The Importance of Biblical Christian Anthropology: The Doctrine of Man

The Importance of Biblical Christian Anthropology: The Doctrine of Man

May 27, 2026 | Theology

We human beings are a conundrum, often more of a mystery to ourselves than to others. It’s clear there is something terribly wrong with us, and we’ve been trying to figure it out since the dawn of time. There is also something amazing about us, something very much more than the sum of its parts. Some people given their assumptions about the nature of the world just see us as more or less clever apes, so much lucky dirt, a product of matter plus time plus chance. That, however, is a weak explanation for the glory and wreckage that is man. Seventeenth century mathematician, physicist, and Christian apologist Blaise Pascal put similar thoughts in a much more poetic way:

What kind of freak is man? What a novelty he is, how absurd he is, how chaotic and what a mass of contradictions, and yet what a prodigy! He is judge of all things, yet a feeble worm. He is repository of truth, and yet sinks into such doubt and error. He is the glory and the scum of the universe!

A biblical anthropology, or how we understand what we are, is consistent with what we experience of human nature. All of us, if we’re honest, can see Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in ourselves. Throughout our lives the proverbial little devil on one shoulder, and the angel on the other, are constantly at war as to which we’ll listen to, and the little devil wins more than he should.

Christianity is like a nuclear bomb of explanatory power, except instead of destruction it brings clarity and hope everywhere it goes. Everything in life has to be explained. It’s a very dull person who goes through life never wondering what the heck is going on, why it all exists, what it all means. Most people want some kind of explanation, or the world would not be such an endlessly religious place. Even secularism and those who claim no religion, are religious to the bone. They believe in something, even if they think it’s nothing. Everyone lives by faith.

When we come back to anthropology, Christianity in every way nails it. Man was created in God’s image, male and female he created them. Without sin, man was given a mandate to fill and subdue the earth, in effect to civilize it. Then giving into the temptation to usurp his maker’s place in the universe thinking he could become like God, he rebelled and fell into the deplorable state of sin and death. Everything changed in a moment, and difficulty, struggle, and frustration would be the lot of man ever thereafter. As God says to Adam:

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”

Who cannot attest to the accuracy of that curse! When our kids were growing up we had a favorite saying around our house when things inevitably went sideways: thorns and thistles. Jesus in John 16:33 makes what must be one of the great understatements of history: “In this world you will have tribulation.” No kidding! All because of what sin did to us and our world.

What exactly is a proper understanding about human nature and why is it so important? With our limited space we will look at two concepts of man that developed in the West because of Christianity, and the implications of each.

Rousseau and Man Born Good
Swiss born French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) started a transformation in the Western understanding of man giving us a bountiful harvest of misery, suffering, and death. Yes, how we look at human nature has life or death consequences.

Rousseau came up with an idea about human nature that nobody in the history of philosophy or religion had ever conceived, that man is born good but is corrupted by society and civilization. The reason no one had ever conceived of something like that before is because it’s obvious human beings are nothing of the sort. If you have children, or know any, you’ll understand. Rousseau, however, made the idea that people are naturally good the cornerstone of everything he wrote. He believed people in the original state of nature were healthy, happy, good, and free. Human vices, he argued, started to develop from the time when societies were formed. Rousseau thus exonerates man and blames society. Passions that generate vices hardly existed in the state of nature but began to develop as soon as people formed societies. This had inevitable political consequences as our anthropology always does.

In his book, The Social Contract, his opening sentence has become famous, or infamous depending on one’s perspective: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” It follows then if you want to make human beings better, you make their environment or society better. Once circumstances improve, people will improve. Thus began the slow development in Western history of the left side of the political/cultural spectrum. Roger Kimball in his book, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America explains why this went so wrong:

Rousseau’s ideas about freedom and virtue are a recipe for totalitarianism. “Those who care to undertake the institution of a people,” Rousseau wrote in the Social Contract, “must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature, . . . of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.”

This, he thought, could be accomplished by one of of his most disastrous concepts, the “general will.” People in society developed what he called a “social contract” where people act as a group that never falters so that each person acts to further the public or common good and national interest. In such an environment, individual liberty is a threat to the general will, and all dissent must be silenced. The individual will must be brought in conformity to the general will. Who determines what that will is, he doesn’t says, but Kimball calls this idea, “surely one of the most tyrannical political principles ever enunciated.” History bears out the accuracy of that statement.

Thus we see here the seeds of the modern totalitarianism that turned the French Revolution into a bloody terror. It won’t surprise us that Rousseau was a great inspiration for that failed Revolution, and every failed revolution thereafter. As I’ve heard it put, for the left nothing succeeds like failure. If it doesn’t work, try it again, harder. We’ll contrast the fruit of the French with the American Revolution below, but you can see the seed of many of the modern political disasters in this simple concept that man is born good, and if we want better human beings we just have to create a better environment.

The Fruit of the French Revolution and Totalitarianism
As we look back at the modern world from the vantage point of the 21st century, we can see the seeds of much of the political upheaval in the bloody reign of terror known as the French Revolution. The root of the terror can be found in the Enlightenment project started by a pious French Catholic, Renes Descartes, back in 1637. As a Christian, Descartes was distressed at the growing skepticism among intellectuals in Europe, and he decided to address it head on. Unfortunately, his solution became the problem. He decided to doubt everything that could be doubted and realized the only thing he could not doubt were his own thoughts. With that conclusion he came up with the famous, or infamous, phrase, I think therefore I am, or Cogito Ergo Sum in Latin.

Descartes’ solution would become the problem of the modern world and lead to untold misery. That would be his basic assumptions about knowing, or how we come to knowledge, what’s called epistemology. First he assumed we could know without revelation, that all we need for us to know anything is our mind and reason. That came to be known as rationalism. Of course we can have some level of knowledge without revelation, but without it when it comes to questions about ultimate things, we’re stuck with speculation and conjecture. Witness the history of philosophy and religion.

Eventually Western intellectuals decided that not only didn’t we need the Bible and God’s revelation to know, but that it was all myths and made up stories, and God didn’t exist anyway. That was bad enough, but to add insult to injury, Descartes assumed we could attain knowledge of an absolute sort. In other words, we could attain absolute certainty. For whatever reason, he never put two-and-two together, and realized that meant man would be accepting Satan’s temptation in the garden, that we could “be like God knowing good and evil.” No we can’t! Finite beings like we us are by definition limited beings, and thus can only have knowledge of a limited sort. Needless to say, man hasn’t done a real great job being God. The French Revolution was the first real world example of rationalism in practice, and it wasn’t pretty. It would not be the last.

The stage was now set for communism, and Karl Marx stepped onto it in the mid-18th century putting into theoretical practice all the ideas of Rousseau and the French Philosophes and their revolution. By the middle of that century atheism was fully flourishing, and Darwin came along to provide the creation myth they needed to give their views some intellectual credibility, evolution. This entire intellectual and cultural stew produced men of amazing feats of intellectual legerdemain, or sleight of hand meant to manipulate or deceive, like Frederich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, among many others. They weren’t purposefully lying, of course, but stuck in a box without revelation, guessing is the best they could do, and the result was the 20th century and its mass horrors. It all started with the Great War, which gave birth to the Russian Revolution in 1917 and a century of communist tyranny. Marx was a Utopian, as have been all communist movements he inspired, and mere human beings would never be allowed to get in the way of creating their perfect communist society on earth. Hitler was just a different kind of Utopian, and after he and other assorted communists got done with things, north of one hundred million people were killed in the 20th century. Ain’t life without God grand! Now let’s take a brief look at the alternative.

The American Revolution and Christian Society
Unlike the French Revolution, the American version was driven by the Christian faith. Robert Curry in his book, Common Sense Nation, says  “the Great Awakening prepared the way for the American Revolution in too many ways to be counted.” Pulpits across America, influential in a way modern Americans can’t comprehend, were aflame with justifications for liberty and revolution. The colonies were steeped in the Protestant Christian faith. That meant the founding generation, and every founder had a Christian worldview, whether they were orthodox Bible believing Christians or not. Instead of rejecting tradition and Christianity and the church as the French radicals did, they embraced it as necessary for their Revolution to succeed.

As evidence for this, the most quoted book of the founding wasn’t some philosophical tome about liberty, but the Bible! And the most quoted book of the Bible was Deuteronomy, and the most quoted chapter was 28 on the blessings and curses. If their Revolution was to be blessed and honored by God, it would come through obedience to him. Of the many quotes referencing Christianity, one of the most famous is by John Adams who said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” By which he meant a Christian people. The founders knew nothing of a generic “religious people,” as if any old religion would do. It doesn’t work that way. False gods and false religion do not bring the blessings of the God of Israel, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

One reason for this is Christianity and the Bible give us the true understanding of human nature. Only a truly biblical anthropology could produce the American Republic. When we juxtapose these two revolutions, holding them side by side, the differences could not be more stark. Revolutions always include suffering and death, but what counts is what comes after the guns go silent. The French assumed the anthropology of Rousseau, while the Americans assumed the anthropology of the Bible via Calvin. Calvinism was the most dominant of the Protestant traditions in the colonies.

That meant those men putting together a government believed people were sinners and couldn’t be trusted with power. In Calvinistic theology that is called total depravity, which doesn’t mean everyone is as evil as they can be, but that every part of man is corrupted. There could be no Utopian vision in such a people or such a government. Thus if the liberty the Americans fought for was to be achieved, no one person or group of people could be entrusted with power. Everything about American government was to be limited so that the people could govern themselves. Government’s job is not to make people good; that is the job of their God, and government represents the people. Unlike in tyrannical governments where power is concentrated in one man, or a group of people, the American government is accountable to the people, and power shared among the different branches of government.

Secularists over the last century have tried to take credit for America’s founding saying it was primarily an Enlightenment project and a secular republic. While there were certainly Enlightenment influences, they were not of the radical Enlightenment that drove the French. Rather, the primary influences of the founding generations came from the history of a thoroughly Christian England. Starting with Alfred the Great in the 9th century, England’s Christian heritage defined everything about America’s founding. He developed a law based on the Ten Commandments that became foundational for English law thereafter. The founders looked back to Magna Carta in 1215, the first time in history limits were put on a king’s power, to the English civil war of the 1640s, to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the English Bill of Rights the next year which served as the inspiration for the U.S. Bill of Rights. They saw themselves as simply defending their rights as Englishmen.

A Christian nation isn’t just about the moral standards, but about a full orbed understanding of reality from a Christian perspective, including the nature of the human person. There is no neutral way to govern a country, let alone is secularism neutral. As an increasing number of Christians are realizing, that is a myth, and affirming that God will bless a nation to the degree it looks to Christ.

What is Sin? The Key to Unlocking the Meaning of the Universe

What is Sin? The Key to Unlocking the Meaning of the Universe

May 20, 2026 | Theology

That’s quite a claim for such a little word, but it’s a word that contains multitudes, a phrase coming from Walt Whitman’s famous poem, “Song of Myself,” in a collection called Leaves of Grass. It comes specifically from this passage which will make a good introduction to our topic:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Whitman gets at something about the nature of sin connected to the nature of man: it is a mystery, one human beings have been trying to solve since the beginning of recorded history. We know it as the problem of evil.

Most people think this is a problem primarily for Christianity, but in fact it’s a problem for every person trying to make sense of our messed up world. Human beings have been asking the same question for all of history: why? Why is there evil, suffering, and death? Why does it exist? What does it mean? How can we solve it? Every religion and philosophy has tried to find answers, speculating endlessly because without revelation, without God the Creator giving us the answers, all we’ve got is guesses, conjecture based upon conjecture, speculation upon speculation. Only Christianity via Judaism tells us why sin and evil exist, and only Christianity offers us a solution to our dilemma that is not a dead end, which we’ll explore below. A correct understanding of the problem will help us make sense of our existence, and finding real answers will also help us live better lives amid the chaos and turmoil. That is the key to which I refer in the title.

Unfortunately, we live in a thoroughly secular culture where God has been disinvited from the societal dinner table. The cultural messaging is that at best we can either rage against the meaningless machine of existence, or just ignore it, and do our best to mitigate the suffering brought about by evil, but there are no answers. Evil just is, a brute fact of existence, deal with it. That people have not been satisfied with such a non-answer throughout all of history tells us it’s not a satisfying one. In our day I believe we’ve reached the end of the road for the usefulness of secularism and its lies. Western man thought he could create a society without God, and it hasn’t worked out so well. Living in a universe with no transcendent reality or reference point is deeply unsatisfying to most people. Every human being knows there has to be something beyond our material existence, something above, outside of it that gives some kind of meaning to it all.

The metaphysical poverty of secularism is like lukewarm water, or flat soda, or another blockbuster movie sequel; it’s unfulfilling and disappointing. People are thirsty and hungry for meaning, purpose, and hope, yet secularism is dead end. That realization is driving many people who are currently looking for answers to find them in Jesus. As I never tire of quoting ex-atheist C.S. Lewis in this regard,

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

While we will never fully understand everything, something impossible for finite creatures with limited knowledge, Christianity does offer us real answers and real solutions. As an atheist, Lewis realized it offered no answers at all, and in fact made the problem worse. Eventually he realized Christianity had the answers he was looking for, and the nature of Christianity as a revealed religion will tell us why.

The Christian Idea of Revelation
If we’re to truly unlock the meaning of the universe in our understanding of sin and the suffering it brings, we’ll have to assume the concept of revelation from God is possible. This is critical. Think of it like this. The universe is a room, and we live inside the room. That’s easy enough to imagine. But we have to make a decision about this room, and in our scenario we have only two choices. One option is a room with no opening, no door, no windows; just four walls and a ceiling. No matter which way you look, bare walls, ceiling, and a floor. That is the no revelation option; we’re stuck in the room with no way to know what if anything is outside of the room, and no way to know what anything inside the room means or why it exists. One guess is as good as another. The other option is a room with a door and windows so we can get answers from outside the room despite our limited view of things. In fact, we’re dependent on the answers from outside the room.

Which brings us to something we need to understand about the nature of Christianity: it is a religion of revelation. The answers are not something we can discover on our own; they must be revealed to us, shown to us. They must come from outside the limits of our minds and experience, outside of the guesses we come up with being stuck inside the room. So we start with a biblical fact, a biblical assumption, that as human beings we don’t find God, or the answers. We don’t work our way to him, but rather God is the one revealing and disclosing himself, and the answers, to us, or else he and the answers could not be found.

The reason it works this way is because as sinful human beings we do not seek God. As guilty sinners, both before our own consciences and before a perfectly holy God, he is our judge, jury, and executioner. No wonder we want nothing to do with him in our natural, sinful state. Rather, we hide when God shows up, as Adam and Eve did after the fall. Revelation itself tells us why, but human experience makes this perfectly clear as well; we can’t live up to our own standards, let alone those of a holy God. That doesn’t keep people from trying to find meaning in the conundrum that is existence, as we see in every permutation of religion throughout human history. By contrast, many Enlightenment thinkers wanted to rid the world of religion, so they insisted we could find meaning without revelation; human reason was all we needed. But Christianity counters that the only way we can understand the true nature of reality is revelation; we can’t get that from man-made religion or reason alone. God must take the initiative to tell us the nature of things, or life is endless confusion.

The history of philosophy is a testimony to such confusion—endless speculation and conjecture that contradicts and confuses, as do all world religions, save one. As Winston Churchill said of the Soviet Union, life without revelation is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. B. B. Warfield in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible tells us why:

The religion of the Bible announces itself, not as the product of men’s search after God, if haply they may feel after Him and find Him, but as the creation in men of the gracious God, forming a people for Himself, that they may show forth His praise. In other words, the religion of the Bible presents itself as distinctively a revealed religion. Or rather, to speak more exactly, it announces itself as the revealed religion, as the only revealed religion; and sets itself as such over against all other religions, which are represented as all products, in a sense in which it is not, of the art and device of man.

We must also understand the nature of biblical revelation. According to Herman Bavinck, revelation is God’s self-revelation. “He is the origin, and he is also the content of his revelation.” This is an important point because if we primarily see revelation as mere knowledge, God revealing certain things to us, we will miss what makes biblical revelation so, well . . . . revelatory. God has primarily revealed himself, and continues to reveal himself, his being and nature, in three ways: creation, Scripture, and Christ. We see all three in the first two verses of the book of Hebrews:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 

God’s ultimate revelation, that which defines everything else, is Christ. He spoke to us not only through the prophets, but also through the apostles, our New Testament. We also notice that revelation is spoken communication. God speaks, which shouldn’t surprise us given we’re made in His image; and we too speak. Revelation comes to us primarily in the words of God’s redemptive acts in history. We learn this in the first sentences of the gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

God’s words speak through the Word that speaks through creation even as He speaks through the stories, propositions, and reasoning we find in Scripture. The Bible is a profoundly human book precisely because it is a profoundly divine one—not a book (or 66 books by 40 different authors) of mere human invention, despite what the critics claim.

Those who reject this possibility have no ground on which to stand. Theirs is a completely arbitrary assumption based on nothing but a rank anti-supernatural bias. Christians, on the other hand, have solid logical, rational reasons to believe in the possibility of revelation. Sadly, I can’t establish that here, but trust me, revelation is not only possible, but actual, and because it makes sense of everything a la Lewis, sin, evil, and suffering are no longer a mystery we just have accept. If there is no revelation, sin and the suffering associated with it, make of life an absurdity. With it we’re given meaning, purpose, and hope in the midst of it. Let’s take a deeper look at sin from God’s perspective.

The Nature of Sin and Its Answer
We might think this is obvious, but unless God tells us what it is, what the nature of the problem is, we’ll always see sin as all about us. The best definition I’ve come across is from Agustine and Luther who define it as, Incurvatus in Se, or Latin for being turned or curved inward on oneself. We are by nature inveterate navel gazers—it’s always about us. Or as it’s perfectly described in a song by George Harrison, I Me Mine.  But in fact, sin is fundamentally an offense against Almighty God. Even our sin against others or ourselves is primarily a sin against God, or else it has no meaning. We can see this most clearly in King David’s committing adultery with Bathsheba and having her husband killed to try to cover it up. He says in Psalm 51:

3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.
4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.

What is striking is David saying it is only against God that he’s sinned. Surely it was also against Bathsheba and her husband, which it was, but the point is that sin has no meaning, evil is not evil and morally wrong, apart from it ultimately being against God. He defines what is good and what is evil in his very nature.

A very lot could be written, and has been written, about sin and its nature, but I want to focus on one thing that infects our understanding of sin more than any other in our day. . . . . happiness. You might wonder what sin has to do with happiness, or happiness with sin. If we go back to the definition of sin as being curved in on ourselves, our tendency will be to see sin as about what makes us happy or not. In other words, we define our life by our circumstances. If they are to our liking, then we think God likes us, if not, God must hate us. Everything becomes about us, and we fail to understand what David said, that in fact it’s all about God.

In the end, we have two stark choices in life. We either start with our desires and work up toward God, which distorts everything, or from God’s being, his character, to our desires. Charles Hodge explains these choices wonderfully:

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

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

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

He further says, that if we live this way, with this orientation, “every question which comes up for decision, is answered, not by a reference to the law of God, or to the instincts of his moral nature, but to the calculations of expediency.” In other words, we become calculating and manipulative, and the only issue is how it affects me, whether it makes me happy, whether it’s something I want or not. In the worst cases, the most important issues becomes how something makes me feel. Whether it’s right or wrong, whether God has commanded it or not, is irrelevant.

If we go back to the title, and sin helps us unlock the key to the meaning of the universe, what we see in human nature is exactly what we would expect to find if the story we read in our Bible is true. Right from the very beginning it all becomes so predictable. After man rebels against God in the garden, wanting to be his own God, to call the shots, what happens? Everything goes to hell. In the very next chapter, Genesis 4, Cain becomes jealous and angry and kills his own brother! Ultimately his anger is against God, but since he can’t kill God, he takes it out on his poor brother who hasn’t done anything wrong. Thankfully, in the biblical story God himself provides the answer. In other religions we have to work our way up to God, but in Christianity God himself came down to solve the problem of us ruining our lives with the fatal inward curve. Now we can practice true love that blesses us and others, and glorifies God.

The Hound of Heaven and Sanctification

The Hound of Heaven and Sanctification

Apr 22, 2026 | Theology

Whenever I tell my story, my testimony about God’s working in my life, I always use the great late 19th century poem by Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven. When I was first exposed to it many years ago, it captured my experience of God perfectly, and that was before I’d embraced Reformed theology and Calvinism. It was doubly applicable after that. Here is the first stanza which is absolute perfection when it comes to describing not just my experience, but that of many Christians I’ve known and whose testimonies I’ve heard:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’

Labyrinthine is such a great and apt word nobody would use anymore. I just learned looking it up, that labyrinth like many great words goes back to ancient Greek mythology meaning maze or elaborate, confusing structure with intricate passages that is very difficult to get out of. How perfectly does that describe sin! He also perfectly captures the emotional roller coaster of trying to live our lives outside of obedience to the will of God, even at times when we deceive ourselves into thinking we are living according to that will. We sinners can justify anything in our self-delusion. And since God will not let us go because he died for us, for his people, we can’t escape! This fact is an important piece of the story of the Hound of Heaven for our entire Christian life, which I’ll get to below.

As I say often, God is never in a hurry. His pace is never perturbed; it’s relaxed and infinitely persistent, in history and in our lives. We sense him, we turn our heads knowing he’s after us, yet we continue trying to find fulfillment in anything but him. It’s the craziest thing, but exactly what we should expect if the Bible is true. We are born rebellious sinners whose natural inclination, like Adam and Eve, is to run away from him. He will never, however, let us find any kind of ultimate gratification in anything that excludes him. The very same thing we can enjoy with and through and because of him, will betray us without him. All sin, as Augustine said, is good perverted. In one of the greatest sentences ever penned, also by Augustine, he wrote in his Confessions:

You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

The irony of this statement is that in many cases, a la the Hound of Heaven, he has to hound us into finding that rest.

God’s Sovereign Salvific Plans in Sanctification
As I mentioned above, I’m a Calvinist, and have been so since February of 1985. It was pretty much an instant conversion because once I was introduced of God’s sovereignty in our salvation, not only did I start to see it everywhere in the Bible, I saw it everywhere in my life, specifically in God bringing me to saving faith. I knew in some sense it applied to my sanctification as well, that my inner transformation and growth in holiness was God’s work and responsibility, not mine. However, I didn’t quite understand my part in all this, that I am responsible to seek God and obey his law. I recently wrote a post on The Christian Life of Pursuit, how the Christian life is a verb, what we are commanded to do now that we are those who belong to God, his holy ones, set apart for service. Christianity is a doing religion flowing out of our being, who we are, who Christ saved us to be. An example of one verse among many is from 1 Peter 2:

24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.

All of this is, of course, God’s working in us, but it is still our work. Just because God is sovereign and in control of all things, doesn’t mean we are not responsible beings with agency whose choices really matter and have real consequences. This is what most Christians misunderstand about Calvinism, that because we affirm God’s sovereign control of all things, that means human beings are robots, that it is just a Christian form of determinism. It’s not. It is a mystery, how God can “control” someone and them still be free and accountable. Nonetheless, it’s true, a biblical reality from Genesis to Revelation. The sovereign power of Almighty God is an important piece of the Hound of Heaven catching those he’s after, his people, which brings us to the biggest theological hangup with Calvinism for most Christians, and to me the most obviously true—Jesus died for his people, not every human being who ever lived. He didn’t make salvation possible for all people, but made it actual for his people.

This means Jesus only died for them, what we call limited or definite atonement. This idea offends many Christians because they think it somehow not fair that God wouldn’t offer salvation to all people, and make it possible that they could believe in Jesus and be saved. God, however, is not obligated to be fair, whatever that means. If justice is what it means, then every human being should be justly condemned and damned. We’re born guilty, and nothing we can do will change that; the penalty must be paid. Over my decades as a Reformed Christian I accepted this, but I don’t think I fully understood the implications. Then at some point God opened my eyes to two verses that transformed my perspective on our sanctification in salvation. This first is part of the birth narrative in Matthew 1 where Joseph has a dream and an angel tells him what the name of Mary’s child is to be:

21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

I noticed two things. First, Jesus didn’t come to make salvation possible for all people, but actual for his people. In theological terms Paul calls this election; God chooses whom he will save. Then I saw that it wasn’t from sin in general, but the word Matthew uses is plural, sins. God in Christ didn’t just save us from the guilt and penalty of sin, something that was done with animals in the Old Covenant, but from the power of sin as well, something the blood of bulls and goats could never accomplish. Augustus Toplady in the classic him wrote about how Christ’s death provides the “double cure” for sin, saving us from both God’s wrath and also to make us pure. It’s as we say, a twofer. And because our sanctification is part of God’s sovereign plan in salvation, the Hound of Heaven will inevitably make us holy, more like Christ in the process, like it or not.

The other verse is from the Apostle Paul, I Corinthians 1:30:

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

It’s a package deal! Back in 2012 I had been going through a bit of a dry time in my faith, partly because I forgot that the Christian life is one of pursuit. So one day I decided no matter how rotten I felt, I would read the Bible and pray every morning, and that I have done ever since. In due course I discovered it made all the difference, and at some point God opened my eyes to this verse. I realized, not only was my justification not up to me, but either was my sanctification. I of course was and am involved in both, but both are the ultimate responsibility of God, the Hound of Heaven. The one part of this we will not be involved in is our redemption, our resurrection because we will be dead. But from the moment we are raised spiritually from the dead in our justification, God works throughout our lives to make us increasingly holy, set apart for good works unto him. As Paul says in Ephesians 2, salvation is the gift of God, and that includes sanctification, as he says:

10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

How does this happen? God.

The Transformation is God’s Work
The first Reformed theology I read not long after my “conversion” was Charle’s Hodge’s Systematic Theology. I’ll never forget the simple sentence for his definition of Christianity: “The work of God in the soul of man.” For much of my Christian life I thought my sanctification was a matter of my willing it. If I just tried hard enough I could overcome my sin, but I found that my experience was much like the Apostle Paul’s as he describes it in Romans 7:

14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. 15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Yet as he discusses the law and the sin dwelling in him, he declares something I felt many times:

24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

I often felt nobody could deliver me, including God, but the answer that frees us from despair and will deliver us is obvious:

25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Some commentators think Paul’s description of his struggle with sin is prior to his becoming a Christian, but I don’t think it is. Even after we come to Christ, sin still lives in us, in our flesh as Paul calls it, the body of death we are stuck with in this fallen world. Because of this we can understand why the first of Martin Luther’s 95 Thesis had to do with daily repentance:

Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said “Repent”, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance.

Somewhere along the way on my journey from 2012 when I learned this, I started to begin every morning prayer repenting of my sin, following it with prayers of thanksgiving. The struggle still exists and always will while we live in this body of death, but now we realize our sanctification is as much the work of Christ as is our justification. This truth is why Paul follows the chapter of our struggle with sin with the assurance of forgiveness and the possibility of transformation in chapter 8:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

I realized I can’t change myself, but God in Christ can change me. That does, however, require something on my part. It is within our power to abide in the true vine (John 15) that we might bear much fruit. So, knowing I was too weak and pathetic with little will power, focused on what I knew I could do. Initially, my prayers were inspired by Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18: “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” I figured like the tax collector I could beat my breast and say that. In due course my process every morning became reading God’s word, which along the way also started to include Scripture memory, then prayers of repentance, thanksgiving, and supplication.

At some point I realized that any real, substantial change and transformation of who I am was the supernatural work of God in my soul because of the work of Christ. I still had choices to make, the most important being to ask, seek, and knock, that I might receive, find, and the door opened to me. Then obey in whatever feeble way I could and trust God for the inner transformation to make me want to obey. It is important to understand the power and the beauty of the gospel isn’t that God in Christ just changes our actions, but that he changes our desires and affections and abilities. The inner transformation required to live the Christian life, what we call sanctification, is every bit as up to him as is our being born again in the first place. As Paul says in Philippians 1:

6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

The good work he began in us and will continue in our sanctification is just as supernatural as when we were raised spiritually from the dead to eternal life. I love my 1978 NIV translation of Romans 4:17 as it relates to our sanctification and transformation. Speaking of Abraham he says:

He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.

He literally call things that have no existence into existence, like this universe and us in it. If he has the power to do that, our paltry little sin problem is nothing for him. That’s why Paul’s declaration of deliverance is so exuberant: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

 

 

 

 

The Christian Life of Pursuit

The Christian Life of Pursuit

Apr 8, 2026 | Theology

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

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

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

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

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

Then he compares it to the seed that bears fruit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
34 No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

A Protestant Take on the Catholic Faith

A Protestant Take on the Catholic Faith

Feb 18, 2026 | Theology

I’ve been a Christian north of 47(!) years now. That’s insane. There was a time I couldn’t conceive of ever being 47 years old; now 47 is receding in the rear view mirror. I was born-again in the heyday of the Jesus Revolution late 1970s, and as the Grateful Dead also in the 1970s sang, what a long strange trip it’s been. I’ve found as I’ve gotten older that in many ways I’ve become more Catholic than Protestant in my basic understanding of the nature of things. Mind you, I could never embrace Catholic theology given I’m a convinced Reformed Christian in the Presbyterian tradition, but I think I’ve grown increasingly more Catholic than Protestant in my perspective on things, as I’m going to attempt to explain in this post. 

Coming from an Italian heritage I grew up Catholic, but firmly rejected it when I was introduced to the Evangelical faith my first semester in college. In fact, I became vehemently anti-Catholic for a period of time because they never told me I could be assured of salvation and have eternal life, not wonder if I did. For example, When I was introduced to Romans 10 the night I prayed the Sinner’s Prayer, I was blown away:

9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 

I will? I didn’t know this as a Catholic, and one of my big fears was going to hell when I die; maybe that’s a Catholic thing. I was also early on introduced to this passage in 1 John 5:

11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 He who has the Son has life; He who does not have the Son of God does not have life. 13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. 

I can know this? Really? When I realized the Catholic Church had never told me this, it ticked me off. Of course it horrified my mother and father. My mother is still convinced that I had gotten involved in a cult, but I keep telling her that no, I was just a young know-it-all teenager who had no idea what life was all about.

Eventually I lost my animus toward Catholicism as I got to know about the many solid Catholics I highly respected in the conservative movement. These people were not stupid or ignorant. Eventually I came to accept that they simply came to different conclusions with the information and facts presented to them. I also was able to learn more about Catholic theology, and I discovered it was far more nuanced than I realized in my know-it-all ignorance. There is much I disagree with, but they are not as far away from what I believe as I initially thought.

It’s far too complicated to explain, and I don’t know enough to really do that, but I’ve concluded that no, Catholics don’t believe their works will save them, that in effect obedience to the law will earn them God’s favor. Some Protestant Catholic haters will declare that, but it’s a caricature. They too believed we are saved by God’s grace alone, and Christ’s merits, only that it’s applied in and through our lives differently than we Protestants understand it. Most importantly, they are passionate about standing for the ancient creeds that declare the historic orthodox Christian faith. For me, as long as someone can proclaim the Apostles or Nicene Creed, we’re brothers or sisters in Christ regardless of their other theological convictions.

What exactly is it about my perspective on things that has become more Catholic? The nature of salvation is one, and the nature of reality is the other. I may be going out on some thin ice, but I’m confident it’s much thicker than it first appears.

The Difference Between a Proposition and Trust
Protestants are a people of the Book, of words, of propositions. Our Reformation, our break from the Roman Catholic Church, was declared by the five Solas, one being Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone as our ultimate source of authority. Catholics, on the other hand, are people of the Church and the sacraments, of grace infused, not merely accepted rationally. Scripture is but one piece of the puzzle for them, whereas for us it is the puzzle. That said, the Roman Catholic Church stands strongly on the inerrant, authoritative word of God. In fact, growing up a Catholic gave me an inherent respect for the Bible, so that when I was presented clearly with what it said, I believed it was in fact authoritative truth about the nature of reality, including how we are saved.

Which brings me the first of what I think are my more Catholic perspectives, salvation. As Evangelical Protestants, we believe in the primacy of propositions. If you believe in X, Y, and Z, you shall be saved. If you only believe in X and Y, and are not quite sure about Z, or ignorant of it, it’s iffy. If you only understand X and don’t get the others, you’re out! I don’t buy this anymore. I know this will send my Protestant brothers and sisters into a tizzy, but it shouldn’t. I came to believe a long time ago that there will be no theology test to get into heaven, or to receive our new resurrected bodies when Christ returns and death, the final enemy, is destroyed. As I became less dogmatic in my certitude about things, realizing I’m finite and in the cosmic scheme of things know pretty much next to nothing, I even told a friend we might get there and find out, to his horror, that the Roman Catholics were right!

As I came to have a more capacious understanding of salvation I never changed my basic theological convictions. I was a Calvinist then and I’m a Calvinist now. Only now, I don’t think everyone who disagrees with me is going to hell. In fact, I now believe anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, even if they don’t quite understand what they are calling on. The opposite holds true as well. Someone can believe all the right things, have every proposition down and intellectually assent to them all, and still be headed for hell. Mere intellectual assent is not the basis of salvation, trust in a person is.

Which brings me to John 3, and Jesus analogizing the process of salvation from sin on the cross to Moses and the snake in the desert:

14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

As modern, post-Enlightenment people, when we see the word believe we immediately think, one who intellectually assents to something. The Greek, however, doesn’t mean that at all. It doesn’t preclude it, but it only tells part of the story. The word means trust, to put your faith in something or someone. Of course one has to have some understanding of the object of our faith or trust, but we don’t have to fully understand it to believe, to trust, to entrust our self to it, him, or her. I can trust getting on an airplane without understanding anything about physics or aerodynamics. I simply believe, trust, that the plane will get me safely to my destination. We exercise faith, or trust, every single day of our lives in ways too many to count. It is the glue that hold families and societies together.

We read the story of the bronze snake in Numbers 21. As with much of what we read in our Bibles, it’s a bizarre story. The Israelites are in the desert on the way to the promised land and they are complaining. They figure, Moses brought them out into the desert to die. A rebellion ensues, and God sent venomous snakes into the camp as a judgment against them. They quickly realize the error of their ways, repent, and ask Moses to pray to the Lord for them. The Lord tells Moses to fashion a snake and put it on a poll, so that, “anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” I guess Moses melts some bronze, makes a snake, puts it up on a poll. “Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.” They were to look up to an image, a symbol, of the thing that is killing them? How strange is that! You can imagine the people saying to themselves, that’s it, just look up and we’ll be healed? Did they understand anything about how or why it worked? Nothing. They just trusted Moses’ words, and were desperate enough that instead of looking down at the injury, they would look up and be healed.

Now Jesus tells us the cross and the salvation it brings is analogous to this. How much do we really need to understand the nature of soteriology, or the how and why of it all, to be saved? Most Christians could agree nobody understands 100 percent, but is 80 percent good enough? How about 60 percent? Forty or 20? For all of Christian history until the 19th century, not only were most people illiterate, few people outside of the church owned Bibles. Even after Guttenberg, Bibles were hugely expensive until mass printing in the 20th century. The vast majority of Christians heard it read and preached on Sundays. Most of these could likely not explain the intricacies of salvation and the gospel, but trusting Jesus to forgive them and give them eternal life, that they could understand.

All of this is why I believe my mother, for example, will be with Jesus when she dies. She couldn’t explain the gospel very well, and as a Catholic of 92 years of age, a personal relationship to God is an abstraction she has a hard time grasping, but I keep giving her hope that she just needs to trust in Jesus for what is often difficult to believe and understand, and she does as best she can. As I said, I’m convinced there will be no theology test to get through those pearly gates, which I why I always just encourage people to look to Jesus, and get to know him and his word if they at all can. Hopefully, the understanding will come along in due course.

Lastly, do we intellectually assent to something before we believe or trust? Or can the assenting to something as true come after trusting? A wonderful movie with Mark Whalberg about the life and faith of Father Stuart Long opened my eyes to how powerful the Catholic approach to faith and trust can be, as well as the testimony of Shia Labeouf in his interview with Bishop Barron. Neither of these men would have become Christians with an Evangelical, intellectual first approach. Rather, as those who had yet to believe, they were invited to participate in the sacraments, which in turn created faith in them as their understanding was illuminated by what stood behind those sacraments. To we Protestants, that’s all but heretical. Nope, you have to understand and accept before we’ll let you do any of this Christian stuff.

Now, on to the minor topic of the nature of reality.

Reality is a Lot Messier and More Complex Than We Think
This one is a bit harder to explain, or maybe a lot harder. An allusion to a hit movie might help. We live in the Matrix, in a world, a universe, of information and data so infinite in magnitude and complexity that it makes all the AI data centers and computing power in the world look like a child’s sandbox. We can take our blue pills and pretend what we see is what we get, reality obvious, right in front of us, or take the red pill and go down the rabbit hole. The Protestant mind tends to the more rational, logical, explainable, and I’ve found over the years the more I know, the more confounding reality becomes to me. Maybe it’s a more mystical take, a less buttoned down, I’ve got reality figured out take. Like I said, this isn’t easy to explain.

It seems to me Catholic thinkers, and the Catholic worldview in general, tend to see a more seamless connection between the eternal or heavenly non-material world, the Matrix, and our material world than Protestants do. This became especially true as conservative Protestant Christianity grew more Pietistic and tended toward a Gnostic dualism in their understanding of spiritual and material realities, upstairs and downstairs if you will. Catholics tend to see the world as more enchanted, more connected to that which is not of this world, which is why praying to saints is plausible to them and anathema to Protestants. They see the vail between the two worlds as more permeable, a water wall rather than a brick wall.

Regarding this, I heard Bishop Barron, I’m sure the Catholic thinker I respect most, explain praying to saints using Hebrews 12:1, that “we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.” Building on chapter 11, the great Hall of Fame of faith, this cloud of those who have gone before us is not off on some other planet with an unbridgeable gap between us, but all around us, invisible to our five senses, but there all the same. I couldn’t buy his argument, but at least it was plausible given how Catholics perceive the world we live in. So no, I haven’t started praying to the saints, and after all, Scripture is clear, every Christian is a saint, a holy one set apart to God.

On an intellectual level, Catholics going back to Augustine through Aquinas and many others, have developed a much more robust and broad intellectual tradition trying to apply their Christian worldview to every nook and cranny of existence. I think they got much wrong, but they also God much right. Conservative Protestant Christianity, now called Evangelicalism, has been anti-intellectual for some two hundred years. Add to that anti-theological and ahistorical. In fact, historian Mark Noll, an Evangelical, wrote a best-selling book in 1995 called, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. I began to understand this in my early Christian walk through Frances Schaeffer, and learned more as I embraced Reformed Theology in my 24th year. The Reformed tradition is much more intellectually robust, but we’re a small portion of the greater Evangelical church.

Art is another area where a Catholic and Protestant worldview diverge because of The Matrix. The Reformation gave us iconoclasm, taking the Second Commandment against making images and bowing down to them and worshipping them as a commandment against making any kind of images. Catholic Christendom gave us the most amazing art and architecture the world has ever seen, and Protestantism rejected all of it. That’s why if you go into Evangelical churches there is no art, and of course, no statues. By contrast, if you go into Catholic churches it’s usually a visual feast, something that inspires the worshipping soul to connect with a different world to which the art points.

Having said all this, I’m no less a Reformed Calvinist than I’ve ever been, only that after well over four decades following Christ I’ve come to appreciate the Catholic Christianity that gave us birth. I came to realize a while ago that I can disagree with my Christian brothers and sisters theologically, and still see them among the great cloud of witnesses to our glorious Lord and Savior. To put it crassly, we are on the same team, and together we are doing our best to obey the Lord Jesus when he taught us to pray, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The Wide and Narrow Road Reconsidered

The Wide and Narrow Road Reconsidered

Jan 21, 2026 | Theology

If you’re not active on Twitter, you likely won’t know about the big blow up about Kirk Cameron that happened some weeks back. On his podcast he was having a conversation with his son about the topic of Hell. They questioned the concept of Eternal Conscious Torment (ETC), and Christian Twitter went nuts. Words like heretic and apostacy were thrown around like confetti at a New Year’s Eve celebration. The other option for conservative Christians who believe in hell but question or wonder about the eternality of conscience torment is annihilationism. At some point after God’s “judgement of the living and the dead,” these people will cease to exist, they will die, forever. So the punishment is eternal, forever, but the person is not consciously being punished in misery forever. They’re dead.

I have no desire to debate or explore the topic because I believe God is just, and whenever difficult issues arise in life, or death, I lean on Moses’ declaration in Deuteronomy 32:3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.

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

That is the hill I live and die on, and to which I give my life, my fortune, such as it is, and my sacred honor.

One of the many comments about this was regarding the wide and narrow gate and road Jesus speaks about in Matthew 7:

13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

The person who commented was affirming that most people will go to hell and not be saved. For all of my Christian life until August of 2022 and my embrace of postmillennialism, I believed that too. From Jesus’ words it seems obvious this is the case. I’ll never forget hearing for the first time the idea that more people will be saved than damned to hell. It sounded so strange to me, but it sounded so right given everything I was learning about my newfound optimistic eschatology. I’ll get into that below, but first let’s see why a la Vizzini in The Princess Bride, I don’t think that passage means what you think it means.

The Context of Matthew 7 and Jesus’ Ministry
People forget that Jesus was a Jewish Messiah sent to “the lost sheep of Israel,” and not to anyone else. When a Canaanite woman came to Jesus to heal her daughter (Matt. 15), first he ignored her, then replied: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” Her response to Jesus’ rejection so impressed him that he healed her daughter. Here we see both dynamics in play. On the one hand he is telling us his first mission was to Jews only, but also confirming the Old Testament witness of the blessings of God extending to all peoples and nations. Jesus used the same phrase in Matthew 10 when he sent out the Twelve, “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.” We get off track when we think Jesus’ words always apply equally and always to all people in all times. That is not the case.

We must remember that Jesus came in fulfillment of 2,000 years of redemptive history through the people of Israel. The promises and commandments while in some sense universal, were as Paul says about the gospel, “first to the Jew, then to the Gentile” (Rom. 1:16). As we know, he would always go to the synagogue first when he visited a city, and if they rejected him, which they often did, he would go to the Gentiles. Many Jews didn’t like that, at all. But God’s plan of salvation was never only to the Jews. It took a while for early Jewish Christians to figure this out. Even Peter had to see a vision from God and then be reminded, and even be rebuked by Paul, because he so easily forgot that it may have been the Jew first, but it was always also to the Gentile.

From the beginning, the blessings of salvation from sin were intended for Gentiles, as can be seen from God’s first calling of Abram in Genesis 12. He picked only one man on earth and said to him, “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you,” and this promise is reiterated two more times to Abraham, and then to Isaac and Jacob. In Genesis 46 and 49, the Lord tells us that his servant will be “a light to the Gentiles” (42:6 and 49:6), and the latter passage adds, “that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” The same word translated Gentiles in these verses is also used in the great Incarnation passage of Isaiah 9. We’re all familiar, in the elegant language of the King James Version, with verse 7:

6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

We’re generally not familiar with the verse that introduces the transforming life of this child, which talks about God now honoring “Galilee of the Gentiles.” As we know Jesus was from the Nazareth in the region of Galilee. Most translations, for some reason translate Gentiles as nations, but it’s the same Hebrew word as Isaiah uses the in the previous two verses. The point is that the Gentiles are part of God’s redemptive plans, but their salvation will only come through the Jews. In the metaphor Paul uses in Romans 11 of the olive tree, the Gentiles are the ones needing to be grafted in. In another conversation with a non-Jew, although not a Gentile, the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), Jesus tells her that “salvation is from the Jews,” but because of that encounter with her, many of the Samaritans came to believe in him. Salvation is from the Jews, but not only for the Jews. It is for all peoples and nations.

When we come to the context of Matthew 7, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is speaking to Jews and for Jews. Yes, there are universal principles throughout, but he is communicating to Jews in a Jewish context because that’s why he came as their Messiah. They are the lost sheep he is going to find. Chapter 5 very much has a Jewish flavor as he directly discusses the law of Moses, the Ten Commandments and other laws from that period of their history. Chapter 6 is mostly universal, but in the last passage about worry he contrasts the Jews he is speaking to with the pagans. Chapter 7 again is more to the Jews because he speaks of false prophets and disciples, and it is here that we read of the wide gate and the broad road that leads to destruction.

Seeing how Jesus’ life and ministry played out, his declaration about the few definitely applied to the Jews. After his resurrection and just prior to Pentecost, there are only 120 among what Luke calls “the believers.” That means every other Jew in the Roman Empire did not believe in Jesus as their Messiah. You can’t get much smaller and narrower than that! The road to destruction for the Jews was indeed broad and many entered through that gate. Even after 40 years of the ministry of the Apostles at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70, Christian Jews were a tiny minority. Taking Jesus’ prediction about only a few finding life as applying to Gentiles cannot be inferred from this text. It may be true, but Jesus isn’t saying that here.

To me, whatever the nature of hell, and it exists, God would never allow Satan to win more souls to send there. No way, no how. I used to believe that He did allow that because I didn’t understand the context of Matthew 7.

The Redemptive Plan of God and His Mighty Saving Power
Many Christians, most I dare say, believe God is stingy with his mercy and grace. I’ve often heard Christians referred to as a remnant, a reference to the few Jews saved from Israel’s rebellion in the Old Testament. I get it, the world can be a horrific place, and if we do the math in our head solely based on appearances, and history up to this moment, Satan definitely has the lead. However, we’re not at the end of the story yet, and instead of judging by what we see, I suggest we go to God’s word to see what he says about the salvation Jesus accomplished for His people on the cross.

The first thing we notice is that multitudes will be saved, and in the word God used with Abram, be blessed. The Lord uses three images to give us a sense of the magnitude of His saving work as he communicates his covenant promise to His people: stars, dust, and sand. We read of stars in Genesis 15:

4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” 5 He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

And dust in Genesis 13:

16 I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.

And after the Lord changes his name to Abraham and introduces him and his household to circumcision, he adds sand (Gen. 22):

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.”

The Lord reiterates his multiplication promise to his son and grandson. To Isaac he says (Gen. 26):

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.

And then to Jacob (Gen. 28):

14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.

And He further clarifies the nature of these peoples (Gen. 35):

11 And God said to him, “I am God Almighty; be fruitful and increase in number. A nation and a community of nations will come from you, and kings will be among your descendants.

We can’t necessarily infer a majority from these passages, but images of stars, dust, and sand don’t exactly bring to mind God as a grinch miserly with his saving grace. Why do I, and specifically we postmillennialists, believe God will in fact save more people than he allows to be lost? Because the word that best describes God’s redemptive plans on earth is what his mighty saving power is accomplishing—victory.

An Eschatology of Victory
That is the title of a book by J. Marcellus Kik I read in the early days after my embrace of postmillennialism. I found this new theological journey I had embarked on after almost 44 years as a Christian changed not only my perspective on “end times,” but on everything. In 2024 I had the privilege of being invited to do a podcast on a YouTube channel called Eschatology Matters, which says it perfectly. What we think about “end times” shades our perspective on everything in life—past, present, and future. Eschatology, the study of end things, does indeed matter, a lot.

Prior to this shift, not only did I think more people would be lost than saved, but I believed the devil had the upper hand “down here” in this fallen world. When I was born again in the Late Great Planet Earth late 70s, I naturally embraced the dispensationalism that was everywhere at the time. Rapture theology was common. Things were getting worse, and Jesus was coming back soon. Not exactly an “eschatology of victory.” After I got burned out on such “newspaper eschatology,” I became an eschatological agnostic, what I came to call pan-millennialism because everything will pan out in the end. The Bible, or so I thought, doesn’t give us clear guidance on “end times,” so why worry about it. By the way, I put that phrase in quotes because it became dominant in the 70s to refer to what happens at the end of time, to the end of the world as we know it, as the end times. The 90s into the 2000s had the Left Behind phenomenon, so “end times” became even more engrained in the culture.

I’m generally not a negative or pessimistic person, so for most of my pan-mill life I believed we could change the world for the better, and even though I thought the devil would win on earth, Jesus would come back to save the day and usher us into eternity. As the creed says, “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” When I embraced amillennialism in 2014 because I learned the Bible does indeed say something about eschatology, I found that it turned me into a pessimist. Either I learned or came to believe that sin and man’s rebellion were a more powerful force in a fallen world that I mistakenly believed belonged to Satan. In August of 2022 I started to understand just how wrong I had been. On this earth, in this fallen world, the gospel declares in the words of another book I read early on, Victory in Jesus. This one by Greg Bahnsen, and the subtitle says well the nature of this new eschatological perspective I now have: The Bright Hope of Postmillennialism.

I had for decades believed postmillennialism was a secular distortion of the biblical record, turning it into a belief in unending human progress, and specifically because of man’s efforts. It had nothing to do, or so I thought, with the gospel. Given the track record of us humans over the millennia, I considered it unworthy of even considering, a joke. What really surprised me was that it only took me listening to a YouTube video on a walk one Saturday afternoon to convince me it was likely true, that I had been wrong all these years, pre, pan, or a-mill.

My objective here isn’t to convince anyone of my now optimistic eschatological convictions, but to convey that how we interpret something like Jesus talking about wide and narrow gates is not only determined by the context as I argued above, but also by our eschatology, even if we don’t think we have one. We do!