TL;DR
Progressive scholarship, political strategy, and even preaching can turn Christianity into something usable—an inspiring story, a moral framework, a cultural tool. But the gospel cannot be reduced to its usefulness. Faith is not about managing the story of Jesus for our purposes; it is about being taken by it. If we only admire or deploy the story, it may be beautiful—but it will never be Lord.
Taken by the Story
I’m sitting in the reading chair in my office one morning, briefly grabbing my Bible while getting my son ready for school. I’m trying to build in a new habit of “scripture before screens,” something I heard from Dwight Zscheile. And, utilizing a tip from Jack Shitama, I’ve decided even sixty seconds of Bible reading is better than nothing.
With Lent approaching and me trying to discern what to do for those forty days, I flip to the Gospel of Matthew. Maybe I’ll read through Matthew and Mark—one chapter a day.
Then I hit the genealogy in Matthew 1.
And suddenly something from Elaine Pagels’ recent book Miracles and Wonders: The Historical Mystery of Jesus flashes through my mind.
Pagels argues that Jesus was likely an illegitimate child, born to a single mother, and that the stories about Joseph and the virgin birth were later theological constructions meant to make his origins less embarrassing and more impressive. It’s not a new idea—John Dominic Crossan and others have floated similar claims—but Pagels presents her work as an effort to “recover… what actually happened.”
What struck me most wasn’t the claim itself. It was her posture.
Pagels repeatedly contrasts her work with first-century sources, describing them as not “neutral” and not “straightforward historical writing.”1 She confidently asserts that the early gospels, read in context, “do not support the theological assumptions enshrined… in the Nicene Creed.”
And yet, by the end of the book, she concludes:
“I love this about the gospel stories… what keeps the stories of Jesus alive amid the twists and turns of history… [is that] they give us what we often need most: an outburst of hope.”
In that framing, Jesus becomes a beautiful story.
An inspiring story.
A hopeful story.
But still a story we manage.
A colleague who attended one of Pagels’ lectures said something similar to me: “Even if the virgin birth isn’t true, it makes the story even better.”
Without the supernatural baggage, Jesus becomes the ultimate rags-to-riches narrative. A peasant remembered and celebrated 2,000 years later. How inspiring.
But this, to me, is the problem with liberal or progressive readings that are deeply steeped in modernity. They assume control.2
We curate the story.
We refine the story.
We make the story usable.
The story does not confront us. We interpret it safely from above.
And we can simply let it go or set it aside when it no longer suits our purposes.
Being Taken Rather Than Taking
A few months ago, I was in Memphis for the Iowa Preachers Project. A poet named David Wright gave a presentation on art and poetry. I’ll admit: much of it went over my head. I chuckled as much to him afterwards.
But his closing line lodged itself in my brain:
“I want to be taken by a story rather than take it for myself.”
That sentence has been haunting me since.
A few days ago, I reposted a Substack by Liz Bucar arguing that Democrats need to do a better job of utilizing religion. I mostly agreed with the premise. Ryan Burge’s research, especially in The Vanishing Church, documents how Christianity in America is becoming increasingly Republican-identified.
But what unsettled me was the instrumental tone.
Religion was being discussed as a tool.
A resource.
A strategy.
This is most obvious on the political Right, where Christianity can function as what family systems theory would call “togetherness pressure”—a glue that holds the tribe together.
But increasingly, it feels like parts of the political Left are discovering that religion might be useful too. Useful for mobilizing voters. Useful for moral framing.3
The instinct is bipartisan.
The problem is theological.
The Gospel Cannot Be Reduced to Its Usefulness
In an article we read for the Iowa Preachers Project, Mark Mattes wrote:
“The gospel as a promise cannot be reduced to its usefulness.”
He warns that many preachers present the gospel as if it were a program for personal or social improvement.
Eugene Peterson said something similar in Run with the Horses:
“Wanting to maintain control over our lives, to keep the initiative in our hands, we chop the word of God into little pieces so that we can control it and maybe even put it to practical use.”
Andrew Root, throughout his Ministry in a Secular Age series, makes the same critique—warning against turning God into a mascot or idol4 we deploy for our causes. In A Pilgrimage of Letting Go, which he co-wrote with Kara Root, they write:
“Leadership in the way of God must be a journey into uncontrollability.”
Not just leadership.
Faith itself.
Religion, at its most basic, can be a human attempt to control the uncontrollable. Christianity cannot survive that reduction. It does not function well as a lifestyle accessory or a partisan instrument. Its claims are too total. Too disruptive. Too destabilizing.
A Personal Reckoning
If I’m honest, I don’t always want to be taken by the story.
I want a faith that confirms what I already think.
A God who blesses my instincts.
A narrative I can deploy when it helps.
But the older I get—and the more I see what happens when we instrumentalize religion—the more convinced I become that Christianity only works when it works on me.
When it confronts me.
When it destabilizes me.
When it carries me somewhere I did not plan to go.5
I don’t want to take the story and make it useful.
I want to be taken by it.
Isn’t this the epitome of modernity? The assumption that neutrality is a thing? Talk about control…
I’d add that fundamentalist Christianity also derives to gain control over the story in other ways.
I would agree that it is useful for moral framing. But, as I try to argue in this post, when it is simply something we manage ourselves, it’s paradoxes become readily apparent and apparently foolish—inevitably leading to it’s abandonment, much as has already happened within liberal circles.
The idol language is my own. I wanted to add in here the story from 1 Samuel 4 where the Israelites bring the Ark of the Covenant into battle in an attempt to summon God, but I worried I was getting to far afield. To be clear, the recent National Prayer Breakfast sure seems like a modern-day version of this.
I’d highly recommend here Andrew Root’s The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticism where Root argues that surrender is essential for transformation rather than the utilization of religious tools in the attempt to manufacture our own outcomes.
Great article! May God bless your lenten practice and may you receive! ... i have been pondering that article by rb... and i feel like it's too neat to say christians are conservative and secular people are progressive... as helpful as those lines can be they also can not tell us the full story. Much like on days when people eat the most ice cream, the most people drown. There is a deeper root to the stats. I wonder if progressivism IS a church, so people don't need Christianity as well. And possibly this would explain the collapse of some of the most progressive church spaces. Much to keep pondering....
Excellent and well said. I am a YDS graduate in 71 and have lived through the various liberal/progressive presentations on the “real” Jesus. I think the bad news in these efforts is simply that the only historical Jesus we know is the one in the NT presented by the Apostolic witness.
All else is conjecture and end with the great criticism of Harnack. “He looked into the long well of history for the historical Jesus and saw the reflection of his own face in the water and concluded that Jesus was a 19th century German liberal.”