Among New Testament commands we’re quick to qualify today (or just ignore altogether), Romans 16:16 may stand out:

Greet one another with a holy kiss.

Really? We might chuckle at the thought of everyone kissing each other before the Sunday service. At least not in our time and place, we think. Maybe other cultures; not ours.
And we might be reasonable to respond that way.

Then we find the apostle repeating the charge again at the end of three more letters (1 Corinthians 16:20; 2 Corinthians 13:12; 1 Thessalonians 5:26), and Peter too (1 Peter 5:14). Even if Jesus might approve of our not doing exactly what his apostles said, but finding appropriate expressions for today, do we have a “theology of the kiss” to guide us?

Look across the breadth of Scripture, and we discover a surprising (and perhaps uncomfortable) amount of kissing — almost fifty instances. And the nature and kinds of these kisses show that this isn’t simply an ancient-world custom. Rather, this kissing is distinctive to the people of the one true God, and a mark of his glory. Their lips bring him honor. A kissing kingdom says something about its sovereign. Its kisses reflect a king who captures human hearts, not just minds and duty.

“A kissing kingdom says something about its sovereign.”

Here, we’ll survey a theology of kissing in the Old Testament, and identify one key takeaway for the church age. Then, in a future article, we’ll draw attention to two special instances of kissing in the New Testament, and further fill out the rich background against which the apostles enjoin the holy kiss.

What’s in a Biblical Kiss?

Before looking at several kinds of kissing in Scripture, let’s first ask about the nature of the act itself and its meaning. What makes a kiss significant?

First, to state the obvious, but necessarily so in increasingly digital and remote times, kissing requires bodily, physical proximity. It assumes nearness, even intimacy. No one blows kisses in the Bible. When Isaac was old and his eyes were dim, he said to Jacob (who he thought was Esau), “Come near and kiss me, my son” (Genesis 27:26). A filial kiss would bring him close enough to smell and touch, and confirm which son it was. So too, a generation later, when Jacob himself was old, eyes dim with age, he brought near Joseph’s sons that he might kiss and bless them (Genesis 48:10). Such nearness requires a willingness to touch and be touched, and that with a sensitive and sacred member: the lips.

Kissing, then, also requires trust — that is, neither party fears imminent physical harm from the other (which could be easily enacted at such close range). The notorious offender here is Joab who twice abuses such trust. In 2 Samuel 3, he drew near to Abner under the pretense of peace and stabbed him in the stomach to avenge a brother’s death in battle. In 2 Samuel 20, Joab drew near to Amasa and took him “by the beard with his right hand to kiss him.” Assuming friendship, Amasa did not anticipate a sword in Joab’s hand (2 Samuel 20:9). Kissing requires a level of trust, making it a mark of peculiar depravity to betray, and exploit, a seeming ally under the pretense of a kiss.

Given the requisite nearness and trust, the kiss, in its essence, shows affection. It is a “sign,” an outward expression of an inward posture of the heart. Early in the biblical story, the kiss is typically a demonstration of heartfelt affection at the reunion of long-estranged relatives, whether Jacob with Rachel (Genesis 29:11), or Laban with Jacob (Genesis 29:13), or Esau with Jacob (Genesis 33:4), Joseph with his brothers (Genesis 45:15), Jacob with his sons (Genesis 48:10), Moses with Aaron (Exodus 4:27), or Moses with his father-in-law (Exodus 18:7). These are family members reuniting, not enemies securing new peace. The kiss is an act of trust and love among those who already share in peace.

Kinds of Kissing

As we work through the many instances of kissing in Scripture, we find several distinct types. Far and away, the most common are the greeting kiss or farewell kiss. They demonstrate familial affection, expressing ongoing love within established relationships. Such kisses, as we might expect, often accompany an embrace (Genesis 29:13; 33:4; 48:10; also Luke 15:20). Biblical figures also kiss goodbye, often with tears: Laban kissing his grandchildren (Genesis 31:28, 55); Joseph, his dying father (Genesis 50:1); and Naomi, her daughters-in-law (Ruth 1:9, 14). David and Jonathan, in an unusual covenant of friendship, kiss each other and weep at their parting (1 Samuel 20:41).

A second type of kiss is the kind that we today (at least in the West) probably assume would be the majority, though it’s not: the marital kiss. We might think to flip first to the Song of Solomon, and there it is, at the very outset: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine” (Song of Solomon 1:2). While the couple is here not yet married, they are anticipating their covenant love. Their kisses, then, are no less familial, but now they are becoming familial in the most exclusive and intimate of senses. The foil to this kiss, of course, would be the adulterous kiss of Proverbs 7. The “forbidden woman . . . dressed as a prostitute, wily of heart” lies in wait for the fool. “She seizes him and kisses him” (Proverbs 7:5, 10, 13). This is an evil, unholy kiss, the literal prostituting of the lips.

If readers today are most familiar with romantic and marital kisses, we likely least expect the regal kisses wrapped up with ancient kingship. When the kiss comes from a subject to his king, we might call it a “kiss of homage.” More than just a bow, which can happen at a distance and accents submission, the kiss expresses a heart of devotion and love, even delight. The kiss of homage also presumes the trust of the king, who allows a subject into such proximity with the dignitary. When the prophet Samuel anointed David king, he “took a flask of oil and poured it on his head and kissed him” (1 Samuel 10:1). As he does, Samuel expresses his glad devotion to the newly anointed king.

“The kiss, sincerely expressed, communicates not only welcome but delight.”

But in a king’s presence, kisses can go both ways. When a kiss comes from the king to his subject, it serves as a great sign of blessing. In 2 Samuel 14:33, when Absalom has been estranged from his father for two years, he comes into the king’s presence for the first time and bows. David then welcomes his estranged son with a kiss that is not only a familial (and filial) greeting but a kingly kiss of blessing. The king communicates that he holds no grudge against his son (a father welcomes home his prodigal, Luke 15:20), and as king, his kiss expresses not only his own personal acceptance but the whole kingdom’s.

Kiss the Son

Among the many instances of kissing in the Old Testament, one regal kiss stands out above the rest — the one of Psalm 2:12:

Kiss the Son,lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,for his wrath is quickly kindled.Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

Here “the Son” is God’s anointed king over his people (Psalm 2:2; Acts 4:25 attributes the psalm to David). Hostile nations rage and unbelieving kings take counsel against him, and in doing so they plot against the God who has installed him — that is, the God who laughs at such hubris, and speaks in holy wrath, “As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill” (Psalm 2:6). This turns the threat utterly on its head. It is not God’s appointed king, “the Son,” who’s actually in danger, but any and all who oppose him.

The king then issues his enemies a warning: “Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling” (Psalm 2:11). The next utterance declares what form such a dramatic change of heart should take:

Kiss the Son.

This is not just a bow of submission. Any defeated foe can cower, and fall to his knees, when overpowered. But Psalm 2 calls for a kiss of homage, and kissing expresses the movement, and transformation, of the heart. Former enemies not only become servants and kiss their new king; they become worshipers in their very soul.

Why So Many Kisses?

In the end, the nature of the kiss speaks volumes about the God who rules over all, the glory of his Anointed, and the faith of his people in him. A people who kiss — whether to greet each other or in the act of worship — testify to a dynamic life of the heart, much like a people who sing. The people of the one true God not only think; they feel. They not only confess; they kiss. They not only affirm, but they do so with affection. And the people of God, in ancient Israel and the early church, are singers and kissers.

The kiss, sincerely expressed, communicates not only welcome but delight. It is no mere exchange of niceties, but a communication of steadfast love. While, for many of us, the “holy kiss” may not, at present, fall in the acceptable (or comfortable) range of normal greetings, we will do well to expand our expressions of holy affection, and find meaningful ways to communicate not only acceptance to our fellows in Christ but affection for them.

And all the while, in expressing our affection for his people, we say something about our God and King as the one who not only moves the human heart, but himself is our final satisfaction. When we “kiss the Son,” we not only acknowledge him, in word and in worship, as Lord and Savior, but we express delight in him, in our hearts, as our supreme Treasure. And so we are, in Christ, a kissing people.

“What do you consider a ‘good death’?”

A furrow creased my eyebrows. The interviewer and I had spent the last ninety minutes discussing the intricacies of end-of-life care, delving into hard topics such as life-support measures, hospice, and advance directives. I navigated those delicate subjects with confidence, but this question so troubled me that I lapsed into silence. “I hate that phrase,” I finally answered.

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Really? Why?”

While she awaited my reply, a plethora of faces and voices cluttered my mind. I saw swollen eyes and tear-stained cheeks. I felt desperate grasps of my arm as loved ones crumpled to the floor in agony. I recalled the questions that hung in the air after the dying drew their last breath. I heard cries of shock and heartbreak echoing on and on, like breakers on a relentless sea.

“Because death is never good,” I said. The memories gripped me, and my voice caught. “Grief testifies to the backwardness of it. That we cry hints at an undoing of God’s created order. He designed us for something different.”

Is Death Ever Good?

The question of a “good death” may seem reasonable, even natural, given shifting views on death in Western countries. In 2021, ten thousand people in Canada died by physician-assisted suicide (PAS), wherein a doctor prescribes a lethal dose of medication for a person to self-administer, ending his own life. Canadian law now permits individuals with mental rather than terminal illness to pursue the practice. In other words, those who are otherwise healthy but suffer from psychological conditions, like depression, can seek medical help to end their own lives. In the United States, the legalization of PAS creeps across more and more states yearly.

Such trends hint at an increasingly prevalent viewpoint that death, rather than a terrible consequence of the fall, is a reasonable option to escape suffering. According to this thinking, death can be “good” if it provides relief from pain. What is more, the movement reflects a culture that upholds self-determination as an ultimate good; we live for ourselves, rather than for God.

Dear friend, when you encounter such ideas, remember that Scripture refers to death not as a phase to celebrate, but as the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). Death comes to us all, and God can and does work through even this for good to those who love him (Romans 8:28), but never lull yourself into the lie that death itself is anything but the terrible wages of our sin, from which we desperately need salvation (Romans 6:23). Remember that “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14).

Scripture is abundantly clear that we were never meant for death. And lest we forget, the experience of grief — to borrow from C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain — shouts as with a megaphone to remind us.

For Now We Groan

God has confronted me with the harsh realities of death and grief more frequently than I ever would choose. As a trauma surgeon, I witnessed deaths both sudden and prolonged, peaceful and traumatic. Many of these losses imprinted on my memory, the tragedies and sorrows burned into my mind as with a branding iron.

I’ll never forget the mother who cried, “You were supposed to save my baby!” when I couldn’t rescue her young son from his injuries after a car accident. I remember another mother crawling into her daughter’s hospital bed to hold her as she drew her last breath, how her words eked out, strangled by her sobs. I flash back to the wife who clenched her fists and cried out to the sky, the father who fell to the floor and screamed, the families — so many — who held the hands of their loved ones and wept in subdued, hushed tones as the monitor tracing dwindled. Afterward, they would drift out of the room as though stumbling through a dream, their eyes bloodshot, their minds far away and disbelieving.

In all the moments I spent at the bedside of the dying, I witnessed none where pain did not overcome the survivors. Even in deaths that were anticipated, like those among elderly people who had suffered the ravages of long-standing terminal illness, the loss left scars. Families who voiced acceptance of a loved one’s impending death struggled afterward, blindsided by the abrupt absence of someone dear to them. It was as if a part of their heart had been removed suddenly.

What Death Leaves Behind

Weeks after a death, I’ve had loved ones come and express to me surprise that grief had so afflicted them, and at how deeply the hurt coursed. Reminders of a loved one’s quirks — her fondness for emojis, his habit of calling promptly at eight o’clock in the morning — would break into their days, and suddenly their wounds would open anew. They’d struggle even to breathe.

Death does this. Even in the most merciful of scenarios, like the losses for which we feel prepared, death leaves suffering in its wake. Even when it occurs peacefully and quietly, death guts the hearts of those who remain.

The reality of grief — the phenomenon of heartache after we’ve bid someone farewell this side of heaven — hints that we were made for a different world, a different fate. We were created for neither death nor sorrow, but for God, the one who made us in his everlasting image to steward his vibrant creation, to be fruitful, and to multiply (Genesis 1:22, 27). Apart from him, all creation groans (Romans 8:22). Apart from him, the soul balks at the brokenness into which our sin has plunged us and cries out for rescue.

Man of Sorrows

By grace, God provided the rescue for which our souls so desperately thirst (Psalm 42:1–2). And he accomplished our salvation astonishingly, magnificently, remarkably, through “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).

Our Savior knows the burden of grief that so torments us. In Gethsemane, as he anticipated bearing the crushing wrath of God in our place, Jesus was “very sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38), “and being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Even as we cry out and lament, and our hearts break, our hope springs from the work of a Savior who can sympathize with our every pang and tear (Hebrews 4:15). He laid down his life for us, willingly, to free us from the bonds of death that so pain us (John 10:18).

We weep and grieve because our world is fallen, “but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4–5). The sufferings of this world, and our enslavement to sin and death, are precisely why Jesus came. Through the cross, he has overcome the world (John 16:33). Through his resurrection, the wages we once owed have been “swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54). We have been “born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3).

Weep No More

The horrors of death and grief point to our experience as Eden’s exiles, displaced from a world without suffering. Through Christ, the world for which we yearn — a world without tragedy and affliction, a world where death mars no complexion and tears dampen no cheek — is not a lofty ideal or childish daydream, but a promise, an assurance, “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading” (1 Peter 1:4).

Apart from Christ, our “hurt is incurable,” and our “wound is grievous” (Jeremiah 30:12). Yet by Christ’s own wounds — wounds he suffered as he walked “through the valley of the shadow of death” in our place (Psalm 23:4) — we are healed (1 Peter 2:24). Although for now we groan, Christ is making all things new (Revelation 21:5). When we join him in the world for which we were made, in the new heaven and new earth, he will wipe away every tear from our eyes. Death, that gray shadow harrowing the heart, shall be no more. Grief and sorrow will fade away like withered grass.

And we will “dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Psalm 23:6).

“Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?”

So asked a curious lady on the streets of Philadelphia in September 1787, giving voice to the question of her fellow citizens. The “Doctor” to whom she directed her query was none other than the aging Benjamin Franklin, who was emerging from the Constitutional Convention. Delegates from across the colonies had met all summer in their city. Beyond Pennsylvania, twelve other colonies waited to hear from the Franklins, Washingtons, Madisons, and Hamiltons, What is it?

“A Republic,” Franklin replied, and then, with his typical wit, added, “if you can keep it.”

For almost 240 years, the collective American psyche has often suspected — sometimes mildly, other times more acutely — that the republic was fragile, and someday soon, an ascendant Caesar would take it away, as happened with Rome’s republic. Frequently, left- and right-leaning parties have suspected the other side. Franklin’s memorable condition “if you can keep it” has been explained against an array of looming threats.

No Christian Founding

Such suspicions played out ferociously in the 1790s, the Constitution’s first full decade. Some suspected Washington; more suspected Hamilton, his de facto prime minister. By 1800, the Federalists suspected Jefferson. Long had Jefferson and Hamilton suspected each other, and now both suspected Aaron Burr. Hamilton and Burr would soon suspect each other — even after both had fallen from power — and take it to the dueling grounds.

Those early administrations in the new republic were not idyllic, peaceful, and pristine, like we might presume from elementary history lessons. Nor were the 1790s as culturally Christian as many today might assume. An early form of what we might now call “secularism” was on the rise, and it was widespread, particularly in the halls of influence. (Conservative evangelicals at the time would have called it “infidelity,” their watchword for Deism and progressive, Enlightenment Christianity.)

The Declaration of July 4, 1776, had mentioned “Nature’s God” and “Creator,” but that is a far cry from any distinctively Christian notion. A decade later, in 1787, the drafters of the Constitution found no need to mention the divine at all. Jefferson, of course, made his own Bible of what he was willing to accept (and not) in the Gospels, and Washington, despite his public mentions of Providence, was conspicuously reticent to say the name of Jesus. Formally, the founding of the United States was not distinctively Christian. In fact, at the time, perhaps as few as 10 percent of Americans were church members.

That is strikingly low compared to almost 40 percent in 1860, on the cusp of the Civil War, and more than 60 percent in the post-WWII era of the 1950s and 1960s. So, what happened that made America feel so culturally Christian from the Civil War until Civil Rights?

God’s Surprising Work

Given the acute sense of decline that U.S. Christians today have lived through — from the heights of church membership and attendance in the 50s and 60s, to the subsequent dip in the 70s and 80s, the small uptick in the early 90s, and now the rapid decline of the last two decades — we should not be surprised that many alive today assume a simple declension narrative. That is, they observe the decline of the last twenty years, or the decline of the last seventy years, and project that trajectory back onto the full 250 years of the nation, presuming the founding to be the height from which we’ve fallen. But such is fiction.

For many, the present sense of alarm stems from a recency bias, comparing their own sense of the state of our union to what’s been mediated to them in their own lifetime — whether in school, in conversation, through television, or now through social media. But the 1950s proves to be a very different standard of comparison than the 1790s.

As for Christianity and the church, American history has been far less a smooth downward trajectory and far more a story punctuated by the surprising work of God. Some historians talk of third and fourth “great awakenings” in the late nineteenth century and in the 1960s and 70s. But most fundamentally, the Second Great Awakening significantly altered the landscape of American life in the early 1800s and produced a nation that felt different, more Christian, than the founding.

How was it that this Second Great Awakening made America feel more Christian? The answer isn’t government power. Neither the Apostles’ Creed nor even God was added to the Constitution. Governments at the national, state, and local levels did not newly mandate Christian professions or church membership, or censor free speech by those deemed heretical.

What changed the social landscape was widespread revival and Christian mission. It was the growing and bearing fruit of the Christian gospel — the power of God, not government, through the movement of his Spirit, making much of his crucified and risen Son. From around 1810 to 1840, the tenor of American life changed, in a way Franklin and Jefferson never would have foreseen, through a Second Great Awakening that lasted far longer and had a far greater impact than the First of the 1730s and 40s.

Religion Indispensable?

Whatever lay behind Franklin’s sly “if you can keep it,” Washington, through the pen of Hamilton, expressed his concerns for the republic in his 1797 farewell address. Framed as “the disinterested warnings of a parting friend,” he warned first of the destructive forces of partisanship, and he praised “religion and morality” as “indispensable” to the prosperity of the republic. And note again that the “religion and morality” in view is not expressly Christian.

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” he wrote, “religion and morality are indispensable supports.” Moreover, “let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.”

Now, on the one hand, from a Christian point of view, these are surprisingly measured commendations of “religion and morality.” Our Scriptures, from beginning to end, aren’t the least bit affirming of paganism so long as it’s religious and moral. So too, Washington’s frame honors and appreciates religion not as true and valuable in itself, but in terms of its usefulness for the life and prosperity of the republic.

But on the other hand, in our increasingly secular climate, with immorality or amorality seemingly on the rise, Washington’s affirmation of “religion and morality” is met with enthusiasm by many Christians. Oh, for a return to virtue and order, for more men and women of principle, for a moral citizenry — the kind that Washington and Franklin believed would be necessary to keep a republic.

‘We Need to Work’

In a recent interview with Kevin DeYoung, Allen Guelzo (who, according to George F. Will, is “today’s most profound interpreter of this nation’s history and significance”) calls American Christians to remember the heart, and hands, of that Second Great Awakening that so transformed the nation’s life. When DeYoung asks, What can we do if it seems like interest in virtue, and the Christian foundations for that societal virtue, have almost disappeared? Guelzo answers, “We need to work.” He explains,

When I hear people say today, “Oh, if we could only get back to a Christian America,” my response is, Then we need to work as hard as the people who created the Second Great Awakening. We need to dedicate ourselves that way, rather than sitting on our hands complaining about it, whining about the situation we find ourselves in, and then imagining, as I’m afraid some of our friends do, that all we need to do is to put some kind of authoritarian regime in place that will enforce the Ten Commandments.

No, that’s the lazy way. If you really want to transform the culture, then you have to take on the culture itself, and you have to meet it on its own terms, and you’re going to have to arm wrestle with it. And my recommendation is that we take a serious leaf out of the book of the Second Great Awakening. If what we want are the recovery of those mores, then my recommendation is that this is a signal that some very hard work has to get done, and we are not going to accomplish it simply by waving our hands and introducing some kind of authoritarian solution.

To the degree that we would like American life to feel more Christian, or at least less anti-Christian, the lesson to take away — both from the New Testament and from our own history — is that of the Second Great Awakening and the power of God through conversion to Christ and spiritual revival and renewal. American life was first transformed not through any seizure of political power nor through the ballot box. Rather, it was transformed through Christian awakening, through the constant preaching of the gospel, through Christian disciple-making, through the widespread movement of the Holy Spirit to grant new birth and spiritual growth, and through Christian initiative and energy and hard work to plant new churches, and build Christian institutions, and establish gospel witness and vibrancy in new places.

Hands to Prayer and the Plough

Here on this 248th Fourth of July, we remember not only the nation’s markedly unevangelical founding, but also the remarkable societal changes brought about by Christian revival — and the prodigious evangelistic efforts and Spirit-blessed industry that served as kindling for that awakening.

On this anniversary of the Declaration, American Christians concerned for the state of the republic will do well not to settle for wish-dreams about seizing power but, like the evangelists and missionaries of the early nineteenth century, put their faith and hands to the plough, believing, in the Spirit, we need to work.

Revival and its lasting ripples has changed the social feel of this nation before. It remains to be seen how long we might “keep” this republic. I don’t presume it will endure until Christ’s return. But being real, rather than nostalgic, about our history, and God’s surprising work, might feed fresh hope that he could work the same remarkable changes in the days ahead, beginning in us.