Blog Posts

John’s Gospel and Tainted Legacies

A poem

Wise council for Christians and US politics from Sebastian Castellio

John Calvin: Pastor. Preacher. Reformer. Tyrant? Part 5

“When [Calvin] has a grudge against someone it is never done.”

A personal review of Healing What’s Within by Chuck DeGroat

When insiders become outsiders, and why

On stillness and watching for the unseen wings of Resurrection

In which Calvin’s former secretary gets to speak

Befriending the Darkness, Part 2

A consideration of 16th century perceptions of John Calvin

And Being Friends in the Darkness

Peter’s reformation by the Song of Songs

Psalm 88 and the corporate dark night of the soul

And why they need a certain kind of apologetics

A Defense of Intuition

A poem from my first time at the beach in two years

A review and reframing of Os Guinness’ Fools Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion

An Untold Whistleblower’s Story

The “Blessed Inversion” of Gender in the Cross of Christ

“The eschatological destiny of human sexuality”

What’s the point of being male and female?

Some further thoughts on gender in the Gospel of John

A wide angle view of gender in John’s Gospel

Spiritual Malpractice and Christian Soul Care

What God has separated, let no one join together

Why would a man believe a survivor and then later change his mind and disbelieve the survivor? The story of Sigmund Freud’s early career illustrates one answer: there is a common temptation for those who face a dilemma between believing victims and maintaining their power.

Pattern Recognition, Awareness, and Transformation

An informal survey of church hurt and spiritual abuse

The excellent image of prayer

How the Gospel of John inspired abundant life in 19th century Kansas

How breathing symbolizes sanctification by the Spirit

How the liberating Gospel of John has also been used for oppression

But what happened doesn’t have to stay the same

An Unusual Holy Week Meditation on John 12:29

Washing Away Empire

When Shepherds Act Like Kings

Last week I offered another reason I think John mentions Kidron in 18:1 before the “arrest” of Jesus [footnote: In John, Jesus isn’t so much arrested as he turns himself in; he remains sovereignly in control throughout John 18-19].

A Brief Followup

Reading with the Seditious Agenda of Scripture

On metaphors and the mind in your body

How Jesus’ Scars Signal Healing for Spiritual Abuse

This week’s post is a personal one. I initially wrote it for my own benefit, but in the spirit of K.J. Ramsey whose writing I am reflecting on, I hope others will benefit from personal reflections on my story.

A Roundabout Assessment of Direct Communication Failure

Click above for my recording of this post.

In this week’s newsletter I share some of Columbo’s traits that transfer to discussions about abuse, traits that advocates for abuse survivors can use with wisdom, discernment and practice.

There is a favorite Harry Potter scene that brings tears every time I watch it. It takes place in chapter 34 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when Harry goes to die in the Forbidden Forest. He intuitively discovers Dumbledore’s purpose for giving him the Resurrection Stone: not to cheat death, but to be encouraged by those few adults who loved him unconditionally:

Offering an answer to the question “why do I write?” is one way I want to say “thank you” here at the beginning of 2024. Thank you for reading, for opening those emails (which are almost always way to long for an email), for liking, for commenting, for sharing, and for encouraging me with how my writing has moved you. Thank you for your part in giving me reason to answer this question anew.

Just as God sent Jesus to reveal and enflesh the love of the triune God, so Jesus sends his followers enflesh the love of God in the world. We truly interpret the incarnation when we incarnate Christ’s love in truth.

In this season of Advent, the incarnation provides a hermeneutical key for opening the door to a fresh way of reading John. The Gospel of John cannot be read properly without tuning in to symbolic images and the sensations they activate through associative memory.

The Son is the Word from all eternity. There never was a time when God the Father was not speaking God the Son. In God, there is no such thing as silence. And yet, the children of God endure silence, just as they often endure forms of death and darkness.

The hope of dawn is real. Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again. But if we want to offer the hope of Christmas, we have to be willing to sit in darkness. We have to be willing to see that crisis reveals character.

For those who have been or are being forced out, pushed out, excommunicated, #churchfired from church and denomination and Christian organization, hear these words from the Doktor Luther on John 15-16.

Don’t underestimate the impact your words have on others. As with all forms of evil, the power of misused praise only serves to illustrate how much more powerful it is when used rightly.

The teacher that spiritual abuse survivors most need is the Holy Spirit. He teaches only what he hears from the Son. No mixture of pride, seeking self and glory, no manipulation, no lies or deceit. Only God’s beauty, goodness, and truth.

We really do think better while walking. Solvitur ambulando. Might that be related to Scripture’s way of picturing our embodied moral selves through walking?

Today, on October 31, 2023, the day when Protestants celebrate the Reformation, I believe the message we most need to hear is already being preached by women who are saying “I don’t see the body of the Lord.”

This post, not sent to your email, shares some biblical reflections excised from today’s published newsletter cut to keep down the word count.

A New Look at the Samaritan Woman

How Jesus the gentle rabbi treats female spiritual abuse survivors

Poems for Fall

This week I want to reflect on the emphasis of darkness in John’s Gospel. Consider this a mini biblical theology of darkness, illuminating how Jesus is presented by John as the light which rescues those who have been wounded by abusive leaders and oppressive religious systems.

Please join me on a slow journey through some familiar stories in Genesis to hear and see how God transforms unfaithful conformists to faithful followers of the God of justice.

Unless we see systems, unless we think with the grain of our systemic existence, we will tend to treat symptoms instead of diseases. And more to the point of this newsletter, we cannot even begin to focus on the underlying disease in any system unless we actually see the system.

Have you been neglected by your earthly shepherds? Did they flee when the wolf came? Or was your shepherd himself a wolf? You can take heart that the Triune God wants you to tell your story. He welcomes your words of spiritual trauma.

How the Trinity Helps Us Understand the Brain

When darkness is all we know, we won’t hope for anything different. In such a condition, it’s not hope we need, at least not initially and only. We need to see the darkness for what it is. Which is to say, we need despair.

A Basic Biblical Framework for Studying Psychology

Each day the sun rises, and the Father reminds us of his rule. Water runs in rivers, pipes and faucets because the Father is the ruler yet. By sight or sound or taste or touch or smell, the evidence of the Father’s loving provision is ever present to our senses.

When we walk into the lives of those who are hurting, we bring healing by reflecting God’s delight. Joy enters the darkness when sufferers see in our face, our eyes, our smile, that there’s nowhere else we’d rather be than right here, with them, in all of their sorrow.

Did you know that the Gospel of John is all about the fulfillment of the OT expectation for the removal of false shepherds and the return of good shepherds?

Maybe we really do need to become like children. If curiosity killed the cat, maybe it can cure the human. Even more, maybe it is a contagious cure. Are you willing to give curiosity a try?

Sometimes the creep of empire is more in action than in word. Not so much allegiance to Caesar but to the ways of Caesar. Which is to say, the ways displayed by all human systems when corrupted by desire for power and glory.

Christians inhabit the same biblically scripted story as the Good Shepherd. The world hated Jesus, and it will hate Jesus’ followers, too. Intimate friends of the faith betrayed Jesus, and intimate friends of the faith will betray Jesus’ followers, too. Only in our day they do it in the name of Jesus.

Reading that gets closer to recreating the experience of writing has a greater effect on us. The slower we read, the more we pause, hesitate, search for words to voice our thoughts and feelings, the more opportunity we give for the written words to sink in, settle, and take up room in our hearts.

The fact of the matter is, there is no such thing as unemotional reasoning. There is only emotionally unaware reasoning, and emotionally aware reasoning.

As long as there are male leaders whose knee-jerk response is to disbelieve, dismiss, deny, discount, deflect, and discard the stories of abuse survivors, churches and denominations filled with such men are not safe.

The Role of the Imprecatory Psalms in Christian Advocacy

In theological language, knowledge of Jesus’ life in the immanent Trinity, God in himself, is not abstract doctrine. Apart from such knowledge, our acquaintance with Jesus the Good Shepherd will sound like a fantasy.

By focusing our minds on Scripture in set times of meditation, we engage the ignition key of attention and open ourselves to the work of the Spirit who brings “life and peace” (Romans 8:6).

Anyone in recovery from addiction and/or anyone helping others in recovery knows the importance of confession.

In this series of posts about prayer, meditation, and mindfulness, I wanted to pause with a note of encouragement for those who are or have been discouraged in prayer.

Many people come to counseling with some level of doubt about the benefit of spiritual disciplines, or means of grace as they are called in my tradition.

In part II in this series on prayer and meditation I mentioned the practice of combining slow awareness of breath with the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”.

Meditation is a thoroughly biblical practice.

As a Christian counselor frequently working with Christian clients, I often wonder what assumptions my clients have about those words and practices. Unfortunately they can be loaded terms.

I have always felt guilty and a bit morally unclean whenever I feel a sense of satisfaction while reading imprecatory psalms. But in the midst of human betrayal there is an undeniable resonance in my body when I hear the words of, say, Psalm 71:13. Why is that?

By allowing others to help you, you are allowing them to enjoy God, and both of you get to enjoy God together. For that is the chief end of mankind: to glorify God by enjoying God, even enjoying in him those we help and those who help us.

A Personal Essay

These are some posts that explore the dynamics of healing from spiritual abuse in John. I’m putting links here all in one post as I work on an outline to potentially expand them into a booklet/book. If you take the time to read any of these I would love your feedback!

Naming is why empathy is so powerful. An empathic person is willing to look at another’s experience that is inherently “other”, because it is not one’s own, and agree with how that other names the experience. Just like our sin has to be named for what it is before we can receive grace, so our ability to digest life in general – thoughts, feelings, actions, experiences – depends on “saying what a thing is.”

When our thoughts are disconnected from our feelings, and when our brains are disconnected from our bodies, we become either rigid or chaotic, unable to process our current reality with flexibility. Naming and talking about feelings integrates our mind/body state so that we can work through difficulties in adaptive ways.

Despite his general patriarchal stance on women, perhaps Augustine might serve as a good example for men today, especially pastors and elders, who are staunchly unwilling to reconsider their views. Not that one has to actually change one’s mind. But something is wrong when we are unwilling to be wrong.

When not sufficiently digested, painful experiences turn to sorrow and take up space in our physical bodies. Indeed, Aquinas writes that “Of all the soul’s passions [or emotions/affections], sorrow is most harmful to the body.”

A poem for Easter

The pressure to deny evil, even and especially subconscious denial, is strong and cannot be withstood in isolation. Reform will not happen without a unified movement.

Jesus calls his disciples to combat stinking thinking with sinking thinking: thinking that sinks deeper into minds and hearts through meditation.

He wasn’t listening. He utterly failed to hear the complaint, the cry of injustice, the groaning of pain. All he heard was a female voice, and because of that, easily brushed off as full of inaccuracies. Lord have mercy.

Christians have struggled with balancing the mind and the body, the spiritual and the physical, ever since the early gnostic heresies of the early church. Engaging in holistic practice restores prayer to its proper biblical position and transformative potential.

In light of errant teaching on the supposed right of husbands to abuse their wives, we need to be Christians who rightly handle word of truth. Rightly handled, we see in God’s Word that submission and abuse do not go together. God never authorizes abuse.

Why should pastors have to answer for Driscoll’s crimes? It’s a Driscoll problem, not a church problem, right? A Tetzel problem, not a problem of systemic proportions. Or is it?

There is something unique about the human brain that works smarter when we stop working harder. And by smarter that sometimes means stopping work entirely.

The best way of getting people to listen to stories of trauma is to simply keep telling stories. If people can be given ears to hear, it will happen through story.

“Writing is not a literary act but spiritual…In writing, I work with words…But not mere words…but words…as carriers of spirit/Spirit. The moment words are used prayerlessly…something essential begins to leak out of life.” -Eugene Peterson

God has designed us with powerfully social identities, and when that identity is stripped away by men who claim to speak for God, trauma results. A wounded soul, caught between life-threatening submission and socially-ostracizing defiance, concludes: “I’d rather die.”

You see, we don’t understand poetry. That is left-brain talk. Poetry understands us; we are object, not subject. It changes how we see and think and feel. And we need more of it.

Order is impersonal. That doesn’t make it bad or wrong. It’s just incomplete. Beauty must be given to order so that it comes alive, so that it is fitting for human persons created in the image of a beautiful God. That is why we also need decency.

Introducing a daily John Owen devotional newsletter! Owen sought to learn and teach “the truth in Jesus” as revealed in Scripture in light of God the Father renewing humanity after the image of the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Another 3,000 word response to Samuel James

The story of Joseph offered comfort to Israel through naming their suffering. But equally as important, there was hope in these empathic resonances of trauma.

If churches implement policies and programs to care well for the abused without repenting of old ways of exercising authority and power, it is new wine in old wine skins. The skins will burst, the sheep will continue to be eaten, and the old system will remain intact, unchanged and in control.

As important as it is for trauma survivors to tell their stories, it is also therapeutic to hear stories of other survivors, especially those who have engaged the healing process.

How do we combine the need for “rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15) with the need to “visit orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27)? Could it be that in our concern to exercise “biblical” justice we are avoiding justice altogether?

Jesus, being the Good Shepherd, brings traumatized sheep to the Father and says, “Fear not, little flock; no matter how many wolves prowl or how loudly they growl, it is the Father’s good pleasure to hold you safe in his hands.”

Levi, Simeon & Jacob’s Sons as Moral Exemplars in Genesis 34

The first thing needed to escape the maze of spiritual abuse is to actually recognize you are in a maze, not a sheepfold. You need things to be called by their proper name. What has been misnamed must be re-named. And that is just what Jesus, the Good Shepherd, does.

A word to pastors, elders, deacons, and Christian leaders: What would it change if you were free to screw up 66% of the time and know your people would still follow and grow as disciples if all you had to do was own your wrongs?

The Holy Spirit wants a relationship with you, a relationship where he can bring you back into the fold of God’s love and show you how deeply you are seen and known by the Father and by his Son Jesus Christ. It is a being seen and known greater than any traumatic unknowing you have suffered.

Martin Luther was many things: reformer, theologian, pastor, Bible scholar and translator, hymn writer. He was also an apologist, in the two best senses of the word: a defender of the faith, and defender of the sheep.

A Christmas Poem

Did you know that you have a unique relationship with each person of the Trinity? As Samuel Rutherford said, “I know not which divine person I love the most, but this I know, I need and love each of them.”

Puffed up balloons are more susceptible to popping with rage at the slightest prick. A 10-minute read (according to Substack’s algorithm), because I like sharing lots of long quotes.

Perhaps this is a condition for transformational reading: be continually willing to grow *as* readers so that we continue to grow *by* reading.

Where is the burden of proof? The sheep who are called to be persuaded, or the shepherds who must do the persuading?

I do meditative chewing while reading, but finishing a book doesn’t mean I’m done eating it. There’s always more chewing that could be done. So I re-read my underlinings in finished books, nibbling up the breadcrumbs from my reading.

Speaking against Calvin resulted in public discipline and expulsion from city ministry, but if you were on the right side—Calvin’s side—discipline was limited to a stern talking to, and ministry life went on as normal.

We are formed by our environments at least as much as we shape them. Formational space fosters formational prayer and meditation. This does not require a sparse monastic cell, but that image might help us envision space conducive to reading for transformation.

Leaders should be more worried about wolves among their own leadership ranks than among the rank and file sheep in their flock.

Reading is dialogue, inviting a distant author into your personal space for conversation. Without hospitality in our minds and hearts, we remain to some degree closed to what the text and its author might say and do to us.

Because the notion that “ladies lie” is a presupposition, a deeply held, unquestioned (sinful) assumption, merely quoting up-to-date statistics about valid vs. false allegations will not be enough. We also need to repent of noetic sin.

When it comes to contemplation and meditation, slow is best. The tortoise was probably farther along in spiritual maturity than the hare.

Did you know that PCA church courts are more likely to block complaints from women than those from men?

We can’t digest steak whole, but sometimes that’s how we read texts that have the potential to transform us. If we want to digest it and be changed, we have to slow. down. and. chew.

By definition, abuse is never balanced. So a “balanced” conversation about abuse is, in my estimation, an oxymoron. And neither is it biblical.

For the sake of the honor of Christ, the mission of the gospel, and protecting the sheep, I hope we continue clarifying how to properly name healthy and sinful shepherding. That is the mark of a theologian: calling a thing what it is.

Make prayer the beginning, middle and end of your reading. Making prayer central to reading is necessary because one does not, or at least should not, read alone.

Wolves have always been in God’s sheepfold. But they ought not be. When God’s shepherds turn into wolves, he is “against” them (Ezekiel 34:10), but he is adamantly for the sheep.

Have you ever thought about your reading habits and what they say about you?

Many good people are giving survivors space to tell their story.

What if we could grow as Christians and churches in our ability to discern good from evil?

The “how” of apologetics for the abused starts not with technique, but with costly courage and faithfulness. Here we pick up the thread from last week and consider what I mean by apologetics for the abused.

There is power in reading: reading orally, and reading in community.

Apologetics for the Abused

In walking alongside survivors of religious trauma it is very tempting to focus the light on the darkness.

How can we help survivors of spiritual abuse?

Eyes must be open to see light.

“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of the terrible” (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Beautiful words are like a deep lake in the mountains: the surface can stun you with reflected splendor of cloud and peak and sky, and in hot summers your skin thirsts for its cold shock.

I am a visual learner.

Little did I know that the largest living organism on earth is 60 miles from my home.

As I mentioned briefly last week, Timothy Patitsas challenges us to think about the order and priority we give to truth, beauty, and goodness.

on cross-tradition theological reading

There was a time, not too long ago, when I got annoyed with books that started each chapter with a story.

Reflection

The apostles warn about wolves in God’s church, not only from inspiration but because they had a close encounter with a wolf in Judas Iscariot. So I wonder, if there wasn’t a Judas, would the other 11 have been more vulnerable to becoming wolves themselves?

Hospital Acquired Infections and Christian Soul Care

Once a Week

Once a Week

Once a Week

Once a Week

Once a Week

Once a Week

Once a Weak

Lessons on the right brain and reading from Flannery O’Connor

Once a Week

Once a Week

Once a Week

Once a Week

Once a Week

As Job makes clear, reinterpreting another’s experience can be harmful, even if the motive is mercy: “miserable comforters are you all” (Job 16:2).

“From time immemorial prayer has been spoken of as the breath of the soul. And the figure is an excellent one indeed.” Ole Hallesby

Once a Week

Once a Week

Once A Week

Once a Week

When we walk into the lives of those who are hurting, we bring healing by reflecting God’s delight. Joy enters the darkness when sufferers see in our face, our eyes, our smile, that there’s nowhere else we’d rather be than right here, with them, in all of their sorrow.

Gospel content must always be mediated through gospel process. We want people to believe that Jesus saves, but that belief only sinks into the depths of a person’s heart through relationship with God and with God’s people.

Paying Attention

A Counseling Newsletter for Pastors and Leaders