man. The word “good” doesn’t appear at the end of Matthew 5, but I sorta think that Jesus encourages his listeners toward goodness when he says, “For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?” The good person is the person who goes beyond what is normally expected. How much further beyond? Well, Jesus is our example. We’ll come back to the definition, how to think about goodness. Earlier I imagined a judgment scene, with the divine interrogator questioning me about my goodness. We have a whole parable from Jesus about this moment, this Judgment Day scene. More than one parable, in fact, but I’m thinking now of the Parable of the Talents in Mathew 25. The Parable of the Pounds in Luke 19 is similar. I know there’s no need to remind you how this goes; you’ve meditated on it many times. This is one of the parables that Jesus designed to scare people, or to light a fire under them, to give them a kick in the pants. A master, about to depart on a long journey, distributes money to his slaves so that they may direct his affairs during his absence. This slave-master is a Jeff Bezos type, or a Bill Gates type. He’s not hurting for money. A talent is a measurement, something like 50-75 pounds. Let’s be conservative and say a talent is 50 lbs. Now, I used to assume that the talent was gold, the price per ounce of which is hovering between $4500 and $5000, and so the a single talent would be about $3.8M. But I have found that the word “silver” is actually in the text at Matthew 25:18, often translated “money,” but let’s go with it. The price of silver is much lower than gold, about $70/ounce now, so a talent of silver (50 lbs) would be $56,000—not a bad gift, but not the millions that I had been imagining. The master entrusts a significant amount of money to these slaves to run his affairs. One slave gets 5 talents, so something like $300K, and he doubles his money. Another slave gets 2 talents, so about $112K, and he also doubles his money. The third slave is entrusted with a single talent, a measly $56K. “He that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money” (Matt 25:18). Why would he do this? Why bury the money? He’s afraid to lose it, obviously. When the master returns and settles accounts, this one-talent slave offers the following report. Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. (Matt 25:24–25) I understand this impulse, this caution, this aversion to risk. “Look before you leap” is my kind of proverb. Before I leap I tend to look, and then look again, and then I just mull over the possibility of leaping for sometime, maybe years, and then after I’ve let it percolate for a while, I look again and imagine myself leaping. It’s usually at that point that I decide to sit down. The master of this one-talent slave received from his slave the entire amount of money that had been entrusted to him. And he replied thusly: “Thou wicked and slothful servant” (Matt 25:26). The master didn’t want back what he had given. He wanted more. He wanted that talent to be used. Caution has its place. Looking before you leap has its place, but leaping is a necessary part of the equation. The master expected his slave to use that $56K he had given him; that’s why he gave it to him. The master could have buried that money himself, and some rich people do that, they stuff cash under their mattress; they hoard. Not this master. This master wanted his slave to take risks, to be courageous. But the third slave was risk-averse, a coward, or “wicked and slothful,” in the words of the master. Can you imagine being handed fifty thousand dollars by someone with instructions to make good use of it? It’s not so far-fetched, is it? If you live in America, then you’re in the most prosperous society that has ever existed on planet earth. Many of us will earn a few million dollars in annual pay over the course of our working lives. Most of us won’t ever have that much money all at one time, but there will be times when we have the equivalent of a talent of silver. And what will we do with it? We will offer a report to our master about what we did with his money, and we know that he doesn’t want merely what he gave us. He wants more. Not just money, of course. The significant blessings we enjoy, the historically unusual blessings we enjoy, that previous societies in history have not even conceived, are not limited to money, but other things like technology, air conditioning, automobiles, media, medicine, education. If only we weren’t so blessed, there wouldn’t be so much pressure to deliver. I have long considered the scariest verse in the Bible the one where Jesus says this: “unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more” (Luke 12:48). God blessed other people with different opportunities. Not time and money and technology and health—like we enjoy—but different blessings that we can only imagine. In many times and places, God has given people the blessing of martyrdom. They have been persecuted for … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

Near the end of Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis includes a chapter called “Two Notes,” a very brief chapter which essentially offers two long footnotes to the previous chapter, which is called “The Obstinate Toy Soldiers.” The first note explores why God created humans as toy soldiers and not as sons; Lewis answers that it had to be this way, but I’ll let you read how he presents his case. The second note concerns how humans are connected to one another and yet different. “Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body—different from one another and each contributing what no other could.” As members of a body, we should recognize our connection to one another and respect our differences. Lewis explains: “If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an Individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.” I love that for Lewis these are not political choices. Well, of course they are political choices, but beyond that, they are moral choices, religious choices. “A Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.” Of course, this phrase “must not be” does not indicate that one’s salvation is at stake. Is it a salvation issue? Can a Totalitarian or an Individualist gain admittance through the pearly gates? I don’t know, but that’s not the point. It puts distance between you and Jesus. That’s the point. Being a Totalitarian or an Individualist means that you are less like Jesus. A Christian must be like Jesus. Must be, but will never be, not in this life. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. And now we get to the part of the chapter that I really want to talk to you about, the final paragraph. Jumping off from the notion that Totalitarianism is no good, and neither is Individualism, Lewis now says: I feel a strong desire to tell you—and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me—which of these two errors is worse. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them. Note well what Lewis said here. The devil “relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.” It’s not that I think individualism is good, but people are so crazy—I just want to let them do whatever they want. I wash my hands of the whole thing! It’s not that I like totalitarianism, but do you see what those people over there are trying to do? Somebody needs to stop them! As Lewis says, the choice itself is diabolic, because it is a choice between two godless errors, and our supposed piety steers us away from the godlessness of the one into the godlessness of the other. Or, to put it another way, the choice is driven not by love but by hate. It’s not that I love the thing I choose; it’s that I hate the other thing more. I was reminded of this point from Lewis by an online article published in the Spring at The Dispatch, which is, by the way, the best news and commentary outfit in the English language. You should, at the very least, make a habit of listening to The Dispatch Podcast. But, anyway, The Dispatch website published an article back in March called “The Philosophers and Churchmen who Fell for Fascism,” written by Nathan Beacom. The article treated the Frenchmen during the 1930s and 1940s who ended up supporting the pro-Nazi government of France based in Vichy, and those who resisted this collaborationist French regime. Times of intense stress, such as WWII, present many opportunities, almost universal opportunities, it seems, for people to choose something important. It therefore presents many opportunities for moral compromise. Eight and half decades of hindsight makes it obvious to all of us that it was the resisters of Vichy France who were right, while the collaborators compromised their morality in all kinds of amazing, depressing ways. But without that hindsight—if we had been there, at that time—what would we have done, resist or collaborate? What is so clear to us in the 21st century was perfectly clear to a lot of people in the early 1940s; I mean, the film Casablanca was released in 1942, for goodness sake. But, of course, the Nazis had their intellectual apologists, and what is so distressing about the article by Nathan Beacom is his profile of, primarily, two apologists from within Christianity: the French bishop François-Louis Auvity and the theologian and friar Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. For our consideration of how Christianity does—or does not—make people good, we could simply read the entire article by Beacom, but here I’ll just present some excerpts. Beacom sets up the struggle in 1940s France this way: In that frothy age in France, there were many forks in the road. A person did not wake up one day and decide to collaborate with the Third Reich. There was a slow, almost imperceptible process of decision whereby someone was led one way or another. Of those who counted themselves faithful Christians, many adapted to Vichy, but many others stood against it in favor of a different idea of France—and a different idea of faith. It is instructive, however, to consider how individuals who began from similar starting points went two separate ways. Some, like the philosophers Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson, saw the wickedness of Vichy for what it was, while others, like Bishop Auvity, compromised themselves morally step by step. How to maintain moral clarity and avoid a blind wandering into wickedness is a question of perennial importance. Who is this Bishop Auvity? Well, you know where to go to get quick answers to such questions, and let me now read to you the opening paragraph of Wikipedia’s entry on the bishop. François-Louis Auvity (9 January 1874 – 15 February 1964), bishop of Mende (1937–1944), was one of seven French Roman Catholic bishops who were obliged to submit their resignations to Pope Pius XII … because of their enthusiastic collaboration with the occupation of France by Germany. That’s the opening sentence. This guy was a bishop who lived to be 90 years old. Who knows how many people he helped during his long life, how much good he did in this world? But, according to Wikipedia, the first thing you need to know about Bishop Auvity is that he collaborated with the Nazis. My goodness, talk about beclowning yourself, covering your legacy with shame! Whatever good you did in the world is overshadowed, because in the moment of decision, when the stakes were the highest, when you had the opportunity to be a hero or a villain, you chose poorly, and that’s what people need to remember about you. Yikes! Back to Beacom’s article. To the end, Auvity operated out of a fear of the liberal Republicans, and at each decision point he decided to go whatever direction would most clearly work against them. I pause here to explain that Republicans in this context does not mean conservatives or the GOP or MAGA, as it does in America now, but it means almost the opposite in Auvity’s context. Republicanism in France is most clearly associated with the French Revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century. Being a conservative, and being a fan of the Catholic Church, means that Bishop Auvity disliked French Republicanism. He longed for the old days; he wanted to make France great again. Note, as Beacom tells it, that the bishop operated out of fear; he chose the Nazis because h… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com

Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up. (Matthew 15:13) People are sinners. Not some people; all people. Every single person who has ever lived is a sinner; no one has ever escaped it, except for one person—the very one we worship as God. Those who are not the embodiment of the eternal Deity sin, and they sin a lot. There is a longstanding teaching in some Christian traditions about something called “original sin,” which is basically an attempt to explain why people are so terrible, such hopeless sinners. It’s an infection, a flaw in our nature, something we can’t help but inherit from time immemorial. I myself do not accept a doctrine of original sin—certainly not a strong version of it. But since I’ve introduced the term I can now quote the famous comment from G. K. Chesterton, an Anglican turned Catholic, who said more than a hundred years ago that “original sin … is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved” (Orthodoxy, ch. 2). He meant that if you start with the hypothesis that people gravitate toward wickedness, you will not lack for evidence. In the mid-twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr said something similar, asserting that original sin is “the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith” (see the title of ch. 3 of this book on Niebuhr). The century intervening between Chesterton and us has not proven him wrong. In his 2012 book on Christianity, the Anglican layman Francis Spufford took the fact of sin—or, in his terminology, not sin but HPtFtU—as a universally recognized datum. Thanks for reading Gallagher! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. People can and often do display remarkable goodness. I gave some examples last time; this goodness seems most clear when it requires bravery, as in the case of Casper ten Boom, who told a Christian pastor in about the year 1943 that to die on behalf of a Jewish infant would be a great honor for his family. The divine Spirit, which inhabits each one of us who have been immersed in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit, works to produce goodness in us, because goodness is one of the fruit of the Spirit. But the relationship between adherence to Christianity and the display of goodness is complex. For it is not only Christians who might overcome their natural wickedness and display goodness; non-Christians often do this, whether people of other faiths or no faith. And Christians often fail miserably to display goodness. For this latter category, I gave several examples last time, particularly the slaveholder of the young Frederick Douglass, who, as Douglass later recalled, got religion and immediately became more cruel. We can also look back at the more recent Civil Rights struggle, especially in the 1960s, and find many examples of Christians beclowning themselves, directly opposing first principles of the gospel, as if law and order were opposed to loving thy neighbor, and—even if it were—as if it took precedence over the second greatest commandment. A century earlier, to return to Douglass, this former slave sprinkled throughout his 1845 autobiography bitter complaints about Christians refusing to live Christianly. He did this so much, in fact, that upon re-reading his memoir before its publication, Douglass realized that he might give readers the wrong impression about his true feelings toward Christianity, so he added an appendix to clarify things, and the main function of that appendix for us today is that it clarifies for us how susceptible Christianity is to perversion. I’m going to steal some valor here by excerpting a long section from Douglass, one of the greatest orators this nation has produced. Well, since I’ve never actually heard him deliver a speech, maybe I should change that description—not orator but speech-writer. That man could write a speech. I hesitate to identify Frederick Douglass as the absolute greatest speech-writer in American history, because I am thinking of his older contemporary who served as our sixteenth president. In my mind, it’s hard to beat out Abraham Lincoln as a speech-writer. And if you’re looking for a great American speech, it’s hard to surpass the two speeches that are carved into the walls of the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall. (See my previous essay.) Part of the reason that the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural are so great—a big part of the reason—is because they’re short, short enough to chisel the entire text into those walls. They’re compact; they pack a punch. I am not aware of Douglass giving such brief speeches. But I imagine he was usually called upon to fill an hour or more, because people enjoyed the experience of listening to Frederick Douglass, so he wasn’t in a position to give brief speeches. But let me tell you, when he writes a speech, he brings it. Lincoln wrote speeches that were thoughtful, calm, considering great thoughts, applying the current moment to the great themes in history. The outcome of reading Lincoln is solemn contemplation on the serious issues just discussed. Frederick Douglass is different. I don’t mean that he’s not thoughtful; of course, he’s brilliant, but his speeches do not lull the reader into solemn contemplation. Rather, the reader of Douglass’ speeches has the sensation of having been hit over the head by a 2x4, or walloped in the gut. I mean, good grief, read his most famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and it is clear that to this meeting of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in 1852, Douglass has brought a sledgehammer. I imagine the assembled crowd, abolitionists everyone, listening to that speech leaning further and further back in their chairs the more he talked, or maybe hiding under their seats to protect them from the thunder coming from the rostrum, but then afterwards mobbing their invited speaker to tell him, “Thank you, we needed that.” Because sometimes you need to be hit by a 2x4. Jesus knew that well enough. So here comes the 2x4 from Douglass. It’s not one of his famous speeches, or any of his speeches, but rather a section of the appendix to his first autobiography. I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative, that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of “stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.” I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin duri… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit edmongallagher.substack.com