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.

 

God is Doing A Glorious Work in You, and in the World!

God is Doing A Glorious Work in You, and in the World!

Jun 10, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

Some weeks back our pastor preached on these verses in Colossians 2:

6 Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

The sermon was tremendous, especially because it was framed from a Reformed perspective that puts our hope in this walk with Jesus firmly in God’s sovereign power, not our own striving. As I wrote recently, the Christian life is one of pursuit; we must ask, seek, and knock, but it is God himself who roots and builds us up in Christ, who establishes us in the faith. That is a supernatural work of God beyond our abilities, and as the pastor rightly said, “Christ is building something glorious in you!” He is the builder of this new temple by the power of his Holy Spirit. But for me, something in the sermon was lacking, which brings me to a consistent bogey man of mine: Pietism.

As I always have to remind people, I’m not talking about piety, but about a movement started in Lutheran Germany in the 17th century that developed as a response to a cold and overly intellectualized Christian faith. The intentions were good, but in teaching a more passionate faith it turned it into a completely personalized one which ended up turning Christianity into an irrelevant cultural force in the West. What was once a Christian Western civilization out of which flowed innumerable blessings, became a secular West where those blessings disappeared. So, given my perspective when the pastor said Christ is building something glorious in us, in my mind I shouted, and in the world! Unfortunately, for the Pietistic mindset Christian influence in the world, in culture and society in general, is if not irrelevant, because every Christian would love a better more peaceful God-honoring world, but beside the point. And for many, working for Christian cultural influence is a distraction from the only thing that counts, our relationship with God through Christ.

Pietism makes the focus of our faith almost totally on the individual and our personal salvation, justification and sanctification. It completely enervates Christianity’s cultural influence because lay people have no vision whatsoever of cultural transformation, that their faith is supposed to transform the world, thy kingdom come . . . Enervate is the perfect word for the Pietistic effect on the church because it means to deprive of force or strength; to destroy the vigor of; to weaken. Over the last several hundred years the church and Christianity have become completely culturally irrelevant in the West and there has been much suffering because of it. With Christianity comes blessing, as God promised Abram 4,000 years ago, that through his offspring, i.e., Christ, all peoples on earth would be blessed. When Christianity’s influence wanes, suffering follows.

Russian dissident, novelist, and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn knew first-hand the consequences of the waning of Christian cultural influence in his country. In an address accepting the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983, he identified what happens when God disappears from a society and culture. Speaking to the death and destruction wrought by communism in Russia in the twentieth century “that swallowed up some 60 million of our people,” he said he “could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this happened.’” He used phrases like, “deprived of its divine dimensions . . .” and “lacking all divine dimensions . . .” and “our Godless age . . .” and “The entire twentieth century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction.”

A better description of secularism, and its implications, and lack of Christian cultural influence, could not be found: “Men have forgotten God . . .” Speaking of Russian history he said:

Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the nineteenth century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.

Later in the talk, he spoke of “the destructive spirit of secularism.” Destructive indeed.

Which brings me to a phrase that came to my mind as I was leaving church that day.

Where There is No Vision, The People Perish
If you’ve been a Christian any length of time this verse will sound familiar. It comes from Proverbs 29:18. The entire chapter is filled with warnings and reminders of two directions a person and a people can go, one filled with peace and righteousness and justice and blessing, or the opposite. What I quoted is from the King James Version, and is the first half of the verse. Here is the entire verse, and also in several different versions.

KJV
Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

NASB
Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained,
But happy is one who keeps the Law.

ESV
Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint,
but blessed is he who keeps the law.

NIV
Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint;
but blessed is the one who heeds wisdom’s instruction.

These four English translations capture well the nuance of the meaning in Hebrew. The word vision comes from a word meaning a mental sight, seeing with the mind. One of the frustrating things I learned very early in my Christian life is how most of the Evangelical church sees the Christian faith solely in personal terms. What counts, what is important, is that the gospel is all about my personal relationship with Jesus and my personal holiness. Of course it is very much about that, but it’s not only about that. The point of the gospel, of Jesus coming to earth, God becoming man to die for the sins of the world, wasn’t just to transform individual people, but to transform the entire world. Yes, I know, that will only happen fully at the Second Coming and Christ returning for the consummation of all things, the final enemy to be defeated being death. And prior to that, Paul tells us what Christ will be doing, is doing since he ascended to the right hand of God (I Cor. 15):

25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

Paul is confirming what the Lord revealed through the Psalmist in Psalm 110:

1 The Lord says to my lord:

“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”

Peter further confirms this started happening at Christ’s first coming by quoting this verse in the very first Christian sermon in history in Acts 2. Christ isn’t just reigning in our hearts or in the church, but in the world! The world the Father gave him all authority over, in heaven and on earth. Victory is the vision, not fruitless battle against evil, and the justification for victory is God’s covenant promises to his people.

I am convinced of the centrality of the covenant in God’s dealing with humanity. The Triune God made a promise to himself in eternity that when the fall happened, he himself would redeem his creation, and turn it from the Devil’s playground to the means of his blessing the nations, paradise restored. Because I see the Christian faith through this lens, I always go back to the promises God made upon which we are to stand, to live and proclaim. Our confidence isn’t in us or our abilities, but in God who blesses those to bear fruit for his glory and our good.

These verses should constantly come to our mind as we “contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

Genesis 3
God to Satan:
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

Genesis 12
God to Abram:
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

Genesis 15
God to Abram:
5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

Genesis 18
17 Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? 18 Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.

Genesis 22
The Lord to Abraham after he sacrificed Isaac:
17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

Genesis 26
God to Isaac:
4 I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed.

The word bless or it’s variations is used some 65 times in the first book of Scripture, the foundational work upon which our faith is based. And as these verses indicate, it’s not merely blessing to God’s people, to the church in New Testament terms, but to nations. Never was our faith meant to be solely for us. Even Jesus in giving his disciples a charge before he ascended to the right hand of God indicated what he had accomplished was not merely for individuals or the church, but for the nations. We’re all familiar with it:

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

And no, this does not mean to just disciple individuals within nations, but to baptize the nations themselves, to see Christianity permeate every nook and cranny of the society and culture.

A Vision of Victory
We can look at this in any variety of ways. If we want our nation to truly be blessed, then evil must be defeated. And I will qualify this yet again, all evil will not be defeated on this side of the Second Coming, but Christ is even now putting all his enemies under his feet. As Christians, we don’t look at the suffering, dysfunction, and sin in our world as if it’s inevitable, and there is nothing we can do about it. That’s called defeatism. God’s covenant promise is blessing, not the proliferation of evil and it’s horrible effects. Over the last several hundred years because of the rise of Pietism, Christianity has become insular and culturally irrelevant, and our societies have suffered for it. The sexual revolution of the 1960s happened because while Christians were primarily attending to their souls, secularism became the dominant worldview of the West, and our societies went to the proverbial hell in a handbasket. Proverbs 29:18 tells us why.

Let me ask you a question. Do Christians want societies with crime and poverty and broken families, suffering, misery, and premature death? What is the answer to this, so societies are not disarray? The gospel! Christ, God’s law, a Christian worldview, Christians loving and serving others, men leading their families and building things, all men and women fighting for goodness, beauty, and truth, because where they are, so Christ is whether the people in every instance acknowledge him as their author. We must have a vision of all these blessings as fruit of the gospel. We have to learn as I said above how to develop the mental sight, seeing these blessings with our minds as the inevitable fruit of the gospel. We’re not here to lose, to give the devil the default victory because things look a bit challenging at the moment. It’s like your team is down a bunch of runs, and since you’re a time traveler you know the outcome of the game already, and your team wins. Are you going to pout and cop an attitude when everything is going wrong and everyone is thinking defeat is inevitable? No! You know without a shadow of a doubt it’s not, even if at the moment things look bad. So you fight on, work, play, proclaim, create, and be a source of blessing to those in your circle of influence.

Let’s not settle for half a gospel that applies only to the narrow sphere of our personal lives. I read a wonderful book by Ken Gentry called, The Greatness of the Great Commission. He explains how the discipling work of the Great Commission goes beyond just us:

[It] aims at the comprehensive application of Christ’s authority over men through conversion. As the numbers of converts increase, this providentially leads to the subsuming under the authority of Christ whole institutions, cultures, societies, and governments.

The authority of Christ isn’t just for the church! The proclamation that Jesus is King in the New Testament church had political and cultural ramifications.

Because our commission is great, we know God isn’t just doing a glorious work in us, but in the world. The fallen world was never meant to remain the same after Christ came, rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and sent his Holy Spirit to earth in his people. And it isn’t. The reason is that Christians throughout history never saw their mission as merely personal, and their lives reflected that. In writing his book about the greatness of the Great Commission, Gentry asks some questions hoping his answers would “be hope inducing, vision expanding, and labor encouraging.” As Christians we would should have a theology of great expectations. For me that’s postmillennial eschatology, but regardless of our eschatology, we must see ourselves as part of something as big as it gets, even if our part in the process is tiny, as for most of us it is. The Puritans were world changers because they believed, as Ian Murray writes in The Puritan Hope “that the church, despite all the odds set against her, was yet to be an instrument of blessing on a scale far surpassing all that has been previously seen in history.” The expectation of success drove their missionary efforts. As Murray writes:

With this belief in the church’s future the Puritans gained energy and resolution. Had they adopted the short-term view, the problems of the church in their day might justifiably have seemed hopeless, but they faced them with an unflinching sense of their duty toward posterity.

That says it splendidly, “an unflinching sense of their duty toward posterity.” That is our call as Christians because God is indeed doing a glorious work in us, and in the world.

 

 

 

He Came to His Own, and His Own Received Him Not: Jesus, the Religious Professionals, and AD 70

He Came to His Own, and His Own Received Him Not: Jesus, the Religious Professionals, and AD 70

May 6, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

One thing many Christians seem to miss is that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, that he came first exclusively to his own people. There is a tendency to see all of Jesus’ words as written to us and universally applicable, and ignoring the historical context in which the story takes place. We’ll notice as we read through the gospels Jesus uses the word generation a lot, specifically in the Synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke where Jesus uses the word twenty-six times. Each time he uses it he is referring to the generation currently living. Even in John where that specific word is not used, John starts his gospel saying that Jesus “came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” That statement is a good synopsis of the entire story of the gospels and Jesus’ ministry, which is the foundation upon which is built the Apostle Paul’s ministry eventually taking the gospel to the Gentiles and the entire world.

First, Jesus has to deal with the Jews and what the Jewish religion had become by the time he started his ministry. We have to look at the gospels in the context of the flow of redemptive history, and what God’s ultimate purposes were in creating a people for Himself in the first place. This requires us to go back to the very beginning. Adam was given a charge in the garden to take the world God had given him, and in effect to civilize it. Once he created man, both male and female, he gave them this charge:

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

We call this the dominion mandate coming from the word the King James Version used for rule, dominion. Expanding on the meaning, it indicates prevailing against, to reign and rule over, to take. Adam was given a world of raw material with which to create a world of blessings for the people he would co-create with God. Needless to say, he blew it. When sin entered the world taking dominion would become a very mixed blessing, but the blessings were there to be had. Sin just complicated things. Eventually God chose Abram, one man out of all the people’s on earth to bring his blessings to every nation, to all peoples, through him and his seed or offspring, which is Christ (Gal. 3:16).

The Jews by the time of Jesus seemed to miss this message, that their religion wasn’t just for them, but for all peoples on earth. Judaism had gotten so insular, so exclusive, that Jews were not even allowed to eat with Gentiles, or to go into their houses and visit. Since God had stopped speaking through the prophets 400 years prior, the Jewish religious professionals had turned their religion into something completely foreign to what God had intended it to be. Jesus came to rectify that.

The Misunderstood Jesus
For those of us who’ve been Christians for a while and have read and heard the gospels preached many times, they don’t shock us, or even cause us to wonder what the heck is going on. Part of the reason is that we don’t realize the gospels were not written to us, but for us. In my early Christian years I thought the Bible was God speaking directly to me divorced from the historical context in which the stories took place. Needless to say that is not the most solid biblical hermeneutic, or interpretive framework. It’s impossible to understand what’s going on unless we see it as the culmination of Jewish history, as the turning point, the pivot in redemptive history.

Jesus was a corrective, and because of that completely misunderstood. His ministry, those three short years, might best be described in Isaiah 53:3, “He was despised and rejected by men.” Despite all he said and did to prove he had come from God, he was continually rejected, even by his own family! In Mark 3 Jesus is making a ruckus, and Mark tells us his family “went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’ In Mark 6 Jesus visited his hometown, and the response of those who knew him best isn’t exactly welcoming. They say,

3 Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

As the old saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. And as Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”

In chapter 5 Mark gives us two stories of how how widely Jesus was misunderstood. In the first story, a demon-possessed man everyone must have known about because of his prodigious strength came to Jesus. No wonder the demons who spoke through him gave the name Legion. They plead with Jesus not to send them out of the area, so he gives them permission to go into a very large heard of pigs, who then immediately rush down a bank into a river and drown themselves. The people’s response is to plead with Jesus to leave their region. He had cost them a lot of money and they wanted nothing to do with him. The fact that Jesus commanded demons and they obeyed him was irrelevant.

The other story of rejection in this chapter is about Jesus raising a young daughter of one of the synagogue leaders named Jairus. He pleads with Jesus to come and heal his daughter, which he promptly does. When they arrive at his house, they tell him he’s too late, she’s already dead. Jesus tells them she’s not dead but asleep. The response of the people?  “But they laughed at him.” This is what reminded me of John’s observation in the first chapter of his gospel:

11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

Jesus had already done amazing works of healing throughout the region, yet they still doubted. Moral of the stories? No matter what Jesus did, many, most Jews, would never believe. In fact, at the very end of his life he is completely alone, hung on a tree, a Roman cross, as a crucified criminal, enemy of the state. Only a handful of women are there in his final hours. He was truly despised and rejected by men. He came to bring good news to that generation, that man could be reconciled to God, that the blessings promised to Abraham and the Patriarchs could be theirs, that the dominion mandate could finally be fulfilled in him, and they wanted nothing to do with it.

Jesus’ War with the Religious Professionals and the Covenant
The ministry of Jesus is the culmination of 2,000 of Jewish history starting with God calling Abram to go from his home to Canaan to the land of promise (Gen. 12):

2 “I will make you into a great nation,
and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

The expansiveness of this promise is the point, and it goes back to the Dominion Mandate. God always intended to bless the entire earth, his creation and everyone in it, and that blessing would come through His people. The Jews forgot that, and turned this welcoming religion into an insular legalistic affair for only the few. Witness the early church’s struggle with Jewish Christians welcoming Gentiles into the church. When Peter had his vision of the clean and unclean animals and was sent to the centurion Cornelius, the Jewish Christians “were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles” (Acts 10). That wasn’t supposed to happen!

But if we’re going to understand the full redemptive-historical meaning of Jesus and his contentious interaction with the Jewish religious professionals, we have to see it in its legal-historical context in God’s dealing with His people. This requires some understanding of Ancient Near Easter religion, and for modern people that’s not easy to imagine. What we see in our Bibles isn’t some petulant God frustrated with His people and lashing out at them. The heretic Marcion even went so far as to see the Old Testament God as a different God. Far from it. Rather, God established a legal relationship with His people typical of an ancient Near Eastern Suzerain-Vassal relationship. A Suzerain was a superior ruler, a king, or great power who exercised dominance over a subordinate ruler or state, known as the vassal. The relationship was formalized through suzerain-vassal treaties (or a word we’re familiar with, covenants), which were common diplomatic and political instruments. These were not generally agreements between equals, although such did exist, but hierarchical relationships imposed by a stronger party on a weaker one, often after conquest, alliance, or submission.

This started with God’s unilateral covenant agreement with Abram in Genesis 15, a bizarre ritual to us, where God puts Abram into a deep sleep. He tells Abram the story of what will become his descendants’ slavery and deliverance that happens 400 years into the future, and then in the form of a firepot, a blazing torch passes between cutup animals as a ceremony to formalize the suzerain-vassal relationship between God and His people. This relationship was unique, though, because it was unilateral, only one party, the suzerain, God, declaring he would fulfill both parts of the covenant. These covenants or agreements, like our contracts today, were always established between two parties. Not with God and His people. Those who would become the Hebrews and then the Jews would never be able to keep their end of the bargain.

God rescuing His people from slavery in Egypt began to formalize this relationship as we can see from the intricate details required of the people to maintain it. God lays out the conditions and consequences most starkly in Deuteronomy 28. There are detailed blessings for obedience, and curses for disobedience, more of the latter than the former. We must notice the number one stipulation, a warning at the end of the list of blessings:

14 Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them.

The turning aside, turning away from their God, was a function of their following other gods and serving them. That is the essence of the human struggle with sin. It isn’t primarily our behavior that is the issue, but which god or gods we will serve. Our behavior always flows out of that. The final result of the cursing, which would prove prophetic in Israel’s history, is destruction. It’s a sobering read knowing what happened three times in Israel’s history. First with the Assyrians destroying the northern kingdom in 722 BC, then the Babylonians destroying Judah and Jerusalem in 586 BC, and finally the Romans destroying Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD. All this was a result of Israel’s unfaithfulness, of their turning aside to follow other gods and serve them.

Israel’s Marriage Covenant with God
In the Old Testament the covenant, i.e., legal, relationship between God and His people is depicted as a marriage, and Israel is often portrayed as an unfaithful wife who had committed spiritual adultery by turning to idols, yet God remains faithful and promises restoration. God had warned Israel of the exact consequences of the agreement, and they responded to Moses three times that, “We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey” (Exodus 19 and 24). They willingly entered into this agreement, and would have to live with the consequences. This is the ultimate context of Jesus’ ministry and mission to the Jewish people.

If we go back through Jewish history in the Bible we see a double minded people who are not sure if they want to remain faithful to their God or follow the ways of the other heathen pagan nations. God called His people to be holy, set apart and not contaminated by those heathen pagan cultures, and by the time of Jesus the Jewish religious professionals, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Teachers of the Law, had perfected a narrowly exclusive version of Judaism that bore little resemblance to what God intended in his promise to Abram. God’s design was that the nations wouldn’t infect His people, but rather that His people would influence the rest of the world with His blessings. After 2,000 years it was clear that just wasn’t going to work, and Jesus is bringing his message of warning to his people who instead of heeding it, kill him. Yet the Apostle Peter says in Acts 2 this was all part of the plan:

23 This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. 24 But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

Israel’s history was one long object lesson in failure, that without God the Holy Spirit dwelling in His people, the kingdom of God could never advance on earth, or Satan’s dominion be destroyed. That would take the man who would come to be called the Messiah, who in himself would fulfill all three offices of mediator that sinful humanity required, prophet, priest, and king. As prophet, Jesus was truth teller, speaking messages the people often didn’t want to hear. It was as prophet that Jesus’ contentious relationship to the Jewish religious leaders is best understood. They chaffed at everything he said and did because it condemned them. As Jesus lamented (Matt. 23):

37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.

They were determined to do the same to him. As priest, Jesus would atone for the sins of the people he spent three years condemning. Sadly, they completely missed that Jesus was himself the Passover lamb, who willingly took the wrath they deserved. And finally as King, he would be their ruler, the one to whom they owed unquestioned loyalty and obedience. Instead, they proclaimed that they had no king but Caesar.

The Jews would not accept Jesus’ atonement for their sin and unfaithfulness, and him as their Messiah, so as Jesus warned them, their house would be left to them desolate. Jesus had warned the teachers of the law and Pharisees in Matthew 23 with seven woes that judgment was coming, and in Matthew 24, what is called the Olivet Discourse, he prophesies the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in AD 70. God would send an unmistakable message to the Jews and the world that there was a new way to the Father, the only way, and it was Jesus, Savior of the entire 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Material Implications of the Gospel

The Material Implications of the Gospel

Mar 25, 2026 | Eschatology, Parents and Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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