The Christian Life of Pursuit

The Christian Life of Pursuit

Apr 8, 2026 | Theology

Being a Christian is not just an ontological state, meaning what I am, my being, but also very much about what I do. It is the indicative, what God has done for us in Christ, and the imperative, what we must do. The Christian life is a verb, what we are commanded to do now that we are those who belong to God, his holy ones, set apart for service. Christianity is a doing religion flowing out of our being, which Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:17, is now a new creation. Jonathan Edwards said we don’t seek God and then find Him. Like Adam and Eve, by nature we run away, we hide. Rather, God saves us in his sovereign mercy and grace, and then the seeking begins, as I call it, the Christian life of pursuit.

We Protestants over the last several hundred years have developed a kind of Christianity where justification by faith in effect becomes the entirety of the gospel. When we use the word gospel, the good news, what we tend to mean is being made right with God, our sins paid for by Christ, and his righteousness being credited to us. Therefore, we now by faith have a relationship to God, and our alienation from him by our sin is laid aside. So far so good. But Christianity is far more than coming into a saving relationship with God through Christ. I imagine that sentence might raise a few eyebrows among faithful Evangelicals, but it’s true. One of the reasons Jesus uses the metaphor of salvation as being “born-again” is because when you’re born, you’re just starting life. You don’t stay a baby your whole life, physically or spiritually. In fact, the writer to the Hebrews rebukes Christians who think this way (Hebrews 5):

11 We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. 12 In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! 13 Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. 14 But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

The phrase the NIV translates as “you no longer try to understand” is also translated as “dull of hearing” or “too lazy to understand.” Lazy is the best translation of the Greek here, and it speaks exactly to what I’m talking about. Can we be honest? Most Christians are too lazy to do the hard work of growing into the maturity of the Christian faith. Or they are distracted by other things in life that appear more important, or as someone called it, “the tyranny of the urgent.” In the parable of the Sower, Jesus explains it this way (Matt. 13):

22 Now he who received seed among the thorns is he who hears the word, and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and he becomes unfruitful.

Then he compares it to the seed that bears fruit:

 23 But he who received seed on the good ground is he who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.”

The question is, how do we become the seed that bears fruit a hundredfold, and do we really want that. As I’ve discovered over my growing number of years, we always do what we want, what is important to us.

Making Our Calling and Election Sure
The inspiration for this post, and its title, came from a sermon I recently heard on 2 Peter 1, which is Peter’s answer to that question. To alter a line from The Princess Bride that applies to the Christian life: We are men of action; laziness does not become us. This of course applies to women too. In other words, we do not take our relationship to God for granted, just has a husband or wife or parent should never take their relationships for granted. Great relationships take work, effort, and sacrifice. The wonderful thing about the Christian life is that we’re not on our own. The God who saved us has provided us everything we need in this divine life he has called us to. As Peter says,

3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

Everything pretty much covers it all. But notice where these things are found, in our knowledge of him, of God, which is why every Christian is called to be a theologian, which means the study of God. Out of His love for us and His almighty power to do whatever he says, his faithfulness to those promises gives us the ability to live a holy life. In Christ we’ve already escaped the ugliness and misery that sin causes. We don’t have to live in the corruption and ugliness of sin. When we do sin, John tells us to confess our sin, name it, and that God “is faithful and just to forgive us our sin, and purify us from all unrighteousness.” It’s God’s job to do the cleansing, and our job to be obedient.

We must always remember, sin never delivers on its promises and lies every step of the way to destruction. Of course still being sinners our obedience will always be imperfect, but that is why the gospel includes both justification and sanctification, as Paul tells us in I Corinthians 1:30. But Peter tells us that in order to overcome our inclination to sin we have work to do, as he says, “make every effort”:

5 For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; 6 and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; 7 and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. 

I like Strong’s extended definition of that phrase: “properly, swiftness to show zealous diligence, i.e. one’s “best” (full effort by making haste).” We need to be like young Olympic athletes determined to be the best it is at what we do. We are called to moral virtue which we are compelled to because of our faith or trust in Christ, but it can’t stop there. If it does, it’s merely moralism that becomes legalism.

I find it interesting that Peter puts knowledge so high up in the list, it is that important. That means doing something people think they gave up in high school or college, study, and also something people are less inclined today in the age of the ubiquitous screen—read. Like books, with, of course, the foundational book being the Bible. But depending on our interests, reading books on history and philosophy and apologetics, how to defend our faith, biographies, current events, science, whatever. Remember, not only is the entire Bible, as Jesus said in Luke 24, about Christ, but so is everything in life. C.S. Lewis put it best as he always did:

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

Jesus himself is the unifying principle of all knowledge. As Paul tells us in Colossians 1, not only is Jesus “the image of the invisible God,” he created all things, and that “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

And finally, as we look at the other virtues we’re exhorted to act upon, it is all tied up in the perfect ribbon of love, that which is a perfect summation of all the law and the prophets, and the entire revelation of God in Christ. Jesus himself told us what is required to live a life worthy of him, to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness,” and all the other needs of life will be added. God and his kingdom first, and then everything else will follow. Toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus piles on the verbs:

7 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

All of this screams, do not take our relationship to God for granted! Everybody takes time for what is important to them. Let’s look at why we might take it for granted.

Antinomianism: Confusing Justification with Sanctification
The word antinomianism means anti-law, nomos in Greek, and it’s been a concept debated since the Reformation and the Protestant focus on salvation by grace alone through faith alone. There has been a tendency to downplay the law because we’ve been granted Christ’s righteousness in justification. Calvin explained a proper understanding of God’s law when he was the first to describe what he called the three uses of the law. The first use, the one most Christians are familiar with and accept, is the law as a mirror. It shows us our sin, and how ugly it is, and drives us to Christ. Because of our modern focus on the gospel, there is a tendency to do what the antinomians do, ignore the law. Supposedly we don’t need the law anymore because that’s part of the Old Covenant and not the New. We might conclude God’s law is no longer applicable to the Christian because of the gospel. As I heard a pastor once say, “The Ten Commandments are not your friend.” The law, supposedly, is our enemy because the only thing it can do is condemn us because we can never live up to its demands. It drives us to Christ who is our righteousness, and we’re done with it.

The problem with this perspective is that God’s law for the Christian is in fact now our friend. I’m currently reading a book on antinomianism by Mark Jones, and he states the confusion well:

Antinomians typically fail to make the distinction between what the law requires and what the gospel requires, and only focus on the former. Not surprisingly, they are flummoxed by so many passages in the Bible that seem to speak of the saints obeying god’s law “with their whole heart.”

Jones adds further that as the gospel has both the indicative and imperative in it, “the antithesis between the law and the gospel ends the moment someone becomes a Christian.” Law and gospel are no longer in contrast, no longer in tension.

The gospel in fact requires a holy life as we see throughout the New Testament, and this passage from Peter is only one small example. Christian antinomians seem to forget that our relationship to the law in Christ has completely changed because the law is no longer written on tablets of stone but written on our hearts. As the Lord tells us Jeremiah 31:

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.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.”

For Christians, the law is no longer there merely to condemn us because we often come up short, but rather it is now there for our sanctification, to help us to become holy. When we are saved, reconciled to our God, transformed from God’s hated enemy to beloved children, we want to obey the His law, we long to be obedient, even as difficult as that can sometimes be given the sin that remains in us. We can now say with the Psalmist in Psalm 119:

97 Oh, how I love your law!
    I meditate on it all day long.

This, for Calvin, is the third use of the law, our sanctification, the second being to restrain evil in society. As he says in the Institutes:

The third, and principal use, which pertains more closely to the proper use of the law, finds its place among believers in whose hearts the Spirit of God already lives and reigns.

The law being a reflection and extension of God’s character and being, was never meant to be our enemy, even has God himself was never meant to be our enemy. Now redeemed and renewed, the law is our friend, our guide, our north star, meant to bless us in our obedience which God Himself makes possible by the power of the Holy Spirit within us.

As I said above, there is a tendency to confuse justification with sanctification. We, in effect, equate the gospel with our getting right with God, being born-again, justified by Christ’s righteousness being imputed to us, but that’s only the start of the gospel in our lives, the good news. Transformation is also good news, and that too is, in Paul’s favorite phrase, in Christ. He tells us in I Corinthians 1:30:

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

What Christ accomplished in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, not only freed us from the guilt of sin, but also from its power. In the same year America declared independence from England, 1776, Augustus Toplady wrote the beloved hymn Rock of Ages about our independence from sin in Christ, from the guilt and power of sin. The first stanza says it beautifully:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee;
Let the water and the blood,
From Thy riven side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure,
Save me from its guilt and power.

 

 

 

The Existential Crisis that is The Passage of Time

The Existential Crisis that is The Passage of Time

Apr 1, 2026 | Explanatory Power

I think about time all the time. You might think this happens more as you enter your elderly years, but I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. Well, not in biblical time, but in regular old human time. One of my favorite sayings is that God is never in a hurry, as we can see from him making promises that take thousands of years to come to fruition. Take the promise to Abram, for example, in Genesis 12. God promises him that all peoples on earth would be blessed through him, and then it takes 2,000 years for that promise to finally be fulfilled in Christ. That’s a long time! Inconceivable to us who are stuck in time. I vividly remember, although this only occurred to me recently, that when I turned 24, I really experienced time for the first time. Yeah, sorry about the repetition of that word, but It’s an obsession of mine. It reminds us every moment of every day that it will not stop, that it endlessly marches on, seemingly quicker and quicker, until it does indeed stop, for us.

Speaking of 24, my sister is almost four years older than me. As she moved into her later 20s she started bemoaning getting older, and I’d say, no big deal, happens to everyone, deal with it. Then on my 24th birthday back in 1984, I distinctly remember thinking, oh crap, I’m getting older; I’m mortal too! Nobody gets outta here alive, including me! Prior to that moment time, getting older and heading inevitably to death, was theoretical. All of a sudden, it wasn’t. And I was only 24! Kids, yes, kids, who are 24 appear to me now like they’re in high school. Speaking of kids, another moment this hit me was in the job I got after I graduated from Seminary in 1988 at a small Christian liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania, Messiah College (now University). When I started there I was 28 and the kids who attended were six to ten years younger than me, but by the time I’d been there five years, they were now eleven to fifteen years younger. One day early in a new school year as I was walking on the campus, I looked around and said to myself, “When did they let all these high school kids in!” They looked so young. Then it hit me, that they appear younger to me now that I’m a bit older. Think how they look now over 30 years later, like children, which of course they are.

Another one of the moments I look back on, although it took some years for me to realize it, was when I was probably in my mid-30s. My wife and I were involved in an Amway business for the decade of the 90s, and we’d go to big seminars from time to time. This one was in Miami, and Tim Foley, who played with the great Don Shula Miami Dolphins in the early ‘70s, was on stage. He was talking about “the three-to-five-year plan,” a plan that didn’t quite work out for us. Given my later obsession with the swift passage of time I’ll never forget what he said, how he said it, and my response. “For you youngsters out there, you think five years is a long time; it’s not!” And I said to myself, “Well, yes it is.” Oh, how wrong I was.

The passage of this mystery process of moments rushing by us is theoretical when we’re younger, something that really only happens to other people. It just isn’t real to us when we’re young. I encounter young folks in their 20s and 30s who when I lament time’s swift passage say they get it, but they have no idea. Not really until you get into your 40s does it move from the theoretical, it only happens to other people, to it’s happening to me! Then as it continues to press on you find as you go to the doctor or dentist that, apparently all of a sudden, they’re all younger than you!

I’ll share one last anecdotal experience you oldsters can possibly relate to. Our youngest son, speaking of 24, turned that age February 1. He’s now married with a baby recently born, but he was probably 19 or 20, and one day I was talking to him, as I’m wont to do as an old person, about the swift passage of time. I was getting frustrated because it’s impossible for a 20 year-old to understand, to see it like I do, and I said, “Oh, you can’t relate!” And he replied, “Then why do you keep telling me that?” Priceless. And I blurted out, “Because that’s what old people do!”

A Brief History of Time
The passage of time is no doubt trippy, in that old 60s/70s druggy term, but what is it? Why does it exist? As Christians, how are we to look at It? Do we deplore it? Worry about it? Curse it? Ignore it? Using the phrase “existential crisis” in my title kind of gives away my answer. Existential doesn’t just mean existence, but comes out of a 20th century philosophy called existentialism, which Wikipedia defines well: as “a family of philosophical views and inquiry that explore the human individual’s struggle to lead an authentic life despite the apparent absurdity or incomprehensibility of existence.” It’s the swift passage of time that pours lemon juice on that wound. It’s a war we can’t win against an incomprehensible enemy. Death, specifically our deaths, but also the very concept of death, brings any idea of the meaning of our lives into question. Without God life becomes a Woody Allen movie, leading to despair, denial, or resignation.

The great Augustine of Hippo, the 5th century Bishop and one of the most profound thinkers of all time, tripped out on time as well. In Book 11 of his Confessions as he is contemplating God and this mystery he says:

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

Time he says is a paradox. The past no longer exists, nor does the future, and we can’t quantify the present—it just is. The instant it happens it becomes the past that no longer exists; very strange. He talked about God’s creation in which time exists, and says if the present didn’t pass away like it does on this created earth, then that would be eternity. So time “tends not to be” because it’s constantly vanishing as it comes into being. As I said, trippy.

Einstein in the early 20th century added to the trippiness when he postulated that time and space were relative. Basically, that means time passes slower for fast-moving objects compared to something at rest. I’m not sure Einstein’s theory, supposedly proved by experiments, applies, but as we get older time does appear to move faster. Remember when you were young, summer vacation, all of maybe three months, seemed like forever. When we were kids, we would play outside all day until it got dark, and as teenagers would sing with Zeppelin and Robert Plant that “Dancing days are here again as the summer evenings grow.” After all, we have, it seemed, forever. As the decades pass and the years pile up, years seem like months, months like weeks, and weeks like days. Christmas seems upon us not long after New Years.

I’m sure people have been perplexed by time since God created it, but secularism which developed over the last several hundred years did something unique to time. It gave people the impression they could evade its consequences. Yes, everyone knows in the end it can’t be escaped, but they hope by ignoring it just maybe it will leave them alone. This is nothing new, although secularism made it more widespread. Blaise Pascal writing in the mid-1600s as if it was 2026:

In spite of all these miseries man wants to be happy, and only to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how can he go about this? It would be best if he could make himself immortal, but since he cannot do this, he has decided to stop thinking about it. Being unable to cure death, misery, and ignorance, men have decided that in order to be happy, they must repress thinking about such things.

Files this under the more things change . . . .

One of the reasons Charlie Kirk’s assassination had such a profound impact, especially on young people, is that a young vibrant man in the prime of life, only 31, was cut down. That makes death not so theoretical after all, and as secularism’s deceits fade away faith becomes a more plausible alternative for many young people. Secularism and the rise of science, technology, and modern medicine gave people the impression we have some control over what happens to us in time, but that becomes increasingly difficult to sustain in an apparently random and chaotic world. As Pascal added, “The last scene of the play is bloody, however fine the rest of it. They throw dirt over your head, and it is finished forever.”

The Ultimate Question Mark: Death
It’s impossible to escape the question unless we are determined to ignore it, and many are, unfortunately. If they thought like I did, they wouldn’t. Have you ever watched an old movie from the 40s or 50s and suddenly realize almost everyone you’re watching is now dead. I always do. The movie is like moving life that doesn’t move captured in amber. Life, and time, however, keeps moving. Or having grown up in the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, I look back at the baby boomer generation, at those who reveled in youth and rebellion, and they are now tottering old senior citizens. I loved the band The Who in the 1970s. In a song called “My Generation,” Roger Daltrey in the flush of youth sings, “I hope I die before I get old.” Keith Moon did! At only 32. Bassist John Entwistle died young, at 57, and Daltrey and Pete Townsend are now entering their 80s. They didn’t get their wish.

In spite of the ignorance of youth and the deceits of secularism, the fear of death haunts us at every moment. Why do we fear it so? What is it about our ceasing to exist that terrifies us? That is the question. Why is it that animals and insects intuitively fear death even though they can’t think? Shouldn’t we be the least bit curious as to why that is? Given our mortality and its ever present reality in our world, it seems to me a good question to ask is, why does death exist? If we can find the answer to that question, maybe it will also lead us to the answer as to why we exist in the first place, and what it all means. Why is there something rather than nothing. Philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in the 20th century called it “the fundamental question of metaphysics.” He asked: “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?” Good question.

Yet even in the face of e death’s certainty most people believe death, and its associated suffering, requires no explanation. It’s just a brute fact. But why does death seem so wrong? We may not feel outrage at the funeral of a great grandmother, but go to the funeral of a five-year-old and you will feel wrongness . . . viscerally . . . deeply . . . painfully. Which worldview holds the most compelling explanatory power for the anguish of death, atheistic materialism or Christianity? I rest my case.

We know the Christian explanation. God created reality good, his creatures rebelled and fell into sin and death. Therefore, sin and death are an aberration, not the way things were supposed to be. It feels so wrong because it is wrong! Far from seeing death as part of the Disney “circle of life,” or “natural,” just the way things are, we are all repelled by death as if it were an aberration because it is. When confronted personally with the possibility or actuality of death, no one treats it as “natural.” Viscerally we all hate death. Jesus hated death too.

Jesus stands before the tomb of his friend Lazarus (John 11), whom he would raise from the dead in minutes, and John writes, “Jesus wept.” This seems like a strange response when he knew he would shortly bring his friend back to life. To me these may be the most profound words in all of Scripture. Jesus is looking at the ultimate consequence of his creation marred, looking upon the ugliness and smelling the stench of the wages of sin, and he hates it! It broke his heart. And the Greek in this passage indicates that he wasn’t just sad, he was angry, as well he should have been. The image of God in man had been defaced, and it is a tragedy, literally, of biblical proportions.

Yet, strangely enough, the Bible never anywhere apologizes for, or is embarrassed by death. In the Book of Job, the most direct confrontation questioning the pain of sin and death in Scripture, God refuses to apologize or even explain anything! How can you explain the unexplainable? While we are never privy to the eternal Trinitarian councils as to why God created everything and allowed this disease to infect his creation, we know that the plan all along was to solve the problem. Jesus knew that too, but that didn’t mean the pain and perplexity and sadness of death isn’t real.

When something goes wrong most people want to know why, but the uncomfortable fact that we die and know it’s wrong seems to elicit little curiosity. For some reason it doesn’t occur to such people to ask why, or question what death means. In fact, if looked at correctly, death is the ultimate question mark, and God provides the answer. If what the Bible tells us isn’t true about life, death, and everything else, what is the alternative explanation? We must always consider the alternative because something must be true about death; it’s either a brute fact or some kind of aberration. Yet no other religion except what we find in our Bibles gives us any answers. For them death and suffering and evil just are, and we have to deal with it. There is no explanation and no ultimate solution. Least plausible is the view of the God-less, of the materialist-atheist.

I once heard William Lane Craig lay out the implications if atheism is true:

  • Death is the end; the dirt is our future.
  • There is no ultimate purpose in life
  • There is no ultimate justice
  • There is no basis for morality—Darwinian morality is all

Atheist‑materialists admit that we all experience purpose, long for justice, and act in moral ways. They expect us to believe that atoms coming together by chance for no reason at all explains the complexity of purpose, justice, and morality. I don’t think so. I, and almost every person on earth, don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. In 2026 the absolute poverty of the atheist‑materialist worldview is more apparent to more people than ever before.

Thankfully, when confronted with the question we have an answer: Jesus who conquered death, then tells us we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is. Our hope isn’t an immaterial bodyless eternal life in heaven, but eternal life in a material resurrected body on this earth. There are many passages in the Bible about the resurrection and this life to come. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but one certainly comes from the man I mentioned above who experienced horrible suffering with no answer as to why. Yet says, and we can affirm along with him (Job 19):

25 I know that my redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
26 And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God;
27 I myself will see him
with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!

The Material Implications of the Gospel

The Material Implications of the Gospel

Mar 25, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Most Christians reading the title of this post might think I’ve mixed things up. Shouldn’t it read, “The Spiritual Implications of the Gospel”? Well, yes, it does if read the right way. The gospel’s spiritual implications have material implications as well because we live in a material world. We can’t divorce spiritual from material, nor material from spiritual. Many varied influences throughout Christian history gave us a kind of dualistic thinking about things, as if material reality were on one side, and spiritual reality on the other, and never the two shall meet. And when we see or think of the word “spiritual” we envision a kind of ethereal non-material thing, ghostly, something you can see through, not something solid like a brick. I would suggest this is a faulty view of spirituality and the spiritual, more Platonic and Gnostic than Christian, influenced more by Greek philosophical thought than the Jewish faith which birthed the Christian religion.

Having recently read through the Old Testament again, I was impressed with what an earthy book it is. There is even a sect of Jewish religious professionals that developed in the intertestamental period called Sadducees who we read about in the gospels. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible, the books of Moses, and because there is little reference to “spiritual” things in the Pentateuch, they denied the resurrection of the dead, and the existence of angels and spirits (or demons). The concept of heaven and a non-material reality where God and angels dwell is an Old Testament theme, but everything about the Jewish faith is focused primarily on man’s life in this world, and the implications for it. They had no conception of a bodyless spiritual existence of the soul going to heaven when they died. The focus for Jews always remained on this world where God blessed His people with long life, prosperity, children and descendants into the future, rather than on hope for existence after death. The are many examples of God exhorting the Israelites to obedience that they might receive blessings in this life.

Deuteronomy 8 is a good example. Moses is giving the people a vision of the life they can have, the material blessings of the promised land, if they just obey and observe His commands. Toward the end he says:

18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today.

We tend to think of wealth in a narrow sense, as mainly money and material possessions. The Hebrew word for wealth, however, is much broader and all encompassing. It has the sense of a force, whether of men, means or other resources. So, it can be an army, wealth itself, money, or virtue, valor, and strength, along with the idea of being able, of activity, like accomplishments, even an army, or band of soldiers, or great forces, including power and riches, strength and valor. The way I read this verse is that because of God’s covenant promises to the Patriarchs, he gives us the ability to prosper and flourish in this life, to accomplish substantial things for His glory, our good, and the good of others. Blessing in this life is the point of Christianity, not an accidental by product of capitalism. It was Christianity that allowed for the creation of capitalism!

This more Jewish conception of blessing carried over into Christianity, but it also inherited a strong other worldly focus that often competed against life in this fallen world. Nonetheless, Christendom was built by men and women who sought blessing in this life, not escape of this life for the next.

The Origin of our Faulty Notion of Spirituality
Joe Boot wrote a book called The Mission of God, and when we see a phrase like that, most Christians immediately think of proclaiming the gospel, of saving people from their sin so they can go to heaven when they die. The word missions brings to mind the same thing, people going to the nations of the world to proclaim the gospel with primarily a spiritual or soteriological focus, the saving of people from their sins so they can have eternal life and escape the punishment of hell. Of course it is that, but it’s so much more. Everything about the mission of God changed for Christians in the 19th century, from a this-worldly spiritual focus to a primarily other-worldly spiritual focus, the faulty kind. Nineteenth century conservative Protestant Christianity is exemplified by evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899). All things, including doctrine, took a backseat to winning souls. By the early twentieth century, according to George Marsden in Fundamentalism and American Culture, for Christians “evangelism overshadowed everything else.”

When I became a Christian in 1978 I was born-again into a type of fundamentalist Christianity where the focus was on evangelism, Bible reading, Scripture memory, and fellowship with other Christians. Discipleship was about developing our relationship with Jesus, and sharing that with others so they too could experience that same saving faith. This is all to the good; the problem is that that’s as far as it goes. Any implications of this faith for the culture or societies in which we lived was never mentioned. It was irrelevant because the implication was that it was the spiritual, eternal things that matter, not this life and its worldly concerns. This kind of fundamentalist Christianity came from somewhere, and I’ve written about that here many times, so I won’t rehash all that. I will briefly, though, mention the word I would like anyone who is influenced by my work to remember, Pietism. That mindset, a faulty view of spirituality, is the enemy of the true full orbed mission of God in the world.

As I always have to say, however, I’m not talking about being pious, something I’m grateful to have learned from my brothers and sisters in college in my early Christian life. I still daily practice all the things I learned there, but what I constantly warn Christians about is the German Lutheran movement of the 17th century with good intentions that over time ended up destroying Christian cultural influence in the world. Fundamentalism with its narrow, truncated version of Christianity came from that influence. It went through a first and second Great Awakening, and the Moody type of revivalism in the 19th century, eventually doing battle with the German higher criticism. Praise God for the fundamentalists in the early 20th century who did battle against the modernists and liberal Christians who turned Christianity into a completely different religion, a non-supernatural religion.

By the 1920s, unfortunately, fundamentalist Christianity had become almost completely culturally enervated and lost its ability to influence the culture it once created in America. The symbolic turning point was the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial.” The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity started there until in the 1960s when it was finally openly mocked and despised, when not ignored.  Scopes was the first culturally accepted overt hostility to Christianity in American culture, and it eventually weaved its way into the popular imagination in the 1960 movie Inherit The Wind, staring Spencer Tracy and based on a 1955 play of the same name. For decades prior to Scopes, modernists were portraying fundamentalists as backward, benighted enemies of progress, science, and all that was good about civilization. As Marsden says about the liberal perception of fundamentalists:

Modern liberal culture was fighting back against the efforts of “bigots and ignoramuses” (as Darrow described them) to retard its progress, and ridicule was perhaps the most effective weapon.

After Scopes the mainstream media was merciless. Marsden says the trial and its fallout “would have far more impact on the popular interpretation of fundamentalism than all the arguments of preachers and theologians.” Unfortunately, fundamentalists often lived down to the caricature, and their alienation from the wider American culture was complete.

In trying to keep from being defiled and reviled by the culture, Christians increasingly developed their own sub‑culture. Isolated in a Christian cocoon, they were soon creating their own educational system, books, movies, and media, all of which still have little impact on the wider culture today. Much of conservative Christianity for the next 50 years embraced a Christ against culture posture which is informed by an over spiritualized dualistic Platonic spirituality. Let’s see how God in Scripture reveals to us a different kind of spiritually, one that has material implications for this world.

Christianity and Transforming Our Material World
One of the challenges of reorienting to a more this world spirituality is that modern Evangelical Christianity tends to focus on the New Testament to the exclusion of the Old. It’s built into the fundamentalist theology inherited from dispensationalism that separates the Jewish Old Covenant people of God from the Christian New Covenant people of God. The implication is that the Old is not relevant for the New, that Moses and the Law of God revealed to Israel no longer apply to the Christian life. That’s unfortunate because the New is the fulfillment of the Old, not something different from it. Everything that was revealed under the Old Covenant was to find it’s fulfillment in the New, including the material blessings of a redeemed and renewed relationship with our Creator.

I was inspired to write this post after reading one of the most powerful gospel passages in the Old Testament, Zechariah 3. Standing before the Lord being accused by Satan, the high priest Joshua is wearing filthy clothes. The Lord rebukes Satan and tells the angel to take off those filthy clothes and he tells us why. “See, I have taken away your sin, and I will put fine garments on you.” He next gives Joshua a charge to obedience that should always result from a sinner being saved, and then telling him about a Branch to come, a prophecy referring to Christ. Then the chapter ends with this:

10 “‘In that day each of you will invite your neighbor to sit under your vine and fig tree,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”

To our modern eyes there doesn’t seem to be anything overtly “material” here in terms of prosperity or success, but to an ancient Jew living in Israel in the 5th century BC it definitely suggested exactly that. The phrase “in that day” and variations is used 16 times in Zechariah, and they are all Messianic references. Do a Bible word search and you can see all 16 on one page. It’s a powerful confirmation of God’s transformational intentions of the mission of the Messiah in this world, with not one mention of a heavenly or spiritual life.

Given that the entire Old Testament is about Christ, you would expect there are probably more than a few passages that refer to the transformation of Messianic fulfillment to come, and the specific material implications for this world. It starts with God’s promise to Adam and Eve that her seed will crush or strike the serpent’s head, and that promise begins to make its way into history with God’s calling of Abram. The blessing God promises him and his descendants implies a this-worldly prosperity, and the Hebrews eventually called Jews as those from Judea certainly believed that. As I mentioned above, to them God’s covenant promises were for the blessings of a prosperous life in this world, the spiritual making itself real in the material circumstances of their lives. It was sin that got in the way of true peace and prosperity which would only be found in relationship to their Creator God as he dwelled among them. They missed that it was only in the Messiah that they would find the fulfillment of this promise, in Immanuel, the one who would be God with us.

If you want a wonderful picture of how Christ and the gospel and God’s word, the Bible, really changes the material circumstances of our lives, I’d suggest reading a wonderful book by Indian Vishal Mangalwadi called, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. As an Indian, he has seen first-hand what a civilization without Christianity looks like, in his case a Hindu culture. I recently listened to an interview he did with Jordan Peterson called India, Europe & Biblical Revolution. I highly suggest giving that a listen.

A Different Kind of Discipleship
My college Christian experience was all about discipleship, but a truncated, narrow, other worldly one that ignored the culturally transforming power of the gospel. I would suggest a different kind of discipleship, one that sees cultural and societal transformation as one of the primary purposes of the gospel, of bringing God’s kingdom to earth just as Jesus taught us to pray. That was the purpose of Jesus being given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” to bring the fulfillment in this world of all the types, shadows, and promises of the Old Testament. That is a completely different, and more exciting vision for life than the over spiritualized personalized Pietism of much modern Evangelical Christianity.

That means a young person should taught beginning in their teenage years that their career is more than just making a living, but a calling, a way to live out a Christian, gospel infused world and life view in the marketplace. When we see the word gospel we tend to define it narrowly as salvation from sin and primarily personal, but the good news of Christ is that this salvation affects all that we are an everything we do. The transformation started in our hearts is then worked out into our lives into the lives of others and how those lives develop into a civilization. Christians miss this not only because of Pietism, but because of the modern notion of secularism that programs us to believe there is a realm where our faith doesn’t apply, but biblical faith applies to every square inch of existence, everything we see or do or experience, it’s all through the lens of our Christian faith.

We can see this civilizational transforming power of the gospel develop in the early centuries of the church as it battled paganism. When Constantine converted to Christianity in the early 4th century, he started the process of outlawing crucifixion and gladiatorial games, blood for sport. A nation’s laws are a reflection of its faith and worldview. Christianity had begun a slow process of infusing its morals and values into Western culture. Thomas Cahill writes in his book, How the Irish Saved Civilization:

In his last years St. Patrick could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland . . . With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.

That is the gospel! As Paul says in Romans 14:17, the kingdom of God is a matter of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Christianity is never merely personal, and that is how we are to raise and disciple our children, with a faith that is transforming on a societal level, not just about their own personal holiness and relationship to God.

For just one example, in practice that means, speaking of laws, that if your son gets into the middle school years and likes to argue, you might begin thinking he could make a good lawyer. Then you begin teaching him about the Christian nature of law, where it comes from, what are its purposes, and so on. He can then see his calling as a lawyer as a Christian mission to advance God’s kingdom on earth by brining justice to the nation. It could lead to a political career as a Christian legislator who brings God’s law to bear upon the state’s or nation’s law. This can be done with any career, including the calling to be a wife or husband, a mother and homemaker or father. This gives our lives and our children’s lives what every person is looking for, meaning, hope, and purpose, and on a grand scale, the spiritual-material touching and influencing everything we and they do. Life doesn’t get any better than that!

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

Most Christians Don’t Believe in Postmillennialism, But the Left Does

Mar 18, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

In January I was listening to Steve Deace opine on the woman in Minnesota who was trying to block ICE agents on a suburban street. At one point it looked like she was trying to run over one of the agents, and he shot her. She died giving her life for the leftist religious cause of all things anti-Trump. You can bet if Joe Biden had sent Ice to deport illegal aliens, she would not have been on that street blocking them that day, and ICE wouldn’t be in the news at all. In fact, when Democrats have deported illegal aliens, and they have, there wasn’t a peep from the left, but if Trump does it, the left loses its mind. They are also invested in immigration, illegal or otherwise, because their power depends on it. A guy who goes by the moniker Raw Egg Nationalist put it well:

Mass immigration is an existential issue for the modern left, perhaps more than any other. Without mass immigration, the leftist project collapses. Kaput.

The word existential is one most people aren’t familiar with, but it says perfectly what’s at stake: existence itself. The concept developed in the mid-20th century post-World War II, “where an entire generation was forced to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness.” The seeds of this intellectual movement go back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the 19th century, but it was the horrors of the 20th century capped by Nazi death camps and atomic bombs dropped on Japan that gave it momentum. Existence itself, and it’s meaning, seemed to be on the verge of extinction. The radical left realizes this, and unfortunately most of the Democrat Party is right with them. Trump is the ultimate threat to their power grab because he realizes their threat to the American way of life, the liberty and prosperity handed down to us from our forefathers. Too many on the right side of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum don’t seem to get this, that this is a metaphorical war for a way of life we’ve come to take for granted.

Deace sees this, and was bewildered that more on our side, especially Christians, don’t get what’s at stake. He was also marveling at the religious commitment of this woman willing to become a martyr for the cause she believed in so deeply, and he was wondering how she became who she is. The media tried to portray her as an innocent woman caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she was in fact an anti-ICE warrior, part of a group of activists who worked to “document and resist” the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota. She was a lesbian who was “married” to a woman and who was previously married to a man. She likely immersed herself in the left’s religious echo chamber, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The New York Times, etc. and was committed to applying her faith to all of life. She had a radical leftist atheistic secular worldview. She even sent her son to a woke charter school, which boasts that it puts “social justice first” and “involving kids in political and social activism.” She took her faith seriously.

What Deace was marveling at was this passionate commitment of leftists compared to most Christians who are committed to comfort and ease. For many Christians, their faith is irrelevant to this world, and thus this world is never influenced by their faith. As I’ve written about extensively here, I blame Pietism for this, the 17th century German Lutheran movement with good intentions, that over the next three hundred years changed Evangelical Christianity from a transforming force in society into a culturally irrelevant one. A curiosity to me is how many people complain about how terrible things are, but don’t seem to realize the faith they believe is a transformational faith, not just for individuals but for entire civilizations. Look what happened to the once mighty Roman Empire; it was defeated by Christianity and turned into Christendom.

The Left: No Longer Democratic Rivals, but Existential Enemies
The existential battle between left and right, between good and evil politically and culturally, goes back to the French Revolution. That conflict gave us left and right, specifically from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly (also known as the Estates-General convened at Versailles). Those who supported the king, monarchy, tradition, and the old order sat on the right. Today these are called conservatives. Those who supported radical change, the revolution, limiting or abolishing royal/aristocratic power, greater equality, and republican ideas sat on the left. These are the leftists, liberals, progressives; Democrats have become the party of the left. That first radical Revolution in France led to tens of thousands of executions, upwards of 17,000 having their heads lopped of via Madame de Guillotine. It turned out to be a revolution in innocent blood, unlike the revolution coming before it in America.

Many revolutions followed in its wake, the most consequential the October 1917 Russian Revolution, out of which came communism and what is called the “Old Left.” This left gave us Stalin and purges and war on an industrial scale, but accomplished none of the dreams of its grandfather, Karl Marx. Communism simply didn’t work. Those who yearned for a world informed by the French Revolution, taking down the old order and everything supposedly inimical to “progress,” would never give up. In the 1920s and 30s a group of leftists in Germany developed a form of cultural Marxism, moved to America before the war, and eventually developed into the New Left in the 1960s. The current batch of woke leftists are the children and grandchildren of the New Left. The old Left focused on economics, labor issues, and socialism, while the New Left’s obsessions were issues like civil rights, anti-war protests, feminism, environmentalism, and plain old countercultural rebellion, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s when screens were limited to 3 main channels, CBS, NBC, and ABC, or channels 2, 4, and 7 in Los Angeles. PBS was channel 11, and then there were a couple local stations. Shocking to you youngster, I know. Protests of leftist hysteria over one issue or another was a consistent theme, and I had a front seat to it all in our house when the screen was turned to the news every night. So the antics of the woke left in our day are nothing new, and not at all creative. They’re basically a broken record, same old story, a turgid Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals movie, over and over again. It’s exhausting, and banal, not to mention dangerous. Susan Sontag, one of the New Left radicals, is a good example. Some people today are shocked by the anti-white racism of the leftist-Democrat liberal establishment, but Sontag wrote in 1967 that, “the white race is the cancer of human history.” You can’t get more anti-white than that! The real cancer of anti-white racism, which is anti-Christian and anti-masculine, has been around a long time.

What makes them especially pernicious is their self-righteous smug moral superiority. They believe themselves to be moral and good and right, and everyone else is evil, a fascist, a Nazi. Hitler for them is the apotheosis of evil; Satan doesn’t compare. Branding everyone who disagrees with them a fascist allows them to justify violence as a political tool. That’s why they’ve branded Trump as Hitler from the moment they realized he wasn’t one of them, and was a threat to their vision to take over the world. Of course killing Hitler is justified, then there would have been no World War II and no Holocaust. Go back to the 60s and 70s and we’ll see this is nothing new either. Their only real moral value is might makes right; the will to power rules all. Truth is a luxury they can’t afford.

The Christian Response to the Evil of the Left
These people take their faith seriously, and it is an all-consuming religious worldview applying to every area of life. Like we postmillennialists, they are confident their kingdom will eventually win and take over the world. They are something that appears contradictory, optimistic in their rage and anger. This actually reflects the futility of their efforts, but they don’t know that. They’re convinced they are, in the words of radical leftist Barack Obama, on the “right side of history.” Jesus begs to differ. When Peter in Matthew 16 declared of Jesus, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” Jesus told them that he was going to build his church upon this declaration, and the gates of hell would not prevail against it. For most of my Christian life I missed that gates were defensive mechanisms in the ancient world. It is the church, Christians, who are on the offensive in this spiritual war, and the devil and his minions are on the defensive.

We give the devil entirely too much credit. After the resurrection Jesus had been given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” and at his ascension was coronated as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Paul affirms this in Ephesians 1 when he tells us that Jesus was seated at God’s right hand,

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.

Notice, and this is critical, Paul took it for granted that his audience understood Jesus had all this power and authority now, in “the present age.” He felt he had to remind them, it was also for the age to come. The devil has no authority on this earth, zero, zip, nada, none. He only does what God allows him to do. Scripture further tells us when the Holy Spirit was unleashed on this world at Pentecost, that Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (I Cor. 15). Peter in the first sermon in Christian history in Acts 2 quotes Psalm 110 to affirm that this has been the plan all along:

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
   until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’

All of this started, the ushering in of the kingdom of God on earth, at Christ’s first coming. The victory in this world is ours because we belong to Christ, we are “in him,” as Paul says many times in his letters.

We have a problem, though. Most Christians don’t believe this. I didn’t believe it either until a few years ago. I was convinced sin and the devil were such powerful forces that things would get increasingly worse on earth until Jesus came back to save the day and finally usher in his kingdom. This is a relatively new eschatological perspective in the history of the church. Most Christians believed the kingdom of God on earth had come in Christ, and it was the church’s job to advance the kingdom on earth. In the 1830s this all changed with J.N. Darby and the rise of dispensationalism. Even those who are not familiar with that term or what it means, have heard of things like Antichrist, 666, the rapture, and the great tribulation. This mentality is fundamentally defeatist in the face of evil, like the evil presented to us by the political and cultural woke left in our day.

The other problem is non-theological. Most Evangelical Christians are conservatives. Unlike secular leftist radicals, and the Democrat big money donors that enable them, we just want to be left alone to live our lives and raise our families, and be productive members of society. That’s why we’re called conservatives. We think there is value in traditions and the Christianity that gave birth to our civilization, and want to conserve them against those who fetishize progress. We are on the right side of the French Assembly squarely against the Revolution. Most normal people’s lives are not consumed by politics, yet therein lies the problem. The radical left, which is the entire Democrat industrial complex today, will never leave us alone until they’ve ushered in their woke Utopia. Basically what it’s come down to is us or them, as I said, it’s existential.

As I write this, we are witnessing an existential battle for the American way of life in the streets of Minneapolis. Either the radical left and their minions of protestors are crushed, or America is over. It’s our will against theirs. Either truth, righteousness, and justice prevails, or it’s lies, evil, and tyranny. As a culture, a society, a nation, we have a clear choice, made all the clearer by the woke radicals: it’s either Christ or chaos. The church, as Jesus said, needs to “discern the signs of the times.’” It is either them or us. I will end this with the immortal words of Thomas Paine written in the darkest days of the Revolutionary War in late 1776. They apply to our present moment in history and we need to take them to heart. There is no place anymore for a personalized Pietistic faith. As with the Patriots of old, we must decide if America is worth fighting for:

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

 

 

What Does It Mean to Baptize Nations?

What Does It Mean to Baptize Nations?

Mar 11, 2026 | The Gospel

That’s a good question! At first I didn’t think so. I recently put up a post about Sphere Sovereignty, and someone responded on Twitter asking how nations are baptized. I gave a bit of a snarky answer. Then thinking about it I realized it’s actually a great question, and I apologized to the commentor for my snark. What am I taking about? It’s a passage in Matthew 28 every Evangelical Christian is familiar with, what we’ve come to call the Great Commission:

18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

For most of my Christian life, and that’s not a few years, I assumed like most Christians that when Jesus said to disciple nations he meant to disciple individuals in those nations. It would have never occurred to me that a nation as a nation, or nation qua nation as the scholars would put it, could be discipled. We don’t disciple America, Germany, or Lithuania, we disciple Mary, Bob, and Joe. Then a few years back I had an eschatological awakening, a red pill regarding how I think about “end times,” and it affected how I see the entire scope of redemptive history, past, present, and future. Now I realize discipling entire nations is exactly what Jesus had in mind, in addition to individuals within those nations. According to Matthew, he used the word that in Greek means nations, not individuals. Christians out not to try to explain that away, but rather try to figure out what Jesus meant, and then how to do it.

One way to do this is to see nations as corporate entities. Jesus speaks of “his church” which means both the individuals in it, and his church “body” corporately. Nations are made up of individuals, of course, but they also have corporate identities. The Lord repeatedly declares judgments or blessings on nations, and even towns like Jesus does in the gospels, which would affect every person in those nations even if each individual is not personally guilty or worthy of blessing.  So merely equating nations with individuals doesn’t work. It took my awakening about the study of the end of things to make me realize when Jesus said nations and not individuals he really meant nations.

Speaking of eschatology, the word means the study of end things, and we think that’s what it’s about, what happens at the end of history, the end of time. It is about that, but it’s much more about bringing the end into the present, and how we see the end influencing how we read history. I love the phrase N.T. Wright uses for this: “inaugurated eschatology.” To inaugurate means “to make a formal beginning of; initiate; commence; begin.” What Jesus accomplished in his first mission to earth, redemption accomplished, was then after his ascension applied to his church and this world at Pentecost.

In other words, eschatology is a comprehensive worldview that affects how we see everything. Other than that, it’s not really that important. That’s a bit of sarcasm for you who tend to the literal. It’s massively important, although most don’t realize it. I didn’t for most of my Christian life; I was an eschatological agnostic. I didn’t believe how we viewed the end mattered at all, one way or the other. Eschatology was something people argued and speculated about, and I had no interest in it. Then the red pill, postmillennialism, dropped out of the sky and crashed my eschatological indifference into a million little pieces, and down the rabbit hole I went!

I learned eschatology isn’t really about “end times” at all. That phrase I always put in quotes comes out of dispensationalism, a broadly Pietistic perspective that sees this world as evil, and the goal of the Christian life as getting away from it as much as one can, and also becoming more “spiritual” and less worldly in the process. I’m all for the latter, but eschatology is about bringing Christ’s fulfilled mission, how eventually everything will be in God’s kingdom, to earth. That means, according to Jesus, teaching them, the nations, “to observe all that” he had commanded. That doesn’t just mean the Sermon on the Mount, or other teaching we find in the gospels, but the entire word of God, all of it. Which brings us back to the question about baptizing nations and what that means.

Teaching Nations All that Jesus Commanded
When we ask a question about what something means, it’s often good to start with what it doesn’t mean. Depending on your baptistic convictions, Jesus wasn’t telling us to either sprinkle water over an entire country, or cover the entire nation in water. I think we can look at this both from a Presbyterian and Baptist perspective. For the former, baptism is a sign and seal of the covenant, of God’s promise to His people to save them from their sins (Matt. 1:21). In other words, baptism is a sacrament primarily about God’s faithfulness to which we are responding. For Baptists, it’s primarily about our confession of faith, a sign proclaiming to the world our trust in Christ as our savior. Let’s see how we can apply these to nations.

Both kinds of baptism require a confession, although Presbyterians believe the covenant community includes infants and children whose parents act as covenantal representatives for their children. They primarily confess God’s covenant faithfulness, while Baptists confess their faith in God’s saving work in Christ. Nations cannot be sprinkled or immersed in water, but the people in those nations can be, and the primary ethos of those nations, both culturally and in their governance, can confess God’s covenant faithfulness, and Christ as Savior and Lord. Even in complete heresy now, Great Britian confessed exactly these things when King Charles was coronated in 2023. The British Isles have been confessedly Christian for over a thousand years until the god of secularism seduced them after World War II. Now it’s just words, traditions.

So nations are baptized when the nation, it’s worldview and value system, reflects Christianity as the aspirational guiding system of the country. America was seen by its people for most of its history as a baptized confessionally Christian nation, even if the founders did not expressly state that in our founding document, the Constitution—they should have. Unfortunately, the secular strain of the Enlightenment had infected the thinking of many of the founders, and we got almost as good as it could have been. Of course, a baptized Christian nation must have a lot of baptized Christians, although it does not have to be a majority. I’ll explain why in a moment, but this quote from a book I’m currently reading, The Cousin’s War by Kevin Phillips, tells us just how religious, i.e., Christian, the colonies were in the run-up to the Revolution:

More material was printed in mid-eighteenth-century America about religion than about political science, history, and law combined, and even as the Revolution approached, devotional books outnumbered any single group.

Robert Curry in his book, Common Sense Nation says, “the Great Awakening prepared the way for the American Revolution in too many ways to be counted.” America was a Christian nation because it had many Christians who took their faith seriously. And it wasn’t just laymen. I have a book called, Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805, and it clocks in at 1596 pages! Pietism had yet to fully infect American Christianity as it would in the later 19th and 20th century, and Christians from every walk of life, including church leaders, believed their faith applied to every square inch of reality, including how they were governed. This affected not only Christians, but nominal Christians and those who didn’t embrace the Christian faith at all.

The Christian Plausibility Structure of a Nation
I used the word ethos above, that a society to be Christian, baptized as Christian, needs to have a Christian ethos. The technical definition of that word is, “the fundamental character or spirit of a culture; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs, customs, or practices of a group or society; dominant assumptions of a people or period.” The ethos informs the basic plausibility framework or structure of a nation. For something to be plausible it must be believable, credible, and the plausibility structure of a nation is that ethos that makes things seem a certain way, or just the way things are. We currently live in a secular nation with a secular ethos and plausibility structure, so most people think a woman killing her offspring is something that should be her “choice.” Sex outside of marriage is normal. Homosexuality is as natural and good as heterosexuality, and I could go on.

To be a Christian nation, that society must have a solid Christian plausibility structure. Even the non-Christians need to buy into and fully accept a Christian view of reality. Today, without knowing it, most Christians adopt the secular plausibility structure of our dominant secular culture. How can they not! It’s everywhere, all pervasive, in every screen, coming through every message in our education, news, law, government, advertisements, all of it is indoctrinating us into the secular worldview, the secular plausibility structure that this is just the way things are, the way they’re supposed to be. Watch pretty much any TV show and movie, and God isn’t the enemy, for the most part, he’s just irrelevant, persona non grata, doesn’t much matter at all. Making God invisible and irrelevant to life is some of the most powerful indoctrination of all. In most screen entertainment, God or Jesus only shows up in some kind of expletive. Or take government schools, what we call “public schools,” where over 50 million kids go five days a week. They are an anti-Constitutional establishment of religion, the secular religion. The indoctrination is the same, all the more powerful because God is a non-entity.

So, what’s the answer to the suffocating secularism that inundates us at every point of our lives? How could the culture ever change and become once again a culture that affirms God and Christianity as the driving force of the nation? First, that has to be a goal and determined project of every Christian, but must start first in the pulpits and among Christian leaders who need to teach cultural transformation as a biblical imperative. When we look at the bleak cultural landscape, it might appear like we’re trying to leap over the Grand Canyon; even with a running start we’re not getting very far. But Peter tells us we have everything we need to make it to other side:

3 His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. (2 Peter 1:3, 4).

We immediately tend to read this as if it only applies to us personally, but it applies to nations as well because Jesus told us to teach them everything he commanded, and this comes directly from his word. Even as we plan and work and execute to the best of our abilities, the transformation of the culture as is the transformation of our lives, is a supernatural work of God. That’s why we pray as we work. What might that work look like?

The Culture Project
That was the name of a non-profit I started in 2008 after I realized that almost 20 years of conservative and Christian futility was because we had ignored the importance of culture in the transformation of our nation. We were so focused on politics figuring the culture would take care of itself. It most certainly will not! In the early days of my conservative political journey, which started with Reagan’s first election, I learned about conservative activist Mortan Blackwell who started an organization called The Leadership Institute. According to Wikipedia, its mission is to “increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists” and to “identify, train, recruit and place conservatives in politics, government, and media.” I believed we needed to do this for the culture because until we win back the culture, nothing is going to change. As the late great Andrew Breitbart said, “politics is downstream from culture.” I believe that is true, to a degree.

I’ve learned since my early realization about the importance of culture, that culture can also be downstream from politics. Law shapes culture as well as reflects it, so if Christians want a godly society, being involved in politics is not an option either. It is politicians who pass laws that we are compelled to live by, and righteous laws will only ultimately be passed by righteous people, by those who fear God and obey his word. I’ll just give one example. In the 1970s California passed the first no-fault divorce law, which communicated to Americans that getting out of a marriage is no big deal, just a choice among many other choices. Soon no-fault divorce was normal throughout America, which led to broken families, and the misery and suffering that comes along with those; lives ruined for convenience.

But without the culture long term political effectiveness, which means governance from a conservative and Christian perspective, is like trying to run on ice with tennis shoes; you won’t get very far, and the harder you run, the more futile the effort.

I had a vision of The Culture Project as a kind of recruiting and mentoring enterprise that would identify young Christians and conservatives, and help them make careers in what I called “the cultural influence professions.” These are obvious—Hollywood and entertainment, media and journalism, education, law, etc. It never went anywhere because I’m not Charlie Kirk, but it is in fact what has to happen if we’re to really push back against the relentless assault of secularism. We can’t create a Christian plausibility structure or ethos, a Christian culture, by complaining or wishing upon a star. It also won’t happen automatically if more people become Christians, as if that will somehow turn into Christian cultural influence. It requires intention, planning, and execution, or focus and a lot of work. Not to mention, determination, resilience, and grit. It won’t be easy because secularists won’t just roll over and embrace the Christian message. We’re also fighting Christian secularists and Pietists who think cultural transformation is a waste of time. To them, we just need to preach the gospel and wait for Jesus to return.

The biggest obstacle to cultural transformation is this Pietism of a personalized Christianity that doesn’t see cultural influence as a biblical imperative. Like I said, it has to start from the top, but unfortunately most church leaders are Pietists, and Christianity for them is primarily personal not societal. Over the decades I’ve heard many prayers for cultural and political change, but few calls for Christians to actually do something about that. If we’re to obey Christ’s Great Commission mandate, we have to change it from being just about leading individuals to Christ and discipling them, to discipling entire nations, and teaching nations to obey everything he commanded.