More Lessons from the Eternal City

I was recently in Rome for a gathering of the Rome Scholars and Leaders Network, convened by the Reformanda Initiative, where I was invited to deliver two lectures. We met in a beautiful quarter of the old city near the Imperial Forums, the Trevi Fountain, and two of the Roman Catholic Church’s great universities, the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Gregorian.

Rome does not keep its beauty behind glass. You can wander into almost any old church and find a Caravaggio in a side chapel or a Bernini in a piazza. You do not need a museum ticket to see great art. So much of it is simply there, throughout the city. It was a trip I will never forget.

Carl Trueman recently wrote of his own love of the city in First Things.[1] I appreciate his reflections, and I thought I would share some additional lessons I took away from my time in the eternal city. Together they point to a single conviction: for all its beauty, allure, and warmth toward outsiders like me, Rome cannot give the one thing its nickname suggests: eternal life. It is still a mission field, hungry for the gospel of God’s free grace.

The event was hosted at Breccia di Roma, an evangelical church, for a week of excellent lectures delivered over a near-constant wail of police and ambulance sirens. I had come down to the city with an Italian minister, after preaching at his church in Umbria. I arrived knowing only a few of the scholars gathered there, and those only through their books and podcasts, though I left counting many of them friends.

During one of the sessions, Leonardo De Chirico led us through Leo XIV’s recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the magisterium’s meditation on safeguarding the human person in this age of artificial intelligence.[2] For another session, we welcomed a Catholic priest from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross to lecture on the relation of church and state (his answer would have scandalized many American Christian nationalists). One morning, on my walk to the church, I even ran into a Dominican theologian I had interviewed years before, and he invited me to join him to see the excavations under St. Peter’s. I have generally found Roman Catholic academics warm and inviting toward evangelicals; there is, it turns out, ample room even for a confessional Presbyterian.

I think I understand why that inclusion comes so easily. My doctoral study focused on Karl Rahner and the theology that remade Rome at the Second Vatican Council. Rahner saw every person as already oriented to grace, a supernatural existential written into the structure of the human, so that the sincere outsider may be an “anonymous Christian.”[3] The Council declared that the one Church of Christ “subsists in” the Catholic Church while acknowledging elements of grace beyond her visible bounds, and that the baptized who are not in communion with Rome are “separated brethren” rather than strangers.[4] Gaudium et Spes, which Leo XIV sets at the very head of his encyclical, teaches that “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh does the mystery of man truly become clear.”[5] This is a generous and confident vision, and it is exactly what makes the invitation so easy. A church certain that it already includes you, that your Protestantism is a deficient mode of its own fullness, has every reason to be warm and none to convert.

But there are no anonymous Christians. Salvation is not a hidden capacity every person already carries. It is given in covenant through the death and resurrection of the incarnate Son of God. It is an eschatological gift that comes as a result of a supernatural redemptive work in history. The “more than human” that transhumanism counterfeits, and that Leo XIV locates in a deifying union, is nothing less than the resurrection body given to those joined to the last Adam, who has become life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45).[6] It does not crown a nature already straining upward; it raises the dead. Leo XIV’s communion enables humans to transcend; the gospel raises sinners from death to life.

The gospel proclamation of Christ dying for sinners and being raised for their justification can go strangely unspoken amid the city’s celebrated beauty. It is certainly not neutral. Some of it catechizes precisely against the gospel we preach. There are altarpieces staging the triumph of the Mass over heresy, and a few steps from where we met, in the Chiesa del Gesù, a cherub cheerfully shreds books marked Luther and Calvin. Those Roman churches and their art were not built only to become museums. They were built to teach Catholic doctrine and to move the beholder into accepting it.[7] The form is indeed beautiful, but the beauty here is also an argument, and we cannot receive the one without reckoning with the other.

On my last night two evangelical missionaries took me to a small restaurant near one of their homes, a place they frequent often enough to know the owner and his staff by name. It played like a scene out of Fellini, and I half felt I was watching it from outside myself. While the owner regaled us in language that, as my friends quietly explained, far outran a sailor’s, his parrot did gymnastics in the corner. I have not laughed that hard in years. Trueman is right that evenings like this, good friends, good food, unhurried conversation, and the gratitude they awaken, are among the most humanizing things we are given, and I felt it deeply. For all its excitement, though, the night was never merely for entertainment. We were there to enjoy ourselves, and we did; but for these brothers la dolce vita was never an end in itself. It was subservient to the relationships they had established and the gospel they had come to share.

One of my friends nodded toward the young woman working the kitchen and called her a hero. She had endured a hard employer and a harder life, and still she persevered. It is one thing to enjoy the city for a week and then to move on. It is another to pack up a family and move there to minister to everyday people. He knew her story because he was there, week after week, human to human, for the sake of the gospel of God’s free grace, Christ crucified and raised for sinners. I was reminded that while I was enjoying the city as a tourist on a break from normal life, this was the missionary field my new friends have been cultivating moment by moment alongside faithful Italian brothers and sisters for years.

The first thing I had read on the English version of that restaurant’s menu, hours earlier, was a small phrase meant as a joke: “You shall have no other host beside me.” The animated restaurateur was referring to himself, but in this city the word carries additional weight. The “host,” of course, is also the Eucharistic bread lifted at the altar, and I suspect this irreverent line printed for a laugh meant more than he knew.

So much of Rome is beautiful, and the sweet life is wonderful. Rome offers much, but neither the city nor the Roman Catholic Church that crowns it can give what it does not have. The Italian people need what no piazza and no ornate basilica can finally supply: the good news that God justifies the ungodly. That is why my friends labor in Rome, and why more of us should join them, to plant churches, to train pastors, and yes, cultivating relationships long into the evening, so that Romans might have no other “host” but the one true God, no other mediator than the Lord Jesus Christ, and no other bread than his bread of life. I came home thinking less about the golden afternoons than about that crowded little kitchen, filled with several of the countless Romans whom God is still calling to himself, and to whom he sends laborers bearing the gospel. May he send many more to serve with his people there.

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[1] Carl R. Trueman, “Lessons from the Eternal City,” First Things, March 19, 2026, https://firstthings.com/lessons-from-the-eternal-city/.

[2] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026).

[3] Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1978); on the “anonymous Christian,” see Theological Investigations, vols. 5–6 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966–69).

[4] Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium §8, and Unitatis Redintegratio §3.

[5] Gaudium et Spes §22, cited at Magnifica Humanitas §1.

[6] Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930; repr. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1994), esp. chap. 8; cf. 1 Corinthians 15:42–49. On the deifying union Leo invokes, see Magnifica Humanitas §232.

[7] On the systematic coherence that makes Catholic theology a whole rather than a set of detachable parts, see Leonardo De Chirico, Same Words, Different Worlds: Do Roman Catholics and Evangelicals Believe the Same Gospel? (London: Apollos, 2021).