Uninvented and the Unlikely Apostle Paul

Uninvented and the Unlikely Apostle Paul

Jun 24, 2026 | Apologetics, Parents and Family

I wrote my book Uninvented because as I studied apologetics, the defense of the Christian faith, I consistently came across the argument that the Bible and the stories contained therein could not have been made up, were not mere human fiction as critics have insisted for several hundred years. The Apostle Paul is a powerful piece of the argument.

The Apostle Paul is probably the most influential figure in all human history (without Paul no one may have ever heard of Jesus). While some radical skeptics don’t even believe Jesus existed, nobody, not one historian or scholar would ever claim Paul did not exist. For an ancient, Paul was a voluminous writer, and ancient writers are much harder to dismiss. What we find in our New Testament is probably a small portion of his actual letters. The question isn’t whether the Apostle Paul existed, but most troubling for the skeptic is the question: how did Saul become Paul? Paul’s conversion is difficult for the skeptic to explain away. I once heard someone say how unlikely his conversion would have been. Not unlikely as in, wow, that’s surprising, but . . . . that just can’t be! He gave a couple examples of equally unlikely conversions. Imagine Winston Churchill becoming a Marxist. Or Hitler becoming a Jew. The Hebrew Pharisee Saul becoming the Christian Apostle Paul is every bit as inconceivable.

Paul’s conversion is the primary thing skeptics must explain away. For them, Jesus couldn’t have appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus because, well, Jesus was dead, and dead people don’t come back to life. Therefore, Jesus couldn’t appear to Saul, as he was then named. See how this works? But the radical conversion of Paul is one of the most well-attested facts of the ancient world, and nobody denies it, so it must be explained. Only the supernatural elements need to be, for the skeptic, explained away. I haven’t done any in depth study of those who engage in such anti-supernatural arguments for Paul’s conversion, but I’m confident they’d be even less persuasive than the anti-supernatural arguments for the empty tomb and the subsequent growth of the church. The only real option explaining away Paul’s conversion is psychological (Paul thought he saw the risen Jesus), and then engage in some Freudian or Jungian analysis of his upbringing and mental state, and heap conjecture upon conjecture. Or maybe they should just believe Paul’s own testimony (Gal. 1):

11 I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. 12 I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

13 For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. 14 I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers. 15 But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased 16 to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. 17 I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.

18 Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. 19 I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother. 20 I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie.

Galatians is one of Paul’s “undisputed” letters, meaning scholars of even the most skeptical stripe are convinced Paul wrote it. Thus, we have a choice: either what Paul says here is true, and we believe his assurance, or he is lying. Those anti-supernaturalists, though, insist there is a third option. While Paul obviously didn’t see Jesus on that road, he wasn’t in fact lying because he thinks he is telling the truth. That whole “road to Damascus” experience only happened in his head, maybe with some natural explanation for bright lights and such, but Paul really, really thought he saw Jesus, thus he wasn’t lying.

The problem with this anti-supernaturalist reading is the historical record. The only reason we know this happened on a road to Damascus is because Luke records the event in Acts 9, and as a companion of Paul on his missionary journeys Luke likely got the story from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. We know he was a close brother and friend of Paul because they spent a lot of time together, as we learn from what are called the “we passages” in Acts where Luke moves from describing events in the third person, to the first person. For example, in Acts 16:10-17 Luke writes, “After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” Paul also says of Luke in his letters that he was “the beloved physician” (Col. 4:14). He tells Timothy when he was in Rome, “Only Luke is with me” (1 Tim. 4:11). He also calls Luke one of his “fellow workers” (Phil. 1:24). Luke knew Paul as well as anyone, and there is nothing about what happened on the road to Damascus to suggest it was merely a psychological event in Paul’s brain. Here is how Luke describes what proved to be the greatest inflection point in human history (Acts 9):

Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest 2 and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. 3 As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

5 “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. 6 “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”

7 The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. 8 Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. 9 For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything.

We’ll discuss the Saul of “murderous threats” below, but we’re again confronted with the perpetual question any Bible reader must answer: Is this historical? Did it happen, or not? The writers of the gospels, including Luke, were clearly attempting to write history. Without a question begging anti-supernatural bias, we are free to assess the evidence of the text itself, and not read our prejudice into it. With bias, we must conclude it’s made up. Without bias it is straightforward history of a supernatural event. It was also not Paul alone having the experience, but several others witnessed it. Something happened, and it happened instantly. In Damascus, the Lord appeared to a man named Ananias, and he told him to go and lay his hands on Saul to restore his sight. Ananias’ reply reflects the Saul everyone knew about, and the one they were expecting:

13 “Lord,” Ananias answered, “I have heard many reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. 14 And he has come here with authority from the chief priests to arrest all who call on your name.”

After being rebuked by the Lord for questioning him, Ananias goes to see Saul, and his sight is restored. It is difficult to explain what happened next unless it really happened:

Saul spent several days with the disciples in Damascus. 20 At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. 21 All those who heard him were astonished and asked, “Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name? And hasn’t he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?” 22 Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.

It would be like being in a worship service at a Jewish synagogue in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s and seeing Adolf Hitler come waltzing in wearing a prayer shawl and yarmulke. There would be a lot of cases of severe whiplash. To see and hear Paul preaching about Jesus as the Messiah mere days after getting to Damascus was every bit as shocking as Hitler embracing Judaism. A mere hallucination can’t explain it. And nobody could make it up because it was Paul’s declaration of his conversion for the rest of his life. How best to explain it? God!

A Hebrew of Hebrews and Mission to the Gentiles
As for the “murderous threats,” the conversion of Saul is most plausibly explained by it happening exactly as Luke describes it. The reason is found in why he was so rabidly anti-Christian. Saul’s parents obviously had big plans for the young man, and he was sent from his hometown of Tarsus to Jerusalem to study under one of the great Rabbis of the day, Gamaliel. Known as something of a moderate, his pupil Saul most certainly would not be. Steeped in Judaism, it defined everything about him. In Paul’s own words we see him recount his Jewish bona fides in Philippians 3 and Acts 22. In the latter he then goes into detail about his conversion experience and encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. I imagine Paul recounted his coming face to face with the risen Jesus many times during his life, and every time he believed it was real. The only plausible explanation for his life and influence on world history is that his   encounter with Jesus was indeed real, not a figment of his imagination.

What is every bit as radical and unexpected as Paul’s conversion was his teaching and missionary obsession. The reason for the latter was the former. Until Paul, religion had never been considered universal in scope. The Jews should have known better because God’s promise to Abraham was that through him, and thus Israel, all the nations of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 12). The Lord gave them an important hint through Isaiah (42:6, 49:6) when He said Israel would be “a light to the Gentiles.” By the time of Jesus, however, Jews wouldn’t even eat with Gentiles, let alone be a light and blessing to them. For the pagans it was the same but for quite different reasons. Martin Goodman explains why in Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations:

The sense of mission set Christians apart from other religious groups, including Jews, in the early Roman empire. The notion that it is desirable for existing enthusiasts to encourage outsiders to worship the god to whom they are devoted was not obvious in the ancient world. . . . On the contrary, it was common for pagans to take pride in the local nature of their religious lives, establishing a special relationship between themselves and the god of a family or place, without wishing, let alone expecting, others to join in worshiping the same god. Christians in the first generation were different, espousing a proselytizing mission which was a shocking novelty in the ancient world. Only familiarity makes us fail to appreciate the extraordinary ambition of Paul, who seems to have invented the notion of a systematic conversion of the whole world, area by geographical area.

Spoken like a true question begging anti-supernaturalist! We’re supposed to believe Paul “invented” this notion of converting the entire world all by himself? He made it up because of some non-supernatural “experience” as he was going to persecute the followers of “the Way”? Then he immediately starts proclaiming the message of those he was supposed to be persecuting? Not only that, but in doing so he goes against every cultural instinct of literally every single person in the world, Jew and pagan alike, including fellow followers of “the Way”? Somehow, he comes up with the notion out of nowhere that every person in the world needs to believe this? I don’t think so. A better, more believable, and plausible explanation is God!

The God ordained nature of Paul’s mission becomes more apparent when we understand the dynamic of the early Jewish church, and the intense struggle he had moving outside the bounds of Judaism. We see this played out in Acts and described by Paul in his epistles as he confronts the Judaizers. It’s difficult to imagine what would motivate Paul to invent an idea so against the religious expectations of the entire world without divine intervention. There are plenty of other examples of why it was so difficult for Paul to take the gospel beyond Judaism, both in Jerusalem with the other Apostles and on his missionary journeys. For the latter as he was speaking to Jews and they rejected the message, he told them he was going to the Gentiles and it made them furious.

On the Pagan side of the equation, what Paul was doing was equally as disturbing to them as it was to the Jews. Syncretism was the religion of the ancient pagan world, and to require someone to give up every allegiance for just one God or one religion was unheard of at the time, and deeply unpopular. Even though Jews rejected such Syncretism, they never had a vision or mission to turn all pagans into Jews. Christianity for Paul was world conquering or nothing, and Paul doesn’t invent that all by himself.

There is also the issue of Paul’s world transforming teaching which I can’t get into in any depth here, but will briefly mention broad areas of Paul’s teaching that radically contrast with his Jewish upbringing, and Jewish teaching of the time. These like his missionary zeal could never have been invented by Paul himself, or what would become the Pauline theology of Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, etc. It had to be revealed to him. The Messiah of Jewish expectation was not a sin-bearing redeemer who would be punished for the sins of his people. There is not even a trace of such an idea in pre-Christian Jewish literature. Where, then, would Paul have come up with such an idea if not in the Judaism he was raised and immersed in? It is not there. Another area of Paul’s teaching that was mind blowing and incomprehensible to Jew and Gentile alike is found throughout his letters, and can be summarized in these words from Galatians 3:28:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

The implications of this verse turned every cultural assumption of every person in the ancient world upside down and inside out. It would have been positively ludicrous to even say such a thing at the time, let alone believe and try to live it. Yet, there was Paul teaching it throughout the Roman empire as the logical conclusion of God redeeming his people in Christ and saving them from their sin. It was so radical at that it can plausibly be argued no one at the time could have invented it on their own, and it was only that it was in fact true, and revealed, that it eventually transformed the world.

 

Tim Allen, the Hollowness of Philosophy, and the Consideration of the Alternative

Tim Allen, the Hollowness of Philosophy, and the Consideration of the Alternative

Apr 29, 2026 | Apologetics, Parents and Family

The great comedian Tim Allen, Buzz Lightyear himself, sat down with fellow comedian Bill Maher for a long conversation about their careers, and at one point discussed the credibility of Christianity. Maher’s at best an agnostic, but Allen clearly believes in God, and has struggled for years to get to the truth about the nature of things. I didn’t realize what a deep thinker he is. He wrestles seriously with the ultimate questions of life, and won’t settle for facile answers. It’s a real battle for him, and at times not coming up with answers has made him depressed. He’s a genuine seeker.

At one point in their conversation he brings up the Apostle Paul’s journey to his belief about the story of Jesus being true, and Allen is trying to wrap his mind around it all. Part of what prompted his thoughts was a trip to Israel to where it all happened, and he’s blown away that the gospels are actual history, that those things really happened in space and time. While he’s clearly not fully embraced the Christian faith, he’s also clearly compelled by it. What his thinking reveals to me is someone who intuitively understands something that cannot be denied, that we have to believe something, and it happens to be one of my favorite apologetics perspectives about realizing Christianity is true, which we’ll explore below.

His almost testimony reminds me of the actual testimony of Vishal Mangalwadi he shared in a wonderful conversation he had a few years back with Jordan Peterson. He’s Indian, the land of the Hindus, but he became a Christian in high school, and then rejected it in college because the very smart professors he encountered said it was basically hogwash. After he’d gotten out of college as a skeptic, his sister talked him into reading the Bible. His entire experience of coming to Christ was through multiple readings of the Old Testament, especially the historical books about Israel. Every time he read it he came to a different conclusion about what the nature of the Bible is and what it could mean. Eventually he saw the genius in it, the story of Isreal and their God, that could only be explained by being true revelation from God. He realized one of two things about the Bible must be true. Either it’s what it claims to be, the revelation of God to man, or it is a product of man, primarily stories of human fiction.

If it’s the latter he concluded there is no such thing as truth, and Christianity is the same as all the philosophies and other religions he studied, just fruitless searches for meaning in a meaningless universe. He and Allen both realized that without God’s revelation the very possibility of truth and knowing anything about the nature of reality is impossible. That’s why Allen was depressed and despairing over ever really knowing what life’s about. As Leon Morris said in his book, I Believe in Revelation:

[T]he view that what matters ultimately is what appeals to the individual’s experience or reason is a profoundly pessimistic view. It means that we have nothing from which to correct our errors, no way of knowing what is true or false once we have accepted an idea. If man’s mind is the measure of things there is no way of getting back to the right way once that mind has gone off the wrong track.

Both Mangalwadi and Allen knew this in their bones, and that the revelation of God in the Bible is the only answer to man’s dilemma, which which leads us to one of my favorite apologetics tools.

The Consideration of the Alternative
Simply put, if we don’t believe one thing, we must believe another. There is no in between where we get out of having faith, of deciding if one thing is true then everything else is not. As Geddy Lee sings on Rush’s Free Will, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Exactly. If Vishal had decided the Bible was not God’s revelation, then he was saying it’s a product of man. It’s either/or, one or the other. There are many scholars in the history of biblical criticism who didn’t get this. They claimed God spoke through some of what we read in Scripture, not all of it, and lo and behold, they were the ones who decided which Scripture was which! Convenient, that, and completely arbitrary.

Being deep philosophical thinkers, both Allen and Mangalwadi realized something most people never do. They intuitively grasped that if there is no God there is no truth. This is an undeniable fact of existence that the entirety of atheistic Enlightenment rationalism missed. All these atheists just assumed truth exists while denying God who is the Truth exists, and thus the ground of all truth. You can’t get truth from dirt because if all we are is lucky dirt, then you can only get, well, dirt! Atheistic materialism posits all that exists is matter; there is nothing beyond matter, no transcendent or spiritual reality beyond the material. Logically that means any moral assessment of reality, like goodness, beauty, and truth can only be mere preference, what each person prefers, like flavors in ice cream, or taste in music or food. There is simply no way around that conundrum for the atheist. Over the years I’ve marveled reading atheistic thinkers like Marx or Nietzsche or Freud, and how it never seems to occur to them that their atheism is problematic when it comes to their assessment of things being true or not.

Which brings us to another issue in the consideration of the alternative, the burden of proof. Once we realize, or accept, that if one thing is not true something else must be, the burden of proof shifts from only one side of the equation to both. Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud never thought, even for a second, that they had to prove or justify their belief in a God-less universe. To them it was as axiomatic as water flows downhill, just the nature of things. For most atheists, reality needs no explanation; it’s just brute fact. There is no why or justification behind good or evil, truth or lies, beauty or ugliness; they just are. They, however, were wrong because without God there can be no transcendent standard for what is morally right or wrong, or for what is true or not, or if beauty or ugliness even exist. All things become inclined to the tyranny of personal preference, or tyrannical preference on a societal level. So, in Hitler’s Germany, or Mao’s China, or Stalin’s Russia, genocidal murder of tens of millions of people was for them legal and morally justified. And if there is no God who’s to say it wasn’t?

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis’s first section is on “right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe.” People, he says, will quarrel about one thing or another, and each appeals to a standard that assumes something beyond their own preferences. As he says about people making claims of fairness:

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: ‘To hell with your standard.’ Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it.

In other words, people without being taught it know that some objective standard exists to which each person can appeal, regardless of what they personally believe. In fact, we can only know what a crooked line is because we know it is not straight, and that the straight line exists. This puts the atheist in the unenviable position of trying to argue for a standard he claims doesn’t even exist. All he can ultimate says is, I don’t like it!

This means we must never accept the burden of proof double standard placed upon us by the materialist atheist. As I often say, there is no such thing as an unbeliever—all people live by faith. This applies to any counter claim to Christianity’s truth claims. For example, when the skeptic says the Bible is myth or fairy tale, made up stories, he has to provide evidence that is the case. Just saying it doesn’t make it so. Since the beginning of biblical criticism going all the way back to Spinoza in the 17th century, critics have just blithely assumed the Bible could easily be made up, that obviously the default assumption should be that for the most part it’s merely human fiction. We must challenge that assumption and force them to provide evidence beyond their blatant anti-supernatural bias. For example, I made the argument in my book Uninvented that nobody could make up a Jewish Messiah like Jesus, and laid out extensive arguments why. Now let the skeptic make counter arguments. They can’t because there are none!

What Are the Alternatives to Christianity? If we go to the big picture when we look for an explanation of reality we might think there are many alternatives vying for our allegiance. The skeptic will tell us there are thousands of religions all claiming to be the one true path to God or whatever is ultimate, but that’s not true. All religions basically accept Jesus in some form, as I say, everyone wants a piece of Jesus. But only Jesus makes the completely exclusive truth claim that he is “the way, the truth, and the life,” and that “no one comes to the Father except through” him. When you get down to it, there are only three ultimate options: theism, atheism, or pantheism. Two of these alternatives are impersonal. Atheism is material, therefore not personal. Pantheism is spiritual, but not personal. In a world filled with persons and personalities, these are not credible. Only theism is spiritual and personal. And of the great theistic religions, only Christianity because of the Trinity is truly personal. It is no coincidence that the world created by the Triune God is inhabited by persons.

Whenever I am tempted to doubt, for what psychologically healthy person doesn’t doubt at times, I consider the alternatives. There is no other plausible explanation, no other religion, or worldview, that has close to the explanatory power of Christianity, and we’ve only scratched the surface in this section.

The Power of Explanatory Power
If you haven’t heard this phrase before, it’s something you’ll want to become familiar with. The term comes from the Philosophy of science, and means what “provides a better explanation” for X, Y, or Z. For example, is a Creator or chance a better explanation for the bumble bee? In science it often comes down to probability, or what the likelihood is of one thing being the case versus another. 

Explanatory power is associated with something called abductive logic. “Abduction or, as it is also often called, Inference to the Best Explanation, is a type of inference that assigns special status to explanatory considerations.” Douglas Groothuis in his book Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism, gives us some real‑world examples of the practical power of abductive reasoning:

This kind of argument is often used in . . . courts of law. In court cases, various kinds of evidence are arrayed in support of a judgment concerning the guilt or innocence of the party on trial. One accused of larceny must give a better explanation of his whereabouts during the crime in question than does the prosecutor. If this kind of reasoning is common, useful and acceptable in other contexts, its use in the philosophy of religion should not be excluded.

C.S. Lewis put this concept best as he normally does. In a talk given on, “Is Theology Poetry?” he said the following with poetic simplicity:

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

Light always does this. Lewis’s sun metaphor is illuminating, pun intended, because the Christian worldview sheds light on everything. Light is a common biblical metaphor. Unfortunately, light is so common and easily produced in the modern world that we take for granted what a powerful function it plays in our lives. Think about it: light lets us see what’s actually there, even though we all have different perceptions of things. For example, when you turn on the lights chances are you will not run into the couch. Instead of sitting on nothing and falling on your behind, you can just go sit in the chair. Notice when the lights are on, you also have depth perception; three‑D is so much more impressive in reality than on a movie screen. When the lights go on, you can see color. All of a sudden, everything is defined!

The Apostle John tells us about Jesus, that

4 In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome (or understood) it. . . . . 9 The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 

John’s claim is that Jesus is the one who allows us to see reality as it actually is! As we get to know Jesus and his word and his world, we will bump into fewer chairs. We’ll stop running into things we can’t see and stop trying to convince ourselves, and others, that there really was nothing there after all. Why do you think it is that psychotherapists do such bang‑up business, especially among the rich and famous, and increasingly among the young and not so famous? Their clients are confused! (There are over half a million “mental health professionals” practicing in the US.) If you lived in spiritual darkness you would be confused too, running into walls and couches, wondering if this thing you’re feeling is the door to the garage or the bathroom. It would be so much easier if someone would just turn on the damned lights! God has, in Christ!

That is explanatory power. Lewis gives us an example of how explanatory power works. He beautifully contrasts Christianity as an explanatory framework with what he calls the “scientific point of view,” or swallowing “the scientific cosmology as a whole.” This view assumes reality is solely material, and it provides zero explanatory power:

If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio‑chemistry, and bio‑chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test.

For former atheist Lewis, the question is which cosmology, or what account of why things exist, best explains what actually exists.

The West has been indoctrinated into a secular, basically materialist cosmology; it is assumed everywhere we go, in everything we see or hear. A perfectly innocuous example comes from a golf tournament I watched on TV. The first PGA tournament of the year is always in Hawaii, and they were broadcasting the beauty and grandeur of the islands. The commentators, watching a large gray whale frolicking in the sea, remarked how beautiful this magnificent creature is, how majestic and awesome a sight. However, what they couldn’t say was how incredible and awesome must be the God who created that whale—the God who thought up the concept of a whale in the first place, and water, and oceans, and gravity, and an earth and moon, and human beings who could be blown away by the experience of it! A professional announcer today wouldn’t think of injecting “religion” into such an environment. As my family will attest, at times like that I yell at the TV and say something like, “What about the God who created it!”

It is this God, the Creator of all things, the Triune God of Scripture, and of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior that will finally put all the puzzle pieces into a big beautiful coherent picture for Tim Allen. Let’s pray for him that he makes it all the way to finding what he’s always been looking for.

“The Universe” and the Demise of Secularism

“The Universe” and the Demise of Secularism

Apr 15, 2026 | Apologetics, Parents and Family

One of the many evidences secularism is dying is a phrase you’ll hear in popular culture, most often in TV shows and movies: “The Universe.” As in, “The Universe” is telling me something, or telling me not to do this or that. It’s funny how an impersonal material force can somehow communicate meaningful messages to persons. The reason people attribute power and will and intelligence to mere matter is because atheistic materialism, and it’s offspring, secularism, for all intents and purposes is dead, especially among the youngest generation.

Having been a consumer of popular culture all my life, this is something new, but it doesn’t surprise me. Secularism as the dominant societal ethos in the West has proved itself vacuous and unable to speak to the deepest needs of the human heart. As it developed and became dominant in the 20th century, God increasingly became persona non grata, merely a personal option among an infinite variety of options to find meaning in life. It hasn’t quite worked out like it was planned.

Where we are in this dying age of secularism reminds me of the beginning of Charles Dickens’ iconic work, A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859 and set during the French Revolution of the 1790s. It could very well describe our own time:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Until, that is, the blood flowed and heads came off at the behest of the merciful Madame la Guillotine. We’ll remember that period became known as “the Reign of Terror.” The secular reign of terror isn’t so bloody, but its promises are just as hollow as the revolutionaries who brought so much misery and suffering to France. Secularism is dead. It has been weighed on the scales and found wanting, yet its cheerleaders still believe it’s our only hope for societal flourishing. Looking at a little history will help us understand why.

Secularism and the Societal Myth of Neutrality
Secularism does its damage on a personal and societal level. Initially it was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” space, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence. Unfortunately, most Christians still believe in this myth, thus the hysteria over “Christian nationalism.”

Secular understood classically in the medieval world prior to the Enlightenment simply meant the mundane as opposed to the sacred. The Reformation rightly critiqued this dichotomy between the secular and the sacred as unbiblical, but the rationalism of Enlightenment thinkers ended up affirming the same dichotomy, only now religion ended up becoming dangerous to social harmony. As Christianity’s influence waned in Western civilization, secularism came to dominate the public square as a force hostile to Christianity, and in due course became the dominant worldview of the West. The hostility is expressed in manifold ways throughout government and every area of culture. We saw this played out in America in the autopen presidency of Joe Biden, and are currently seeing it play out throughout secular Western Europe.

It is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. And make no mistake, secularism on a societal level will always and everywhere lead to tyranny. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After almost 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point; its true nature can no longer be hidden by empty promises. Their description of secularism is helpful:

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

I could not agree more. The so called “secularization thesis,” that as science and knowledge progress religion will eventually disappear, has been completely discredited. The world is arguably more religious than ever, even if the West is less so. The authors further state the obvious:

The impact of secularism . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics. . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

I could not agree with this more as well, the consequences becoming clearer with every passing year. Only Christianity gives us the true basis of liberty, as America’s founders knew full well.

Secularism and the Personal Myth of Neutrality: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Secularism on a societal level assumes the myth of neutrality on a personal level as well; one feeds the other. It’s ubiquitous and easy to spot, but I’ll use one example to make the point, a piece from the 2011 print edition of The New Yorker Magazine called, “Is That All There Is? Secularism and its discontents.” Author James Wood, a committed secularist, admits secularism has its problems, but not enough for him to discard it.

As a secularist, Wood clearly considers himself not “religious,” and therefore believes he is neutral regarding ultimate issues. Since he believes he isn’t “religious,” he also believes he doesn’t need faith. The secularist’s definition of faith is, however, fallacious and biased, something along the lines of what Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, declared: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Faith in this view is basically wishful thinking, and not “scientific,” as if science could answer metaphysical questions of meaning; it can’t. That would be known as a category error. Science and philosophy do different things and address different issues, and most secularists are terrible philosophers. The bias is specifically anti-supernatural because secularists are naturalists or materialists, i.e., they believe the material is all there is. They are, however, every bit as “religious” as the religious.

In other words, the un-believer doesn’t exist. One of my pet peeves is referring to certain people as believers and others as unbelievers. The word believer is biblical, but it’s a word we need to retire in our secular age. Using it allows the “unbeliever,” the secularist, the false impression they don’t have faith just like every “believer.” All human beings by the nature of their finite created existence are believers and live by faith; the issue is what or who they believe in. In the apologetics task against secularism, Christians must learn to refer to people either as Christians or non-Christians, not believers and unbelievers.

Throughout the article Wood contrasts religious “believers” with atheists, and at one point refers to “Both atheists and believers . . .” Ergo, atheists don’t have to believe anything! It’s almost comical how ridiculous the contrast it. Without the slightest evidence atheists believe all material reality basically created itself, everything came from nothing for no reason at all. Talk about a leap of faith! Wood might even say he doesn’t need the “crutch” of faith like many atheists, but atheism and secularism are their own rickety crutch. You’ll see throughout his piece something else secularists are especially good at, begging the question, a logical fallacy meaning to assume the premise as the conclusion, a form of circular reasoning. A great example of this is early in the piece when he lays his cards on the table claiming, “God is dead, and cannot be reimposed on existence.” The bald assertion is never defended, just asserted, as if it need not be defended; but it is a statement of faith. We must question the unexamined assumptions of the secularist and secularism wherever they rear their ugly head.

C.S. Lewis said something that underlies the impossibility of neutrality in the Christian understanding of reality:

There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.

In other words, there is a spiritual war being waged on the vast plane of reality, and only one side wins.

Making the Secular Plausible: Epic Fail
The reason “the universe” is showing up in popular culture as a character directing the lives of people in some way is because secularism is no longer as plausible as it once was. The sociological concept of plausibility structures is helpful for us to understand what is going on, to get the big picture.

All societies and cultures have a structure of the plausible, all those things in the culture, entertainment, law, media, education, family, religion, etc., that make reality seem real and natural and normal to us—just the way things are. The truth of the seeming is irrelevant. What is plausible is what makes the worldview of a people, how they understand who and why they are, and people in the West inhabit a secular plausibility structure. God for them is for the most part irrelevant.

Since we’re talking about popular culture, the indoctrination into secularism, both personally and societally is insidious. Watch almost any TV show or movie, and God is invisible, unless used as some kind of curse. Treating God as if he’s irrelevant is far more effective in secularizing people than your typical atheist talking points, and we’re all more susceptible to the lies and illusions of a secular view of reality because of it. An irrelevant God is the secular cultural air we breathe, and the dominant cultural messaging, which is why the personal and societal effects of secularism are ubiquitous and profound.

James K.A. Smith in his book summarizing the magisterial tome of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, entitled his book, How (Not) to be Secular. He has numerous helpful insights into the nature of secularism. In speaking of plausibility, he mentions Taylor’s “conditions of belief,” saying there was “a shift in the plausibility conditions that make something believable or unbelievable.” It’s not so much what people believe, as what is believable. These are reflected in “the default assumptions” of a people, ideas unexamined and taken for granted by everyone, and thus most secular people don’t think they assume anything at all! Commenting on the “conditions of belief,” Smith gives us a helpful perspective on the implications for faith:

Taylor not only explains unbelief in a secular age; he also emphasizes that even belief is changed in our secular age. There are still believers who believe the same things as their forebearers 1,500 years ago; but how we believe has changed. Thus faith communities need to ask: How does this change in the “conditions” of belief impact the way we proclaim and teach the faith? How does this impact faith formation? How should this change the propagation of the faith for the next generation?

Even though Smith makes my previous point referring to believers when the whole paragraph is about belief, he does say later, “[I]t’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise.” And in this sense, everyone is a believer.

In simplest terms, secularism means “no God.” It doesn’t necessitate atheistic materialism, although all atheists are secularists. The vast majority of people believe God exists, but He has no practical relevance to their lives because all that matters is flourishing in this world. The dominant secular faith is called moralistic therapeutic Deism (MTD), meaning God’s there, He wants us all to be nice, and the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. If we get in a pickle, then we’ll bring God into the picture, otherwise not so much. Finally, this MTD faith believes good people go to heaven when they die.

This God is no threat to secularism because it is a religion of secularism. What’s important is the here and now. Why worry about all that stuff we really can’t know and everyone disagrees about anyway. Thus God’s invisibility in popular culture. The problem with this shallow secular religion is that people know it doesn’t meet their deepest emotional and psychological needs for meaning, hope, and purpose in life. It’s based on nothing but wishful thinking, nothing solid, nothing real, like soap bubbles, as soon as you catch them, there’s nothing there. It’s just preference as worldview, which is why an increasing number of people in the West are turning back to faith in God, to Christianity, the only true, solid, and real thing in this world and the next. Is it another Great Awakening? We’ll see, but it is an epic fail for secularism.

The reason it is epic is that it started somewhere in the 17th century with rationalism, and then developed over the next 300 to 400 years, eventually displacing Christianity as the dominant faith in the West. All the cultural elites believed we could order a prosperous and flourishing society without any reference to God. It’s obvious by this point that isn’t true. The 20th century was the bloodiest in the history of the world by far, and the 21st isn’t starting out much better. We’re the most prosperous societies the word has ever seen, and people are miserable. The universe won’t save us; only God in Christ can, he who died for our sin, and rose again to conquer death that we might live with Him forever.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Developing an Attitude of Gratitude and the Atheist Dilemma

Developing an Attitude of Gratitude and the Atheist Dilemma

Dec 24, 2025 | Apologetics

I recently saw an article that attracted me because of the title, “The Ingratitude of the Well-Fed.” The author, Maarten Boudry, explains what the piece is about in the subtitle: “We need to cultivate an appreciation for the abundance that modernity has bestowed instead of taking it for granted.” We have no idea just how much we take for granted. Unfortunately, the article is now behind a paywall on the Quilette.com site, but the first couple of paragraphs give us the basic idea of the author’s perspective. Here’s the first one:

In my June essay “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers,” I examined the curious phenomenon of anti-Western self-loathing as a supply-side effect. People everywhere like to complain about their life (the demand side), but only free societies offer abundant opportunities to do so with impunity (the supply side). As a result of this asymmetry, free societies become victims of their own success, subject to relentless self-criticism in a way that unfree societies largely are not.

This is primarily an affliction of the left which drinks deeply from the lies of Rousseau and Marx, but a lack of gratitude is a sinful human predilection, and not just for we modern people. My only disappointment with the piece was when Boudry said he’s an atheist. I really didn’t think they existed anymore, but apparently they do, and we’ll discuss that below related to gratitude. But I was inspired by what this atheist wrote to do some reflection on gratitude, and the importance of it for Christians.

Count Your Blessings One by One
This is the title of a hymn from the 19th century, and the chorus says:

Count your blessings, name them one by one;
Count your blessings, see what God hath done;

I’ve often thought over the years if I actually did this it could take days. The blessings God has bestowed on us in the time in which we live are innumerable, not to mention all the non-material and spiritual blessings. As Paul says in Ephesians 1:

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

Paul also quotes a version of Isaiah 64:4 in I Corinthians 2, and I love it in the King James Version:

9 But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

The verse in Isaiah says our God “who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.” This includes material as well as spiritual and familial blessings, but let’s focus on the material for a moment.

The reason we take for granted the blessings of living in the modern world is our ignorance of history, and how horribly difficult life was for people, from paupers to kings, prior to the 20th century. Recorded history goes back approximately 5,000 years, and for about 4,900 of those years, death, disease, and starvation were a common feature of life. Just staying alive was a challenge. Clean water and basic sanitation were something nobody took for granted because they were so rare—we think it’s our birthright. Cheap filtered water is available to us whenever we want it, and indoor plumbing is everywhere. For all of those 4,900 years people just couldn’t flush human waste away. Disease was often rampant because of it.

Child birth was perilous, both for the woman and the child, and children making into adulthood was something people hoped for, but didn’t count on. It always amazes me that people had children before the 20th century. God made the sex drive so powerful that despite all the risks, people kept having them. Diseases that are easily cured today with antibiotics and medical intervention, killed people. Plagues and famine were common. If someone had a toothache, they either got it pulled or died. One could go on, but we have no idea just how easy we have it. Are we grateful? Given our sinful nature, we have to teach ourselves not to complain and be grateful; that shouldn’t be difficult, but often it is.

Even in the 20th century the abundance to be found in America and the West was inconceivable to most people in the world. Boudry’s article has a picture of Boris Yeltsin visiting a grocery store in 1989 prior to the fall of the Soviet Union. I remember that, and how the news was filled with stories about how blown away he was by the cornucopia of affordable goods available to all Americans. Grocery stores and modern food production, even as we complain about processed food, is a miracle. Like Yeltsin’s experience implies, people were amazed by it in the 20th century. I worked at a small college in Pennsylvania in the early 90s, and some students from Africa visited for a semester. Going to a grocery store for the first time was beyond their comprehension. They had a hard time believing it was real. We don’t have to grow our own fruits and vegetables, kill and prepare animals to eat, milk the cows, or bake the bread. We go to the store, put it in the cart, complain about inflation, go home and cook it on our gas or electric stove, and keep the rest in a refrigerator or freezer. We can now even have it all delivered to our door for a pittance. Thank you, God!

And it’s amazing what’s happened since I grew up in the 60s and 70s. Back then there was something called the Club for Rome, a think tank established in Rome in 1968. They published a report in 1972 called, “The Limits to Growth,” and it “warned of potential global collapse in the 21st century if growth trends continued unchecked.” This pessimistic assessment assumed a Malthusian perspective, (from 19th century British cleric Thomas Malthus), that we live in a world of finite resources, and the more of us there are, the less there will be for everybody. They and others predicted mass starvation as early as the 1980s. In fact, because we live in a world God created to sustain His creatures, the more the merrier! Poverty and starvation have declined dramatically since the 1980s exactly because of economic growth and increased population. Yet leftists still condemn both, while we give thanks. Now instead of overpopulation being a threat, the problem is not enough children being born!

If you want to cultivate more of an attitude of gratitude, a great practice is to teach yourself to be amazed at common, every day features of life (and if you have children, teach them to be too!). A few years ago, for example, I was visiting my sister and her husband and had taken a shower. I walked downstairs and exclaimed to them: You won’t believe this, but I turned these knobs, and hot water came out of the wall! Can you believe it! They rolled their eyes. Open a refrigerator or freezer, and be amazed. Flip on a light switch, marvel. Turn on your computer or phone, and the Library of Alexandria or of Congress can’t match it. I am surrounded by books in my office, and not only are they affordable and widely available, but I can read them! Most people prior to the 19th century were illiterate. And I have my very own Bible! Something unheard of until the late 19th and 20th centuries. Take a plane, train, or automobile and zip to the other side of town or the state or country, and be astounded. One could go on, but you get the idea.

Lastly, Hollywood. We watch movies or TV shows set in the past, and things don’t seem all that bad. Production designers do an incredible job, and we think we’re getting a real picture of how life was hundreds or thousands of years ago, but we’re not. As good a job as Hollywood does, nothing can capture just how perilous and fragile life was in the past. Remember, count your blessings, name them one by one . . .

The Theological Grounding for Gratitude
The basis of all true gratitude is in God, the theos in theology, the study of God. Without a personal, sovereign, Creator, and Savior God to whom to be grateful, gratitude can only be a fraction of what it was intended to be. The author of our piece as an atheist can only argue for gratitude on a pragmatic level. It’s better if you are grateful for the benefits of modern life, so be grateful. The atheist, and agnostic for that matter, can be grateful to other people for their role in providing those benefits, but being grateful to a divine benefactor who makes it all possible in the first place is what we were created for. Not to mention the truth that God and not random acts of chance are responsible for all of it. In a sly mocking of atheist pretensions while my kids were growing up, when we would see something amazing, like a beautiful sunset or full moon I would exclaim, praise chance! One has to be educated into atheism because even to a child the created world appears to be, well, created!

One of my family prayers as my kids were growing up was asking God to give us hearts of gratitude. I did this because I know how inclined we are to complain and see the negative. I know this had some traction with them when I’ve heard my daughter, who now has her own growing little family, pray for hearts of gratitude. I also taught them how being thankful, even for the tough things in life, keeps us from falling into self-pity and seeing ourselves as victims. Those two emotions are evil because they reflect a lack of trust in God. In fact, they turn our circumstances into God, as if they were sovereign and He is not. Paul addresses exactly this in I Thessalonians 5:

18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

This was Paul being even more direct than usual. Complaining in any manner, even if it’s just annoyance or frustration (a major challenge for me), is sin. So, I give thanks a lot because I’m so tempted to “trust” my circumstances. My morning prayers always start with repentance and giving thanks, and I try to practice thanksgiving throughout the day, especially when I don’t feel like it. Another verse from Paul is especially challenging in a fallen world living among fallen people in a fallen body, Romans 8:28:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

I would joke with our kids that Paul couldn’t possibly mean all. Maybe 98%? Nope, all. And notice how Paul prefaces it with, “And we know,” not speculate, hope, but know. We can be certain God will somehow, in some way, use it all, everything and every moment of our lives, for our ultimate good and His glory. It is on this foundation upon which we can obey Paul’s injunction to give thanks in all circumstances, knowing our sovereign Creator God who made us and died for us has our back, always.

Another way to theologically ground gratitude is looking at one of its synonyms, appreciation. To appreciate can connote, “to understand a situation or thing fully,” to appreciate it. When we are grateful in this sense, we understand that the ultimate rationale for a thankful disposition is agreeing with God’s definition of things, not ours. This can be difficult, but from Paul’s perspective gratitude becomes the assessment of reality as it actually is, not what we wish or hope it would be. This is something our atheist friend cannot hope to capture in his perspective of a lonely God-less universe that came from nothing for no reason at all. Not only are we dependent and limited creatures, but our view of things and our reason is clouded by sin. Without God’s revelation to us in Scripture and in Christ we’re in spiritual darkness. As Christians we submit our perspective to God’s omniscient characterization of things, and teach our kids to do the same. Gratitude is obedience.

The Self and Gratitude
The Bible is full of commands to be thankful. But what if I don’t feel thankful? What if the circumstances I’m encountering are really crappy? These reasonable questions assume gratitude is about us, about our feelings and our circumstances. A perfect recipe for misery is to make sure it’s all about us. Who are the most insufferable people to be around? Those who think everything is about them.

Augustine and Luther describe sin as, Incurvatus in se, or being turned or curved inward on oneself. If we are the center of our existence, and if our desires, our ideas, our accomplishments, our comfort, our glory are what counts, we will never be thankful. These things are rightfully important to us, and to God, but they must never be most important. If they are, everything in life will be out of proportion, and reality distorted. By contrast, Augustine defined virtue as “rightly ordered love”:

But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved, or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally.

Understanding the relative value of things is a big part of curing the sinful inward curve.

Some years ago I came across a wonderful example of someone who understands Augustine, a young Christian mother, 35, who learned she had stage four cancer (since recovered and doing well). Kate Bowler is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School and the author of “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel.” She didn’t see much prosperity in that moment. Her insights about how Christians ought to think about life, not only in the face of terminal cancer, but every day are worth contemplating:

When we overly‑instrumentalize prayer, we become convinced we’ve connected all the dots between us and God. To be totally honest, I cannot say things like “It would be better for my son not to have a mom, because surely God is working in all things for the good of those who love him.” That sounds like a lie to me, because I’m working from my desires forward toward God’s.

What I can say honestly is things that work backwards from God’s desires to mine ontologically: God is good, God is faithful, God’s desires for me are good. When I work from God to me I can say true and beautiful things. When I work from me to God, I end up lying.

This is brilliant! These are the two stark choices of existence. We either start with our desires and work up toward God, which distorts everything, or from God’s being, his character, to our desires. Charles Hodge explains these choices wonderfully:

Order and truth depend on things being put in their right relations. If we make the good of the creature the ultimate object of all God’s works, then we subordinate God to the creature, and endless confusion and unavoidable error are the consequence. It is characteristic of the Bible that it places God first, and the good of the creation second.

Hodge zeroes in on the heart of the issue and argues something that will not go over well with sinful human beings, especially with we who live in the ubiquitous iEverthing culture:

Few principles . . . have been so productive of false doctrine and immorality as the principle that all virtue consists in benevolence, that happiness is the highest good, and that whatever promotes happiness is right.

Such a mindset leaves little room for living in an imperfect, fallen world. If you want to be miserable, make your life all about your happiness. We will never understand what seems to be a contradiction, how we can be grateful and not happy, grateful and unfilled, grateful and miserable, grateful and dissatisfied, grateful and grumpy, simultaneously. We can’t completely avoid these negative attitudes. The question for us, then, is do our internal responses or interpretation of circumstances actually make them what we interpret them to be?

Gratitude is inextricably tied to God’s definition of things. Rephrasing Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor, who are you going to believe, God or your lying eyes? We are simply not capable of any kind of ultimate, eternal, accurate assessment of anything apart from God’s revelation. Unless we frame things in the biggest of big pictures, that which is eternal, all we are left with is distortion. Our perspective is not authoritative, or accurate, merely because it is ours. Thus we give thanks because we agree with God, we trust God, and that in the end is how we develop an attitude of gratitude.

 

 

The Hiddenness of God and God Revealed

The Hiddenness of God and God Revealed

Dec 10, 2025 | Apologetics

Ever since the French philosopher Voltaire in the 18th century, the existence of God has been debated, especially among cultural elites. There have been atheists throughout all cultures and times because life can be so absurd, but with the Enlightenment and the modern world, atheism became intellectually respected and culturally dominant in the form of secularism. A soft agnosticism would be an accurate description of the masses in Western culture, God pretty much an irrelevance, his existence not all that important one way or the other. Many atheists and agnostics will argue that if God really did exist, why wouldn’t he make himself more obvious. Thus the idea of the hiddenness of God, or if God exists why doesn’t he make it more obvious. Does the God of the Bible delight in making himself obscure, in effect hiding himself from his creatures? Their premise is that if God is real and good and loving, then he will make his existence undeniable to people. That begs the question: They assume their conclusion in their question, and then declare, he must not exist!

I was thinking of the hiddenness of God recently as I was reading through the book of Jeremiah, which can be a brutal read. Jeremiah lived in Judah during the fall of Jerusalem in the 580s BC as the armies of the Babylonians destroyed the city, and he saw the people of Israel exiled to Babylon. It was a horrific time to be alive, and is one reason Jeremiah is given the title, “the weeping prophet.” It was fitting he should write a book called, Lamentations. If Jeremiah, or we, live by site, judging our lives by circumstances, and not by faith, or by trust in God, then the hiddenness of God can be a real problem. I’ll deal with this from an apologetics perspective below, or how we can defend God’s existence and the veracity of Christianity against it, but I want to establish that it can indeed be an issue for some people. I went through my own “plausibility insanity” phase in my Christian life where God just didn’t seem as real to me as he used to. I could actually feel some sympathy for the atheist and agnostic, although I could never have become one of them. Something brought back God into the realm of the plausible, which I’ll share below as well.

Jeremiah and the Occupation of Prophet
Being a prophet in ancient Israel was a tough job. The life insurance was really expensive. Having finished Isaiah prior to reading Jeremiah, the contrast is stark. When you read through the book of Isaiah there are plenty of declarations of judgment on a wayward, rebellious people, but it is interspersed with promises of hope and salvation. In the first several chapters there are glimmers of hope among the judgment, then we’re told in chapter 7:

14 Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Instead of destruction, God against us, Isaiah is telling Israel that there will come a time when something remarkable, something unprecedented will happen, and through this son God will somehow be with them, not against them. Hope! In Jeremiah it takes 29 chapters to get any hint of hope amidst the unrelenting gloom. Then we get the great New Covenant announcement in chapter 31, but the book is almost all gloom and doom. From chapter 13 speaking of the people he is trying to warn, Jeremiah says: 

17 If you do not listen,
    I will weep in secret
    because of your pride;
my eyes will weep bitterly,
    overflowing with tears,
    because the Lord’s flock will be taken captive.

And they will be taken captive. The suffering, misery, and death will be overwhelming.

As I was reading chapter 26, I couldn’t help thinking of how God communicates to His people, and this fallen world in general. Jeremiah is commanded by the Lord to go out into the courtyard of the temple and speak to all the people of Judah who come to worship the Lord. The people are continuing with their religious duties, going through the motions thinking that’s good enough, but not living it out in their lives. Generally, we sinful human beings don’t like being told we’re wrong, and the priests, prophets, and people were not happy with Jeremiah. They seized him and said, “You must die! 

As I was reading through the chapter I kept asking, why are the people responding that way? I suspect it’s because they don’t think it is actually a message coming from the Lord. If they really believed it was from God Himself, I suspect they’d repent immediately. Then I asked another question. Why doesn’t the Lord just make it obvious he’s the one behind the message, make it clear this is not just something Jeremiah made up? That’s when the phrase “the hiddenness of God” came to mind, a phrase I’ve never much liked. Those who struggle with belief in God use it to justify their lack of faith. If, they claim, God only made his existence clear, made it easier to believe in him, then I would believe. But if he is there, he sure makes it difficult to believe in him. Why is that? The implication is that it’s just not fair. I’m sure Jeremiah wondered the same thing.

Around 587 BC the Babylonians were laying siege to Jerusalem, and Jeremiah’s message of divine judgment and urging surrender to the Babylonians wasn’t going over well. So, a plot was hatched to kill him by lowering him into a well or cistern (chapter 38). There wasn’t any water in it, but it was filled with thick mud at the bottom, so he either sinks into the mire, facing a slow death by starvation or suffocation.

6 So they took Jeremiah and put him into the cistern of Malkijah, the king’s son, which was in the courtyard of the guard. They lowered Jeremiah by ropes into the cistern; it had no water in it, only mud, and Jeremiah sank down into the mud.

We can imagine Jeremiah thinking, okay, God, as if I haven’t suffered enough, now this? We could add another question: Why does God allow his servants, or us, to suffer? Who knows! He does, but even amidst the suffering God remains faithful to his eternal promises. The question before God’s people is always this: do we trust him, or not. For me, I always go back to the character of God revealed to us in Scripture, and most specifically Moses’ glorious declaration in Deuteronomy 32:

3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
    Oh, praise the greatness of our God!
4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
    and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
    upright and just is he.

Either this is true, or not, either I believe it, or not, even in the darkness or amidst the flood, even when I don’t want to believe it! If our hope is eternal, then this mist of a life, blink and then it’s gone, is nothing in comparison, as the Apostle Paul declares in Romans 8:

18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 

And this from the man who endured unimaginable suffering for the name of Christ (2 Cor. 11), eventually to have his head lopped off as an enemy of Rome.

Is God Really Hidden?
He most definitely is not! This, of course, depends on your starting point, your premise, your most basic assumptions. Because we live in a dominant secular culture awash in scientism, or the idea that science can give us all the answers for life, we think questions regarding God can somehow be proved empirically, as if the world’s a laboratory with test tubes and measurements. It’s not.  No metaphysical (i.e., beyond the physical world) questions can be answered with absolute certainty, or what we know as proof. We must start from somewhere, and where you end up will be determined by where you start. We, of course, start with God’s revelation of himself in Scripture, which tells us that God has revealed himself in his creation, what some call nature. So Paul tells us in Romans 1:

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

It can happen the other way round as well. Many people start with “nature,” and eventually come to “creation” because God’s hand in it all it is unmistakable, so they end with Paul’s declaration, that God is “clearly seen” from what he’s made.

For many, though, the obviousness is an inconvenience; being their own God is preferable. Paul is saying that whatever people may claim, they are without excuse. This applies both to acknowledging that God exists, but further that they don’t measure up. In general terms we call that conscience, the guilt that comes from breaking God’s law, basically the Ten Commandments. God’s wrath against sinful humanity as well as his existence are obvious, even though people deny both. As Paul explains:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

The word suppress means to hold firmly, restrain. Even though God has made himself plain to them, sinful human beings stuff this truth down in their hearts, but it’s futile. I envision it like trying to hold down a beach ball under water while the pressure up is unrelentingly up. It takes constant effort to keep it down, but one way or the other that ball is coming up. It does so in varying ways, hopefully by getting people to acknowledge their sin, repent, and trust in Christ. What does this wrath look like? Contrary to Hollywood, it’s not lightening and thunder and fearsome storms and raging fire. It’s more prosaic than that, every day, humdrum. It starts with their minds becoming perverted:

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 

Remember Satan’s temptation to Eve: “You will be like God, knowing Good and Evil.” You get to call the shots now, not that tyrant God who is keeping you from fulfilling your potential because he’s just jealous and insecure. How’s that working out for sinful humanity? Paul starts the litany of sinful consequences with sexual sin, especially homosexual sin, but that’s only one of the most obvious. Dysfunction of every variety is found among people who reject their Creator God.

Put simply, God created reality to work a certain way, and he’s revealed himself in creation, Scripture, and Christ to tell us how to live in it. The contrast between those who live in Christ and those who reject him is stark, and for our purpose evidentiary. In other words, it is evidence for the existence of God, and our obligation to worship and obey him. In apologetics terms, this is part of the moral argument, that living in a moral universe, one of good and evil, right and wrong, can only be accounted for by God.

Evidence for God’s Existence
When we speak of apologetics proper, or defending the veracity of the Christian faith, all of the above applies. Man’s moral nature is evidence. We are not merely lucky dirt, matter in motion. Everyone knows we are born with a bent toward doing wrong. Leave a toddler to his own devices, and you will get a monster. The bad must be disciplined out of children. Crooked sticks cannot make themselves straight. Why is this? Of all the world’s religions only one gives us a plausible explanation why this is the case. Guess which one. Judaism and it’s fulfillment in Christianity. Why are people the way they are? Why does evil exist? We know why because of Genesis 1-3. If right and wrong, good and evil exist in the universe, then where did they come from? Mere matter cannot provide an answer. If they exist, then God must exist. If evil exists, then the devil exists, and if the devil exists, God exists.

For me, the moral argument is probably the most compelling of the evidences for God, but a close second is the design argument. This was one I could use most easily on our children because the material world was clearly created. A la Romans 1, a person has to work really hard at suppressing this undeniable fact, and few people now proudly proclaim they are doing that. We’ve seen a lot of conversions to agnosticism from atheism in the last two decades, not to mention to Christianity. The reason for that is critical to understanding the power and persuasiveness of the design argument in our historical moment.

First, what is this argument? It is also known as the teleological argument, from the Greek telos meaning “end” or “purpose.” When atheism became an accepted intellectual position in the 19th century, ridding the universe of purpose was a priority. Purpose implies a designer, and at just the right time Charles Darwin provided the answer to the problem. His system of evolution implies that the universe is a product of chance because it has no designer or creator. The design argument, by contrast, says we can infer a designer from the material world because of the implicit design, and obvious order and complexity of everything. Anything that has such order and complexity must be designed, and therefore must have a designer. Not too long ago this was vigorously denied by the greatest minds in Western culture.

In the 19th century atheism became a respected intellectual position because the knowledge of the material world was limited. Science and technology were in their infancy, and a Darwinian explanation for the world we inhabit had some credibility. These intellectuals further assumed that as knowledge increased, the case for God’s existence would become even weaker and religion would eventually wither away. Karl Marx certainly thought it would. But something strange happened on the way to the funeral: God wouldn’t die! In fact, as knowledge has increased the existence of God has become even more undeniable.

If you were alive and culturally aware in the first decade of this century you will remember the “New Atheists.” There was nothing new about them at all, but they thought so. They were an arrogant, loud-mouthed band of God and religion haters who became famous seemingly overnight, but their success contributed to their downfall. They failed to take into account that for the vast majority, like 95 percent, of human beings, the existence of God is not at all problematic. Again, it’s too obvious. It wasn’t too many years after their rise that their arrogant certitude started turning people off, and the exploding knowledge of the material world was increasingly revealing a preposterous complexity that could only be explained by a creator God. Now those atheists once as loud and confident as roaring lions, are as meek and quite at little lambs. If I ever wonder about God’s existence, I just look outside.

There are other evidences for God’s existence, not least for me is the Bible. I wrote a book called Uninvented, How the Bible Could Not Be Made up, and the Evidence that Proves It. That says it all, but I’ll end this with the most powerful apologetics argument for me: the consideration of the alternative. Whenever we believe something, there is always an alternative. If one thing isn’t true, something else must be. There is no neutral space where we can safely reside without having to make a decision, especially when it comes to ultimate questions: Why do we exist? What happens when we die? Why do we die? Why is there evil? What is the meaning of life? As the band Rush sang, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” God has revealed himself in so many compelling ways that the choice should be easy—he is not hidden.

I said above I would share what got me out of my “plausibility insanity” phase. It was two things. One was a deep dive back into apologetics in 2009. Being reminded again of all the evidence for Christianity being the truth, and the logical, rational reasons for its veracity makes it easy for me to believe it’s real. The other was in 2012 making a commitment to read the Bible and pray every morning. Communing with the living God every morning is what really did it, and I can’t even recognize the guy who would relate to the atheist and agnostic. This shows us that the so called problem of the hiddenness of God is a heart and not an intellect issue. As Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:

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.

 

 

Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Nov 5, 2025 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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