Response Post: Carl Truman and Two Kingdom Pietists

Response Post: Carl Truman and Two Kingdom Pietists

May 28, 2025 | Culture

Sometimes I read something and I just can’t let it go. I have to tell somebody about it and share my reaction. Much of the time it’s my poor long suffering wife, and since I got active on Twitter early last year, that allows me an outlet, but you have to be pithy there, and I’m not really good at pithy. As a Christian in a dominant secular culture, I’m in the minority so there’s plenty to react to. But within Christian circles, I’m in the minority of the minority of the minority, and maybe a few more. I’m Reformed in my theological convictions, a Calvinist. Among these, I’m a Presbyterian, thus believe babies should be baptized as covenant children, while not believing baptism saves babies like Lutherans and Catholics do. That’s pretty solid for minority status, but I’m also postmillennial in my eschatological perspective, and you can’t get much more minority than that! So, there’s a lot I run across that drives me nuts, and I just have to get it off my chest. I came across a piece by Carl Truman I have to respond to, so he is going to be the first response-piece victim, so to speak, and a worthy one at that.

He wrote an article last year for First Things called, “How Pop Nietzscheanism Masquerades as Christianity.” How’s that for a provocative title! If you’re not familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche, he was a late 19th century atheist philosopher who declared God is dead, and prophesied the horror of the 20th century wars because of it. Even as an atheist, he knew the moral structure of Western civilization came from Christianity, and even though he despised it, he knew if you cut off the branch from the tree, it will die. Western intellectuals in fact cut down the entire tree! The term Nihilism, often associated with Nietzsche, means nothing, and those who embrace it believe exactly that, nothing. Nobody can consistently live that way, but without God that’s really all you got, nothing. We’ll have to see how Truman creatively weaves this into condemning certain Christians he disagrees with on politics, but I will make the point that whatever he’s trying to do, he fails miserably at it.

I won’t quote the entire piece, but let’s start here. This is enough to get the old Italian blood boiling.

I wrote the piece when Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option was the talk of the town. At that time, the big threat to the faith was the emerging pressure on religious freedom, focused then on the issue of gay marriage. The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity. It’s understandable why such a thing has emerged. Many Christians think America has been stolen from them. And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. While the left may pose an obvious threat, there is also a more subtle danger in succumbing to the rules of the political game as currently played by both sides.

His first criticism is that this “pop Nietzscheanism,” is “fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same.” For an otherwise intelligent man to say something so inane is   something to behold, but two kingdoms Pietism will do that to a person.

Evangelical Elites’ Problem with Power
Notice the inherent dualism in Truman’s understanding of the world. Simply, dualism is the idea that there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles of reality, and these are mutually exclusive, something on one side of the wall, another thing on the other. Pietism sees a dualistic world of competing forces, spiritual and material, spiritual and sinful. Truman believes there is something called “worldly power,” and clearly “worldly” means not “spiritual” power, which we presume is good. He assumes we agree with him that there is this kind of inherently bad “worldly” form of power, and that those who engage in it are somehow Nietzschean. If we are to have fruitful discussions with anyone about anything, we must define our terms. Assuming the meaning of the terms, and that others agree with you, is a very bad strategy for fruitful discussions. Regarding the word power, Britannica has an excellent definition to help us parse what Truman might mean:

Power, in political science and sociology, the capacity to influence, lead, dominate, or otherwise have an impact on the life and actions of others in society. The concept of power encompasses, but is not limited to, the notion of authority. Unlike authority, which implies legitimacy, power can be exercised illegitimately.

The reason this is so helpful is because power, like most anything else in God’s created order, can be used legitimately, and so is good, or illegitimately and thus bad. What use a thing is put to, and how it is used, determines its goodness or badness. Two kingdom Pietists believe there is something called “worldly power,” which I guess can be legitimately used for “worldly” ends by “worldly” people, but if Christians do the same thing, it’s bad, wrong, and possibly even sinful. It’s hard to tell exactly what Truman means. Power can also be exercised through coercion to exercise control over others, and I think that’s likely what’s lurking in Truman’s mind about those Christians exercising illegitimate “worldly” power. Coercion can also be good or bad depending on the circumstances and people involved.

What frosts me about what Truman is saying is that Christians are not allowed to exercise political power as Christians for Christian ends. That, to him, is apparently “worldly.” What’s even worse is that he accuses such people of being Nietzschean, which means like Nietzsche, they believe they can mold reality to their own wills by the exercise of their sheer, raw power, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “the will to power.” This is where Truman’s dualistic assumptions are most pernicious. He’s accusing fellow Christians of believing their power, their influence, is being exercised apart from God, that these Christians believe by their own power they can usher in the kingdom. Over the years I’ve heard two-kingdom Pietists hurl such accusations, all the while assuming their assessment of “worldly power” is the truth. That is what in logic we call begging the question.

Today that phrase has come to mean, “raise the question,” but it’s critical to be aware of its meaning in logic when we’re assessing people’s assertions. Truman begs the question when he says, “the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same,” because he’s assuming all kinds of things he doesn’t feel the need to prove. That’s what makes it a logical fallacy. If something is a temptation it’s clearly bad. It assumes there is something called “worldly power,” the bad kind, and we guess a good kind of power which he doesn’t define, but we presume it’s spiritual power, the kind that depends on God. Who knows; he never bothers to explain himself.

He gives us a hint as to what he thinks this “worldly power” is:

And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. While the left may pose an obvious threat, there is also a more subtle danger in succumbing to the rules of the political game as currently played by both sides.

Given he wrote this in the middle of last year’s presidential campaign you know he’s got Donald Trump on the mind, and he is a card carrying member of the NeverTrump cabal. This again begs the question. Are we to believe all Christians do these things? And let’s stipulate that “crudity, verbal thuggery, the destruction of any given opponent’s character” can be in the eye of the beholder. Also in his mind I’m sure anyone associated with Trump is lumped in and likely guilty by association.

The Delusions of Third Wayism and Moral Equivalence
Commenting on these two sentences it is difficult for me not to be verbally incontinent, it’s that bad. Unfortunately, America’s Evangelical establishment, its elite, buy into a moral equivalence between left and right that is so morally obtuse you wonder if these people can think at all. Yet they are intelligent, often brilliant, but intellect has never equaled wisdom.

They also fail to understand in the old phrase, politics ain’t beanbag, and one might say something in the heat of political battle that is less than charitable toward the opponent. Andrew T. Walker captures this mentality well:

Third-wayism in politics is a form of political Gnosticism as it assumes that there is a platonic ideal to politics that does not require engaging the kingdoms of the world as what they fundamentally are: worldly, temporal, & creational ordinances designed for proximate justice.

Christians in the modern world have proved terrible at politics because they live in this idealized platonic world where they believe in some kind of third way that doesn’t exist, and never has.

As for Democrats, I’m not sure exactly when it started, but at some point they became the party of perpetual liars, and their media lackies tagged along. There can be no compromise, no in between, no third way, when you’re dealing with liars. What Jesus said of the Pharisees could be said of Democrats (John 8:44):

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

I will say it bluntly: the Democrats are Satanic. Lying is effectively the language indicating where someone comes from, to which country or nation they belong. As someone who speaks Japanese is likely from Japan, so someone who speaks lies is from hell. I’m not talking about someone who tells a little white lie, or someone who gets caught doing something and lies under pressure, but someone who lies as his “native language.” Lies are the native language of the secular progressive left, a case that is not hard to make, and all Democrats, save possibly a few, are of the secular progressive left.

While all politicians may lie to one degree or another, this didn’t become a political strategy for the Democrats until Barack Obama came on the scene. What happened wasn’t so much about not telling the truth, but crafting a narrative. Whatever was required to drive “the narrative” was fair game, thus truth became optional. How do I know this? The media has always been biased, as I learned when I embraced conservatism as a young Christian in 1980. While the media always feigned objectivity, when Obama came on the scene, “the narrative” became priority number one.

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 had 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. Then when Trump came on the scene, they went from narrative driving to blatant lying. In fact, their hypocrisy was so blatant and in your face, that it was almost impressive. There can be no third way in response to such mendacity.

Do Church Things, The Rest Will Take Care of Itself
This is the basic message from Pietist two kingdom folks like Truman. Since the church is the kingdom of God where His redemptive work happens, everything else is a bit less than important. All Pietists of whatever stripe live in such a bifurcated reality, one branch being the spiritual, the eternal, which is the truly important stuff, and down the other branch everything else. I’ll quote one more paragraph where Truman embodies this mentality, and all Pietistic two kingdom thinkers do so as well:

And yet the sun also rises, to quote Ecclesiastes. Regardless of the political stakes, at ground level the births, marriages, illnesses, and deaths continue. Pastoral ministry goes on, day to day, year to year, whatever the political officer class, right and left, are debating. And so in this context, the Church must continue to do that to which she has been called: proclaim Christ in Word and sacrament. The big problems of life—sin and death—remain, whoever wins the election in November 2024. And so the Church needs to remain faithful to her appointed task and not become simply an arm of those vying for political power.

This doesn’t infuriate me like the previous paragraph, as much as sadden me. To take God’s kingdom redemptive work and truncate it to such a degree that it’s only narrowly applied to the ministry of word and sacrament, as they often say, is tragic. I’ve written in the past that the kingdom of God is not identical to the church, yet most Christians limit God’s kingdom work to the church. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, they think that means the spiritual stuff, things pertaining to salvation and personal holiness. Grubby stuff like politics, that’s most certainly not “spiritual” nor kingdom work. In fact it is both.

We also notice another pernicious distortion in such sloppy thinking. He’s speaking about “the church,” but we’re not quite sure if he means the institution of the church, like a denomination, or individual Christians. He just assumes we know what he means. Clearly he has to mean the latter because no church denomination makes authoritative proclamations as a church body about public policy, and I doubt seriously any denomination has hired lobbyists in DC to push policy. So his target is individual Christians. For Truman, Christians who engage in politics are basically pawns of those greedy for political power, which he seems to infer is a bad thing, or at the last not a “spiritual” thing, as we’ve already discussed.

I wrote here recently about the history of Pietism and how this kind of dualistic thinking came to dominate the Evangelical church over the last several hundred years. Before Pietism, Christians saw God’s kingdom coming in Christ as applying to every square inch of life because declaring Jesus as Lord is an all-encompassing statement, including politics. King Jesus is just that, King of kings and Lord of Lords. I recently learned that when the Messiah was composed by Handel and Charles Jennens, they put The Hallelujah Chorus in the middle, and not the end where I always thought it was. We are so programmed to believe Jesus only really takes charge at his second coming and not his first, that of course Handel would have put the chorus at the end, where it belongs. But until Pietism took over, Christians didn’t think that way. They believed like the Bible teaches, that Christ was coronated as King of kings and Lord of Lords at his ascension to the right hand of God where he now reigns over all things, including all earthly power, and that Christians are his representatives on earth. That makes everything we do spiritual, not just the “spiritual” stuff.

So, contrary to Truman and all two kingdom Pietists, redemption accomplished by Christ in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension is meant to reverse the effects of the fall in every nook and cranny of life. As the great Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper famously said,

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!

This is not a theoretical authority, but a real, concrete, authority realized in the nitty gritty of life, be it in politics or anything else. And Christ exercises this authority, like it or not, through his body, the church as his people, not the church as an official institution that ministers word and sacrament. So Carl, you could not be more off base or wrong. Christians should be involved in “vying for political power,” and in our day that would be as part of the Republican Party. Learn it, live it, love it!

 

What and Why Boomers: The Generation Everyone Loves to Hate

What and Why Boomers: The Generation Everyone Loves to Hate

May 21, 2025 | Culture

I was listening to Tucker Carlson interview Tim Dillon, a comedian I’d never heard of. He’s a funny guy, not surprising, but when he and Tucker went on a twelve-and-a-half-minute rant completely trashing boomers it was hilarious. I shared it on Twitter, and someone replied with this:

This is so true (broadly speaking). It’s been a bizarre observation to me how much wisdom people in their 80s and 50s have compared to those in their 60s and 70s. I don’t understand what happened with that generation, but the stereotype is so real. So many are like old children.

Given my handle on Twitter is The Based Boomer and I have a podcast of the same name, I suppose I’m the ideal person to speak to the phenomenon of the horribleness of the baby boomer generation. And from what I can gather, my woeful generation is responsible for every horrible thing that’s happened in the modern world, even, it seems, the stuff that happened before we were born!

There’s the rub at which I have a bit of a problem with the boomer blamers. No generation is born in a vacuum, and each generation is in some sense determined by what came before; they are the recipients of all the historical forces coming before and into which they were born. In fact, I would contend that boomers could no more help who they’ve become than any other generation. This process, a kind of historical determinism, is just baked into the generational cake.

The significance of the baby boom generation is not only their timing in history, but their size. They are a huge generation. Millions of men fought in the war and came home ready to procreate, and they did, thus the boom. As this generation, this demographic wave moved through society and years, they affected everything. It’s the law of big numbers. As consumers what they were interested in, the world became interested in, like it or not. Think of the Beatles and the popular music of the 60s and 70s (the best there has ever been, says this boomer), to fashion, to sex and changing moral standards, the boomers led the way. In the 80s and 90s as they were growing up, careers, raising the perfect children, and real estate became the thing, and as they neared retirement and health challenges increased, the medical industrial complex took over the world. Why do you think Big Pharma is the biggest advertiser on television? Boomers!

Culturally, we boomers have been bad enough, but politically we’ve been an unmitigated disaster. I’ll talk more about that below, but I think the worst part of this disaster has been the Civil Rights revolution that started in 1964. If you haven’t read Christopher Caldwell’s book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, I highly recommend it, especially if you want to know why America is in the sorry state she is in. I wrote about it last year, and called it “the most important book of the 21st century,” no hyperbole. When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Caldwell called it a new Constitution, something that fundamentally changed the nature of the American experiment. It wasn’t intended as that, and wasn’t at the beginning, but it became that. The power of the demographic boomer wave made sure of it. Civil rights soon came to mean not just race, but as Caldwell says, “Racial integration turned into the all-embracing ideology of diversity.” And that, literally, changed everything. But let’s do a brief look back and see where boomers came from.

What Created the Modern World, And Boomers?
One of my passions is studying intellectual and cultural currents in history to see how they’ve flowed down to us in the present, and then how they’ve influenced who we are and what we think as a people and as individuals. Nothing happens in a vacuum, nor does anyone exist in one. We are the product, the result, of innumerable forces coming before we existed, and encompassing us at every level of our existence. This does not mean, in case you’re wondering, that I’m saying we are determined and have no choice about who we are or who we become. A fundamental Christian assumption is that we have agency, that we can change things, and that our choices matter and have consequences; we are accountable beings. Thus, as creatures made in God’s image we are not slaves to these forces, which is why we study them, so we don’t have to be.

We can go all the way back to the fall. Man, male and female God created them, rebelled against God, and introduced sin into the world. You might think it silly to even mention, but in the 18th century a French philosopher came up with the brilliant idea that man is born pure, and it is civilization that corrupts him. His name was Jean Jaques Rousseau, and he introduced the concept of the “noble savage” into the bloodstream of Western intellectual culture. If man is indeed born noble and corrupted by his environment, then all you have to do is change his environment and you will change the man. On the other hand, if man is born a sinner, corrupt from birth, you have to change the man before you can change the circumstances.

Historically, side by side God in his providence gave us these two views of man in juxtaposition so we can compare how they work in practice. Rousseau’s influence gave us the French Revolution, the triumph of reason, which gave the world a Reign of Terror. From September 5, 1793, to July 27, 1794, upwards of 1,400 people were summarily executed, having their heads mercifully lopped off by Madame Guillotine, and tens of thousands were executed over the course of the Revolution.  By contrast the American Revolution, steeped in Protestant, specifically Calvinistic, Christianity, gave us the American Revolution. Two diametrically opposite views of man, two diametrically opposite results.

What, you ask, has this to do with baby boomers? My fellow boomers are children of Rousseau, but coming through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, and innumerable influences in between and since. Starting with French Philosopher Renes Descartes in the 17th century, and through all of these influences, as Marx said, the object of life became for man “so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun.” This had implications, as you can imagine, for both individuals and the societies they developed. Marx was just parroting Satan in the garden, that man could “be like God, knowing good and evil.” The boomers exploded onto the world scene in the dreaded “60s” at the apex of the hubris of man thinking he could “be like God.” On a personal level, this coincided with the triumph of the therapeutic, in the title of an important 1966 book by Philip Rieff. Even as a secular Jew, Rieff lamented the loss of religion by modern man. His religion had now become the therapeutic, his highest good a manipulatable sense of his own well-being. He explains it in the introduction:

In compensation, and in place of where faith once was, men are offered Art and/or Science. It is true that new religions are constantly being born. But modern culture is unique in having given birth to such elaborately argued anti-religions, all aiming to confirm us in our devastating illusions of individuality and freedom.

I’m not sure anything could better explain boomers, except as Rieff fills out the picture a few pages later:

Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when “I believe,” the cry of the ascetic lost precedence to “one feels,” the caveat of the therapeutic. And if the therapeutic is to win out, then surely the psychotherapist will be his secular spiritual guide.

And while boomers didn’t create psychotherapy, as with many other things they popularized, therapy became the religious replacement of our age. And when Rieff uses the word religion in his book, he’s speaking primarily of Christianity because his concern is the Western Christianized world. It was the development and dominance of Christianity that gave us the blessings of the modern world, and Rieff is lamenting its demise with the rise of secularism.

Being a boomer, albeit on the younger side, I grew up witnessing this societal convulsion in real time. Having been born in 1960, I could only experience the wild 1960s as a child, but as teenager in the 70s, I could participate in some of the more enjoyable aspects of the era, not having to think too much about the politics, or be worried about being drafted into the Vietnam War. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll were our past time, but thankfully I wasn’t too successful on the sex part, and I was too much of a scaredy cat to do more than a few brief experiments with the heavier drugs. I mostly indulged in beer and the weak pot of the time, and loved it!. Rock n’ roll was my passion. Say what you will about boomers, but we gave the world the greatest era in popular music ever. I was going to be a rock star, but thankfully God had different plans.

It wasn’t until I became a born-again Christian in 1978 and then embraced conservative politics in 1980 that I began to look back critically at this era. I started learning about these forces that would create possibly the most consequential generation of the modern world, and it wasn’t just the implications for the personal and relational, but how my generation saw America and the world.

Boomers and the Progressive American Dream
As a generation, the boomers would be well-prepared to build a modern tower of Babel, and inherit the hubris to try. We are fortunate the Lord revealed any Babel like aspirations are not good (Gen. 11):

6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

Nothing will be impossible for them was pretty much the vibe of the post-World War II period. People in the 1950s and early 1960s pre-Vietnam believed anything was possible, and they prepared the way for the boomer generation. Kennedy’s administration was staffed with the “best and the brightest,” young guns who never doubted their ability to do great things with their power. Unlike the generations before them who went through a global conflagration that developed in them a certain kind of modesty, there was nothing modest about the boomers who believed they could use technology to create anything. This wouldn’t last.

Just as the sinking of Titanic was a blow to the spirit of optimism of the early 20th century, so too was Kennedy’s assassination a blow to the optimism of the early 1960s. This “we can do anything” dynamic combined with shattered dreams of greatness, would create a generation of schizophrenics, delusions of grandeur on the one hand, psychosis on the other. Looking back on the 60s and 70s, Christopher Lasch wrote a surprising best-selling book whose title explains this dynamic well: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. Because of sin all human beings are self-centered, curved in on themselves, but the boomers especially so. The generation giving them birth were determined to give them a better life than they had, which when I was growing up was a common refrain. Of course you try to give your kids a better life than you had, but that created a rather self-absorbed generation, one of the common criticisms of my generation.

It turns out all of these many forces made the boomers the perfect generation to inherit the progressive American dream. I blame the Enlightenment for pretty much everything wrong with the modern world, but once reason was exalted as the ultimate means to knowledge, called rationalism, Babel builders were inevitable. Secularism was the unavoidable result of rationalism, which meant God was persona non grata, unwelcome at the societal table, and eventually unwelcome at the personal one as well. The boomers became the generation living out fully agnostic lives, God only an occasional player if at all. God, however, would not be completely ignored. So, he had to be taken out.

As secularism spread its tentacles throughout the Western world in the 19th century, German biblical scholars declared war on the credibility of the Bible with higher criticism. There are two forms of biblical criticism. Lower is an attempt to find the original wording of the text since we no longer have the original writings, and higher studies of the historic origins, dates, and authorship of the various books of the Bible. Biased German scholars approached the Bible with the anti-supernatural assumptions of the Enlightenment, so were looking for ways to explain away any such references with natural or scientific explanations. Because secularism had not completely engulfed Europe yet, the Germans wanted to keep their non-supernatural Christianity, out of which flowed what came to be called liberal Christianity.  Americans were enamored of all things European, especially all things German, and higher criticism made its way to America and blew up the mainline denominations.

The progressive movement of the late 19th century was also in many ways inspired by the Germans. Prussia, a state in northern Germany, was known for their commitment to efficient bureaucracy, and American progressives loved it. It is from the Prussians we get the idea of the rule by “experts.” For progressives, government was instrumental in creating the just society of America’s founding promise. Without government intervention the problems of the modern world would remain insoluble, and anarchy and suffering would reign. The government of America’s founding built for an agrarian society of primarily farmers and ranchers with a relatively small homogeneous population was no match for a modern industrial society. Holding the firm conviction that with science and technology no problem seemed too big to overcome, progressives were determined to apply this mindset to government. “Scientific” management or planning by “experts” would become the rallying cry of the 20th century.

Woodrow Wilson is the founding father of the American administrative state. As an academic, Wilson wrote a paper in 1887 arguing for “the science of administration,” which speaks to the rule by “experts.” This started with Wilson’s administration, and with Roosevelt’s New Deal, government became dominant in American society. But it wasn’t until the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in the 60s, and his Great Society and “War on Poverty,” that the progressive vision was fully realized. The greatest generation fought in World War II and saved the world from tyranny, but they also gave us the dreaded “post war consensus” of the modern liberal welfare state. You can’t blame that on the boomers. It was something they inherited, and they ran with it, liberals and conservatives alike. Government in some way was always their answer. Since the 1980s Con Inc. has been filled with boomer conservatives who I eventually came to see as just liberals in skirts. The conservative movement was adept at losing, going along with progressive gains all the while pretending they were against them. Then Trump, himself a boomer of a very different kind, came along and messed everything up.

Looking back, we can see the Covid disaster was the beginning of the end for the Babel building boomers. The “experts” didn’t come out looking so good, and it so happens people the world over prefer being governed more locally than by an unaccountable globalist elite. We’re just beginning to see what comes after the post World War II “consensus.”

The Boomers and the end of Secular History
The Greatest Generation grew up in the Depression and fought a world war, and as I said, they were determined to give their children a better life; they did, materially. The changes and economic growth in post war America meant boomers were the first generation to live with the illusion they could “have it all,” and it seems many parents didn’t disabuse them of this notion. With the explosion of feminism and the invention of the pill in the early 60s, the sexual revolution was off and running. Unfortunately, the boomers’ parents didn’t prepare them for the radical moral changes, and we got “the 60s.” Francis Schaeffer’s ministry was to these boomer kids whose parents in the 50s had a faith that was a mile wide and an inch deep. In the 1950s Christianity was dominant in America, but lacked substance. Schaeffer published The God Who is There in 1968 as a result of his ministry to these disaffected boomer children. He starts the book with his assessment of the problem:

The present chasm between the generations has been brought about almost entirely by a change in the concept of Truth. . . . Young people from Christian homes are brought up in the old framework of truth. Then they are subjected to the modern framework. In time they become confused because they do not understand the alternatives which they are being presented. Confusion becomes bewilderment, and before long they are overwhelmed.

That pretty much describes an entire generation who turned into relativists—what’s true for you is true for you and not for me. We’ve seen where that leads. Boomer kids saw hypocrisy in their parents and a faith that had no substance, so they rejected the faith of their fathers, and embraced a new faith of self-fulfillment.

Having said all this, I make the point I started with. Boomers are easy to hate, but they are a products of societal forces into which they were born and were in some sense determined by them. I see the boomer generation as the fulcrum generation. They were the final generation in Western history putting the finishing touches on the secular Berlin Wall. Like the physical one in Germany, it appeared impenetrable, but all along was made out of paper mâché. The cracks started appearing a while ago, but Covid revealed just how weak it was as people started pushing on it, and lo and behold, it fell! Younger generations are more conservative than older generations, which has never happened before in the modern world. This is because secularism has proved as hollow as the old East Germany and the Soviet Union that propped it up. As Dylan, not a boomer but of that generation, sang, the times they are achangin’.

If you’ve made it this far listening, I want you to listen to these lyrics by the late great Kevin Gilbert in his song Goodness Gracious from his album Thud. The album was released in 1995, so the boomer lament, as you’ll hear, is nothing new.

Goodness Gracious my generation’s lost
They’ve burned down all our bridges before we had a chance to cross
Is it the winter of our discontent or just an early frost?
Just an early frost

 

Goodness Gracious of apathy I sing
The baby boomers had it all and wasted everything
Now recess is almost over and they won’t get off the swing
Won’t get off the swing

 

Goodness Gracious we came in at the end
No sex that isn’t dangerous, no money left to spend
We’re the cleanup crew for parties we were too young to attend
Goodness Gracious me

 

 

 

The Secular Eschatology of Doom

The Secular Eschatology of Doom

May 14, 2025 | Culture

For much of my Christian life I didn’t think eschatology mattered. That word comes from the Greek eschatos, which means last or farthest, so it means the study (ology) of last things. Since the Late Great Planet Earth 1970s, Christians have come to think of it as the study of “end times,” given the popularity of dispensational theology that believes the world is going to the proverbial hell in a handbasket; the ship is sinkin’ fast, so we have to save as many as we can, and prepare for the end. That view of eschatology isn’t as popular as it once was given the end is always around a corner never seeming to come, but it still informs much Christian understanding of “end times.” That, as the title implies, is not the subject of this post. Here I’m going to take on the secularists because in the title of the YouTube channel I contribute to, eschatology matters. In other words, how we see the end of things has an impact on how we live in the present, and everyone alive has some kind of vision in their mind of the end of things, even if most secularists suppress it with games and distractions. They want to enjoy their Nihilism until the bitter end.

What inspired this post is a TV series my wife and I recently watched on AppleTV+ called Silo (season 1 and 2). As with most of what we watch on streaming TV, it reveals the glories of secularism, or not. We enjoyed it, and I decided to read the book, the first of three in a trilogy. The story is a perfect example of something inevitable in a worldview where God is persona non grata: THE SECULAR ESCHATOLOGY OF DOOM. I don’t normally do all caps, but I want to emphasize the poverty of secularism as an exhausted vision for life. This is extremely important to understand as we do spiritual battle at the end of this secular age (see Eph. 6:12, but only in the context of Eph. 1:18-23). I write about this a lot in my work because we’re at a profound turning point in history, which is a culmination of almost 400 years of thinking and cultural change in the West (which is most of the world today). Intellectuals thought we could build societies and lives where God was a bit player, at best, and we could conquer reality to our indomitable will. It looks like reality isn’t so malleable after all; reality is winning. The liberal progressive secularists, the Western elites who ran things, the “experts,” thought they could mold reality to their wishes, but instead they have encountered the unmovable structure of God’s created order. Let’s take a look at how we got here.

A Brief History Secular Disappointment
From the beginning of the Enlightenment, and its development into secularism in the 17th century, until the early 20th century, everything was Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Sing it with me, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood . . .” Uh, maybe not. Even as difficult as life could be in the 19th century, an infectious optimism gripped the imaginations of all but the most downtrodden. Industrialization brought a new kind of misery to cities exploding in growth, but the blessings of technology and knowledge were undeniable. To cite only one of those blessings, clean water was brought to the masses and saved untold lives from disease because of indoor plumbing and public sanitation.

A good example of the understandable hubris of the time was the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Held around the world annually, fairs showcased some of the world’s most revolutionary inventions and concepts known at the time, and the period between 1880 and World War I was the golden age of fairs. At the Chicago fair, known as the World’s Columbian Exposition celebrating Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492, the world-changing technology of electric light made its debut. It really seemed humanity could accomplish anything, and conquer the limits imposed by nature. Without God, however, as Nietzsche prophesied, disaster loomed.

Although a staunch atheist, Nietzsche realized Christianity had created the moral framework that made Christian Western civilization possible, and without something in its place, bad things were bound to happen. Branches can’t be cut from the tree and live. According to Walter Kauffmann, Nietzsche’s writings abound in prophecies of doom.

“If the doctrines . . . of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal . . . are hurled into the people for another generation,” if mankind realizes the unique worth of the human being has evaporated, and that no up and down remains, and if the tremendous event that we have killed God reaches the ears of man—then night will close in,” an age of barbarism begins,” and “there will be wars such as have never happened on earth.”

Next to this paragraph in the book I wrote, “The 20th Century!!!” And remember, this comes from a convinced atheist, but one who realized the West wasn’t just cutting off branches, but cutting down the entire tree! It’s safe to say, no other thinker at the time would have said anything like this, and his prescient prophecies proved disastrously true.

I place the beginning of the end of modernism and its inevitable secularism with the sinking of RMS Titanic in April 1912. While the builders and White Star Line, the technological marvel’s operator, never actually declared it unsinkable, that was the impression in popular imagination. The sinking was a huge cultural blow to the dominant hubris of the time. A little more than two years later a war of unimaginable horror and carnage swept up the most educated and civilized nations in the world. This “war to end all wars” had many horrific unintended consequences, as all wars do, and two decades later led to an even more deadly and horrendous war. One of those consequences was the Russian Revolution, leading to Soviet communism and tens of millions more dead. The communists seemed to want to outdo each other in the mass murder sweepstakes, and Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and others gave the world by most estimates north of 100 million corpses. An “age of barbarism” only begins to describe it.

Ironically, despite all the carnage and destruction, Western cultural and political leaders were more confident than ever “progress” would continue. Technocratic man and “scientific management” would solve all problems sooner or later. The post-World War II period was an especially heady time. People in the 1950s and early 1960s pre-Vietnam believed anything was possible. Kennedy’s administration was staffed with the “best and the brightest,” young guns who never doubted their ability to do great things with their power. Kennedy’s promise of landing a man on the moon in 1961 was indicative of the can-do spirit. Under the surface, however, cracks were beginning to appear.

Technology, like anything sinful human beings create, can be used for good or evil. As Blaise Pascal put it so memorably:

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

The cracks leading to the eschatological doom I speak of started with the 1962 book by Rachal Carson called Silent Spring, which set the stage for the environmental movement. She exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, and questioned humanity’s faith in unlimited technological progress. In due course, environmental doom and gloom became a staple of the left’s worldview. Global warming transmogrified into “climate change,” and is only the latest catastrophe awaiting mankind if radical revolutionary changes are not enacted. The changes just happen to conveniently require globalist, leftist, tyrannical, anti-free enterprise solutions, always top down, never bottom up.

The Influence of Christian Eschatology
It’s important to remember the concept of eschatology, of history going somewhere with an inherent telos, or purpose, is a solely Jewish/Christian concept. Prior to God calling Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans (Gen 12), history was literally going nowhere. Humanity’s conception of time and life itself changed that day.

Thomas Cahill in his The Gift of the Jews tells the story of that change. The subtitle isn’t hyperbole: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. He explores the many ways Jewish belief and practice was completely unique in the ancient world. Here are just a few of these gifts:

  • Fate: Before the Hebrew people came along, life was viewed as something determined by inscrutable forces beyond any person’s control. There was nothing to be done about it but submit. That changed forever when God revealed through Scripture that He created man, male and female He created them, in His own image.
  • Time: Prior to the idea of “In the beginning God,” all peoples of the world viewed time cyclically, one season moving into another, a wheel turning forever going nowhere. The people of Israel, by contrast, introduced the concept of past, present, and future; that history was going somewhere, something inconceivable to all other ancient peoples.
  • A transcendent, personal Creator God: All other ancient peoples believed in gods who were visible (idols), and in fear of the forces of nature, believed they could manipulate the gods who presumably controlled those forces. The Hebrews introduced a concept no other peoples could conceive: a personal God, in some way like them, and the only true God. I can imagine an ancient person encountering these strange people saying, One God… who created everything? That’s crazy! Cahill writes that the God of Abraham, “no longer your typical ancient divinity, no longer the archetypal gesturer—is a real personality who has intervened in real history, changing its course and robbing it of predictability.”

Secularism hijacked the Jewish and Christian worldview, threw God out the door, and thought it could fly the plane of reality anywhere it wanted. Man was finally in control of his own existence without all the pesky divine interference. As Karl Marx said in his Communist Manifesto, man could now “move around himself as his own true Sun.” That was the plan anyway, but it hasn’t quite worked out as planned. Providence, however bastardized it becomes, is an inescapable influence of Christianity. Every worldview influenced by Christianity has an eschatology, a vision of the end of things, including secularism, and given the obvious dysfunction of the world, they inevitably tend towards the negative.

Which brings us to the Book of Revelation. Any providential discussion of history, as well as the present and that to come, can’t escape the most influential biblical book in Western history, eschatology or not. It’s instructive to consider the Greek word John uses for revelation as he begins his letter to “the seven churches in the province of Asia.” His first words are, “The revelation of Jesus Christ . . .” Revelation in Greek is apokálypsis and simply means unveiling, uncovering, revealing, revelation, and has no inherent positive or negative connotation. The word in English as it has come down to us, apocalypse, has only negative meaning when we see, hear, or use it ourselves. That is the influence of a certain interpretation of Revelation, but left or right, secular or religious, what often unites them all is the conviction the worst is yet to come.

The Inevitable Hopelessness of a God-Less World
One of the things Silo reminded me of is how important our fundamental assumptions are about the ultimate nature of reality, and in the Western mind there are only two mutually exclusive assumptions. Either God revealed to us in the first chapters of Genesis is real, or it’s all a cosmic accident, a product of chance. Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution is the creation myth for the secular eschatology of doom. If there is no God who sovereignly ordains all things for the good of is creation, then there is nothing upon which humanity can base their hope for a bright and positive future. Without God, there is nothing to counter human sin and its attendant evil. Dysfunction will always win in the end, inevitably leading to despair, and logically that leads to dystopia.

Speaking of dystopia, such a concept didn’t exist until Western culture fully embraced secularism. The idea is the flipside of “utopia,” which literally means no place, and was coined by Thomas More in his book Utopia in 1516. In it he describes a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean that is a satire on the state of England. We think of it as an impossibly idealized place that cannot exist, and those who think they can achieve it on this earth generally end up in a very bad place. Inspired by More’s writings, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill coined the word dystopia, meaning ‘bad place’ in 1868 as he was denouncing the government’s Irish land use policy. As the 20th century developed, any kind of Utopia looked increasingly unlikely, and fiction started to embrace this concept of history inevitably going to this bad place, this dystopia. In a God-less universe man was ill equipped to overcome himself. The story behind the Silo series is a perfect example of this. I could probably write an entire post just listing the dystopian novels and movies of the last hundred years. Anyone reading or listening to this could pull numerous of them to mind. And this is only just the fiction. We’re almost daily reminded by the leftists in politics and culture that dystopia is inevitable if we don’t listen to them and give up all our freedoms and wealth so they can save us.

Why is it that God-less secular man is so given to a penchant to doom? I previously talked about the importance of ultimate assumptions for how people view the world, their worldview. Human beings are question raising animals specifically because we are not cosmic accidents, and fundamental questions about the nature of reality will be asked and answered. Nobody can remain a functional agnostic in their actual lives, and what they choose for entertainment will reflect that. I will briefly mention four that all people go through their lives asking and answering. This will of necessity be brief, but each could be developed in a post of its own, not to mention the tomes that have been written on them for thousands of years. Human beings can’t stand unanswered questions, but without God that’s all we got. Christianity is infinitely superior to secularism in the answers it provides to these questions.

  • Origin – Where do we come from? How did we get here? These questions are asked a lot in Silo because 10,000 people live in a hole in the ground and have no idea why. As mentioned above it’s either Darwin or God, either we’re merely animals, clever apes who fell out of the void, or creatures lovingly created and determined to exist by an Almighty Creator God who designed the world and everything in it specifically for us. The former is inherently hope-less; we are hurdling toward death in this mist of a life, and then it’s into the void, nothingness, it’s over. How inspiring! Or God and eternal life in paradise with no more sin, suffering, or death. Let me think about it.
  • Meaning – If all we are is matter in motion, so much lucky dirt, where does one get meaning? People try to squeeze it out of all kinds of things in life, but those things can’t give us ultimate meaning. Those are merely individual puzzle pieces that have no puzzle within which to fit, no big picture to give them meaning, and thus they never ultimately satisfy.
  • Morality – All human beings long for justice, for wrongs to be righted. They know intuitively, deeply, that right and wrong are not merely like preferences in ice cream. There has to be some kind of transcendent moral standard beyond matter, some kind of ultimate straight line that tells us when all the other lines are crooked and by how much.
  • Destiny – And finally, our destiny is either Utopia or Dystopia. It can be nothing in between. People read the book of Revelation and come to the wrong conclusion because they’re stuck on not only the wrong definition of the word apocalypse, but also on the wrong interpretation of the story. It doesn’t end in a bleak and dreary lifeless landscape, but a glorious place of God living with his people. We’re told what it will be like in Revelation 21:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Only God in Christ offers us answers to all our questions and satisfies all our deepest longings. As Augustine put in most memorably, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”

 

Why Christianity Isn’t Moralism

Why Christianity Isn’t Moralism

May 7, 2025 | Theology

I was born-again as an 18 year old college student into a kind of fundamentalist Christianity. In the late 70s there were two types of conservative Bible believing Christians, fundamentalists and Evangelicals. The former grew out of the fundamentalist-modernist controversies in the early 20th century, and were seen as backward rubes after the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In the 1950s, a group of conservative Christians reacting against this anti-cultural, anti-intellectual type of Christianity decided to call themselves Evangelicals. They came out of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California, and Billy Graham, growing in popularity, joined them with the founding of Christianity Today. They wanted a more culturally engaged and intellectually robust Christianity. Today, there is no distinction; all conservative Christians are referred to as Evangelicals, and the word fundamentalist in reference to Christians has disappeared.

This Christianity I was born-again into didn’t exist in an historical vacuum, although for the Christians I was around, the history of Christianity seemed irrelevant. I often say when referring to this version of Christianity that it was anti-intellectual, anti-theological (or anti-doctrinal), and ahistorical. It was just me and the Bible. We didn’t want any of that other stuff getting in the way of our relationship with Jesus. This wasn’t overtly taught, for the most part, but it was part of the spiritual dynamic of that kind of fundamentalist Christianity. I began to realize all this after I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There, probably in my junior year. From him I realized how truncated this version of Christianity tended to be, as if entire parts of life were cut off from it, and narrowed down to just what was seen as the “spiritual.” It wasn’t long before I rejected the fundamentalist label and started calling myself an Evangelical. The fundamentalist label has completely disappeared over the last 40 years.

I distinctly remember the realization dawning on me that my early understanding of Christianity came from somewhere, and how thrilling that was. That was only the beginning, though, because I didn’t fully realize it had practical consequences until I was introduced to Reformed theology in February 1985 when I was only 24 years old. That’s when I learned about the anti-theological nature of fundamentalism, and the implications of that for my newly Reforming faith. But before I get to some history and theology, it would be helpful to explain what I mean by moralism.

Everyone knows what morals are or what morality means. A dictionary definition puts it this way: “of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical.” Moralism related to Christianity is simply the focus on right and wrong, be it in conduct, thought, or speech. This, it was implied, was what Christianity was all about, mediated through the Bible and my relationship with Jesus. The gentleman who introduced me to Reformed theology told me this turned Christianity into a jumping through hoops exercise. If you jumped through all the right hoops, doing good and right, you knew you were right with God, but when you failed, guilt was a constant companion. That struggle, striving to do right, failing all the time, trying again, an endless exhausting cycle, explained my experience quite well, and put me on a journey to a more full-orbed Christianity that I continue on to this day.

Pietism and Perfectionism
I remember him telling me this Christian experience came from Pietism, something I’d never heard of. I had no idea my experience of Christianity had been influenced by something that started developing over 300 years ago. In the 17th century a movement in German Lutheranism arose responding to Scholasticism, a dry doctrinal orientation of the Christian faith. The Pietists were looking for something more dynamic, more personal, more experiential that touched the whole person, not just the mind. Christianity had to be more than just propositional statements of doctrines about the Bible. A significant aspect of this experiential Christianity of the Pietists was a focus on holy living. In due course Pietism would grab hold of John Wesley, and his influence would come to dominate modern Christianity. Wesley was an intense character, to say the least. When he and his brother Charles were at Oxford in 1729 they started a religious study group derisively called the “Methodists” because of their emphasis on methodical study and devotion. The “Holy Group,” as they were also known, were active in doing good works in the community and intense in their religious devotion, and John applied his intensity to a critical self-examination. Striving for holy living, and failing, became a theme of his life.

In due course as Wesley’s influence grew so did his twofold emphasis, a conversion experience and holy living. He eventually came to believe that Christians could completely overcome sin and live a perfectly holy life, that Christians could completely overcome sin. In the 19th century this made its way into a stream of Christian thought called perfectionism, developing and growing in influence in various holiness movements such as victorious Christian living and the higher life movement. Evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899) did as much as anyone to bring perfectionism into the American Christian bloodstream, even though he didn’t teach the doctrine itself. We can see in him the transition from perfectionism to moralism by promoting holiness with an ethical emphasis. A perfect example of such moralism was his focus on the will. “Whatever the sin is,” Moody exhorted in a typical statement, “make up your mind that you will gain victory over it /” (from George Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture). This became much of my early Christian experience. I obviously wasn’t very good at making up my mind because I didn’t get much in the way of victory. I imbibed the idea that if you were a serious Christian and worked on it hard enough, you could overcome sin in your life, but given sin isn’t what we do but part of who we are, these movements were destined to fail in the face of human experience. I was a perfect example of this.

My mentor introduced me to a book by the great Princton theologian B.B. Warfield called Studies in Perfectionism that helped me think through what up to that point was my lived Christian experience. This passage explains the problem perfectly.

Perfectionism is impossible in the presence of a deep sense or a profound conception of sin. This movement proclaimed, it is true, only an attenuated perfectionism—a perfectionism merely of conduct. But this involved a correspondingly attenuated view of sin. The guilt of sin, the corruption of sin, were not denied, but attention was distracted from them and fixed on the practice of sin. This is a fatally externalizing movement of thought and brings with it a ruinous underestimate of the baneful power of sin.

Warfield calls perfectionism and its attendant moralism a “fatal externalizing movement” because it trivializes sin by making it primarily about our actions, or lack thereof. Sin is a far more profound dilemma than just what we do; rather, it is who we are, our being, in philosophical terms, our ontology. We are sinners, saved sinners, but sinners, nonetheless. Alas, sin is not like the water you dry off your skin when you get out of the pool; it is your skin!

Paul uses the Greek word σάρξ- sarx translated in English as flesh. He doesn’t mean a la Plato and the Greeks that our bodies are what make us predisposed toward sin, but rather it is our immaterial sinful natures. Our self-centered sinful inclinations are who we are as embodied, fleshly creatures, and thus mere will power can’t overcome it. Moralism makes sin about our wills, thus fatally externalizing it. D.L. Moody was wrong; making up our minds is worthless in our battle to overcome sin. What we need is a new nature, biblically speaking, a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, to be born again (John 3). The most vivid Old Testament image is found in Ezekial 36. In striking typological imagery, we see the Lord restoring Israel to the land of Promise. He’s clearly speaking about more than a plot of land because what’s in view is a personal transformation of His people He came to save (Matt. 1:21). It’s worth quoting at length because it helps us understand this process is far more profound than our merely willing it. There area a lot of “will’s” in this passage, but they are all God’s.

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. 28 Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God. 29 I will save you from all your uncleanness. I will call for the grain and make it plentiful and will not bring famine upon you. 30 I will increase the fruit of the trees and the crops of the field, so that you will no longer suffer disgrace among the nations because of famine. 31 Then you will remember your evil ways and wicked deeds, and you will loathe yourselves for your sins and detestable practices. 32 I want you to know that I am not doing this for your sake, declares the Sovereign Lord. Be ashamed and disgraced for your conduct, people of Israel!

The more profound the nature of sin, the more profound our salvation is from it. Only a supernatural work of God can transform a human heart from dead inanimate spiritual stone to living, vibrant, beating flesh. Born His enemies, we are transformed into his children who cry Abba, Father.

Thankfully, perfectionism is forgotten, a relic of a bygone more naïve era when an obsession with progress dominated Western culture. When I became a Christian, though, the spirit of perfectionism was still in the air even if not overtly taught. I eventually came to call it moralism. As Wesley’s life reflected, it’s easy to fall into a kind of morbid introspection, which is one reason it took him until he was 35 to believe he was actually a saved Christian. Although I was nothing like Wesley, my early Christian experience was moralism, and it was exhausting.

Unfortunately, because of the thin theological foundation of much modern Evangelicalism, most Christians confuse Christianity with moralism. One of the reasons skeptics and non-Christians in general think Christianity is all about ethics, obsessing about right and wrong, guilt and shame, is because for many Christians it is exactly that. Because God is merciful in the power of the cross most Christians don’t live guilt ridden lives on a roller coaster of success and failure to overcome sin. Even the most theologically ignorant among us know Jesus paid for all our failures, past, present, and future. For me, though, having a solid theological foundation was invaluable in helping me overcome my own morbid introspection.

What Exactly is the Gospel?
Have you ever asked yourself that, or has someone else, and you’ve had to come up with an answer? What would you say? It’s so simple it’s difficult. As sinful human beings we want to have something to do, to work out, basically save ourselves, but that’s not possible. No matter how “good” we are, it will never be good enough because we can’t change who we are, born enemies of God. In Pauline terms, no one will be saved by obedience to the law. The first night I was introduced to Reformed theology, my mentor painted a picture for me of man in his lost state. He said it’s like we’re dead at the bottom of the pool. There’s absolutely nothing we can do to save ourselves because, well, we’re dead. Our only hope is to be brought back to life by Almighty God. That is our predicament in our lost sinful state apart from God. In the contrasting version, we’re now drowning in the pool calling out for someone to save us, to throw us a rope so we can grab it and in effect save ourselves.

The way I’d seen it previously, and the way I think most Evangelical Christians do, is that we’re drowning—not dead. As Miracle Max says in The Princess Bride, “Your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.” Many Christians mistakenly believe we’re “mostly dead” in our sins, as I did before I embraced Reformed theology, or Calvinism. It wasn’t difficult for my new friend to convince me of this because I seemed to know it intuitively. I can’t save myself. Plus, he told me something I already knew; the wages of sin is death, as God told Adam would happen if he ate of the tree he was commanded not to eat. He and all his progeny, us, are now alienated from God and by nature want to hide from Him because we know we are guilty. Plus he shared with me a bottom-of-the-pool verse in Colossians (2:13):

13 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins.

It seemed impossible to argue with that. And in Ephesians 2, Paul also says, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,” and then he adds, God “made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions” Death to life seems pretty clear. Then he tells us how he did it:

6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.

This is all gospel 101, but it’s amazing how easily we forget it when it comes to living the Christian life. Prior to embracing Calvinism, I had even memorized verses 8 and 9, but since I didn’t have any theological grounding, I believed non-Christians were just drowning and needed to hear the gospel. It was up to them to receive it or not, and if they “made a decision for Jesus,” then they would be born-again. But after my introduction to the 16th century Reformer, I realized nobody chooses to be born! In that passage in John 3, Jesus tell us this means we are “born of the Spirit,” or in Ezekiel’s terms, our hearts by God’s Holy Spirit are transformed from stone to flesh!

In theological terms we call this justification, but the Christian life doesn’t stop there. God saves us to make us holy, what is called sanctification. While it’s relatively easy to buy into God doing the work to save us from our sins, justification, we then think making ourselves more holy is our work, up to us; it’s not. In fact, that’s impossible. The confusion comes in confusing our choosing and efforts with God’s supernatural transformational work. The former is our responsibility, the latter is God’s. The transforming of our being, of our becoming more holy, more set apart to him for service to others, is God’s job and He’s quite good at it, even as we fight it every step of the way. After decades of living the Christian life, there were two verses that brought this to life for me and took off all the pressure of performance. The first is 1 Corinthians 1:30:

It is because of him [God] that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

When I finally grasped that transformation of who I am to become more like Christ was as much God’s job as saving me from my sin, it was life changing. The other passage is from John 3, the “born-again” chapter. What at first glance seems a bizarre analogy to salvation, makes total sense in I Corinthians 1:30 hindsight:

14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

I wrote about this in detail in a previous post, but all we have to do is look up to Jesus, both for being saved from sin and being transformed to overcome it. The word believe means trust, so we don’t have to understand “how” it works, but only trust that he has to power to pull it off. Our tendency is to look down at the bite, the pain, the circumstances, the situation, at us. Don’t do that! Look up to Jesus because the reason he came to earth was to both save us and sanctify us from sin. In fact, that is why he was given his name, as the angel of the Lord told Joseph (Matt. 1:21):

She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

Not try to save us, but to actually do it! God doesn’t do try. Believe it, trust it, Him, and you’ll know exactly what the gospel is.