The Christa Conundrum

A sculpture, a controversy, and the choice facing women like me

The Chapel of St. Saviour at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

Note: A version of this article was previously published at amymantravadi.com.

Back in October 2022, I had the opportunity to visit the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the bishop’s seat for the Episcopal Diocese of New York. A quick Google search confirms that it is the largest church in the United States, despite being only two-thirds complete and jokingly referred to as “St. John the Unfinished.” Cathedrals tend to be long-term building projects—construction of Cologne’s cathedral began in 1248 and ended in 1880—but as I traveled north on the C line along the western edge of Central Park, I doubted whether this particular cathedral would ever reach its maximum size.

During the early days of the Covid lockdown, my husband and I watched a documentary series exploring traditional rituals at various sacred spaces on earth. Buddhist, Roman Catholic, Shinto, Muslim, and Native American sites were all featured. As a representative of Protestant Christianity, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s annual Blessing of the Animals was selected. Occurring each October, these services are packed with young children and their parents excited to see animals strange and exotic making their way down the central aisle of the nave. A cathedral employee remarked to the documentary crew that it was nice to see the space so full of people, because normally they have few attendees at their services.

As I exited the subway at 110^th Street-Cathedral Parkway, that comment was reverberating in my mind. The cathedral has long prided itself on being a beacon, refuge, and advocate for the community. Throughout the 20^th century and into the 21^st, it has worked to promote justice in the here and now, bringing a bit of heaven to planet earth. It has provided sustenance to the poor, supported AIDS victims, and engaged in interfaith outreach, seeking to be a home for the homeless and voice for the voiceless. As I climbed the hill upon which the cathedral keeps watch over Morningside Heights, I passed large panels featuring the stories of immigrants, this in the same week that Mayor Eric Adams would announce a state of emergency to deal with the buses of migrants regularly arriving in New York City from El Paso. The message could not be more politically topical, and yet I thought to myself, Where are all the people?

Arriving at the cathedral’s western front, I admired the Gothic revival architecture. Only one of the towers has been completed and the second is never likely to be, but it is nevertheless impressive. Over the central portal, the figure of Christ sits upon the judgment seat: hardly an original theme for ecclesiastical art, but there was something about this version that was a bit different. In medieval art, Christ passes judgment over all humanity, separating the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the damned. The offense of sin against God is the chief topic of concern. In the modern version at St. John the Divine, Christ is accompanied by a host of Native Americans, their eyes pointed not at Christ but the viewer. The implication is clear: Christ is not casting judgment on the entire world, but those who oppressed and exterminated the original inhabitants of the land upon which the cathedral sits.

Sobering thoughts of unspeakable pain! I did not doubt that the crimes against Native Americans were worthy of divine judgment, nor that the current status of their descendants should be a subject of concern for all Christians. Yet, as I entered the church and made my $10 donation for right of passage, I asked myself once again, Where are all the people?

But I had not come chiefly to see the people. I had come to see Christa.

Image of Christ seated in judgment above the central portal of the cathedral’s western front, with various Native American groups depicted below

“THIS IS 2016”

In the great tradition of Christian cathedrals, St. John the Divine has always been a patron of the arts. It has hosted the likes of Aretha Franklin, Duke Ellington, and the French tightrope walker Philippe Petit. It maintains a poet-in-residence and hosts many temporary and permanent art exhibitions within its walls and across the cathedral grounds. I passed chapels featuring art dedicated to New York firefighters and members of the U.S. Armed Forces. There was a statue commemorating the 9/11 attacks and another work lamenting the desecration of the environment. Stained glass windows depicted familiar scenes from biblical tales and the lives of saints, but there were also windows featuring the medieval Crusades (quite wrongfully waged, in the church’s opinion), an icon of Our Lady of Ferguson in memory of victims of police violence, and a window celebrating the Founding Fathers that I suspect is destined for cancellation.

The most famous piece of art ever displayed in the cathedral is a bronze statue entitled Christa by the British artist Edwina Sandys. Famous for her provocative works that often feature feminist themes, Sandys is also notable as a granddaughter of Winston Churchill. Her art has been installed on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was during Holy Week in 1984 that the cathedral first displayed what was destined to be her most controversial work: an image of a naked female nailed to a cross.

Sandys recalled the thought process behind the work’s creation in a 2016 interview with The New York Times. “‘I thought: “What should I be doing today? Oh, I know, I’ll do a female Christ,”’ she recalled. ‘It really just happened, more or less automatically.’”[1] Call me a cynic, but it’s hard to believe such a controversial work of art sprung into being spontaneously, as if the clay had a will of its own. In another interview a year earlier, Sandys had said of Christa, “I wanted her to be suffering but compassionate. As I was modeling her out of clay and began to think of the meaning, I told some other women artists in the sculpture studio that I wanted to portray the suffering of women.”[2]

Here we seem to be getting more to the point. Christa is not meant to be an accurate historic representation of what happened one day in ancient Palestine. Rather, the sculpture expresses something about the meaning of Christ’s crucifixion. What Sandys wants us to know is that Christ is a fellow sufferer. As we see Christa’s female body twisted in agony, forcibly stripped of anything that might protect her from a cruel world, we think of the suffering imposed by thousands of years of patriarchy: women denied an education, forced to do the labor that men feel is beneath them, beaten and raped, forbidden even to speak.

Predictably, when Christa made her debut at the cathedral back in 1984, there were some who missed the intended point. “Theologically and historically indefensible”: that was how Bishop Walter Dennis of the Diocese of New York described the work at the time. Christa had been installed during the bishop’s temporary leave of absence, upon the approval of the dean of the cathedral, James Park Morton. The bishop minced no words, accusing the dean of “desecrating our symbols” by allowing the depiction of a female Christ to be displayed.[3] He was not the only one offended: the cathedral received hate mail, which at that time consisted of physical mail rather than digital replies. The statue was removed soon after its debut on the insistence of the bishop.

Thirty-two years later, Christa was welcomed back to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for part of an exhibition entitled “The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies.” It was permanently installed in the Chapel of St. Saviour, and the reception the second time around has been far more positive. The dean of the cathedral, the Very Rev. James Kowalski, said that the statue’s 2016 return was “an opportunity to reframe the conversation and, frankly, do a better job than the first time.” A New York Times article run the week of the installation added the following.

[Kowalski] said he did not know how much controversy the exhibition would generate this time around. But Lisa A. Schubert, the cathedral’s vice president for programming, said there had already been some “pushback.”

“We have people who worship here who expressed concerns,” Ms. Schubert said on Monday, as the statue was being put into place. Still, “the leadership of the cathedral said this is 2016, not 1984,” she added. “Surely we can have a woman on the cross.”[4]

How should we interpret Ms. Schubert’s words? “This is 2016, not 1984.” In other words, criticism of the statue is based on outdated opinions. “Surely we can have a woman on the cross.” Which is to say, having a woman on the cross is the natural result of the gains made in women’s rights over the previous century. “We have women bishops now,” Sandys commented in the same article, implying that acceptance of one should lead to acceptance of the other: that accustoming one’s self to the image of a female Christ is only logical if you believe in the basic equality of males and females.

The bishop at the time of the 2016 re-installation, Andrew Dietsche, approved of giving Christa a permanent home at the cathedral. In a booklet accompanying the exhibition, he wrote, “In an evolving, growing, learning church, we may be ready to see ‘Christa’ not only as a work of art but as an object of devotion, over our altar, with all of the challenges that may come with that for many visitors to the cathedral, or indeed, perhaps for all of us.”[5]

The nearly empty nave of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, with scaffolding visible

WHERE ARE ALL THE PEOPLE?

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine was not the first church I had visited that day. Earlier, I had made my way down Fifth Avenue in a relentless drizzle to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, mother church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. There were some similarities between the two churches: both were begun in the second half of the19^th century to accommodate the city’s growing population of worshippers, and both eventually settled on a Gothic revival style. However, it was the cathedrals’ differences that struck me that day.

First, we could title the Roman Catholic cathedral “St. Patrick the Finished.” Primary construction was begun in 1858 and completed in 1878, with a pause for the American Civil War. Secondary construction continued until 1906, and the cathedral was consecrated in 1910, after all its debts had been paid. In comparison to similar building projects throughout history, that’s pretty much a sprint.

The second difference would be apparent to anyone who passes through the doors of both cathedrals on an average weekday: unlike its Episcopal cousin, St. Patrick’s is filled with people. In my whole time at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, I saw a dozen persons at most, none of them worshippers. St. Patrick’s, on the other hand, probably had somewhere between 100-200 people milling about, many of them dipping their fingers in the holy water upon arrival and subsequently kneeling in the pews or before one of the altars. Throughout the church were the traditional votive displays, many of their candles lit. It was very clearly a living place of worship,

Could the contrast in attendance have to do with the cathedrals’ geographic locations? After all, St. Patrick’s sits at the heart of Fifth Avenue, not far from Rockefeller Center and Times Square, whereas St. John the Divine is in a largely residential neighborhood on the north end of Central Park, just south of Columbia University. I have no doubt that this provides part of the explanation, but it is also worth noting that while US church attendance has decreased across Christian denominations in recent decades, mainline Protestant denominations have often suffered worse than others.

It can be tricky to judge the state of a given denomination: one may consider weekly church attendance, median congregant age, overall number of baptized members, or total annual giving. By nearly every measurement, the Episcopal Church in the USA is in worse shape than non-mainline Protestant churches or the Roman Catholic Church. Attendance at Episcopal Sunday services decreased by 24.5% between 2009-2019,[6] and it seems safe to assume things haven’t improved since the COVID-19 pandemic. This may be the most important statistic of all when comparing Episcopalians and Catholics in the US: as of 2016, the average Episcopalian was 56 and the average Catholic was 49.[7]

The decline in mainstream church attendance was observed as early as the 1960s, driven largely by young persons raised in the Church who departed when coming of age. Since the younger generation was more likely to be concerned about issues of social justice and sexual liberation, there were many who suggested that the way to stem the bleeding was to appeal to those instincts. But there has never been complete agreement on which strategy is most likely to increase attendance. Some favor a decreased focus on doctrinal rigor in favor of an open, accepting message of social justice and love extended to all.

For every person who adheres to that theory, there is at least one other claiming it is the very fact that the Episcopal Church is, in the words of Bishop Andrew Dietsche, “evolving, growing, and learning” that is its greatest problem. The way to attract young people, this group argues, is not to abandon historic Christian positions, but to double down on them. As evidence, this second group points to the fact that members of conservative denominations tend to be younger and attend services more often.

This brings me back to my visit to St. John the Divine. The first thing I passed on my approach was those murals featuring immigrants, most of whom were Hispanic. The church clearly wanted the neighborhood to know it welcomes immigrants, regardless of legal status, and is concerned with their social plight. This sentiment is largely shared by the Episcopal Church as a whole and other mainline Protestant denominations. But are Hispanics attending these churches? In general, they are not.

The Barna Group conducted a survey back in 2009 that found that, “While Hispanics make up 16% of the US population, they are only 6% of the mainline population.” Since that time, the population of Hispanics in the United States has continued to grow, while the proportional share of white and black Americans has declined. I saw Hispanic worshippers when I visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and many Catholic churches across the country now offer Mass in Spanish. The growth of the Hispanic population is the main reason that the Catholic share of the US population has remained fairly steady while that of other Christian groups has declined.

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine may be “evolving, growing, and learning” regarding social issues, but “growing” is not an adjective I would apply to the Episcopal Church in the USA. I do not doubt that the residents of Morningside Heights have been fed and clothed by their local cathedral, but whether they have been converted is another question entirely. This is not surprising, given that the Barna Group found that only 31% of mainline adults believe they “have a personal responsibility to discuss their faith with people who have different beliefs.”

The western front of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine

“BORN OF A WOMAN”

Remember old Bishop Dennis, the man who in 1984 described Christa as “theologically and historically indefensible”? The 2016 New York Times article portrayed him as a crank out of touch with the times. Was he really just a grumpy old misogynist, or was there something more substantial to his criticism?

Perhaps it would be worth asking the question, “Is Christa’s sex incidental to who she is, or essential?” Clearly, Edwina Sandys thought that Christa’s sexual identity was important when she formed her out of clay. Otherwise, Sandys would have never accepted the societal censure that was sure to come. She clearly felt that she could not communicate what she desired without altering Christ’s gender.

Critics of the work likewise see Christa’s sex as an essential part of who she is, and they believe the decision to make her female is a powerful theological statement. Here it is worth asking, “What exactly are Sandys’ personal religious views?” I could find no details online, but given the small percentage of British persons who hold historic, orthodox Christian beliefs, it seems a fair guess that Sandys does not belong to the more conservative end of the Christian spectrum, if indeed she is a Christian at all. In crafting the statue, she likely sought to make a social and political point more than a theological one, but when the subject in question is the death of Christ, any commentary is inherently theological.

Bishop Dennis might have been a crank, but he called Christa indefensible because he believed that Christ’s male identity was an important part of who he was—even an essential one. We live in a cultural moment when sexual identity means both everything and nothing at the same time: everything in that it must be legally protected and socially respected, and nothing in that it can change at any time based on a person’s emotional experiences. In such a society, when females have been accepted as the equals of males and traditional gender stereotypes are being broadly rejected, you could forgive a person for wondering why it is important that Christ was a male and not a female.

The Christian Scriptures teach that Jesus Christ was the second Adam. The Book of Genesis details how Adam was formed as the first human being from the dust of the earth and the very breath of God. It was to Adam that the command not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was given, and it was Adam who was held chiefly responsible when humanity fell into sin. As St. Paul wrote, “For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve.” (1 Timothy 2:14) Adam served as a federal head for his descendants, which means that because of his sin, all humans now inherit a sinful nature. The doctrine of original sin has been essential to orthodox Christianity since the time of the Church Fathers and was powerfully explicated by Augustine of Hippo.[8] St. Paul taught that even as Adam was a federal head for humanity, so Christ has become a federal head.

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned—for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. But the free gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one the many died, much more did the grace of God and the gift by the grace of the one Man, Jesus Christ, about to the many.

Romans 5:12-15

Even as Adam was a firstborn, Christ was a firstborn. Again, it was St. Paul who wrote of Christ that, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.” (Colossians 1:15) Adam imputed death to all those under his federal headship, whereas Christ imputes life to all who are under his federal headship.

If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So also it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living soul.’ The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual. The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven. As is the earthy, so also are those who are earthy; and as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly.

1 Corinthians 15:44b-48

It was necessary for Christ to be a federal head like Adam to bring righteousness and life to human beings trapped in sin and death. But perhaps you are wondering, “Does that mean Christ had to be a man?” I would argue that it does, but lest you think God favors men over women or only used the former in his plan of salvation, allow me to destroy that assumption.

Although it was Adam who imputed sin to his descendants, Eve was the first to fall into sin after she was tempted by the serpent. God declared in response to the serpent’s act, “And I will put enmity / Between you and the woman, / And between your seed and her seed; / He shall bruise you on the head, / And you shall bruise him on the heel.” (Genesis 3:15) Soon after, Adam gave his wife the name Eve, “because she was the mother of all the living.” (Genesis 3:20) It seems reasonable to conclude that the “seed” of which God spoke was Jesus Christ, who would crush the devil, and that while Adam imputed death to his descendants, in the sovereign plan of God, life would be brought into the world through Eve and all the women who came after her, preparing the way for the Savior.

Christ was brought into the world through the body of the Virgin Mary. The female sex was therefore essential to the divine plan of salvation, as was the male sex. This is why St. Paul wrote, “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.” (Galatians 4:4-5) Jesus Christ was not made incarnate as a parentless individual. He was “born of a woman.” We must grasp this in order to appreciate 1) Christ’s true humanity, and 2) the necessity of women for salvation.

I therefore conclude that if Christ were not a man, he could not have been a federal head as Adam was, and therefore could not have delivered the benefits of his salvific actions to humanity. However, I also conclude that it was necessary for him to be born of a woman, and that it would have been impossible for him to be born of a man. To say that Christ could have been a woman is to say that Mary could have been a man. Rather than demeaning women, the insistence on recognizing Christ’s historic sexual identity simply acknowledges the importance of both males and females in God’s saving work.

Our Lady of Ferguson displayed in the cathedral

CHRISTUS VICTOR

If it was necessary for Jesus Christ to be a man to impute his benefits to humanity, then it seems a rather essential part of who he is, not an incidental one. Even as Edwina Sandys could not accomplish what she intended if Christa were male, so God the Father could not have accomplished what he intended if Christ were female. This is not a misogynistic opinion, but simply an accurate statement of biblical teaching.

What is at stake is the very essence of human salvation, which Scripture clearly teaches is delivered through the person of Jesus Christ. The Church has always acknowledged this fact. Therefore, Bishop Dennis argued that it was “theologically and historically indefensible” to portray Christ as a woman: theologically indefensible because it flies in the face of Scripture and historically indefensible because it flies in the face of what the Church has always taught. It would be much the same as portraying the Virgin Mary as a man without a womb.

If you are a person who holds an historic Christian view of sin and salvation, you will have a problem with the idea of a female Christ (unless you are rather confused). I am now hitting very close to the heart of the disagreement, for the fact is that many Christians today do not hold to historic views of sin and salvation. They see sin as something committed against our neighbors more than God. They deny the existence of hell or hold to some form of universal salvation. Already in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, many Christians in what are now mainline Protestant denominations were denying the Virgin Birth, the full deity of Christ, and other key historic doctrines.

The Social Gospel movement, among others, emphasized the need to provide for and defend the vulnerable in this life while deemphasizing certain aspects of the life to come. Remember when I told you only 31% of mainline adults believe they “have a personal responsibility to discuss their faith with people who have different beliefs”? Perhaps the reason they see no such responsibility is that they view Christianity as one of many paths to a general salvific enlightenment rather than the only path toward the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

One of the main differences between conservative and liberal Protestant denominations today is how they understand the atonement—that is, the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and its theological purpose. Conservative Protestants tend to favor penal substitution theory, which holds that Christ took the penalty of sin upon himself in order to spare those who would believe in him. Many of those who hold to penal substitution theory also teach a double exchange in which, through union with Christ, a person’s sin is transferred to Christ while the righteousness of Christ is transferred in the opposite direction.

Liberal Protestants tend to reject penal substitution theory and hold to an alternative doctrine called moral influence theory. Pierre Abelard is usually credited with developing this view in opposition to Anselm of Canterbury’s satisfaction theory of the atonement. According to moral influence theory, Christ’s death on the cross is the chief display of God’s love for humanity. God is not a cruel judge who would meet out wrath upon his own Son. The closely related moral example theory, which seems to have appeared in the 16^th century, holds that Christ’s sacrificial death teaches us how to properly love God. The view was picked up by Immanuel Kant and eventually became the dominant one within liberal Protestantism.

If one holds to a moral influence (or moral example) theory of the atonement, then the federal headship of Christ becomes something of a non-issue. It is easier to see the main point of Christ’s death as a kind of “suffering alongside”: that he was confronting injustice by suffering as an oppressed person, and that we therefore should make sacrifices to confront injustice in our own day and stand up for the oppressed. Sandys’ desire to acknowledge the suffering of women therefore makes complete sense according to this view. When Jesus was suffering on the cross, he was suffering as a woman, a black man, a Jew, a disabled person, a gay person—whichever group one chooses to focus on that day.

But there is a problem with this view of the atonement: it does not provide the ultimate succor to victims of injustice that one would hope, because it mistakes the causes and nature of injustice. Injustice is not a simple behavioral problem. It is symptomatic of an evil that lies within every human heart and a curse that touches every corner of creation. That is what the mainstream, orthodox Church has always taught. If sin is the problem, and we are mired in sin absent the work of the Spirit of God, then no amount of behavioral correction is going to permanently solve the problem of injustice. It might produce some short-term improvements, but it is not a cure: only a mitigating treatment. What is even worse, society could begin to accept these minor improvements as if they were equivalent to a cure, thereby failing victims of injustice.

There is another theory of the atonement titled Christus Victor. This view sees the main point of the atonement as Christ’s victory over the devil and the evil powers of this world. On the cross, the forces of evil were decisively defeated and their power broken. Christ did not merely suffer alongside the oppressed: he provided the cure for their suffering by freeing them from the chains that bound them. If one holds this view, or the penal substitution view, or some combination of both, it becomes much easier, in this author’s opinion, to reckon with the problems of injustice and suffering than if one holds the moral influence view. There has been a great battle, and the light has defeated the darkness.

How one views the atonement is tightly linked with how one views the problems of evil, injustice, and suffering. I would submit that, while it may make us feel better to think of a non-judgmental God, such a God cannot save us from the world, the flesh, and the devil. He cannot be the death of death. This is a point on which I am unlikely to agree with most members of the Episcopal Church in the USA.

I thought of all this as I stood there gazing at Christa, but I also thought about something else: something that has been bothering me for quite some time.

The figure Christa by artist Edwina Sandys

A FALSE CHOICE

Edwina Sandys may not be the world’s finest theologian. However, she is correct that women have suffered greatly throughout history. I do not object to her desire to honor women, but rather the manner in which she does it. A female Christ does not have the power to solve the problem of injustice. Only a male Christ can redeem the suffering of women rather than simply sharing in it.

In my understanding of the atonement, I am in line with conservative Christians and at odds with liberals, but in my concern for the state of women in the Church and the world, I find myself increasingly at odds with conservatives. Although I have never sought ordained office in the Church, but merely desired to write about Christianity, I have been criticized by those who see such writing as a kind of “gateway drug” to seeking formal authority in the Church. When I have raised concerns about sexism in the Church with respected conservative Christian leaders, I have not received the type of responses one would hope.

One female author asserted she had never experienced sexism in conservative Reformed churches, which she insisted were full of “good men.” A male pastor and author told me that if sexism was worse in his denomination than others, it was a “moot point.” One pastor seemed to give limited credence to my concerns, but then failed to follow-up. I wrote back multiple times over several months. He was always too busy.

I have had people question my motives for writing about theology and ask if I was driven by a desire for personal glory. Do they also address these questions to male writers? One time, after many months of witnessing misogynistic attacks by a particular Christian Twitter account, I finally warned others to avoid said account, only to be deluged with replies accusing me of slander. I watched female friends get harassed online by ordained ministers, and I saw exactly how little accountability those ministers received from their denominations.

I also saw how connected the mainstream of Reformed evangelicalism is to the more misogynistic fringes. I watched in dismay as men I had respected shared the stage with men who had attacked victims of sexual abuse. I watched the Southern Baptist Convention come under investigation from the U.S. Department of Justice due to its mishandling of abuse cases, only to have many SBC leaders insist it was all some kind of satanic plot and there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with the way they were treating women.

I cannot unsee these things. I cannot forget my experiences. Worst of all is the fact that I know my mistreatment has been mild in comparison to the experiences of other women. I reached a point where I seriously wondered who, if anyone, in conservative circles would treat me with respect and take my concerns seriously. I went out of my way to be gracious in the way I raised these issues. I waited for more information before rushing to judgment. I played by the rules, but the game was rigged against me.

The statue of Christa confronts me with a conundrum: Should I go to the portion of the Church that has a correct view of the atonement or the portion that respects me as a person?

As I live and breathe, the Lord has not placed this choice upon me. He has commanded the Church to teach correct doctrine and practice correct behavior, but there are plenty of people in the American Church who have an interest in forcing me to choose between those two things. The conservatives draw people by warning of the dangers of liberalism, and the liberals draw people by warning of the dangers of conservatism. It is a gross mirroring of the tendencies of our politicians. I have considered this conundrum, and I choose not to choose. No human being should be forced to make a choice between biblical truth and personal dignity.

I am never going to have a perfect church, because no such thing exists. Like every Christian before me, I will have to live in the “already and not yet.” The kingdom of God is at hand, but the New Heavens and the New Earth are a thing of the future. Some of us will suffer more in this transitional stage than others, and it seems to me that women have drawn one of the short sticks.

I will not be defeated by the conundrum Christa presents. The real Christ and his cross are far too glorious to simply give up and walk away. But I will pray for the restoration of Christ’s Church. May the gates of Hades never defeat it. (Don’t worry. They won’t.)

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All scripture quotations are from The New American Standard Bible (1995 version), copyright The Lockman Foundation.