Dr. David Gushee’s next book is about Job.
When he mentioned that on Created in the Image of God, I immediately began reflecting on my pivotal second year of college. Because Job has followed me for decades. As a confused, zealous liberal arts student majoring in theology, I decided to fast once a week from sunset to sunset—no food, no water—during my entire sophomore year, and read the book of Job over and over.
I wasn’t trying to win points for piety. I was wrestling with a question that had lodged itself painfully in my soul:
What does it mean to be righteous without becoming self‑righteous?
In the church culture I was immersed in, that wasn’t a theoretical problem. We were serious, law‑keeping Christians. We were convinced we were the “remnant” that had the law and the testimony of Jesus, and we could back it up with chapter and verse. We kept the seventh‑day Sabbath, the biblical holy days, and the food laws of Leviticus 11. We were, as I’ve said elsewhere, like Messianic Jews in reverse.
And we were called legalistic. A cult. Self‑righteous.
Someone actually told me, to my face, that I suffered from self‑righteousness. Another person gave me a line that has stayed with me ever since: “Some people are so afraid of being self‑righteous that they never approach righteousness.”
That cut both ways. On one side was the arrogance of “we’re the obedient ones,” on the other, the fear of becoming that guy—the intolerant, judgmental, legalist. In our understanding, that was Job. His sin was self-righteousness. By the end of that school year, my shorthand summary of Job was this: while that may have had some truth to it, through his trials, God blessed Job with a New Testament understanding in the Old Testament.
Job is introduced as blameless, upright, “the greatest of all the people of the East.” Yet by the end of the book, this righteous man has to put his hand over his mouth and say, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
There was more for him to learn—about God, about himself, about what righteousness really means.
As David Gushee and I talked, and as he described his upcoming book Job in Exile: A Guide for Spiritual Refugees, I heard that same thread from his side of the table as well: you can be sincerely righteous and still need to be broken open. You can be mostly right and still need to change. You can be loved by God and still be led through suffering to a deeper obedience.
Gushee reads Job not just as a private spiritual manual, but as a mirror for a whole generation of “spiritual refugees”—people who once believed they had the system right, only to be driven into exile by suffering, disillusionment, or abuse. Job, in that reading, becomes the patron saint of those who did everything their religious community asked, and still ended up in the ash heap asking, “What went wrong?”
That’s not a message many post‑evangelicals want to hear. We’d rather skip to restoration than revisit the whirlwind.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Hebrews says of Jesus something even more shocking than anything in Job:
“Though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” (Hebrews 5:8)
If Jesus Himself “learned obedience” through suffering, then what are we so afraid of?
When the Church Forgets Jesus
Gushee has spent his career thinking about Christian ethics—how followers of Jesus ought to live. His recent book, The Moral Teachings of Jesus, is a sustained attempt to do something alarmingly simple: sit back down in front of the Gospels and ask, “What did Jesus actually say about how we should live?”
Not just what we say about Him. Not just doctrines and atonement theories. The moral teachings themselves.
In our conversation, he diagnosed something I’d felt but struggled to name.
On the evangelical right, in the rush to win the culture war, Jesus’ moral teachings have often been left behind. Enemy love, turning the other cheek, forgiving seventy times seven, refusing the sword, not doing our righteousness to be seen by others—these are deeply inconvenient when you’re trying to “save” the country from the other side.
“My concern about evangelical Christianity,” he said, “is that in an effort to fight and win culture wars and political battles, the focus on the way of Jesus has been largely lost.”
On the progressive left, meanwhile, Jesus is often reduced to a kind of patron saint of inclusivity. The sermons are gentle, the politics usually line up with the latest social justice consensus, and the actual demands of Jesus—about money, sexual ethics, forgiveness, judgment—can get thinned out into “be nice” and “don’t judge.”
“My concern about the more progressive side of the church,” Gushee went on, “is more often a kind of a thin vague preaching that offers platitudes, sometimes its own version of politics, and not a lot of explicit demanding teaching about what Jesus had to say.”
So on both sides, in different ways, Jesus’ actual words about how to live get sidelined. In the name of avoiding fundamentalism on one side and bigotry on the other, the church has, in many cases, simply stopped letting Jesus be Lord of its moral imagination.
And this is where post‑evangelicals—those rethinking or leaving evangelicalism—are especially vulnerable. Many of us have been hurt by harsh, weaponized versions of “truth.” We’ve seen Scripture wielded to exclude, to shame, to uphold injustice. We’ve been burned by self‑righteous leaders and systems. The last thing we want is to become like that.
Gushee knows that world from the inside. He was, for years, a respected evangelical ethicist and pastor. He helped shape the very movement he now critiques. When he talks about “post‑evangelical hope,” he’s not lobbing grenades from the outside; he’s describing his own pilgrimage away from a politicized, culture‑war version of faith toward something more Christ‑centered.
So we go silent. We flinch from moral clarity. We treat any talk of “holiness” or “obedience” as suspect.
I understand that impulse. I’ve lived it. When the denomination I served in split right down the middle—this global body I’d given my life to, as a minister and as Director of Family Ministries—I watched both sides insist they, and they alone, were the faithful ones. It wasn’t just my church; it was my spiritual family collapsing in a bitter custody battle.
Having been through that, and having been told in my earlier years that I myself was self‑righteous, I became acutely sensitive to the charge. I didn’t want to be “that kind of Christian” anymore.
But Gushee’s warning is clear: if our primary goal becomes not being like the Pharisee, we can end up avoiding discipleship altogether. We become so allergic to self‑righteousness that we never approach righteousness. We prefer ambiguity to obedience—not because ambiguity is truer, but because it feels safer.
Jesus doesn’t give us that option. He forgives the woman caught in adultery and then says, “Go, and sin no more.” He tells us to pluck out the offending eye if that’s what it takes. He says, uncomfortably, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” And yet, in the same breath, He reserves His harshest words for the self‑righteous.
As Gushee put it in another context, Jesus has “a very radical agenda for human beings”—a life totally oriented toward pleasing God, with other motives (like honor, status, winning) steadily pushed to the margins. That radical agenda does not fit neatly into today’s left or right. It calls everyone—evangelical, progressive, post‑evangelical—to die to something.
The path between cheap grace and brittle legalism is narrow. It runs right through suffering—through admitting we were wrong, through being misunderstood, through loving people who don’t love us back, through letting go of our need to be seen as “tolerant” or “right.”
Cain, Abel, and the Older Brother
Long before I ever talked with David Gushee, I found myself struck by an odd parallel between two famous stories: Cain and Abel on one side of the Bible, the Prodigal Son on the other.
In Genesis, Cain and Abel both bring offerings. God looks with favor on Abel’s sacrifice, but not Cain’s. Scripture doesn’t say Cain sinned. It simply says his offering wasn’t received in the same way. God warns him: “Sin lies at the door, and its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”
Cain doesn’t. Resentment wins. The “unfavored” brother kills the favored one.
Fast‑forward to Jesus. He tells a story in which one son—call him the younger—does everything wrong. He dishonors his father, squanders the inheritance, winds up feeding pigs in a far country. Then, broken, he comes home. The father runs to him, embraces him, throws a feast.
And this time, it is the obedient son, the one who “never transgressed,” who burns with resentment outside the party. “These many years I have served you…yet you never gave me even a young goat.” It’s a reversal of Cain and Abel. Now the “good” brother is in danger of committing murder in his heart.
This was the kind of thing Gushee and I delighted in teasing out: how Jesus’ parables re‑weave Old Testament threads in surprising ways, and how that re‑weaving is aimed, again and again, at religious insiders.
I’ve come to believe that many post‑evangelicals live in terror of being that older brother. We’d rather be the prodigal than risk being seen as the resentful, rule‑keeping sibling. We equate any moral seriousness with Phariseeism, any mention of obedience with control.
Add to that the current climate Gushee described: American Christians are so divided along political and cultural lines that “it’s probably fair to say that we hardly consider each other members of the same religion anymore.” We’ve gone from Catholics vs. Protestants to conservatives vs. progressives within the same denominations. Now the most vicious fights are not between Christians and secularists, but within the body itself.
In that environment, who wants to be the one saying, “I think Jesus really meant what He said about money…about sex…about forgiveness…about loving our enemies”? Who wants to risk being flattened into a caricature, labeled self‑righteous or intolerant, when we’ve just crawled out of those spaces?
Yet here, too, Gushee pushes us back to Jesus. Rather than letting the culture wars set the agenda—who’s the good son, who’s the bad one—he invites churches to become what they were meant to be: laboratories for learning the way of Jesus together. Places where we practice forgiveness, enemy love, generosity, truth‑telling, and humility in community.
And Jesus doesn’t ask us to be the prodigal or the older brother.
He invites us to become like the Father.
To be the one who maintains a clear moral center and runs, undignified, to embrace the repentant. To be the one who goes out to plead with the seething older son, “All that I have is yours,” while still refusing to cancel the feast. To love both kinds of children, and absorb the misunderstanding from both.
That calling will not spare us from accusations—from either direction.
Love as the Sign of the Covenant
Coming out of my former tradition, I was steeped in identity markers. We had a verse for everything. Revelation 12:17 describes the dragon making war with the “remnant” who “keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus.” That, we believed, was us. The seventh‑day Sabbath was our sign. The holy days were our calendar. The dietary laws shaped our fellowship. This gave us a powerful sense of being special—and, if I’m honest, more obedient than others.
There’s something dangerously intoxicating about that.
Later, as I stepped away from that system—resigning from the ministry so I could disentangle my faith from my paycheck—I went looking for the true sign of the Christian covenant. What is the marker Jesus Himself gives?
John 13:35 answered with unsettling clarity:
“By this shall all men know that you are My disciples, if you have love one for another.”
Not by this shall you know. Not an internal badge you privately wear. But a visible sign to “all men”—to outsiders, atheists, skeptics, spiritual refugees—that we belong to Him.
Love for one another.
Not just love for those in our little subgroup. Not just warm feelings. A visible, practiced, cross‑bearing love that can be seen from the outside and recognized as something different.
In my conversation with Gushee, I heard a similar hunger. He’s spent years in the thick of American Christendom, watching as churches contort themselves around culture‑war priorities, or drift into vague niceness. His current impulse is neither to join one side nor the other, but to call us back to the feet of Jesus.
“I think renewal in Christianity begins with a return to the most fundamental source of our faith,” he told me. “And I think the most fundamental source of our faith is the account of the life of Jesus—what he taught, how he acted, how he treated people.”
“I like imagining Bible studies and classrooms and churches full of people who are being exposed to the challenging teachings of Jesus and realizing, I guess it’s time for me to stop pointing fingers at the other side and start working on being a better follower of Jesus,” he said. “That applies to all of us.”
That’s not cheap love. It’s not “let’s all agree to disagree” while we quietly despise one another. It is love that tells the truth, that forgives the unforgivable, that refuses to play by the scripts of left vs. right. It is love that keeps Jesus’ actual teachings at the center, and lets them offend everyone as necessary.
Love, in that sense, is not the absence of standards. It is the willingness to suffer for them—for the sake of the other.
God’s Tolerance, God’s Standard, and the Suffering In‑Between
Which brings us back to where we started: Job, Jesus, and the fear of being “that kind of Christian.”
Here is what emerges when you hold Gushee’s work, my own journey, and the witness of Scripture together.
God is far more tolerant, patient, and merciful than any of us dare to imagine. If you doubt that, sit with the stories Jesus tells. The father running to the prodigal. The employer paying the late‑arriving workers the same as the early risers. The king inviting street people to fill the feast. Or Job’s story itself: God enduring chapter after chapter of raw complaint without smiting the speaker.
He is also far more demanding.
“Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” “Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord’ and do not do what I say?” “If you love Me, keep My commandments.”
His tolerance is not indifference. It is directed toward transformation.
And transformation, for Job, for Jesus, for David Gushee, for me, for you, runs through suffering.
Sometimes that suffering is obvious: illness, loss, persecution. Sometimes it is quieter: the pain of admitting we were wrong; the ache of forgiving someone who will never apologize; the loneliness of refusing to join in a mob—left or right—that is clearly violating Jesus’ way.
For post‑evangelicals and spiritual refugees, there’s another layer. Many of us have already suffered under distorted, oppressive versions of Christianity. We’ve endured spiritual abuse, authoritarian leadership, weaponized theology. We’ve watched churches fracture, families split, friendships implode over politics and doctrine. Our instinct is self‑protection.
Gushee understands that. It’s why he wrote Job in Exile as “a guide for spiritual refugees.” It’s why The Moral Teachings of Jesus is not a scolding, but an invitation: to meet Jesus again, beyond the distortions, and let Him speak for Himself.
But if we stop at self‑protection—if our only moral compass is “don’t be like them”—we will never become like Him.
We will confuse God’s mercy with permissiveness. We will trade the hard, beautiful work of discipleship for a comfortable agnosticism about everything that might cost us.
Jesus “learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” Job, righteous as he was, met God in the whirlwind and came out changed. David Gushee, after decades in evangelical and academic spaces, now spends his time helping Christians take Jesus seriously again—not as a mascot for their team, but as Lord.
And I, once a zealous young minister afraid of my own self‑righteousness, find myself returning to Job, to Hebrews, to the Gospels, with the same old question, now sharpened by Gushee’s example:
Am I willing to suffer—to be misunderstood, to be called intolerant by some and compromised by others—if that’s what it takes to follow Jesus’ actual teachings in love?
Post‑Evangelical Hope
The title of one of Gushee’s earlier books is After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity. The phrase he used with me was “post‑evangelical hope.” Not the thin hope of having escaped a bad system, but a thicker, riskier hope: that on the far side of disillusionment, there is a way of being Christian that is more Christlike, not less.
That starts, I am convinced—and Gushee would agree—by letting Scripture, and especially the Gospels, read us again. By letting Job ask us hard questions about suffering and righteousness. By letting Jesus unsettle both our progressive and conservative assumptions. By allowing love to become, once more, the visible sign of our discipleship—not love as sentiment, but love as cross‑bearing obedience.
There will be suffering involved. But it is suffering with a purpose, in the hands of a God who is both more tolerant and more demanding than we’ve dared to believe.
You are created in the image of God. And God loves His creation.
— Wade
If this reflection resonates—especially if you’re navigating your own post‑evangelical wilderness—subscribe, share, or pass it on to someone who needs encouragement to keep wrestling, not just walking away. In next week’s episode of Created in the Image of God, we’ll turn from Job’s ash heap to the public square, asking with religion scholar Mark Silk what happens when our culture wars swallow even our attempts at unity. You won’t want to miss it.
