“Christ at Heart’s Door”
As a kid, in churches and other Christian spaces, I occasionally encountered prints of Warner Sallman’s “Christ at Heart’s Door.”[i] In the painting, a tall, white, long-blond-haired Jesus, adorned in a pillowy, white, flowing robe, stands near a heavy wooden door bordered by a wall of white stone masonry. Nearly facing those observing the painting, Jesus seems to have approached the unmarked entrance to the dwelling at dusk, or perhaps even later in the evening. His right hand is aloft, with his knuckles hovering near the door, and his head is bowed slightly—suggesting that he has just knocked gently on the door and is listening attentively for anyone who might be stirring behind it.[ii]
Sallman’s image of Jesus standing at the door and knocking is inspired by Revelation 3:20, perhaps most memorably translated for English speakers in the patriarchal verbiage of the King James Version (KJV, published in 1611): “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” More recently, the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition (NRSVue, completed by a scholarly translation committee and published in 2021) renders the same verse as follows: “Listen, I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.” Interestingly, despite the KJV’s masculinist translation, its opening (“if any man”) clause is perhaps closer to the sense of the Greek (ean tis—which means “if anyone”) than is the more personal—and less androcentric—“if you” of the NRSVue.
In Greek, the initial clause of the verse almost suggests a broad principle (“if anyone hears . . .”), though as a young person I understood the verse in a way that was closer to the personalized implications of the NRSVue (“if you hear”). For me, this passage wasn’t articulating a general principle; rather, it was meant for me, specifically. As a kid, the imagery of the verse implied that Jesus was knocking at my door, awaiting my response. I simply assumed that Revelation 3:20 was referring not to just “anyone,” but ultimately and, above all, to me—and in a direct and pointedly personal way.
As I imagined the imagry in Revelation 3:20, Jesus was standing right there, just outside, waiting for me to answer my personal door—the door to ‘my heart,’ to invoke the biblical metaphor widely used by those in my former, white evangelical subculture (and not accidentally implied by the title of Sallman’s painting, “Christ at Heart’s Door”) to describe the deepest inner reaches of our spiritual selves. Jesus wanted to be allowed in there, where I was. Did I really want that? Could I even understand what it would mean to open the door of my heart to Jesus? And would I really want to host him for a meal in there? I knew all too well that my ‘heart house’ wasn’t clean enough for a guest of Jesus’ stature. And didn’t the Jesus-in-my heart imagery imply that he would continue to stay there—always and forever? Hosting a guest forever? Who does that? Was I willing to open the door, with all the implications that letting Jesus in would bring? For me, there was a palpable intensity and inherent urgency in the imagery of Revelation 3:20. Would I ignore the knock or open the door and engage? I mean, when the Jehovah’s Witnesses literally come to my door, I have a choice about whether to open the door or not. The same would presumably be true with anyone else, including Jesus. The need to choose how I would respond (with its forever implications!) to Jesus’ insistent knocking felt quite stressful and momentous.
I was—and, as an adult, still am—unsettled by Warner Sallman’s painting. In truth, his work unnerves me for the same reason that I used to find Revelation 3:20 itself unsettling: because, given the evangelical Christian waters within which I swam as a young person, I understood both the painting and the verse it sought to illuminate as directed personally to me. Of course, we can and indeed probably should read scripture hoping—even expecting—to find something that will address us in a personal way. But that’s not quite what I mean by saying that Sallman’s painting was unsettling for me. In fact, the image of Jesus knocking and listening for a response seemed to conjure up something restless in my young soul—a longing, perhaps—for security, for assurance, for comfort, for certainty, for salvation.
Growing up in the church, with a grandfather and father who were both deeply involved in theologically conservative Protestant ministries, I knew intellectually that the gospel of God’s love in Jesus Christ was supposed to be a fully sufficient response to my deepest longings. Existentially, though, I often struggled to experience the gospel as sufficient. Much of my theological upbringing suggested that in order to be truly in synch with God, I needed to feel close to Jesus—that my feelings were indispensable as diagnostic indicators of the depth, quality, and authenticity of my faith. I had been raised to believe that being a Christian was fundamentally about being in a deeply intimate relationship with Jesus—a relationship that, honestly, felt tenuous and stilted every time my emotions reflected anything less than rapturous, enthusiastic bliss (an experience that was, in fact, vanishingly rare) about the state my spiritual situation.
In short, I often imagined that the divine love I was supposed to experience in my ostensible relationship with the invisible Jesus was functionally contingent on how I felt at the time—and on how much I believed the right things, whether I was behaving appropriately, and how intensely I was working on the relationship (even if I knew intellectually that such thinking was theologically problematic). So, what I typically felt upon seeing Sallman’s Jesus knocking at my door was not God’s abiding, invitational, and noncoercive love, but a sense of nervous foreboding. Hadn’t I already opened the door? Did I need to open it again? (I had metaphorically opened the door dozens of times in my youth, constantly afraid that, for some reason or another, Jesus may not actually have fully walked across the threshold and into my heart—or that perhaps he had left silently during one of my many so-called ‘backsliding’ moments.) No less worryingly, I imagined that Jesus (as in Sallman’s painting) must be standing at my heart’s door because he was checking up on me, about to find—inevitably, I feared—evidence that my home was still somehow inadequately ‘open’ to him.
So why delve into all of the foregoing reflection about my experience with—and, frankly, anxiety about—Sallman’s “Christ at Heart’s Door”? Because revisiting how I have encountered and reacted to the painting over the years—and, honestly, to this very day—helps me come to terms with how narrowly and individualistically I have always heard Revelation 3:20. (And I’m not yet even talking about the deeply problematic rendering of Jesus as a white, Anglo-European, blond guy. There is so much to address there, but we’ll have to table most of that discussion for another time since Revelation 3:20 itself, not Sallman’s painting, is my primary concern here.) Even now, if I’m completely honest with myself, it’s still relatively easy for me (even as a biblical scholar and college professor)—when confronted with a text such as this—to revert back to the existentially liminal space of theological anxiety and spiritual fear that was so characteristic of much of my youthful and early adulthood faith journey. Whenever I see a print of “Christ at Heart’s Door” (which, thankfully, happens very infrequently), a small but raw part of me instantly becomes once again a timid child facing a potentially fateful encounter with a relentlessly knocking Jesus. In those moments, I tend to forget all of the things that I have learned to value and lift up about biblical texts, such as literary and historical context, grammar and syntax, genre and style, and the nature and function of metaphor. As it turns out, Revelation 3:20 is not (primarily) about my personal salvation. And I am grateful to none other than Martin Luther King Jr. for a recent reminder to this effect.
Revelation 3:20 in Context
We will discuss how Martin Luther King Jr. has helped reframe my experience of Revelation 3:20 (and, by extension, Sallman’s painting) in a moment. Before we do so, I’ll note that as a young person I never realized that the biblical image of the knocking Jesus in Revelation 3:20 wasn’t actually addressed narrowly to me. Again, the text makes it clear that Jesus’s knock is for anyone (Greek: tis)—which would, of course, presumably include me. But it’s not only (or even mainly) about me.
My appropriation of the passage had always been purely about my personal, individualized, spiritual experience of Jesus. My understanding of Revelation 3:20, as I now recognize, had effectively severed its imagery from its original—and quite socioeconomically poignant—context. Indeed, in my experience Revelation 3:20 was invoked in a generally proverbial and aphoristic manner, in splendid isolation from its literary and historical context.
The image of Jesus knocking actually appears in the context of the complex, confusing, and widely misunderstood biblical book we know as Revelation. Most scholars place the document’s authorship—and, most importantly, locate its primary interpretive implications—squarely within the late-first-century reign of the emperor Domitian. In an historical context dominated by a Roman Empire in which the line between religious devotion and political allegiance was blurred or even non-existent, the Spirit-inspired seer John intimates that he was instructed to “write in a book what” he saw—and then to “send it to the seven churches” in western Asia Minor (i.e., modern-day Turkey)—“to Ephesus, to Smyrna, to Pergamum, to Thyatira, to Sardis, to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea” (Revelation 1:9–11). At the outset of John’s writing, we find a series of seven letters (2:1–3:22), each one individually addressed to one of those seven ancient church communities. John describes being instructed by Jesus to write in the last of those letters “to the angel of the church in Laodicea” (3:14). Apparently, something was dreadfully wrong in the Laodicean faith community from the risen Jesus’ perspective. The church was “lukewarm,” and thus in danger of being ‘spit out of Jesus’ mouth’ (3:16), presumably because its wealth and prosperity left the community members assuming, incorrectly, that they were self-sufficient and in ‘need of nothing.’ In fact, in Jesus’ view, they were “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (v. 17). Still, he makes it clear that they are not a lost cause. Through John, Jesus insists: “I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent” (v. 19).
Things in Laodicea needed to change—dramatically. That is the context leading up to Revelation 3:20, in which Jesus stands at the door knocking. A wealthy, self-satisfied, “lukewarm” church, presumably unmoved by contemporary contextual challenges it should have been facing more thoughtfully and intentionally, needed to undergo a radical metamorphosis. They needed to change direction—“to repent”—literally.
At least two things are worthy of note here. First, it is clear that the image of Jesus knocking does reflect an invitation to change. Jesus is knocking, inviting, beckoning—to a wayward community. Revelation 3:20 does, therefore, involve a challenge to wrongdoing and passivity. If Jesus is “about to spit” the Laodicean church “out of” his “mouth,” there is an obviously fraught and stressful tenor to the door-knocking imagery. Perhaps I wasn’t entirely off-base in finding Sallman’s artistic interpretation of the verse to be unsettling, at least in that sense.
Secondly, the Greek in Revelation 3:20 implies that “anyone” can respond to Jesus’ knocking, but the literary and historical context of the verse suggests that it may be problematic to translate the Greek tis as “you” (a la the NRSVue) instead of the more literal “anyone.” While there is undoubtedly something generally true about the image of Jesus knocking on the doors of each of our spiritual hearts (as suggested by Sallman’s painting), Revelation 3:20 invokes the imagery of Jesus knocking in the context of first-century Laodicean Christian self-sufficient apathy and inaction. The verse is surely relevant to me at some level—especially, perhaps, to the extent that I embody, today, the problematic dynamics Jesus calls out in ancient Laodicea. But Revelation 3:20 has its own context, literarily and historically; it is not, first and foremost, about me. Above all, the verse is directed to an ancient church that hasn’t adequately reckoned with the distance it has strayed from what God has called it to be—in the very socioeconomic, religious, and political contexts within which it is called to bear witness to Jesus: a poor, Palestinian Jewish prophetic teacher and healer previously crucified by the imperial Roman state apparatus.
Again, Revelation 3:20 was written to Laodicean Christians, rather than to me. Of course, once we take the verse’s contextual dynamics seriously, Revelation 3:20 can presumably help us begin to diagnose, name, and repent of similar phenomena in the church—and in our individual lives—today. But that is a very different thing than assuming the verse is primarily about one’s (e.g., my) personal salvation—with Jesus knocking at my individualized ‘heart’s door’—as I believe Sallman’s painting suggests.
By the way, the imagery of a blond, white Jesus becomes especially problematic in this regard. For white evangelical Protestants, Sallman’s Jesus—portrayed as an idealized white male—is relatively easy to relate to personally, in a one-on-one manner. He appears, to put it sharply, to be ‘one of us’—literally rendered in the image of those who are the implied observers of the painting. I suspect that a more historically accurate portrayal of Jesus—as a poor, brown, first-century, Jewish Palestinian man living under Roman occupation—would not have had the widespread appeal among American Christians that Sallman’s Jesus has. White evangelicals would probably not have found in such an historically and culturally different Jesus such a ‘natural’ connection between Revelation 3:20 and the spiritual salvation of individual people—in which Jesus is knocking at our personal ‘heart’s doors.’ In short, a white Jesus maps well onto the highly individualized and non-material faith that has tended to characterize much—though certainly not all—of white evangelicalism. It is worth noting, moreover, that the notion of a narrow, spiritual salvation of individual hearts contrasts quite sharply from wider biblical imagery in which salvation portends liberation from everything (spiritual and material alike) that separates us from God and that holds the entire creation in bondage.
Martin Luther King Jr. on Participation with God
I continue to follow Jesus as I approach sixty years old, but I have admittedly left behind many of the evangelical presuppositions and commitments that characterized my youth. Doing so has been incredibly healing for me in many ways. Indeed, it had been years since I had given Sallman’s “Christ at Heart’s Door”—and all that it had represented for me—much thought. But recently I came across a 1959 sermon by Martin Luther King Jr., “The Answer to a Perplexing Question,”[iii] in which this soon-to-be-martyred, modern-day prophet had pondered the problem of confronting evil in the world. Revelation 3:20 was not a particularly integral facet of King’s sermon; in fact, it appears only briefly at the very end. The primary text under consideration was Matthew 17:19: “Why could we not cast him out?” King draws on that verse (and the larger story of the epileptic boy in Matthew 17:14-20) to ponder the endurance of evil and how a world of justice might be realized. As King recognizes, “human life through the centuries has been characterized by man’s persistent efforts to remove evil from the world. . . . man knows the ‘is’ is not the ‘ought’ and the actual is not the possible” (p. 118).
King describes two primary ways in which we have tended to think about how evil in the world might be eliminated: “The first calls upon man to remove evil through his own power and ingenuity in the strange conviction that by thinking, inventing, and governing, he will at last conquer the nagging forces of evil” (p. 119). Yet as King points out, we have utterly failed to do this. Indeed, as he notes, “the age of reason has been transformed into an age of terror” (p. 120). It has become clear that “man by his own power can never cast evil from the world” (p. 120) because of our human “capacity for sin” (p. 121).
The second approach for eliminating evil, according to King, has been to put the onus entirely on God. As he puts it, “if man waits submissively upon the Lord, in his own good time God alone will redeem the world. Rooted in a pessimistic doctrine of human nature, this idea, which eliminates completely the capability of sinful man to do anything, was prominent in the Reformation . . .” (p. 121). King asserts that this overly “pessimistic” perspective “overlooked” humanity’s “capacity for goodness,” and “has often emphasized a purely otherworldly religion, which stresses the utter hopelessness of this world and calls upon the individual to concentrate on preparing his soul for the world to come. By ignoring the need for social reform, religion is divorced from the mainstream of human life” (p. 121). The danger in this God-will-handle-it-all approach, according to King, is that “God becomes little more than a ‘cosmic bellhop’” or “that prayer” effectively becomes a shallow “substitute for work and intelligence” (p. 122).
Claiming that neither of these two options is adequate for confronting the evil that we face, King observes, “man is neither totally depraved, nor is God an almighty dictator” (p. 123). Ultimately, “The belief that God will do everything for man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself. It, too, is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith, but superstition” (p. 123).
For King, the only viable approach for eliminating evil—and, by implication, the tangibly real social injustices that often function as its most obvious and enduring manifestations—requires a missional partnership between humans and God. True and active discipleship—both individual and communal—involves concrete participation in the divine mission of establishing justice and shalom in all of creation, through faith. God’s mission involves the elimination of evil in the process of reconciling all things to Godself (see Colossians 1:20); human faith in this missional (i.e., purposeful) God involves far more than individualized spiritual redemption. That is, God’s mission does not exclude, but is never limited to the saving of human ‘hearts.’
Ultimately, King argues, “neither God nor man will individually bring the world’s salvation. Rather, both man and God, made one in a marvelous unity of purpose through an overflowing love as the free gift of himself on the part of God and by perfect obedience and receptivity on the part of man, can transform the old into the new and drive out the deadly cancer of sin” (p. 124). King recognizes that “in his magnanimous love, God freely offers to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Our humble and openhearted acceptance is faith. So by faith we are saved. Man filled with God and God operating through man bring unbelievable changes in our individual and social lives” (p. 124; emphasis added). When we participate faithfully in God’s mission, evil can and is being addressed—even if its final demise is obviously yet to come.
Ultimately, King concludes that “evil can be cast out, not by man alone nor by a dictatorial God who invades our lives, but when we open the door and invite God through Christ to enter” (p. 126). It is at this point, at the very close of the sermon, that King suddenly invokes Revelation 3:20 (KJV): “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (p. 126). It was King’s seemingly abrupt invocation of this verse at the end of the sermon that especially caught my eye, piqued my imagination, and sent me into reflection on Sallman’s painting. Why, I asked myself, would King refer to Jesus knocking at the door in Revelation 3:20 at the close of a sermon on Matthew 17:19 (“Why could we not cast him out?”) and the problem of the endurance of evil? I soon realized that King had seen something in Revelation’s image of Jesus knocking at the door that I had completely missed.
Warner Sallman’s visual exegesis of Revelation 3:20—and my reception of it since my childhood—was so dominant in my mind that I had almost completely failed to account for the literary and historical context of the verse. I had thoroughly imbibed Sallman’s painting of Jesus knocking at my ‘heart’s door’—along with the very personal and individualized notion of spiritualized salvation that seemed to accompany it within the white evangelical circles that initially shaped my faith life. For me, the image of Jesus knocking and a narrow ‘heart’ spirituality relatively uninterested in the concrete, material problems of the world went hand in glove. In my imagination, Revelation 3:20 was largely irrelevant and unhelpful for addressing evil and injustice because it bespoke a religiosity that in my experience almost entirely downplayed such problems—and, worse, left them entirely for God to address. I was caught off-guard when I noticed King invoking Jesus knocking at the door, because I knew that he had always been deeply concerned with—and palpably engaged in—the need to address the radically inequitable social and material conditions that we human beings have created for ourselves. Clearly, he saw something different in Revelation 3:20. Indeed, even though he didn’t refer to the literary and historical context of the verse, King was deeply familiar with its provenance. He knew that in Revelation 3:20 Jesus knocks on the door inviting anyone to turn from participation in self-sufficient apathy and the societal injustice of worldly empire toward participation in God’s recreation of the world as it was intended to be. King saw that Jesus knocks, not merely for an individual heart’s wellbeing, but ultimately for the wellbeing of all God’s children. God knocks for us, personally—hearts and all—so that we might join him in the difficult and divine work of ridding the world of evil. In the context of the Roman empire, that seems far closer to what Revelation 3:20 implies.
While I am no longer the child I was when I first encountered Sallman’s painting, I am eager to reimagine its implications in my life: Jesus is knocking at anyone’s door, including yours and mine, bidding us to welcome him in so that we might commune together and participate with him in bringing about a world of abundance, love, justice, and shalom—the world that God has always envisioned for us. What an exciting image to live into—one that was relevant and true for those facing a first-century Roman imperial order opposed to God’s shalom, and one that remains so in our own unjust and unsettling imperial contexts, today.
Pardon me for a moment—someone’s knocking and I really want to get the door!
[i] Access to this and other paintings by Sallman is available online at the Warner Sallman Galleries, Anderson University (https://anderson.edu/galleries/warner-sallman/).
[ii] Perhaps the only painting by Warner Sallman more familiar to Western Christians is his “Head of Christ” (reproduced a billion times [https://www.newsweek.com/have-you-seen-man-102285]), which similarly portrays Jesus as an aquiline-nosed, bearded white man with flowing blondish brown hair. For further discussion, consult the non-technical analyses by Emily McFarlan Miller (https://religionnews.com/2020/06/24/how-jesus-became-white-and-why-its-time-to-cancel-that/) and James Martin, S.J. (https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/06/26/jesus-was-not-white-heres-why-we-should-stop-pretending-he-was/).
[iii] Martin Luther King Jr., “The Answer to a Perplexing Question,” in Strength to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 118-126.
Michael Barram, Ph.D.,is Professor of Theology & Religious Studies at Saint Mary’s College of California. His work focuses on missional hermeneutics and how the Bible seeks to shape its readers’ moral imagination and reasoning (particularly about economic and social justice). Barram is the author of Missional Economics: Biblical Justice and Christian Formation (Eerdmans, 2018); Mission and Moral Reflection in Paul (Lang, 2006); and, with John R. Franke, Liberating Scripture: An Invitation to Missional Hermeneutics (Cascade, 2024). He is also co-editor of Reparations and the Theological Disciplines: Prophetic Voices for Remembrance, Reckoning, and Repair (Lexington Books, 2023), and co-chair of the Forum on Missional Hermeneutics, and co-editor of the Cascade series, ‘Studies in Missional Hermeneutics, Theology, and Praxis’. Barram is a New College Berkeley Board of Trustees member and regularly teaches for New College Berkeley and at his home church, First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, California.