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Mike Cosper • Collin Hansen • Mark Mellinger

I spent this week in New York with the staff and fellows of The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. Sadly we didn’t make time for a Broadway show. But then, Les Misérables has been off Broadway since 2016. We would have needed to settle for anything else.

The world-renowned musical debuted at London’s Barbican Theater 40 years ago this month. Especially since the movie version premiered in theaters Christmas 2012, many Christians have rejoiced in the how this adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel draws out themes of legalism and grace.

As The New York Times pointed out, British theater critics didn’t immediately warm to the musical 40 years ago. It came across as dark. Traditional. Moralistic. Audiences, however, loved it. And continue to love it after more than 15,500 showings in London. The program debuted at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in summer 1986.

I paid particular attention to how The New York Times described the arduous process of translating Hugo’s 1862 novel into a modern musical. The producers struggled to identify a unifying narrative thread through Hugo’s 1,400 pages. In a parable of the post-Christendom West, they fell back on a familiar structure. Co-producer John Caird cast Valjean as a New Testament believer in grace and Javert as an Old Testament believer in justice.

“As a bunch of liberal humanists, we had tried to avoid every mention of religion,” Caird said in the line that grabbed my attention. They couldn’t find any other motivation to give the show meaning and purpose: “sewing God into the show was what animated the characters,” Caird said.

We’ll have to forgive Caird’s hermeneutical fail to focus on this main takeaway: look at how the post-Christendom West is eager but unable to escape the gospel frame. Sure, audiences love Les Misérables for its dramatic Paris barricades, heart-tugging ballads, and soaring ensemble anthems. But it resonates more deeply not only as an echo of Christendom but as the very question at the bottom of every human heart. In a world plagued by injustices—what we have done and left undone, and what has been done to us—can our relentless pursuit of justice put the world to rights? Or must we seek forgiveness, and to forgive others?

The Bible doesn’t pit forgiveness and justice against each other. They are joined at the cross in the sacrifice of the perfect One, Jesus Christ (Rom. 3:21-26). The ongoing success of Les Misérables after 40 years reminds us how much the world still needs this good news of forgiveness in our longing for justice.

COLLIN HANSEN

Editor in Chief

Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life

Collin Hansen • Rebecca McLaughlin

Imagine you could save your life through one simple, regular act. You wouldn’t always want to do it. Every week you’d come up with multiple excuses. The night before would often be a struggle. Same with the morning before. Every time you finish you feel refreshed, energized, eager to undertake that day’s agenda. But then when it came time to do it again, somehow you’d still struggle to do it.

I don’t know what comes to mind for you. Maybe the gym. Maybe a quiet time of Bible reading and prayer. Maybe a call or meeting with a family member or friend. But I’m talking about church and a new book by Rebecca McLaughlin, How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life (Crossway and TGC).

Rebecca is widely known to Gospelbound viewers and listeners as author of several of the most encouraging and successful books in TGC history, including Confronting Christianity, The Secular Creed, and Jesus through the Eyes of Women. She’s also a fellow with The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. She returns to Gospelbound to discuss the life-changing research on what makes church good for your health.

The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It

Alec Ryrie

One of my most anticipated reads of 2025 was by Alec Ryrie, a guest going all the way back to the first season of Gospelbound in 2020 for his book Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt. In Unbelievers he advanced a provocative and compelling thesis about the shift in moral focus from Jesus to Hitler. While for centuries Western culture strove to meet the standard of Jesus, now we just want to avoid being compared to Hitler. I developed that thesis and pointed out the shortcomings of anti-Hitler morality in my book published earlier this year, Where Is God in a World with So Much Evil?

Ryrie expands his sources to identify fictional villains who resemble Hitler, from Harry Potter to Doctor Who. “These are the myths on which generations of children in the post-Christian West have been raised,” Ryrie writes, “cleansing the brutal lessons of the Second World War and transposing them into timeless morality tales.” He also makes a good point of how rarely the losers in a conflict repent. “The white South accepted abolition at the point of a bayonet,” he writes of the American Civil War. The Second World War in Italy, Germany, and Japan played out in ways we probably shouldn’t expect to be normative after wars.

Based on his earlier writing I wondered where to place Ryrie with respect to religion. Is he lamenting the eclipse of Jesus? Does he think we could go back to the pre-Hitler age? Definitively not, as he explains in this new book, with pointed criticism for the moral and Christian writings of T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis. He urges “old religious establishments” to retreat into the wilderness for two or three generations where Christians can repent of the destruction their churches have caused over the centuries. Ryrie hopes that the “Christendom values” of sexual ethics, gender identity, and abortion will recede and a different Christianity will “mend fences” with the post-Nazi consensus. As Glenn Wishnew pointed out in his TGC review, this kind of “watered-down Christianity mixed with progressive politics” has already proven to be a dead end.

The problem of replacing Christianity by forging a new moral tradition runs into two familiar problems. With no risen Christ we have no spiritual power to resist evil. And with no biblical authority we have no moral standard to define evil.

I’ll stick with Eliot and Lewis and contend that in the “age of Hitler” we don’t need more of the cosmopolitan humanitarianism Nazis trampled in Weimar Germany. We need the costly discipleship of Bonhoeffer that triumphed over Hitler by witnessing to the judgments of God in eternity.