Christ and Culture Revisited

Christ and Culture Revisited

Jun 18, 2025 | Culture

Way back in the mid-1980s when I was introduced to Reformed theology, my theological and intellectual mentor introduced me to an influential book I’d never heard of by H. Richard Niebuhr called, Christ and Culture. The Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold (1892–1971) and H. Richard (1894–1962), were prominent American theologians and ethicists. Reinhold was the more well-known of the two, but Richard’s Christ and Culture became a classic that put him on the mid-20th century intellectual map. Written in 1951, it analyzes five broad approaches Christians have taken to their interaction with culture in church history. For me it was significant because when I was introduced to the gospel in college at the ripe old age of 18, engaging culture was not a thing for the Christian group I was involved with. When I discovered Francis Schaeffer a couple years later I learned that Christians should indeed bring their faith to bear upon the culture, which expanded my vision of Christianity greatly. Niebuhr’s book explores how Christians thought about and practiced cultural engagement in the past, and what that might mean for us today.

Something became quickly apparent to me. Almost from the beginning, Christians have disagreed on how they ought to interact with the culture. One of the great church fathers, Tertullian, wrote a work called Prescription Against Heretics, in which he gave us one of the most famous rhetorical questions in church history, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” He was questioning the value of Greek philosophy about which there was much disagreement. In Niebuhr’s phraseology, Tertullian would be Christ against culture. The culture in which the church was born was a thoroughly Hellenized culture with Greek influences everywhere, which some embraced, others rejected, and most were in between if they thought about it at all. We can file this under the more things change . . . .

Many Christians think cultural engagement, or what some pejoratively call, “the culture wars,” is a waste of time and a distraction from the important work of the gospel, as if the gospel had no implications for the culture. They’ll point to the New Testament and say, see, there are no exhortations of commends to “engage” or “transform” the culture, and they’ll say it dismissively as if it’s too obvious to need an explanation. Duh! They miss the salient fact that the New Testament church was only newly born into an exceedingly hostile world, and it would take some time to figure out how to interact with it. These culture engagement critics treat the early church as if it were a middle age career family man who has life pretty much figure out. In fact, none of those early Christians even thought they would reach middle age. Jesus was coming back soon, and they had better be prepared.

After the Apostles died, and the first turned into the second century, it became apparent Jesus wasn’t coming back so soon after all, and people like Tertullian realized they had to figure out how Christians and the culture were going to interact. All of the things the New Testament didn’t address, like politics and economics and law and art and architecture and education and entertainment had to be addressed from the Christian perspective—disagreements have been going on ever since. I can’t explore Niebuhr’s five categories in any depth in a blog post, so if you’re interested I would highly suggest the book.

Before he gets to those, his first chapter of introduction tells us there are no easy, obvious answers to what he calls the “enduring problem” of Christ and culture. Christians disagreeing about culture is nothing new because Christians disagree about everything all the time, always have and always will. Sinners, even saved ones, are finite creatures with limited knowledge who get as much wrong as they get right. That will never change. It’s good to know as you survey Christian history the bickering in our time is nothing new. God knew agreement for sinners would be rare, which is one reason the greatest commandment is love. The problem endures. But before we assess Niebuhr’s take on our interaction with culture, it might be good to define what culture is.

What Exactly Is Culture?
At its most basic level, culture is whatever human beings create. Culture is also an amorphous set of influences. Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, states that, “culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations,” and that, “culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on.” Culture affirms certain values and propositions, while it denies others, embraces certain beliefs, while it eschews others; culture is never neutral. Our modern concept of culture derives from a term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman orator, Cicero: “cultura animi.” In Latin, cultura literally means cultivation. We could say culture cultivates.

This seems obvious, but most people don’t realize how culture shapes not only what they believe, or what they like, or how they behave, but literally shapes who they are. Unfortunately, many Christians fail to think in a discerning way about the culture we inhabit; they are reactive rather than proactive. Culture is something we cannot take for granted or escape, so we must consider its effects, not only for us and our families and friends, but for everyone culture impacts.

As Christians, we must think about culture biblically, as opposed to sociologically or anthropologically. Christians define culture differently than non‑Christians because we start with the Bible, God’s story about his relationship with the human race, and not with something called culture that somehow exists independently of His story. The Bible has no word for culture, thus, no definition of it, but we can say culture is the imprint human beings put on God’s creation. In Genesis 1 and 2 we learn of God giving Adam and Eve the cultural or dominion mandate. He tells Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply to fill this earth, but also to subdue it, to rule over everything He has created. Most importantly for culture making and interaction, man is made in God’s image, male and female He created them. We are God’s visible representatives on earth! We reflect His likeness and attributes in every aspect of our human faculties, be it moral, intellectual, relational, etc. All of these attributes contribute to creating culture.

There is much more that can be said and that has been written on culture, an endlessly fascinating topic, but the takeaway for Christians is that we must realize culture and its influence is inescapable. We must as Christians cease to be reactive and become proactive, meaning a constant awareness of cultural messaging through the variety of ways it communicates to us. None of this messaging is neutral, so we have to learn how to interrogate the culture, like a skillful seasoned prosecutor in a courtroom drilling a defendant. What do these lawyers do? They ask questions, a lot of them, and we must be skilled prosecutors of the culture. Let’s get to Niebuhr.

Christ Against Culture—This might be the most intuitive of the categories, but the least justified. In this perspective, antipathy to culture makes sense in light of how fallen this world is and the people in it are. Niebuhr Identifies the first letter of John as “least ambiguous presentation of this point of view.” These well-known verses from chapter two make his point:

15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. 17 The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

This is an uncompromising either or, the world or the will of God. As Niebuhr says, “a clear line of separation is drawn between the brotherhood of the children of God and the world.” Culture is “the world” in John’s terms, and it is seen as a threat, something to be avoided or escaped. Christians are a separated people and must live like it. However, the number one rule of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics, is context determines meaning, and I John comes in the context of the entire Bible. We can only determine John’s meaning in light of the rest of Scripture.

When I first became a Christian in college I was exposed to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity that didn’t expressly teach “Christ against culture,” but it was sense I got, Christianity on one side, the world or the culture on the other. This “against” dynamic in American culture developed with the rise of so called liberal Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th century. A movement of fundamentalists pushed back against the liberals with a vigorous defense of supernatural Christianity in what are known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. The modernists won, and fundamentalism became a cultural backwater of Christians who were determined to separate themselves from a decaying culture. Nieburh identifies this mindset going back to Tertullian, and it expresses itself throughout church history, but the fundamentalists embodied the most well-known against culture Christian approach of modern Christianity. This was how I saw culture in my early Christian years, but came across Francis Schaeffer in college and moved more into other categories.

Christ of Culture—Rather than avoid it or see it as hostile, this approach embraces and accommodates Christianity to culture. As Nieburh says, “They feel no great tension between the church and the world,” the complete opposite of the against culture Christians. The liberal Christianity of the early 20th century and the once dominant mainline denominations fit this approach. In effect, liberal Christians, what we call progressive Christianity today, gets swallowed up by the dominant secular culture, and its values determined by it.

The next three are what Niebuhr calls “the church of the center” because they fall between the extremes, and this is where almost all Christians fall. Theologically, in assessing cultural issues, these three positions affirm Jesus Christ as Lord, and God the Father through the Holy Spirit as the Creator of all things. As such, creation reflected in cultural human products can’t be the “world” and the realm of godlessness because the “world cannot exist save as it is upheld by the Creator and Governor of nature.” All agree “about sin’s universality and radical character,” and to some extent “the primacy of grace and the necessity of works of obedience.” The “three families” as he names them, are “synthesis, dualists, and conversationists.” You, dear Christian, fall in one of these “families” whether you know it or not.

Christ above Culture—This approach affirms a synthesis of Christ and culture, that the two cannot be completely separated. Culture isn’t fully corrupt, but must be informed by revelation. They affirm “both Christ and culture as one who confesses a Lord who is both of this world and of the other.” The synthesis sees culture as “both divine and human in its origin, both holy and sinful, a realm of both necessity and freedom, and one in which both reason and revelation apply.” Nieburh puts it very well when he writes, we can’t say “’Either Christ or culture,’ because we are dealing with God in both cases.” The greatest representative in church history of this approach is Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the most influential philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. His influence today is as great as it was in the 13th century.

Christ and Culture in Paradox—The dualist differs from the synthesist in that Christ and Culture are in perpetual tension. Culture is a battle between sin and Grace, a holy God and sinful man, law and gospel. Sin pervades all human works, so while God’s creation is embraced as good, there can never be a synthesis that isn’t tainted by sin. In other words, any attempt at synthesis is a fool’s errand. Nieburh writes:

The dualist Christians differ considerably from the synthesists in their understanding of both the extent and the thoroughness of human depravity. As to extent: Clement, Thomas, and their associates note that man’s reason may be darkened, but is not in its nature misdirected; for them the cure of bad reasoning lies in better reasoning, and in the aid of the divine teacher.

For the dualist, however, the only hope is not in reason but in divine grace. We could use the phrase made popular by the rise of Calvinism in the 16th century—the total depravity of man. This corruption is inescapable in all human works of culture, so skepticism is the right approach to engagement with those works. The accommodation of the synthesist is effectively seen as compromise. The debate between the synthesists and dualists goes on strong and heavy today, especially among Evangelicals.

Nieburh believes Paul fits in here, but I think judging Paul’s approach to culture in the specific first century context is an anachronism; it doesn’t fit this historical context because the newly born church didn’t have the luxury of thinking critically of its interaction with a concept that hadn’t even been invented yet. A better representative is Luther; the man God used as the torch to set the reformational blaze in Medieval Europe. He says Luther has “a double attitude toward reason and philosophy, toward business and trade, toward religious organizations and rites, and well as toward state and politics.” Which makes sense when you believe in God’s good, created order, but also in the profound power of sin corrupting all things.

Christ the Transformer of Culture—For most of my Christian life I fit squarely between synthesis and dualist, ambivalent and often confused. When I first read this section of the book I wasn’t sure what to make of it because Nieburh isn’t clear about exactly what transforming means. I’ve always been for Christ transforming culture, at least since I found Francis Schaeffer in college, but I had no theological justification for it. It’s interesting to read this chapter from my relatively new perspective of postmillennialism, and see that Niebuhr got it more right than wrong after all. The point of the gospel isn’t just to change individuals, but to permeate, thus transform, everything they put their minds and hands to. Christ’s righteousness isn’t just to be imputed to Christians, but to be lived out and brings its influence everywhere sin has distorted God’s good, magnificent creation. Christ is King, and “culture is under God’s sovereign rule, and the Christian must carry on cultural work in obedience to the Lord.”

He calls these the conversionists, as opposed to the synthesists and dualists, although they would side with the latter in their understanding of the seriousness of sin, except they have a more hopeful attitude toward culture. What the dualist misunderstands, is that the transformation of culture while done by Christians active in cultural pursuits, is all about “the creative activity of God and of Christ-in-God,” and our actions are “under the rule of Christ and by the creative power and ordering of the divine Word.” The critics of postmillennialism, conversionists through and through as we are, are always claiming we think transformation comes merely through our own activity, as if we, without the power of the Holy Spirit, could transform anything—we cannot!

A key word that distinguishes the dualist from the conversionist is corruption. Human nature has become corrupted, but “it is not bad, as in something that ought not to exist, but warped, twisted, and misdirected.” Taking from Augustine, a primary example of the conversionist, the loves given man at creation are disordered, as in they are no longer ordered correctly, thus corrupted. “Hence his culture is all corrupted order rather than order for corruption, as it is for the dualist. It is perverted good, not evil; or it is evil as perversions, not badness of being.” Although not a conservative Evangelical as we would understand it today, he perfectly captures what we postmillennialists believe, that “The eschatological future has become for him an eschatological present. . . . Eternal life is a quality of existence in the here and now.” The conversionist is focused on “the divine possibility of a present renewal.” The “transformed human life in and to the glory of God” can now transform culture. To me that’s the point of the gospel, not merely to go to heaven when we die, but to bring heaven to earth here and now.

I will finish this with a long quote that perfectly captures the hopeful, optimistic theology that brings the end of all things into the here and now until the end:

The life of reason above all, that wisdom of man which the wisdom of God reveals to be full of folly, is reoriented and redirected by being given a new first principle. Instead of beginning with faith in itself and with love of its own order, the reasoning of redeemed man begins with faith in God and love of the order which He has put in all His creation; therefore it is free to trace out His designs and humbly to follow His ways. There is room within the Augustinian theory for the thought that mathematics, logic, and natura l science, the fine arts and technology, may all become both the beneficiaries of the conversion of man’s love and the instruments of that new love of God that rejoices in His whole creation and serves all His creatures. . . . Everything, and not least the political life, is subject to the great conversion that ensues when God makes a new beginning for man by causing man to begin with God.

Amen!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Response Post: Kim Riddlebarger Against the Eschatological Optimism/Pessimism Paradigm

Response Post: Kim Riddlebarger Against the Eschatological Optimism/Pessimism Paradigm

Jun 11, 2025 | Eschatology

I was born-again in the Jesus Revolution era of the late 1970s and it seemed dispensational premillennialism was what every Christian believed about “end times.” I had no reason to question it, so I waited expectantly for the rapture to happen at any time. In due course this “newspaper eschatology” got tiring because the disasters, and the rapture, never happened, and I checked out and got on with real life. I learned about other eschatological positions in seminary, but by that time I was eschatologically burned out and didn’t care anymore. I became an eschatological agnostic, or what I would later come to call it, a pan millennialist, as in, it will all pan out in the end. I thought “end times” stuff in the Bible was a confusing jumble of esoteric references beyond our understanding, so why waste the time.

Then in 2014 a friend told me about a teaching series Kim Riddlebarger did on amillennialism, I listened to it, and was hooked. I was thrilled because I was learning the Bible did indeed have something to say about “end times.” It was exciting, and not least because Kim is a tremendous teacher. If his name is new to you, Kim was the long-time pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, California, an original co-host of the White Horse Inn radio program in the 1990s into the 2000s, and a scholar. So I went along my merry amillennial way until August 2022 when much to my surprise I embraced postmillennialism in one day. I wrote a piece in November of that year explaining my “conversion,” and I will quote myself to give you the premise for my interaction with Kim in this one:

I didn’t realize how our theology of “end times” determines how we interpret everything about the times in which we live, whether negatively or positively.

It seems Dr. Riddlebarger doesn’t much like this framing of how we postmillennialists think of eschatology. When I first came across this piece I’ll be responding to, I was not at all surprised.

As an amillennialists I found myself becoming increasingly pessimistic about the world and the Christian’s role in it. In fact, I came to mock my younger self for thinking I could “change the world.” How absurd. Sin isn’t going anywhere until Jesus returns, and we’ll just have to muddle along until Jesus returns and cleans this whole mess up. Then Trump. No, Donald Trump did not persuade me to become a postmillennialist. That was James White in a sermon entitled, “My Journey to Hope for the Future.” I’d become increasingly optimistic since I found Steve Bannon’s War Room after the compromised 2020 election, and was looking for a biblical justification for my optimism. I found that in postmillennialism, as will anyone who believes Jesus didn’t teach us to pray in vain, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Kim, however, believes we have a “rather embarrassing shortage of biblical passages in the New Testament that teach such a view.” He’s aware that the Bible is made up of both a New and Old Testament, and speaking of the Old, Paul tell us, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). I became a postmillennialist specifically because I found it so exegetically grounded, both in the New and Old Testaments.

This assertion comes in the second paragraph of his piece, so you can see we’re not getting off to a good start. The article is from a 2011 issue of Modern Reformation magazine called “Eschatolog y by Ethos.” The magazine comes from the White Horse Inn guys, which includes Michael Horton, who I interacted with in my last post. I learned a lot from them over the years, but slowly realized much of their perspective on the faith wasn’t sitting right with me, especially as Trump came on the scene and contributed to so many of the red pill experiences I’ve had in the last decade.

Before I get started, I want to mention and define the two logical fallacies we’ve seen in the previous two pieces I’ve critiqued, and in this one. One is begging the question which means assuming the premise without arguing for it. The writer will make assertions about something without seeing the need to prove it, just like Kim did about the supposed exegetical problem with postmillennialism. We’re just supposed to agree with him because he asserted it. The other is the straw man fallacy. In this, the writer creates a distorted, exaggerated, incorrect, or invalid version of what the other side believes, and then refutes that and not the actual position. There are a lot of both of these fallacies in this piece, and it’s good to be aware of them as you read.

The Eschatological Optimism/Pessimism Paradigm
Right out of the gate he makes two inaccurate assertions about postmillennialism. I’ve already addressed one, and the second comes shortly after that. He says we determine the “soundness” of our “eschatological position using the optimism/pessimism paradigm.” This follows logically from his first assertion, that postmillennialism isn’t biblically exegetical, so of course he thinks we’re using something other than the Bible to establish it’s “soundness,” and he believes it’s this paradigm. I can assure you it is not. Since he assumes these two things, everything he says from here about postmillennialism will necessarily be inaccurate. He rightly says no Christian wants to be identified as a “pessimist,” and given we know who “wins in the end,” we shouldn’t be. But that doesn’t address how we regard what happens in this “present evil age” (he’s quoting Paul in Gal. 1:4).  Did you catch the assumption in this reference? What Paul means, supposedly, is that evil in this age can’t be overcome because this age is evil, and optimism is not “the best category to use in identifying the essence of one’s eschatology.” Who said it was! Do you see how that works? It’s begging the question at its best.

Mind you, when someone does this, they aren’t intending to be deceptive. They simply believe what they’re saying is so obvious that the readers will of course see what they mean, and most importantly, agree with them. If you are not aware of assumptions and how they work, it’s easy to fall into their trap. If you read through the piece, you’ll see this everywhere, which is the reason it was such a frustrating read for me. I kept saying, “That’s not what we believe!”

Then we get to one of Kim’s fundamental assumptions coloring everything he says. That would be his amillennial eschatology, and a futurist understanding of eschatological passages. There are three options for reading a time frame into these passages. We can see them as happening in the past, preterist, during the course of history, historicist, and happening in the future, futurist. We can see here Kim is in the latter:

Jesus himself speaks of world conditions at the time of his return as being similar to the way things were in the days of Noah (Matt. 24:37-38)—hardly a period in world history characterized by the Christianizing of the nations and the near-universal acceptance of the gospel associated with so-called optimistic forms of eschatology.

He again thinks his readers agree with him without seeing the need to establish that Jesus is talking not about what he in fact said he was talking about, that generation he was speaking to. He makes that clear in verse 34:

Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

The you in Greek is the second person plural, so all the people he is speaking to, and “this” is the same in any language, a pronoun indicating the lifetime of those people. But to the futurist, Jesus wasn’t speaking about people in the first century and events they would encounter, as he seems to be saying, but about events that will happen far into the future. Preterists, on the other hand, believe Jesus was speaking of events that we know happened in the run-up to AD 70 and the destruction of the Temple. So Kim’s sarcasm about “so-called optimistic forms of eschatology” depends on a view he assumes is true but sees no need to prove, or at least acknowledge others see differently.

In the very next paragraph he presents Straw Man # 1 and a complete distortion of what postmillennialists believe:

Aside from the fact that many contemporary notions of optimism have stronger ties to the Enlightenment than to the New Testament. . . the New Testament’s teaching regarding human depravity (i.e., Eph. 4:17-19) should give us pause not to be too optimistic about what sinful men and women can accomplish in terms of turning the City of Man into a temple of God.

He doesn’t identify who these “contemporary notions of optimism” belong to or what they are, but since they are tied to the Enlightenment they are if not anti-biblical at least not biblically justified. Where these “notions” come from makes them problematic, but also the presumption of Christians thinking they can by their own power transform the products of sinful humanity into something holy. This is a common criticism among critics of postmillennialism and “optimistic eschatology,” that we think we can change things by what we do without the supernatural intervention of the Holy Spirit. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point is that we believe God by the power of the Holy Spirit is building His kingdom, extending Christ’s reign on earth, and building his church, and He does that through his body, the church, you and me, because he has no choice. That’s how it works. God has always used fallen, sinful, imperfect people to bring His kingdom to earth. Without God doing the accomplishing our efforts are in vain.

That is what postmillennialists actually believe, and thus our optimism is not in our strength or power, but solely in God and what He can do. We believe the point of Christ coming to earth was to establish his kingdom rule in this fallen world, to defeat the devil, to bind the strong man (Mark 3), and reclaim ground the devil took through lies and deception. It is in fact a reclamation project. What separates postmillennialists from other eschatological perspectives is that we believe Christ began reclaiming what is his, this earth and everything in at, at his first coming. He didn’t come and suffer and die and rise again and ascend to the right hand of God to leave his people to suffer in futility as they fight for righteousness, to “lose down her” while they wait for ultimate victory to come at the end of time and Christ’s return. We believe with Paul about Christ (I Cor. 15):

25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Christ reigning “until” is not him sitting on his throne just observing while the world and sinful man goes on its merry way in sin and misery to destruction. And the word all in this case does mean all, as in each and every one. It’s not merely the enemies in our personal lives, but enemies everywhere in God’s created order. The other positions I reference also believe Christ is reigning, but his rule is limited to Christians and the church. Outside of that, the devil reigns and there isn’t much we can do or accomplish in the “City of Man.”

Why Optimism/Pessimism Is the Apt Description of Modern Eschatology
In the next section of his piece, Kim discusses the rise of optimism versus pessimism in eschatology with the book An Eschatology of Victory by J. Marcellus Kik, published in 1971. Kick comments on a variety of verses that speak to the victory of God in Christ in the messianic kingdom during the millennium (the period between Christ’s ascension and Pentecost and his second coming). Then he says, “We do not glorify God nor his prophetic word by being pessimists and defeatists.” So if postmillennialism is an eschatology of victory, then the other positions are eschatologies of defeat, thus optimism and pessimism, and Kim doesn’t like that.

Unfortunately, he has a distorted perspective of postmillennialism, thinking our optimism is determined by what we can do to the exclusion of the work of the Holy Spirit, but that is a straw man and not our actual position. The big bogeyman for him and people like him is cultural transformation, which he thinks is at best a distraction from the real purpose of Christianity. This, he argues, developed with the publication of two other books after Kik’s, R. J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) and Greg Bahnsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics (1977). With these books the concept of theonomy, or rule by God’s law, made its way into the Reformed conversation. The problem with that word and its variants is that nobody can agree on exactly what it means, and no two people agree on how it should be applied in a nation. Other than that, it’s great! God’s law must be the ultimate foundation of a nation’s laws, but that’s a (huge) conversation for another time, but regarding transformation he says:

With the publication of these volumes, a new form of eschatological optimism made its way into the Reformed bloodstream—one closely tied to the transformation of culture.

On the printout of the article next to this I wrote, “It wasn’t new!” It can only be new to him because of the assumption he makes about the purpose of the gospel, and how Christians prior to the 19th century understood it. For all of Christian history, the purpose of Christ’s first coming was to transform this fallen world into a less fallen heavenly world. Bring heaven, as Jesus taught us to pray, to earth, God’s kingdom come, His will be done. Of course that is going to affect everything, from politics and governments to families and how they live in their communities, which means everything Christians put their minds and hands and effort into. That’s not just part of a Christian worldview and its influence, but bringing Christ’s kingdom reign over all things, a la Ephesians 1 and his reign at God’s right hand in this age, and the Great Commission (Matt. 28), Christ having all authority in heaven and on earth.

By contrast, for people like Kim, Mike Horton, and Carl Trueman, who I interacted with in my last two posts, their two kingdom Pietistic assumptions limit the extent of the gospel’s influence in the world and is a byproduct not a purpose of faith. Any transformation outside of the walls of the church has nothing to do with its true purposes, which are primarily “spiritual,” and thus about salvation of individuals and their personal holiness. Culture, as we’ve seen from Truman and Horton, is at best a distraction, and at worst a deceptive idol. Here is how Kim sets up his straw man. For “theonomic postmillenarians”:

“Optimistic” Christians are not only to evangelize the world, but they also must engage the surrounding culture with the goal of transforming it. Transformation of culture becomes the church’s mission.

In my printout I circled the word, “the,” as in “the” mission. Something can be part of something without becoming the primary thing, but in his mind it became that. The reason, as I’ve referred to it, is in the next sentence,

Transforming culture is no longer understood to be the incidental fruit of the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

Exactly. The word incidental means it’s unplanned, so if influencing the culture for Christ because of the gospel is your conviction, you have now, according to Kim, made cultural transformation “the” church’s mission. How can people living together in society be incidental to the purpose of the gospel? And Christians never thought transforming what people do in relationship to each other in society was incidental to the spread of the gospel, but that is what he’s implying Christians have always believed. That is called historical revisionism.

If God decided the ultimate end of things, the wiping out of sin and suffering and death, was to be introduced into the world at Christ’s first coming, how can we not be optimistic? N.T. Wright calls it inaugurated eschatology. In other words, 2000 years ago God formally commenced bringing all the blessings to earth that will be fully realized at Christ’s return. John the Baptist and Jesus introduce his ministry with the exact same words, “The kingdom of God has come near.” And Jesus taught us two parables about the inevitability of the growth and influence of the kingdom, the mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13). It would be slow and steady exactly because it is God’s kingdom, and he’s the king!

Most premillennialists and amillennialists, to one degree or another, believe sin in “this evil age” will always have the upper hand, and our efforts to combat it will be futile until Christ returns to transform everything in an instant. For them, the growth of the kingdom a la Matthew 13 only happens within the church walls. That’s what the gospel for them is about, transforming and discipling people, not nations, even though Jesus expressly states in Matthew 28 it is the nations, the ethnos, not individuals who are to be discipled. And this gets at their biggest distortion about postmillennialism. They think we believe it is our efforts to change culture that is of primary important, not the message of salvation in Christ. No postmillennialist believes the nations will be discipled without the power of the Holy Spirit working through the gospel in God’s people, and as Paul says in Ephesians 1, in this age:

19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

There is much more to say along these lines in Kim’s article for anyone interested in learning more about what postmillennialists don’t believe.

Response Post: Mike Horton and Culturally Irrelevant Christianity

Response Post: Mike Horton and Culturally Irrelevant Christianity

Jun 4, 2025 | Eschatology

In my last post I responded to Carl Truman and what I called two kingdom Pietists. These thinkers are every bit as dualistic as Gnostic Pietists, but with an intellectual bent. Mike Horton is another unfortunate example of this mentality and worldview. Horton is a professor at Westminster Seminary in California and author of numerous books. He’s influential in the Reformed community, but has written books for more general Evangelical audiences, so it is important to engage his thinking where he falls into the same trap as Carl Truman.

The piece I’m responding to, written in 2010, is called, “Transforming Culture with a Messiah Complex,” which gives you a hint of what’s to come. This is longer than Truman’s article with a plethora worthy of comment, but I will only be able to scratch the surface of what I think is aweful. Once you learn to see how the assumptions of the two kingdom Pietists work, you’ll learn to question everything they say. Let’s start in the first paragraph when he addresses those Christians who are talking about “transforming the culture.” This sounds good, but to Horton it is not:

The trouble is, these movements can conceive of the church as a substitute for Christ, shifting the focus of Christians from his promised return to your best life now.

The phrase, “your best life now” is a favorite whipping boy for Horton. By it he implies an undue worldly focus on the here and now which is incompatible with a truly spiritual and heavenly focused life. Or something like that. You can see here the distortion of Pietism, the dualistic overly spiritualized tendency to play this life off against the next. Like all forms of Pietism, the Christian life is primarily about going to heaven when you die and personal holiness. If you want a good life in this world, then you are guilty of compromise. When I see that phrase I think, what, am I supposed to want my worst life now? And I guess we’re supposed to be so focused on Jesus’ return, that this life becomes an afterthought or less important. As with Truman, these things are never fully defined or explored, just stated as if we all knew what they meant.

Confusing Liberal Christianity with Cultural Transformation
Horton spends the next several sections doing what most two kingdom Pietists do when criticizing cultural engagement or postmillennialism: comparing it to the liberal Christianity of the 19th and early 20th centuries. As with most of these critics, Horton is adept at distorting what people like me believe, setting up straw men, then refutes something that doesn’t even exist. For example, he compares today’s Christians focused on cultural engagement to the Pelagians of the Second Great Awakening, like Charles Finney, and other moral reformers of the time. Here is one such assertion:

True to their pragmatic and self-confident instincts, American Protestants did not want to define the church first and foremost as a community of forgiven sinners, recipients of grace, but as a triumphant army of moral activists.

This was most certainly true of the liberal Christians of the time who rejected the supernatural foundations of God’s word, but is a slander against modern Evangelicals who believe cultural transformation is a biblical imperative. We used to have a pastor like Horton at a Presbyterian church we attended. In a sermon he said those focused on the culture wars are basically rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That did not make me a happy camper. Our pastor, and Horton, have a lot in common with D.L. Moody, the great 19th century evangelist, who eventually embraced the dispensational premillennialism of J.N. Darby. Horton writes:

Although he was initially representative of Charles Finney’s social activism, Moody became increasingly pessimistic about the extent to which earthly empires could become the kingdom of God. “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel,” he would later write. “God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”

Most Christians, unfortunately, accept some form of this societal pessimism, as I did to some degree until I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022. Then, according to Horton, I became a “social reformer.” Yet ever since I came across Francis Schaeffer when I was a 20 year-old college student, I’ve believed like he did that Christian cultural engagement is not an option, but like Horton I rejected postmillennialism because I thought it was just a repackaged liberal Christianity obsessed with secular progress. It most certainly is not. Horton just digs the hole deeper in continuing this comparison by comparing the left and the right, as all two kingdoms Pietists tend to do:

As George Marsden has documented in various places, both the Christian Right and the Christian Left derive from this late nineteenth-century evangelicalism. It is this quite recent train of thought (or, more precisely, activism), rather than the profound reflection of Augustine and the reformers, that guides contemporary evangelical activism. . . . The agenda for moral reform may have divided in liberal and conservative directions, but both owe their origin to the revivalism of Charles Finney.

Actually, the left owes its activism to Karl Marx, big difference. Attributing a moral equivalence between left and right is rampant among two kingdom Pietists, as we saw with Carl Truman. And notice the false choice Horton presents to us. Either you have “contemporary evangelical activism” or you have “the profound reflection of Augustine and the reformers,” but by golly you can’t have both! This dualism is so deeply ingrained among such thinkers that anyone who is an “activist” or believes in Christian cultural transformation is to them not spiritually serious. That is blatant calumny, or in a word more modern people would know, slander.

Far from being anything close to the liberal Christianity coming out of the 19th century, modern cultural transformationists are solidly conservative Bible believing Christians. Such Christians, like me, have the temerity to believe the Christian faith was meant to have an impact on every area of life in everything human beings do.  We believe the purpose of Christ coming to earth was to bring God’s kingdom and its heavenly influence into this fallen world, just as Jesus taught us to pray it should. This isn’t merely for the church, or for Christians in their personal lives, as the modern Pietists would have it, but for the entire earth, in biblical terms, for the nations who God through Abraham and the Patriarchs promised to bless 4000 years ago.

The Centrality of the Ascension Misunderstood

Then Horton gives a strange explanation of Christ’s ascension to justify his cultural apathy, one that I’ve never seen before. He titles it, “Under-realized Ascension, Over-realized Eschatology.” As he describes what must be a fully realized ascension, it will sound familiar from what all such two kingdom Pietists believe. Here’s how he puts it:

The time that the church thus occupies because of the ascension is defined neither by full presence nor full absence, but by a eucharistic tension between “this age” and “the age to come.” The church is lodged in that precarious place of ambiguity and tension between these two ages, and it must live there until Jesus returns, relying only on the Word and Spirit.

His concern is Christians replacing the absent ascended Christ with the church, and displaying an unrealistic triumphalism in the worldly or cultural matters in which it is engaged. In practice, this “precarious place” he describes means sin and evil triumph over righteousness in this fallen world, and victory is only meant for the world to come when Christ returns.

Then he makes a move all two kingdom Pietists do, where Christians do the “spiritual” things of “relying only on the Word and Spirit,” or, we have to conclude, they rely on themselves. This false choice, which I’ll dissect below, is a pernicious lie. Like all of these thinkers, Horton assumes we know what he means by “relying only on the Word and the Spirit.” We’ll notice he does two things without having to assert them because he assumes them. First, his self-righteousness is evident because anyone who disagrees with him about cultural engagement doesn’t rely solely on the Word and the Spirit, but he sure does. All two kingdom Pietists look down their noses in their supposed spiritual and moral superiority on we cultural engagers who are presumably not “relying only on Word and Spirit.” Only is a small very big word. Second, he makes these mutually exclusive. Either you agree with him and live in this “precarious place of ambiguity and tension,” and thus stop believing God’s kingdom can transform the kingdoms of this world, or you don’t rely on God. It’s like a spiritual Berlin Wall, and if you want to get out you’re basically a traitor.

This is how he perceives this strange idea of an “under-realized ascension.” I guess if you fully realized it, you’d give up these silly notions of God’s kingdom pushing back the effects of the fall and sin in the world, which means you have an “over-realized Eschatology.” What exactly does that mean? The word means the study (ology) of the end or final things, ἔσχατος-eschatos in Greek. It can also mean what the result will be at the end, so after Christ’s second coming. That’s the way Horton is using it. He’s accusing we cultural transformationists of thinking we can bring the final fulfillment of God’s kingdom to the here and now by our own efforts. And we do this by not just leaving Jesus alone up there sitting at God’s right hand, but dragging him down here to get involved in our futile culture wars.

As a convinced postmillennialist who believes cultural transformation is another phrase for discipling the nations, or the Great Commission (Matt. 28), I believe bringing the eschaton into this fallen world is exactly what we’re called to do. It’s crazy to think Christ came to earth, was tortured and shed his blood via Roman crucifixion, rose from the dead, and ascended to heaven to leave the world exactly the way it is, but that appears to be what Horton and two kingdom Pietists believe. To them, such transformation is a possibility in the church and in our personal lives, but that’s it. If it breaks out of the church walls, that’s gravy, unintended consequences of being like Jesus in our everyday life. By contrast what I and all postmillennialists believe is that the purpose of the gospel and Christ’s first coming was to bring the kingdom of God to earth, as I mentioned above. To put it another way, the kingdom of God is as all-encompassing as sin. Think of what that means for the kingdom’s influence on this fallen world. Wherever sin has had its miserable effects, the righteousness of God in Christ lived out through His people will reverse those effects, not just for the church, or in our personal holiness, but in everything we do as human beings made in God’s image. It’s a glorious vision for God’s people on earth. Here, by contrast, is the depressing vision of the two kingdom Pietists:

Yet we must wait for the restoration at the end of the age. We hope and act in the present not in order to save the world or build the kingdom of God, but because “we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Heb. 12:28).

Ugh. We’re supposed to be like the disciples when Jesus was taken up before their eyes, and just look up waiting for him to come back. That’s the Christian life to Horton. Get out the lawn chairs, pour some ice tea, and wait for Jesus to return. Yet the angels mocked them, “why do you stand here looking into the sky?” In effect saying, get to Jerusalem so you can receive the Holy Spirit like Jesus said, then you can get about saving the world and building the kingdom!

The False Choice of the Two Kingdom Pietists
Horton spends the rest of the piece attempting to convince us this dualistic understanding of reality is the true Christian understanding. He wants to assure us that all of life is not “kingdom work.” He tell us what is:

proclaiming the Word, administering baptism and the Supper, caring for the spiritual and physical well-being of the saints, and bringing in the lost are kingdom work. Building bridges, delivering medical supplies to hospitals, installing water heaters, defending clients in court, holding public office, and having friends over for dinner are “creation work,” given a pledge of safe conduct ever since Cain under God’s regime of common grace. In this work, Christians serve beside non-Christians, as both are endowed with natural gifts and learned skills for their common life together.

 

Only when Christ returns in glory will the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. Until then, the New Testament does not offer a single exhortation to Christianize politics, the arts and sciences, education, or any other common grace field of endeavor.

The false choice is always one between the “spiritual” and the rest of life, as he calls it our “common life together” with the heathen where we interact on a field of “common grace.” Horton, like all two kingdom Pietists, believes the Great Commission has invalidated the creation mandate given to Adam and Eve. The former as he says here is for Christians doing “spiritual” things, and the creation mandate will only be fully realized when Christ returns. Let’s remind ourselves what this mandate was. In Genesis 1 after God created man, male and female he created them, He commands them:

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Sometime after this sin entered the world through man’s rebellion and ruined everything. God then declares curses on the man and woman, and on the ground itself, because of sin, and instead of blessing and flourishing in God’s created order, we’ve had hell on earth ever since. According to Horton and all two kingdom Pietists, that’s not going to change. Jesus came to pluck the embers out of the fire and not push back the effects of the fall and make his blessings flow “Far as the curse is found,” in the words of the great Christmas hymn, Joy to the World.

To put this in words most Americans might understand, in Horton’s Christianity there is a strict separation between church and state. Inside the walls of the church is where all the action is, where the kingdom is built, redemption happens, and the curses of sin are overcome by Christ’s righteousness and kingdom reign. Outside is a wasteland of sin, although we have the created order in common. These two kingdoms are completely separate and have nothing to do with one another. Yes, he says, Christians bring their Christian “worldview” to bear upon the common stuff, but as I’ve argued here in detail, a Christian worldview is not enough. Why? Because Jesus is King and has given us the Great Commission to disciple the nations, which means, as Jesus says, to teach them to obey everything he commanded them. Not some things, not most things, but everything. And the word in Greek is nations not individuals. Two kingdoms advocates explain this away. It doesn’t really mean entire nations, just individuals within those nations. Christianity comes down to individual salvation and personal holiness, a narrow, truncated, and limited view of Christianity which claims to be the biblical view, but effectively renders Christianity impotent outside the walls of the church. This is why the once Christian West became the totally secular West. The devil got the culture because Christians were doing the important “spiritual” things and didn’t think it worth fighting for.

The New Testament, according to this view doesn’t offer us, as he says, “a single exhortation” to “Christianize” outside of the Church, as if that was dispositive, as if that settled the matter conclusively. It doesn’t! This is the worst kind of biblicism, as if something isn’t expressly addressed in the New Testament, God has nothing to say about it. The Apostles and the New Testament church didn’t have anything to say about “politics, the arts and sciences, education, or any other common grace field of endeavor,” because those things didn’t exist! Life in the first century Roman Empire was a bit different than life in 21st century America. None of the early Christians expected I would be writing this, and you would be reading it 2,000 years later, so of course they didn’t address issues that took centuries and millennia to develop.

Thankfully, we don’t have to chop up reality because there is only one king, and his name is Jesus. As he told us, he has been given all authority in heaven and on earth, and that means here and now. Paul confirms this in Ephesian 1 when he tells us God raised Jesus “from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” Paul had to remind his first century audience that Jesus would also have all power and dominion in the age to come because everyone took it for granted Jesus was king in this age, in this fallen world, over all the nations, and everything and everyone in them. One kingdom, one King over all.

 

 

 

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