Trump, A Great Awakening, and the Refounding of America

Trump, A Great Awakening, and the Refounding of America

Mar 26, 2025 | America

If you’re not one of my multitude of fans, all three of them, you won’t know this is the subtitle of the book I published last year, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. As we see things unfolding in Trump’s second term, I’m thinking I might be some sort of prophet. Since most of you reading or listening to this haven’t read the book, you may want to check it out to see the bigger, grand historical context in which our momentous times are taking place.

If we look back through redemptive history we see God working out his plans to redeem His people and His earth even up to this very day. None of what’s happening now should be seen outside of its historical, ultimately redemptive context, even in the grimy world of politics and governing. Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven applies as much there as it does in our personal lives and in our churches. If you don’t believe this, or if that statement rubs you the wrong way, I encourage you to read or listen to three of my previous posts:

Because I now see the Christian faith, mine included, as something grounded and rooted in history, nothing that happens is outside of God’s ultimate redemptive purposes. History is the outworking of those purposes, of which are the subject of my book. Let’s see why I believe everything that is happening is of God.

God, Red Pills, and History’s Dividing Line
As 2024 progressed and Democrats continued to double down on stupid, I became increasingly optimistic, an optimism developing since I first came across Steve Bannon’s War Room after the 2020 election. As a long-time card carrying member of Con Inc., officially from when Reagan was first elected, I had gotten used to conservative losing. Our side talked a good game, but never did anything to actually challenge the progressive status quote, let alone push back. Then Trump.

Democrats will rue the day they did everything in their power to not let Trump win the 2020 election. If he had, his second term would have been mired in controversy and “resistance,” but most importantly the Democrats would not have been able to inflict wokestan upon the American people to the degree they did, which opened the eyes of tens of millions of Americans to their stupidity and lies. They actually believed what they were doing was morally good and the American people were behind them. Lies will tend to make people delusional. As important as the left’s blindness and stupidity, Trump and the people around him would not have had those four years to learn what they did wrong in the first term, and apply it in his second. He’s accomplishing things literally nobody thought possible. Even Democrat analysts are amazed, saying in effect this is truly something new under the sun. Even worse for the Democrats? They pissed Trump off, pardon the French, but trying to kill and put him in prison for 500 years will do that to a guy. The determined, angry, focused Trump is the Democrat’s and left’s worst nightmare.

What explains all this? If God isn’t at the top of your list, you’re not paying attention. As the book developed over ’22 and ’23, I would look at the print on my office wall Washington praying next to his great white steed at Valley Forge. Painted by Arnold Friberg to celebrate America’s bicentennial in 1976, its symbolic meaning would grow in importance to me by the day. I began to realize the odds against the newborn American republic were far worse than ours against the leftist woke Uniparty deep state. America should have been still born against the mighty British Empire, so God explains our founding as He does our potential refounding.

The founders fervently believed their success ultimately depended on the Almighty God revealed to us in Scripture. The supposed Diest, Benjamin Franklin, may have said it best. At the convention where the details of America’s experiment in self-government were being hashed out, he said these words to the august attendees which could come out of the mouth of any fervent Evangelical of that time or now:

I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that “except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.

In our case the question is, can an empire endure. Only God knows, but more importantly it is only God who determines whether it will or not. As I was writing I believed and hoped that was true, but now I’m suspecting in fact it is. God appears not to be done with the United States of America!

 

Everyone in the world knew, even the hardcore atheists were tempted to admit it, that Trump turning his head at that exact moment wasn’t chance. And then the raised fist and Fight! Fight! Fight! Are you kidding me? I get chills envisioning it again as I write this. If we didn’t know any better we would think this was scripted by mega reality TV Star Trump, but we do know better, and it was most certainly scripted by Almighty God. Both Reagan and John Paul II believed God saved them from the assassin’s bullet for a reason, and that was so together they could defeat the Godless Soviet Union. Trump too is a man on a mission to defeat the progeny of those same Soviets embodied in our Democrat Party and everything they stand for in American government and culture. Trump is on a mission from God, having said as much, that God spared him to do exactly what he’s been doing since January 20 at noon Eastern Standard Time.

As I’ve often said, this Great Awakening, the one I write about in the book, is not at all like the previous Great Awakenings. Those were primarily spiritual, taking place in thoroughly Christian cultures among Christian peoples steeped in Christians assumptions and a Christian worldview. This Great Awakening is happening in a thoroughly secular culture whose assumptions and worldview are agnostic. Like the ancient Epicureans, everybody believes in God, save the very atheist few, but lives as if God is completely irrelevant to their lives and the world, persona non grata. We call this religion moralistic therapeutic deism, the faith of secularism, a failed several hundred year experiment in Western culture out of whose ashes will come a new Christendom. It so happens that Trump came along right at the time secularism was showing its age, its impoverished worldview leaving an increasing number of people looking for more.

Because this awakening is not only spiritual but broadly culture, red pill experiences are touching people just at the point of what I call in the book, “the dividing line in Western culture: truth.” Whether this is related to politics, or the administrative state, or endless wars and the military industrial complex, or the Uniparty and Con In., or money and economics, or justice and injustice, or health and the medical-industrial complex, Big Pharma and Big Food, or the woke insanity, those whose eyes are opened are those who care most passionately about truth. And I argue that even if these people are not yet Christians, they just haven’t realized their allegiance to truth points them inevitably to the one who is The Truth. As such, truth itself has metaphysical and spiritual implications. I believe this is why Jesus and Christianity in our cultural moment is no longer uncool and “controversial.” I recently wrote a piece about how We Went from Negative to Positive World in One Day! Even the non-Christians know Christianity captures something deeply at the heart of the nature of reality, and it’s now welcome in the public square like it hasn’t been in a long time. They know something about Christianity leads to societal flourishing. We need to build on that.

The Founding of America
Covid was a blessing in disguise. So many things came to light for so many people during those few years it’s impossible to see any chance of refounding America without it. God’s providential sovereign control of all things could not have been displayed any more clearly if an airplane was writing it in the sky. Of course, in the midst of a storm it’s difficult to see anything but the storm, but since life is 20/20 hindsight, we can see His hand all over the place. As for many things in life, the easiest way to see it is in contrast. Holding two things side by side allows us to compare them and see what we’re really dealing with, in this case two contrasting views of human government, views as different as night and day. The founding is our north star contrast.

Which brings us to the story of Babel in Genesis 11. Man in his hubris was building “a tower that reaches to the heavens,” and God understood if he let them continue, “then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” The moral of the story is a simple one sinful human beings seem adept at forgetting; concentrations of power are bad. We can see throughout history how common aggrandizing power is, and how jealous man is of his power once he has it. Man not only wants to be God, he wants to be God over others. In previous ages this could be limited geographically. For example, the Roman Empire and its tyrannical rule could only extend as far as Roman physical power allowed it. In the 21st century, the aggrandizing is global, something we’ve come to call globalism, run by globalists. In the early 1990s George H.W. Bush called this a “new world order,” and many of us thought it was a good thing. We obviously hadn’t learned our lesson from Babel well enough. Then Trump. So much of the red pill times we live in come down to, then Trump. I still marvel, incredulously, that God would use a man I once so despised and thought so little of to do such remarkably good things.

I didn’t know he’d always been an America first populist-nationalist. His timing to run for office in 2015 was perfect because the spirit of Brexit, the nationalist referendum in Britain to leave the EU, was in the air. Globalists by definition hate the nation-state because it gets in the way of their plans to remake the world in their globalist image. They see themselves as an omnicompetent elite who know better than the people they seek to rule what is good for them, but a “rule by experts” always leads to Babel. The progressive movement in the early 1900s started this, and the Trump induced Covid hysteria ended it. With his reelection, for the first time in almost a hundred years, we’re seeing the potential dismantling of the administrative state. In other words, the pulling down of Babel brick by brick, and the left is powerless, both politically and culturally, to stop it. For a conservative like me since 1980 who’s been conned by Con Inc. ever since, this is stunning to behold.

Which brings me to the founding of America. America had been in historical development since Alfred the Great, specifically in the development in England of the rule of law, and the concept of political liberty. It was Christianity alone that allowed this to develop, not some fictional secular so-called Enlightenment. But it wasn’t only a development in Western intellectual history, but simultaneous boots on the ground governance. It developed through Magna Carta in 1215 and over time into the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Virginia had been settled in 1607, becoming the first enduring English colony in North America, and the English Puritans started fleeing religious persecution to the New World starting in the 1620s. Over the next hundred and fifty years waves of immigrants from all over the British Isles would come to America to establish a Christian country with the rights of Englishmen. In due course the unique character of this Christian people would slowly develop. Far from home they began carving out a living in a harsh land, and learned how to govern themselves which would eventually lead to a Declaration of Independence from the mother country, and the founding of the United States of America. As I was writing the book I read A Patriot’s History of the United States, and I highly suggest it. (Put up image) It was the cultural dynamics of this specific people in a specific geography at a specific time in history that God used to create the historically unique American character, and it is that character at our moment in history that gives us the possibility of a refounding.

The question confronting us in 2025 as we fight this war without bullets and bombs, is what exactly we are refounding. In the book I outline three broad perspectives on how the founding is defined:  Christian, secular, and cultural Marxism leftism. The latter has for the most part been defeated and discredited, so the debate is whether America was founded as a Christian or a secular nation. All of Americas founding generation believed Christianity was at the heart of liberty. Without it, they believed a self-governing republic was unsustainable. The quote on the Liberty Bell from Leviticus 25:10 reflects this, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” The Founders clearly didn’t see a contradiction between liberty and the Bible or Christianity. There wasn’t a secularist in the lot of them! They quoted the Bible, especially Deuteronomy, more than any other book or thinkers as they argued for this new country, believing it was specifically a Protestant Christian people that would enable it to succeed.

Unfortunately, in the increasingly secular 20th century, scholars began to claim most of America’s founders were Deists and the founding primarily secular. The reason they believed this is the same reason most conservatives and Christians today believe America is a secular nation: a Christian nation is not conducive to liberty. Or put the other way round, a Christian nation would be coercive and tyrannical. Only a pluralistic secular society, or so the thinking goes, can avoid the inevitable religious squabbles. I wrote a post last year with a title many conservatives and Christians would answer in the affirmative: Is a Christian Nation an Oxymoron?, a contradiction in terms. They believe this for two reasons. One is misunderstanding the nature of Christianity as the public religion of a nation, and the other is the secular myth of neutrality.

The Refounding of America
The question before us is this: Can America flourish as a secular nation, or was John Adams right when he declared:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The reason this is such a critical question is because America was the first government in the history of the world to be one of limited powers, or enumerated in a Constitutional word, over a self-governing people. The spirit of Babel in the heart of sinful human beings made this a rare thing indeed.

For our side of the political and culture football, i.e., we’re not Marxists, it seems all agree we want to get back to an America with a federal government of limited powers per the Constitution. We may be allies and agree on almost everything, or cobelligerents and only agree on some, but we can all agree the Constitution is our north star. At the turn of the 20th century the clouds of progressivism began to obscure the light of that star until the America of our founding became unrecognizable to us. To the progressive mind, the state ruled by “experts” is the essence of “democracy,” and submitting to their guidance like good little sheep for our own good is what America is all about. Then Trump.

In his first term Trump was naive and had no idea what he was up against. For decades Republicans have been the controlled opposition, part of the Uniparty, effectively no different than Democrats. Everyone, it seemed, was on the progressive statist bandwagon. For me, and I’m not alone, many became aware of what we came to call the deep state, but which we know now as the administrative state, the vast sweeping unelected bureaucracy that really runs Washington, DC, and how insidious it really is. The builders of Babel would have been jealous. Then God in his merciful providence and judgment gave the most radical progressives, leftists, Marxists, statists, their every heart’s desire: four years of almost absolute political and cultural power under puppet Joe Biden. They could not control themselves, and average Americans realized the contrast I mentioned previously, and Trump started looking mighty appealing to millions who previously wouldn’t be caught dead voting for the man.

Given almost 250 years have passed since that Declaration amid the massive changes of modernity, we understand America as re-founded will not look exactly like the 1776 or 1787 version, but it will have basic similarities. Instead of Babel and the concentration of power in globalist minded elites, state and local power, or federalism a la Jefferson, will gain the upper hand. It’s a simple matter of governmental tyranny in the hands of the few, or liberty in the hands of the many, what we call self-government. The latter is built into the American DNA, and the newly MAGA infused Republican Party may actually be able to lead Americans in that direction. Culturally, secularism will no longer be imposed by God hating elites, and Christianity will once again be respected as America’s founding religion. Babel will never sleep, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, and in the year of our Lord 2025, we have taken it.

 

 

 

A Christian Worldview Is Not Enough

A Christian Worldview Is Not Enough

Mar 19, 2025 | Theology

Since I was twenty years old when I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There, I’ve been a worldview guy. I went from a fundamentalist type of Christianity focused on the personal, on my relationship with Jesus, the Bible and me, to seeing how Christianity applied not just to me but to all of life and everything in it. I went from wearing the default set of secular glasses to Christian glasses, and everything looked different. As a Christian, although it may seem counterintuitive, it is possible to see the world through secular lenses. This means we see our Christian lives in primarily personal spiritual terms, and everything else as part of this fallen world, and thus not spiritual. The implication is that spiritual, personal stuff is important, and the other stuff not so much. I never thought through any of this before my worldview epiphany, but I didn’t see Christianity applying to the fallen world outside of the church. Thankfully, I found Schaeffer only two years into my born-again Christian life, and in addition to being so young and busy with college, thinking through any of this wasn’t a priority. But finding Schaeffer, and that a Christian view of the world and everything in it was possible, was exciting, not to mention being introduced to apologetics, and knowing I could credibly defend the veracity of the Christian faith I had embraced.

I’ve realized only recently, however, that having a worldview is not enough to fully capture the profound world transforming power of the Christian faith. Worldview assumes the intellect and how we think about things is primary, and applying those thoughts to what we do is what is transformational about the Christian faith. It is that, but it’s so much more. A Christian worldview is necessary for this new creation transformation (2 Cor. 5:17), but not sufficient. What is, what takes a Christian worldview to the next level, so to speak, is something almost completely neglected in Evangelical Christianity: the ascension. In all the years I’ve been a Christian, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a sermon on it. I didn’t realize this until I heard a talk by someone back in 2018 or 19. He said Evangelicals pretty much completely ignore the ascension, stopping at the resurrection, and I immediately realized he was right.

The Book of Acts makes it clear the church was built and grew on the declaration of the resurrection, but Luke starts with the Ascension. After Jesus promises his disciples to send them the Holy spirit, and gives them a charge to be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth,” Luke writes:

9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

Although the disciples were no doubt befuddled, this raises two important questions. Where did Jesus go, and what does it mean? We learn by the time of the Apostles Creed the ascension had become foundational to the Christian understanding of the faith. It addresses the second person of the Trinity thus:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

We learn explicitly from several passages in Scripture not only where Jesus went, as the creed affirms, but why he went there.

What Exactly is a Worldview and Why It Matters
Before we get to the implications of the ascension we need to address what a worldview is because not everyone is familiar with it, and for some who are they don’t believe it’s a valid concept. What I said previously assumes familiarity and validity, but I need to make that case and not just assume it.

Discussing worldview requires us to address the meaning and significance of presuppositions, and how they determine our view of the world. Having presuppositions means we assume certain things, we pre‑suppose them. Most people know what assumptions are, but have no idea the role they play in how they view the world, how they understand, process, and perceive reality. In fact, most people don’t believe they assume anything at all! But finite creatures like us have to assume all the time because what we can actually know with any certainty is limited in a multitude of ways. James Sire in The Universe Next Door was one of the first to address worldview from a Christian perspective, and he defines it this way:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) that we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.

I used glasses above as a simple metaphor for worldview because everyone understands without having to explain it that glasses change how you see everything. If it’s sunglasses, it brings a certain hue, or if corrective, they turn blurry to clear. You can’t not see what the lenses determine you will see. That is how the set of presuppositions we hold, knowingly or not, become the framework by which we see, or interpret, all things. In Sire’s words, worldview is a “fundamental orientation of the heart” which is the “foundation on which we live and move and have our being.” How people view reality, how they see things, what has meaning to them, what they value, what seems true to them or not, their “fundamental orientation,” is bound up in their worldview. Hence, their existence, how they “live and move and have their being,” is determined by it. We are fundamentally interpretive beings.

Everyone has a view of the world, but few understand how worldview is the lens through which they interpret reality. As such, it colors everything they see, hear, read, and do. In other words, there are no ultimately objective, neutral observers. Yet, this doesn’t leave us without the ability to actually know things, which is epistemology, or the study of how and what we know. It only says everyone has some type of interpretive grid through which they make sense of reality. In his book Popologetics, Ted Turnau has an excellent explanation of how worldview and presuppositions interact:

Worldviews, then, are not simply rooted in “the facts,” as if we could gather the relevant facts to build a picture of the Truth with complete, presupposition‑free objectivity. Rather, the way in which we process the facts is always already involved in a specific set of presuppositions. We are, in a sense, always “captured” by our worldview, our presuppositions. Worldviews are ultimately based on fundamental faith commitments from which we understand evidence, truths, facts, and all of reality. Your set of presuppositions is the most basic place you know from. At this level, worldviews are fundamentally religious. That is, they are types of faith. Worldviews are religiously rooted in these basic, nonnegotiable beliefs called presuppositions.

Therefore, all human beings are fundamentally religious because all people live by faith which become the glasses through which they try to make sense of an uncertain, chaotic, and often confusing world. What we’ll be doing in the next section is discuss how we can in effect fortify our Christian worldview because of the ascension.

As I mentioned, not everybody is on board with the concept or value of a worldview understanding of human psychology. As best I can tell, the critics think what we’re saying is that worldview is some kind of static grid through which people become robots, or something. I haven’t engaged in any depth with the arguments against it, but they don’t seem well thought out or thought through. Worldview isn’t some infallible measure of human nature, but simply a tool to help us understand how and why, in the words of Sire, we “live and move and have our being.” If we look at people from various cultures as a group, say Muslims from the Middle East, or Asians from China or Japan, or secular Europeans or Americans, we can better understand them because of their basic presuppositions, their worldviews. For me it’s an invaluable tool to help me better understand people and cultures and how the gospel message and Great Commission can advance in Christ’s worldwide mission, to which we now turn.

King Jesus and the Great Commission
Before I began to better understand the ascension, I saw Christ’s reign limited to my personal life and battle for holiness, along with other Christians and thus only for the church. Christ’s authoritative power was not meant for those people or institutions outside of the church; the fallen world I assumed would always remain in its rebellious fallen state until he returned. So when Jesus spoke these words to the disciples I assume it primarily meant saving people so when they die they go to heaven, and being made more holy while they are on earth (Matt. 28):

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Making disciples of all nations meant the people within the nations, not the nations themselves. Jesus doesn’t say that, but that’s what I took him to mean because of my assumptions about Jesus’ ascension and its implications for the world. It didn’t, or so I thought, apply to the world, just Christians, just the church. Then what does Jesus say? He says to baptize all ethnos-ἔθνος in Greek which primarily refers to a group of people or a nation, not merely the individuals within a nation. It is all the people in a nation and whatever they do to develop a society, along with the institutions, mores, and customs to create a unique cultural identity. Christ is Lord and King with authoritative power over all of it, and what that society becomes flows out of the people in it. The gospel and what flows out of it in Christians’ lives affect all of it, every square inch. Jesus’ authority is not in any way limited just to us!

Thus, a broadly Christian people can make a Christian nation, just as a broadly secular people can make a secular nation. Does that mean every person in those nations is Christian or secular? Of course not. Even those who reject the notion that a nation can be Christian, have no problem calling our nation, for example, a secular nation. That’s because the idea is not that every person is secular, but rather that the general makeup of the nation as a whole is secular in outlook. God recognizes nations as a whole, as one entity, and it is nations and everything in it that Christ calls us to disciple. Who people are affects everything they do; it’s as simple as that. As we disciple an increasing number of people, the influence through them of Christ and his kingdom will spread to all aspects of that society. This is what happened in the Roman Empire. It took almost 300 years, but eventually a pagan empire became a Christian one, and that had profound implications for how that empire was run. However, a merely personal faith, something Christianity was never intended to be, won’t do that. It will stay merely personal.

The difference between purely personal King Jesus and King Jesus who has “all authority in heaven and on earth,” is that non-Christians and their worldviews, who they are and how they act, are under the same authority as Christians. Jesus is as much in control of their lives as he is ours, and for the same reasons, to disciple the nations. A personal King Jesus, by contrast, does not include his reign over this fallen world to take back territory, so to speak, from the devil, specifically for advancing his kingdom on this earth as it is in heaven outside of the church. The fallen world in this telling will inevitably get worse until Jesus comes to rescue us out of it at the end of time. It is a pessimistic view of things, which is logical if Christ’s rule has little or nothing to do with anything outside of the church. When I believed in personal King Jesus I effectively equated the kingdom with the church.

As I began to understand the ascension more and its implications for all of life in this fallen world, I had a kind of cognitive dissonance, a discomfort from my contradictory understanding of the ascension. On the one hand Christ had all power over all thigs, on the other it really only applied to the church. This seemed to be what Paul was saying in Ephesians 1:

22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church.

True enough, but the church lives in a fallen world, and Christ’s authority in that world is ultimately to benefit the church in this world, on this earth, to take back territory from the Devil so we can experience God’s blessings in all of life. While many Christians on earth suffer for their faith, as I read very month in the Voice of the Martyrs magazine, that isn’t the goal. Which is why I pray that God would raise up a multitude of Christians in those nations to disciple and turn them into Christian nations where the gospel is proclaimed, and peace and justice reign. That isn’t just for the next life, on this redeemed and renewed earth, but here and now in this fallen world, bringing heaven to earth as Jesus taught us to pray. If Jesus didn’t mean this, he wouldn’t have given the command to his disciples and to us, in just that way; all authority has been given to him, therefore go.

Postmillennialism and the Ascension
Everything about my understanding of the ascension changed when I embrace postmillennialism in August 2022. In addition to my broadened understanding of the Great Commission, I now looked at Daniel’s vision in chapter 7:13,14 differently as well. Daniel sees “one like a son of man” at his coronation being ushered into the presence of “the Ancient of Days” being given “authority, glory and sovereign power” which all “nations and peoples” acknowledge. Prior to postmillennialism I automatically assumed this referred to Christ’s second coming, not a reference to his first. But Jesus clearly tells us it does apply to his first coming. How could I have missed that, and for decades? Paul confirms this all-encompassing authority Jesus received at the ascension was indeed for his first coming in Ephesians 1:18-23. When Jesus was placed by the Father at His right hand, he was now in a position “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is named.” He adds as if, oh by the way,  this rule of Jesus is “not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” In other words, it’s so obvious it’s for life on this fallen world, this the present age, that his readers needed to be reminded it’s also for the age to come. That never stood out to me until I embraced postmillennialism.

Without understanding the true all-encompassing implications of the ascension, a Christian worldview will not positively affirm Christ’s authority over everything, literally every single thing, every single person, including every institution, every government, and every spiritual being beyond earth. If it’s just a Christian worldview, seeing things and applying a Christian view to it all, Christianity will not have the kind of world conquering spirit Christians had for much of the church’s history. In the gospel we declare King Jesus to whom all earthly power must submit, which gives us confidence that bringing heaven to earth is not a product of merely our own efforts or power, but of the rule and reign of Christ over all things. This is why I now pray something I learned from Joe Boot, that Christ would extend his reign on earth, advance God’s kingdom, and build his church. I add this to my four R prayer, for revival, renewal, restoration, and Reformation. That about covers it all!

This brings me to the final point we must discuss: how does this all work? The critics of postmillennialism think our confidence in victory, and our optimism, is in our efforts, and they don’t like that one bit! This straw man is trotted out a lot, but it isn’t true. What is true is that God can’t bring heaven to earth without us, we wretched sinners who always seem to get so many things wrong and messing things up. He’s stuck with us! Read the Bible. Working with imperfect sinners to accomplish his purposes on earth didn’t change when Christ rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. Our confidence then as now is in Christ, in what he accomplished in his first coming, which was to destroy the works of the devil and push back the effects of the fall as far as the curse is found. Now, instead of hell on earth having the upper hand, heaven does.

This is a biblical fact, and if you have faith, and eyes to see, you can see it everywhere. Don’t take my word for it, but do take it from Jesus.  As he told his disciples, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” It never occurred to me until I read it in a book about postmillennialism, that gates in the ancient world were a defensive mechanism. How could I have missed that! And why didn’t preachers at all the churches we attended not tell us this! It is we Christians, Christ’s church, who are on the offensive; the devil and his minions don’t stand a chance!

Add this to your Christians worldview, and you will be a world changer. As I often say, work like it depends on you, but pray because it depends on God. I finish with these world conquering words from Joab, the commander of David’s armies (I Chron. 19:13):

Be strong, and let us fight bravely for our people and the cities of our God. The Lord will do what is good in his sight.

 

The Problem with Biblicism

The Problem with Biblicism

Mar 12, 2025 | Theology

If you’ve never heard the word biblicism, you would never know how prevalent it is in Evangelical Christianity, as in practically ubiquitous. Before I define it in detail and explain why it’s a problem, briefly it means in order to justify doing something or not, there must be a chapter and verse justification for it. If the Bible says it, that settles it. This mentality is the well-intended fruit of the Reformation proclamation of Sola Scriptura, or Scripture alone. The Westminster Confession of Faith lays out the canonical listing of the books of the Bible, and then affirms:

All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.

Christians will tend to read this as the only rule, and anything else that purports to provide guidance and direction for life is illegitimate. The famous passage of Paul about the inspiration of Scripture might seem to justify that take:

 16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

One might think this, and the Westminster affirmation, means Scripture is exhaustive and that is what makes it profitable, but Scripture itself is clearly not exhaustive. The Bible does not address every single thing we do or that confronts us in our daily lives, or that human beings do to make life possible. Thank God for that, or the Bible would be a very different and less compelling book (or compendium of books).

I was born again into a faith that taught a kind of biblicism. My relationship with God was mediated through the Bible alone. When I embraced Reformed theology I came across an image that describes how I saw my relationship with God through the Bible. I imagined a wire coming down from heaven, and as I read Scripture when God wanted to communicate something to me he’d buzz the wire and I would have instant insight directly from Him about the meaning for me. It was always about me, and meaning that was given to me by God himself, or so I thought. That is not the most stable epistemology (how we know) or hermeneutics (the science of interpreting a text which I’ll address below). In fact, it’s a recipe for distortion, and one example of biblicism.

Another example of how this works out in practice for some people is seeking guidance for life decisions, where to live, who to marry, taking a job, etc. How do we “know” something is God’s will? Well, God has to zap the wire and show us through some text in the Bible, then we’ll “know”! Most Christians know intuitively the Bible isn’t that kind of book. As my dad always used to tell me when I did something stupid, God gave us a brain, and we’re meant to use it. The key point in this regard and to biblicism in general, is that God’s nature is not totalitarian. In other words, he’s not a “control freak,” who wants to dictate everything we do. He’s far too secure for that, and His creatures were not created to function with that kind of control. Many non-Christians, especially in our secular age, see God as some kind of dictator who is set on determining everything we do, but that’s not how this world, or us in it, works.

God gave us agency, meaning we are beings who can alter the stuff, the raw material of existence; we can change things. This freedom is not an illusion, but very real, and it means there are consequences to the choices we make. That’s thrilling on the upside, and terrifying on the downside, but we’re not in this alone because God is somehow sovereign and in control over all of it, without destroying the reality of our agency. Only a being, God, who created everything out of nothing and sustains it moment by moment could pull that off. It makes my brain hurt whenever I think about it too much. It’s easier to trust the Bible’s declaration and our lived experience of it as true. Let’s take a further look at how biblicism plays out in practice, and then what I believe the role the Bible plays in our lives.

The Basic Assumptions of Biblicism
The Reformation gave the Christian world the five Solas, of which Sola Scripture is foundational because out of it flow all the others by which we live out our faith: Christus, Fide, Gratia, Deo Gloria, or Christ alone, faith alone, grace alone, to the glory of God alone. What “Scripture alone” has come to mean in the Protestant tradition is embracing God’s inspired Word as the inerrant, sufficient, and final authority for the church and the Christian’s life. None of the early Reformers, however, believed or taught this meant the Bible is sufficient all by itself for the church or the Christian’s life. This becomes abundantly clear when we see how they wrote copiously about what they believed God’s word meant, many times disagreeing with one another over the same text or passage, often vehemently. Out of this developed the various traditions of Protestantism, and the confessions defining exactly what they believed and why they believed it, even those who don’t embrace classic Reformation confessions. Not being Biblicists, we see how the Reformers naturally would defend or argue for their theology looking back at early church fathers, for example.

Since God didn’t gives us a textbook or a how-to manual, it is helpful to see exactly what kind of book He gave us, or like I said books, 66 to be exact, written by 40 or so authors over approximately 1500 years. The Bible is the history of redemption, specifically of the Jewish people in what we call the Old Testament, developing over time into the history of the redemption of the world, including Gentiles, those who are not Jews. Because the Old Testament is more history than statements of belief, we see develop in Judaism differing parties of interpretation. This happened in what we call the Intertestamental period between the cessation of prophecy with Malachi in the mid to early 400s BC to the coming of Christ and the writing of the New Testament. The focus was primarily on the law or the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and three contending parties, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes developed rival interpretations of the law, though they differed in other areas as well. Biblical faith was always messy, as God obviously planned it.

All of the first followers of Christ were Jews and believed authoritative teaching was part of this faith they’d been given by Christ. As Paul says, the church was “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20). In the first century the writings of the Apostles came to be seen with the authority of Scripture, and by the mid to late second century we see a well-defined canon, or list, of New Testament books. However, the Christians found like the Jews, there was often disagreement as to the meaning of a text or passages. Because of heretical movements in those early centuries, Church fathers realized Scripture itself wasn’t sufficient to give Christians full definition of their beliefs. There’s a wonderful saying I first heard applied to economics and liberty, that liberty is necessary but not sufficient to develop a capitalist economy. In a way, this “necessary but not sufficient” concept can apply to Scripture as well. What I mean is that the Bible doesn’t say something about everything, and biblicism gives us that impression. However, it is sufficient in a big picture way that is crucial for living the Christian life and advancing God’s kingdom on earth. As the Apostle Paul says,

15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

What biblicism does is limit Christians to words on a page, and keeps them from developing a transformational worldview lens enabling them to “judge all things,” or forming the universal categories to see all things as Christ the Creator sees them. As my favorite and overused quote from ex-atheist C.S. Lewis says,

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Words on a page isolated from their immediate and ultimate context can’t give us this kind of perspective and understanding, nor the wisdom that comes from seeing the bigger picture. It didn’t take long for me to realize what the implications were for my own form of biblicism, and I used three words to describe it.

  • Ahistorical – In Greek an a in front of a word negates it, so for example, theos means God, and atheos means no God, from which we get our English atheist. Taking from Greek, ahistorical means no or without history. Since I believed as a young Christian the Bible was written to me, not so much for me, the history from its writing to me was irrelevant. For me, the Bible existed in an historical vacuum.
  • Anti-theological – Given the church’s history of theological engagement with the text, it isn’t surprising theology was non-existent in my Biblicist days. Doctrine, another word for theology, was disparaged as divisive. When I discovered Reformed theology I found it helped me to understand what I believed and why I believed it.
  • Anti-intellectual – While this is not true for all Biblicists, especially in my Reformed tradition, the me-and-the-Bible mindset made being overly intellectual suspect. Taking Paul in I Corinthians 8 out of context, I was taught, mostly implicitly, that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” as if love and knowledge are mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ignorant people who are plenty puffed up.

We can see from the early church none of these things were true of them. This becomes apparent as the church delt with heretical movements arising in the first several hundred years of Christianity. Directed by the providence of the Almighty God, the author of Scripture, this complicated and messy process gave us what we call the historic, orthodox Christian faith. This came down to us in the creeds, specifically the Apostles, Athanasian, and Nicene Creeds, also adding a later creed which came out of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, thus the Chalcedonian Creed.

The Bible in the Christian’s Life
You might think from all this that I don’t believe the Bible has an inherent spiritual power within the text itself, that all its power comes from our human intellect and ability to reason and understand it. Certainly, the human ability to think is instrumental in bringing Scripture to life which God must use, but spiritually, the power of the Bible goes well beyond the human intellect, or imagination, to conceive. We can’t chalk up the change in the human heart and transformation of lives merely to our reason. It’s much more mysterious and profound than that. That’s because we’re dealing with the literal Word of God who is God himself in Christ. As John says, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.” How that all works I have no idea, but God moves in powerful ways in the heart of His people as they faithfully read and pray through His word, and through the words of His word, preferably every day. Keep in mind how blessed we are to have access to cheap Bibles, and free online, so have God’s word always at our fingertips. This wasn’t true for most of Christian history as books were incredibly expensive, and thus rare. Most Christians were likely only able to hear the word read at church.

For me, daily Bible reading was a habit in my early Christian life, but then I allowed life to get in the way for a couple decades and it wasn’t as consistent as it should have been. In 2012 that changed when I made a commitment to read the Bible every morning and get on my knees and pray. I’ve pretty much done that ever since, although not always on my knees, and it was transformational. God, and everything about my daily life with him became more real. That’s a difficult thing to quantify, realness, but it’s powerful. We’re staking our lives, deaths, and eternity, on something, someone, who is invisible, who we can’t physically touch or feel, so it can easily come to feel un-real, which is why daily time in the word and prayer, and weekly worship and fellowship with God’s people is critical to experiencing God’s realness. That awareness is mediated through God’s word found in the text of Scripture in our Bibles. There are numerous verses I can cite before I get to the principles of how we understand it, but Hebrews 4:12 says it well:

For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

The words on the page are the tools the Holy Spirit uses to kindle the parched timber and brush of our souls dried out by sin and life in a fallen world, and alight our hearts afire for the Living God. The results in God’s people are captured perfectly by Isaiah (26):

8 Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws
we wait for you;
your name and renown
are the desire of our hearts.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism first question asks what the chief end of man is, and accurately expresses it in elegant simplicity:

Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him ever.

Everything we are looking for to fulfill us, to give our lives meaning, hope, and purpose, is found in God Himself, and in glorifying and enjoying him we can truly appreciate everything He gives us in life, including the challenges and suffering He may call us to. The question is, how do we get an accurate understanding of what God is communicating through the words on the page. That brings us to hermeneutics, simply, the study of interpretation. Words on a page have meaning, they need to be interpreted, and all human beings are interpretive creatures, whether it’s interpreting text on a page or scenes in a play or movie, or news items, or other human beings. The word interpret simply means to give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate.

So, as we come to the text of Scripture, we need to keep these four hermeneutical principles in mind if we are to interpret it rightly:

  1. Authorial intent: what we can assess the author intended when he wrote the words.
  2. Audience understanding: what the intended audience would have been expected to believe the words meant. This means context counts, specifically the moment in history and culture in which it was written.
  3. Scripture interprets Scripture: never read a text in isolation from the rest of Scripture.
  4. Scripture is all about Christ (Luke 24): the overarching theme of God’s revelation to us is Jesus.

To fully benefit from the scope of redemptive history revealed to us in Scripture, we must understand how the puzzle pieces fit into the overall big picture. The pieces can only give us a limited picture, and an easily distorted one. Fortunately, we’re not in this alone, which is why we must read more than just the Bible. We have easy access to books, and the Internet, to help us grow in our understanding of the big picture, and all the little pictures that make it up. If we are to obey the imperative of Scripture itself to grow in our knowledge, then we will want to take advantage of the great minds who have come before us, as well as those of our contemporaries. The treasures are endless.

Lastly, we’re aware how much disagreement there has been in the history of the church over interpretation. We might reasonably ask, if these principles are so helpful, why is there so much disagreement, and so many arguments about the meaning of the text. You might not expect the answer I will give, but I believe because God wants it that way. God is sovereign, so if he wanted everyone to agree on everything it would have been that way, but it’s not so he didn’t. Why might that be? First, we are finite and so limited in our understanding. Two, we are sinners, which messes everything up. I often see Christians appeal to Jesus’s command that his disciples should love one another, or this passage of Paul in I Corinthians that they should always agree with one another:

10 I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.

There you go, that’s what we should do, but Paul’s appeal is just that, and not a command, mainly because it’s impossible. It might be an aspiration, but even then, aspiring to agree can only get us so far. Like the great creeds of the church. I believe all the disagreement gives us the opportunity to obey the actual command of Jesus to love one another. If the entire law and the prophets, in effect, the entire Old Testament is summed up in loving God, ourselves, and our neighbor, then it’s pretty important. All we need to do is do it, and watch the word of God come alive in us and in those around us; it’s glorious to behold.

 

We Went from Negative to Positive World in One Day!

We Went from Negative to Positive World in One Day!

Mar 5, 2025 | Culture

For those not familiar with the phrase “negative world,” it comes from Aaron Renn who wrote a piece for First Things in early 2022 titled, “The Three Worlds of Evangelism.” He lays out his assessment of where American culture was at the time:

As I laid out back in 2017 and refined for my recent article in First Things, I divide the period from the 1960s to today into three phases distinguished by the way official American culture viewed Christianity: the positive, neutral, and negative worlds.

In the negative world, which we live in now and in which came into existence around 2014, official culture now views Christianity negatively. To be known as a Christian is a social negative in the elite domains of society, and Christian morality is expressly repudiated and treated as a threat to the new moral order of society.

I would argue it officially goes back to 2008 with Obama’s election, but by 2014 negative world was entrenched in all areas of elite American culture and government. This is true throughout the West because when America sneezes, the world catches a cold, and Western culture and the Anglosphere had it bad.

According to Renn, Americans and American culture saw Christianity as a net positive for society through the 1980s. Christians were generally viewed positively in the culture. He says that began to change in the 90s into what he calls neutral world, where Christianity was seen as neither good nor bad, just one religious choice among many, as long as it stayed personal within the church or the home. Even before Obama was elected he had to pay lip service to whatever Christian faith he possessed, and politically felt the need to leave the church of the Marxist, “God damn America,” pastor Jermiah Wright. Then with his election, and the leftist radicals who filled his administration, Christianity became the enemy of all that was decent and good. That was always the plan of the “Community Organizer” and his Marxist desire to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” as he said near the end of the 2008 election. America was born a Christian nation full of bigotry and hatred and misogyny, and that just wouldn’t do for the Utopia he had in mind. As the “transformation” in government and law started, the media made sure it became entrenched in the culture as well.

I became a Christian in the fall of 1978, as those of you familiar with my writing know because I say it all the time, and after finding Francis Schaeffer a year or two later realized I was a conservative. Being a Christian who is, as they called us at the time, a “social conservative,” I was painfully aware of the media biased against people like me. The idea of objective journalism was a 20th century invention starting with Edward R. Murrow who became famous reporting on World War II from Europe, eventually making the transition to TV in the early 1950s. He was every journalist’s hero, including Walter Cronkite who was on in our house every night during the 60s and 70s. He would famously end his broadcasts with an affirmation of Murrow type objectivity claiming, “That’s the way it is,” and giving the date. Of course the mainstream media was never objective, and when Rush Limbaugh came on the air on August 1, 1988, it was a shock to conservatives all over the country. Someone on national radio who is a conservative? He mocked liberals for over 30 years and unmasked their bias every weekday until the Lord took him too soon.

Until Obama, the media played the game nobody believed, that they were objectively reporting the news. If they were accused of bias, they would call their accusers “right wing extremists.” Funny how there has never been a reference to “left wing extremists” in the media, ever. With Obama, the veneer of objectivity was officially dropped, the mask not just taken off but thrown to the floor and stomped on for good measure. The media now showed its true leftist stripes, but still pretended they were down the middle, until Trump, when they effectively became Pravda, an embodiment of 1984’s Ministry of Truth. This is not anecdotal or just my opinion either; we can measure this empirically.

In the Spring 2020 journal Academic Questions, Dr. David Rozado did a word frequency usage study on New York Times articles written between 1970 and the end of 2018. He was looking for progressive/Marxist buzzwords used by groups with an ideological agenda. He discovered in 2010 and the years following such words and phrases exploded in frequency. There are numerous charts in the article graphically displaying the jump in terms such as climate change, sexism, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, and so on. Apparently, all these things became such critically important issues around 2010 that America’s “paper of record” found it necessary to endlessly report upon them. In fact, they were doing what the left always does, driving “the narrative,” but in this case it went into overdrive. Joseph Goebbels would have been impressed.

If the media bias in the Obama Era was becoming undeniable, it went full-on steroids when Trump came on the scene. Because of Trump, the term “Fake News” stuck, but fake doesn’t begin to describe the blatant lying which has been the media’s stock in trade ever since. Everything started to be seen through the lens of hurting Trump or not, which was fine for most liberals because, well, Trump. But for many honest liberals who are not leftists, who still believe in and care about truth, this move by their media buddies, normal allies, was raising red flags. Woke culture, long tyrannical on college campuses, was taking over newsrooms and corporate board rooms. Covid and the 2020 election season, with the silencing of free speech and big tech de-platforming, made the globalist totalitarian nature of the threat to Western civilization undeniable to a growing number of liberals, let alone conservative Christians. The narrative now became, Christians bad, Christians immoral, Christians unenlightened, Christians homophobic, Christians anti LGBTQ+, or whatever, Christians racists, Christians narrow minded, Christians tyrannical, Christians bad, bad, bad! Negative world was in full flow.

The Overnight Transition to Positive World, Or Not
The one day I reference in the title was November 5, 2024, with the election of Donald Trump to his second term in office, only the second president in American history to serve two non-consecutive terms in office, the other being Grover Cleveland in that late 19th century. While “the vibe,” as we say nowadays, has certainly shifted in a positive direction toward sanity, vibe shifts in culture don’t happen in one day. The cultural and intellectual influences of wokeness given to us by cultural Marxism have been developing in their current form since the 60s, inspired by a group of intellectual Marxists in the 1920s and 30s called. The woke revolution only seemed to have happened quickly, but this toxic mentality had been brewing for some time even though almost overnight it came to dominate cultural and governmental elites and their media allies. It was never as strong or widespread as it appeared because only a tiny minority of the cultural and political elites are true believers. How did woke become discredited so quickly when it seemed so strong? A move back to positive world for Christianity is part of the reason, which didn’t seem to be a possibility too long ago.

Most of us remember the so called New Atheists who were active in the first decade of the century bringing their old worn out arguments against God and Christianity to a Western culture disconcertingly receptive to it. Seemingly everywhere, they sprouted messages like, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, in the title of Christopher Hitchens’ book. I had just started a blog in 2004, and their spouting’s were often topics of my rants. But something funny happened on the way to their God-less, secular Utopia. They disappeared. Justin Brierly, who was host of the popular long running podcast, Unbelievable? Published a book in 2023 with the provocative title, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again. In hindsight it isn’t all that surprising.

I wrote about this in some depth in my book Going Back to Find the Way Forward if you’re interested in a more detailed explanation, but briefly, secularism, a several hundred year experiment in human history, proved to be a colossal failure. It was based on two lies. One called the myth of neutrality presumes a society could be irreligious, which is impossible because human beings are by nature religious beings who live by faith. Vishal Mangalwadi in his wonderful book, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, states an unalterable fact of existence:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

What is secularism’s final source of authority? That’s not a hard one to answer: The state! Which has become readily apparent in the last 15 years, especially with a fake pandemic.

The other lie is that religion, specifically Christianity, is what causes division and violence in a society and wars among nations, not sinful self-centered human beings. Developing in the age of the so-called Enlightenment, secularism promised a God-less nirvana, and produced nothing but misery, suffering, and death, including an America where 50,000 people every year successfully kill themselves, and triple that number try. Not to mention the massive number of people on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. By the time woke came on the scene and was in the process of discrediting everything the left-liberal-progressives ever believed, secularism was sucking air, on its deathbed, and soon to be dead. Of course it isn’t going anywhere soon because culture’s don’t fundamentally change quickly, but Christianity and Christians are now getting the attention culturally once given to atheists, especially as the Internet and social media have become ubiquitous. Even some of those angry “New Atheists” are declaring themselves to be “cultural Christians,” something we could never have imagined 15 years ago.

The change toward “positive world” started happening because of a transformational event, Donald Trump coming down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his run for the presidency. This caused a hysterical reaction from the left, and driven by Trump Derangement Syndrome, wokeness came out of its shell with a vengeance like a rabid dog with rabies, foaming mouths and all. At the same time all of this was happening, secularism as I said was showing its age, and itself being exposed for the fraud it always was. As my book was an exercise of grappling with this event and its stunning aftermath, I started it with this sentence:

When Donald Trump started his descent down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, there was a rip in the space-time continuum.

For me and millions of others, Trump’s trip down that escalator began a dizzying red pill journey. And it wasn’t just the failure of secularism setting the table for this, but also the character of the American people. As we go back to the founding of this country, we see a unique series of historical events. It starts with the Puritans fleeing persecution in England from the 1620s into the 1640s coming to America, and a British people founding a country while developing a civilization on a wild and dangerous continent. Nothing like it had ever been done in the history of the world, and it produced a one-of-a-kind people and nation. Because of their unique character, Americans en mass could never be turned into communists, even through the Great Depression, nor into woke leftist who hate their country in the 21st century. This was the big mistake of the left, thinking average Americans were like them and buying what they were selling. Not a chance.

I realized this after I graduated from Arizona State University in 1982. Even then America-hating leftists were common among the faculty, especially in the social sciences. It was common enough that later in the decade after getting my masters at Westminster Theological Seminary, I decided against getting a Ph. D because I didn’t want to deal with the widespread liberalism in academia. I kept my college experience throughout my life as I got older, and it would bubble up every Fourth of July celebration while I attended fireworks celebrations in the communities in which we lived. I would look around at the multitudes and think to myself amid all the red, white, and blue festivities, “There is no way any of these people hate America like the lefties do.” And my unpleasant experiences with liberal professors would flood back into my mind’s eye.

I had become increasingly positive and optimistic in the run-up to the ’24 election season and finishing the book. The entire book is an argument for God being the author of all of it, which is why the subtitle is, Trump, a Great Awakening, and the Refounding of America. The question I was trying to answer in my argument is, why? Why was all this happening? The answer is God’s providence at our unique time in redemptive history. 

Personal and Societal Flourishing in Positive World
Unlike secularism which had a nice several hundred year run but is now bankrupt, Christianity is only 2,000 years in and just getting started. It doesn’t hurt that it is the truth about the ultimate nature of reality, and the only answer to the conundrum of life daily delivering on its promises of meaning, hope, and purpose for a humanity desperately needing it. Not to mention its massive explanatory power, meaning Christianity enables us to take the puzzle pieces of life and fit them together in a way that makes sense of the bigger picture of existence. But it’s far more than merely psychological and emotional power to make sense of life for us; it is transformational at the very heart of our being. In other words, the changes aren’t just on the surface, some rudimentary outward changes in our habits, mere morality. The change is ontological, the transformation of our inner being, who we are. This is most powerfully illustrated by God’s revelation through the prophet Ezekial, specifically chapters 36 and 37.

God is proclaiming Judgment on Israel for its evil deeds, and in the middle he promises to save them from their own sin in this powerful image pointing to their ultimate redemption in Christ:

24 For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Although there is historical referent in these chapters for God bringing Israel back to the land, the image is about far more than a people in a plot of land. Rather, it’s about the transformation of God’s people Jesus came to save (Matt. 1:21). Jesus is at the right hand of God reigning “above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that can be named” (Eph. 1:18-23), and by his authoritative power transforms spiritually dead hearts of stone to spiritual living hearts of flesh living to the Glory of our great God. He sent his Holy Spirit to make sure of it. Put starkly, secularism can’t compete, nor can any other religion. And the Lord makes the point even more strongly by giving Ezekiel a vision of a valley of dry bones, very dry bones. Before his eyes these bones are slowly clothed in flesh, then God breathes life into them, and they come back to life as a vast army. That, brothers and sisters is us!

This third decade of the 21st century is a time of revealing contrasts. One side is God-less, be it in its virulent woke version, or just your average agnostic American going about their daily lives. This we call secularism. To see how pathetic this is, watch any TV show or movie dealing with the deep, existential issues of life where God is persona non grata, unwelcome and invisible. Without God in Christ, all you get is the blind leading the blind, life as a Woody Allen movie leading to despair or resignation. On the other side is Almighty God revealed to us in creation, Scripture, and Christ. This option brings ultimate and eternal meaning, hope, and purpose to life through a Savior who in the prophetic words of Isaiah tells us over 700 years before it happened what Jesus of Nazareth did for us, his people:

4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

This story, this narrative, the miracle of the incarnation in Christmas, to the inconceivable suffering of the cross, to the hope of the resurrection in Easter, is again grabbing people in a powerful way exactly because of the death of secularism. It offers but failed promises, while Christianity is the only option available to humanity for true personal and societal flourishing. It delivers. As America’s Founders knew, obedience to God’s law is the means of blessing, and the American republic could only succeed with a religious, i.e., Christian people. It is positive world again, and that gives us a chance to Make America Christian Again!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Show notes:

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism-7fc

 

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Negative-World-Confronting-Anti-Christian/dp/0310155150

 

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/what-caused-the-negative-world

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/a_window_on_the_orwellian_dystopia_of_america_.html