Of Prophets, Priests, and Poets: Christian Formation at the Gates of Hell

by Brian J. Walsh

If there is one thing that recent political developments have taught us it is that “character doesn’t matter.” The electorate—and most tragically, most of the white “Christian” electorate—has no problem endorsing people who have none of the virtues or character traits that would be identified with following Jesus. In this book of essays and reflections from over twenty-five years, Brian Walsh asks the What does Christian formation look like when “the gates of hell” have not only prevailed against the church of Jesus Christ, but the church has, in so many ways, become the gates of hell?

172 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 22, 2025

Reviews

[Persis]

I’ve been a fan of Brian Walsh’s writing since I read his books on worldview with Richard Middleton. This is a compilation of works and it did not disappoint. We need books like this which takes an honest look at the world and still finds hope in God. Not a sentimental, ethereal, things will be fine in the afterlife, but a challenge to live in the world justly, grow in the fruit of the Spirit, and love the neighbor.

(Edited to clarify - “Worldview” per Walsh and Middleton is NOT merely a set of intellectual propositions that when believed make a person “right” and then can be used to characterize who is right or wrong.)

[Dave Courtney]

Turned out to be much different than the book I thought I was going to get, beginning with the fact that, at it's heart, this is specifically about the nature and shape of "Christian education." Or perhaps more astutely, the relationship between those two terms.

There is of course a lot on the line for the author in terms of why this subject matters. As he states at the start, "What if the gates of hell have prevailed over the church of Jesus Christ? Or worse, what if the church is the gates of hell?" (page 19) A striking statement that doesn't seek to throw the Christian hope of victory over Sin and Death into question, but rather seeks a more honest assessment of future hope and present reality sitting in tension. It is in this sense that our present cultural, political, and social realities can embody both victory and defeat. Perhaps that acknowledgement is precisely the sort of humility we need to seek a better story, or better knowledge of THE story that holds all of this in it's storied hands. For the author, Christian education plays an important role to this end. "We could say that Christian education and ministry at a time like this is all about Christian formation at the gates of hell." (page 20) An idea that recognizes all "worldviews, even transformational worldviews, are not immune to ideological distortion." (page 21)

Beginning with the prophetic, defined as engagement "in a ministry of retrieval and remembering for an amnesiac people who had lost their way." (page 34) As the author suggests, "The prophetic word only sounded novel and new because the people had forgotten their own story, they had lost the plot, and their imagination had been taken captive by alien, and invariably idolatrous, cultural systems, symbols, and narratives." And part of the particular modern problem that author will go on to dissect is the tendency of the modern world to "split the world up into two realms of sacred and secular." (page 35) Here the necessary role of the prophet gets bound to either enslavement to the culture or complete disinterest in these earthly realities beyond it being an inevitable symbol of a world persistantly and forever destinted to desturction at the gates of hell.

If you can feel that swing of the pendulum towards aiming such thinking at the church itself, you can feel the punch this book is attempting to make in terms of its inner critique. If you can hear echos of Jesus' words to some of his audience of religious leaders/pharisees you wouldn't be alone- it's what kept coming to my mind, with this important note: in a world where "Christianity" has become good at playing those narratives in convenient us versus them supersessionist paradigms, the much more difficult work is imagining Jesus' words to those religious leaders as an inner critique that doesn't stand against them at the gates of hell, but for them. In some sense this becomes the necessary grounds for challenging certain conceptions of "justice" that have become the trademark of this aformentioned modernist, enlightenment era. A justice bent on us versus them paradigms will always turn us into the gates of hell. When the justice which we find in the prophetic ministry is allowed to guide our way, and indeed become our judge, "new questions emerge about vocation, family, church, sexuality, politics, ecology, and economics."

In other words, it pushes us straight into this earthly existence, not apart from it, simply with a narrative that has us standing against the gates of hell not enacting its structures.

"When you understand the call to justice, you become painfully aware of both your own privilege and your complicity in justice." (page 41)

And then their is the role of the priest. Perhaps best articulated as "the holding of faith" in the form of our questions. This pulling together of the intersection between life in this world and the prophetic ministry into a kind of intellectualism that seeks to protect against the same kind of aforementioned dualism noted above. Which is where the real inference of the book's catchy title comes into play- the role of the poet. The guardians of the imagination. As the author writes, "The key pathology of our time, which seduces us all, is the reduction of the imagination so that we are too numb, satiated and co-opted to do serious imaginative work... It isn't simply a matter of believing certain things and then putting them into practice, because if we have reduced our captive imaginations, then we simply won't have the resources of imagination to envision what faithful life looks like." (page 46)

At the root of this prophetic imagination is the idea of transformation. If you are bringing up Walter Bruegemmann here you would be correct. His work in this area is something the author is pulling from. From his specific concern for Christian education (and educators), he insists that any such intellectual concern must be satiated by it's interest in transformation of the character;
"We are concerned with transformation not because a modernist narrative of the ineluctable progress of humanity animates our work, but because we believe that in Christ all things are made new." (page 53) And this is "not a once and for all accomplishment in the life of an individual, but an ongoing dynamic in history and all of creation." Here is where I really appreciated how he likewise brings in our relationship to the scriptures (or to their role in our lives). In the spirit of Christian education he seeks to reclaim a posture that both upholds their sacred role in our formation AND the necessary and ongoing act of constant recon(text)ualization. In this sense what is being recontextualized is not a bunch of information but a story. And in that light, any time we engage the story one of three things happen in relationship to the community existing in relationship to it- orientation, disorientation, and renewed orientation. All three of those things break into our worlds by way of Christian education.

In this sense, in another key point within the book that has stuck with me, we can note the problem even with the concept of "worldview," a word that has become predominant within the secular/sacred divide. "The limitation of worldview language to descrsibe what Christian education is all about" is rooted in our tendency to elevate view over praxis. (page 57) Meaning, as formative beings engaged in spiritual formation, it's not simply about "thinking" Christianly, but living Christianly. Worldview is totality language. It thinks and creates a world in the most "comprehensive" and "broadest" way possible. (page 58) As such, these ways of thinking, anchored in the divisions that fuel them, tend to make their way of thinking about and seeing the world impenetrable to the more complex and nuanced concerns of matters of participation by "hiding" behind rhetoric, rhetoric that often gets recast as "the heavy hand of divine sanction." And not just within Christianity. This is in fact the nature and aim of empire.

It is precisely the point where a "Christian worldview" becomes a fence buidling exercise (yes, at the gates of hell).

Hence why worldviews are considered lenses, or in the analogy the author uses, "maps." There is truth to the idea that worldview plays a role, but they are not the whole picture. As the author points out, an orienting map (to where we are in our thinking ways) is worthless to someone who has no idea where they are in a participatory sense. The important and key point here: A "transformationally dynamic worldview can be reduced to a repressive ideology if it is taken to be a total system." (page 63) The notion of metanarrative that modernists have, perhaps, become so allergic to in their dismantling of a religious worldview, remains necessary and important (and it's own discussion regarding a necessary reclamation of its worth and point and purpose), but for the author there is perhaps a greater concern apparent within Christian education, which is the tendency to see worldview in a too comprehensive fashion and form. It has crippled its ability to move from an acknowledgment of the metanarrative to the particulars of our ongoing participation in this world. "Minds" aren't the only dimension in play. Or, in the author's own catchphrase, "while systems can be taught, worldviews are caught." (page 64) Meaning, a worldview should be an outcome of ones participation, not the other way around.

Or to put it in another way concerning our relationship to the scriptures- "If our reading of Scripture always confirms our worldview and if the Scriptures never surprise, confuse, upset, or disorient us, then we are undoubtedly misreading the Scriptures." (page 66) The irony here being, that when all we ever have is this protective vision of orientation by way of right "information," worldview becomes "ideology" and we become more and more biblically illiterate. (page 66) It becomes about intellectual assent rather than the praxis of participation. It becomes about a "fortress" mentality for individualism rather than a transformational vision for living and being and acting in the world as community. (page 72) "Ideology is such a devastating betrayal of a transformational worldview precisely because it becomes culturally inconsequential." (page 74) One thing that protects against such an ideological approach, usually bolstered by propping up the Bible as "an easy answer book," is retaining and recovering a "lost biblical dynamism." (page 75) Namely, recovering the interpretive practice that happens both in relationship to tradition and likewise in concert with the every changing dynamics of our context. "A biblical worldview is, at heart, not a system at all: it is an ongoing story." (page 77) Or, as the author suggests,

"If a story is to remain vibrant and formative, there must be a community of people capable of remembering and reinterpreting that story. Only then is the community capable of ordering their new experience in a manner consistent with their story."

Tradition is about transformation. An "unchanged tradition is dead." (page 78)

"The issue isn't just how you "see" the world but also how your imagination shapes the way in which you construe the world. Not just what you see, but how you see it, why you see what you see, and what hope you have for what you see. Imagination isn't content witih simply seeing the world as it is: it has the audacity to imagine that the world could be different." (page 87)

(quoting N.T. Wright) "To know is to love. Knowing Christianly is a knowing that affirms the reality and goodness of the other, and longs to enter into a covenantal relationship of intimacy, truth, and betrothal with the world. Christians are incurable world lovers- even when it hurts- because we follow one who so loved the world that he gave his only Son." (page 93)

And where this comes into the grassroots reality of the systems of Christian eduction, something it shares with secular education systems, one of the key problems is the way they tend to treat education as "upward mobility." (page 98) Something the author argues as being a project that creates "global homelessness." A people without a context (or the producst of a coopted and colonized context). Instead, the author speaks about an educational praxis built around the idea of "homecoming." Meaning, education that places us back into the context of our place in this world. Rather than seeing our educational systems within the framework of our modern western "worldview," which sees education as the necessary endeavor of progress which dismantles the constraints of our past for the sake of upward mobility in technological terms (information driven education designed to control by reconstructing the deconstructed world in the image of that western ideal), we can learn to see education as teaching us how to rightly inhabit our home. Such a system would be as truly "Christian" as it gets.

In his most biting term, he imagines this as "seceding" from the Empire, or in the biblical language, the Powers of Sin and Death that we have bound ourselves to at the gates of hell. (page 112) Homecoming then, as an exercise of particiaption in the world as a key and essential way of knowing, confronts us with its essential characteristic- hospitality. This is what it means for prophet (justice), priest (teaching) and poet (imagination) to be brought together through a truly Christocentric imagination.