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OhOver the past few weeks, I have been traveling with a group from Christianity Today, teaching through the Exodus along the Nile in Egypt. Along the way, I found myself visiting numerous temples and tombs, many of which were filled with the embalmed corpses of ancient Egyptian kings and queens.
However, while I was there, I couldn’t help but think about the American Church. With all the discussions – some legitimate, some not – about a “exodus” away from religion, I wonder if we have lost the subject. Maybe the American Church is not dead. Maybe it’s not even dying. Maybe the situation is worse than that. Perhaps the American Church is mummified.
Mummies are more than just a way to dispose of bodies; they represent a specifically ancient Egyptian view of life and death. After all, mummification is not easy. Only a society as technologically advanced as ancient Egypt could embalm bodies in a way that would preserve them for thousands of years. Mummification reflects a certain stability of the power in place. The pharaohs and rulers, and those they choose to be with them, are the ones who are mummified – an assumption that in the life to come, power is defined exactly as power is now; the first will be first and the last will be last. Denial, as they say, is sometimes just a river in Egypt.
Christians often forget the most famous mummy in Scripture: how the book of Genesis ends. Joseph, the hated younger brother of the sons of Israel, was, of course, sold into slavery, declared dead, and then rose to power in Egypt. He was so perfectly acclimated to the Egyptian way that his own brothers did not recognize him when they saw him. Genesis ends with Joseph, having forgiven his brothers, begging them to carry his bones with them on the day God brings them back to the Promised Land.
The book that begins with the words “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” ends with the words “They embalmed him, and he was laid in a coffin in Egypt” (50:26, ESV throughout). This feels like an anti-climax. It’s actually a cliffhanger. These words signify the coming Exodus – a promised exodus not with Israel enslaved in Egypt but with Israel in power there.
In describing Joseph’s faith, the book of Hebrews does not praise everything one might expect: his interpretation of dreams, his refusal to sin sexually, his return to the power of the dungeon, or his rescue from the world. a famine through the use of grain storage technology. He doesn’t even mention his forgiveness of those who wronged him. Instead, it is written: “By faith Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave instructions concerning his bones” (Hebrews 11:22).
At the end of his story, Joseph was as Egyptian as he could be: an embalmed mummy in Pharaoh’s land. His faith was that he saw a different future. Joseph’s skeleton ends up being a recurring theme in the Exodus narrative. As everything is happening – following a series of plagues, with Pharaoh’s armies marching, with thousands of enslaved refugees having to be evacuated – the Bible says: “Moses took away the bones of Joseph with him” (Ex. 13:19). When Israel crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land, the Book of Joshua says: “As for the bones of Joseph, which the people of Israel brought from Egypt, they buried them in Shechem, in the land that Jacob bought . » (Joshua 24:32).
Joseph was not the only one whose acculturation to Egyptian customs had to be reversed. The central narrative of idolatry – the people of Israel dancing around a golden calf which they named after the god who had brought them out of Egypt – was because, as the Christian martyr preached Stephen, “in their hearts they turned toward Egypt” (Acts 7:39). Having left a land of graven images, the people wanted one of their own, something they could see and feel, a source of solidarity and community since “this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt we do not know.” know what happened to him” (Ex. 32:1).
The attraction to Egyptian affections is denounced by the prophet Isaiah, as the people of Israel sought protection from their enemies through the power of Egypt. Egypt as an ally was as bad as Egypt as an oppressor, perhaps even worse. “Therefore the protection of Pharaoh will turn to your shame, and the refuge in the shadow of Egypt to your humiliation” (Isaiah 30:3). Whether it was Egyptian-style statues or Egyptian-led armies, the impulse was the same: to seek protection and a future in an idol rather than in the way of God, a way that, according to the terms set by Pharaoh or Caesar, to be a failure.
The prophets warned that the making of idols—those objects, ideas, or affiliations that replace for us what should be ultimate—is destructive. But right now, idols don’t seem to be killing us. They seem to help us succeed. In reality, however, they do worse than kill us: they deafening We.
Idols are useful. They bring people together. They give a person meaning, a cause to live and die for. Nothing can mobilize a sense of nationalist identity better than the song “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” » (Acts 19:28). Their usefulness, however, is the very reason the Bible says they are useless.
Idols have two fatal flaws: they are self-created and they are dead. The man who “falls in love” with his chatbot can experience all the glandular sensations of what resembles a love story. Ultimately, however, he must know that what he “likes” is himself – what the algorithms repeat to him is what he put there in the first place. Idols, the Bible warns, are dead. And what’s worse, the Bible warns: “Those who do them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Ps. 115:8).
At the end of the path to idols, you find yourself locked in your own self, but part of you knows that what controls you is a construct of your own making. We end up by dead– numbed to the very source of your life and being. And then, seeking to respond to death, you build another idol to provide a glimpse of what life looks like.
Many years ago, I would have agreed with those who warned that the fundamental problem with the American Church was that there was “no room for truth” – that the superficiality of doctrine emptied of its substance. I wonder now if the even more perilous problem was – and still is – that there is “no room for life”.
Tired of prayerless and numb lives, believers lose their sense of adventure and try to find it again in political idolatry, in public spectacle, in addiction to online visual sex or online verbal abuse. Lacking the confidence that comes with authentic living in the Spirit, we succumb to Pharaoh’s hunger, wanting the strong men of Church or State to deliver us from evil at the cost of telling them: Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Lifeless, we seek to prove our position by choosing the right syllogisms, by chasing away the right heretics, by waging the right culture wars.
We have never been more technologically advanced. And we’ve never seemed more personally dead. Jesus warned us about this (Revelation 3:1) and, to reverse the situation, he did not give us a ten-point strategy. He told us to wake up, to “strengthen what remains and which is about to die” (v. 2).
The embalming of Joseph was a typically Egyptian activity. And yet his faith showed him that all his mastery was only the maintenance of a corpse. Life would have another meaning if it depended on a people who could bring him back from where he was lost, and on a God who could count all his bones.
Maybe American religion needs the same thing. You cannot have both a Pharaoh and a Father. You cannot serve both God and Mom.
Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of Christianity today and directs its public theology project.