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!

 

 

The Dominion Mandate for Today

The Dominion Mandate for Today

Jan 14, 2026 | Theology

For most of my Christian life the Dominion Mandate was not something I gave any serious thought to. For me what counted was what some call the Cultural Mandate. From early in my Christian life, I always thought we should bring our Christian worldview and thinking to bear upon all of life, but that didn’t have anything to do with “dominion,” or so I thought. Both of these mandates come from the same place, Genesis 1, but they are two different perspectives based on two different theological understandings of the church’s role in the world. For those focused on it as a cultural endeavor, it is primarily an intellectual exercise of applying a Christian perspective to the world and what we do in it. Dominion, on the other hand, implies rule and authority, not just influence. it’s taking over, becoming the boss, so to speak.

There is a third option where neither culture nor dominion is relevant, and that is the basic Pietistic Christianity of the vast majority of Evangelical Christians. For most Christians their faith is primarily a personal affair with little relevance to the wider world. I’m not talking about being personally pious, but a movement in 17th century Germany as a reaction to a dry scholastic form of Christianity. Eventually through the two Great Awakenings, revivalism, and fundamentalism, by the mid-20th century Evangelical Christianity became culturally irrelevant. Christianity was now about personal spirituality, and cultural or societal transformation was beside the point. Plus the world would get increasingly worse and Jesus would come back soon to consummate all things. This is slowly changing, but it still dominates the church. What I’m talking about here is a completely different orientation for the Christian life.

I was inspired to write this because of a book I’m reading by a new friend of mine, David Bostrom, Get Dominion: You’ve Been Called to Fulfill a Mission. The paradigm shift from a personal, Pietistic Christianity to a dominion mindset is dramatic. As I discovered, it can also be dramatically different from a worldview, cultural influence perspective. I like David’s definition of dominion: “to fulfill a mission,” a mission to accomplish. Speaking of which, the movies, and the old TV show, Mission Impossible, give us some sense of the momentous task before us. When he was given a mission, Peter Graves would listen to a small reel-to-reel tape recorder which would self-destruct after it explained the mission. He was told, “You’re mission, Jim, should you decided to accept it . . . .” and then the tape would self-destruct in five seconds. Finally, he was wished good luck. We don’t need luck! We have a mandate from the Living Creator God, Christ having redeemed the world and taken it back from Satan, and the Holy Spirit living in and through us to transform creation as Adam and Eve were supposed to do. Most importantly, the Dominion Mandate is theologically grounded in the ascension of Christ now sitting at the right hand of God “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1).

What Exactly is the Dominion Mandate?
The Dominion Mandate comes from the charge God gave Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1.

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

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

This is the NIV translation which uses the word rule, as do most modern translations. The term dominion mandate comes from the King James which translates rule as “dominion over.” According to Strong’s, the word means, “make to have dominion, prevail against, reign, bear; to tread down, i.e. Subjugate.” Like I said, become the boss.

For most of my Christian life I didn’t think this mandate to rule, to “have dominion over” applied to Christians; it fell after the fall, never to rise again until the second coming. This is because like most Christians I tended to over spiritualize my faith, even as a worldview Christian. Basically I thought the world belonged to the devil, and only at Christ’s second coming would he take it back. I was wrong. In fact, Christ came at his first coming to take the world back. He began an inch by inch, step by step, brick by brick process of transforming the world by extending his reign over it, and advancing his kingdom in it. Both John the Baptist and Jesus said the exact same thing as they were declaring his coming ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” At his death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, it fully came. His life on earth was the foundation upon which his kingdom would be built, and his church, his body, would carry out his reign throughout the earth, just as we’ve seen over these last two thousand years.

But that doesn’t get to the question of exactly what this mandate is, how it works, how we are involved. David in his book does a great job of making it practical for every one of us, and it is for all Christians. When we trust Christ, our salvation from sin doesn’t just reconcile us to God, but it gives us a mission to fulfill on this earth, to “have dominion over” it. Because of the rise of both secularism and Pietism, people today are adrift in the world. They are looking for meaning, hope, and purpose, but are stuck as Henry David Thoreau said, leading “lives of quiet desperation.” As Christians that shouldn’t be us! Not only has Christ given us a holiness mandate, but a dominion mandate in his creation as well. Here is how David begins his introduction:

Are you having a hard time figuring out where you fit in this world? Are you frustrated because your efforts don’t seem to have a significance you think they ought to have? Do you know deep down there’s more to life than what you’re experiencing, but can’t seem to get a handle on what it is? Does a lack of meaning or vision for your life make you feel like you’re dying inside?

It doesn’t have to be this way because Jesus imbues everything we do in this material world with spiritual significance.

The Priesthood of All Believers
In the Middle Ages prior to the Reformation, there was a stark societal dualism between the clerical class and the laity, what Martin Luther called the “temporal” and “spiritual” orders. The religious professionals, priest, monks, nuns, etc., did the spiritual stuff, and everyone else just survived and did their spiritual stuff on Sundays and holy-days. Martin Luther changed all that. The Reformation he unwittingly started began a transformation of the lives of everyday, average people, and ended up transforming the world. The dominion mandate for the most part had been lost, and now was found. We need to find it again.

In his Address to the Nobility of the German Nation (1520), Luther criticized the traditional distinction between the two orders—the laity and the clergy— and he puts his argument this way:

It has been devised that the Pope, bishops, priests, and monks are called the spiritual estate, princes, lords, artificers, and peasants are the temporal estate. This is an artful lie and hypocritical device, but let no one be made afraid by it, and that for this reason: that all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone.

The Apostle Peter agrees:

9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

In other words, there is no difference between the religious professionals and everyone else, except the calling we’ve received from God and how we serve others. Luther says it beautifully:

A cobbler, a smith, a peasant, every man, has the office and function of his calling, and yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops, and every man should by his office or function be useful and beneficial to the rest, so that various kinds of work may all be united for the furtherance of body and soul, just as the members of the body all serve one another.

In our current day this could be expressed as, “A plumber, a doctor, a lawyer, a builder, a homemaker, has the office and function of his or her calling, and yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops . . . “ In 1520 this was insane. No wonder the church and the government of the Holy Roman Empire wanted him dead. This would turn the world upside down! Just like the Apostle did.

Most of us in the daily grind have difficulty perceiving what we do as a “spiritual estate” of any eternal value. Part of the reason is that we have reverted to a Middle Ages mindset before Luther’s Nobility address, mainly because of the Lutherans who came in the century following his death who developed the Pietism I referred to above. Building a house, or selling a product, or fixing a car, doesn’t seem “spiritual” to us, but everything human beings saved by Christ do is spiritual! Everything we do, every single thing, is done unto the Lord (Col. 3:23). Paul puts it this way in I Corinthians 15:58 in a verse I used to read dualistically:

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

Certainly my work as a carpenter, or sales guy (what I do five days a week), or nurse, or trash collector, or you name it, is not “labor in the Lord,” right? The labor that will last forever are things like evangelism, or prayer, or Bible reading, or church, or fellowship with other Christians, but surely not grubby old work. Nope, it’s all spiritual, all labor in the Lord, and none of it is in vain. The reason is the Dominion Mandate tied to the life, death, resurrection, ascension of Christ, and Pentecost.

The Fall to the Ascension, Pentecost, and Dominion
Lastly, let’s see how the spiritual significance of everything we do is rooted in Christ’s mission on earth, and how that connects to the Dominion Mandate. At creation, Adam and Eve had everything they needed to fulfill the mandate the Lord had given them, but at some point Adam allowed Satan to slither his way into the garden as a serpent, and he broke it into a million pieces. Christ came to accomplish what Adam couldn’t. Two thousand years later and a very lot of water under the bridge, God became a man because as he says through Isaiah (63:5):

I looked, but there was no one to help, I was appalled that no one gave support; so my own arm achieved salvation for me, and my own wrath sustained me.

I write this in the season of Advent in which we celebrate the incarnation, God the Son coming down from heaven, born of a woman, becoming man, to be “pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.” In that prophecy from Isaiah 53, we’re told that although “he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth,”

10 Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand

In other words, because of what Christ accomplished, the Dominion Mandate can now be fulfilled. We are his offspring, and because of his accomplishment, his obedience unto death, the Lord’s will for us to rule, to have dominion, will prosper in his hand. Dominion is not our work, but the Lord’s will working through us.

Most importantly, is what the ascension means for us, his people on earth, those he left behind to fulfill his mission, and to take dominion over the earth. Before Christ ascended to heaven, he told his disciples (Matt. 28) that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go . . . .” Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 that when Christ was seated at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms, he had achieved a position “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” This authority is what gives the Dominion Mandate its power. Christ ascended that he might send his Holy Spirit at Pentecost that he might be with us always, to the very end of the age (Matt. 28:20)

What the ascension enabled was God the Holy Spirit acting through His people to do and accomplish significant things for the advance of God’s kingdom on earth. But what cements this concept in the heart of God’s people is what Paul says a little later in Ephesians about our own spiritual resurrection from the dead (Eph. 2):

4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

Think about that. We are seated with him, meaning we partake of his authority in this age, and in the age to come! When we’re trying to hammer the 2×4 on the frame of that house, it’s not just a hammer and nail and a piece of wood—it’s us in Christ taking dominion! Serving that customer? We’re taking dominion!

The ancient world became the modern world because of Jesus enabling his people, his body on earth, to accomplish what Adam could not. This has profound spiritual and material implications because these are one and the same. Whatever God accomplished spiritually for His people as he reconciled them to Himself in Christ, will always have material implications. Rejecting any kind of false dualism, we need to be about fulfilling the mission we were given when we placed our trust in Christ. Everything we do is imbued with profound eternal meaning and purpose and hope. As Jesus said in John 10:10:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

 

 

The Miracles of Jesus and their Meaning

The Miracles of Jesus and their Meaning

Dec 31, 2025 | Parents and Family, Theology

I was inspired to write this post because of an unpleasant Twitter interlocutor who claimed to know things about me from one sentence I wrote in a comment: “Jesus’ healing ministry was a metaphor for spiritual reality.” He came back in so many words with, why do you hate Jews? What? He used the word “literal” a number of times as if my statement somehow implied I didn’t believe Jesus physically, “literally” healed Jews. Not too many responses in and it was clear he was not interested in a conversation. Such is part of the downside of social media and interacting with sinful human beings, but alas I get to flesh out here what I did in fact mean, and why I think it’s important.

As a Reformed Christian I embrace the doctrines of grace, which refers to a Calvinist understanding of how God saves sinners. Man is unable to save himself because he is dead in his sin, not merely sick or crippled, but on the bottom of the pool dead. That was the metaphor I was presented the first time I was introduced to Calvinism. For my young Christian life up to that point, over six years, I believed all people had the ability to decide to believe in and follow Christ. Jesus died for everyone, and those who choose him will be saved. Instead of being at the bottom of the pool, dead, they were flailing around in the water yelling for help. Jesus was the life preserver, and anyone is free to grab it, or not. I remember thinking, Calvinism is upside down from how I had conceived the Christian faith, but it made sense logically; more importantly, it made sense biblically. I went home and reading the Bible I saw it everywhere, thinking, how could I have missed this?

You might already see where I’m going with this. If someone is blind, he can’t make himself see. Only Jesus can do that. Deaf, lame, or crippled? Only God can heal that. Not to mention literally (there’s the word) bringing someone back from the dead, which included Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter. All these healings, and almost all of them were Jews, point beyond the healings, to a much more important spiritual healing to come. First, Jesus didn’t heal people to show off his power, but as evidence of his authority to fulfill God’s covenant promise to save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21). Jews were expecting a different Messiah than Jesus turned out to be, which is why he could never have been made up by Jews. They were looking for a Davidic king who would finally end their oppression, the Romans only the latest of their tormentors. What Jesus the Messiah came to bring was a transformation in spiritual reality by paying the ultimate price for sin that would eventually transform this material world.

The Material Implications of Jesus’ Healing Ministry
Using the word “spiritual” in the modern church context is a problem because of Pietism. I used that word with my unpleasant interlocutor, and he went on a rant that I was against being pious, or against a personal, experiential relationship with God through Christ in devotional Bible reading, prayer, and worship. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve never been as emotionally invested in my faith as I am now. What I do mean by Pietism is the 17th century German Lutheran movement that developed in response to a dry, overly intellectual approach to the faith called scholasticism. Through the First Great Awakening, Wesley, the Second Great Awakening, Revivalism, and fundamentalism, Pietism came to dominate the modern Evangelical church.

As a result, the word “spiritual” came to mean other worldly, heavenly, non-material. The word that best describes this state of mind is dualism, an upstairs/downstairs reality. Upstairs is the important, “spiritual” stuff, Bible reading, prayer, evangelism, worship, downstairs the not so important, mundane, material stuff like work and politics and cultural pursuits. My interlocutor was stuck in his dualistic perspective on spirituality, so when I wrote “spiritual” he interpreted it as having nothing to do with downstairs, physical, “literal” reality. In fact, biblical speaking, the “spiritual” has everything to do with the “material.” There is no dualism separating them in a biblical view of the world. This is why it’s good to immerse ourselves in the Old Testament because the Hebrews, then Jews, were a deeply this material world oriented people, and they saw salvation as connected to material reality. To them, spiritual meant material, and material meant spiritual. It was the Greeks who brought us dualism, and eventually that made its way into Christianity over many centuries.

Now that we have definitions out of the way, what exactly do I mean by these “material implications”? This is a paradigm shift for most Christians, so stick with me.

We’re familiar with the story in Luke 5 about the paralyzed man who is lowered through the roof because his friends were desperate to get him healed by Jesus. When God put in Scripture He had to have Hollywood in mind, it is that dramatic. Luke tells us:

19 When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus.

The crowd must have been enormous. Luke says that people had come from “every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem.” The news of the power Jesus had to heal had gone far and wide, and now the show was ready to begin. What does Jesus do? The unexpected, of course:

20 When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.”

What? I can imagine the people thinking, “What in the world does that have to do with healing a crippled man?” The Pharisees and teachers of the law were horrified because they rightly thought, “Only God can forgive sin.” To them Jesus was blaspheming. Then Jesus asks a question nobody could have made up, except Jesus of Nazareth:

23 Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?

This is almost funny because it’s easy to say either one. The issue is, can you pull it off, whether you have the authority and power to do these things. Here is where we see an example of the material implications of a spiritual reality. So Jesus tells them:

24 But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” 25 Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God. 26 Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.”

If you’ve ever seen Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, the 1977 miniseries, he portrays this episode masterfully. Nobody, most especially no Jews, could conceive of a Messiah who would have the authority to forgive sin. If he could, he would be God! Exactly. Jesus proved his authority to forgive sins by overcoming one of the consequences of the fall, disease of the human body.

Metaphorically, then, Jesus healing disease points to a powerful spiritual reality of the transformation of this fallen, sinful world, and a pushing back against the material effects of the fall. Contrary to what our Charismatic and Pentecostal brothers and sisters might believe, Jesus and the Apostles were not telling us that supernatural healing would be the common, normal way people would be healed. Rather, it would be the result of the permeating of the good news of the gospel into the dark, fallen world. The two parables that speak most directly to this are the parables of the mustard seed and leaven in Matthew 13. Jesus prefaces the parables with, “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .” The scope and extent of the spreading of gospel influence, i.e., God’s kingdom, will ultimately affect every square inch of reality like leaven or yeast through a batch of dough. The question is what this spiritual-material influence looks like.

The Christian Transformation of the World
We have to go back to the very beginning when God gave Adam and Eve the dominion mandate to rule God’s creation, to fill the earth and subdue it. When they rebelled, sin and death enter the world, and Satan took control of God’s creation. God’s plan was to take it back, and he promised the seed of the woman would strike or crush the serpent’s head. Then God in Genesis 12 promises Abram that “all peoples on earth would be blessed through” him. The word blessed is used some 65 times in Genesis because the whole point of redemptive history is for God to bless his creatures and his creation, to bestow his favor upon it, and not in dualistic “spiritual” terms, but in every way human beings interact with material reality. Look around you. Open your eyes. What do you see? Blessings!

One way I define blessing is with the idea of empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers, He enables, them to do a wide variety of things, to flourish. We easily see the blessings of “spiritual” flourishing in personal terms, in our own relationship to God, forgiven, loved unconditionally, living in harmony with others, but not so much in material terms, those we easily take for granted. Try to imagine living in a world without electricity. You can’t! Electricity empowers us to control our environment so we can live in a swamp like Florida or a desert like Arizona. Try counting the modern amenities electricity makes possible, and you would be at it for a while. Blessings! Prior to the late 19th century people couldn’t conceive of any of them. Petroleum used to be a nuisance in the ground, and the knowledge gained from science and technology has enabled us to transform civilization with it.

We would go on, but the material flourishing we live with every day is the spiritual reality of God’s covenant promise expressing itself in materially significant ways. In other words, what God promised Abram, and then confirmed consistently throughout redemptive history, and fulfilled in Christ, we’re experiencing right now in material blessing. That is spiritual! It is the result of what Christ accomplished on the cross. The Lord through Moses in Deuteronomy 8 tells is:

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 ancestors, as it is today.

One of the reasons Jewish people have been materially successful wherever they’ve lived throughout the millennia is because wealth isn’t merely a material thing to them, but a sign of God’s covenant faithfulness to them, a result of God having established a relationship with them. This mentality got into the Jewish DNA so that even secular Jews have some kind of residual blessing effect in what they accomplish.

My last post was on developing an attitude of gratitude, and in it I compare life in the modern world to what it was like in the ancient world so we get a graphic picture of the profound blessings we have all around us and live with every day. I won’t repeat all that, but in the first century before science and technology and modern medicine, and the explosion of knowledge in the last two hundred years, life was extremely hard. English philosopher Thomas Hobbs describing life in his own time more than 1500 years later as living in “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In the ancient world even more so. Life was terribly difficult until the 20th century, but in the ancient world it was positively brutal. Because of God’s promises to Abram and the Patriarchs it is so no longer.

What I’m trying to say is that when Jesus died on the cross, was buried, rose three days later, ascended to heaven and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost, material wealth and prosperity have been one of the many blessings of his saving work. We’re so caught up in that Pietistic and dualistic mentality that we limit Christ’s saving work to our own personal salvation from sin and personal holiness, but not saving the material world from the horrible effects of sin. Jesus has enabled us, his body, by the power of the Holy Spirit to fulfill the dominion mandate Adam could not. I’ve often referenced and quoted Tom Holland’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World here and in my books, and if you haven’t read it, it’s well worth the effort. He says in the preface:

So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that is has come to be hidden from view.

And this transformation from ancient and brutal to modern and civilized and wealthy is not merely from the ideas of Christianity, but from Christ defeating the devil and sin and death on the cross! Salvation from sin is not merely personal or relational or just for the church but for the entire world. As Isaac Watts says in his great Christmas hymn, Joy to the World, “He comes to make His blessings flow Far as the curse is found.”

I know how counter intuitive this is to most Christians today because our conception of “spiritual” is so other worldly. But God so loved this world that he gave his only begotten son for it. One day it will be fully transformed when Christ returns and sin and death are finally destroyed, but God began the transformation at Christ’s first coming, and it’s been slowly happening ever since, and will until he has put all his enemies under Christ’s feet (I Cor. 15:25).

One of my favorite passages pointing to Christ’s transformational power accomplished in the gospel is Isaiah 65. I used to think it applied only when he returns and transforms all things ultimately. This verse seemed to confirm that:

17 “See, I will create
new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered,
nor will they come to mind.

How could this not be at his second coming? Now I realize given the rest of the passage, this is describing what is happening because of this first coming, his first Advent. It’s a metaphorical description of what Christ came to accomplish, and will be literal as well when he returns. Think about it. Can you even imagine a world without the gospel, without Christianity, without the multitudes of transformations, personal and societal, it brought? No! You can’t.

It’s clear from the rest of the passage this can only refer to our current fallen world where sin’s effects still exist, including death:

“Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
the one who dies at a hundred
will be thought a mere child;
the one who fails to reach a hundred
will be considered accursed.
21 They will build houses and dwell in them;
they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
the work of their hands.
23 They will not labor in vain,
nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune;
for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,
they and their descendants with them.
24 Before they call I will answer;
while they are still speaking I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
and dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,”
says the Lord.

It is difficult to see how this refers to a sinless, perfected world where death and the effects of the fall are completely eradicated. Some will say the wolf and the lamb feeding together is certainly in the new heavens and earth, but it could also be a metaphorical account of harmony among us as God’s creatures, and what will happen when everything is made new again.

Also, because of my post-Covid health epiphany, I see the possibility of a hundred plus year healthy lifespan as a real possibility in the generations to come. I also love that the Lord is telling us because of “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17), we will “long enjoy” the work of our hands. As Paul says, our “labor in the Lord is not in vain” (I Cor. 15:58), both now and into forever. All of this is the gospel! All of it the good news! Proclaim it from the rooftops: Our God is the Lord Almighty!

Christian Children Are Not Strangers to the Covenant

Christian Children Are Not Strangers to the Covenant

Nov 19, 2025 | Parents and Family, Theology

In this life the debate between Baptists and paedobaptists, or baptizing babies, will never end, and this post doesn’t seek to do the impossible. My powers of persuasion are not that great, nor is my knowledge. It is written, rather, for those who are open to trying to understand why we baptize our children, and our grandchildren. And I won’t lie; I always welcome Baptists becoming Presbyterians. The latter in case you don’t know is a baby baptizing denomination. So full disclosure: as I try to explain, I also try to persuade. So be warned all yee Baptists!

If Baptism comes down to water and a handful of examples in the New Testament, then the Baptists have a slam dunk case, no pun intended. But if Baptism is about the entire context of redemptive history, the examples are not the point. For the average Christian the handful of examples in Acts are dispositive, they decide the case, end of story. But the examples also point in the other direction, the paedobaptist direction, as we’ll see.

The critical issue is where you start. Most Evangelicals are Baptists, so they start and likely end with the examples in Acts. They would also wonder why we Presbyterians are always talking about covenant as it relates to baptism, but Christianity didn’t start when Jesus was born. Jesus was the fulfillment of thousands of years of redemptive history. We can go back to the fall and God’s promise to Adam and Eve that the seed will strike or crush the serpent’s head, but the specific start of the covenant of grace started with God’s promise to Abram (Gen 12). Remember, he called one man out of all the people on earth at the time, and promised that through him all the peoples on earth would be blessed. Unless you start your study of baptism there, you’re missing the entire context of why baptism exists in the first place. The discussion of baptism must start with the doctrine of the covenant. I became a paedobaptist because of it.

My Journey to Paedobaptism
I’d become an Evangelical Christian at 18 having been born and raised a nominal Catholic. Of course I rejected infant baptism as a new Protestant, and got myself dunked and re-baptized. Then when I was 24, I was introduced to Reformed theology, and instantly embraced it. TULIP was a no brainer for me, but infant baptism? No way! That’s Catholic! And I was virulently against all things Catholic at the time. Then one Sunday I attended at Reformed Baptist church, and it so happens they had a baby dedication that morning. For some reason, and I don’t know where the idea came from, I thought to myself, they are treating their children as strangers to the covenant, and it annoyed me. I instantly became a paedobaptist. I knew intuitively that God’s covenant promises were not just for me individualistically, but as Peter says in Acts 2, for me and my children.

What I started learning that day, is that my understanding of Baptism didn’t start and end with a handful of passages in the book of Acts. Rather, I learned that to understand the true profundity and import of baptism, I needed to look at all the passages in Scripture that address parents, children, generations, descendants, promises, circumcision, Gentiles, Jews, olive trees, among other issues, in addition to covenant. In fact, if you looked at every passage in the Old Testament referencing child or children, that would take you a while because there are over 400 of them. Not to mention passages that reference seed or offspring or descendants. If I had the time and space and could cite every passage in the Old Testament indicating the generational nature of our faith it would be overwhelming. One of my favorites is Deuteronomy 7:9:

9 Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments.

The faithfulness of God to his covenant promises is what baptism points to, not us! And this verse directs us to the New Covenant which would make generational faith a reality, something Israel and the Old Mosaic covenant never could. This is why in those Acts examples, baptism always includes the household, not just the individual. Baptism, like circumcision, was a corporate, familial covenant act, as all Jewish Christians in the first century would have expected it to be. Yet, we’re to believe according to the Baptists that the New, and better, Covenant, suddenly became individualistic. The Apostle Peter says it doesn’t because, as I mentioned, in the first Christian sermon in history he tells us our faith is still familial and corporate, or covenantal in nature. The people Peter was preaching to were cut to the quick, and they ask, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

Peter is telling them, and us, the natural Jewish understanding of generational faith is informed by God’s covenant promises to families. Baptism and the promise associated with it were not just for the people who were repenting and being baptized; it was for them and their children. If we ignore that, we are in effect ignoring everything BC and the nature of our generational faith handed down to us by Christ and the Apostles, and assuming only AD counts.

The New Covenant is Better Because it is Generational: Household Baptism
The examples of baptisms in Acts do tell us something about the nature of baptism, but not quite what the Baptists think. Let’s look at each instant in Acts, and then one reference of Paul in I Corinthians. In every example, except one, the person who repented and was baptized also had their household baptized. That’s kids, including babies, slaves, cousins, grandma, grandpa, anyone living in the household, and extended households in first century Israel were common. So “you and all your household” could mean 5, 10 or more would have been baptized. When the head of the household embraced the faith, so did everyone in the household. Did everyone in the household make a profession of faith? It didn’t matter because nobody saw it as a personal, individualized decision. It just didn’t work that way, and to think it did is reading our modern assumptions back into the text. We ought not do that.

As far as I know there is only one clear example of a person professing faith and not having a household baptized as well, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Household salvation starts in Acts 10 with Cornelius, a Roman centurion, as God displayed salvation and the Holy Spirit coming to the Gentiles too. This passage doesn’t explicitly say household, but when Peter entered the house “he found a large gathering of people.” It could have been friends and neighbors, but as a Roman centurion, a good number of the gathering would have been his household. After the Holy Spirit came on them, Peter ordered that they all be baptized. How we read this passage depends on our assumptions, which should be informed by the following examples, not to mention the entirety of redemptive history prior to this.

Luke continues the story in Acts 11 as Peter tells Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who couldn’t believe that the Holy Spirit would be given to Gentiles too. Cornelius was told by an angel about Peter:

14 He will bring you a message through which you and all your household will be saved.’

Salvation, “repentance that leads to life,” and thus baptism as we see in chapter 10, came to the entire household, not just Cornelius.

The next example in Acts 16 is of Lydia’s conversion, the first Christian convert in Europe.

15 When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.

Luke tells us, “The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message.” And naturally, “When she and the members of her household were baptized,” she invited them to her home.

Also in chapter 16 is the famous example of the Philippian jailer. Paul proclaims the gospel to him, and the result is the same as with Lydia:

33 At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized. 34 The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household.

Another example is in chapter 18 where Paul is in Corinth preaching to both Jews and Gentiles, and Luke tells us:

8 Crispus, the synagogue leader, and his entire household believed in the Lord; and many of the Corinthians who heard Paul believed and were baptized.

The final example is from I Corinthians 1, where Paul tells us about his own baptizing:

Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.”

We will tie the bow on this household box with Acts 2. The adults Peter was speaking to believed on the Lord Jesus, and he told them they needed to be baptized. He immediately added that the promise reflected in baptism and the story of redemption he’d just told them was for them AND their children. Of course it was—They were Jews! When they embraced the faith, everyone in their household would embrace that faith as well. As we see in Acts 21, Jewish Christians insisted their boy infants still receive the sign of inclusion in the covenant community, circumcision. Both Paul and James agreed with this. So it makes sense that Jewish Christians would also include their children in the sign of inclusion into the New Covenant community, baptism.

Baptists will tell us this is an argument from silence, but it’s a silence that speaks loudly and boldly, which we ignore only because of the baptistic assumptions we hold. If we don’t have those assumptions, and our theology is informed by the entirety of Redemptive history, as were the Jews in days of the Apostles, of course babies and children will be given the sign and seal of God’s covenant faithfulness in Christ.

And lastly, Doug Wilson points out in his book, To A Thousand Generations, that we also don’t have an example of a child growing up in a Christian household who was not baptized, and then making a profession of faith to receive baptism. It just doesn’t exist, so what does that tell us? Nothing. Examples are not the final word on baptism, but only one puzzle piece of a large, glorious redemptive puzzle God has developed into a beautiful picture.

The New Covenant and Children: Jeremiah 31 & 32
The pivotal passage for Baptists is found in Jeremiah 31 when God reveals that a new and better covenant is coming:

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
32 It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
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.

The Lords contrasts the new with the old, Mosaic covenant, and from this Baptists insist the New Covenant community can only include professing, regenerate Christians. They believe that in Christianity, in contrast to Old Covenant Judaism, a transformed
heart is what includes someone in the community of God’s people.

Baptists assume what makes the New Covenant new, is that now God is transforming hearts as a requirement for inclusion in the covenant, and that baptism is a sign of that. The passage doesn’t say this, but this is the inference they take. Therefore, children are no longer included. This inference also assumes Old Covenant saints did not have God’s law in their minds and written on their hearts, which is not true. Some clearly did. But the point I want to make is that children, including infants, are still included in the New Covenant community because this community doesn’t only include regenerate Christians. We’ll discuss that in the next section on olive trees and branches, but God references this new covenant in the very next chapter, and He includes children. We read in Jeremiah 32:

38 They will be my people, and I will be their God. 39 I will give them singleness of heart and action, so that they will always fear me and that all will then go well for them and for their children after them. 40 I will make an everlasting covenant with them: I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me.

If we’ve read the story of God’s people up to this period of the Babylonian exile of Judah (around 580s BC), the inclusion of Children in the New Covenant promises of Yahweh to His people won’t surprise us. It has always been so, and will always be thus. What seals the deal, though, is olive trees.

The Covenant and the Olive Tree
The metaphor of the olive tree for God’s people, His covenant community, is used several times in Scripture, and most relevant for our discussion in Romans 11. Paul speaks of Isarael as an olive tree into which a wild olive shoot, the Gentiles, have been grafted in. The Jews were broken off because of unbelief so we could be grafted in. Then Paul says something that has vexed Christians ever since.

19 You will say then, “Branches were broken off so that I could be grafted in.” 20 Granted. But they were broken off because of unbelief, and you stand by faith. Do not be arrogant, but tremble. 21 For if God did not spare the natural branches, he will not spare you either.

It seems Paul is saying that those who were once part of the olive tree, the covenant community, Christians, can be cut off, and thus lose their salvation. On baptistic assumptions that is the only conclusion one can come to. Many Christians wonder if we can “lose our salvation.” If they are Arminian, meaning they believe our choice is what makes us a Christian, then we can un-choose Christ. If we’re Calvinists who believe our salvation is God’s choosing, then we can’t be unchosen by Him. So from a Calvinistic perspective, how do we explain being grafted in but able to be cut off, taken out of the olive tree and from God’s covenant community?

The fundamental assumption of the Baptist is that every baptized professing Christian who has been baptized is a regenerate Christian, and thus part of the New Covenant community. You profess faith in Christ, get baptized, and you are grafted in. In Christian terms, your profession of faith means you are one of God’s elect. The theology of election is a challenging topic for Christians, but clearly a Biblical fact. The term is used six times by Paul and three by Peter, and clearly means God chooses whom he will save. So, if you are a Calvinist and you are grafted into the olive tree, you are in for good. You are one of God’s elect, and that can never change. How then to explain those God cuts off, like we read in Hebrews 6:

4 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age 6 and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.

John helps explain it (I John 2:19):

19 They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

As does Jesus in John 15:

5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 6 If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.

A person can be part of the covenant community, appear to be a Christian on the outside, but if they do not remain in Jesus, if they go out from among us, they will be broken off of the olive tree like the unbelieving Jews. For example, everyone including Judas thought he was a “believer,” but he proved by his actions not to be. Until then he was a Jew and part of the Old Covenant community. So, we have our children baptized because they are part of the New Covenant community, and they received the benefits of being part of the calling of God’s people. Because we’re not Lutherans or Catholics, we don’t believe baptism saves them, but we raise them as Christians and teach them to proclaim Jesus as their Lord and Savior because he is.

 

What Exactly is Replacement Theology? And Is It Biblical?

What Exactly is Replacement Theology? And Is It Biblical?

Jul 2, 2025 | Theology

Back when we lived in the Chicago area my wife listened to Moody Radio, and she told me how they often spoke disparagingly of something called Replacement Theology. I’ll never forget one time hearing Janet Parshall sneeringly say those words as if she was spitting out some horrible tasting medicine. Knowing Moody, both evangelist DL in the 19th century and the empire he built in Chicago today, are committed to dispensationalism this didn’t surprise me. What did was the vitriol, as if the very idea was an insult to any right thinking Christian. Having gotten active on Twitter early last year, the eschatology wars are a common occurrence. A dispensationalist and I started a conversation, mostly respectful, and he suggested I read this book, Has the Church Replaced Israel? By Michael J. Vlach.

The question of the title is something I couldn’t really answer because I’d never studied the relationship of Israel and the church in any real depth. I’m reading slowly through John Calvin’s commentary on Isaiah, and he always calls Old Testament Israel the church. This isn’t common in Evangelicalism, but most Evangelical Christians who are not committed dispensationalists tend to believe the church is the fulfillment of Israel, even if they couldn’t articulate exactly what that means. Historically as Vlach acknowledges, so called “replacement theology” was the default position of the church. I’ll explain what exactly this means below because it’s a new theological category that only developed in the last two hundred years. It would not exist if not for the also new eschatology of dispensationalism.

When I first heard this phrase I intuitively didn’t like it. Ever since I embraced covenant theology as part of Reformed theology in my 20s, I never saw the church as “replacing” Israel, as if we were throwing them out like unwanted trash. In my mind, the church doesn’t “replace” Israel, but is the fulfillment of Israel, of God’s redeemed people. Those two concepts, replace and fulfill, have completely different meanings. To re-place means to “put in place of,” so Israel no longer exists because the church has been put in her place. It’s kind of like replacing a struggling pitcher. The starter is not getting the job done, and the coach replaces him with a pitcher from the bullpen, a reliever, who saves the day and the team wins the game. There are two different people, two different pitchers, and the only thing they have in common is throwing a baseball to batters. In the minds of dispensationalists, that is “replacement theology.” To fulfill, on the other hand means “to bring to completion.” God’s promise to Abram that through his seed all nations on earth would be blessed through him meant God’s covenant promises were starting with Abraham and Israel, and would ultimately be fulfilled in Christ and his body, the church.

Eschatology and the Importance of Assumptions
A favorite theme of mine is the importance of assumptions, mainly because we tend to be unaware of how they affect our thinking. Everyone assumes (there I go again!) they’re objective and don’t assume anything at all! We all do, all the time, or we couldn’t think anything at all. It’s part of the deal of being a finite creature with limited knowledge. I was happy to see Professor Vlach admit that up front. On the very first page of the introduction he states an indisputable fact:

As will be shown, one’s hermeneutical assumptions will largely determine where one lands on the relationship between Israel and the church.

I would say totally determines. The assumptions we bring to the interpretation of Scripture, our hermeneutics, determine our interpretation. For example, in the 19th century as skeptical German higher criticism developed, biblical scholars came to the text with an anti-supernatural bias. They rejected the supernatural because they embraced Enlightenment naturalism. So, whenever the Bible mentions miracles, those miracles couldn’t have happened, so they searched for other “scientific” explanations. This is an obvious example of how assumptions affect our conclusions about Scripture, but everyone brings certain assumptions to their reading and study of the Bible, some more obvious than others. Our eschatological assumptions will determine how we think of Israel and the church.

The first thing I noticed about Vlach is that he assumes the burden of proof is on those who, according to dispensationalists, believe the church replaced Israel. These are called supersessionists. It seems to me the newer position, dispensationalism, should have burden of proof, but he believes his position is so biblically obvious the bigger burden is on those he disagrees with.

Then of Israel he assumes they are an entity God will continue to deal with in the same way throughout history. He refers to “the nation Israel,” Israel as “the group,” and Israel as a “people.” Isarel as a nation, a distinct people with a distinct geographic boundary, is fundamental to the dispensational paradigm because they assume God’s promises in the Old Testament to Israel necessitate a literal one-to-one correspondence in the New Testament church age. Based on his assumptions, he states the fundamental issue clearly in this passage:

I have no trouble with the designation replacement theology because with the supersessionist view there is a taking away or transferring of what national Israel was promised to another group. One can use fulfillment terminology as some prefer, but in the end the result is the same—promises and covenants that were made with the nation Israel are no longer the possession of national Israel. Israel’s promises and covenants now allegedly belong to another group that is not national Israel. This other group may be called the “new” or “true” Israel, but this does not change the fact that what was promised to one people group—national Israel—is now the possession of another group to the exclusion of national Israel.

As you can see clearly here, his assumptions determine his position. For his position to be true, or truly biblical, God needs to have intended all his “promises and covenants” to be specifically, literally, for the entity of the nation-state of Israel and its people, which will always be a distinct, independent, and self-contained object of God’s plan. There is no way for him to prove God’s intentions, or at least in any persuasive way, which is why supersessionism has been the predominant position in the history of the church.

The History of Supersessionism
First let’s clarify that word. It originated from the Latin term supersedere, meaning “to sit above” or “to take the place of.” It is formed from super- (“above” or “over”) and sedere (“to sit”). It emerged in the theological scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries specifically to indicate “replacement theology” as a system of thought or doctrine. Once dispensationalism got its start with J.N. Darby in the 1830s, and Israel as a nation-state entity became theologically relevant again, there needed to be a descriptive way to refer to what had been until then the historical position of the church. Vlach quotes theologian Lorraine Boettner:

It may seem harsh to say that “God is done with the Jews.” But the fact of the matter is that He is through with them as a unified national group having anything more to do with the evangelization of the world. That mission has been taken from them and given to the Christian Church (Matt. 21:43). (Italics added.)

The phrase, “unified national group” is an apt description of the heart of the matter. For all of church history until Darby, the position of the church was that God was no longer dealing with Israel as a “unified national group.” God’s covenant and promises that came through Israel were now fulfilled in the church consisting of both Jews and Gentiles.

According to Vlach there are three variations of supersessionism in the history of the church.

  1. Punitive Supersessionism – In this perspective, because of Israel’s disobedience and God’s punishment, He is displacing Israel as the people of God with the church because they have forfeited that right. Vlach says this was common in the Patristic era, and Luther with his anti-Jewish views held it as well.
  2. Economic Supersessionism – This is where I and most non-dispensationalists fit. As Vlach explains, “it focuses on God’s plan in history for the people of God to transfer from an ethnic group (Israel) to a universal group not based on ethnicity (the church). In other words, economic supersessionism asserts that God planned from the beginning for Israel’s role as a people of God to expire with the coming of Christ and the establishment of the church.” I have a saying I heard somewhere and have used over the years: God’s covenant promises are about more than a plot of land in the Middle East. Vlach argues that it is exactly what they are about.
  3. Structural Supersessionism – Simply, this is an interpretive approach to the Bible that discounts the Old Testament history of Israel, and skips right to the New Testament age and focuses upon the church. He is right in that most modern Evangelical Christians ignore the history of Old Testament Israel, and use it primarily for moral lessons. Even as well-read as I am, and a seminary graduate at that, I still didn’t have a solid and detailed grasp of Israel’s history until the last handful of years.

This doesn’t mean we supersessionists don’t hold that there is a future for Isreal and the Jews as a people. Vlach calls this moderate supersessionism, and most Christians have held this position in the history of the church. He distinguishes between salvation and restoration. Moderates do not believe the nation-state of Israel as a “unified national group” will be restored, but we do believe per Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11 that God is not done with the Jews, and that many Jews will come to believe in their Messiah and be saved. We call those today Messianic Jews. The church is the new Israel made up of saved Jews and Gentiles, and supersessionists do not see “any special role for Israel apart from the church.”

Vlach then does a deep dive into the history of supersessionism in the church from the church fathers through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Enlightenment eras, into modern times. He rightly points out that it is no longer the dominant view, but doesn’t tell us why. He wants us to believe it’s because the biblical case for God restoring national Israel is so obvious, even though it’s not as church history indicates. Supersessionism is no longer dominant because of the rise of dispensationalism in the last two hundred years, and it having completely taken over the Evangelical church. That goes back not only to the Plymouth Brethren and Darby, but to the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of fundamentalism against the liberal modernism of the early 20th century. Once Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth hit the bookstores in 1970, it was all over but the shoutin’! Then to put the dispensational icing on the cake, the Left Behind novels (16 of them!) exploded in the 90s, and the movies only added to the dominance of Evangelicals seeing national Israel continuing as part of God’s plan. Not to mention the unlikely event of Israel becoming a nation in 1948.

Hermeneutical Assumptions Determine Our Perspective on Israel and the Church
Having started the book admitting the importance of our interpretive assumptions regarding the Bible, he spends several chapters explaining what those are. This is the heart of the matter, more than the theological justifications he explains later, which we will not have space or time to get into. There are three primary assumptions:

The doctrine of supersessionism is largely controlled by three interrelated beliefs: (1) belief in the interpretive priority of the NT of the OT. (2) belief in the nonliteral fulfillments of OT texts regarding Israel, and (3) belief that national Israel is a type of the NT church.

He then implies that there are two mutually exclusive approaches to interpreting the redemptive history we find in our Bibles. For him these are either/or:

Can one rightly use a grammatical-historical-literary approach to OT passages? Or should the student interpret the OT primarily through the lens of the NT?

The answer to these questions is yes. If you’re not familiar with what a grammatical-historical approach is, simply, it looks to interpret biblical texts by focusing on their original context, language, and literary features. The first thing it asks is what is the author’s intended meaning for the original audience, which can only be understood in the context of the historical and cultural setting.

I was born-again at 18 years old, and I would not learn of this approach to biblical interpretation for over five years. Prior to that it was either implied or expressly taught that the Bible was written to me not for me, that it was God speaking directly to me. When He wanted me to understand something, God would zap! a metaphorical little wire coming down out of heaven into my brain, and I would understand the text for me. That was the primary interpretive grid of the kind of Pietistic Christianity I encountered as a new Christian and a recipe for interpretive distortion. I’m not saying by the power of the Holy Spirit God doesn’t use specific texts to us in unique ways, only that the text has one objective meaning in its historical context, and our objective is to understand that meaning. The phrase I learned that helped me quickly understand all this was “authorial intent,” or what did the author intend as he was writing the text, and related to this is what his readers would have been expected to understand.

The other question he raises is how we use the lens of the NT to interpret the OT. For me the ultimate hermeneutical principle is found in Luke 24 after Jesus is risen from the dead. He makes it clear that he himself is that principle. To the two disciples on the road to Emmaus:

25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

According to the risen Jesus, God himself in human flesh, all the OT Scriptures, from Genesis to Malachi, is about him. In the following quote we get to the heart of the issue for dispensationalists, literalism:

Closely related to the supersessionist view of NT priority over the OT is the belief that the NT indicates that there are nonliteral fulfillments of OT promises, prophecies, and covenants related to Israel.

For Vlach and all dispensationalists there are OT texts that “appear to predict a time when Israel will fully possess its land and have a special place of service among the nations.”

The crux of the issue between dispensationalists and supersessionists is literalism, a basic assumption of the former is that certain texts must be interpreted literally. The problem with literalism is that it is impossible to apply consistently. Even in the book giving examples, Vlach doesn’t apply it consistently himself. He agrees that some texts merit typological interpretation, which means there are patterns or “types” in the OT seen as foreshadowing or prefiguring events or themes fulfilled in the NT. So who determines which are literal and which are types? In fact, something can be literal in one context, and a type in the ultimate fulfillment in Christ in another context.

Because of this, his critiques of these three hermeneutical principles of supersessionism (NT priority over the OT, nonliteral fulfillment of texts, and typological understanding of the OT story), is not persuasive; it’s his dispensational assumptions verses supersessionist assumptions. Neither of these approaches can technically be proved, and he admits “the hermeneutical issue of how the NT uses the OT is a difficult and complex topic.” Ultimately, as I said above, your hermeneutical approach and understanding of Israel and the church will be determined by your eschatology. The new eschatological kid on the block, dispensationalism, has gotten a very lot wrong in its less than 200 years, so they shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt regarding the status of national Israel in God’s redemptive plan. I’ll be sticking with supersessionism, the historically solid position in the history of the church.