Evangelical “third wayism” is continually subject to withering criticisms. According to critics, third wayists shape their public witness in order to appeal to non-Christians, particularly those on the left. This misplaced assimilation of politics to proselytizing incites purveyors of third wayism to be overly acquiescent and “winsome.” The result, at best, is that third wayists strive to stake out a middle ground when more distinctive conviction is called for. At worst, third wayists “coddle” those to their left while “punching” those to their right—for example, harshly castigating vaccine, climate, or lockdown skeptics while insisting on nuance and charity for those who promote progressive stances on sexual ethics and abortion. 

There is no agreed-on (black)list of third wayists, but Tim Keller, Gavin Ortlund, Ray Ortlund, Russell Moore, David French, J.D. Greear, James Davison Hunter, Beth Moore, Mike Cosper, and Alistair Begg are frequently identified. For some critics, in a prior “neutral world,” in which Western society did not necessarily embrace but was not overtly hostile to the gospel, this winsome approach could be effective. However, we have progressed, or regressed, into a “negative world,” a situation in which espousing Christian faith is socially disadvantageous. Critics of third wayism also appeal to high-profile converts such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali or the vibe shift represented by Joe Rogan’s positivity toward Christian faith to suggest a harvest is more likely to come from the right than the left. What is required in our moment, these critics argue, is not winsome appeals to those whose cultural and moral assumptions sit at odds with Christianity but firm pronouncements of right and wrong, good and evil. Clarity, not squishy gentleness, appeals to a rising generation of right-leaning men and women yearning for someone to tell it like it is amid the West’s moral confusion. 

These critics are, in some ways, correct. The church’s political witness should not be guided by judgments regarding which public policies most “appeal” to non-Christians. Furthermore, soft-pedalling orthodoxy is no recipe for ecclesial flourishing in an age of disenchantment, secularism, and spiritual deconstruction. If Christians are to love their neighbours, they need to engage not merely in politics but in the bruising world of partisan politics. As Jacques Maritain warns, “The fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not virtue, but a way of escaping virtue.” 

Nonetheless, while Christians should not give way to the cosmopolitan, technocratic, anti-humanism of the left, the ethno-nationalist excesses of the right are no more compatible with the Christian faith. What remains but to insist on a public posture that will, almost inevitably, be construed as a third way? Christians should adopt this posture not to attract converts or capture an elusive middle ground but because it is the right thing to do, regardless of whether it wins applause. 

In the broader context of the foregoing quotation, Maritain—an architect of twentieth-century Christian democracy—offers a stark warning about what he calls Machiavellianism. Machiavellianism, on his definition, is a vision of politics motivated by an “illusion of immediate success” which promises that if we take the gloves off, taking the fight to our enemies, we will get results and get them now. Yet this promise of quick results tempts us to use vicious means for virtuous ends. 

As opponents of third-way winsomeness remind us, Christ is Lord over all. Therefore, we cannot check our allegiance to Christ and his commands at the door when entering the public arena. However, if the Lord over all really is Christ—namely, the one from Nazareth who suffered and died for his enemies—then neither can we jettison our fidelity to Christ’s example when conducting ourselves in the public arena. As Oliver O’Donovan continually warns, we must guard against naturalized visions of Christian ethics and politics that fail to maintain riveted attention to the crucified and risen one’s particularity and history. Maritain suggests that if Jesus really is “Lord of all,” then not any but his sort of “spirituality” has primacy over earthly power. We are not, then, at liberty to impose supposedly “Christian” values on the public sphere by any means. Maritain goes on, “The principle of the primacy of the spiritual has to be respected even in the manner in which we shall work to bring it into existence; . . . the primacy of the spiritual, in other words, cannot be brought about by a negation of itself.” As my former pastor Mark Stirling often said, “You can’t do Jesus’ work in non-Jesus ways.” 

Regardless of one’s feeling about the neutral- versus negative-world framing, our present moment does present acute challenges for the church’s public witness. Those challenges, however, come from all sides of the ideological spectrum. Principled opposition to unregulated immigration degenerates toward ideologically masked selfishness and prejudice; righteous insistence on the welfare of Palestinian refugees morphs into thinly veiled anti-Semitism; advocacy for the dignity of gay and trans persons funds ideological purges of those whose view of sexuality is deemed unenlightened; and worries about the exclusion of religion from the public square support not a renewed vision of a common-good politics but sympathy for authoritarians promising to exclude those different from ourselves. Third wayism of the sort I commend has nothing to do with staking out a mushy middle ground or remaining above the fray and everything to do with honesty and clarity about the temptations facing us regardless of our political ideology. The gospel should unsettle our political alliances by making us aware of the distortions of our moral intuitions that arise when we offer wholesale allegiance to any political ideology, whether left, right, post-liberal, or anything else. 

Again, if third wayism is the attempt to keep one’s hands clean from the ambiguity of real-life partisanship, hoping thereby to gain the approval of a watching world, then cast it into the abyss. But I suspect the reality is rather different. Seeking this sort of third way, one based on principle and not perception, far from avoiding offence or minimizing disagreement, is the harder path. The widely discussed phenomenon of “audience capture” exemplifies this difficulty. Public figures often gain prominence by virtue of a courageous willingness to object to their tribe’s excesses and a refusal to be beholden to external interests. However, as their audience grows, they are incentivized to avoid offending their newly established “base.” If third wayism merely refers to a set of “moderate” policy prescriptions or a gadfly mentality that refuses to inhabit a distinctive political tradition, then of course it is as vulnerable to audience capture as any more conservative or progressive ideology. However, the best sort of third wayism—and, on the whole, Keller is exemplary in this regard—is less concerned with ideological moderation and more concerned with resisting audience capture. This sort of third wayism makes decisions about when to coddle and when to criticize not on the basis of misguided evangelistic aims but from a conviction that the prophetic truth of the gospel shatters all ideological confines. 

Critics misunderstand Keller if they think he sought a third way primarily to appeal to secular progressives. In an unforgettable sermon (and then book) on Jonah, Keller describes the “world’s rebuke of the church.” The covenant insider representing the church—namely, Jonah—is continually portrayed as more ignorant of God’s loving intentions than the pagans. Whether it is sailors in a near-capsizing ship crying out to Jonah’s God for mercy or Ninevah’s shamed citizens begging for a reprieve despite receiving a (seemingly) unconditional promise of judgment, the plot line of the book leads us to suspect it is not merely the pagans who needed to learn about Israel’s God from Jonah but also Jonah who desperately needed to learn from them about the God he thought he knew. The reason to be humble and winsome with “the pagans” of our day is not primarily as a subversive evangelistic strategy but because our own tribe does not possess the totality of truth. What’s more, we should, even amid prophetic diatribe, expect to learn from those we suspect are unenlightened or unredeemed. The story of Jonah offers an indispensable warning regarding the way our supposed zeal for the ways of God can subtly tempt us to betray God’s compassionate purposes for our cultural or ideological opponents. In sum, third wayism consists not in staking out a moderate ideology but in attentiveness to the abiding temptation to deny the gospel of God’s love to the stranger and sinner—whether that sinner be a champagne socialist or crypto-trading, winner-take-all capitalist. 

In a letter from prison addressing the question of how the next generation might rebuild after the cultural devastation of fascism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, appropriating Jeremiah 45:5, “It will be the task of our generation, not to ‘seek great things,’ but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos.” The antidote to Machiavellianism is not to offer a listless generation yearning for roots a milquetoast, middle-of-the-road ideology devoid of passionate denunciation. It is to insist on the difficult “narrow way” of righteousness and often involves not merely denouncing injustice but—for the sake of preserving our own spiritual integrity—resisting the mob baying for blood, whether that mob consists of woke post-evangelicals or conservative Christian nationalists, aware that the ills to be denounced are not only outside but also within our own camp. 

Take the example of Herbert McCabe. McCabe was a Dominican priest known for his strident criticisms of John Hick’s liberalizing revision of Christian theology in The Myth of God Incarnate and his understated, brilliant re–articulations of Thomistic doctrine in modern, analytic style. Yet despite this fairly traditionalist pedigree, McCabe was a socialist who insisted that a classical vision of divine absoluteness and transcendence better secured God’s preference for the poor and for liberation than the revisionary doctrines of liberation theologians. Whatever one thinks of McCabe, one could not confuse him for a moderate. Nonetheless, epitomizing the vision of third wayism I celebrate, he said, 

This insight applies, of course, not only to the Christian socialist but also to the Christian progressive, the Christian libertarian, the Christian post-liberal, and so on. Third wayism does not bid us forsake these labels, but it warns us not to inhabit them without a cultivated, ironic detachment and relative ambivalence, one that recognizes we are subservient to a higher city and liable to deploy Machiavellian means that sidestep the only path to true victory, which must lead through Golgotha. 

At the brink of the Second World War, urging the Swiss to prepare for armed resistance, Karl Barth—perhaps drawing on his days as a preacher in the village of Safenwil—proclaimed that God wants to “encounter a bunch of men and women who are decent enough not to fall for the perfidy, swindles and fraud of this era and who will avoid making any contracts with the devil.” He urged them, in short, to fight, motivated not by bloodlust but by the sort of decency that protects the goods of justice, family, and homeland. Yet the devil’s lucrative “contracts” arrive at our door in various guises—as Barth’s own tragic biography attests. These contracts can, indeed, tempt us to lay down our arms, forsaking resistance to forces of dehumanization. Critics of third wayism are right to warn us in this regard. Yet scandalizing his countrymen in later years, Barth’s earlier incitement to armed resistance did not hinder him from insisting with as much vehemence that the same gospel that had bid them take up arms now demanded they befriend the German people despite the horrors they had been party to. Barth imagined the voice of his Saviour saying, 

The loudest voices insist one cannot have it both ways; it is either armed resistance to lies and wickedness or unqualified embrace of the other. For many post-evangelicals, for example, the church’s witness is bankrupt, her moral currency spent. Resistance looks like hypocrisy. But resist she must, because for all the church’s failures, some of the culture-war issues that evangelicals commonly decry are in need of resistance. Western societies, with state sanction, kill our youngest and increasingly our oldest as well. We have incentivized a culture of endless consumption and rights without responsibility. The world we are collectively creating is inhospitable and inhumane. 

Yet if we grant that critics of third wayism have a point, we must admit progressives and post-evangelicals do as well. The witness of the church has been sapped not merely by assaults from without but by scandal, abuse, and greed from within. To think our churches are in a position to be anything other than winsome represents the real failure to attend to the reality of our moment, for the negative world is a result of both the sins of a progressive society and the moral calamity wrought by the church’s breaches of integrity. Christians should speak with humble winsomeness, not because we wink at the sins of the society without, but because we wince and even weep at the church’s own failures to exemplify a better way. Prophets we must be, but rare indeed is the genuine prophet with honour in their hometown, or with their own audience and tribe. The most pressing prophetic task, then, lies not in the denunciation of the right or the left but, as Bonhoeffer says, in preserving our own souls in the chaos. This is our great act of witness. 

I worry that progressive Christians seeking to accommodate the church’s public witness to the perspective of a Guardian or New York Times columnist and critics of winsomeness advocating a more aggressive, less ambivalent public posture each in their own way fail to take seriously the ubiquity of evil. Post-evangelicals are tempted to shout about the church’s failures and whisper about the wickedness of progressivist social orthodoxy, whereas critics of third wayism miss that winsomeness need not indicate an underestimation of “the world’s” wickedness and might instead derive from a serious, Augustinian accounting of the way the tragedy of sin distorts our own vision and witness. 

In a searing article, the widely influential—but less widely known—Cambridge theologian Donald MacKinnon sought to reckon with the tendency of brilliant people to commit acts of horrific indecency. Reflecting on theologian Paul Tillich’s gross infidelities, MacKinnon describes a moment when Tillich’s wife desperately sought divorce. In response, Tillich “threw himself on the floor, begging her not to, enlisting his friends to tell her that it would ruin his career. Sadly we must conclude that at that time the ‘courage to be’ of which Tillich wrote did not extend to risking his career, his status, his reputation, his security.” MacKinnon notes that Tillich tended to talk of his theology in heroic terms, describing it as a leap into the abyss of unknowing. But, MacKinnon wonders, does Tillich illustrate a tendency among all of us to celebrate the wrong sorts of heroism? What, he asks, was most heroic about the ministry of Jesus? Not his confrontations—denunciation of the political and religious establishment was standard fare among first-century, would-be messiahs. No, the risk, if we can call it that, was that Christ allowed himself to “endure” pervasive misunderstandings from all sides. His silence was misconstrued as weakness; the ambiguity of his teaching was represented as a failure of nerve. His refusal to take up arms was taken as a signal—if I might be forgiven the anachronism—of mealy-mouthed third wayism. What was heroic about Christ, for MacKinnon, was his “endurance” of these misconstruals, his refusal to take up more aggressive means to dispel them, and his patient waiting for his vindication to arrive at the Father’s chosen hour and no sooner. Of course, he did all of this because he came not to crush but to redeem his enemies. 

I suspect public faithfulness, in our moment, will be perceived as both an impotent coddling of Christianity’s opponents and a bigoted refusal to embrace a self-righteous progressivist agenda. In short, I am sometimes tempted to think our only options are something like Tim Keller–style third wayism or Machiavellianism of one sort or another. In that case, there are worse things than being winsome.