Why I Left Full Preterism by Sam Frost: A Review

Why I Left Full Preterism by Sam Frost: A Review

Nov 26, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

Preterism was back in the news recently. Doug Wilson and Gary DeMar had another powwow in Moscow on Monday, November 3, this time an official debate. So, the timing is good to bring attention to this little book with big intentions. 

The word preterism comes from the Latin word for past, and it describes certain biblical prophecies having been fulfilled in the past, specifically in the first century. Most Evangelical Christians are futurists, meaning they believe those same prophecies describe future events happening very far into the future, most not even having happened yet. I hadn’t heard the word preterism until I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, probably because I didn’t put much stock in eschatology as a recovering dispensationalist. I was an eschatological agnostic.

In my zeal for my new postmillennial eschatology, I was learning everything I could find on the topic. One resource I found was Gary DeMar, whose knowledge of eschatology seemed encyclopedic. I started listening to his American Vision podcast and became a big fan. I didn’t know much about preterism, and nothing Gary said gave me the slightest indication he believed anything out of the ordinary about eschatology. I caught a few things here and there indicating he was supposedly controversial, but even when addressing the topic there were no red flags.

Then last year I went to the Fight Laugh Feast conference, and I mentioned something about DeMar. A number of people I respect seemed to agree he was in fact out of the ordinary eschatologically. Some even used the word heretical, which I found hard to believe at the time. Fast forward to DeMar some months back going to Moscow to meet with Doug Wilson and make an appearance on CrossPolitic. What I saw on the podcast certainly didn’t seem ordinary. Getting him to affirm something definitively is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, frustrating. Thus, I began my journey down the rabbit hole of full preterism (FP). This interview and DeMar’s trip to Moscow brought out the full preterists on Twitter en mass. It was bizarre. These guys, and it seems they’re all guys, have a certitude about them that makes James White look positively doubt ridden. Ken Gentry wrote a foreword to Frost’s book, and in it says of such preterist zeal, “I have seen immature Christians swallow the system whole, then become intoxicated with a cult-like arrogance.” Surely not all who embrace it are immature, but I experienced a bit of that arrogance as well.

I still had no clue how deep the hole went, but not long after this I came across a Sam Frost interview on YouTube. As soon as he mentioned the book, I had to get it. I’m glad I did because now I know why I’m most definitely not an FP. Frost mentioned something in the interview I found surprising given what I was learning about Gary DeMar. On the back of the book is an endorsement by Gary DeMar! He writes that Frost’s book “is a great starting point in understanding the inherent dangers of a full preterism position.” I wonder what he thinks about that now.

Sam Frost has some credibility in writing a book about leaving FP because he not only embraced it, but taught and championed it, and wrote a couple books about it. He was a mainstay at FP conferences for a number of years until he grew disillusioned and saw what Gentry describes as “methodological errors, positional inconsistencies, and internal fragmentation.” What started to give me that queasy this is just not right feeling was the apparent rejection of 2000 years of Christian orthodoxy.

In the first chapter Frost gives us a short history of FP, and lays out four points on which all eschatological positions agree:

  1. Christ will return bodily . . .
  2. at the end of time and history . . .
  3. and raise our bodies . . .
  4. and bring full judgment to all.

Christians in history have been unified on what Frost calls “these essential matters.” I was shocked when I began to understand they didn’t believe these “essentials.” And it isn’t that they just don’t believe them, but they seek to “undermine them entirely.” How they do this is by claiming that all prophecies, all eschatological events (Matthew 24, Revelation, Daniel, etc.) were fulfilled in the past, and specifically in AD70 and the destruction of Jerusalem. AD70 is the ultimate hermeneutic by which they interpret everything in Scripture. The pretzel logic I encountered on Twitter of people trying to defend this was hard to believe.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, for average Christians to wrap their minds around such a concept. What do you mean Jesus isn’t coming back “to judge the living and the dead”? What do you mean we will not be raised physically, bodily, out of the dust of the earth in resurrected eternal bodies? When I started to grasp what FP is, I thought there is no way Gary DeMar believes such things. Then seeing him on CrossPolitic trying to talk about the resurrection and watching the incredulous faces of the guys encountering this, it seems he does. Like I said, it’s hard to nail Gary down.

The short history of FP Frost recounts goes back to the early 70s. Out of 2000 years a half century or so isn’t much. Yet we’re to believe Christians for all that time completely misunderstood what God was saying about the very nature of redemptive reality, of reality itself? Sure seems like it. One man is responsible for this, Max King, an ex-Church of Christ minister. He published his first book in 1971 called, The Spirit of Prophecy, and as the description at Amazon says, it “shook the foundations of modern Bible interpretation.” It must not have been very high on the Richter Scale since so few have ever heard of it or FP. He wrote another book in 1987 Frost calls his magnum opus, The Cross and the Parousia of Christ. And he adds, this is the first documentation of full preterism, even though preterist ideas are common in church history.

Another thing that is new in church history was the FP antipathy to creeds Frost recounts in a chapter on, “History, Creeds, and Sola Scriptura.” The latter is a Reformation affirmation, and is important in this context because the FPs claim they only reject the creeds at the points which they disagree with Scripture. But I always thought the creeds were based on Scripture. Apparently not. This explains DeMar’s fixation on “show me the verse,” which he repeats ad nauseam when discussing this topic, as if affirmative declarations in Scripture settle anything. Or that inferring something from Scripture that isn’t spelled out is illegitimate. Like, for example, the Trinity. The word doesn’t exist in our Bibles, so “show me the verse” isn’t going to work for something Christians have believed since Christ rose from the dead and Trinitarian orthodoxy agreed upon at the Council of Nicaea.

The problem with such extreme Biblicism is that it contradicts itself. Because God didn’t see fit to give us a textbook or operating manual, spelling out exactly what we’re to believe but rather a story; doctrine must be inferred or derived from the text. The authority of Scripture doesn’t come directly from the text but must be interpreted, and upon that interpretation we stand or fall. FPs are “stuck” with the rest of us interpreters, even though their absolute certitude indicates otherwise. The inevitability of interpretation means they criticize those who do exactly what they do, interpret the text! You would think this obvious reality might engender a little humility, but alas you would be wrong. Absolute certainty for finite creatures like us is an impossibility. Sadly, too many people haven’t realized that.

Another concept I hadn’t encountered before reading Frost is the idea of infinity, in the title of chapter 4. This is truly bizarre. According to FP the world as we know it will never end (remember everything was fulfilled, finished, in AD70), so there will be no end to baby making, or what they call “infinite procreation.” As Frost writes from the FP perspective, “’the Bible nowhere speaks about the end of time, but only of the time of the end,’ which of course was AD 70.’” And if the covenant is eternal, forever, then history must go on eternally. Like I said, bizarre. But what about the elect. There can’t be an infinite number of those because Scripture is clear on this, not much interpretation required. Frost quotes John 6:39:

39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 

Frost writes a chapter on John 6 because it was critical in moving him away from FP.

Also, the concept of the book of life is affirmed throughout Scripture, and the idea is that a certain number of people are in it, not an infinitely expanding number of people. Daniel 12:1, for example, states: “But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered.” Doesn’t sound like an ever expanding book to me.

Frost finishes with a chapter on the reasons he left FP, and some might surprise you. One is that FP and dispensationalism “share a lot in common.” I didn’t see that coming, although he does mention dispensationalism several times. The similarity is that they are both “all or nothing” approaches, and both have a “one time fulfillment” in mind, among other things.

I could write much more, but my objective in writing this is to give you some sense of the bizarreness of this very newfangled eschatology, and the inevitable unorthodox implications that result. It’s worth the read if you’re curious or have someone in your life who is thinking about or embracing FP.

 

 

Christian Children Are Not Strangers to the Covenant

Christian Children Are Not Strangers to the Covenant

Nov 19, 2025 | Parents and Family, Theology

In this life the debate between Baptists and paedobaptists, or baptizing babies, will never end, and this post doesn’t seek to do the impossible. My powers of persuasion are not that great, nor is my knowledge. It is written, rather, for those who are open to trying to understand why we baptize our children, and our grandchildren. And I won’t lie; I always welcome Baptists becoming Presbyterians. The latter in case you don’t know is a baby baptizing denomination. So full disclosure: as I try to explain, I also try to persuade. So be warned all yee Baptists!

If Baptism comes down to water and a handful of examples in the New Testament, then the Baptists have a slam dunk case, no pun intended. But if Baptism is about the entire context of redemptive history, the examples are not the point. For the average Christian the handful of examples in Acts are dispositive, they decide the case, end of story. But the examples also point in the other direction, the paedobaptist direction, as we’ll see.

The critical issue is where you start. Most Evangelicals are Baptists, so they start and likely end with the examples in Acts. They would also wonder why we Presbyterians are always talking about covenant as it relates to baptism, but Christianity didn’t start when Jesus was born. Jesus was the fulfillment of thousands of years of redemptive history. We can go back to the fall and God’s promise to Adam and Eve that the seed will strike or crush the serpent’s head, but the specific start of the covenant of grace started with God’s promise to Abram (Gen 12). Remember, he called one man out of all the people on earth at the time, and promised that through him all the peoples on earth would be blessed. Unless you start your study of baptism there, you’re missing the entire context of why baptism exists in the first place. The discussion of baptism must start with the doctrine of the covenant. I became a paedobaptist because of it.

My Journey to Paedobaptism
I’d become an Evangelical Christian at 18 having been born and raised a nominal Catholic. Of course I rejected infant baptism as a new Protestant, and got myself dunked and re-baptized. Then when I was 24, I was introduced to Reformed theology, and instantly embraced it. TULIP was a no brainer for me, but infant baptism? No way! That’s Catholic! And I was virulently against all things Catholic at the time. Then one Sunday I attended at Reformed Baptist church, and it so happens they had a baby dedication that morning. For some reason, and I don’t know where the idea came from, I thought to myself, they are treating their children as strangers to the covenant, and it annoyed me. I instantly became a paedobaptist. I knew intuitively that God’s covenant promises were not just for me individualistically, but as Peter says in Acts 2, for me and my children.

What I started learning that day, is that my understanding of Baptism didn’t start and end with a handful of passages in the book of Acts. Rather, I learned that to understand the true profundity and import of baptism, I needed to look at all the passages in Scripture that address parents, children, generations, descendants, promises, circumcision, Gentiles, Jews, olive trees, among other issues, in addition to covenant. In fact, if you looked at every passage in the Old Testament referencing child or children, that would take you a while because there are over 400 of them. Not to mention passages that reference seed or offspring or descendants. If I had the time and space and could cite every passage in the Old Testament indicating the generational nature of our faith it would be overwhelming. One of my favorites is Deuteronomy 7:9:

9 Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.

The faithfulness of God to his covenant promises is what baptism points to, not us! And this verse directs us to the New Covenant which would make generational faith a reality, something Israel and the Old Mosaic covenant never could. This is why in those Acts examples, baptism always includes the household, not just the individual. Baptism, like circumcision, was a corporate, familial covenant act, as all Jewish Christians in the first century would have expected it to be. Yet, we’re to believe according to the Baptists that the New, and better, Covenant, suddenly became individualistic. The Apostle Peter says it doesn’t because, as I mentioned, in the first Christian sermon in history he tells us our faith is still familial and corporate, or covenantal in nature. The people Peter was preaching to were cut to the quick, and they ask, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

Peter is telling them, and us, the natural Jewish understanding of generational faith is informed by God’s covenant promises to families. Baptism and the promise associated with it were not just for the people who were repenting and being baptized; it was for them and their children. If we ignore that, we are in effect ignoring everything BC and the nature of our generational faith handed down to us by Christ and the Apostles, and assuming only AD counts.

The New Covenant is Better Because it is Generational: Household Baptism
The examples of baptisms in Acts do tell us something about the nature of baptism, but not quite what the Baptists think. Let’s look at each instant in Acts, and then one reference of Paul in I Corinthians. In every example, except one, the person who repented and was baptized also had their household baptized. That’s kids, including babies, slaves, cousins, grandma, grandpa, anyone living in the household, and extended households in first century Israel were common. So “you and all your household” could mean 5, 10 or more would have been baptized. When the head of the household embraced the faith, so did everyone in the household. Did everyone in the household make a profession of faith? It didn’t matter because nobody saw it as a personal, individualized decision. It just didn’t work that way, and to think it did is reading our modern assumptions back into the text. We ought not do that.

As far as I know there is only one clear example of a person professing faith and not having a household baptized as well, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Household salvation starts in Acts 10 with Cornelius, a Roman centurion, as God displayed salvation and the Holy Spirit coming to the Gentiles too. This passage doesn’t explicitly say household, but when Peter entered the house “he found a large gathering of people.” It could have been friends and neighbors, but as a Roman centurion, a good number of the gathering would have been his household. After the Holy Spirit came on them, Peter ordered that they all be baptized. How we read this passage depends on our assumptions, which should be informed by the following examples, not to mention the entirety of redemptive history prior to this.

Luke continues the story in Acts 11 as Peter tells Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who couldn’t believe that the Holy Spirit would be given to Gentiles too. Cornelius was told by an angel about Peter:

14 He will bring you a message through which you and all your household will be saved.’

Salvation, “repentance that leads to life,” and thus baptism as we see in chapter 10, came to the entire household, not just Cornelius.

The next example in Acts 16 is of Lydia’s conversion, the first Christian convert in Europe.

15 When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.

Luke tells us, “The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message.” And naturally, “When she and the members of her household were baptized,” she invited them to her home.

Also in chapter 16 is the famous example of the Philippian jailer. Paul proclaims the gospel to him, and the result is the same as with Lydia:

33 At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized. 34 The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household.

Another example is in chapter 18 where Paul is in Corinth preaching to both Jews and Gentiles, and Luke tells us:

8 Crispus, the synagogue leader, and his entire household believed in the Lord; and many of the Corinthians who heard Paul believed and were baptized.

The final example is from I Corinthians 1, where Paul tells us about his own baptizing:

Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.”

We will tie the bow on this household box with Acts 2. The adults Peter was speaking to believed on the Lord Jesus, and he told them they needed to be baptized. He immediately added that the promise reflected in baptism and the story of redemption he’d just told them was for them AND their children. Of course it was—They were Jews! When they embraced the faith, everyone in their household would embrace that faith as well. As we see in Acts 21, Jewish Christians insisted their boy infants still receive the sign of inclusion in the covenant community, circumcision. Both Paul and James agreed with this. So it makes sense that Jewish Christians would also include their children in the sign of inclusion into the New Covenant community, baptism.

Baptists will tell us this is an argument from silence, but it’s a silence that speaks loudly and boldly, which we ignore only because of the baptistic assumptions we hold. If we don’t have those assumptions, and our theology is informed by the entirety of Redemptive history, as were the Jews in days of the Apostles, of course babies and children will be given the sign and seal of God’s covenant faithfulness in Christ.

And lastly, Doug Wilson points out in his book, To A Thousand Generations, that we also don’t have an example of a child growing up in a Christian household who was not baptized, and then making a profession of faith to receive baptism. It just doesn’t exist, so what does that tell us? Nothing. Examples are not the final word on baptism, but only one puzzle piece of a large, glorious redemptive puzzle God has developed into a beautiful picture.

The New Covenant and Children: Jeremiah 31 & 32
The pivotal passage for Baptists is found in Jeremiah 31 when God reveals that a new and better covenant is coming:

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.

The Lords contrasts the new with the old, Mosaic covenant, and from this Baptists insist the New Covenant community can only include professing, regenerate Christians. They believe that in Christianity, in contrast to Old Covenant Judaism, a transformed
heart is what includes someone in the community of God’s people.

Baptists assume what makes the New Covenant new, is that now God is transforming hearts as a requirement for inclusion in the covenant, and that baptism is a sign of that. The passage doesn’t say this, but this is the inference they take. Therefore, children are no longer included. This inference also assumes Old Covenant saints did not have God’s law in their minds and written on their hearts, which is not true. Some clearly did. But the point I want to make is that children, including infants, are still included in the New Covenant community because this community doesn’t only include regenerate Christians. We’ll discuss that in the next section on olive trees and branches, but God references this new covenant in the very next chapter, and He includes children. We read in Jeremiah 32:

38 They will be my people, and I will be their God. 39 I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them. 40 I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me.

If we’ve read the story of God’s people up to this period of the Babylonian exile of Judah (around 580s BC), the inclusion of Children in the New Covenant promises of Yahweh to His people won’t surprise us. It has always been so, and will always be thus. What seals the deal, though, is olive trees.

The Covenant and the Olive Tree
The metaphor of the olive tree for God’s people, His covenant community, is used several times in Scripture, and most relevant for our discussion in Romans 11. Paul speaks of Isarael as an olive tree into which a wild olive shoot, the Gentiles, have been grafted in. The Jews were broken off because of unbelief so we could be grafted in. Then Paul says something that has vexed Christians ever since.

19 You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in.” 20 Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but tremble. 21 For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either.

It seems Paul is saying that those who were once part of the olive tree, the covenant community, Christians, can be cut off, and thus lose their salvation. On baptistic assumptions that is the only conclusion one can come to. Many Christians wonder if we can “lose our salvation.” If they are Arminian, meaning they believe our choice is what makes us a Christian, then we can un-choose Christ. If we’re Calvinists who believe our salvation is God’s choosing, then we can’t be unchosen by Him. So from a Calvinistic perspective, how do we explain being grafted in but able to be cut off, taken out of the olive tree and from God’s covenant community?

The fundamental assumption of the Baptist is that every baptized professing Christian who has been baptized is a regenerate Christian, and thus part of the New Covenant community. You profess faith in Christ, get baptized, and you are grafted in. In Christian terms, your profession of faith means you are one of God’s elect. The theology of election is a challenging topic for Christians, but clearly a Biblical fact. The term is used six times by Paul and three by Peter, and clearly means God chooses whom he will save. So, if you are a Calvinist and you are grafted into the olive tree, you are in for good. You are one of God’s elect, and that can never change. How then to explain those God cuts off, like we read in Hebrews 6:

4 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age 6 and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.

John helps explain it (I John 2:19):

19 They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

As does Jesus in John 15:

5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.

A person can be part of the covenant community, appear to be a Christian on the outside, but if they do not remain in Jesus, if they go out from among us, they will be broken off of the olive tree like the unbelieving Jews. For example, everyone including Judas thought he was a “believer,” but he proved by his actions not to be. Until then he was a Jew and part of the Old Covenant community. So, we have our children baptized because they are part of the New Covenant community, and they received the benefits of being part of the calling of God’s people. Because we’re not Lutherans or Catholics, we don’t believe baptism saves them, but we raise them as Christians and teach them to proclaim Jesus as their Lord and Savior because he is.

 

Charlie Kirk, Christian Nationalism, and the Sword of the Spirit

Charlie Kirk, Christian Nationalism, and the Sword of the Spirit

Nov 12, 2025 | America, Uncategorized

As Christians have said for probably 2000 years, and Jews for 2000 before that, God works in mysterious ways. Why he allowed that young man’s life to be snuffed out at such a young age, and with decades left to continue his work, we can’t know, but we can observe the response to it. I listened to this interview Mark Halprin did with four young people who either new Charlie or were involved in his organization, Turning Point USA. It’s stunning for me, a baby boomer and Christian for 47(!) years, to hear these kids and their boldness for Jesus Christ, and their passion to take their Christian faith into politics and culture, and transform it. I’ve written here in detail about how the modern church was captured by a Pietism that made it politically and culturally anemic. Being born-again in 1978 into such a version of the faith, and having been exposed to Francis Schaeffer a couple years later, I’ve been frustrated ever since.

As Christians have said for probably 2000 years, and Jews for 2000 before that, God works in mysterious ways. Why he allowed that young man’s life to be snuffed out at such a young age, and with decades left to continue his work, we can’t know, but we can observe the response to it. I listened to this interview Mark Halprin did with four young people who either new Charlie or were involved in his organization, Turning Point USA. It’s stunning for me, a baby boomer and Christian for 47(!) years, to hear these kids and their boldness for Jesus Christ, and their passion to take their Christian faith into politics and culture, and transform it. I’ve written here in detail about how the modern church was captured by a Pietism that made it politically and culturally anemic. Being born-again in 1978 into such a version of the faith, and having been exposed to Francis Schaeffer a couple years later, I’ve been frustrated ever since.

I started looking at everything from a Christian worldview perspective, and learned from Schaeffer and others, that we as Christians are to take the implications of this worldview into every area of life. The Evangelical church on the whole under the influence of Pietism and fundamentalism, however, wasn’t interested. The focus always seemed to be our salvation from sin and personal holiness, and by extension personal relationships. Any impact on society and culture was incidental and not all that important. It took negative world and peak woke to begin opening the eyes of Christians, and cultural conservatives in general, that the stakes in negative world could no longer be ignored. The consequences were real. The promise of a neutral secularism negotiating between various worldviews and religions proved to be the lie it’s always been, the myth of neutrality fully exposed. Instead of the peace and harmony secularism promised, we got Christian persecution and debauchery promoted in government and law.

As I explained and argued in detail in my last book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, a Great Awakening started happening sometime in the last 10 years. I believe it started with Donald Trump’s entrance on to the political stage. Here are the first two sentences of the book:

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. I’m not sure what that means, but in God’s providence something clearly remarkable happened that day.

I had no idea anything happened on that day, other than the sun rose and set like any other day. And as I say, it was not Trump himself, but the response to him that instigated something we’re now seeing come into full fruition, a Great Awakening. For a number of years starting with the Covid debacle, the awakening wasn’t gospel or Jesus centered, but truth centered. I knew that was something momentous because of he who is the Truth. I believed sooner or later many people who were waking up to the truth about a variety of things would find their way to the source of all truth, the logos, the word made flesh who dwelled for a while among us. I believe this started with Trump’s attempted assassination in July of last year. Everyone knew, whether they believed in God or not, that it was providential the bullet didn’t kill him. And it now seems Charlie Kirk’s assassination did something profound to many people in a way nothing else could. The memorial in Arizona made that abundantly clear.

The Left and Might Makes Right
Something else has become abundantly clear in 2025: the left in America is driven by violence. How else is one to explain an organization that calls itself Antifa, for anti-fascist, using blatantly fascist tactics to advance its agenda? You can’t make that stuff up. Hypocrisy is a job description for a leftist, and projection is a tactic. That word is critical if you want to understand the demonic nature of the Marxism driving the left. When defined psychologically in means:

The tendency to ascribe to another person feelings, thoughts, or attitudes (or actions) present in oneself, or to regard external reality as embodying such feelings, thoughts, etc., in some way.

Everything, and I mean literally every single thing, the left (i.e., Democrat politicians and legacy media) says is projection, meaning what they accuse the right of doing and thinking is exactly what they do and think. It’s so perverse and evil, it’s almost impressive. And they do it all with a perfectly straight face.

If you’re not familiar with the terms left and right in a political context, it goes back to the French Revolution and the seating arrangement in the French National Assembly (kind of like our Congress). Supporters of the monarchy and traditional institutions sat on the right in the assembly hall, while those who favored radical change, republicanism and social equality sat on the left. The radical republicans got their philosophical inspiration from the man who effectively created the modern world, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Simply, he believed man was born pure but corrupted by modern society, so it follows if you change society you will change man. Christianity teaches just the opposite. Man is born in sin, and to change the society you need to change man. The French Revolution embraced Rousseau, and the American Revolution embraced the Bible. The results speak for themselves.

Marx and Engles took the Rousseauian worldview and developed it into an entire political philosophy known as communism. In this Marxist world there is no truth, no God, only ideology, a set of ideas that must drive all action to accomplish some kind of undefinable Utopia on earth. Since Marx and Engles published The Communist Manifesto in 1948, the ideology of oppression became the driving force of leftist politics, and victimization defined everything. Initially, Marxism was economic and class based, rich oppressing poor, but that didn’t work. So in the 1920s and 30s, Marxists developed cultural Marxism, which is identity based, out of which we get racial and sexual oppression, in which white Christian heterosexual married men are the worst of the worst. DEI and transgender madness are just the latest examples.

All of this is convoluted and makes little sense, but the bottom line for our day is that to the left truth is irrelevant, and all that matters is “the narrative.” Since they don’t believe in truth, what drives their action is “the will to power,” in a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche, might makes right. So if your opponent won’t submit to “the narrative,” then they must be either discredited or silenced; toe the line or die is their motto. Thus, we get leftist assassination culture. In the last month I’ve learned just how widespread it is. As in, the threat of the leftist death cult stalks anyone who is politically popular and influential on the right. Charlie Kirk, by contrast, used words as his weapons, and had to die for it because he was so effective.

The Sword of the Spirit Verses Real Swords
Here we see the societal implications of two incompatible views of reality in undeniable juxtaposition, side by bloody side. On the atheistic secular left violence is its calling card, while on the Christian right are words and persuasion, real swords verses the Sword of the Spirit. In this fight real swords have no chance. This didn’t appear to be the case from the beginning when the nascent Christian church was up against the Jewish establishment and the Roman Empire. There is no David and Goliath metaphor to capture those odds. Yet, in less than 300 years the Roman Empire embraced the faith it was determined to destroy. This happened again and again in Christian history, often with those claiming the mantel of Christianity trying to silence other Christians. For example, during the Reformation William Tyndale was executed by the government at the behest of the Catholic establishment simply for translating the Word of God into English so lay people could read it. This war, however, is between two diametrically opposed views of reality, and why all Christians of whatever theological persuasion must stick together. There will be time for theological debates later. What Ben Franklin said when the Declaration was signed applies in our cultural and political civil war: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

What made Christianity the world conquering religion it proved to be wasn’t military and political power, but the power of the Holy Spirit through God’s word through God’s people. It transformed everything it touched. This from a book I read recently perfectly captures what I’m saying: “The church on earth is a colony of heaven’s citizens commissioned to heavenize earth.” Part of this is using political power to establish justice in a nation because God gave the state the power of the sword to punish evil doers (Rom. 13). But the church and Christians within it never “wield the sword” to bring justice (only in self-defense). Ours to use is the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, the declaration of Christ as Savior and ascended King in whose authority (Eph. 1:18-23) we battle against “the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12). This can mean engagement in the very messy real world of politics for some of us, but for most it means the power of persuasion in God’s truth in service to others. By contrast, we see the “real swords,” the violence, the enemies of God on the left use almost daily on our screens. For Christians, we focus on the sword of the Spirit with which we do persuasive battle. Persuasion is what Charlie Kirk was doing when he was martyred:

To induce to believe by appealing to reason or understanding; convince.

This is the Christian way, using words because the power of the word of God, Jesus himself. Let’s look at some verses indicating this even if they don’t put it exactly this way. In the Ephesians 6 passage in which we wage battle against spiritual forces of evil, Paul says:

16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

The writer to the Hebrews says of the Word’s power (chapter 4):

12 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.

There are several references to this sword in Revelation. Speaking of Jesus (Rev. 1):

16 In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.

In Revelation 2:

12 “To the angel of the church in Pergamum write:
These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword.

16 Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

And these verses in Revelation 19:

14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15 Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: king of kings and lord of lords.

21 The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.

I used to envision a real sword coming out of Jesus’ mouth killing people, but his sword is his word! This is symbolic language of the spiritual battle in which we are engaged, which has real world consequences in this life, in this fallen world. When Jesus ascended to heaven he became king of kings and lord of lords. He began his reign then, and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost to begin his conquering mission to take back his creation from the devil through his people. This means real change, real transformation among people. Just compare the fruits of the Spirit with the acts of the flesh in Galatians 5. Which world would you rather live in? I’ll tell you which: a Christian world.

A Christian Nation is Not an Oxymoron
Despite what many Christians think, a Christian nation is not a contradiction in terms. It is not tyranny, as too many Christians believe. I wrote about this in depth last year, so I won’t do that here, but we don’t live in the Middle Ages, and we have 2000 years of Christian hindsight to see what the church got wrong, and really couldn’t have known at the time. We also live on this side the thousand year development of English common law fulfilled in the American Revolution, and on this side of hundreds of years of the development of secularism that turned the American dream into a woke nightmare, one the British Isles hasn’t woken up from yet.

As we can see from the Biden years and peak woke, and what the UK is experiencing now, secularism is a jealous God. It is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point. Their description of secularism is helpful:

Western culture is not pagan, nor is it Christian. It has been secularized. Western man has “come of age,” passing through the stages of mythology, theology, and metaphysics, reaching the maturity of science. The totem pole has yielded to the temple which in turn has given way to the acme of human progress, the laboratory. . . . Resistance to Christianity comes not from the deposed priests of Isis but from the guns of secularism. The Christian task (more specifically, the rational apologetics task) in the modern epoch is not so much to produce a new Summa Contra Gentiles (an apologetics work of Thomas Aquinas to non-Christians) as it is to produce a Summa Contra Secularisma.

I could not agree more. They call statism “the inevitable omega point of secularism,” and I could not agree more with that as well. Statism means total control of the state, and it is the enemy of liberty, therefore secularism and its inevitable omega point are our enemies.

In the 20th century there was something called the “secularization thesis,” that as science and knowledge progress religion will eventually disappear. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. The world overall is arguably more religious than ever, and the West’s religion is secularism. As we see, America is beginning to break out of that, as are a couple other Western nations like Turkey and Poland, but the West on the whole is completely captured by secularism at the moment. I am convinced that will change as the tide of truth overwhelms the rickety fence of lies trying to keep truth out. This will be no more effective at keeping the truth out than the Berlin Wall was.

The reason Christian Nationalism is supposedly “controversial” and brings out cries of theocracy or “Christian authoritarianism,” is the claim that the state should recognize and formally acknowledge God in Christ, King Jesus. That nations could be Christian was commonly accepted and was not in the least “controversial” in all Western societies of Christendom until the latter half of the twentieth century. It was recognized that the state had a role in promoting what people in the past called “true religion,” which was Christianity. It is obvious today what “true religion” is, and the state is most definitely promoting it, except in November of 2024 America’s state took a U-turn, while most of Europe is still mired in a suffocating secularism. Only with “true religion” and God’s law can there be true flourishing and liberty in the land. This is why those young people Mark Halprin interviewed is such a profound moment in American history. They are indicative not only of the millions of people Charlie Kirk influenced, but also of Christianity as a cultural and political force in America. Maybe, finally, the personalized, pietized Christianity that captured the church long ago, is giving way to a culturally robust Christianity as God always intended it to be.

 

Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Nov 5, 2025 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

On Twitter recently I saw this short video of a young British Journalist, Louise Perry, explain why she became a Christian. In 2022 she published a book called, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which indicates like many secularist liberals she had been mugged by reality. It is obvious from the devastation coming in the wake of “the 60s,” and the rejection of traditional Christian sexuality morality, that something is terribly wrong. The rejection of monogamy and the sexual exclusivity of marriage, and yes between a man and a woman, destroyed the foundation of civilization and source of true human flourishing, the family. Not only have we seen the explosion of divorce and single parent households, but we’ve discovered that children raised in such an environment are often emotionally and psychologically damaged. Every study over the last 50 years makes this undeniable. Everyone agrees, even those who reject the primacy of the family, that children do best in a two parent, mother and father family.

Frenchman Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) founded the academic discipline of sociology, which can be defined as “the study of human society, social behavior, and the structures, institutions, and interactions that shape them.” It is clear from such study that certain things work better than others, meaning they bring human happiness, peace, safety, and prosperity, or they don’t. Normal human beings tend to prefer these to misery, war, crime, and poverty, so it makes sense to try to order our lives and society so they produce more of the former than the latter. For Ms. Perry, she saw that the sexual revolution and everything associated with it clearly wasn’t working. I don’t know her story, but she clearly saw a connection between what was working, what could work, and Christianity. So in her studies she came to the conclusion that if Christianity “were supernaturally true you would expect it to be sociologically true.” In other words, for human beings to function optimally in a society, the truth of Christianity could be verified by that, and she found that it is. That realization is happening to a lot of people in this age of Great Awakening. For some reason people prefer harmony over chaos, love over hate, beauty over ugliness, liberty over tyranny. Go figure.

Living in a Christian World: Gospel Influence Everywhere
A journey through Western history allows us to see these contrasts in living color. We can also clearly see this in other countries and their cultures today, but so much of the World is Westernized it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate how unique our Western culture is specifically because it was created by classical and Christian influences. I say classical because both ancient Greece and Rome have had significant influences on the development of the West, but those pagan civilizations were as unfamiliar to us as aliens from some distant galaxy far, far away.

Historian Tom Holland’s journey to an appreciation of Christianity in the development of the West is chronicled in his highly influential book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Here was someone who grew up enamored of everything he thought ancient Greece and Rome stood for, until one day he realized he had absolutely nothing in common with those people. Their moral value system and view of the world was completely, well, alien to him, something he could not relate to at all. Mind you, he’s not a Christian, yet sees the world through Christian lenses, and realizes we don’t have the modern world without Christianity.

Holland’s book was a profound revelation for me, and multitudes of others. We’ve all grown up in a Western culture that is what it is because of Christianity. On some level we know that, but like the air we breathe we take it for granted, as if it’s just the way things are supposed to be. The problem with this is that living in a dominant secular culture, we just assume the blessings we enjoy of living in a modern society just happened for no reason at all. We live with a modicum of peace and prosperity, political liberty, education, health, etc., just because. In other words, they come from chance, just like they think the physical universe came from chance. The “narrative” of the secularist is that the Enlightenment saved us from religious fanaticism and tyranny, and because of science and technology we have the modern world in spite of Christianity, most certainly not because of it. That gets the reality of the situation exactly upside down, as well as inside out.

The ancient world was a brutal place, brutal in a way unimaginable to us now. We see this in movies and literature, but it’s difficult for us to comprehend the realness of it, and how difficult everyday life was for most people. Because of Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder, I’m reading the 1951 novel, Spartacus, from which a movie as made in 1960 with Kirk Douglas. The story is about the slave revolts in the Roman Empire, and a line from the story is apropos for the time, “I am Spartacus,” as other slaves stood up to protect and affirm what Spartacus stood for. A lot of people today are saying, I am Charlie Kirk.

The author, Howard Fast, paints a horrendous picture of slavery and how cheap life was in a way that makes American chattel slavery in the 19th century look like Disneyland. The brutality of it is incomprehensible to us. The story starts with some wealthy patrician Romans taking a trip on the Apian Way, and on both side of the road 6,000 slaves are hung, naked, on Roman crosses as a sign of Roman justice. They had put down the slave revolt instigated by Spartacus, and the book looks back in time at how it all developed. It’s brilliant in the way it depicts the image of God in man struggling to live with dignity against impossible odds. This was the world Tom Holland grew up with and loved so much he became an historian of the ancient world.

What’s powerful about the book is that the slaves are driven by visions of a world they think will never exist, but they are willing to die for a taste of freedom and their Utopian dreams. Spartacus is the inspiration for those dreams. Little could they have known that in a hundred years another man would die like a slave on a Roman cross to free mankind from the sin that enslaves far worse than shackles. In the book Holland focuses on the crucifixion and how absurd it is that such a thing would become the inspiration and symbol of a religion that would take over the world, and make it a better place. What the slaves in the slave revolt missed is that the nature of a civilization cannot be changed by force of arms because unless man is fundamentally changed, nothing else will change. To transform the nations, man must first be transformed, which can only be found in one religion on earth, Christianity. All religions in one way or another require people to confirm to some kind of law to change, whereas Christianity declares the person supernaturally changed by the power of God, and who because of that now wants to obey God’s law. The inner person is changed before the outer person can truly live a different life.

We call this gospel, the good news, man set free so he can live free. Then those set free can live in a way that enhances human dignity in everything they do because now they live according to their natures as created by God, the telos or purposes for which He created them. True human flourishing can only happen in a Christian context. God in the Old Testament reveals to us that obedience to his law is required for blessing, while disobedience incurs His curse. The gospel, the New Covenant, as the Lord tells us in Jeremiah 31, means God’s law has now been put in our minds and written on our hearts. This now spreads throughout society in everything Christians do, and personal transformation allows societal transformation, gospel influence everywhere and in everything.

Transformation and Truth
The contrast of the ancient pagan world, BC, to what the world eventually became because of Christianity, AD, is what prompted Holland to write an almost 600 page book. He was driven to such effort because he had to know what it was that made the modern world in which he lived and embraced and loved so different from the ancient pagan world. What exactly caused the change? Jesus of Nazareth! It’s unfortunate that Holland still hasn’t been able to embrace Jesus as risen Lord and Savior, but he’s on my heathen prayer list, so I trust God will bring him there in due course. Nevertheless, he has done the church a great favor by writing the book, and completely changing the nature of the conversation about Christianity and the modern world.

The book was published in 2019, and it certainly didn’t appear at the time anyone except Christians were buying his argument, especially going into the 2020s as the woke and Covid nightmare took over the world. But something amazing happened on the way to the leftist repaganizing of the world: Jesus of Nazareth! Even the once angry “New Atheists” are proclaiming the benign influence of Christianity on Western culture, when they once declared that “religion poisons everything.” Secularism is proving the feeble lie it’s always been. 

That is the contrast in our day, not to ancient paganism, but to a modern secularism that was just another version of the ancient, barbaric creed. As secularism has come crashing down in this third decade of the 21st century, we’ve been able to see the contrast juxtaposed, side-by-side with Christianity, and secularism is not looking like the dream Utopia our cultural elites promised. It’s in fact just another form of slavery Spartacus and the Romans slaves could have recognized as such. The reason so many are now coming to this realization, and that we’re seeing a Great Awakening among us, is what Louise Perry discovered. If Christianity is supernaturally true, it must also be sociologically true. In other words it is self-authenticating, obviously true, first lived out in an individual’s life, and then in society. If it’s true, it will work. If it claims to be an explanation for reality as we find it, how it got here, why it is the way it is, then it should also tell us how to make it work the way it’s supposed to work. If you want to fix a car engine that’s not working, it’s best to use a repair manual for that specific model, and everyone agrees the world we’re born into is very broken and needs to be fixed.

I’ve listened to hundreds of Christian testimonies in the last handful of years, and the more I’ve listened to the more I’ve realized what a powerful apologetic transformed lives are for the veracity of the Christian faith. The skeptic would chalk up changed lives up to psychology because that’s all they got, but mere human psychology can’t make fundamental transformations of human nature. In other words, thinking good thoughts of sweetness and light and fairy tales, doesn’t mean good results will follow. In fact, each human being knows there is a war going on inside of them, the proverbial angel on one shoulder and demon on the other. Pascal puts it perfectly as he normally does:

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.

Positive thinking without supernatural power can never fully address our wretchedness. When you hear enough stories of people’s personal transformation you realize lies cannot do that. Multiply that by entire societies and nations, and thinking lies can do that is every bit as ridiculous. If Christianity isn’t true, then it’s a lie. J. Gresham Machen writes in Christianity and Liberalism that, “Christianity depends, not upon a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event.” That event is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a man tortured to death on a Roman cross. If that event didn’t happen, if Jesus didn’t come back to life as his followers claimed, and gave their lives for that claim, then Christianity is a lie, all of it. But it is not a lie, and the transformation that inevitably comes in its wake is powerful, even irrefutable, evidence of that.

Constantine the Great’s Conversion and the Beginning of Christian Western Civilization
Because of Pietism and dispensationalism, modern Evangelical Christians are confused about the influence Christianity should have on society and culture. The question confronting us reveals the confusion. Should Christianity’s influence on the culture be the incidental fruit of the gospel? In other words, mostly personal, and society influenced unintentionally because of that? Or is societal influence one of the main purposes of the gospel? Jesus in the Great Commission made it clear that entire nations should be discipled, not only individuals. Since the Second Great Awakening, however, discipling the nations came to mean discipling Christians within nations, not actually teaching entire nations. The word disciple in Greek means to instruct or teach, to become a pupil. So Jesus was telling his disciples that they were to go and teach and instruct entire nations, a foreign concept to the personalized Pietistic Christianity that dominates most modern Evangelicalism. I read something recently that captures the Evangelical mindset perfectly. Speaking of the Great Commission, this person said that “God is calling people to himself out of every nation . . .” No he’s not. God is calling people within nations to Himself to transform those nations, starting with themselves and their families, then their communities, and so on.

Which brings us to Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor in the early 4th century who converted to Christianity and slowly brought Christian influence throughout the empire. Why do you think he thought doing this was an important part of his Christian faith? Or thought that Christianity wasn’t merely about his personal life? Because Jesus’ disciples, the Apostles, taught the world transforming power of Christianity, and the early church embraced that. We must never forget in this debate between Pietistic personalized Christianity and world transforming Christianity, that the declaration, “Jesus is Lord,” was treason in the Roman Empire. It was a blatant political statement. The societal transformation skeptics, let’s call them, tell us that we don’t see any political or cultural engagement in Acts or the New Testament church as if 2,000 years of history hadn’t happened. But most importantly they forget what “Jesus is Lord” meant in that context—Christians were radically political.

Constantine, who ruled from 306 to 337, began this transformation not long after his conversion in 312. He issued the Edict of Milan in 313 which stopped the intermittent persecution of Christianity throughout the empire, and granted tolerance to Christians, allowing them to practice their faith openly. The process was slow and no doubt imperfect, but his favoring of Christianity marginalized traditional Roman pagan religions, reshaping Roman cultural identity toward Christianity. He also introduced laws reflecting Christian morality such as banning the brutal practice of crucifixion, and ending gladiatorial games, which was just another use of slaves for Roman entertainment. He also enacted measures to protect widows, orphans, and slaves. He realized something that Martin Luther taught over a thousand years later, and Christians have forgotten in our day: law is a teacher. The laws not only reflect the cultural values of a people; they teach the people cultural values. The ancient pagan world was slowly becoming the modern Christian world because of Constantine.

I can hear some Christians complain about my describing the modern world as Christian. You’ll have to read Holland’s book to understand what I’m saying. It was the influence of Jesus through his church, his people, that we have human rights, slavery is outlawed, if not disappeared, the rule of law, the nation-state, science and technology, capitalism and free enterprise, among other blessings. All those Christians complaining about how rotten things are would never want to exchange modern life for life in the ancient pagan world. As you can see, the Christian influence that transformed the ancient brutal pagan world into the much less brutal modern world goes far beyond what we consider “spiritual,” but it is all spiritual.

And speaking of that, this allows me to address the contentious topic of Christian nationalism, or what a Christian nation is. You might be able to infer from what I’ve said about Christian influence in the world, that in a Christian nation not every person has to be an orthodox Christians who confess Jesus as risen Lord and Savior. What they do have to buy into Christian assumptions about the nature of reality, whether they are aware of them or not, or can explain them or not. It doesn’t matter what each individual in a society believes on a metaphysical or religious level, they will benefit if Christianity is the dominant cultural worldview. That doesn’t even take the majority of people to be Christians, although that is certainly what we want.

What counts on a sociological level is what people believe about the ultimate nature of reality. Since we’ve been talking about sociology, let’s use a sociological concept to describe this: plausibility structure. This is the mental and psychological societal structure, a mental map, that defines reality for a people. It makes certain things seem real, the way they are supposed to be; it’s just the way things are. Since the mid-20th century, post-World War II, and especially “the 60s,” the West’s plausibility structure has been secularism. That has proved a complete failure, and now Christianity is rushing in to fill the empty space.