A Book to Remember
Tuesday, January 27, 2026
With Scripture, we’ve … been invited to a centuries-long conversation with God and God’s people that has been unfolding since creation, one story at a time.
—Rachel Held Evans, Inspired
Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) recounts the historical circumstances that led to the creation of the Old Testament:
Our Bible was forged from a crisis of faith. Though many of its stories, proverbs, and poems were undoubtedly passed down through oral tradition, scholars believe the writing and compilation of most of Hebrew Scripture, also known as the Old Testament, began during the reign of King David and gained momentum during the Babylonian invasion of Judah and in the wake of the Babylonian exile, when Israel was occupied by that mighty pagan empire….
While the circumstances of the exiled Israelites may seem far removed from us today, the questions raised by that national crisis of faith remain as pressing as ever: Why do bad things happen to good people? Will evil and death continue to prevail? What does it mean to be chosen by God? Is God faithful? Is God present? Is God good?
Rather than answering these questions in propositions, the Spirit spoke the language of stories, quickening the memories of prophets and the pens of scribes to call a lost and searching people to gather together and remember.
The Bible can be understood as a call to remember our shared humanity:
This collective remembering produced the Bible as we know it and explains why it looks the way it does—foreign yet familiar, sacred yet indelibly smudged with human fingerprints. The Bible’s original readers may not share our culture, but they share our humanity, and the God they worshipped invited them to bring that humanity to their theology, prayers, songs, and stories.
And so we have on our hands a Bible that includes psalms of praise, but also psalms of complaint and anger, a Bible that poses big questions about the nature of evil and the cause of suffering without always answering them. We have a Bible that says in one place that “with much wisdom comes much sorrow” (Ecclesiastes 1:18) and in another “wisdom is supreme—so get wisdom” (Proverbs 4:7 HCSB). We have a Bible concerned with what to do when your neighbor’s donkey falls into a pit…. We have a Bible that depicts God as aloof and in control in one moment, and vulnerable and humanlike in the next, a Bible that has frustrated even the best systematic theologians for centuries because it’s a Bible that so rarely behaves.
In short, we have on our hands a Bible as complicated and dynamic as our relationship with God, one that reads less like divine monologue and more like an intimate conversation. Our most sacred stories emerged from a rift in relationship, an intense crisis of faith. Those of us who spend as much time doubting as we do believing can take enormous comfort in that. The Bible is for us too.
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| BRADLEY JERSAKJAN 26 |
“Any ‘identity in Christ’ that does not have regard for the fragility of human life
is anti-Christ and a subversion of the Gospel.”
—David Goa
‘P.O.S. Theology’
I was part of the generation of young Evangelicals who at last discovered the poverty of any Christian anthropology (our doctrine of humanity) that saw humanity as flawed or even ‘totally depraved’ all the way down to our foundations. This tradition endeavored to give an account for the ‘human condition’ and our need for a Saviour. And rightly so. But in that model, we had reverse-engineered our neediness to such extremes that we literalized and totalized verses like Romans 7:18: “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.” We could then make an easy case for “salvation by grace alone.” In recent years, this dehumanizing interpretation became UNaffectionally known as ‘P.O.S. theology.’ It claimed that we are rotten to the core, that we are dung, and that Christ must cover our shame so that his Father only sees Jesus.
Gratefully, we began to see that this is not the whole story—or even the truth. We remembered from Genesis that we were created in the image of God and declared a delight. Still, we asked, hadn’t human goodness ended with ‘the fall’? But we kept reading. Scriptures like Psalm 8 revealed how God continued to hold humanity in high regard. And the author of Hebrews heard that song as a foreshadowing of the Incarnation, when Christ would dignify the human race.
We are not simply the ‘snow-covered dung’ as certain Protestants insisted, but ‘pearls of great price’ unearthed from the dirt by the One who ‘sold it all’ to retrieve and restore us. We began to understood that far from worthless objects of God’s disgust (still preached today), we are beloved children of a loving heavenly Father, no matter how lost or dysfunctional we’ve become. In our self-will, we became estranged but never disowned—and by God’s grace we find ourselves meandering our way back home—always accompanied by a clandestine guide, anonymously when necessary.
‘Identity’
With the recovery of this ancient and more beautiful way of seeing ourselves and our neighbors, we began to speak about our ‘identity in Christ.’ The very best version of this is the confident, God-given assurance that we are all God’s beloved children and that will never change. Authors like Paul Young and C. Baxter Kruger often call this the truth of our being. Others use the phrase ‘my true self in Christ’ or ‘Christ in me.’
Early in this awakening, we gravitated to “I am” Scriptures that describe our humanity according to our telos (who we are becoming as a transfigured people). For example, we recited long lists that included identity claims such as “I am the righteousness of God in Christ.” We identified as those “set apart” (saints, holy ones). And we resisted belittling and demoralizing identities.
Naturally, we also witnessed this much-needed course correction oversteer in the extreme. Some would say:
- I am not a sinner (because that’s not my identity),
- I don’t need to ask forgiveness (because I’m already forgiven),
- there’s no such thing as sin and
- there’s no need for a Savior.
Okay. I won’t argue. Life will be their teacher.
But others didn’t careen so wildly. To those readers, I want to offer a few tweaks to avoid the dualism of being one person “seated with Christ in the heavenlies” and a disconnect alter-ego that continues to relapse into self-centeredness, selfishness, and self-sabotaging ways of being. My ‘identity in Christ’ must be more than an ethereal abstraction while real-life relational dumpster fires rage on. My friend Paul invites me to think of holiness, not as more perfectionism, but as wholeness—an alignment of the truth of our being and the way of our being. I’m down with that. Ministries such as “Identity Exchange” also help people discover their unique identity—the particular grace gift they are to the world.
Tweaks
Now for a few supplements:
- The truth of our being is not actually true if it doesn’t transform us from the inside, even incrementally. The truth of our being is not separate from real life. The truth of our being (Christ in us) sets us free. If the truth of our being is not liberating us in some way from the demands of the ego, our attachments and cravings, our judgments and religiosity, then I need to slow down with my claims and examine what’s up.
- If the truth of our being is that we’re beloved children of God (we are!), that assurance make for a stable relationship. But it’s better than that. That truth is ever unfolding and expanding and deepening. It’s stable but never static.
- The word ‘identity’ in popular, cultural, and political use has become incredibly reductive. Identity labels can shrink wondrously complex persons into some thing. When folks say, “I identify as…,” I get it. They are becoming more and more self-aware. But I also want them to beware of reducing who they are to a labeled box the constrains their growth and can’t account for the wildness of human existence. Oppressive forces will always try to weaponize those identity labels to lock us down to scripts and stereotypes, eventually even legislating our freedom.
- Conversely, I wonder if there’s a way to become all that we are without erasing our beautiful particularity. “Beloved child of God” is true but also too generic. Who we are includes our story, our ancestry, our geography, our people, our culture, our character, our gifts. “Who am I?” can’t be photocopied. We are all unique handwritten sagas of grace, unfolding over a lifetime.
- I suspect the way forward is to shift from ‘from umbrella identities’ to the language of ‘personhood,’ along with a commitment to seeing John 10:10 ‘human flourishing’ at every stage of our unfolding.
- I opened with a quote from David Goa (today at breakfast), where in view of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, true personhood and the fullness of humanity include the full spectrum of human experience. Jesus did not regard his very real grief and raw lament in any way compromising his identity or sabotaging our faith. His faith, his humanity, his deity (!) was expressed in sorrow and with many tears. It all belongs. Nor did Jesus regard recognition of our need, of our mourning, of our fragility as a negative confession to be repressed or expunged.
Trust
My friend Elliot ask me what “trust in God” actually means. I’ve been praying about that. I can start by saying I trust that God knows my tears and bears my sorrows. But if I boil it down, maybe trust for me means living as if what God has shown me is true, to an infinite (literally) degree. I also thought about the limits of my capacity to trust. For many, the most severe test is the tragic suffering and death of children. Can I trust God through that? And I don’t need to future-trip made-up scenarios ()counterfactual hypotheticals. The suffering and death of children is real to me and current to my direct experience with grieving friends. Still, I trust God.
But I have also seen and experienced the real limits of my emotional strength. I remember vividly what “It’s too much!” feels like. Many people who I love dearly know what Paul was describing when he said, “We were under under a great burden far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself.” (2 Cor. 1:8). Then I remembered these verses, which seem so conditional (at least out of context).
“…the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:32).
“By your endurance you will gain your lives” (Luke 21:19).
“For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end” (Hebrews 3:14)
“Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Revelation 2:10).
What if I can’t? I know I’m loved and I also know myself. My endurance is limited. I have unravelled before. And if I really must endure—if it’s up to me—in whom is my confidence? But then I thought, I guess I’ll just have trust God to carry me, even if trust in God fails (again). I will act as if its true that “… when I’m faithless, God remains faithful, because he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:15). I will live as if “he will never leave me or forsake me” (Hebrews 13:5).
Anna’s Wool Cap
Maybe God is like my Anna, a master knitter. Yesterday (as I write this), I was out for the day while she was knitting a wool toque (that’s Canadian) using a new pattern she’d not tried before. She estimated it would take 3-4 hours to complete but when I returned to her house, there was nothing to show me. There were issues with the length of the needles and the weight of the wool, causing her to unravel the wool cap and start over—three times. I would have been so frustrated. Not Anna. She enjoyed her day, working with the wool, patiently starting afresh after each unravelling, experiencing the joy of the process. She wasn’t at all angry at the wool, or resentful of the re-knitting, and it never crossed her mind to discard the project.
Psalm 139 says that God knit me together in my mother’s womb. It feels right and true that God’s knitting of my personhood (or identity if you will) continues to this day. Regardless of my unravellings. In God’s hands, it all belongs. I belong… and I trust that I’m coming along.
