Over the past several weeks, I used to be away with a Christianity Today group, teaching through Exodus up and down the Nile River in Egypt. Along the way in which, I discovered myself in a lot of temples and tombs—lots of them full of the embalmed corpses of ancient Egyptian kings and queens.
As I used to be there, though, I couldn’t help but think in regards to the American church. With all of the talk—some legitimate, some not—of an “exodus” away from religion, I ponder if we’ve lost the purpose. Maybe the American church isn’t dead. Maybe it’s not even dying. Maybe the predicament is worse than that. Maybe the American church is mummified.
Mummies are greater than only a way of disposing of bodies; they represent a specifically ancient Egyptian vision of life and death. Mummification, in spite of everything, isn’t easy. Only a society as technologically advanced as ancient Egypt could accomplish embalming bodies in a way that would preserve them for hundreds of years. Mummification reflects a certain stability of the powers-that-be. Pharaohs and governors, and people they decide to be with them, are those that are mummified—an assumption that within the life to return, power is defined just as power is now; the primary will likely be first and the last will likely be last. Denial, as they are saying, is usually only a river in Egypt.
Christians often forget probably the most famous mummy in Scripture—the way in which the Book of Genesis ends. Joseph, the hated younger brother of the sons of Israel, was, after all, sold into slavery, reported to be dead, after which rose to power in Egypt. He was so thoroughly acclimated into the Egyptian way that his own brothers didn’t recognize him after they saw him. Genesis ends with Joseph, having forgiven his brothers, pleading with them to hold his bones with them on the day God returns them to the Land of Promise.
The book that starts with the words “In the start God created the heavens and the earth” ends with the words, “They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt” (50:26, ESV throughout). That looks like an anti-climax. It’s actually a cliffhanger. These words signify the Exodus that’s to return—an exodus promised not with Israel in slavery in Egypt but with Israel in power there.
In describing the religion of Joseph, the Book of Hebrews doesn’t commend all of the things we would expect: his interpretation of dreams, his refusal to sin sexually, his up-from-the-dungeon comeback to power, or his saving the world from a famine through the usage of grain-storage technology. It doesn’t even mention his forgiveness of those that had wronged him. Instead, it reads, “By faith Joseph, at the tip of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave direction concerning his bones” (Heb. 11:22).
At the tip of his story, Joseph was as Egyptian as he could possibly be: an embalmed mummy within the land of Pharaoh. His faith was that he saw a special future. Joseph’s skeleton finally ends up being a recurring theme within the Exodus account. With all the things occurring—on the heels of a series of plagues, with Pharaoh’s armies on the march, with hundreds of enslaved refugees needing to be evacuated—the Bible says, “Moses took the bones of Joseph with him” (Ex. 13:19). When Israel crossed the Jordan into the Land of Promise, the Book of Joshua says, “As for the bones of Joseph, which the people of Israel brought up from Egypt, they buried them at Shechem, within the piece of land that Jacob bought” (Josh. 24:32).
Joseph wasn’t the just one whose acculturation into the ways of Egypt needed to be undone. The pivotal account of idolatry—the people of Israel dancing around a golden calf they named because the god who brought them out of Egypt—was because, the early Christian martyr Stephen preached, “of their hearts they turned to Egypt” (Acts 7:39). Having left a land of graven images, the people wanted one in every of their very own—something they might see and feel, a source of solidarity and community since “this Moses, the person who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we have no idea what has change into of him” (Ex. 32:1).
The pull to Egyptianized affections is denounced by the prophet Isaiah, because the people of Israel sought protection from their enemies through the facility of Egypt. Egypt as an ally was as bad as Egypt as an oppressor, maybe even worse. “Therefore shall the protection of Pharaoh turn to your shame, and the shelter within the shadow of Egypt to your humiliation” (Is. 30:3). Whether trusting in Egyptian-like statues or in Egyptian-led armies, the impulse was the identical: in search of protection and a future in an idol as a substitute of in the way in which of God, a way that appears, within the terms set by Pharaoh or Caesar, to be failure.
The prophets warned that the making of idols—those objects or ideas or affiliations that replace for us what must be ultimate—are destructive. At this moment, though, the idols don’t appear to be killing us. They appear to be helping us succeed. In reality, though, they’re doing worse than killing us—they’re deadening us.
Idols are useful. They draw people together. They give an individual a way of meaning, a cause for which to live and die. Nothing can mobilize a nationalistic sense of identity higher than the mantra “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (Acts 19:28). Their usefulness, though, is the very reason the Bible says they’re useless.
Idols have two fatal flaws: They are self-created and so they are dead. The man who “falls in love” together with his chatbot can have all of the glandular sensations of what looks like a love affair. Ultimately, though, he has to know that what he “loves” is himself—what the algorithms repeat back to him is what he put there in the primary place. Idols, the Bible warns, are dead. And what’s worse, the Bible warns, “Those who make them change into like them; so do all who trust in them” (Ps. 115:8).
At the tip of the trail to idols, you find yourself enclosed in your personal self, but an element of you knows that what’s controlling you is a construction of your making. You find yourself, furthermore, dead—numb to the very source of your life and being. And then, in search of to reply the deadness, you construct another idol to provide a rush of what appears like life.
Several years ago, I might have agreed with those that warned that the elemental problem within the American church was that there’s “no place for truth”—that doctrinal shallowness was hollowing us out. I ponder now if the much more perilous problem was—and is—that there’s “no place for all times.”
Bored by prayerless, numb lives, believers lose a way of adventure and check out to search out it in political idolatry, in public spectacle, in addiction to online visual sex or online verbal violence. Lacking the boldness that comes with real life within the Spirit, we fall to Pharaoh hunger—eager for strongmen of the church or of the state to deliver us from evil at the value of our saying to them, Thine is the dominion and the facility and the glory eternally. Without life, we seek to prove our standing through selecting the appropriate syllogisms, hunting the appropriate heretics, fighting the appropriate culture wars.
We’ve never been more technologically advanced. And we’ve never seemed more personally dead. Jesus warned us about this (Rev. 3:1), and, to show it around, he gave us no ten-point strategy. He told us to get up, to “strengthen what stays and is about to die” (v. 2).
Joseph’s embalming was a very Egyptian thing to do. And yet, his faith showed him all his mastery was just the keeping together of a corpse. Life would mean something else, depending on a individuals who could carry him back from where he was lost, and on a God who could count all his bones.
Maybe American religion needs the identical. You cannot have each a Pharaoh and a Father. You cannot serve each God and mummy.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
