A Christian Worldview Is Not Enough

A Christian Worldview Is Not Enough

Mar 19, 2025 | Theology

Since I was twenty years old when I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There, I’ve been a worldview guy. I went from a fundamentalist type of Christianity focused on the personal, on my relationship with Jesus, the Bible and me, to seeing how Christianity applied not just to me but to all of life and everything in it. I went from wearing the default set of secular glasses to Christian glasses, and everything looked different. As a Christian, although it may seem counterintuitive, it is possible to see the world through secular lenses. This means we see our Christian lives in primarily personal spiritual terms, and everything else as part of this fallen world, and thus not spiritual. The implication is that spiritual, personal stuff is important, and the other stuff not so much. I never thought through any of this before my worldview epiphany, but I didn’t see Christianity applying to the fallen world outside of the church. Thankfully, I found Schaeffer only two years into my born-again Christian life, and in addition to being so young and busy with college, thinking through any of this wasn’t a priority. But finding Schaeffer, and that a Christian view of the world and everything in it was possible, was exciting, not to mention being introduced to apologetics, and knowing I could credibly defend the veracity of the Christian faith I had embraced.

I’ve realized only recently, however, that having a worldview is not enough to fully capture the profound world transforming power of the Christian faith. Worldview assumes the intellect and how we think about things is primary, and applying those thoughts to what we do is what is transformational about the Christian faith. It is that, but it’s so much more. A Christian worldview is necessary for this new creation transformation (2 Cor. 5:17), but not sufficient. What is, what takes a Christian worldview to the next level, so to speak, is something almost completely neglected in Evangelical Christianity: the ascension. In all the years I’ve been a Christian, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a sermon on it. I didn’t realize this until I heard a talk by someone back in 2018 or 19. He said Evangelicals pretty much completely ignore the ascension, stopping at the resurrection, and I immediately realized he was right.

The Book of Acts makes it clear the church was built and grew on the declaration of the resurrection, but Luke starts with the Ascension. After Jesus promises his disciples to send them the Holy spirit, and gives them a charge to be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth,” Luke writes:

9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

Although the disciples were no doubt befuddled, this raises two important questions. Where did Jesus go, and what does it mean? We learn by the time of the Apostles Creed the ascension had become foundational to the Christian understanding of the faith. It addresses the second person of the Trinity thus:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

We learn explicitly from several passages in Scripture not only where Jesus went, as the creed affirms, but why he went there.

What Exactly is a Worldview and Why It Matters
Before we get to the implications of the ascension we need to address what a worldview is because not everyone is familiar with it, and for some who are they don’t believe it’s a valid concept. What I said previously assumes familiarity and validity, but I need to make that case and not just assume it.

Discussing worldview requires us to address the meaning and significance of presuppositions, and how they determine our view of the world. Having presuppositions means we assume certain things, we pre‑suppose them. Most people know what assumptions are, but have no idea the role they play in how they view the world, how they understand, process, and perceive reality. In fact, most people don’t believe they assume anything at all! But finite creatures like us have to assume all the time because what we can actually know with any certainty is limited in a multitude of ways. James Sire in The Universe Next Door was one of the first to address worldview from a Christian perspective, and he defines it this way:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) that we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.

I used glasses above as a simple metaphor for worldview because everyone understands without having to explain it that glasses change how you see everything. If it’s sunglasses, it brings a certain hue, or if corrective, they turn blurry to clear. You can’t not see what the lenses determine you will see. That is how the set of presuppositions we hold, knowingly or not, become the framework by which we see, or interpret, all things. In Sire’s words, worldview is a “fundamental orientation of the heart” which is the “foundation on which we live and move and have our being.” How people view reality, how they see things, what has meaning to them, what they value, what seems true to them or not, their “fundamental orientation,” is bound up in their worldview. Hence, their existence, how they “live and move and have their being,” is determined by it. We are fundamentally interpretive beings.

Everyone has a view of the world, but few understand how worldview is the lens through which they interpret reality. As such, it colors everything they see, hear, read, and do. In other words, there are no ultimately objective, neutral observers. Yet, this doesn’t leave us without the ability to actually know things, which is epistemology, or the study of how and what we know. It only says everyone has some type of interpretive grid through which they make sense of reality. In his book Popologetics, Ted Turnau has an excellent explanation of how worldview and presuppositions interact:

Worldviews, then, are not simply rooted in “the facts,” as if we could gather the relevant facts to build a picture of the Truth with complete, presupposition‑free objectivity. Rather, the way in which we process the facts is always already involved in a specific set of presuppositions. We are, in a sense, always “captured” by our worldview, our presuppositions. Worldviews are ultimately based on fundamental faith commitments from which we understand evidence, truths, facts, and all of reality. Your set of presuppositions is the most basic place you know from. At this level, worldviews are fundamentally religious. That is, they are types of faith. Worldviews are religiously rooted in these basic, nonnegotiable beliefs called presuppositions.

Therefore, all human beings are fundamentally religious because all people live by faith which become the glasses through which they try to make sense of an uncertain, chaotic, and often confusing world. What we’ll be doing in the next section is discuss how we can in effect fortify our Christian worldview because of the ascension.

As I mentioned, not everybody is on board with the concept or value of a worldview understanding of human psychology. As best I can tell, the critics think what we’re saying is that worldview is some kind of static grid through which people become robots, or something. I haven’t engaged in any depth with the arguments against it, but they don’t seem well thought out or thought through. Worldview isn’t some infallible measure of human nature, but simply a tool to help us understand how and why, in the words of Sire, we “live and move and have our being.” If we look at people from various cultures as a group, say Muslims from the Middle East, or Asians from China or Japan, or secular Europeans or Americans, we can better understand them because of their basic presuppositions, their worldviews. For me it’s an invaluable tool to help me better understand people and cultures and how the gospel message and Great Commission can advance in Christ’s worldwide mission, to which we now turn.

King Jesus and the Great Commission
Before I began to better understand the ascension, I saw Christ’s reign limited to my personal life and battle for holiness, along with other Christians and thus only for the church. Christ’s authoritative power was not meant for those people or institutions outside of the church; the fallen world I assumed would always remain in its rebellious fallen state until he returned. So when Jesus spoke these words to the disciples I assume it primarily meant saving people so when they die they go to heaven, and being made more holy while they are on earth (Matt. 28):

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

Making disciples of all nations meant the people within the nations, not the nations themselves. Jesus doesn’t say that, but that’s what I took him to mean because of my assumptions about Jesus’ ascension and its implications for the world. It didn’t, or so I thought, apply to the world, just Christians, just the church. Then what does Jesus say? He says to baptize all ethnos-ἔθνος in Greek which primarily refers to a group of people or a nation, not merely the individuals within a nation. It is all the people in a nation and whatever they do to develop a society, along with the institutions, mores, and customs to create a unique cultural identity. Christ is Lord and King with authoritative power over all of it, and what that society becomes flows out of the people in it. The gospel and what flows out of it in Christians’ lives affect all of it, every square inch. Jesus’ authority is not in any way limited just to us!

Thus, a broadly Christian people can make a Christian nation, just as a broadly secular people can make a secular nation. Does that mean every person in those nations is Christian or secular? Of course not. Even those who reject the notion that a nation can be Christian, have no problem calling our nation, for example, a secular nation. That’s because the idea is not that every person is secular, but rather that the general makeup of the nation as a whole is secular in outlook. God recognizes nations as a whole, as one entity, and it is nations and everything in it that Christ calls us to disciple. Who people are affects everything they do; it’s as simple as that. As we disciple an increasing number of people, the influence through them of Christ and his kingdom will spread to all aspects of that society. This is what happened in the Roman Empire. It took almost 300 years, but eventually a pagan empire became a Christian one, and that had profound implications for how that empire was run. However, a merely personal faith, something Christianity was never intended to be, won’t do that. It will stay merely personal.

The difference between purely personal King Jesus and King Jesus who has “all authority in heaven and on earth,” is that non-Christians and their worldviews, who they are and how they act, are under the same authority as Christians. Jesus is as much in control of their lives as he is ours, and for the same reasons, to disciple the nations. A personal King Jesus, by contrast, does not include his reign over this fallen world to take back territory, so to speak, from the devil, specifically for advancing his kingdom on this earth as it is in heaven outside of the church. The fallen world in this telling will inevitably get worse until Jesus comes to rescue us out of it at the end of time. It is a pessimistic view of things, which is logical if Christ’s rule has little or nothing to do with anything outside of the church. When I believed in personal King Jesus I effectively equated the kingdom with the church.

As I began to understand the ascension more and its implications for all of life in this fallen world, I had a kind of cognitive dissonance, a discomfort from my contradictory understanding of the ascension. On the one hand Christ had all power over all thigs, on the other it really only applied to the church. This seemed to be what Paul was saying in Ephesians 1:

22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church.

True enough, but the church lives in a fallen world, and Christ’s authority in that world is ultimately to benefit the church in this world, on this earth, to take back territory from the Devil so we can experience God’s blessings in all of life. While many Christians on earth suffer for their faith, as I read very month in the Voice of the Martyrs magazine, that isn’t the goal. Which is why I pray that God would raise up a multitude of Christians in those nations to disciple and turn them into Christian nations where the gospel is proclaimed, and peace and justice reign. That isn’t just for the next life, on this redeemed and renewed earth, but here and now in this fallen world, bringing heaven to earth as Jesus taught us to pray. If Jesus didn’t mean this, he wouldn’t have given the command to his disciples and to us, in just that way; all authority has been given to him, therefore go.

Postmillennialism and the Ascension
Everything about my understanding of the ascension changed when I embrace postmillennialism in August 2022. In addition to my broadened understanding of the Great Commission, I now looked at Daniel’s vision in chapter 7:13,14 differently as well. Daniel sees “one like a son of man” at his coronation being ushered into the presence of “the Ancient of Days” being given “authority, glory and sovereign power” which all “nations and peoples” acknowledge. Prior to postmillennialism I automatically assumed this referred to Christ’s second coming, not a reference to his first. But Jesus clearly tells us it does apply to his first coming. How could I have missed that, and for decades? Paul confirms this all-encompassing authority Jesus received at the ascension was indeed for his first coming in Ephesians 1:18-23. When Jesus was placed by the Father at His right hand, he was now in a position “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is named.” He adds as if, oh by the way,  this rule of Jesus is “not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” In other words, it’s so obvious it’s for life on this fallen world, this the present age, that his readers needed to be reminded it’s also for the age to come. That never stood out to me until I embraced postmillennialism.

Without understanding the true all-encompassing implications of the ascension, a Christian worldview will not positively affirm Christ’s authority over everything, literally every single thing, every single person, including every institution, every government, and every spiritual being beyond earth. If it’s just a Christian worldview, seeing things and applying a Christian view to it all, Christianity will not have the kind of world conquering spirit Christians had for much of the church’s history. In the gospel we declare King Jesus to whom all earthly power must submit, which gives us confidence that bringing heaven to earth is not a product of merely our own efforts or power, but of the rule and reign of Christ over all things. This is why I now pray something I learned from Joe Boot, that Christ would extend his reign on earth, advance God’s kingdom, and build his church. I add this to my four R prayer, for revival, renewal, restoration, and Reformation. That about covers it all!

This brings me to the final point we must discuss: how does this all work? The critics of postmillennialism think our confidence in victory, and our optimism, is in our efforts, and they don’t like that one bit! This straw man is trotted out a lot, but it isn’t true. What is true is that God can’t bring heaven to earth without us, we wretched sinners who always seem to get so many things wrong and messing things up. He’s stuck with us! Read the Bible. Working with imperfect sinners to accomplish his purposes on earth didn’t change when Christ rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. Our confidence then as now is in Christ, in what he accomplished in his first coming, which was to destroy the works of the devil and push back the effects of the fall as far as the curse is found. Now, instead of hell on earth having the upper hand, heaven does.

This is a biblical fact, and if you have faith, and eyes to see, you can see it everywhere. Don’t take my word for it, but do take it from Jesus.  As he told his disciples, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” It never occurred to me until I read it in a book about postmillennialism, that gates in the ancient world were a defensive mechanism. How could I have missed that! And why didn’t preachers at all the churches we attended not tell us this! It is we Christians, Christ’s church, who are on the offensive; the devil and his minions don’t stand a chance!

Add this to your Christians worldview, and you will be a world changer. As I often say, work like it depends on you, but pray because it depends on God. I finish with these world conquering words from Joab, the commander of David’s armies (I Chron. 19:13):

Be strong, and let us fight bravely for our people and the cities of our God. The Lord will do what is good in his sight.

 

The Problem with Biblicism

The Problem with Biblicism

Mar 12, 2025 | Theology

If you’ve never heard the word biblicism, you would never know how prevalent it is in Evangelical Christianity, as in practically ubiquitous. Before I define it in detail and explain why it’s a problem, briefly it means in order to justify doing something or not, there must be a chapter and verse justification for it. If the Bible says it, that settles it. This mentality is the well-intended fruit of the Reformation proclamation of Sola Scriptura, or Scripture alone. The Westminster Confession of Faith lays out the canonical listing of the books of the Bible, and then affirms:

All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.

Christians will tend to read this as the only rule, and anything else that purports to provide guidance and direction for life is illegitimate. The famous passage of Paul about the inspiration of Scripture might seem to justify that take:

 16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

One might think this, and the Westminster affirmation, means Scripture is exhaustive and that is what makes it profitable, but Scripture itself is clearly not exhaustive. The Bible does not address every single thing we do or that confronts us in our daily lives, or that human beings do to make life possible. Thank God for that, or the Bible would be a very different and less compelling book (or compendium of books).

I was born again into a faith that taught a kind of biblicism. My relationship with God was mediated through the Bible alone. When I embraced Reformed theology I came across an image that describes how I saw my relationship with God through the Bible. I imagined a wire coming down from heaven, and as I read Scripture when God wanted to communicate something to me he’d buzz the wire and I would have instant insight directly from Him about the meaning for me. It was always about me, and meaning that was given to me by God himself, or so I thought. That is not the most stable epistemology (how we know) or hermeneutics (the science of interpreting a text which I’ll address below). In fact, it’s a recipe for distortion, and one example of biblicism.

Another example of how this works out in practice for some people is seeking guidance for life decisions, where to live, who to marry, taking a job, etc. How do we “know” something is God’s will? Well, God has to zap the wire and show us through some text in the Bible, then we’ll “know”! Most Christians know intuitively the Bible isn’t that kind of book. As my dad always used to tell me when I did something stupid, God gave us a brain, and we’re meant to use it. The key point in this regard and to biblicism in general, is that God’s nature is not totalitarian. In other words, he’s not a “control freak,” who wants to dictate everything we do. He’s far too secure for that, and His creatures were not created to function with that kind of control. Many non-Christians, especially in our secular age, see God as some kind of dictator who is set on determining everything we do, but that’s not how this world, or us in it, works.

God gave us agency, meaning we are beings who can alter the stuff, the raw material of existence; we can change things. This freedom is not an illusion, but very real, and it means there are consequences to the choices we make. That’s thrilling on the upside, and terrifying on the downside, but we’re not in this alone because God is somehow sovereign and in control over all of it, without destroying the reality of our agency. Only a being, God, who created everything out of nothing and sustains it moment by moment could pull that off. It makes my brain hurt whenever I think about it too much. It’s easier to trust the Bible’s declaration and our lived experience of it as true. Let’s take a further look at how biblicism plays out in practice, and then what I believe the role the Bible plays in our lives.

The Basic Assumptions of Biblicism
The Reformation gave the Christian world the five Solas, of which Sola Scripture is foundational because out of it flow all the others by which we live out our faith: Christus, Fide, Gratia, Deo Gloria, or Christ alone, faith alone, grace alone, to the glory of God alone. What “Scripture alone” has come to mean in the Protestant tradition is embracing God’s inspired Word as the inerrant, sufficient, and final authority for the church and the Christian’s life. None of the early Reformers, however, believed or taught this meant the Bible is sufficient all by itself for the church or the Christian’s life. This becomes abundantly clear when we see how they wrote copiously about what they believed God’s word meant, many times disagreeing with one another over the same text or passage, often vehemently. Out of this developed the various traditions of Protestantism, and the confessions defining exactly what they believed and why they believed it, even those who don’t embrace classic Reformation confessions. Not being Biblicists, we see how the Reformers naturally would defend or argue for their theology looking back at early church fathers, for example.

Since God didn’t gives us a textbook or a how-to manual, it is helpful to see exactly what kind of book He gave us, or like I said books, 66 to be exact, written by 40 or so authors over approximately 1500 years. The Bible is the history of redemption, specifically of the Jewish people in what we call the Old Testament, developing over time into the history of the redemption of the world, including Gentiles, those who are not Jews. Because the Old Testament is more history than statements of belief, we see develop in Judaism differing parties of interpretation. This happened in what we call the Intertestamental period between the cessation of prophecy with Malachi in the mid to early 400s BC to the coming of Christ and the writing of the New Testament. The focus was primarily on the law or the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and three contending parties, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes developed rival interpretations of the law, though they differed in other areas as well. Biblical faith was always messy, as God obviously planned it.

All of the first followers of Christ were Jews and believed authoritative teaching was part of this faith they’d been given by Christ. As Paul says, the church was “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20). In the first century the writings of the Apostles came to be seen with the authority of Scripture, and by the mid to late second century we see a well-defined canon, or list, of New Testament books. However, the Christians found like the Jews, there was often disagreement as to the meaning of a text or passages. Because of heretical movements in those early centuries, Church fathers realized Scripture itself wasn’t sufficient to give Christians full definition of their beliefs. There’s a wonderful saying I first heard applied to economics and liberty, that liberty is necessary but not sufficient to develop a capitalist economy. In a way, this “necessary but not sufficient” concept can apply to Scripture as well. What I mean is that the Bible doesn’t say something about everything, and biblicism gives us that impression. However, it is sufficient in a big picture way that is crucial for living the Christian life and advancing God’s kingdom on earth. As the Apostle Paul says,

15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

What biblicism does is limit Christians to words on a page, and keeps them from developing a transformational worldview lens enabling them to “judge all things,” or forming the universal categories to see all things as Christ the Creator sees them. As my favorite and overused quote from ex-atheist C.S. Lewis says,

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

Words on a page isolated from their immediate and ultimate context can’t give us this kind of perspective and understanding, nor the wisdom that comes from seeing the bigger picture. It didn’t take long for me to realize what the implications were for my own form of biblicism, and I used three words to describe it.

  • Ahistorical – In Greek an a in front of a word negates it, so for example, theos means God, and atheos means no God, from which we get our English atheist. Taking from Greek, ahistorical means no or without history. Since I believed as a young Christian the Bible was written to me, not so much for me, the history from its writing to me was irrelevant. For me, the Bible existed in an historical vacuum.
  • Anti-theological – Given the church’s history of theological engagement with the text, it isn’t surprising theology was non-existent in my Biblicist days. Doctrine, another word for theology, was disparaged as divisive. When I discovered Reformed theology I found it helped me to understand what I believed and why I believed it.
  • Anti-intellectual – While this is not true for all Biblicists, especially in my Reformed tradition, the me-and-the-Bible mindset made being overly intellectual suspect. Taking Paul in I Corinthians 8 out of context, I was taught, mostly implicitly, that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” as if love and knowledge are mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ignorant people who are plenty puffed up.

We can see from the early church none of these things were true of them. This becomes apparent as the church delt with heretical movements arising in the first several hundred years of Christianity. Directed by the providence of the Almighty God, the author of Scripture, this complicated and messy process gave us what we call the historic, orthodox Christian faith. This came down to us in the creeds, specifically the Apostles, Athanasian, and Nicene Creeds, also adding a later creed which came out of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, thus the Chalcedonian Creed.

The Bible in the Christian’s Life
You might think from all this that I don’t believe the Bible has an inherent spiritual power within the text itself, that all its power comes from our human intellect and ability to reason and understand it. Certainly, the human ability to think is instrumental in bringing Scripture to life which God must use, but spiritually, the power of the Bible goes well beyond the human intellect, or imagination, to conceive. We can’t chalk up the change in the human heart and transformation of lives merely to our reason. It’s much more mysterious and profound than that. That’s because we’re dealing with the literal Word of God who is God himself in Christ. As John says, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.” How that all works I have no idea, but God moves in powerful ways in the heart of His people as they faithfully read and pray through His word, and through the words of His word, preferably every day. Keep in mind how blessed we are to have access to cheap Bibles, and free online, so have God’s word always at our fingertips. This wasn’t true for most of Christian history as books were incredibly expensive, and thus rare. Most Christians were likely only able to hear the word read at church.

For me, daily Bible reading was a habit in my early Christian life, but then I allowed life to get in the way for a couple decades and it wasn’t as consistent as it should have been. In 2012 that changed when I made a commitment to read the Bible every morning and get on my knees and pray. I’ve pretty much done that ever since, although not always on my knees, and it was transformational. God, and everything about my daily life with him became more real. That’s a difficult thing to quantify, realness, but it’s powerful. We’re staking our lives, deaths, and eternity, on something, someone, who is invisible, who we can’t physically touch or feel, so it can easily come to feel un-real, which is why daily time in the word and prayer, and weekly worship and fellowship with God’s people is critical to experiencing God’s realness. That awareness is mediated through God’s word found in the text of Scripture in our Bibles. There are numerous verses I can cite before I get to the principles of how we understand it, but Hebrews 4:12 says it well:

For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

The words on the page are the tools the Holy Spirit uses to kindle the parched timber and brush of our souls dried out by sin and life in a fallen world, and alight our hearts afire for the Living God. The results in God’s people are captured perfectly by Isaiah (26):

8 Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws
we wait for you;
your name and renown
are the desire of our hearts.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism first question asks what the chief end of man is, and accurately expresses it in elegant simplicity:

Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him ever.

Everything we are looking for to fulfill us, to give our lives meaning, hope, and purpose, is found in God Himself, and in glorifying and enjoying him we can truly appreciate everything He gives us in life, including the challenges and suffering He may call us to. The question is, how do we get an accurate understanding of what God is communicating through the words on the page. That brings us to hermeneutics, simply, the study of interpretation. Words on a page have meaning, they need to be interpreted, and all human beings are interpretive creatures, whether it’s interpreting text on a page or scenes in a play or movie, or news items, or other human beings. The word interpret simply means to give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate.

So, as we come to the text of Scripture, we need to keep these four hermeneutical principles in mind if we are to interpret it rightly:

  1. Authorial intent: what we can assess the author intended when he wrote the words.
  2. Audience understanding: what the intended audience would have been expected to believe the words meant. This means context counts, specifically the moment in history and culture in which it was written.
  3. Scripture interprets Scripture: never read a text in isolation from the rest of Scripture.
  4. Scripture is all about Christ (Luke 24): the overarching theme of God’s revelation to us is Jesus.

To fully benefit from the scope of redemptive history revealed to us in Scripture, we must understand how the puzzle pieces fit into the overall big picture. The pieces can only give us a limited picture, and an easily distorted one. Fortunately, we’re not in this alone, which is why we must read more than just the Bible. We have easy access to books, and the Internet, to help us grow in our understanding of the big picture, and all the little pictures that make it up. If we are to obey the imperative of Scripture itself to grow in our knowledge, then we will want to take advantage of the great minds who have come before us, as well as those of our contemporaries. The treasures are endless.

Lastly, we’re aware how much disagreement there has been in the history of the church over interpretation. We might reasonably ask, if these principles are so helpful, why is there so much disagreement, and so many arguments about the meaning of the text. You might not expect the answer I will give, but I believe because God wants it that way. God is sovereign, so if he wanted everyone to agree on everything it would have been that way, but it’s not so he didn’t. Why might that be? First, we are finite and so limited in our understanding. Two, we are sinners, which messes everything up. I often see Christians appeal to Jesus’s command that his disciples should love one another, or this passage of Paul in I Corinthians that they should always agree with one another:

10 I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.

There you go, that’s what we should do, but Paul’s appeal is just that, and not a command, mainly because it’s impossible. It might be an aspiration, but even then, aspiring to agree can only get us so far. Like the great creeds of the church. I believe all the disagreement gives us the opportunity to obey the actual command of Jesus to love one another. If the entire law and the prophets, in effect, the entire Old Testament is summed up in loving God, ourselves, and our neighbor, then it’s pretty important. All we need to do is do it, and watch the word of God come alive in us and in those around us; it’s glorious to behold.

 

Pietistic Gnostic Dualism’s Influence on Modern Christianity

Pietistic Gnostic Dualism’s Influence on Modern Christianity

Feb 19, 2025 | Culture, Theology

In a couple previous posts I wrote about what it means that the Christian’s citizenship in is heaven, and what it does not mean, and how the understanding of our spiritual home developed in the history of Pietism. This happened, along with the predictable consequences of waning cultural influence and the growth of secularism because of the Pietistic Gnostic and dualistic assumptions and teachings that came to dominate Evangelical Christianity. Most Christians are not aware they hold these assumptions, let alone how they affect the experience of their faith, or their views of the Christian mission in the world. Further, and the driver of the problem, is pastors who themselves hold these assumption and basically teach a Pietistic Christianity which truncates or narrows the Christian’s mission in the world in various ways. Most Christians see the world as a sinking ship, and our job is to rescue people because the ship is going down, likely soon.

A properly eternal this-worldly vision and understanding of the mission of God, in the title of Joe Boot’s book, is something I myself didn’t understand even as a “worldview Christian.” I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There in college, and became passionate about applying a Christian perspective to all of life. This, however, did not include the reign of Christ in this fallen world to take back territory, so to speak, from the devil, specifically for Christ advancing his kingdom on this earth as it is in heaven outside of the church. Inside the church is where kingdom stuff happened, or so I thought; outside was a wasteland. I basically assumed a Pietistic worldview, and believed those words in that old hymn, that heaven is my home, and I’m just a passin’ through. We went to a Christian worldview oriented church for a number of years, and in a sermon the pastor said any Christian engaged in “the culture wars” is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That did not make me a happy camper, but I knew the Pietism that inspired it.

For those of us who believe God’s kingdom on earth most definitely means “culture wars,” we need to understand we are in the education business. In his book, Schaeffer speaking in the 1960s of the radical shift that had taken place in the world up to that time said, “If we do not understand it then we are largely talking to ourselves.” This is a temptation in the Reformed postmillennial circles in which I run. We’re a small pond compared to the ocean of Evangelicalism dominated by going-to-heaven-when-you-die Christianity, and we need to get this message out to our brothers and sisters in Christ who don’t know anything about it. I’m excited about the possibilities of success because of the Great Awakening happening all around us I wrote about in my previous book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. America and the West in general, has reached the end of the Enlightenment and its logical offshoot, secularism. It promised everything and delivered nothing but misery and despair. People are looking for meaning, hope, and purpose, and only Jesus can ultimately give them that. A God-less, basically agnostic society seeks fleeting fulfillment based on circumstances, but even the best circumstances, every dream coming true, leaves people empty if Jesus isn’t the center of their lives.

I am convinced because of all this, we live in a time where Christians are open to a much more expansive vision of Christianity than the overly spiritual, personalized, other worldly Christianity they get at most churches. The gospel is so much bigger than me. I can get plenty of tips for Christian living, for growing in holiness and service to others from Pietistic Christianity, but nothing about transforming the world by bringing God’s kingdom and extending Christ’s reign in every area of life. And it’s not just a Christian worldview, but Christ’s reign; big difference. It’s about King Jesus, not just bringing Christian assumptions and perspective to things, as important as that is. In 21st century Pietistic Christianity consequences for this world are pretty much beside the point. The world will go on its merry way to destruction, and we’ll get as many out as we can in the meantime. What a horribly depressing conception of the purpose of God’s people on earth, about as inspiring as running into battle against an enemy with superior force, numbers, and weapons. Why even fight?

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to change the Christian orientation toward this world, bringing heaven to earth instead of primarily toward the next and going to heaven. In order to do this, we need to understand the other two of the three words informing the Pietistic mindset, Gnosticism and dualism. These are deep and expansive topics, so this will be a brief exploration. Even though Gnosticism is dualistic, we will treat them separately because I see the Gnostic influence in the experiential and emotional side of Pietism, and the dualist influence more as a state of mind, a worldview, a way of looking at existence.

Gnosticism and the Search for “Secret” Knowledge
The early Pietists were influenced by Gnostic dualistic ideas of the ancient Greeks. All Greek thought was essentially dualistic, but Gnosticism was radically Platonic and became a thorn in the side of the church in its early centuries. Its influence continued in one way or another in Western thought through the Middle Ages eventually affecting the worldview of those who became Pietists.

The Greek philosopher Plato envisioned a world of transcendent, immaterial, eternal, and unchanging forms, the ideals of which could be found in the material world that are always changing and uncertain. The material world was created by what he called a Demiurge, a god-like figure who takes the preexisting materials of chaos, arranges them according to the models of eternal forms, and produces all the physical things of the world, including human bodies. The Gnostics adapted this term into their radical dualistic worldview, seeing the Demiurge as one of the forces of evil responsible for the creation of the despised material world and was wholly alien to the supreme God of goodness. In the Platonic understanding of reality, put simplistically, the material world is bad because it is material, and the immaterial world of ideal forms is good because it is immaterial. There is nothing at all like this in the Jewish or early Christian worldview which declared God’s material creation very good, even if distorted and marred by the fall and sin. Gnosticism took this anti-materialist mentality to the nth degree, where escaping it was the essence of salvation.

Gnosticism developed into a Christian heresy primarily active in the second century. The word comes from the Greek gnostikoi, meaning “those who have gnosis,” or knowledge. Gnosticism was a movement focused on a religious experience of gaining knowledge without the intellectual efforts of theology or philosophy, but through a revelation that reawakens knowledge (gnosis) of humanity’s divine identity. The concepts of sin, guilt, and redemption are irrelevant to this awakening because it is not something dependent on the work of God for man, but man’s inner being finding God. This radical dualism teaches that the key to salvation lies in a secret knowledge revealed only to the initiated few, and what separates man from God, the human from the divine, is an illusion that fades away with the enlightenment gnosis brings. Genuine self-knowledge is essentially an awareness of one’s own divinity.

As Gnosticism faded away in due course, it’s specific form of anti-materialist dualism remained an influence within Christianity down through the centuries. While certainly no Gnostic, Augustine, the great Bishop of Hippo (North Africa), was heavily influence by Plato’s philosophy, embracing a form of Neoplatonism, a knockoff of Platonism developed by third century philosopher Plotinus. Augustine believed in the soul’s superiority to and independence of the body, with the soul being superior in the hierarchy of reality. So, for example, sex was problematic because it was part of our material existence, and a necessary evil to propagate the human race. Gnosticism influenced monasticism in the desire for monks and nuns to isolate themselves away from the world and its material temptations that war against the spiritual. Initiates could spend all their time in prayer and the contemplation of the divine gaining a kind of secret knowledge (gnosis) that only comes from isolation and immersion. The mysticism of the Middle Ages naturally flowed from this mentality, inspiring early Pietists and their Gnostic tendencies.

Gnosticism is one of the innumerable answers in history to the most common question in human existence: Why? What Winston Churchill said of the Soviet Union applies perfectly to the conundrum that is life: It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Thus we see man throughout all of recorded history trying to unwrap the mystery, but never quite figuring it out. The reason is the benighted nature of human finitude; we are limited creatures. This is illustrated by the history of philosophy and religion, speculation upon conjecture going nowhere, educated guesses and arguments going in circles. C.S. Lewis spent his early years as an atheist, but found the answers he sought to why and other questions elusive, and the ones he got wanting. After he finally made his way to Christianity, he tells us why he embraced it in my favorite quote of his:

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

Which brings us to the problem of evil, and Gnosticism.

Throughout all human history mankind has been driven by theodicy, better known as “the problem of evil,” trying to answer the why question by founding religions and philosophies of various kinds. None of these outside of Judaism and Christianity have been able to give a satisfying answer as to why evil, suffering, and death exist. Religion and philosophy are the means to deal with this horrible fact of existence.

The phrase “problem of evil” developed in Western thought primarily because of Voltaire and his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or An Examination of the Axiom: All is Well” written in 1756. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed an estimated 60,000 people, and in the age of the so called Enlightenment, people were trying to wrap their minds around the horror. How could God allow such suffering and death? Voltaire put God in the dock and found him guilty of grave injustice. The problem developed as such: If God is good he would never allow such suffering, and if he was all powerful he would prevent it, but since such suffering exists he can’t be good, and since he can’t prevent it, he is not all powerful. So down through Western history this became primarily a problem for Christians trying to defend the God of the Bible, and even His very existence. Contrary to what many people think, this is not just a problem for Christians. Reject the existence of God completely and you are still left with the question, why?

Gnosticism gave the world a convoluted and complicated answer as I briefly referenced above, but it all comes down to matter is evil therefore there is evil and suffering in the world. Matter and the world must be escaped, and that is through this secret kind of mystical knowledge for the lucky few. The Gnostic tendencies for the Pietist come from this kind of experiential seeking for a knowledge that will confer on the Christian a means of escape from this messy, fallen sinful world. As a young Christian that knowledge came in the form of a little wire I imagined coming down from God into my brain and then zap! when I needed to understand something of spiritual significance. In a way, I completely envisioned it as bypassing my intellect and mental faculties which of course made it all more “spiritual” and thus valid. Few if any Christians given to Pietistic tendencies actually think through any of this. It’s just how they see their relationship to God mediated through the Bible.

There are many passages in Scripture that might give one inclined this way to read them in a Gnostic fashion. I’ll just reference an obvious one in Colossians 3:

1 Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3 For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

This has a Gnostic feel to it, but if you continue to read, “earthly things” isn’t referring to this material world at all, but to whatever belongs to our “earthly nature,” then he lists things like sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, greed, anger, rage, etc. He then tells them to put on virtues that are all encapsulated in love. Things above doesn’t refer to a place somewhere far off like heaven where we can escape through a quasi-mystical experience while we’re stuck on earth, but living this Christ-like life here and now.

Dualism and Two Reality Christianity
As I said, unlike Gnosticism, which I look at as the experiential aspect of Pietism, dualism isn’t about salvation, but a way of looking at the nature of things, a mindset, a worldview. I’m not saying Christianity doesn’t have its dualisms, it does. We can see these in good and evil, heaven and hell, body and soul, righteousness and sin, just and unjust, material and spiritual, etc. But these dualisms are firmly found in an understanding of the cosmos rooted in Scripture, that God is the all-powerful creator of the material world which he declares very good. Yet Greek language, and therefore thought, would have a profound influence on Christianity just as God planned it.

Since God doesn’t do coincidence, Christians inherited some of this dualistic mentality from the Greeks given the faith was born in a thoroughly Hellenistic, i.e., broadly Greek, culture. In the providence of God, three great cultures come together at a point in history before Christ was born. Paul tells us why in Galatians 4:

 4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

The Jews, the most ancient of these peoples, gave us God’s people and the covenant promises fulfilled throughout their history in Christ. The Romans brought the Pax Romana (Latin for ‘Roman peace’), the roughly 200 year-long period of relative peace and prosperity allowing Christianity to flourish. This included Roman military power, law, and technological prowess seen most importantly in the vast network of Romans roads allowing relatively safe travel throughout the empire which contributed to the swift spread of the gospel to the “ends of the earth.” And finally the Greeks because of the Hellenizing process starting with Alexander the Great several centuries before Christ. Greek culture, including a universal language and worldview coming from Greek philosophy, influenced Christianity in profound ways. We can see this clearly in John’s gospel as he comes right out of the gate taking a Greek philosophical concept and transforming a Jewish understanding of God into a Christian one:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There is a lot going on in this paragraph from a Greek philosophical perspective, most importantly is John’s teaching on who this Word, or logos, is. According to biblehub.com:

In ancient Greek philosophy, “logos” referred to the principle of order and knowledge. Philosophers like Heraclitus used it to describe the rational principle governing the cosmos. In the Hellenistic Jewish context, “logos” was associated with divine wisdom and the intermediary between God and the world.

John then takes this Greek idea and applies it to the divine preexistent Christ who is the ultimate revelation of God who not only governs the cosmos but created it.

Christianity also inherited and developed a dualistic worldview influenced by Greek thought. Some Christian thinkers have seen this as unfortunate, and something that distorts Christian faith and thinking, while others embrace it with proper qualifications. I would lean more in the latter camp, but it’s clear dualism taken too far gives us a bifurcated two story reality. There are various ways to describe this two-story version of the faith, but it breaks life into two competing realities. Picture a house where upstairs is all the important stuff, the truly meaningful and important things, real stuff, and downstairs is for the servants, the mundane reality we deal with every day. Even though it’s the same house it appears like two completely different houses, say upstairs is 19th century Victorian, and downstairs 1960s hip modernism. In Schaeffer’s words, upstairs “is above the line of despair.” Everyone without access to the stairs is stuck downstairs trying to find meaning, hope, and purpose. If you do have a pass, you can go upstairs when you want to access the things that really matter in life. You can see how a type of Gnosticism might be appealing to people who see reality as mutually exclusive forces, and places.

In a biblical view of things, however, there is only one reality, or as N.T. Wright in Surprised by Hope puts it speaking of heaven and earth, “They are twin interlocking spheres of God’s single created reality.” Most Evangelicals today, unfortunately, are so steeped in the Greek philosophical mindset, even never having read any of it, that saying heaven and earth are one reality almost boarders on the heretical to them. As Wright further puts it:

We think of heaven by definition as nonmaterial and earth by definition as nonspiritual or nonheavenly. But what won’t do. Part of the central achievement of the incarnation, which is then celebrated in the resurrection and ascension, is that heaven and earth are now joined together with an unbreakable bond and that we too are by right citizens of both together.

As I’ve said previously, the first generations of Pietists didn’t see material and spiritual reality as mutually exclusive, but this dualistic perspective was bound to grow over time, and the experiential and personal push of Pietism made sure it did. In my next post I will explore why this mentality, this version of Christianity came to dominate Evangelical Christianity in America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Walking on Water – You Can Too!

Peter Walking on Water – You Can Too!

Jan 8, 2025 | Theology

Well, maybe not actual water, but in Christ we can do the seemingly impossible in not giving way to fear and doubt because circumstances are greater than our Savior God. The gospel story of Peter walking on water has been significant for my life in many ways. There are several theological and practical takeaways, and I’ve never written anything extensively about it, so here are some thoughts on the gold to be mined from this amazing story.

I want to start with the most important question about this event: Did it really happen? If it didn’t actually happen, who cares what kind of spiritual or practical lessons we might learn from it. If it didn’t happen, it’s a lie, and I’m not interested. As I say, if the Bible isn’t true, throw it in the trash. I have more important things to do than waste my time on invented stories claiming they are true. Yet, all the world’s religions want a piece of Jesus even while they reject the supernatural Creator God Jesus of the Bible. For them it’s a pick and choose Jesus. They want nothing to do with actual Jesus of the Bible, Israel’s Messiah and the Savior of the World, and the one who not only can walk on water, but created it! So, first let’s establish the historical nature of the event portrayed in the gospels. To do that, I will use an argument I develop in my book, Uninvented: You just can’t make this stuff up!

Jesus’ Special Relationship to Water and Nature
Nothing is more absurd to the skeptic than Jesus walking on water or stilling a storm just by his command. Impossible, so they tell us. However, the way in which these stories are told is powerful evidence for their veracity. Before we get to Peter, we’ll look at the power of Jesus’ word over creation, told in Matthew (8), Mark (4), and Luke (8). The details are similar in each telling. Jesus gets into a boat with his disciples and says they are going to the other side of the lake (of Galilee). Obviously exhausted, Jesus falls asleep while a furious storm comes up. Terrified, the disciples wake him and plead with him to save them. Jesus’ reply as Matthew reports it is priceless:

26 He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm.

Are you kidding me? What kind of question is that! How could they not be afraid? A raging storm on a dark night in the middle of a large body of water on a small boat is the perfect recipe for terror. But Jesus is as cool as a cucumber. Mark reports another question they ask in the midst of the squall: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” That’s almost funny. Didn’t Jesus say before they even got into the boat, “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake”? Yes, in fact he did. He didn’t say, we’re going to the middle of the lake to drown. I guess when Jesus says something, he means it, storm or no storm. After the storm is calmed, the disciples’ response is even more priceless than before:

They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

So let me get this right. They are terrified during the storm when they think they’re going to die, and now they’re terrified of the guy who saved their lives? The answer to their question, and its implications, must have been troubling to say the least. The portrayal of the story has verisimilitude in spades, it reads real, not at all like mere human fiction.

As I said, if this is a made up story, it’s a lie, and in this case we would have roughly a dozen liars. Then, are we to believe they all made it up, and continued to stick to the story even when they all knew it wasn’t true? We only have two choices, either it happened, or it didn’t. And it’s an awfully odd story to make up if it didn’t really happen. Imagine them getting to the other side of the lake and telling people what happened. They probably didn’t, at least initially. It’s too preposterous! They hardly believed it themselves. There is also nothing comparable in Israel’s history. Even when Elijah called down fire from heaven in his encounter with the prophets of Baal (I Kings 18), he prayed to the Lord, and it was the Lord who did it, not Elijah. Here, Jesus himself is exerting power over nature by his mere word. God does such things, not man, yet here was a man doing it. No wonder they were freaking out. It made no sense! And to top it off, there was no expectation of the long-awaited Messiah having such power, none.

If this isn’t crazy enough, imagine making up the story about Jesus and Peter walking on water (Matt. 14, Mark 6, and John 6). There is nothing remotely like this in biblical history. Instead of Jesus getting in the boat with the disciples this time, he has them get in, and says he’ll meet them on the other side. This has the same problem as the previous episode on the lake for those who deny it happened; it’s a very strange thing to make up. Sometime after three in the morning on a wave-tossed and windy lake, the disciples see what they take as a ghost walking on the water, and it terrifies them. Who wouldn’t be? They respond like real people encountering something unimaginable. Jesus tells them not to be afraid, it is him. In Matthew’s account, impetuous Peter wants a little proof that it is in fact Jesus, so he asks Jesus to tell him to walk out to him on the water. Bad idea. As soon as he sees the wind and waves, he starts to sink. Terrified, Peter shouts, “Lord, save me!” Jesus’ response fits a realistic narrative perfectly:

31 Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

Again, what kind of question is that! Well, Jesus, because, you know, maybe people just don’t walk on water? That reads so real. Then, Matthew writes something utterly un-Jewish: “those who were in boat worshiped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’” Worshiping a man, any man, even if he walks on water, is blasphemy. Mark has a little different take, saying that even though they were amazed, they really hadn’t understood. Jesus had just previously fed more than five thousand people with a few loaves, but “they had not understood.” Both accounts reflect perfect human ambivalence to something so inconceivable. I’ll quote Jewish Christian biblical scholar Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889) as to why it takes more faith to believe this is made up, than it having actually happened:

Not only would the originations of this narrative . . . be utterly unaccountable—neither meeting Jewish expectancy, nor yet supposed Old Testament precedent—but, if legend it be, it seems purposeless and irrational. Moreover, there is this noticeable about it, as about so many of the records of the miraculous in the New Testament, that the writers by no means disguise from themselves or their readers the obvious difficulties involved.

In other words, it doesn’t read at all like legend or myth because there is no point to it or no precedent for it in Jewish history. The disciples are as shocked by it all as anyone would be encountering something so seemingly impossible. We must remember as we read the Bible, what we know as modern fiction didn’t exist in the ancient world. The gospel writers had no category in their minds of trying to write something that didn’t happen to try to make it look real.

As I also argue in my book, the burden of proof is on those who claim the story isn’t real and just made up. The only reason they can give for claiming this comes from an anti-supernatural bias they bring to the text. In logic it’s called begging the question, or assuming the premise before they get to the conclusion. In this case, miracles can’t happen, these are miracles, therefore, these events didn’t happen. Sorry, that won’t work because it’s pure bias. Having established the historicity of the events, let’s look at the theological implications.

Jesus is God: The Doctrine of Christology
Christology is simply the study of who Jesus as the Christ was, and is. We learn two things about Jesus in these stories. The first is his humanity. We see this in his falling asleep while they are in the boat on the lake; even while the storm is raging he’s still asleep and the disciples have to wake him up. Just prior to this Jesus had fed the five thousand with a few loaves and fishes, and had spent the entire day healing the sick. Most orthodox Christians probably tend to overemphasize the divine Jesus at the expense of the human Jesus, while liberal types do the opposite. The liberal Jesus is pretty much human. The testimony of Scripture and the entire history of the church, however, declares Jesus is both fully God and fully man, something, remember, utterly inconceivable to obsessively monotheistic Jews at the time, or any time.

Christology was a struggle for the church for several hundred years. All the first Christians were Jews, so a man who proclaims by his words and deeds he is God wouldn’t compute. In fact, as we see in the gospels, his claim to divinity was why he was put to death. When the high priest asked Jesus after he was arrested to tell them if he was “the Messiah, the Son of God,” his affirmation of equality with God leaves no doubt, and the high priests’ response confirms it:

65 Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “He has spoken blasphemy! Why do we need any more witnesses? Look, now you have heard the blasphemy. 66 What do you think?”

And they all agreed, Jesus was worthy of death.

We see how difficult this was for Jews to accept in the story of doubting Thomas, who refused to believe Jesus had come back from the dead. As he said:

 “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Did he think Mary and the others were lying or delusional? It’s more likely he didn’t know what to think. Not being a modern post-Enlightenment person who automatically disbelieves in miracles, it wasn’t that Thomas couldn’t believe Jesus came back from the dead. After all, he’d seen him bring Lazarus back to life after he’d been dead four days. I think, rather, it was Thomas as a Jew finding it impossible to believe the supposed Messiah would die on a Roman cross, hung on a tree enduring God’s curse. All Jews knew this passage in Deuteronomy 21:23:

his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.

You can see why the disciples so quickly wanted to get Jesus off the cross before the Sabbath started. Knowing this is what makes Thomas’s declaration after he encountered the risen Jesus and saw Jesus’ wounds so Christologically powerful:

28 Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Yet for hundreds of years heresies would arise denying exactly this, that Jesus wasn’t only just a god, but The God, Yahweh himself, Israel’s covenant making Creator God. This controversy was finally put to rest at the council of Nicaea in 325 from which we get the ringing declaration of the Triune God. Jesus was fully God and fully man, a theological fact upon which our salvation from sin depends.

What Peter Walking on Water Teaches Christians About Faith
Before I get to the lessons, one comment on the word faith. We tend to use it in a non-biblical way to mean intellectual assent. I believe in something, have faith, because I’ve been given logical reasons to do so. I intellectually assent to such and such because I believe it. However, faith in the biblical sense is a synonym for trust. This includes using our intellects, our minds, but so much more. The first dictionary definition I came across defines trust well:

assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something, one in which confidence is placed

We can immediately see the focus of trust isn’t me or so much what I believe, but the person or thing I’m believing in, the one or thing in which I place my trust. This is perfect for our story, but more importantly, trust not only includes our mental faculties, but our entire being, our emotions and will as well. My favorite verse about trust in the Bible is Isaiah 26:3, short and sweet:

You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast because he trusts in you.

We don’t have perfect peace, we don’t trust. This means no worry, fear, anxiety or doubt. I repent every morning for my worry, fear, anxiety, and doubt because I’m a sinner, and sinners sin. It’s a battle to attain perfect peace, and always just beyond our grasp. Think of it like Peter walking on the water. He’s actually pulling it off. Notice carefully what is making the impossible possible:

Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”

The contrast says it all. For those few seconds he was obviously looking at Jesus and almost didn’t notice the tempest raging about him. The moment he does, fear kicks in, and he starts sinking. Fear, of course, was a perfectly reasonable response, and once he took his eyes off Jesus fear, and thus sinking, is inevitable.

This is the perfect metaphor for the Christian life because of Jesus’s response. It takes us back to Christology, and our own ever present sinful inclinations to live by sight, and not by trust. When Jesus says to peter, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” you almost have to laugh? I can imagine Peter thinking in that moment if thought was even possible, “What, are you kidding me? How in the world could I not be afraid? Walking on water is impossible!” Well, if Jesus really was God, Creator of the universe, and all the physical laws of the universe are under his control, then fear was in fact not warranted at all. Jesus seems to be saying, if you would just trust me, you wouldn’t have even seen the wind and the waves, only me, and you would have been able to do the impossible without fear.

We know however, in real life in a fallen world in a fallen body among fallen people it doesn’t work that way. Lack of trust is built into the proverbial sinful human cake. The faith-trust dynamic, and thus struggle, is perfectly captured by Blaise Pascal in his description of human nature:

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

Therein lies the battle of trust. The question for us is, which of these will win in the battle of daily life. This reminds me of the story in Mark 9 when a man brings his son who is often violently possessed by demons, and the man pleads with Jesus to help them. Jesus replied, “all things are possible for those who believe.”   In what must have been a heart wrenching scene, the father responds:

24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The word for belief in Greek is pisteuó-πιστεύω, or trust. This is my daily prayer because I fail continually, “Lord, help my lack of trust!”

Thankfully, sanctification is real because Jesus died, as the hymn rightly says, “to make men holy.” This isn’t only positionally before the Father, justification, but actually changes who we are, what we think and what we do. That’s why Paul in I Corinthians 1:30 shares with us these comforting truths:

And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

When we struggle to trust Him, so experience the seemingly ever elusive perfect peace, we must remember to keep our eyes stubbornly focused on Jesus and do our best to ignore the wind and the waves. We just might find ourselves walking on water, even if only for a fleeting moment, until the next time.

 

The Importance of Both the Inner and Outer Body for the Christian

The Importance of Both the Inner and Outer Body for the Christian

Nov 27, 2024 | Theology

Since I got active on Twitter in early 2024, I often come across comments like this as people debate spirituality and physical fitness:

From by what I can gathered and have observed by those who predominantly post about masculinity, not all but some, focus more on outward appearance than the inward man. Being physically in shape is great but being spiritually minded is far greater.

This is undoubtedly true, not least because Paul tells us this exactly in I Timothy 4:8:

For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

If that was all there was to say I wouldn’t be writing or talking about this, and given I’ve had a massive red pill experience regarding physical health because of Donald Trump and then the Covid scam, I have a very lot to say about it.

When I say because of Donald Trump, it wasn’t so much about Trump per se, but the reaction to Trump when he came down the escalator in June 2015. Even though I was not a fan of Trump, and in a way despised him and everything I thought he stood for, the reactions to Trump were so unhinged I thought, nobody can be that bad. So I started to take him seriously, and a year later in the Illinois primary I begrudgingly voted for him over Ted Cruz, and not with a little guilt. I never looked back, though, because the lies of the media, the Democrats, and NeverTrump Uniparty Republicans made me actually begin to appreciate the guy. I thought, he must be a singular threat to their grift to engender this much hatred, and it’s only gotten worse. They’ve even driven the Republican Party to become the Trump party,

something unfathomable just a couple years ago. What has this all to do with health? As it turns out, Everything.

Covid, The Neutron Bomb of Truth
Not too long ago this phrase popped into my mind as a metaphor for how powerful Covid was as a societal red pill about health, and other things as well. Theoretically, a neutron bomb is a weapon that kills by irradiation killing everything that lives while sparing property. So when this particular bomb exploded around the world in 2020, it effectively killed lies about health and modern medicine that had developed in the previous hundred years, while at the same time sparing the property, so to speak, of our every day lives. No longer could those of us affected by it see anything related to our health in the same way. This included the modern medical industrial complex, Big Pharma, and those things that contribute to feeding the beast while destroying our health, like Big Food and Big Ag.

When my cousin told me in March 2020 that Covid was a scam, I was nonplussed, a word that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; to perplex or bewilder someone; to confound or flummox. The “experts,” the CDC, the WHO, governments and media organizations everywhere on earth treated Covid as if it was akin to the Bubonic plague, aka, the Black Death, a real pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. A rough estimate is that 25 million people in Europe died from plague during the Black Death, and the population of western Europe would not reach its pre-1348 level for 250 years. I don’t remember seeing anything during the Covid years like Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s, “Bring out yer dead.” All I remember is masks, masks, everywhere masks. I wouldn’t wear one. Initially it was intimidating, but I learned, for example, to enjoy going to the local Walmart and being the only person in the entire store without a mask, virtue signaling of another sort. I kind of miss those days.

My cousin also started me on my health journey, giving me reading suggestions, while I started searching out resources online about the history of medicine, and how we got to the place where modern medicine seemed to be getting it all so wrong. I learned that modern medicine isn’t so much health care as disease care, the focus on treating symptoms. Like everyone else, I believed it was medicine that healed us. After several years of this journey, and slowly making changes in eating and exercise habits, I had a final red pill experience that in effect confirmed everything I’d been learning since the bomb dropped.

Earlier this year I came down with an unpleasant case of dermatitis, with itchy red splotches all over my body. It started when I noticed white flakes, lots of them, coming out of my hair, and I’ve never had dandruff. It got so bad, gross really, that scabs were appearing on my scalp and I was losing small chunks of hair. That will freak you out! I had been thinking of finding an integrative or holistic doctor for some time, and this was the opportunity to do that. But initially I went to a dermatologist, a skin doctor that I knew was your typically modern medically educated professional. I learned this was Seborrheic dermatitis. They prescribed some medicine and gave me a paper explaining the condition, and on it were these words I could hardly believe I was reading: “Dermatitis is an immune response of the body with no known cause.” What? Are you serious? Talk about nonplussed; I was shocked. And the more I thought about it the more ticked off I got.

The medicine was a steroid cream and some anti-fungal shampoo and some other medicine for my scalp. Not too many years before, pre-Covid, I would have continued to use it, and since it only treated symptoms would likely have had to use it for the rest of my life. What a depressing thought knowing what I now knew. Looking at these ugly red splotches on my arms and legs and the terrible itching was the final motivation I needed to find a holistic, integrative medical professional to figure this out. I found a local nutritionist who had me take several tests, and discovered I had severe fungal and bacterial overgrowth in my gut which led to something called leaky gut. She put me on a protocol of herbal supplements, a specific strain of probiotic, and helped me tweak my diet, and by golly the dermatitis went away! No more ugly red splotches, no more itching. My body like God intended healed itself, no medicine required. Talk about mind blowing.

This doesn’t mean medicine doesn’t have its place, but even when it’s appropriate it isn’t what heals us so much as it allows the body to heal itself. That was the paradigm shift, that God created our bodies, and the ridiculously complex immune systems he gave us, to heal themselves. After six decades of believing the former, it was not an easy transition to fully embrace the latter, but dermatitis sealed the deal. I was automatically conditioned, like everyone had been prior to Covid, to run to the doctor whenever anything was wrong. I now look back with 20/20 hindsight and realize God had been leaving health breadcrumbs throughout my life to help me begin to see that he’s provided everything we need in creation to live healthy and well-functioning lives. Prior, like most others, I believed health and disease was a crap shoot, a matter, for lack of a better term, of luck. Now I know better. We are responsible for our health, or lack thereof.

The Apostle Paul and Bodily Exercise
For much of my Christian life I mocked those who were obsessed with health and exercise. I wanted to be healthy and exercised, but I assumed the people who obsessed about it were deluded, thinking they could live forever. Then Covid. I slowly came to believe our health isn’t merely something that’s nice to have if we’re fortunate, and something to be wished for, but something we have control over. It’s not a crap shoot, a mere roll of the dice. If we just happen to get the wrong number, bad luck, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, whatever. That is what we’ve been programmed to believe by a well-meaning medical establishment that is blind to their own indoctrination. Thankfully, with the explosion in knowledge and the Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, the Internet, distributing it to anyone who wants it, the indoctrination is slowly being revealed for what it is, false information, also known as lies, about human health and disease.

Living 2000 years ago when the average lifespan was probably 30 or 40 years old, and knowledge about disease and health was guesswork, Paul couldn’t imagine what we know now. I would like to believe if he were writing to Timothy today, he might write something like this:

For physical training and your health is of great value, but godliness has even more value and for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

Paul and people in the ancient world in general did have some idea what they did had some effect on their health. He even implies in chapter 5 that Timothy’s ill health is bad for his ministry and that he should do something about that:

23 Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.

Think about what he might say if he had our knowledge about the human body and could suggest more than wine. Or what he might say about how much value physical training and our health has if the choices we made allowed us to live productive, healthy lives into our 90s. Let’s look at this theologically and get a big picture perspective on these issues.

God has chosen to reveal himself to us in two ways, one through His creation, and the other verbally through His word, Scripture, in Greek, graphé-γραφή, the writings. In Matthew 4, Jesus tells us that “man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Here Jesus is telling us both are required for life, physical substance from the earth and spiritual substance from God’s word. Without either one we die. Regarding the former, God’s material created order, Paul tells us this in Romans 1:

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

We can see the maker of matter through His matter, the Creator of all things from His creation. Through it He is “clearly seen,” no ambiguity, no guesswork whatsoever. And since all knowledge has it origin in God, we gain knowledge of God through His creation. In the Middle Ages, Christians came to see these as two books, the book of nature and the book of Scripture.

Related to both, is the concept of progressive revelation. As we can see in Scripture, God doesn’t pull up the dump truck of revelation and unload it all at once. Rather, he slowly, painstakingly slowly (God is never in a hurry), revealed Himself and knowledge about the nature of reality over 2000 years to give us our Bibles. When the canon of Scripture was closed, that didn’t mean God stopped revealing himself. The Bible itself being the revelation of God is a bottomless ocean, the depths of which can never be fully comprehended, but He’s also revealing Himself slowly but surely in creation. Knowledge grew slowly through the first 1500 years of so of the church, but when the scientific revolution started this process picked up speed. People who lived at the turn of the 20th century were dumbfounded at the growth of technology and knowledge. A hundred years later that had multiplied exponentially, and in the third decade of the 21st century, human knowledge is mind boggling. All of it is revelation from God, including knowledge about the human body and our health.

Our Health, Our Responsibility
When we lived in Illinois, the Chicago area, we went to a large church, and because we’re not fans of modern praise music, we attended the traditional service, which meant there were a lot more older people there. Many times I would see some old guy with a cane or something hunched over hobbling down the isle to his seat, and I would tell my family, I don’t want to be that guy. Yet I really didn’t believe I had control of whether I became that guy or not. Sure, to some degree I did, but I still bought into the crap shoot mentality of health and illness. Knowing better now, I see Jesus’ words in the parable of the master and the servant in Luke 12 as relevant for this discussion:

47 And that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. 48 But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.

Related to health and the body, we can’t pretend the last 2000 years didn’t happen, specifically that there has been an explosion of knowledge about the human body, disease, food, exercise, and optimal health. Nor can we pretend that we don’t have agency, and that the choices we make have implications for our health, nor that all this is a gift of God to be utilized for his glory and in service to others. To whom much is given applies here as much as to any of the other gifts of life God has graciously granted us. We’re also taught by Jesus in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 that he expects us to invest what he’s given us to multiply it and not bury it in the ground.

Lastly, who wouldn’t rather be healthy than sick? If God has given us the knowledge and technology to be the former rather than the latter, why wouldn’t we do that? And further, if being healthy allows us to more effectively and for more years be part of God’s glorious effort of bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, shouldn’t we do that? Think about the implications of this. Effectively, it means physical training and our health has great value not only for this life but for the one to come. There are spiritual, eternal implications for the choices we make regarding our health, including how much we exercise, what we eat, how much we sleep, and how we handle our stress. No more do we need to play the physical off the spiritual, as if somehow they were either in conflict or mutually exclusive. They are both oriented to the same end; the telos, purpose, of each is the glory of God, our good and the good of others. Because of this, the Apostle Paul would tell us:

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.

What I’ve learned and what I’m sharing here is that physical health and it’s connection to spiritual reality is part of the 21st century Great Awakening. As a convinced postmillennialist, I now believe that what Isaiah tells us about the “new heavens and earth” in chapter 65 is becoming a reality it our time.

20 “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.

What an exciting time to be alive! And remember, God has chosen us to be here, you, me, and everyone one else, to be alive at this very moment, as Paul tells us in Acts 17:26:

He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

Onward Christian soldiers!

 

To a Thousand Generations: The Triumph of the Covenant

To a Thousand Generations: The Triumph of the Covenant

Oct 23, 2024 | Theology

I was born and raised a Catholic which was my religious life until I went away to college at 18 and was born-again into an Evangelical and Protestant faith bearing little resemblance to Catholicism. The primary reason I embraced this new version of Christianity was because I learned the Bible stated clearly, many times, I could be assured when I die I would go to heaven, that such assurance was mine if I trusted in Christ. How come, I wondered, I’d never been told this in my 18 years as a Catholic. The fear of going to hell when I died was a very real presence in my life, and as I understood the Catholic faith I could not have assurance of my salvation. When I learned of this I was not a happy camper, and became virulently anti-Catholic for a number of years.

I was born-again into a typically Baptist environment of the 1970s “Jesus Revolution,” and like my boomer brothers and sisters was dunked and re-baptized because I guess I thought the first one didn’t take, or something. Being a Baptist was among the anti-Catholic responses of my young faith, and baptizing babies made no sense to me, or any sense to anyone I associated with in the first five years and four months of my Christian life. Then by God’s wonderful providence, I met a man named Steve Kennedy. One evening I went to his house in Newport Beach to meet him for the first time, and he introduced me to Reformed Theology. He would become a mentor of mine, and change the course of my young life (I have a wife and three children and two and a half grandchildren because of this secondary cause). I could accept TULIP, that made sense, but baptizing babies? No way! That was Catholic!

One Sunday morning not too long after I met Steve I went to a Reformed Baptist church, of course, and it so happens, also in God’s wonderful providence, they were doing a baby dedication that morning. I had learned from Steve the biblical concept of covenant, something rarely discussed in the non-Reformed circles I’d been involved in. As they were dedicating their babies a thought unbidden crashed into my brain; they are treating their children as strangers to the covenant! And it ticked me off. I have no idea where the thought came from, but it was powerful and I was instantly converted to paedobaptism. I could see in an instant that the faith of our fathers was, is, and always would be a generational faith. The Lord thought this idea was important enough that just prior to the Israelites going into the promised land after 40 years wandering in the wilderness, He felt the need to emphasize the specifically generational nature of the faith. We read this in Deuteronomy 7:9, and there are many more, but this specific verse gives us the practically eternal nature of His covenant faithfulness:

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.

If a generation is 20 years, that would be 20,000 years! We’re just getting started!

The Bible teaches us that baptism, and this includes baptizing babies, is more about God’s covenant faithfulness than it is about our personal decision to trust Christ. As the Westminster Confession says, it is a “sign and seal of the covenant of grace” (28). When Christ came, God’s covenant promises didn’t all of a sudden become solely focused on individuals, but were now capable of being fulfilled to the generations because of what he accomplished on the cross. Jews in the first century, including Jesus, were incapable of seeing their ancient faith in individualistic baptistic terms because God’s covenant promises to His people was always about “you and your children” (Acts 2:39). Our generational faith is rooted in the concept of covenant.

The Centrality of Covenant in Biblical Religion
I can say this with absolute certainty: There is nothing as important in the redemptive history found in our Bibles as the covenant. There is actually more than one, but they are subsumed in the ultimate covenant of redemption made between the Triune God in eternity past. Jesus in John 6 gives us a glimpse of what happened in this covenant when he says:

38 For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.

Jesus was given his name (Matt. 1:21) to accomplish what he shares with us here, that “he will save his people from their sins.” His people, the ones he will save from their sins, are the people God the Father gave the Son in eternity past, specifically to raise them up at the last day. Those given by the Father will believe in the Son, will come to faith in him. You can theologically call this whatever you like, but I call it biblical, and it is bound up in God’s covenant promises revealed to us in redemptive history.

I will contrast the biblical concept of covenant with the primary competing alternative in the modern West, secularism, later, but its centrality to redemptive history happens immediately after the fall in Genesis 3. When Adam and Eve rebelled and introduced sin and all its consequences into the world God reveals that the solution to this catastrophe has already been put in place, and notice who is calling the shots:

15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.

I like the NIV using “crush” for the second “strike” but the Hebrew uses the same word. Clearly, striking a head will be more damaging than striking a heal, and ultimately cause fatal damage. We also learn from this promise of God that humanity will be divided into two mutually exclusive camps, the offspring or seed of the woman, and the offspring of the serpent. As much as we might not like the implications, this was all determined before God even created the world, and we’re playing our part in this cosmic drama.

The covenant next appears with Noah in Genesis 9:

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Although this isn’t specifically a promise related to salvation from sin, notice again it is to Noah and his descendants, as are all the covenant promises of God to His people.

God’s covenant implementation starts in earnest with Abram in Genesis 12 when He calls him out of his homeland to another land and that he will make him “into a great nation.” The covenant will be made official in chapter 15, but in chapter 13 showing Abram the land he will inherit he says to him:

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.

The promise, the covenant, is always to Abram and his offspring. In chapter 15 the Lord promises Abram that his offspring will be as numerous as the stars in the sky, and then he performs a very strange ceremony to modern sensibilities to confirm the covenant with Abram. Covenants were legal agreements in the ancient world with blessings and curses as stipulations, shown vividly in this ceremony. The strange thing about this ceremony isn’t just animals being cut in half, which was common at the time indicating that if the stipulations were not followed, may that party end up like the animals. What was strange is that the Lord in the ceremony indicated he would be responsible for both sides of the agreement. It was a unilateral covenant for two parties because man could never hold up his end of the agreement.

In chapter 17 the Lord confirms his covenant with Abram through the sign and seal of circumcision and changes his name to Abraham. The key point is that God’s covenant promise to Abraham is generational:

9 Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. 10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised.

When Isaac is born, the Lord puts Abraham to the ultimate test asking him to sacrifice his son, his only son, and when he passes the test by completely trusting the Lord in the face of such an absurdity the covenant is yet again confirmed:

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 confirms his covenant with Isaac and Jacob, and the details yet again make the point that God’s covenant promises have always been, and continue to be, generational. This did not stop with the New Covenant. As I quoted Peter above, it is and always will be, “to you and your children.”

The Appeal of the Redemptive Covenant Story to the Next Generation
All Christians of whatever theological tradition want to pass their faith on to the next generation and generations to come, but this isn’t happening to the extent it should be. Thus the rise some years back of the “nones,” those who pick “None of the above” when asked on surveys about their religion. This is unacceptable. Why is it happening? When I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, starting in 2015, the “nones” were big news. When I read my first story of what we now call a “deconversion,” I was livid. How in the world, I thought, could the competing faith of secularism, a life where God is secondary or not welcome at all, be more appealing to young people raised in Christian homes than Christianity? If we can’t sell our children on the attractiveness of the Christian story, something is wrong. Or we’re not trying, thinking their faith will take care of itself. Many parents take their children to church and assume that will take care of them, but it won’t. As I title the first section of my book, “It’s All About Parents.” We determine whether their faith is generational or not. And for those who don’t like the sound of that, we are as responsible in our lives as God is sovereign over them. How do we do that?

The answer is actually quite simple. It’s all about the story. Apologetics, or defending the veracity of Christianity is crucial, but that is all part of helping them see the grand narrative structure of the story we as Christians are part of. Every human being whether they consciously think about it or not, and most don’t, see themselves as part of some kind of narrative, a story arc, that gives meaning to their existence. In the 21st century post-Christian West the competing story is a ubiquitous all pervasive secularism. Either we sell our children on God’s covenant story in history, or the secular culture will sell them on its story. And the secular culture is selling them twenty-four/seven. Thankfully, the secular story is weak and pathetic, but it’s up to us as parents to make the case to our children, and it’s a very easy case to make.

Since the so-called Enlightenment, Western civilization has had two diametrically opposed origin stories, and thus two ways to read history. As rationalism ascended post Descartes in the mid-1600s, and God was relegated to the fringes of society as persona non grata (an unwelcome presence), there needed to be some other plausible account of things. The most common question in all of human history, why? will be asked and must have an answer, even if it’s one as absurd as everything came from nothing for no reason at all. Enter Satan’s greatest post-fall invention into the stream of history, Charles Darwin and his 1859 Origin of species. It’s brilliant! Perfect, really. As atheist Richard Dawkins said one hundred and fifty years later, evolution has made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist—albeit a deluded one. But the insidious beauty of Darwinian evolution was that in the 19th century it was a plausible explanation for heathens who insisted man gets to be his own god. Looked at from the scientific knowledge of 2024, however, and it is almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic.

Survival of the fittest was sinful man’s attempt to imbue life with meaning, hope, and purpose where it inherently has none. Without God the Creator, all we are is star dust, a chance collocation of meaningless atoms, so much lucky dirt, a little more than mere animals who by some freak chance of “natural” selection can talk and think. We have to make our own meaning in a fundamentally meaningless universe, between two poles of meaninglessness, as the Great RC Sproul put it, where we came from, meaningless, and where we’re going, meaningless, back to dust. We have to build our hope on circumstances we think we’ll like, and create purpose in trying to attain them, all the while knowing we are hurdling toward inevitable death, turning into the dust from which we came. How inspiring! Life is basically a Woody Allen movie. One of my favorite scenes is in his 1986 hit movie Hannah and Her Sisters. Allen, unsurprisingly, plays a hypochondriac and he’s convinced he has brain cancer. This scene on the sidewalk is right after the doctor gives him a clean bill of health. He’s skipping and jumping saying he’s not going to die, then it hits him.

Woody Allen movies were a great apologetics tool I used with my children as they were growing up. We can have Christianity, which gives our lives real meaning, hope, and purpose, and it also happens to be true, or secularism which promises everything and delivers nothing, and to add insult to injury, it’s a lie. Life becomes a Woody Allen movie, ending either in despair or mostly resignation.

The Christian covenant story, by contrast, of God working out his purposes for our lives, and our children’s lives, and the world’s redemption is epic. And as they said in the old boomer movie days in the 60s, it’s in technicolor! I could write and talk for days about the meaning, hope, and purpose Christianity gives our lives, but I will restrain myself, and not tax your patience. I will end with two quotes, one from the greatest apologist and story teller combo of the 20th century, C. S. Lewis, and the other from the Bible. Lewis, an ex-atheist realized in his 30s that atheism had zero explanatory power, meaning it has no plausible explanation for anything:

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

We either give our kids puzzle pieces for a puzzle that doesn’t even exist, or we give them the story into which all puzzle pieces ultimately fit. The Apostle Paul said something about those pieces fitting together by the Puzzle Grandmaster in Romans 8:28:

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

I used to joke with my children, and often still do, that Paul certainly didn’t mean all; maybe 95%, but all? Yep, every single thing, every moment of every second of every day, God is working in us, on us, and through us for our good and his glory. Talk about hope, meaning, and purpose! Add to that we get to change the world in our own little corner of it, to advance God’s kingdom on earth and His glory to this fallen world.

That, brothers and sisters, is an easy sell. And children raised with it, will never abandon their faith.