Turn me gentle

Where has gentleness gone?

Pinky Swear, Scott Erickson Art

Oxford University Press announced their 2025 word of the year. It’s not a word but the phrase “rage bait,” referring to online content that is “deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive.” The word of the year is less a fusty specialization of lexicographers and more an artifact of cultural discernment. 2025’s word of the year reveals something about human weakness and points out how we speak shapes our thinking and behaviour, a handmaid to virtue formation (or malformation).

How we talk and engage in the world matters as much as the content or issue at hand. Christians mired in the culture wars of today, both on the left and right, tend to dismiss matters of posture and approach when it comes to engaging with others. But as Eugene Peterson observed, “We can’t do the Lord’s work in the devil’s ways.”¹

In a cultural context that seems increasingly hostile towards Christianity, some conclude there’s limited room for something like winsomeness (see Aaron Renn, James Wood, etc). Aaron Renn notes that Christians most recently existed in a “neutral world” in which Christianity was not widely supported but neither was it actively opposed. Renn says that world is gone, and currently we inhabit the “negative world,” where orthodox Christianity is now understood as opposed to or transgressive of what is common social good. In the context of the negative world, a quality like winsomeness isn’t reading the moment, a failed strategy leading to appeasement or accommodation.

Calling people “a brood of vipers” certainly is no winsome tactic to win friends. Meaning, Jesus confronted, was at times intentionally provocative, and offered up stinging rebukes. Of course it’s important to observe the occasions and audience of this anti-Dale Carnegie side of Jesus. These flares of righteous anger were aimed at the oppression of the poor or when religion and holy things were co-opted and corrupted. But the life of Jesus shows that the how of our witness is not an either-or, all-or-nothing equation. Even in this negative world we inhabit, we’re back to the need for discernment. Skilled wisdom is needed to know when and how to speak in a manner that reflects Christ.

But let’s be honest: in the year of “rage-bait” our problem is not that we are all happy hippies softly singing John Lennon’s Imagine. We don’t need remedial classes to encourage indignation or heighten our docile levels of fury because we’re constantly goaded towards it. The cultural accommodation we should fear is how unchecked anger becomes a default posture of our hearts.

In this rage-baited time, where umbrage and contempt are expertly nursed and amplified, what we need more of is gentleness. Here is a forgotten fruit of the Spirit, a tonic for our time. Proverbs 15:1 counsels: “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” If we’re looking to dial down the temperature, hoping for an antidote to our increasingly abrasive habits, gentleness is a prime candidate to turn the tide of rage.

Do hear me clearly: this is not a tamping down of anger and peddling an overly apologetic Canadian politeness. Anger, of course, is a very proper human emotion. Yet it’s a powerful one with lethal dangers - less so for others and more for oneself. Philosopher Josef Pieper notes how anger easily “shuts the eyes of the spirit before they have been able to grasp the facts and to judge them; bitterness and resentment, with a grim joy in negation, close their ears to the language of truth and love; they poison the heart.”² Anger has a blinding quality, leading one to lose sight that most of the time it is a person with whom you are angry (not a monster). Think of how much regret lies in the wake of a fuming outburst - anger often makes you a fool by distorting your view of reality and blinding you to wisdom. Dallas Willard marks the danger well, noting that Jesus puts anger first up to be confronted in the Sermon on the Mount - “I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.” (Matthew 5:22) This initial focus on anger, Willard notes, is “the first and fundamental step toward the rightness of the kingdom heart.”³

Gentleness does not squelch rightful anger but modulates it. Josef Pieper notes how gentleness doesn’t weaken anger “just as chastity does not imply a weakening of sexual power. On the contrary: gentleness as a virtue presupposes the power of wrath; gentleness implies mastery of this power, not its weakening. We should not mistake the pale-faced harmlessness which pretends to be gentleness unfortunately often successfully for a Christian virtue.”⁴ Gentleness masters anger by setting it within a personal context. Willie Jennings wonderfully and practically captures how this takes shape: “when you’re angry with someone, tell them, but hold their hand while you do so.”⁵

But look around and you’ll find anger has no hand to hold; gentleness is absent from our social imagination and moral vocabulary. Perry Glanzer, in a Christian Scholars Review article, sleuthed around looking for this AWOL virtue. He writes:

“For hundreds of years, due to the Christian moral tradition, men and women alike were encouraged to be gentle … Yet, today, a search for articles discussing gentleness in the literature on virtue, moral education, or public life is a search of futility. In fact, despite an academic revival of virtue ethics in the last fifty years, a search of the now famous books on character or virtue will reveal no mention of gentleness.”⁶

Completely missing. Not in virtue ethics, not in the positive psychology movement, not in education policy (Glanzer conducted a study of character education policy and found 64 different virtues listed but gentleness was nowhere to be found). And not a single reference in three decades of academic journals and research.

This stands in direct contrast to the repeated call in the New Testament for gentleness and its wide application in the life of the follower of Jesus. Here are a few key texts:

• But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)

• As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. (Ephesians 4:1-2)

• Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. (Philippians 4:5)

• Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. (Colossians 3:12)

• Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good, to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone. (Titus 3:2)

There are more⁷ but did you notice the wide and thorough application of gentleness: completely, all, always, everyone. There’s no exception clauses there. No exemptions for that Beemer that cuts you off or the conspiracy-addled acquaintance or the church member you don’t see eye-to-eye on.

So what is the big deal about gentleness? And why such a repeated emphasis? How is this an expression of the gospel? It’s rooted in the life of Jesus, the fruit of the nearness of Christ. The remarkable good news of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is that he is “gentle and humble in heart.”

In the gospel of John Jesus reveals something of who he is in a series of “I am” statements: I am the bread of life, I am the Good Shepherd, etc. There is an additional “I am” self-revelation, but found in Matthew, where Jesus gives not a metaphor but a direct peek into his heart. It’s the only place where Jesus pulls back the curtain and specifically reveals what lies in his heart. There is so much to know about Jesus, but the doorway into his teeming, abundant life is his own self-revelation: “I am gentle and humble in heart.”

Not what you might expect from the Almighty. Pretty much the antithesis of a god of wrath and retribution. Stop and take in the fullness of Jesus’ self-disclosure: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matt. 11:28-30)

Here is the source from which gentleness flows and forms in us - the very heart of Jesus. But don’t muddle this with timidity or weakness because, remember, Jesus is both lamb and lion. As C.S. Lewis noted in a letter to a friend, “the most striking thing about our Lord is the union of great ferocity with extreme tenderness … He’ll frighten and puzzle you.”⁸

So what is this gentleness of Jesus? It is puzzling and there’s confusion about it, but that’s the focus of a future post. For now, let Martyn Joseph’s song Turn me tender begin to turn your heart gentle.

(I can’t figure out how to embed a You Tube video in Substack so the link to the video is here)

Turn me tender again

Fold me into you

Turn me tender again

And mould me to new

Faith lost its promise

And bruised me deep blue

Turn me tender again

Through union with you

1. The Jesus Way, p. 36.

2. The Four Cardinal Virtues.

3. The Divine Conspiracy, p. 147.

4. The Four Cardinal Virtues.

5. Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive, p. 38.

6. The Demise of Gentleness, October 30, 2020, Christian Scholars Review.

7. cf. Galatians 6:1; 2 Timothy 2:24-25; 1 Peter 3:15.

8. The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III