Josh Moody, Senior Pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, spoke from his latest book, Unframed: Conversations that take the Gospel Out of the Box, in SWBTS Chapel on January 29, 2026.
The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Well, thank you so much. You’re very warm welcome, Dr Dockery, it’s a real privilege to be here, and I’ve known Dr Dockery for a few years, and your friendship and your example is very important, and I just praise God for you and for the blessing upon your leadership here and all over the place. So thank you so much for your warm welcome, and it’s great to be with you, as you can tell from my accent. I was born in Texas. It all began for me when I was just about 20 years of age or thereabouts, back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. I was studying at Cambridge University, and I focused for a while on what was known then as the history of ideas, and in particular, I focused for a time on the secular movement of the European enlightenment. So there are all kinds of different enlightenments, but I focus on the philosophes, people like Rousseau, d’alembert, Montesquieu, even lesser well known enlightenment figures like Guillem, pettisti, Vico, the Italian anyway.
My teacher at the time was a marvelous man who had rescued me from a supervisor that at least wasn’t a good fit for me. And this Don, as the professors at Cambridge are called, he stretched me. He was brilliant, exacting in a good way, and also an atheist. Of course, as I studied these European enlightenment figures, Diderot, among others, I began to want to find a way of counteracting their claims. Now I knew, as a student of the history of ideas that I could not within that discipline simply insert into one of my papers a this is what Josh thinks moment I needed to find someone who was contemporaneous to the time. Now there are options. Joseph Butler’s analogy of religion, for instance, which had a significant impact to the time and is still, by the way, an apologetic textbook that is worth consulting. But I was impressed with Butler but and others like that, to me, though they seemed to lack, I felt sufficient intellectual ballast to be a counterweight to those luminaries of the European enlightenment. Now one day, I was thinking about this, praying about it, I hope to at least a bit, and I was wandering up and down the book stacks of the Cambridge University Library.
This is a huge edifice. You’ll know if you’ve been there, and it’s also quite remarkably ugly. It’s said, perhaps in jest, to be the inspiration for J, R, R Tolkien’s evil, Dark Tower in his Lord of the Rings, still unlike the much more beautiful Bodleian in Oxford. And I have no bias there, of course, my father went to Cambridge. My brother went to Cambridge. I went to Cambridge. My other brother didn’t do so well. He went to Oxford. But unlike the much more beautiful bodily in Oxford, you can get into the stacks at the University of university library at Cambridge, which is a great thing. So I was, I was wandering around at random floor upon floor, this huge library meant to contain every book ever published. I picked out a book at random. I opened it at random. This looks like an early scientific Isaac Newton, kind of drawing of a spider. I picked out another volume by the same author. I opened it at random. This is a Puritan sermon. Perhaps. This is it, someone immersed in the enlightenment, scientific way of thinking, but also a Puritan, theologically Evangelical, unashamedly so. While I had stumbled on probably the most brilliant and certainly most influential theologian in American church history Jonathan Edwards before then, in my youthful ignorance, unknown to me, but the one advantage of my unfamiliarity with Edwards was that I had no prior bias to view him as just that sinners in the hands of an angry god guy, he was a blank slate to me, and what I discovered was that he. Was formulating, at an erudite as well as a more popular level, a deliberate biblical response to the burgeoning secularization of the enlightenment of his day, that enlightenment whose results we still with, live with now, I’ve told this origin story before, or at least different versions of it. But the reason I’m recounting it now is not just to give background to the narrative I wish to give to you today, but also to help you contextualize where we are.
You see, for many years, I took what I learned from the research that followed from that chance, let us say, providential encounter, both in student ministry at Cambridge and then later church revitalization next to Yale to help me grasp how to respond to both the secular modernism that was undermining Christian faith throughout Europe and in some areas of America too, and also how to respond to secular modernism, strange twin The once much touted, but now less mentioned. Post modernism, whose influence is no less potent, despite being now less discussed, in the same way that fish hardly need talk about water, post modernism, relativistic modernism, everything being about power, that’s the water we swim in. It’s the air we breathe in our culture, and it impacts our culture’s attitude to sexual morals as only being a matter of personal identity, and our increasingly Nietzschean view of global politics, where might makes right behind it all, behind post modernism and modernism, I became convinced was a cultural crisis of epistemology.
That is how we can know what we know. Great American philosophers like Nicholas, Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga were tackling epistemology at a tactical level, and I had absorbed from Edwards, learning from such contemporary scholarship as he had long ago, from John Locke, but leaning solely on the Bible to preach to the ideas and in the idiom of this day and so near Yale, where we were doing that church revitalization at the time, we saw a number of students come to faith By God’s grace, as we also tended to the relational web of love, which the Bible clearly demonstrates as being an emotive apologetic and grounded all in the what we might call epistemological certitude of the revelation of Christ in the Bible, the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, in a sense, all the research had just made it all the more simple preach Christ as the Apostle Paul exemplified and Him crucified, however, and here the story now takes a new and up to date twist. Recently, I began to realize it seemed to me that something new was happening, and so I started to research the statistics around church attendance. I had often read the cited data, the frequently cited data of young people turning away from church, but I was far from convinced by it.
Experientially, both the church revitalization, the church I served now for the last 16 years, outside of Chicago and Wheaton, seem to have as many young people as ever, but also principally, after all, had not Christ said He would build His Church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it, and should we not then expect to see what only pretends to be church still has the name of church on its sign outside its building, but long since rejected core doctrines, about, for instance, the resurrection of Jesus from The dead, and core morality, about, for instance, sexuality churches so called that perhaps have within them still a remnant of regenerate, if poorly shepherded sheep, converted maybe, but floundering, still named A church, but not truly defined biblically, a church, such so called churches, should we not expect them to fall and fail while God’s faithful people in his church, albeit as the New Testament itself makes clear, still sinners and still needing calls to repentance, but nonetheless, a true church. Should we now expect that sort of church, a true church, to continue to be built? As Jesus promised, I will build my church.
Jesus said, well, I started to believe that distinction between the experience of so called churches and the experience of true churches, especially those. Which are also healthy churches, that that distinction was actually by and large, what the data was telling us, and that to think that Jesus was still building his church in the western culture of our own day was not being glasses half full, pollyannish naive. It was instead having a more accurate appraise of what was really going on, someone once said to me, Jesus promised to build his church, not to build someone else’s church. And with that clarity in mind, I started to want to find out more. So, I had delved into research at an intellectual academic level. But this time, I also wanted to do something a bit more journalistic. I wanted to get out of the ivory tower of the university and do interviews, talk to people with insight, leader types, some of whom were believers, some of whom were not, some of whom had rejected Christ, some of whom had accepted Christ. I conducted a range of conversations over zoom and in person, and the discussions were more than personally invigorating. They were illuminating. And what I found was a tweak on what I had expected, not quite what I had assumed. Though, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I should have got there from first principles, it’s good to be surprised in research, I suppose, if only to show that you’re not conducting exercise in mere self-fulfilling prophecy.
Though, on the other hand, if you seem to discover what you know for other reasons, cannot be the case if your research appears to show you that, say, two plus two equals five, that sort of obviously wrong result can, with legitimacy, make you question whether you’ve done your sums right, done your research correctly in the first place. But the interviews I conducted showed something that, in retrospect, also made sense, biblically and logically. They were fascinating conversations, and though I gradually categorized them my mind in a simple and I hope, accurate way, it would not do justice to them to reduce them merely to their lowest common denominator. So let me then give you at least a couple of examples before I summarize perhaps the most interview, most moving interview I conducted was with a journalist who had started his work as a Christian, determined to tell a story in the media, to defend the church, but from his point of view, found out so much negativity about the inner workings of the quote, unquote, church that he ended up leaving the faith. He investigated some of the shenanigans that can go on with the health and wealth prosperity gospel folk and to no one’s great surprise, least of all, his found financial shoddiness. This did not greatly rock his faith, though it did understandably disturb him. He thought of the widow sending in her few pennies for some purported cure, and then he tracked down the charlatan preacher running around in his fancy car. And it certainly turned his stomach to uncover the extent of the manipulation, financial exploitation so called shepherds not even following the worldly advice of a Tiberius Caesar that it is the duty of a shepherd to shear his sheep, not skin them.
They were skinning them. I remember myself being in the hospital a few years ago with quite a serious bout of illness, and turning on the TV to a Christian channel, hoping for a bit of encouragement, and coming across a preacher promising me a miracle cure, if I would only send him some money. I knew it was nonsense, but it was tempting. You get to the point where you’re willing to try anything. And I said to myself, I could be momentarily enticed by a religious snake oil salesman, even though, with a quick shake of my head, I turned off the TV with a groan, how can someone without the privileges of theological education and biblical discipleship in a local church, a Bible teaching church not be vulnerable? Now this sort of financial manipulation certainly rocked the journalist world, he indicated to me, but he reasoned they were just a few bad apples. Every system has them, every institution, every organization, is no great surprise. He thought just flies in the ointments, the exception, not the rule. But the turning point for him was when he was covering a story of a Catholic priest who had impregnated a parishioner. She was suing the church for help to raise the child. She was very poor. The church was refusing to pay anything, basing their legal argument on the duplicitous technicality. The priest had no money because. He had taken a vow of poverty, even though the Catholic Church itself is not exactly short of a buck or two. And the woman lost the case, outmaneuvered by the Catholic Church’s fancy lawyer, but unknown to that lawyer in that very law court was that journalist that I was speaking to. And after the woman left the courtroom, the journalist went outside to interview the woman, noticing that this was happening.
The lawyer rushed back into the court to try to get the case sealed so the story could not be told. And that was the journalist told me the final straw. I suppose, as I listened to him, it seemed to me such injustices seemed at that point to him no longer to be a bug in the religious system, but a feature of the religious system that the extraordinary rich Catholic Church would plea poverty was he felt unconscionable. Add to that the sordid, griminess of the lawyer running back into the court to try to seal the case so the journalist could not even do his job to tell the story when it pushed the journalist over the edge of doubting faith into the mire of denying faith. Now you’ll read other stories like that in the book, and I tell this one now to give us some texture to the simple though, I hope not simplistic solutions. I hope to offer. I had answers to the journalist I interviewed, but I also resonated with what he said, who has served in church circles, who has not, at times come across evil that turns the stomach, cognitively expected, practically to be resisted for were not Paul’s letters written to solve major difficulties in church life. Christians are declaratively saints, but experientially sinners, still gradually only becoming behaviorally saints, slowly growing to be, in practice, what we are already by position. If you find a perfect church, don’t join it, you’ll only spoil it yet. Versions of the moral question, though, in different forms, kept on raising its head as I interviewed people a well-known Bible scholar who had been an evangelical and then gradually became what he now described to me as an agnostic atheist, which meant he explained he didn’t know whether God existed or not, but he definitely didn’t believe in him anymore.
This well-known Bible scholar told a story with a different nuance for him, the issue had not been as I expected, primarily textual or intellectual. His stumbling block was the problem of suffering. He was teaching at Princeton University showing his students pictures of starving people from various parts of Africa, and he found he could not reconcile such pain filled Gore with a love filled God. Now again, at one level, the challenge of suffering was something that I too felt, as does the Bible itself read the book of Job. But on another level, I had, I thought, what were good answers? Still I resisted immediately pointing out that while he was looking at pictures of suffering, he himself was not suffering, living in actually, one of the nicest towns on the face of the planet, doing one of the most prestigious jobs ever invented, not to mention that many of those who are living in countries where there is far more suffering find that it is there that the church grows fastest. I resisted saying all that, avoiding entering right away into a fruitless, antagonistic debate mode during the interview I was trying to understand, to listen. But I was unavoidably drawn into counteracting when I discovered that his wife, despite her husband’s own agnostic atheism, his wife, was nonetheless herself a Christian.
And so, I couldn’t resist following up with asking him what she thought about her husband’s lack of faith. He replied, she thinks I don’t understand religion. And as I heard that reply, I thought to myself, shrewd woman, and I think she’s right. His view of what he might call the Christian religion thing had become distorted, warped, like he was seeing God in a fair ground carnival set of Fun House mirrors. The thing itself, the actual Christian faith, Jesus was no longer being seen. He didn’t, at some profound level, as his wife put it, understand religion. This and other conversations you can read about in the book, helped me grasp what I felt was going on. Christianity had been framed, framed by gender and sexuality, by partisan political rivalries, framed as a NEO colonialist project, despite the many missionaries who resisted exploitation, defending vulnerable peoples, in a day when epistemology, how we know what we know, is viewed as essentially standpoint, relative you have your own truth, and I have mine, rather than there being true truth, as Francis Schaeffer put it, in that environment in which we All live, inevitably Christianity, which claims to be the truth, not just a truth, is susceptible to being framed as a mere power move to dominate others.
The story spun in such a way the pieces of the puzzle jumbled up, the data distorted the picture, framed selectively reported fake news, so that the end result is a profound misrepresentation of Christianity. Well, I thought if people today are going to reject Christianity, let’s at least make sure they are rejecting the real thing. If we’re going to reject Christianity for the problem of suffering, let’s at least understand enough about how the Christian gospel is so shaped around suffering, the suffering of the god, man, Christ, that one can arguably make the case that suffering, far from being the weak point of Christianity, is actually its trump card. How else explain that the blood of the Masters is the seed of the church, that the church does grow in countries where there is suffering even persecution, that today a Middle Eastern country under a bloody dictatorship, is where the church is growing fastest, that the core message that we proclaim, the center point of it all, is a suffering servant that we do preach Christ and Him crucified is not the very symbol of Christianity, the cross once a quarter, I go away to pray for a day. It’s part of my habit to get renewal. As a preaching pastor, just go away for a whole day, no agenda, just me and God pray.
Now you can imagine whether the weather is nice, you can take a nice walk in a park praying, but in Chicago, in the winter, you need somewhere warm inside. And so recently, I was at a retreat center waiting for my room to be made ready, and as I waited, I picked up an old little booklet on the shelf beside me that was on the subject of suffering. And it was interesting to me at least, how much that little old booklet emphasize the suffering servant without any note of embarrassment. Do we today, though so long to speak positively of the triumph of Jesus that we under emphasize the second half of, for instance, John’s gospel, where God’s glory is shown at the suffering of the cross. To frame Christianity in such a way that it is merely, in Marx’s famous phrase, an opiate of the people, is not to do justice to what Christianity itself is actually saying about suffering. To make Christianity all about pie in the sky when you die, is to miss the life to the fall that we do have in the spirit now, stake on your plate while you wait, if you like. Frame framed versions of Christianity, distorted approximations of what is described in the Bible and what is powerfully experienced, I know, pastorally, powerfully experienced by suffering Christians in the hospital bed, or if we are to reject Christianity because churches can be such a mess because of the claimed evil the church has done, let’s at least do justice to the biblical case that, as CS Lewis winsomely noted, Christians are both the strongest argument for. Christianity, as well as the strongest argument against Christianity too.
And if we are to reject Christianity because there are charlatans who are Christian leaders, there are churches that are abusive, logically, should we not also reject working out ever again at a gym because there are gyms where there are abusive gym owners, or going to a dentist again because there are dentists with crooked teeth. Hypocrisy abounds. Oh, yes, but that’s not a church problem. It’s a human problem. We’re all sinners in need of forgiveness the power of the Spirit to transform us from the inside out. Now, no doubt there are arguments that could be formed against that more biblically balanced way of looking at the challenge that churches don’t always behave as churches are meant to behave against Jesus, teaching that it is by the love his disciples have for one another that we shall know that they are His disciples and the Judas who betrayed him and the Peter who denied him, and the churches of Asia and the first chapters of the book of Revelation, most of whom were not exactly in great shape, and the eventual glorious victory of the finally unblemished bride of Christ recorded for us in the Book of Revelation.
Perhaps there are arguments that could be formed against all that more biblically balanced way of looking at the need for the ongoing sanctification, God fearing holiness of churches. But at least let us hear what is actually being said by the Bible about Christianity, and reject that the real thing, if we are going to reject it. In short, it seemed to me that Christianity needed to be un framed, and that became the title for the book. But that solution, this, I think, is crucial to grasp where I’m what I’m arguing, is not just to construct a different, better frame for Christianity, warring against anti Christian frames. There’s a long history of apologetics taking that tack, and I wouldn’t want to dismiss it all. By no means. I’ve certainly found it hope for myself, this world view, Christianity approach, and certainly we all need a coherent Christian worldview. Without any doubt, we need to tell the story, put the pieces together of Christianity, not piecemeal, not atomized, but coherent. Certainly, that worldview approach is helpful. Don’t misunderstand me, but because we do swim in the waters of relativism. All around us, there can unknowingly, unintentionally be sneaked in a Trojan horse that betrays the whole for the Christian worldview is not just a worldview. We’re not merely putting on a new pair of glasses to view the world in a better way through a preferred set of lenses.
We are seeing him as he is once we were blind. Now we see the blinkers are taken off, not new glasses put on. The veil has been removed, and now we behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That’s not just a worldview, it’s what is. And here, I think the reformers were on the right track. Bequeathed their approach even to the birth of science and to much of the way the Western world at its best, used to think the phrase was in Latin ad Fontes, meaning to the source. Go back away from the accretions, remove the framing, the way of telling the story, and get to the facts themselves. Now naive, our post modern friends may tell us, but let us at least try getting to the source itself and find there not just one way of viewing the world among others, but the actual thing itself. And of course, the only way that can happen, perhaps I shouldn’t say, of course, for here, we leap into some deep waters or land on a firm foundation, depending on the metaphor that works best for you.
The only way we can view the thing itself is because the one who is doing the ultimate perceiving, the viewing, preserving objectivity from what would otherwise be our inevitably subjective, individual standpoint, relative point of view, is God Himself. Self, constantly perceiving, upholding all that is by the Word of His power, so that we see in his light, the light of light in his truth, the truth of all truths. And what we are seeing is not just another way of looking at it, albeit a better or truer way, what we’re seeing is he who is unframed. Well, having then shaped this all around the narrative of how I’ve landed, where I’ve landed, with this case of as the by as the book title puts it unframed now, and I suppose what we might call good Puritan style. I want to leave us with some application of what the Puritans would, perhaps more justly term uses just three quick ones. Here’s the first use I have for us. Let us rediscover the note of authority. Now we are rightly resistant to authoritarianism, as Martin Luther, in his own inimitably bold style, put it, the only thing worse than the Pope in Rome is a pope in every pulpit. But I mean not our authority.
His true spiritual authority can only come with spirit filled humility as John the Baptist, like we point away from ourselves to Him, what a huge challenge that is in our media saturated celebrity age. But it is our task for if Christianity has been framed, let us unframe it. Unleash it with what we might call an unapologetic apologetic, a bold confidence, a clarity and yes, based on Scripture authority, the Welsh preacher Lloyd Jones was asked when he was quite an old man, why it was the young people still listened to him, and Lloyd Jones replied that it was no technique that he did. It was simply the note of authority. So yes to nuance, educated, informed balance, yes, yes to technical expertise, expertise, biblical languages, grasp of church history as well as the tides of current events. Bible one hand, latest news in the other speaking with a timeless and timely message, but nuance, kindness, humility, contemporaneity can decay to a temporary trendiness and a passive niceness, If there is not also an unframed note of authority. But then also, and this is the second of these brief three uses, let us then to rediscover community.
Surely, there can be bad apples even in churches, and perhaps our ecclesiology does not permit us to interpret Jesus’ parable of the tares and the wheats being related only to the church, but including the world around nonetheless, even those of us who serve in the gathered church, rather than a state church or a parish church, even those of us who do will admit that try as we might in the assessment of charity to have a regenerate church membership, we cannot be certain of the spiritual standing of everyone this side of glory and controversial sins do still occur in church life. Who can deny it, but then who can also, if we are to be judicious and fair, deny the good that Christian founded hospitals and individual Christian kindnesses have done, or the values that we in the western world at our best moments, want to ascribe to being shaped by Christ’s values, as so ably demonstrated by the historian Tom Holland’s book dominion. It’s an Augustinian like vision of the City of God, where the church continues to be built by Jesus, where the society around is influenced by those Christian values, and the community of the church remains a church distinct to itself under the banner of Christ, who rules the church by his word. Now, rediscovering community will require more than scheduling a few more potlucks. It will require a commitment to the gathered Christian community, the local church, that for all its failings, is nonetheless the light to the nations, the hope of the world, the City of God, the lifeboat to rescue the drowning, the hospital for sinners, the school for disciples, the body of Christ. And then also, this is the third and final use.
Let us regain the sense of sufficiency, the sufficiency of Christ and the sufficiency. The Scriptures not to say we are to make the Bible sufficient for what it is not designed for, to teach us mathematics or science or how to send a rocket to the moon, but to let the Bible be sufficient for what it is designed for, teach reproof, correct, train in righteousness, so the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Or is Jesus so memorably dramatized in his parables? The sower sows the seed. And while there are soils who do not understand and are fruitless, the same seed in the good soil, the soil where the word is understood, that soil does produce a bountiful harvest. So this word, this seed, is sufficient. It will not return to God empty, but will accomplish what he has designed for it to do. Or, as the great late preacher John Stott used to say, the word of God does the work of God by the Spirit of God to the glory of God. Sometimes we need a friend to show us what we have when we ourselves have lost sight of it, we cannot see it.
I’ve mentioned in passing Tolkien’s famous Lord of the Rings, one of the best selling books of all time, and the inspiration for a wildly popular movie trilogy. The less said about the movie version of his The Hobbit, the better. What is less well known about Lord of the Rings, though the book, is that Tolkien almost threw the whole thing on the fire. Tolkien went to visit his friend and mentor, George Sayer, and as he was there visiting with him, Tolkien told Sayer that he had been completely unable to find a publisher. And as they sat there and talked, Tolkien had the manuscript with him, the manuscript and sitting together by the Fireside. Tolkien, in exasperation, threatened to burn the book in the flames. Sayer urged him not to, and said, No, look, start reading some excerpts for me, as Tolkien did so, say, exuded encouragement. That’s it, that definitely should be published. That’s marvelous. That’s brilliant. One friend, one moment, one conversation by a fireplace in the winter cold stopped a great work being destroyed. Tolkien didn’t need to get rid of the magic. He didn’t need to modernize the Ents stop telling stories about the wizard Gandalf, he needed to tell it as it is, with all its power and beauty, grace, Christianity, the glory, the hope for the world, the Gospel unframed.
