After all the tumult of 2020, the anger and anxiety, I expected Christians to search for hope and healing in 2021.
I’ve never been more wrong.
Compared to 2020, this year didn’t introduce many new challenges. Instead, my top theology stories of 2021 rehearsed many of last year’s historic conflicts. Some of the sharpest evangelical thinkers have sought to explain the sources of our divisions, the cluster of sensibilities on issues all the way from ethnicity and abuse to politics and pandemic. Kevin DeYoung observed four groupings of Reformed evangelicals and labeled them (in positive terms) contrite, compassionate, careful, and courageous. “People who can affirm the same doctrinal commitments on paper,” DeYoung wrote, “are miles apart in their posture and practice.”
You won’t just find these divisions in the church, as George Packer explained in The Atlantic and in his book Last Best Hope. In fact, you can map DeYoung’s four categories onto Packer’s four Americas: contrite (Just America), compassionate (Smart America), careful (Free America), and courageous (Real America). Much as we might imagine otherwise, our theology is shaped by biography, intuition, and tribal loyalties. And when Christian theology can’t overcome natural divisions, the whole world suffers.
“If our religious men cannot live together in peace,” U.S. Senator Henry Clay said in 1852, “what can be expected of us politicians, very few of whom profess to be governed by the great principles of love?”
I expected Christians to search for hope and healing in 2021. I’ve never been more wrong.
When the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist denominations split in the 1830s and 1840s, Civil War followed. I wouldn’t go so far as to predict the same in our day. But much depends on where the final fault lines form. If they divide the contrite and compassionate from the careful and courageous, churches will struggle to offer a prophetic witness to a nation that sees everything in bright red and dark blue. If, however, the compassionate and careful find common ground if the contrite and courageous continue to polarize, then the American church might yet show a better way. Such churches point to an everlasting kingdom that refuses to despair over every manufactured and momentary panic—or even over the real examples of injustice and unbelief.
Churches can decry both abuse and abortion. They can extol both justice and justification. Indeed, they must, if they will be faithful to God’s revealed Word. With that hope and prayer for 2022, I present my latest foolhardy attempt—written from the vantage point of an American who subscribes to The Gospel Coalition’s confessional statement—to discern the top theology stories of 2021. Imagine if Christians who found fault in the church of 2021 devoted this same energy so that God would find faith among us in 2022.
10. Welcome to the metaverse.
We learned in 2021 that some trendsetting pastors believe the future of the church could be on Facebook, now known as Meta. Maybe within the next decade we’ll look back and recategorize this story as #1, based on the overwhelming resources Facebook/Meta and other leading tech companies now devote to creating online 3D worlds. Church leaders who have watched their congregations shift online since COVID-19 will need to make the case for the practical and theological value of embodied, corporate worship.
9. Rising generation debates loyalty to pre-Reformation creeds.
Especially within the Baptist tradition, younger theologians continue to contend with and against each other over the relationship between the Bible and ecumenical creeds. What began several years ago with Presbyterian criticism of theologians who find eternal relations of submission and authority (ERAS) within the Trinity has now broadened to cover theological method itself. Pointed criticism between students and their mentors suggests Baptist theologians will divide as some align with other Protestant and even Catholic and Orthodox counterparts on classical theism.
8. Verdicts revive trauma from violence in 2020.
Three guilty verdicts in the trial for the murder of Ahmaud Arbery didn’t elicit nearly so much debate among Christians as the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse in the shooting death of two men during the Kenosha riots of August 2020. Some Christians see in Rittenhouse a model for self-defense in a city that authorities allowed to devolve into anarchy. Others see him as a dangerous vigilante, even after a not-guilty verdict. Theological priority—on fighting persistent racism, or on resisting the spread of critical race theory—tends to follow which case and verdict you see as more representative of American culture in 2021.
7. Cultural and historical shape of evangelicalism scrutinized.
Unlike the Roman pontiff, no Bishop of Wheaton has the authority to define evangelicalism, which spans the globe. But that doesn’t stop authors from tugging between theological and cultural descriptions of this amorphous Protestant renewal movement. The political ascendancy of white evangelicals as an American voting bloc, especially since 2016, has spawned bestselling critiques that fault conservative Protestant theology for cultural captivity. A spiritually healthy version of deconstruction would be disenculturation, as every generation must distinguish between the timeless gospel and their myopic age.
6. Biden’s White House advances liberal agenda as Trump’s Supreme Court prepares key decisions.
Maybe the biggest reason U.S. presidential elections have taken on an apocalyptic flavor is the expanding role of the unelected Supreme Court in mediating cultural impasses. And nothing stokes the passions of American democracy quite like abortion. Liberal justices identify the pro-life argument as a “religious view” but fail to recognize that all human rights derive from theological conclusions. When President Biden’s White House demands federal funding for abortion as a public good, or new Trump-appointed Catholic justices allow state-level restrictions, they can’t help but draw conclusions about the author of life.
5. Southern Baptist dividing lines harden in closely contested presidential election.
It’s worth noting when smaller denominations such as the Presbyterian Church in America debate modern concepts of identity and release timely reports on human sexuality. But nothing shapes evangelical priorities like the massive Southern Baptist Convention, where the generation’s most influential theological educator finished third in their watershed presidential election. Fights over SBC polity and abuse that dogged Mike Stone’s second-place campaign quickly shifted to accusations of plagiarism against the winner, Ed Litton. Yet unresolved is the question outgoing president J. D. Greear left the executive committee: will the Southern or Baptist identity prevail in the SBC?
4. Afghanistan withdrawal threatens persecuted Christians.
The American population could no longer see a path to stability and victory in the two-decade war in Afghanistan. But they also recoiled at images of desperate allies seeking to escape the vengeance of America’s enemies. Christians worked behind the scenes to evacuate friends ahead of the anticipated Taliban crackdown on the underground church. But others—even Americans—stayed. Because they know the sovereign God can’t be thwarted by the Taliban, at least in eternity.
3. Vaccines add to church divisions over COVID-19 measures.
Anyone aware of Facebook mom groups in recent years could have anticipated the lackluster response among some Christians to the COVID-19 vaccines that became universally available by the first half of 2021. Vaccine skepticism remains high today across Africa as well. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Asbury Theological Seminary sued over President Biden’s vaccine mandate for any business with more than 100 employees. Famously agreeable Canadians even fought over the case of pastor James Coates in Alberta after he refused to limit capacity at his Edmonton church. Churches of all denominations, in all locations, report tension between conspiracy and authority in a pandemic that may have abated but has not ended.
2. ‘The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill’ podcast rocks the church as leaders continue to fall.
Mike Cosper’s podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is the most important breakthrough in Christian media from the last decade. Near the top of global podcast charts, this Christianity Today sensation pushed the problems of spiritual abuse to the top of church agendas, especially after more revelations of Ravi Zacharias’s abuse surfaced in 2021. Prominent churches suffered internal divisions in this atmosphere of mutual suspicion. Because many Christians today expect their leaders to affirm more than challenge them, theologians will continue to debate the proper definition and application of “empathy.”
1. U.S. Capitol storming unleashes flurry of debate over Christian nationalism.
Nine months of tension over the pandemic and politics exploded on January 6 in a surreal scene of hangman’s nooses interspersed among crosses on the U.S. Capitol lawn. Subsequent think pieces on Christian nationalism sometimes conflated appropriate patriotism with unbiblical syncretism. However, it’s still worth asking why so many Christians responded to the 2020 election results with violent anger and even now refuse to accept the results. Maybe it’s not Christian nationalism, where promises to God’s people are applied to the United States. But it might still be an over-realized eschatology or mistaken view of the covenants.
Previous Top 10 Theology Stories:
2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020.
The Gospel Coalition