How do we not lose our evangelical souls in the Middle East? While we will not always agree on how to carry out our responsibilities in the public and political spheres, one thing we must commit to is equally critiquing all parties involved in a conflict…Yes, Israel policies have sometimes increased Palestinian suffering and have been injurious but Arab governments themselves have also contributed to this situation—Egypt has closed their own borders and tunnels to Gaza and has kept aid from getting in.  And so has Hamas, who hid their soldiers at Al Shifa hospital, and who Palestinians themselves accuse of gross mismanagement, corruption and violence towards anyone who opposes them.

The current war between Israel and the terrorist organization Hamas continues to ratchet up heat surrounding the most polarizing issue in our world today.  As Christians observing all this, our response can sometimes produce more heat than light but recently published articles like this one are well-intentioned attempts to navigate through difficult and complex current events.
Most Christians would agree that the events in the Middle East are more than political and military engagements—indeed, they also engage, at their core, moral questions concerning violence, justice and power.  But the difficulty for Christians—and where the debate really lies—is the movement from moral principles to public policy.  Suddenly, biblical principles struggle to shine with their eternal clarity as they bog down in the muck of a sinful world.  A complicated issue is made more complicated as a result.
Some have rightly argued that Dispensational theology—a recent invention in two millennia of theological reflection—has given rise to a carte blanche treatment of modern Israel and its policies towards Palestinians and Arabs.  If the modern, political state of Israel is indeed the prophetic outcome of the Scriptures, it makes sense to prejudicially side with the eternal victors as a moral “right.”  But modern, secular Israel is not a fulfillment of prophecy and Christians should be rebuked for embracing a position so poorly supported in the Scriptures themselves while ignoring or minimizing the plight of non-Jews made in His image that have suffered greatly throughout the Middle East.
But woe to Christians and anyone else who swing the pendulum so far the other way that they generate further confusion.  And because there is currently so much misinformation lobbed at us regarding Israel, it deserves an informed response. It has been argued, for instance, that because Zionism—the 19th century movement to create a homeland for Jews that eventually culminated in the establishment of Israel in 1948—is a secular enterprise, “Orthodox” and “Torah Jews” are even today opposed to the State of Israel as a secular, political entity.  This is proclaimed as evidence that Zionism, despite its current success, isn’t supported by religious Judaism but the facts do not bear that out.
While many Orthodox Jews did oppose Zionism before World War II, the Holocaust changed all that.  And just three years ago, Pew Research noted that support for the state of Israel is actually strongest among Orthodox Jews.
Another common assertion is as follows: when Israel was founded in 1948, Israelis immediately practiced “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” by “forcibly” removing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Arabs from their land (it is also claimed this happened again in 1967).  What isn’t given is proper context—the day after Israel declared its independence, Arab nations surrounding Israel launched a surprise assault in a united effort to sweep the Jews out to the sea (and it was war—in this case the “Six Dar War”—that preceded the 1967 refugee crisis as well).  It also ignores the historical facts that many of those who left did so on their own accord either out of fear of reprisal or because they rejected the possibility of co-existence with Jews.
It is morally troubling when assertions are made in such a way as to place moral blame almost solely on the Jews without understanding context and history.  The pursuit of a homeland is about more than a secular 19th century philosophy but about freedom from constant persecution.  Jews have been a minority for two millennia and wherever they have lived, persecution has followed them like a shadow.
There were the pogroms of 19th century Russia.  There was the Farhud (Arabic for “violent dispossession”) of 1941 Baghdad, home to an ancient Jewish community 2500 years old, where Arabs committed barbaric atrocities similar to those perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th towards Israelis.  And of course the Holocaust that killed six million Jews, which did more to unite differing Jewish opinion on Israel than anything else.  Jews have repeatedly been expelled from their lands and have come to Israel not as colonizers but as refugees.  The feeling of being hunted and hated is ever present.
Second, those opposed to Israel often use the “moral equivalency” fallacy.  It goes like this: “A has done bad things but so has B.  So B (in this case, Israel) is no better than A (Hamas).” For example, it has been said “Jews have their own terrorist organizations like Irgun,” ignoring the fact they were dismantled seventy years ago.  Or Israel is accused of genocide (while citing no evidence they are seeking to kill a whole people group) so that they are made to look no better than those seeking to kill them.
No, let us be crystal clear here—Israel is nothing like Hamas.  Let us not forget the charter of Hamas—its “constitution” and guiding document—which set out quite publicly its intention to destroy Israel and Jews when it said, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
We now know that on October 7th—in the largest loss of life of Jews since the Holocaust—Hamas committed beheadings, extreme sexual violence (mutilating sexual organs in addition to rape) and torture (though there are still people, just like the Holocaust deniers before them, who deny this and accuse Jews of fabrication).
It isn’t Israel that seeks to practice genocide (despite those now claiming Israelis are now “Nazis” in this war) but those who oppose them who are committed to obliterating their very existence.
Today, in the U.S and around the world, antisemitism is on the rise.  In the U.S., in the last year alone, incidents of violence, hate speech and similar behavior is up nearly 400% among Jews while anti-Muslim acts have risen only slightly.   The chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” which calls for the elimination of Israel and its Jews, is chanted freely in the streets by millions worldwide.  College campuses, bastions of far-left politics, have been the scenes of violence towards Jews at places like Harvard and Tulane University while the presidents of Harvard, MIT and University of Pennsylvania, under oath this week in Congressional testimony, couldn’t bring themselves to admit that calling for the genocide of Jews in speech violates codes of conduct and ethics on their campuses.
Meanwhile, on those same campuses, if you “misgender” a trans student, you are guilty of violence and hate towards that student and are then punished.  Such is the moral bankruptcy and hypocrisy of our times.
So, how do we not lose our evangelical souls in the Middle East? While we will not always agree on how to carry out our responsibilities in the public and political spheres, one thing we must commit to is equally critiquing all parties involved in a conflict (Israel is under a microscope in the global community so we don’t have to wonder if they will be critiqued).  Yes, Israel policies have sometimes increased Palestinian suffering and have been injurious but Arab governments themselves have also contributed to this situation—Egypt has closed their own borders and tunnels to Gaza and has kept aid from getting in.  And so has Hamas, who hid their soldiers at Al Shifa hospital, and who Palestinians themselves accuse of gross mismanagement, corruption and violence towards anyone who opposes them.  We must ensure that we do not create double standards concerning morality.
Violence in the Middle East is intractable, it seems, this side of the New Heavens and New Earth regardless of who perpetrates it. And so as we seek with wisdom to know how to act, we must also pray, “Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus!”
Scott Armstrong is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America is Lead Pastor at City Church-Eastside (PCA) in Atlanta, Ga.

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The “formal equivalence” approach to biblical translation strives to bring the original-language source-text to the reader by effecting as close to a word-for-word translation as possible, given the constraints of moving from one language to another. By contrast, the “dynamic equivalence” approach (sometimes called “functional equivalence”) aims to bring the reader to the source-text through a sense-for-sense translation that is less literal but putatively more comprehensible to someone unfamiliar with the cultural environment of the text’s original language. While he carefully explores the pros and cons of both approaches, to each of which he devotes an orienting chapter, it seems that professor Barton’s preference is to lean toward “formal equivalence.” 

On September 29, 1952, the D.C. Armory—capable of accommodating an audience of 10,000 and the site of numerous inaugural balls—hosted a different kind of event: a celebration of a new translation of the Bible, the Revised Standard Version (RSV), which had just been completed and was intended to replace the revered King James Version (KJV). The first copy of the RSV had been given to President Harry Truman three days earlier, but it was Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, who was the principal speaker at the Armory event. The son of the late Episcopalian bishop of Connecticut did not disappoint, welcoming the new edition while describing in eloquent terms what the King James Bible had meant to American culture and public life:
In the earliest days in the Northeast, the Book was All. The settlers came here to live their own reading of it. It was the spiritual guide, the moral and legal code, the political system, the sustenance of life, whether that meant endurance of hardship, the endless struggle against nature, battle with enemies, or the inevitable processes of life and death. And it meant to those who cast the mold of this country something very specific and very clear. It meant that the purpose of man’s journey through this life was to learn and identify his life and effort with the purpose and will of God. … But this … did not exhaust the teachings of this Bible. For it taught also that the fear of God was the love of God and that the love of God was the love of man and the service of man.
Seventy-one years later, it is inconceivable that any such scene might be replicated in 21st-century America, and not just because ours has become a far less biblically literate culture over the past seven decades. Rather, a new biblical translation would be unlikely to generate the great interest displayed in the more than 3,000 events across the country that coincided with the public release of the complete RSV, because new biblical translations have proliferated enormously in the intervening years.
As John Barton notes in his instructive new book, The Word: How We Translate the Bible and Why It Matters, the King James Version was the Bible in the Protestant Anglosphere for centuries, and so a new edition created a major shift in cultural tectonic plates. Yet Barton’s glossary of English-language editions counts over a dozen new translations since the RSV, and that process of continuously re-translating the world’s most translated book seems unlikely to abate anytime soon. Thus, a new biblical translation amid today’s biblical cornucopia would not be a big deal (even if American high culture had not become so biblically ignorant that a reporter, after asking Richard Neuhaus for a comment on some sexual scandal and being told that such shenanigans had been going on “since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden,” could follow up with, “And what garden was that, Father?”).
John Barton—Professor Emeritus of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford—does not offer his readers a guide to these various translations, and still less a detailed evaluation of each of them. And indeed, Barton declares his summary position early: “While there can be translations that are simply wrong, there cannot be one that is uniquely right.” Rather, The Word is a thorough mapping (to use the author’s cartographic image) of the translators’ terrain. And that complex landscape is, to simplify, defined by two promontories.
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Better than the awkward desperation of “cool Christianity” is the quiet confidence of faithful Christianity. More compelling than any celebrity pastor or bespoke packaging is a church’s steady, committed, hand-to-the-plow presence that creates lasting change for the better in lives and communities.
At the beginning of the 21st century, “relevance” became the prevailing buzzword in Western evangelical Christianity. Sensing new urgency to make the gospel more appealing to the next generation—which polls showed were leaving faith in greater numbers—pastors, church leaders, and Christian influencers tried to rebrand faith. This was the era of Relevant magazine’s launch, Donald Miller’s Blue Like Jazz, and Rob Bell’s ascent as a sort of evangelical Steve Jobs. It was the moment when plaid, skinny jeans, beards, and tattoos became the pastor’s unofficial uniform. It was a public-relations effort to pitch a less legalistic, friendlier-to-culture, “emergent” faith that was far from the dusty religion of your grandparents.
I chronicled this awkward era in painstaking detail in Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide, which released 10 years ago this month. In many ways the book is a quaint relic by now—a time capsule of a certain segment of evangelicalism at the turn of the millennium. But the book’s dated nature proves the point I was trying to make—that “cool Christianity” is, if not an oxymoron, at least an exercise in futility. A relevance-focused Christianity sows the seeds of its own obsolescence. Rather than rescuing or reviving Christianity, hipster faith shrinks it to the level of consumer commodity, as fickle and fleeting as the latest runway fashion. To locate Christianity’s relevance in its ability to find favor among the “cool kids”—just the latest in a long history of evangelical obsession with image—is seriously misguided.
Here are a few reasons why.
Chasing ‘Relevance’ Is Exhausting and Unsustainable
As I write in the final chapter, it’s problematic to assume that true relevance means constantly keeping up with the trends and “meeting the culture where it’s at”:
This mindset assumes no one will listen to us if we aren’t loud and edgy; no one will take us seriously if we aren’t conversant with culture; and no one will find Jesus interesting unless he is made to fit the particularities of the zeitgeist. But this sort of “relevance” is defined chiefly and inextricably by the one thing Christianity resolutely defeats: impermanence. Things that are permanent are not faddish or fickle or trendy. They are solid. . . . True relevance lasts.
My argument centered around the inherent transience of “cool” that makes “cool Christianity” unsustainable by definition. Today’s hip, cover-boy pastor is tomorrow’s has-been. This year’s fast-growing, bustling-with-20-somethings cool church is next year’s “I used to go there” old news. Near instant obsolescence is baked into the system of hipster Christianity (or hipster anything). It’s telling that the majority of the “hip Christian figureheads” I profiled in the book are now far off the radar of evangelical influence. Donald Miller is a marketing consultant. Mark Driscoll’s Seattle megahurch dissolved. Rob Bell is a new-age guru endorsed by Oprah and Elizabeth Gilbert. And so forth. That many of the names and trends highlighted in Hipster Christianity a mere decade ago are now nearly forgotten (and would be replaced with a whole new set of personalities and trends today) proves the book’s point.
I know a few people who have stayed in hip churches for most of the last decade, but many more have moved on to another (usually liturgical and refreshingly boring) church. Others have left Christianity entirely. Turns out a church that seemed super cool to your 23-year-old self may not be appealing to your 33-year-old, professional-with-kids self. Turns out a church preaching sermons about “God in the movies!” more than the doctrine of the atonement doesn’t serve you well in the long run. Turns out a pastor you can drink with, smoke with, and watch Breaking Bad with is not as important as a pastor whose uncool holiness might—just might—push you to grow in Christlikeness yourself.
David Wells has it right, in The Courage to Be Protestant, when he says: