Casey Chalk’s thoughtful and intelligent essay “The Plow-Boy with Scripture” (Easter 2026) misses the forest for the trees. The striking fact about Christianity is not disagreement but agreement. Atheists and agnostics like to fixate on the church’s divisions. Christians regret them as well. Yet they also understand that God has always worked through flawed people and flawed institutions. He writes straight with crooked lines.

Why doesn’t the Lord simply wake us all tomorrow morning to a world in which every doctrinal dispute has vanished? I don’t know. But a better question may be this: why, despite centuries of disputes, do Christians continue to proclaim an easily recognized faith? Why has the same Gospel remained visible across cultures, languages, nations, and eras? That enduring agreement is far more remarkable than the disagreements that so often dominate the conversation. C. S. Lewis called this phenomenon “mere Christianity,” and it is an idea Catholic apologists have never quite managed to escape.

For much of my life, I was closer to Tyndale’s plow-boy than to any theologian. Though Protestant for decades with little contact with the Catholic Church, and though I was raised within a mainline denomination whose leaders increasingly drifted toward theological liberalism, I nevertheless managed to discern Scripture’s central message: repent, believe, trust Jesus, and love your neighbor. So have countless others. The Gospel is not hidden behind a veil of theological expertise, nor is it a secret requiring an interpreter to decode. It is spelled out, illustrated, and proclaimed on page after page of Scripture in language ordinary believers can understand.

What of the Ethiopian eunuch who asked, “How can I understand unless someone guides me?” Certainly some portions of Scripture are difficult. The Old Testament prophets can be mysterious, and the New Testament itself acknowledges that some passages are hard to understand. Yet no one had to persuade me that Isaiah 53 points to Jesus any more than someone had to persuade me that Aslan is a Christ figure. I simply saw it.

Similarly, I’d argue that Chalk’s own story demonstrates the Protestant doctrine of perspicuity better than he seems to realize. He clearly understood the Gospel long before his theological crisis began. His crisis emerged not because Scripture failed to communicate the essentials but because he became increasingly preoccupied with the search for interpretive finality and intellectual resolution.

Some of Chalk’s examples prove less than he suggests. McLean Bible Church dropping formal identification with the Southern Baptist Church in order to appear more seeker-friendly is not remotely the same thing as the Episcopal Church embracing homosexuality, and his young peers were right to question E.C.U.S.A. leadership. The difference between institutional realignment and doctrinal fragmentation matters.

And the same interpretive problems Chalk attributes to Protestantism thrive inside Catholicism as well. Does Father James Martin, a pope, or a synod represent “the Church” on questions such as Hell, sexual ethics, or salvation? Unless one acquires considerable theological sophistication, how exactly is the average Catholic supposed to navigate those disputes? A Catholic who wishes to understand contemporary debates frequently finds himself doing precisely what Chalk criticizes Protestants for doing: weighing competing interpretations, evaluating authorities, and deciding which voices most faithfully represent the tradition. The promise of certainty often proves more elusive in practice than it does in theory.

As J. I. Packer wrote:

The Reformers spoke in this connection of the clarity or perspicuity of Scripture. They were not denying that Scripture sometimes alludes to things of which we have insufficient knowledge fully to explain the reference . . . nor were they denying that secondary and incidental matters in Scripture are sometimes less than clear. Their point was that the main things, the things that the writers themselves were concerned to stress, are so fully and plainly presented that none who bring to the Bible an honest willingness to meet and know God, and to be changed by him, will miss them. [That] discovery . . . was one mainspring of the Reformation, and it has animated evangelical religion ever since. To allege at this stage of history that the Bible “does not bear its plain meaning on its face” is rather like complaining that television sets do not work. Millions can testify that they work very well if you know how to switch them on.

The question is not whether Christianity contains difficult teachings. It does. The question is whether the Gospel itself is inaccessible without an infallible interpretive authority. Protestantism has historically answered no. Even Catholic thinkers such as Louis Bouyer and Yves Congar recognized that Scripture genuinely speaks to ordinary believers.

None of this denies that real differences between churches exist or that those differences matter. Catholics and Protestants continue to disagree over authority, sacraments, ecclesiology, and tradition. But the perspicuity of Scripture need not be denied in order to acknowledge those disputes. One may affirm that Scripture speaks clearly and powerfully to ordinary believers without delegitimizing Catholic claims about tradition, the Church, or theological authority.

The Bible is not merely a book but a living word and a sword. Even as theologians debate its obscurities, ordinary readers continue to be cut to the heart by its plainness and power. Whatever problems Chalk detects in perspicuity, it seems the Lord Himself has little difficulty making Himself understood.

Joe Martin
Asheville, North Carolina

The author replies:

What is the Gospel? To quote J. I. Packer, the same Anglican theologian whom Martin cites, it can be summarized by three words: “God saves sinners.” I presume most every Christian can agree with that phrase. But the devil is in the details. Is Jesus God, and if so how—as an adopted son, a derivative divine being, one who is somehow mystically one with God the Father, or something else? Alternatively, how does God save? Through a single spiritual experience represented by asking Jesus into your heart, an altar call, a profession of faith, a baptism, or something else? And who are the sinners that God saves—the “once saved, always saved” of contemporary evangelicalism, the somewhat enigmatic “elect” of Calvinism, those in a state of grace through right reception of the sacraments, or everyone?

These are not minor disagreements among those adhering to Lewisian “mere Christianity” but theological issues that have divided Christians since the earliest centuries of the Church. We may look at Arians, Marcionites, Adoptionists, Donatists, Docetists, Pelagians, and other early heretical movements with a certain distanced curiosity, but these groups offered often dramatically different and contradictory answers to the above questions, so much so as to make that three-word phrase of Packer’s unhelpful, if not largely useless.

And the disagreements remain with us today. I would think a Unitarian Universalist, a Jehovah’s Witness, or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints would all in some sense affirm that “God saves sinners,” but would we say they believe in the Gospel? To cite Martin’s own experience, can the “theological liberalism” so common today in many Protestant denominations become so “liberal” as to no longer preach the Gospel, however we happen to define it? If your church affirms that “God saves sinners” but refers to God in the feminine, views sacraments as superfluous, and believes we must repent not of sexual sin but, say, environmental degradation, is that still the Gospel? Apart from an external institution bearing divine authority to define Christian doctrine and adjudicate such matters, there is no amount of reading the Bible’s “plain text” that can resolve such disagreements.

I’m confused by Martin’s claim that an individual church disaffiliating from a larger Protestant denominational institution is “not remotely the same thing” as a Protestant denomination embracing homosexuality. I never said that it was. The point is that Protestant denominations, even the ones we Catholics might identify as more closely adhering to biblical and apostolic teaching, are inherently unstable because they lack an adjudication mechanism that does not ultimately reduce to the conscience of the individual, Bible-reading Christian. Moreover, if we acknowledge that some parts of Holy Scripture are contextually or culturally conditioned (such as Saint Paul’s decree that women must wear a head covering during worship), the debates regarding, say, what sexual behavior Christianity permits or censures becomes more complicated to resolve. I assess, for example, that the arguments claiming New Testament reproval of malakoi and arsenokoitai to be culturally conditioned and thus not moral absolutes (or, alternatively, to not include homosexual behavior) to be erroneous. Nevertheless, the arguments still have to be evaluated, and, if we’re to do them justice, that will require exegesis and knowledge of koine Greek. I wish it were as simple as Martin claims, but it’s not.

I agree that becoming Catholic does not absolve the individual of the need to interpret, but there is a categorical difference between Protestants and Catholics. Because Catholics believe in a living Magisterium, we possess a means for God through an institution enjoying divine approbation to answer questions and resolve disputes. If a Catholic has a question or concern regarding what Father James Martin says about sexual ethics, for example, there exist not only magisterial documents to clarify Church doctrine on that subject but even in extraordinary circumstances a means to query the teaching office of Saint Peter. The Protestant lacks this. Yes, Holy Scripture is no ordinary book—it is, after all, the inspired and infallible Word of God—but men cannot engage in dialogue with it in the same way they can with a living institution that spans generations. Men in the early Church, relying on their personal interpretation of Scripture, debated the nature and person of Christ; Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, among other ecumenical councils, settled those debates, at least if you wanted to remain in communion with the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

I would also like to offer one clarification, one that I make in my book The Obscurity of Scripture. My argument is not that Protestants, or anyone else for that matter, cannot benefit from reading the Bible. Nor would I claim that people are incapable of divining great truths from Holy Scripture about God, man, and the world. Obviously they do, just as I did when I was a Protestant. Rather, my argument is that there is no means of confirming those biblical interpretations or resolving interpretive disputes, even over “the essentials.” One self-identifying Christian reads the New Testament and concludes that baptism is so closely connected to conversion that it is necessary for salvation and that it some sense seems to remove sin; another Christians reads the same text and concludes that baptism may be important but isn’t related to saving faith in Christ and certainly doesn’t remove sin. In the Protestant tradition, this is the kind of thing that divides denominations and churches because both sides are relying on the same text to support their position. In rare cases, one side capitulates; much more often, one side simply goes off and establishes its own new church, as, in the Protestant paradigm, you have every right, and even obligation, to do. In the Catholic paradigm, the Magisterium can weigh in and make a determination; you’re certainly free to reject that decision and start your own “church,” but in the Catholic paradigm, you have no authority or right to do so.

I agree with Martin: there will always be ordinary readers of the Bible who are “cut to the heart” by its message, whether they are Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise. The issue is whether that spiritual or emotional experience is sufficient, both for the salvation of individual Christians and for identifying the Church Christ founded.

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Ever since I read “Technological Poverty” (Lent 2026) I have been imagining an anti-screen social campaign on the scale of the crusade against smoking that I grew up with in the Nineties. A world in which restaurant patrons are told to put their smartphones away lest the blue light disturb other diners. Obviously, with the advent of Q.R. code menus, we are moving in the opposite direction, but it’s fun to dream.

Such a campaign would inevitably be hindered by the fact that the deleterious effects of excessive screen time on the mind are invisible and difficult to understand. In school I was shown a pair of healthy pig’s lungs and a pair of blackened lungs from a pig that had apparently been forced by scientists to chain-smoke for several decades. What demonstrations could be used by school assembly presenters to frighten children away from iPads? Maybe readers of the lamp have some ideas.

Elizabeth Howe
Sherwood, Arkansas

The editor replies:

I agree very much with the spirit of this letter, but its framing makes me hesitant. For one thing, I reject the underlying “scientific” premises behind the anti-smoking campaigns of the 1990s and would probably welcome the return of cigarettes to an enormous number of public spaces. But even if I felt otherwise, I would still be wary of any attempt to make use of what one might call the “cultural technology” of anti-smoking. Consider the form that the campaign actually took. In addition to making devastatingly effective use of dodgy statistics and enriching parasitic lawyers, “anti-smoking” was a deeply anti-social undertaking. It not only encouraged but almost made a condition of belonging to polite middle class society the treatment of smokers—until the day before yesterday a majority of the population engaged in an ordinary, seemingly life-enhancing (or at least neutral) human social activity—as repulsive, almost sub-human vectors of contagion. Have you ever seen a person have a psychosomatic coughing fit in the presence of what turns out to be an unlit cigarette? I don’t think we should treat people who look at their smartphones the way smokers were treated, nor do I think that we should tell children just-so stories about the evil of screens or subject them to lurid brain-scan images. In the piece I wrote that “a political response to technological poverty . . . must not take the form of snobbery or cheap ‘lifestyle’ advice . . . [or] mumbling about ‘parental responsibility.’” Unlike smoking, an activity from which everyone in the bad old days was free to refrain, the smartphone is essentially coercive. It functions as a kind of de facto passport required to engage in an enormous number of activities. What we need is not a public shaming campaign to discourage individual smartphone use—especially one that takes the form of a callow snobbishness—but a safeguarding of the ability of people to attend a concert (say) or board an airplane with one. This, at any rate, is one short-term solution. The broader problem will only be addressed by a revolution.

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Reading Peter Hitchens’s review “Bound in Iron” (Trinity 2026), I was struck by a British self-regard revived. He describes World War I as “a war of aggression [Germany] had started.” To describe World War I thus is a bald simplification, overlooking Britain and France’s already accomplished colonialization of much of the globe and their jealousy of its spoils. Hitchens notes the “savage prison” of the concentration camps—but fails to note that they were modeled on the British concentration camps used during the Boer Wars. Speaking of Buchenwald, he very wisely suggests that “I very much wish that everyone who cheers for war could be compelled to visit it.” I second the notion, and only wish that the British men who started such wars as the Seven Years’ War, the Opium War, the Irish Troubles, the Boer War, etc. ad nauseam, could have received such an education.

It is right to condemn the sins of Germany. It is not correct to believe that Britain was entirely above them.

Andrew Gorrill
Wayne, Maine

The author replies:

Andrew Gorrill criticizes me for something I didn’t do. That is, nothing in my criticism of the behavior of Germany’s leaders in 1914 can be taken to suggest a belief that Britain was “entirely above” such things. The book under review, Katja Hoyer’s Weimar, is (entirely) about Germany, and it would have been odd if I had inserted some sort of moderating paragraph saying, “But of course other countries, including my own, also did bad and foolish things.” I happen to think that Britain’s decision to enter the Great War was an act of idiocy, which has ruined my country. I deplore both Boer Wars, and regard the Crimean episode as absurd. I think we should have reached a sensible agreement on Home Rule for Ireland before 1914. I suspect I might take a different view of the Napoleonic Wars, but let’s just say that I am not an uncritical defender of my government’s warlike actions, in the past or in the present.

I wrote a book called The Phoney Victory to try to puncture the British preoccupation with supposedly noble war (it failed utterly to do so, but that was its aim). I did mention, in the review, some German war monuments from 1939, which quoted from the Christian scriptures, and I did ask, “Were they, I wondered, entitled to say this on a monument to those who died in Hitler’s armies?” I think this is a reasonable question. Hitler’s troops sang abusive, Judophobic songs about Christ (I will not repeat the repulsive sentiments here) as they went into battle. How could they also associate themselves with such passages as “Greater love hath no man than this than that a man lay down his life for his friends,” from the Gospel of John, and “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,” from the Apocalypse?

Any reader of my work will know that I harbor many doubts about the use of Christian messages in my own country’s war commemorations, especially the once-popular hymn “O Valiant Hearts.” One small note about the British “concentration camps” in South Africa. These were indeed appalling, and are a blot on our national history. But they were wholly different in character from the establishments in the Third Reich which were (I suspect with deliberate intent to confuse) given the same name. Nor do I think that there was, in that Third Reich, any equivalent of Emily Hobhouse, whose courageous and determined campaign against these places was at least partly successful in ending a great deal of stupidity and cruelty. Hobhouse was harried and unpopular, it is true. But she was free to speak and act and her cause was taken up by the main opposition party, something the Third Reich did not possess. My own view remains that Otto von Bismarck would never have been so stupid as to start a general European war. It is most interesting to me that the modern European Union, a continuation of Germany by other means, has now created—using the “limited sovereignty” methods of the subtle Richard von Kühlmann—a borderless politico-economic space in Europe from Ireland to Warsaw and from Spain to Sweden, which the Iron Chancellor would have found most amusing.

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I enjoyed reading the description of the tomb of Pope Francis by Nic Rowan (“The Pope at the End of the World,” Trinity 2026). Mr. Rowan makes the interesting move of interspersing among his own astute observations the views typical of Francis’s critics. The banality and provincialism of the latter is summed up in the tedious list of concerns that exercise the kind of dimwit for whom the Church is important chiefly as a player in right-wing grievance politics, and in the judgement that after 2020 Francis’s papacy was merely a series of somnolent defeats. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

Considering just a reasonably intelligent person of good will, it is easy to see how one could view the last few years of his papacy as a long decline. Long past was the excitement produced by Laudato Si’, the triumphant visit to the United States, the dramatic opening of the Holy Doors in Bangui and at St. Peter’s, the ecstatic, rainswept crowds during the visit to the Philippines that culminated in a Mass attended by six million people, the effortless rock-star charisma and energy that followed him everywhere during the majority of his pontificate. But the absurdity and pettiness of the notion emerge at once when one recalls the trip to Iraq, where Francis visited the plain of Ur, where he prayed and preached in the ruins of Christian churches in Mosul, and where I.S.I.S. tried twice to kill him. There were other dramatic moments, like the visit to Mongolia, where he presided at a Mass reportedly attended by all the nation’s Catholics. And, whatever one thought of it, there was his decision to consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the immaculate heart of Mary—an act that should have told his various critics how little they understand anything that was happening.

Consider two statements about the Church and its future. The first is the picture of a “smaller, purer Church” attributed to a young Joseph Ratzinger based on a radio address he gave in 1968. This statement has been turned into a kind of slogan by a certain sort of Catholic in this drossy age. The slogan has little to do with Ratzinger’s typically thoughtful and challenging address, but it has been embraced as a bit of Pietist mewling beloved by some because it enables them to indulge the two favorite emotions of so many American Catholics, self-pity and self-congratulation. Compare to Pope Francis: “This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting our mediocrity.”

But Francis’s much-vaunted “openness” should not mislead us—he was sharply critical of the World in a genuine and penetrating way that is rare among prelates, whatever pose they sometimes like to strike. One need only mention one of the persistent themes of his public comments—that the devil is real and wants to drag you down to Hell with him, to spend eternity choking on the acrid stench of his hatred and misery. Francis’s frequent warnings against the Lord of the World are one of several ways in which he seemed as if he belonged to a previous age—one easily imagines him as a popular preacher of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries rather than a pope in the age of the strangely bureaucratic and anodyne style of communication the Church now favors.

Francis remained active until the end, his own strength failing but his spirit still a solitary light as the world grew darker. One of Francis’s last communications with the world was a series of Good Friday meditations read on the Palatine Hill at the Colosseum:

We too can live in the world due to the faith of your Mother and of the countless witnesses who generate life even in those places where everything speaks of death. That time, in Galilee, it was they who wanted to see you. Now, as you ascend to Calvary, you seek the gaze of those who listen and act. An ineffable understanding. An unbreakable covenant . . . To those who watch you die, Lord, you give an opportunity to repent, to return to you, and to beat our breast in order to shatter our hardness of heart. Jesus, grant that we, who all too often regard you from a distance, may always be mindful of you, so that when at last you come, death itself may find us alive.

Stat crux dum volvitur orbis.

Jeffrey Metzger