The world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off on the other side. One can’t help him, no matter how one tries. —Martin Luther (Luther’s Works, 54:111)

By 1520, Martin Luther was convinced that the Roman church couldn’t be helped. Or, at least, she wouldn’t. For centuries, the medieval church held that God’s grace was mediated chiefly through the sacraments and those invested with the authority to comprehend and administer them. Priests, therefore, inhabited a unique and higher order, and they alone were gifted by God to contemplate divine mysteries and mediate God’s grace. The priesthood was spiritual and holy; all other vocations were both temporal and profane.

Luther saw these teachings for what they were — the mere traditions of men. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’s day, the clergy of Luther’s day ascribed more authority to their tradition than to Scripture itself.

Priesthood of All Believers

Addled by power, however, the Roman curia wouldn’t be sobered by Scripture — no matter how Luther tried. So, in May of 1520, Luther appealed to Germany’s Christians.

It is pure invention that pope, bishop, priests, and monks are called the spiritual estate while princes, lords, artisans, and farmers are called the temporal estate. This is indeed a piece of deceit and hypocrisy. Yet no one need be intimidated by it, and for this reason: all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except that of office. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12 that we are all one body, yet every member has its own work by which it serves the others. This is because we all have one baptism, one gospel, one faith, and are all Christians alike; for baptism, gospel, and faith alone make us spiritual and a Christian people. (Works, 44:127)

“Luther understood that, in Christ, all of God’s people have received a holy calling.”

Luther understood that, in Christ, all of God’s people have received a holy calling. As those united to Christ by faith, believers are “being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5). The Levitical system of the old covenant was fulfilled in the atoning death and victorious resurrection of Jesus, who is himself the great high priest (Hebrews 4:14). And Jesus’s priestly ministry is extended through his covenant people by the outpouring of his Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:4–11).

As a holy priesthood, believers now offer “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5; see also Romans 12:1). Peter reminds his readers,

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)

In the same way, the heavenly anthem declares that Jesus’s redemptive work has made his people “a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:10).

Therefore, Luther argued, the division between holy and profane vocations was wholly human and artificial. The true “spiritual estate” belonged to all Christians.

Whoever comes out of the water of baptism can boast that he is already a consecrated priest, bishop, and pope, although of course it is not seemly that just anybody should exercise such office. (Works, 44:129)

The Reformation recovery of the priesthood of all believers disintegrated the medieval hierarchical view, and nurtured an evangelical understanding of the church. It emphasized the urgency and necessity of the Great Commission, and ignited a global missions movement with widespread and lasting impact.

While the intent was to remove a hardened and unbiblical distinction, however, the unintended consequence has occasionally been to remove all distinctions whatsoever. Over the ensuing centuries, many denominations permitted an individualistic cultural impulse to eclipse the ecclesial context Luther clearly had in view. Rather than celebrating both the equal standing of all Christians and the intentional distinctions of office and role, radical individualism often dissolved biblical teaching into base egalitarianism. Only barely in the saddle, some fell off the other side of the horse. Perhaps nowhere is this reality more evident than in the early American republic.

Beneath Every Man’s Hat

While the enlightenments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had exalted personal autonomy and eroded confidence in established authority, it was the American experiment that pressed individualism and egalitarianism into the church in surprising ways.

The antiestablishmentarianism of the American founders was frequently reflected by calls to reject Protestant confessional and covenantal frameworks in favor of “primitive Christianity” — a so-called return to New Testament Christianity where any person could be a preacher and any gathering a church. No longer were there biblical distinctions of office or role. The priesthood of all believers was transmogrified into the priesthood of the believer.

In my own tradition, Baptist leaders like Francis Wayland (1796–1865) and even E.Y. Mullins (1860–1928) argued that each individual person was independently competent to determine matters of religious importance. This logic inevitably led to the idea that every believer has the absolute right to private judgment about biblical doctrine and the liberty to interpret Scripture with complete autonomy. The practical effect, as historian Winthrop Hudson famously said, was “to make every man’s hat his own church” (Baptists in Transition, 142).

“The radical individualism of early American culture has become a celebrated feature of American Christianity.”

The radical individualism of early American culture has become a celebrated feature of American Christianity. Skepticism toward an educated pastorate, dismissiveness about the importance of local-church membership, promotion of women to the office of elder (and rejection of the biblical qualifications) — these are all disorders inherited from our American forebears.

As Luther warned, unbounded egalitarianism dissolves the wise distinctions designed by God for the good of his church.

Whoever comes out of the water of baptism can boast that he is already a consecrated priest, bishop, and pope, although of course it is not seemly that just anybody should exercise such office. Because we are all priests of equal standing, no one must push himself forward and take it upon himself, without our consent and election, to do that for which we all have equal authority. For no one dare take upon himself what is common to all without the authority and consent of the community. (Works, 44:129)

The biblical doctrine of the priesthood of all believers establishes the equal standing of all believers in the spiritual estate. But as Paul reminded the Corinthians, “God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Corinthians 12:18). Luther, again, writes,

There is no true, basic difference between laymen and priests, princes and bishops, between religious and secular, except for the sake of office and work, but not for the sake of status. They are all of the spiritual estate, all are truly priests, bishops, and popes. But they do not all have the same work to do. . . . Further, everyone must benefit and serve every other by means of his own work or office so that in this way many kinds of work may be done for the bodily and spiritual welfare of the community, just as all the members of the body serve one another. (Works, 44:130)

Back in the Saddle

Sobriety in our day would lead evangelicals in North America to jettison radical individualistic and egalitarian cultural impulses, and embrace the biblical distinctions designed by God for the good of his church. Distinctions in role or office are not gradations of value or fundamental to our identity. By God’s wise design, we “do not all have the same work to do.” As countercultural as it may seem in our antiauthoritarian, individualistic era, there is goodness, beauty, and joy in embracing God’s good order.

Rather than every man being his own priest, we must also remember Luther’s insight that every Christian is someone else’s priest, and we are all priests to one another (Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, 96). There is nothing noble about the lone-ranger Christian nor any hope in the quest for purely individual spiritual fulfillment. As a holy priesthood, we are designed and intended to pursue Christ together, united around a common confession “that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another” (1 Corinthians 12:25).

“Man has held three views of his body,” writes C.S. Lewis in the “Eros” chapter of his 1960 book The Four Loves.

First there is that of those ascetic Pagans who called it the prison or the “tomb” of the soul, and [others] to whom it was a “sack of dung,” food for worms, filthy, shameful, a source of nothing but temptation to bad men and humiliation to good ones. Then there are the Neo-Pagans, the nudists and the sufferers from Dark Gods, to whom the body is glorious. But thirdly we have the view which St. Francis expressed by calling his body “Brother Ass.”

Lewis then says, “All three may be . . . defensible; but give me St. Francis for my money.” He continues,

Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now a stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. (93)

And so we now move to address the topic of body stewardship, which may seem like a surprising turn in our spring chapel series on the virtues. And, as Lewis saw 60 years ago in his day (and as he summarized three main enduring views of the human body throughout history), so we see them too today. We have our ascetic Pagans, or digital Pagans, who feel their body to be a prison. The body holds them back; screens and virtual reality create new possibilities. Life, for many, has become shockingly sedentary.

On the other hand, those same screens show image after image of meticulously sculpted and enhanced bodies — Lewis’s Neo-Pagans, half-nudists, at least, for whom the body is glorious, or must be glorious no matter how much dieting and exercise and surgery it takes.

And third, we have the road perhaps least traveled. Saint Francis’s road. Lewis’s road. Our road — the road of Christian Hedonists — Christian Hedonists. Today’s non-Christian hedonists may divide themselves up pretty well between sedentary, digital Paganism and semi-exhibitionist Neo-paganism, while we Christian Hedonists are gladly left with “Brother Ass.”

Now, I know the word Ass is arresting and hard to ignore. It accents our natural, sinful laziness and obstinance — the “infuriating beast” deserving the stick, as Lewis says. But I don’t want you to miss the affection and warmth in the word Brother. I don’t think Lewis says “Brother” lightly. Just as Jesus doesn’t say “brother” lightly. I don’t say it lightly. Brother accents the usefulness, sturdiness, patience, and lovability of these bodies, which are, Lewis says, “absurdly beautiful.” And he steers a careful course between reverence and beauty — they are not to be revered, but acknowledged and appreciated as “absurdly beautiful” — or as the psalm says, “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

As Christian Hedonists

Let me just say, I’m a pastor (and adjunct professor). I’m not a personal trainer. I am not a dietician. In fact, I don’t know if I have anything to say here about diet — except a general plug for moderation, and a general warning about drinking sugar — but as a Christian Hedonist, I do have an interest in how the body serves not just natural joy but supernatural joy. And because this is a college and seminary chapel, it might be good to say something about the mind as well. And I hope, as Christian Hedonists, that the flavor of these next few moments would feel far more like the carrot than the stick.

“Working and pushing these bodies, as God designed them, serves Christian learning, joy, and love.”

Question One of the Heidelberg Catechism asks, as many of you know, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer is this: “That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” We could talk about how the soul affects the body. But in these moments together, I’d like to focus on stewarding the body — and in particular moving the body, exercising the body, even training the body — in service of the soul.

So let me take you to one of many important texts in the Bible on the body, make some observations, and then consider how working and pushing these bodies, as God designed them, serves Christian learning, and Christian joy, and Christian love.

First Corinthians 6, start in the middle of verse 13:

The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. . . . Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6:13–14, 19–20)

Four observations:

1. Your Body Is for Jesus

“For the Lord” means for drawing attention to Jesus, for making Jesus look good. Verse 13: “your body is for the Lord.” Verse 20: “So glorify God in your body.” We are made, Genesis 1 tells us, in the image of God. Images are irreducibly visible. We were made to image the invisible God in his visible world — to draw attention to him, not have it terminate on ourselves.

As Jesus says in Matthew 5:16, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” Speak in such a way, and live in such a way in these bodies that others see what you do in your body — they see your good deeds — and they give glory, not to you, not to your body, but to your Father in heaven, and his Son, Jesus Christ.

2. Jesus Is for Your Body

He designed it. He gave it. He took a human body himself — and still has it. He is for your body’s good. Which means he is for us stewarding our bodies well. He is not against some modest efforts at upkeep. He is for that — wind in our sails.

3. God Will Raise Your Body

He raised Jesus’s body. Jesus is the firstfruits; we are the harvest. If you are in Christ, God will raise your body, and glorify your body. It will be changed, and far better, when he raises it. But it will be your body and modest upkeep now, especially in the service of learning and joy and love, is not a waste.

4. God Dwells Now in Your Body

If you are in Christ, you have the Holy Spirit. He is “within you.” Your body is a temple, a dwelling place, for God. So your body is yours but not “your own.” You didn’t make it. God did. You didn’t buy it back from sin and Satan; Jesus did. And you don’t dwell alone in it; God the Spirit dwells “within you.”

Consider, then, how working and pushing these bodies, as God designed them, serves Christian learning, and Christian joy, and Christian love.

For Christian Learning

As I have aged, I’ve sensed more and more tangibly how much better I feel after I’ve exercised. And in particular, I feel like I can think clearer, and more effortlessly, and more creatively. I feel like I have more energy, not only to move but to think and work hard with my mind. But is this just in my head, or is it real? I’ve heard other people talk about it too, but I want more clarity about my perceived mental clarity.

A few years ago, I found a book by a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, John Ratey. He had spent most of his career on ADHD and co-written some of the key texts on ADHD. He was a former amateur athlete and took notice over the years of what amazing medicine exercise proved to be for his patients. So eventually, he put his findings together in the 2008 book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Now, if any of this sounds too good to be true, remember what his prescription is: exercise. Apparently, many want to just take a pill. Few want to exercise. Here’s how he opens the book,

We all know that exercise makes us feel better, but most of us have no idea why. We assume it’s because we’re burning off stress or reducing muscle tension or boosting endorphins, and we leave it at that. But the real reason we feel so good when we get our blood pumping is that it makes the brain function at its best, and in my view, this benefit of physical activity is far more important — and fascinating — than what it does for the body. Building muscles and conditioning the heart and lungs are essentially side effects. I often tell my patients that the point of exercise is to build and condition the brain. (3, emphasis added)

He continues, “To keep our brains at peak performance, our bodies need to work hard” (4). “The brain responds like muscles do, growing with use, withering with inactivity” (5) — and movement activates the brain. And Ratey explains how it is that exercise improves learning — which matters to us as Christians. We call ourselves disciples, which means learners. Christianity is a teaching movement, and a learning movement — in Christ, we are no less than lifelong learners. Learning matters to me as a pastor and editor and adjunct professor. And I hope it matters to you as a student, and as a Christian. So, here’s “how exercise improves learning on three levels”:

first, it optimizes your mind-set to improve alertness, attention, and motivation; second, it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another, which is the cellular basis for logging in new information; and third, it spurs the development of new nerve cells. . . . (53)

Active bodies improve learning. I’ll say more in a minute about how. But there’s the first reason: for Christian learning. Second, then, for Christian joy — that is, natural joy leading to supernatural joy.

For Christian Joy

Hippocrates, the father of medicine (four centuries before Christ), said, “Eating alone will not keep a man well; he also must take exercise.” Hippocrates also learned to treat depression with a long walk. And if that didn’t seem to help, he advised taking another: “Walking is the best medicine,” he said — in the pursuit of joy, a happy soul.

One of the key truths for which we stand at Bethlehem College & Seminary and Desiring God — and perhaps the most distinctive one — is that we believe enjoying God is essential to glorifying God as we ought. To be bored or uninterested in him is to dishonor him, whatever motions we go through with our bodies. And so, vital for our fulfilling the very purpose and calling of our lives is our enjoying, delighting in, being satisfied, in our souls, with who God is for us in Christ.

In terms of the carrot, the angle that has proved most helpful for me over the years in motivating and sustaining body stewardship through regular exercise is reckoning with how it supports the pursuit of joy in God. The little bit of intense exercise that I do is, in its highest and best form, about enjoying God, which glorifies him.

Getting Energy from Expending Energy

I am not mainly motivated by living longer. “To depart and be with Christ . . . is far better” (Philippians 1:23). And I am not motivated much by looking fit and healthy. For me, those motivations are inadequate. For me, the driving motivation under the banner of enjoying more of God is the energy I get from expending energy. And that’s first emotional energy (we’ll talk about the other in a minute). When I exercise regularly, I feel better. Not only do I feel like I think clearer, but I seem to sleep better, and I’m generally happier.

“Regular exercise puts my body and soul into a better position to clearly see and deeply savor who God is in Christ.”

Regular exercise puts my body and soul — and their complicated and mysterious relationship — into a better position to clearly see and deeply savor who God is in Christ. And so I want to put natural joy (and alertness and attention and energy and resilience) to use to serve spiritual, Christian, supernatural joy.

I said I’d say more about how this works — how bodily movement and exertion serve our natural joy. Back to the Harvard psychiatrist, who says,

Going for a run is like taking a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin because, like the drugs, exercise elevates these neurotransmitters. It’s a handy metaphor to get the point across, but the deeper explanation is that exercise balances neurotransmitters — along with the rest of the neurochemicals in the brain. (38)

Miracle Grow for the Brain

But let’s go one step deeper, and stop here. Knowing a little bit of the mechanism helps me:

“BDNF [Brain Deprived Neurotrophic Factor, “Miracle Grow” for the brain] gathers in reserve pools near the synapses and is unleashed when we get our blood pumping. In the process, a number of hormones from the body are called into action to help. . . . During exercise, these factors push through the blood-brain barrier, a web of capillaries with tightly packed cells that screen out bulky intruders such as bacteria. . . . [O]nce inside the brain, these factors work with BDNF to crank up the molecular machinery of learning. They are also produced within the brain and promote stem-cell division, especially during exercise. . . . The body was designed [!] to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too. (51–53)

We know that “bodily training is of some value,” and godliness all the more (1 Timothy 4:8) — but one of the reasons I take “bodily training” with such seriousness, rather than ignoring it, is precisely because of how it serves the joy and strength and stability of my soul.

So, there’s the Harvard psychiatrist. What about Christian voices? Well, I haven’t been aware of many, at least in our circles, over the years. But I did edit a chapter one time on exercise in a book called Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. The chapter was called “Brothers, Bodily Training Is of Some Value.”

John talks there about “the correlation between the condition of the body and the condition of the soul” (183); he says that “consistent exercise has refining effects on our mental and emotional stability” (185). And one of the motivations he points to, and now other Christian voices are chiming in, is energy — in the service of doing good for others. So not just Christian learning, and Christian joy, but finally Christian love.

For Christian Love

Not only does regular exercise make me feel like I think clearer, and I feel happier, and more ready to pursue spiritual joy, but I also feel stronger and more ready to exert bodily effort, whether mental or physical, for the sake of others. I’ve also found that pummeling or disciplining (Greek hupōpiazō) my body, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:27, strengthens my will, and chases away laziness, in all of life. Regular exercise makes me more active, rather than passive or lazy, in every sphere and every relationship — not the least of which is relating to God through his word and prayer. But also for others.

Too Tired to Love

Here are the other voices. In 2019, we published a short article at Desiring God, called “Remember the Body,” by pastor Mark Jones in Vancouver, speaking, like Piper, to fellow pastors, with clearly broader applications:

Physical exertion is an important part of normal human life. . . . [I’m] persuaded that a lot of pastors should jump on a bike, go for a run, walk, or build some modest muscle, and they’d likely get more work done. A lack of discipline in areas such as food, exercise, and drink typically reflects a lack of discipline in other areas of the Christian life. . . . Exercise is a friend [Brother?] of the Christian, and one that, unless prohibited by health reasons, should be part of the ordinary Christian life.

About the same time, I came across the 2017 Crossway book Reset by David Murray, pastor and professor. He says, “Exercise and proper rest patterns generate about a 20 percent energy increase in an average day, while exercising three to five times a week is about as effective as antidepressants for mild to moderate depression” (79).

Finally, in his late 2020 book on church leadership, Paul Tripp writes about his newfound appreciation for stewarding well the bodies God gave us. He realized, beginning with himself, that “widespread church and ministry leadership gluttony is robbing us of both gospel consistency and physical energy.” He continues,

Regular exercise boosts and builds energy. Perhaps many of us are tired all the time not because of the rigorous demands of ministry but because of the lack of rigorous physical exercise in our normal routine. . . . [T]hese are not ancillary issues. (Lead, 82)

Modest Path

Now, before we get going down any Neo-Pagan paths, let’s bring it back to “Brother Ass” — beloved, obstinate, useful, not revered and not hated, pathetically and absurdly beautiful, Brother Ass.

Mark Jones uses the word modest which I appreciate. He says, “build some modest muscle” — which I think will serve most of us well in our age of extremes related to our bodies. On the one hand, we feel the pull of our world’s sedentary patterns: riding in cars, mesmerized by screens. We have indulged ancient instincts, designed for days when food was scarce, to intuit how to move as little as possible. But thank God, we’re not living in times of famine. Just deadly excess.

On the other hand, we find the fitness junkies, pushing back against sedentary assumptions, but for what reason? “Well-being” as enjoying life more today, not just someday far off, is doubtless more honorable than a brazen pursuit of self-glory. But as Christians we have more to say, critically more, about fitness as stewarding these remarkable creations of our Lord we call bodies.

Fit for What?

I do think “fitness” is a word we can work with as Christians. We just need to ask, Fit for what? Fit to draw attention on Instagram? Fit to draw eyes on a stage, or half-clad? Or fit to do others good? Fit to live up to the modest and important calling we have as Christians to love others and use these bodies to serve and bless and help others?

Paul twice uses a phrase — in 2 Timothy 2:21 and Titus 3:1 — that might be a good rallying cry for the modest upkeep of these physical bodies: “ready for every good work.”

We not only want to learn well, which is critical for disciples. And we not only want to have spiritual joy, which is critical in glorifying Jesus as we ought. We also want to fulfill our calling to use these bodies to do others good — and in such a way that others see our good works, in these bodies, and do not give glory to us but to our Father in heaven, and to Jesus.

“We tend to overestimate what can be done in the short run, and underestimate what can be done in the long run.”

And for most of us, we will be well served by modest upkeep. Subtle changes in our default mindset about minimizing movement, or learning to enjoy it. Walking counts; it gets the blood pumping. Small steps over the long haul. Walking for 30 minutes, five times week, would fulfill the recommendation of many of the experts. And if over time, your body was in enough shape to enjoy regular 30-minute walks, you might find exercise to be an acquired pleasure and enjoy some weights or jogging as well. But we tend to overestimate what can be done in the short run, and underestimate what can be done in the long run.

Brothers and sisters, your body, as a priceless gift from God, is “both pathetically and absurdly beautiful.” It is “a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot.” As Christian Hedonists, let’s pursue the carrots of Christian learning, Christian joy, and Christian love.

In July of 1741, a 37-year-old Jonathan Edwards grabbed a sermon already preached in Northampton and took it on the road to Enfield. There it was “attended with remarkable Impressions on many of the Hearers.”1 Edwards spoke of sinners in the hands of an angry God and grace to those in Christ in a message that would come to represent the First Great Awakening. “What are we,” Edwards asked, “that we should think to stand before him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down?”

Thirty years later, the spirit of Edwards was alive and well — yet in a most unlikely place and through a most unlikely pen. In August of 1772, a hurricane, described as “one of the most dreadful . . . that memory or any records whatever can trace,”2 swept through the Caribbean island of St. Croix. The fury came at dusk and “raged very violently till ten o’clock.” Then followed the eye, “a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour.” Finally came four more hours of “redoubled fury . . . till near three o’clock in the morning.”

A few days later, after hearing a Sunday sermon, “a Youth of [the] Island,”3 seventeen years old, composed a letter to his derelict father, who was living on another island. The youth wrote, “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. . . . In a word, misery, in all its most hideous shapes, spread over the whole face of the country.” But this rare teen, in Edwards-like fashion, saw more than natural causation: “That which, in a calm unruffled temper, we call a natural cause, seemed then like the correction of the Deity.”4

Reforming Influences

It was no accident that this youth, named Alexander Hamilton, would take up such a perspective on the hurricane. Earlier that year, a Princeton graduate and pastor named Hugh Knox (1733–1790) had arrived on the island, discovered the precocious orphan, and begun to serve as a spiritual father to him.

In the 1750s, Knox had been student and good friend of Aaron Burr Sr. (1716–1757), founder and second president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey. Burr had married Esther Edwards, Jonathan’s third child (of eleven), and Burr himself greatly admired Edwards. Knox admired Burr. Now the young Hamilton sat at the feet of Knox, on September 6, 1772, as he preached on the hurricane. Later that day, the young Hamilton, imbibing the Calvinist theology, sat to compose the now-famous letter to his father.

Hamilton’s Christian interests cooled as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work.

Doubtless, the first time Hamilton would have heard the name “Aaron Burr” was from Knox, speaking about the father, rather than his son. Burr Sr. died in 1757, just a year after the birth of his son. (Edwards then became the third president at Princeton and would have raised his grandson, Aaron Jr., had Edwards not died of a botched smallpox inoculation in 1758.)

In the fall of 1772, Knox was so impressed with Hamilton’s hurricane letter that he steered it to the local paper (published October 3, 1772), and it became the occasion for raising funds to send this gifted “Youth of this Island” to the mainland, in hopes he would study, as Knox had, at the college in Princeton.

‘Adore Thy God’

What did the seventeen-year-old Hamilton write? The hurricane had thundered, he claimed, “Despise thyself and adore thy God.” Yet Hamilton, in his Christian faith, found refuge:

See thy wretched helpless state, and learn to know thyself. Learn to know thy best support. Despise thyself, and adore thy God. . . . What have I to dread? My staff can never be broken — in Omnipotence I trusted. . . . He who gave the winds to blow, and the lightnings to rage — even him have I always loved and served. His precepts have I observed. His commandments have I obeyed — and his perfections have I adored. He will snatch me from ruin. He will exalt me to the fellowship of Angels and Seraphs, and to the fullness of never ending joys.

The young Hamilton then exhorts his readers, “Oh vain mortal! Check thy ill timed joy,” and he ends with this plea: “Oh Lord help. Jesus be merciful!”5

That same year, Hamilton wrote a Christian hymn, one that his future wife, Eliza, would come to prize and cling to during the half-century she outlived him. In the hymn, Hamilton confessed,

O Lamb of God! thrice gracious LordNow, now I feel how true thy word.6

Yet this early Hamilton is not the one we typically remember today, nor the one celebrated in the award-winning musical (which Lin-Manuel Miranda spent seven years writing, from 2008 until its debut on Broadway in 2015).

What Hamilton is perhaps most famous for is the circumstances of his death, in a so-called “affair of honor.” In the summer of 1804, Hamilton took a duel with Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr Jr., who was the sitting vice president of the United States. Strangely enough, citing Christian conviction, Hamilton “threw away his shot” by not firing at his opponent. Burr, however, took aim and struck his rival. Hamilton died 31 hours later on July 12, 1804.

Hamilton’s Four Stages

Remarkably, in 2004, Ron Chernow’s eight-hundred-page biography began the work of doing justice to Hamilton’s memory in the twenty-first century. More than a decade later, Miranda’s musical, inspired by the biography and with Chernow as historical consultant, sent Hamilton skyrocketing back into broader American awareness — and just in time to save his face on the ten-dollar bill.

Of our interest, Hamilton seems to have experienced a Christian conversion, under Reformed (and Edwardsean) teaching, when the Great Awakening came to the West Indies in the early 1770s. Yet from a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s story is complicated, to say the least.

In his late teens, he professed faith, wrote hymns and commentaries on the Bible, and daily knelt to pray. But in his youthful zeal to rise above his station and in his ascent to political prominence, he became a prodigal. None rose so fast and then fell so far as Hamilton. But when he was finally humbled, neither Chernow nor Miranda could ignore his “late-flowering religious interests.”7

In this complex life of Hamilton, Douglass Adair and Marvin Harvey, writing in 1955, identified “four distinct stages” in his spiritual development:

his early piety, from 1772–1777
a “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” from 1777–1792
his “opportunistic religiosity,” from 1792 to 1800
his final season, from 1800 until his death in 1804, when he “began sincerely seeking God in this time of failure and suffering”8

Jesus told a parable in Luke 15 of a youth who left home for a far country, squandered his life in reckless living, and eventually realized the world could not satisfy. In time, the young man “came to himself” and returned home to his father (Luke 15:17).

Whether there was a celebration in heaven on July 12, 1804, for the final homecoming of Alexander Hamilton, I cannot tell you with certainty. But I want you to hear the rest of the story, so far as we can tell, as we weave together both Jesus’s parable of the prodigal with these four distinct stages in Hamilton’s spiritual development.

A challenge here is that Hamilton’s life will look very different to a political scientist and a Christian pastor. I’m a pastor. Without doing injustice to his life as a statesman, I want to draw out, with special emphasis, the often-muted story of Hamilton’s prodigal journey and late-flowering faith.9

1. His Early Piety (1772–1777)

The younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country. (Luke 15:13)

Hamilton was born in 1755 on the island of Nevis. Due to his mother’s previous marriage and alleged infidelity, his parents were not legally married. He had an older brother, and his father abandoned them when he was ten. Two years later, his mother died of yellow fever. Orphaned, Alexander and his brother went to live with a cousin, who soon thereafter committed suicide. At age fourteen, he went to work as a clerk for an importer-exporter on the island of St. Croix and excelled. In 1772, Knox arrived on St. Croix and took an interest in him.

After the publication of the hurricane letter, Hamilton came to New Jersey, hoping to enroll in Princeton. He proposed an abbreviated course of study to president John Witherspoon, who denied his request. (Recently a student named James Madison had completed a two-year fast-track at Princeton and worked himself into a nervous breakdown. Perhaps Witherspoon had Madison in mind when he declined Hamilton’s request.)

Undeterred, Hamilton took his proposal to King’s College in New York, where it was approved, and he began classes in the fall of 1773. As early as that summer, he made his first public speech in favor of the revolutionary cause. His college roommate, Robert Troup, remembered Hamilton’s “habit of praying upon his knees both night and morning” and that “he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.”10

However, Hamilton’s physical and social journey into the far country soon led to a spiritual pilgrimage — or better, to spiritual lethargy and distraction, as the revolutionary spirit was fomenting in New York and began to draw forcefully on his energies. However devout he may have been at arrival, his unusually able brain and pen were soon captured by the feverish energy of the day. Rather than to Christian jeremiads and hymns, his attention turned to the revolution.

Ashbel Green (1762–1848), who would later serve as the eighth president of Princeton, reflected on those prewar days in the British colonies: “The military spirit that pervaded the whole land was exceedingly unfriendly to vital piety, among all descriptions of the citizens.” And this was especially so at the colleges:

Military enthusiasm had seized the minds of the students, to such a degree that they could think of little else than warlike operations. By the time the cloud of war had passed over, the colleges were more enamored of Deism and the French Revolution’s Cult of the Supreme Being than of orthodox piety.11

Hamilton too, alongside his fellow collegiates, was swept up into what was trending, into the talk of the cultural moment. And he had manifest abilities — skilled with words, brave enough for battle, and a natural leader. His revolutionary success quickly pulled him into the heart of American cause and its politics from 1775 to 1800, perhaps surpassed only by George Washington in that quarter century.

His Christian interests, however, cooled as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work as Washington’s aide-de-camp, then in establishing a law practice in New York, and climactically as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795. Alongside Madison, this young Hamilton would prove to be one of the great intellects of the founding generation. And while being every bit Madison’s match in political thought (if not exceeding him), he far surpassed Madison, and the other leading founders, in economics.

2. Fifteen Years of Indifference (1777–1792)

There [in the far country] he squandered his property in reckless living. (Luke 15:13)

Adair and Harvey call this the “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” when politically he “shot up like a skyrocket.”12 Hamilton’s wordsmithing and courage had propelled him to revolutionary leadership. In 1777, he was promoted to Washington’s side.

Now 22 years old, he would be Washington’s right-hand man during the revolution and, later, under the new constitution, the first secretary of the treasury from 1789 until 1795. Then he would essentially function as the prime minister and occupy the most powerful seat in the first executive administration. Hamilton’s long-standing relationship with Washington proved to be a stabilizing force, at least in public life. In hindsight, his most productive (and least self-destructive) work came when he was most proximate to Washington.

But it was not only Washington (whose guidance was political) who influenced him, but also Eliza, whose sway was gently but relentlessly spiritual. He married her in 1780. She was, even then, what we would call an “evangelical Christian” today, and she became only more so as she aged.

“As a woman of deep spirituality, Eliza believed firmly in [Christian] instruction for her [eight] children,”13 and it would prove to have effects on her husband as they raised them together, and particularly as his great humblings came later. She endured his wandering and, in the end, may have won him with her life and conduct (1 Peter 3:1).

Hamilton was there at the battle of Yorktown in 1781, leading a battalion and with distinction. After the war, his ascending career seemed nonstop. In 1782, he was appointed to Congress from New York, under the Articles of Confederation. Here he would see firsthand how weak and inadequate they were for a league of thirteen states.

In 1783, he resigned from Congress to establish a law practice in New York. In 1786, he wrote the letter calling delegates to a convention in Philadelphia for the summer of 1787. He attended this Constitutional Convention, and the following year he organized and edited The Federalist Papers, partnering with Madison and John Jay to persuade New Yorkers to ratify the new Constitution.

Under Hamilton’s lead in 1789–1795, the Treasury Department drove the executive branch and new government. He grew the department to more than five hundred employees, while the War Department had a dozen employees, and Jefferson’s State Department only six.

And yet it was in this rapid rise, in his shooting up like a rocket, that cracks began to show — in particular, in 1791, in the adultery that Chernow calls “one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment.”14 It would be whispered in private rooms until 1797 and then proclaimed from rooftops. We’ll come back to this in the next section.15

3. His ‘Opportunistic Religiosity’ (1792–1800)

When he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. (Luke 15:14–16)

Washington began his second term in 1793. In January, France’s Louis XVI was executed. By June, the Committee of Public Safety came to power in Paris with its Reign of Terror. France became the unceasing controversy of Washington’s second term, driving party divisions deeper between Hamilton and Jefferson, who soon resigned.

With the furor over the French Revolution came fresh atheistic fears among many faithful Christians. Hamilton saw the pro-French Jeffersonians exposed and “attempted to enlist God in the Federalist party to buttress that party’s temporal power,” write Adair and Harvey.16

Unfortunately Hamilton’s blasphemous attempts to use God for his all-too-human ends were extremely successful with large numbers of the clergy. . . . Actually it is during these years when religious slogans were so often on his lips that Hamilton seems farther from God and from any understanding of his Son, Jesus Christ, than at any time in his whole career.17

Like Jefferson, Hamilton was eventually worn down by political libel and public slander. In debt, with a growing family at home, he decided to return to New York in 1795. In this season, his early forties, he would experience the beginning of his many humblings.

The Adams administration, beginning in 1797, would bring mounting frustrations — both for him and him for Adams. He began to make several terrible judgment calls. In October of 1799, Adams broke with his cabinet (and Hamilton) to send an envoy to France, and in the wake of that came what Chernow calls “a total loss of perspective by Hamilton, the nadir of his judgment.”18

The dominoes began to fall, and Hamilton with them. In December of 1799, Washington died, his surrogate father. By February 1800, it became clear that the Federalist party was turning from Hamilton to Adams. Then, by the end of April, Aaron Burr and his opposing coalition won control of New York. In a matter of months, Hamilton’s political power and influence crumbled.

To top it all off, in the election of 1800, his old cabinet rival Jefferson won the presidency — and with Burr as vice president. As Adair and Harvey write, “Perhaps never in all American political history has there been a fall from power so rapid, so complete, so final as Hamilton’s in the period from October 1799 to November 1800.”19

And all this just eighteen months after the papers got ahold of his six-year secret, the adultery of 1791. Hamilton, hoping to protect his financial reputation, published a painfully long and detailed pamphlet confessing to his marital infidelity. He plainly did not know when to stop. His finances may have been in order. His soul was not.

Back to the Squalor

From a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s adultery appears as his most glaring flaw, even more obviously and unqualifiedly than the duel. His adultery showed how far his heart had wandered — and reminds us of the delusion of power and success. We can indeed be most vulnerable when we feel strongest.

There once was a great king in Israel who, as a prelude to infidelity, remained in the city when others went to war (2 Samuel 11:1). So too Hamilton, at the height of his power in 1791 — and with so much work to do — stayed in Philadelphia while his family summered upstate.

That summer, a 23-year-old woman approached him, telling of an abusive husband and asking for help. Later, in the notorious Reynolds Pamphlet, his extended public confession in 1797, he would write that he came to her door with monetary assistance. “Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.”20 This is the first of several 1790s instances about which Chernow, even as the cool-headed biographer (and measured admirer), appears stunned by Hamilton’s folly:

Such stellar success might have bred an intoxicating sense of invincibility. But his vigorous reign had also made him the enfant terrible of the early republic, and a substantial minority of the country was mobilized against him. This should have made him especially watchful of his reputation. Instead, in one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment, he entered into a sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds that, if it did not blacken his name forever, certainly sullied it. From the lofty heights of statesmanship, Hamilton fell back into something reminiscent of the squalid world of his West Indian boyhood.21

Yet even with the Reynolds affair made public, devastating as it was, it was still another eighteen months before Hamilton began to utterly crumble.

4. His Final Season of Suffering and Seeking (1800–1804)

When he came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.’” And he arose and came to his father. (Luke 15:17–20)

One great irony of Hamilton’s story, and caution for us today, is that when he was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ. And yet as he was humbled, turning again to Jesus, he could have been at his worst politically.

More terrible judgments followed the Reynolds Pamphlet.22 Even as late as the spring of 1802, he wrote a letter to fellow Federalist James Bayard proposing what he called a “Christian Constitutional Society.” I suspect this to be a genuine, though terribly naive, expression of his renewed Christian faith. It may also be one last gasp of his 1790s opportunism.

When Hamilton was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ.

To counter Jefferson’s French-friendly Democratic Societies, Hamilton proposed a new society that would exist to promote (1) the Christian religion and (2) the Constitution of the United States. He saw both under Jeffersonian threat, but his Federalist interests were clearly political, or at least politically expedient.

“By signing up God against Thomas Jefferson,” says Chernow, “Hamilton hoped to make a more potent political appeal. . . . Hamilton was not honoring religion but exploiting it for political ends.” However misguided the effort, Chernow can’t help but recognize, “It is striking how religion preoccupied Hamilton during his final years.”23

Quiet Uptown

In November of 1801, the most devastating domino fell: his eldest child, Philip, age nineteen, died in a duel, defending his father’s honor. Learning of the duel, Hamilton had advised his son to take the righteous course and throw away his shot, that is, shoot into the air. But his son’s opponent did not. This would prove to be Alexander’s greatest devastation. Soon he would write to a friend that Philip’s death was “beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.”24

Yet by late 1801, Hamilton was plainly taking deep solace in Christianity and Philip’s profession of faith: “It was the will of heaven and [Philip] is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity.”25

“While the sufferings and frustrations resulting from political failure started Hamilton’s religious conversion,” claim Adair and Harvey, it was this “terrible personal tragedy [that] crystalized the change.”26 “This plenitude of sorrow . . . accounts for a totally new note — the first echo in all his writings of ‘Thy will be done’ — that now appears in certain Hamilton letters. . . . The old Hamilton arrogance had disappeared.”27

Hamilton’s spiritual renewal in this last season is too pronounced to ignore, whether in a first-rate biography or on Broadway. His reawakening appears to have just preceded (and prepared him for) Philip’s death. Miranda partially captures it in the aftermath of his loss, in the culminating song “Quiet Uptown,” where Hamilton sings,

I take the children to church on Sunday,A sign of the cross at the door,And I pray.That never used to happen before.

What may be a “grace too powerful to name” on Broadway is precisely the name we in the church know as powerful. And we name the name: Jesus.

In July of 1804, on the night before his own deadly duel, he would write,

This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career to begin, as I humbly hope from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality. . . . The consolations of [Christianity], my beloved, can alone support you and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world. Adieu best of wives and best of women.28

And so we ask, Why the duel with Burr? Just three years prior, he had lost his firstborn to a duel. On multiple occasions, he publicly had expressed his own disavowal of dueling. How could he agree to this, and especially now as a professing Christian?

Instead of engaging in speculation, I’ll let Oliver Wolcott Jr., Hamilton’s successor as secretary of the treasury, express his sense of its senselessness. On the day of the duel, Wolcott wrote to his wife that

Gen’l Hamilton . . . reasoned himself into a belief, that though the custom [of dueling] was in the highest degree criminal, yet there were peculiar reasons which rendered it proper for him, to expose himself to Col. Burr in particular. This instance of the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point, has often been noticed as one of the most common yet unaccountable frailties of human nature.29

This was, thought Wolcott, “the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point.” Wolcott added at the end his letter, “Gen’l Hamilton has of late years expressed his conviction of the truths of the Christian Religion.”

However tragic and ill-conceived his decision to row across the river to the dueling grounds in New Jersey, that would be not the place of his death. Hamilton threw away his shot while Burr’s bullet struck him in the liver and lodged in his spine. Hamilton seemed dead onsite but revived on the open water while being rowed back to New York. He lived another 31 hours, until 2:00pm the following day.

Mercy Through the Redeemer

Hamilton’s professions of faith on his deathbed are by no means his only indications of Christian faith, but they are his clearest and most documented.

First, he called for Benjamin Moore, episcopal bishop of New York and president of Columbia (formerly King’s) College. He asked to receive the Lord’s Supper. Hamilton was not a church member, so Moore hesitated to administer the sacrament (he would return later and administer it). Moore asked him, “Do you sincerely repent of your sins past? Have you a lively faith in God’s mercy through Christ, with a thankful remembrance of the death of Christ? And are you disposed to live in love and charity with all men?”30

According to Moore, Hamilton “lifted up his hands and said, ‘With the utmost sincerity of heart I can answer those questions in the affirmative — I have no ill will against Col. Burr. I met him with a fixed resolution to do him no harm. I forgive all that happened.’” Moore says that he “had no reason to doubt [Hamilton’s] sincerity.”31

Rich Grace, Only Refuge

A second minister also visited Hamilton on his deathbed — his old friend Rev. John M. Mason, pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church.32 Mason told Hamilton that he

had nothing to address him in his affliction, but that same gospel of the grace of God, which it is my office to preach to the most obscure and illiterate: that in the sight of God all men are on a level, as all men have sinned and come short of his glory [Romans 3:23]; and that they must apply to him for pardon and life, as sinners, whose only refuge is in his grace by righteousness through our Lord Jesus Christ [Romans 5:21].

Hamilton responded, “I perceive it to be so. I am a sinner: I look to his mercy.” Mason then turned his attention to

the infinite merit of the Redeemer, as the propitiation for sin, the sole ground of our acceptance with God; the sole channel of his favor to us; and cited the following passages of Scripture: There is no name given under heaven among men, whereby we must be saved, but the name of Jesus [Acts 4:12]. He is able to save them to the uttermost who come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them [Hebrews 7:25]. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin [1 John 1:7].

Mason reminded him that “the precious blood of Christ was as effectual and as necessary to wash away the transgression which had involved him in suffering, as any other transgression; and that he must there, and there alone, seek peace for his conscience. . . . He assented, with strong emotions, to these representations, and declared his abhorrence of the whole transaction.”33 Mason then

recurred to the topic of the divine compassions; the freedom of pardon in the Redeemer Jesus to perishing sinners. “That grace, my dear General, which brings salvation is rich, rich.”

“Yes,” interrupted [Hamilton], “it is rich grace.”

“And on that grace,” continued [Mason], “a sinner has the highest encouragement to repose his confidence, because it is tendered to him upon the surest foundation; the scripture testifying that ‘we have redemption through the blood of Jesus, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace’ [Ephesians 1:7].”

At this point, Hamilton looked upward and said with emphasis, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Mason’s narrative continues with more Scripture and further affirmations from Hamilton.

Finally, writes Mason,

As I was retiring, [Hamilton] lifted up his hands in the attitude of prayer, and said feebly, “God be merciful to — ” His voice sunk, so that I heard not the rest distinctly, but understood him to quote the words of the publican in the Gospel, and to end with “me a sinner.”34

Puritan Roots and Prayers

Clearly Hamilton’s late-life return to his early faith and his deathbed confessions raise questions. As Christians, many of us may feel both relief and some uneasiness at the whole scene. That Hamilton never joined a church is troubling. Not many thieves on the cross have God as their Father but not the church as their mother. That is sobering.35 Perhaps he was an exception.

And those of us who grieve his long, tragic journey into the far country of political success and pride want to redouble our resolve to live now for what matters eternally and to welcome God’s humbling hand if we realize ourselves to have strayed.

Lest Hamilton’s late-life Christian faith contribute to a distorted impression of the nation’s founding, we’re wise to concede that this, meager as it is, may be one of the clearer affirmations of evangelical faith among the inner circle of the founders. You will not find such in Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, or Madison. (One exception is John Jay.) This is not to make much of Hamilton’s reticent and late-flowering faith but to own how unevangelical was the nation’s founding.

Hamilton’s political career is a warning to those today who pine to be in the room “where it happens.” Hamilton was there. It did not satisfy. For him, it led to the eroding and near ruin of what mattered most. His life is a cautionary tale.

Hamilton’s succession of humblings and his late-flowering Christian faith show us a man who rose to the top and was not satisfied with what this world alone has on offer. Military achievement and fame, political influence and position, success as a lawyer, an adoring wife, and eight children — his heart remained restless until, through much of his own sin and folly, he fell headlong.

But in his great humblings, he did seem to “come to himself” and find rest in the Savior in whom he first professed faith in his youth. For years, his life looked to Christian eyes like the third soil, “choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life” (Luke 8:14). But perhaps, as Hamilton wrote in his hurricane letter, his Lord did “snatch me from ruin.” In his final season, and particularly in his clear final confessions, he professed “tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

May we too not only depart, but live now with such a reliance — and observing Hamilton’s follies, be spared some of our own.