The Gospel According to the Council: When John 3:16 Becomes a Threat to the Modern State

A Whanganui café is asked to alter John 3:16 in its window. What does this mean for freedom of speech, religious expression, and the right to offend?

Opinion: In a sleepy corner of Whanganui, someone walked past a café and was so shaken—not by burnt coffee, but by a Bible verse—that they lodged a complaint. Not a scalding Yelp review. A formal complaint. The offending text? John 3:16. That old, world-famous verse about love and salvation. “For God so loved the world…” You know the one. Apparently, this was too much for someone's morning. The verse didn’t throw rocks, didn’t call for jihad, didn’t slander anyone’s grandmother. It just sat there on the window, ink on glass, bothering no one—and bothering someone.

And then the Council arrived, not with a flaming sword, but with a suggestion: could you perhaps, kindly, change the writing? Not take it down entirely, mind you. Just tweak the eternal Word of God to suit the sensitivities of the moment. Censor God, lightly. Rebrand the Gospel, gently. Because someone was offended. Because offense, in the Year of Our Bureaucracy 2025, is the last remaining sacrilege.

Søren Kierkegaard would be howling. “Christianity,” he wrote, “is the most offensive thing ever proclaimed.” Not because it swears or blasphemes or incites violence, but because it dares to suggest that the truth is not a shade of beige. It dares to draw a line. It dares to say there is sin and salvation, life and death, God and not-God. In a world that worships ambiguity, this is criminal.

Of course, the modern state doesn’t say you may not be Christian. It says be Christian quietly, in your own time, behind closed doors, like a private vice. Don’t proselytize, don’t display, don’t quote. They’d have more respect if you were into tantric crystals or post-pagan yoga cults. Those have "cultural value." But a Bible verse on a café window? That's just intolerant, apparently.

Enter Friedrich Nietzsche, clapping ironically from his grave. This is what he predicted: a society that has killed God and now finds His ghost offensive. “Christianity is the one great curse,” Nietzsche growled—not because it failed, but because it succeeded in neutering Western man. But what the Whanganui Council reveals is that Christianity hasn’t been neutered quite enough. The message still carries potency. If John 3:16 no longer meant anything, no one would file a complaint. The verse is still a sword, and that's precisely why it must be sheathed.

But who gave the bureaucrat the sword of interpretation? Who deputized the council as exorcist? Why does the modern council, that dull office of forms and fees, now act like a theological gatekeeper? Are they the new Inquisition, politely asking you to repent your signage?

Stanley Hauerwas saw this coming. He warned that Christianity is always a political act because it disrupts the false peace of liberal society. The Gospel doesn't mesh neatly with the slogans of inclusivity when its very premise is exclusive. “No one comes to the Father except through me,” says Jesus in the same book of John. That, too, will have to go. Next window down.

To a postmodern sensibility, the cross is not just offensive—it’s indecent. René Girard went further: the cross exposes our collective violence. It unmasks the myth of neutrality. The bureaucrat, pretending to protect the community, is merely reenacting the old ritual: silence the scapegoat. Smooth things over. Make the complaint go away. Sacrifice one café’s witness so that the crowd feels calm again.

And here comes the crowd—the liberal masses who believe in everything and nothing—chanting diversity, tolerance, respect—but only for that which offends no one. Chesterton was right: “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.” Tolerance without truth. Compassion without clarity. Inclusion without conviction.

Now let’s imagine a different window. Imagine a café with a rainbow decal, a flag for Palestine, a slogan about smashing the patriarchy. Not only would the Council have no complaint—they’d probably feature it in a brochure. And if someone did complain, it would be that person—the complainant—who would be publicly scorned for intolerance.

Slavoj Žižek, speaking as the last honest Marxist in a post-truth age, would see this hypocrisy and snarl. “Political correctness is not about being truly considerate,” he writes. “It is about neutralizing the radical edge of a belief.” Christianity, as Žižek insists, is not a feel-good doctrine. It is the most violent of all religions—because it demands a complete death of self. It is scandal, it is fire. And it must, therefore, be domesticated by power.

Let’s drop the theology for a moment and return to civics. This is not about taste. It is about law. In New Zealand, freedom of expression is protected under section 14 of the Bill of Rights Act 1990: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.” There are exceptions—hate speech, incitement to violence—but none of those apply to John 3:16.

If quoting the Bible is now grounds for council intervention, then we have crossed a line into viewpoint discrimination. That’s illegal in any liberal democracy worthy of the name. It is not neutral to allow one set of cultural symbols and suppress another. It is not impartial to permit certain slogans but ask others to be “changed.”

And let's not forget section 15 of the Bill of Rights: freedom of religion. If a Christian wishes to express their faith publicly and peacefully—through a verse in a shopfront—that expression is not a threat to public order. It’s a guaranteed right.

The Council, of course, will defend itself. They were not banning the verse. They were just “responding to a complaint.” They were just "asking nicely." But a suggestion from a regulatory body, in the context of council oversight of signage, can easily become a veiled threat. It’s not hard to imagine the implied message: change the verse, or we’ll revisit your license, your lease, your permits.

This is how soft censorship works. Not through police raids or bonfires, but through procedural suffocation. One paperclip at a time. A thousand bureaucratic nudges, each designed to “smooth things over.” This is what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace—a faith that costs nothing, says nothing, and risks nothing. And this is what the state now expects of religion: be mild, be vague, be empty.

But John 3:16 is not empty. It is the atomic heart of Christianity. It speaks of salvation for the world, not just therapy for the self. It assumes that the world needs saving. That offends the ego. It says that love came at a cost: blood, death, sacrifice. That offends the hedonist. It says that the offer is universal but the way is particular: Jesus. That offends the pluralist.

So what’s next? If a Bible verse offends someone, why not remove all Bibles from public spaces? Why not prohibit Christmas displays, Good Friday processions, public prayers at council meetings? Why not close every church that displays scriptural texts on its signage?

Do you think this is hyperbole?

Then you haven’t been paying attention.

What begins as an aesthetic discomfort quickly metastasizes into institutional hostility. Today, it’s one café window. Tomorrow, it’s the cathedral. And the bureaucrats will smile, file their papers, and say, “We’re just responding to the public.”

But the public is not sovereign. The truth is.

Kierkegaard again: “The greatest danger to Christianity is not heresy, but mediocrity.” And in Whanganui, it is the mediocrity of moral cowardice that’s now parading as civic virtue. A single complaint—anonymised, weaponized, and filed like a virus—can now move the entire arm of local government against a verse that has comforted billions.

This is not just a theological question. It is a civil one. Either we defend the right to speak even when it offends, or we do not live in a free society. Either John 3:16 can stay, or nothing of any meaning can stay. Because meaning, real meaning, always risks offense.

If your society cannot handle the sentence “God so loved the world,” then it has already sentenced itself.

So I say this to the café owners: do not change your window. Etch it deeper if you must. Let the ink dry into the glass. Let the sunlight reflect the verse each morning like a small, stubborn revelation. For God so loved the world. And if that’s offensive now, then may we be proudly, unapologetically offensive.