What One Chinese Pastor Can Teach You About Suffering Faithfully
Wang quietly embodied so much of what I hear Christians in America today trying to figure out: how to be in the world but not of it.
Wang’s life invites us to ask, What’s the nature of a Christian hero? Does such a person exist? In the creation of heroes, humanity is prone to navel-gazing. Throughout history, men and women have been tempted to make more of each other than they deserve, and it doesn’t serve the persecuted church to put it... Continue Reading
The End of Protestant Retrieval
When we debate difficult questions of human life together, we ought to do so in a consistently Christian way—with due regard for logical precision and conceptual clarity.
A truth-claim regarding (for instance) the simplicity of God is “necessary” in that it is integral to the definition of Him: God would not be God were He not metaphysically simple. On a classical theist account, to be actus purus, without unrealized potentialities, is simply what it means to be God. What this means is that the claims of Protestant... Continue Reading
Fertility Shows Why Christians Must Be Concerned About Political Greatness
The struggles of parenthood appear as nothing when we have great things to do in the political and religious worlds.
The best thing to promote fertility is to promote marriage. This means discouraging ideologies hostile to marriage and promoting healthy religious belief. Ideologies are lullabies, entrancing people to embrace the bright side of cultural decay. James Burnham called liberalism the ideology of western suicide. Among modern Western peoples, feminism and sexual liberation ideologies are our... Continue Reading
Why Does the Gospel of Mark End without Mention of Jesus’s Resurrection?
As Christians, we never move past the cross. Even throughout eternity we will sing, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain!”
Mark’s ending calls us to discipleship. I contend that he intends to use the failure of the male disciples in Mark 14–15 and the female disciples in Mark 16 to remind us both that Jesus graciously uses even imperfect sinners to build his perfect kingdom and that their failures serve to call us to be... Continue Reading
Life in a Fallen World – And in the Next
On being reunited with departed loved ones in the next life.
Our source of comfort isn’t only that we’ll be with the Lord in Heaven but also that we’ll be with one another. Christ is “the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last” (Revelation 22:13, NIV). He alone is sufficient to meet all our needs. Yet God has designed us for relationship not only... Continue Reading
Salvation and the World
Here is a call to worship: Keep Jesus always before your eyes.
Everything in the world—everything in your world—is groaning and travailing under the burden of sin and unbelief. Everything can be improved. Everything needs more of the King’s beauty, goodness, and truth so that it can realize the “very good” possibilities God has invested in it. Your world already shows much evidence of Christ’s rule, but... Continue Reading
Augustine’s ‘The City of God’ and Why It Matters Today
God’s kingdom is a kingdom which shall indeed prevail.
Augustine provides a model for how Christians ought to think of all of world history in explicitly Christian and biblical categories. As Christians raise children and attempt to think about the world we live in on God’s terms—and not ours—Augustine offers a model for making sense of the world in explicitly biblical categories. That is,... Continue Reading
Does Original Sin Still Explain the Human Condition?
The reality of mankind’s inability to save himself truthfully guides us more and more into the beauty of the gospel.
Ephesians 2 provides a clear depiction of the fallen condition of humanity apart from the grace-filled saving work of God, but Romans 5:12 is the locus classicus for discussions about original sin. In this chapter, Paul seeks to expand on his argument in the earlier chapters of Romans by describing the universal impact of the... Continue Reading
Bibles, Books, and Brain Rot
On the vibe shift and the progressive squeeze.
Bible sales rose to 14.2 million in 2023 from 9.7 million in 2019, and hit 13.7 million in the first 10 months of this year. Readers are also stocking up on related titles that provide guidance, insights and context—even sets of stickers to flag particularly meaningful passages. What happens a few years from now after... Continue Reading
Bathrooms Are Not the Real Battlefield
Unrelenting pressure for “acceptance” will continue.
Let’s not allow ourselves to be deceived. McBride called the bathroom fracas a distraction. That’s largely true. Many Republicans are eager to appear as adversaries of “cultural Marxism.” But few are willing to offer the slightest resistance to any of the achievements of modern feminism or gay liberation. These movements endorse the basic premise of... Continue Reading
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