He was my accountability partner — a churchy way of saying the friend I’d asked to ask me the hard questions, the structure I’d built specifically to fight what I was doing. He asked. And I looked at him and lied. I told him I was fine. I’d done the one thing I’d asked him to help guard me against the week before, and I said nothing, and I let him pray for me, and three days later I stood up and preached on wisdom from Proverbs.

I want you to sit in that with me, because I’ve spent a lot of years not sitting in it.

I was leading a ministry. Building it, actually — pouring real hours into discipling people in the Christian life. And by every visible measure, it was working. There was fruit. People were growing. From the outside, and honestly from most of the inside, I looked like a young man on fire for God.

I was living contrary to Scripture in multiple streams and feeding a private habit I hid from everyone. Two lives, running at the same time, inches apart. I’d prepare a lesson on holiness with the previous night still on me. I’d teach people to walk in step with the Spirit and mean it, genuinely mean it, and then go kill nothing in myself the moment the lights went down.

Here’s the part I understand now that I couldn’t see then. I wasn’t a man with no spiritual life. That would almost be easier to explain. I had an enormous spiritual life. I felt real conviction when I sinned — sharp, hot, sincere. I sought God’s forgiveness, and I genuinely gloried in it; the relief was real, the gratitude was real. And then I soared in the pleasure of the sin again the next weekend, and felt the conviction again, and sought the forgiveness again, and round it went.

I called that repentance. It wasn’t. It was rehearsed repentance — the full liturgy of being sorry, performed on a loop, with one thing missing from the middle of it. I never actually killed anything. I confessed the sin, thanked God for covering it, and left it exactly where it was, alive and waiting for me to pick it back up again. I had a functional spiritual amnesia — except it wasn’t that I forgot. It’s that I’d built a cycle where forgetting was the point. Feel it, confess it, move on, repeat.

It ended the way those things end. I was found out. I resigned, and I dressed the resignation in a respectable reason, and the respectable reason was a lie too — the last lie on top of all the others.

You can see the sins well enough, but the sins aren’t the confession. This is the confession: I was doing more Christianity in that season than I have in almost any season since. I just wasn’t putting anything to death. And it turns out you can do an astonishing amount of the first while doing none of the second — and call the whole thing a calling.

I don’t think I’m the only one. I think there are people reading this who haven’t actually killed anything in years, and who would never know it, because the activity is so loud you can’t hear the silence underneath it.

My version of this was loud and obvious. Yours is probably quieter. That’s what makes it more dangerous.

Because most of us aren’t living a double life with a dramatic secret. Most of us are just busy. Busy being Christians, even. We go to church. We serve. We read the plan, we know the words, we’d pass any doctrine quiz you put in front of us. By every visible measure, the faith is working.

And underneath all that motion, a question almost no one asks: when is the last time I actually put something to death?

Not “when did I last feel bad about a sin?” We do that constantly. I mean: when did I last take a specific corruption in myself — name it, drag it into the light, and go to war with it until it died? When did I last lose something I wanted to keep? For a lot of us, the honest answer is a number of years we’d rather not say out loud, if ever. We’ve just treated Jesus as fire insurance instead of life-changing. We’ve been active the whole time. We just haven’t been killing.

And it’s not because we’re sinless. It’s because our sins got respectable. The sharp tongue we call honesty and even embrace as our God-given personality. The ability to be offended we hold onto because we tell ourselves that without it, we’d be a doormat. The self-pity we’ve nursed so long that it feels like personality. The envy we’ve rebranded as ambition. We’ve made a quiet peace with all of it and say, “Oh well.” We’re not at war with these things. We’re cohabiting with them and making them our pet sins.

What we do instead of killing is feel. We feel convicted — genuinely, sometimes intensely. We confess. We feel the relief of grace. And we mistake that whole emotional circuit for repentance, when it’s really just the feeling of repentance running on a loop with nothing dying at the center of it. We’ve been sorry a thousand times. We’ve changed almost none of it.

And we are being told, from every direction, that this is fine. That the things we should be killing are actually the truest parts of us. That peace with ourselves is the goal, and war with ourselves is the sickness. The whole spirit of the age is built to talk us out of the one verb the Christian life can’t live without.

This is where all of it has been heading. Not a new question — the same one, asked for the last time, with nowhere left to hide from it.

It’s easy to nod at all this as a description of the lukewarm church out there somewhere.

It’s harder to ask the question straight: what have I actually put to death lately? And to sit in the silence if the answer is nothing.

There’s a sentence in Paul that the modern church has quietly stopped being able to hear. Not because it’s obscure — because it’s violent.

“If by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom 8:13).

Put to death. That’s the verb. Not manage, not balance, not integrate, not make peace with. Kill. And Paul stakes everything on it: the clause before says that if you live according to the flesh, “you will die” — and he doesn’t mean you’ll feel distant from God. He means death in its fullest, most final sense.1 The commentators who handle this verse carefully refuse to soften it, because Paul refuses to. This isn’t advanced discipleship for the especially serious. It’s the difference between life and death, stated as a command.2

The Puritan John Owen built an entire book on this one verse, and gave us the line that has never been improved on: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”3 There’s no neutral third option, no holding pattern, no maintenance mode. Sin is not a static thing you contain; it’s a living thing that is either dying at your hand or growing at your expense. The Christian life, on this account, has a verb at its center, and that verb is kill.

A verb needs an object

Here’s the thing about a command to put something to death: it only makes sense if there’s something there to die.

“Put to death the deeds of the body.” Mortify what is earthly in you (Col 3:5). The grammar requires an object — a real corruption, a genuine self-in-rebellion that has to be dragged out and executed. The whole vocabulary of the New Testament Christian life assumes it. Put off the old self. Crucify the flesh. Deny yourself. Every one of those verbs reaches for an object, and the object is always the same: a version of you that has to die so a truer one can live.

And this — slowly, over years, without anyone deciding it on purpose — is exactly what we have lost.

Walk back through what this series has watched come apart. We started with judgment — the conviction that sin earns condemnation — and we watched the church quietly retire it, until sin carries no weight and there’s nothing to be saved from. Then we watched the authority of Scripture get relativized, until the texts that name sin no longer bind, and there’s no fixed word left to call anything sin at all. Then we watched the self get sacralized — you are your desires, express them, honor them — until the inner life isn’t a battlefield but a sanctuary, every want a piece of the authentic you.

Now stand back and see what all three have done together, because this is where they were always heading. Remove judgment, and there’s no penalty that makes sin worth killing. Remove Scripture’s authority, and there’s no standard by which to know what to kill. Sacralize the self, and there’s nothing you would dare to kill, because the thing the New Testament calls “the flesh” has been renamed “who I really am.” Strip out all three, and you haven’t made the Christian life gentler. You’ve removed its object. You’ve left the verb — put to death — with nothing left to put to death.

That’s the quiet catastrophe underneath the whole project, and it’s why this series has been one argument and not four. It was never really about any single doctrine. It was about sanctification all along — because when you relativize judgment and Scripture and the self, the thing that actually dies is mortification itself. You’re left with a Christianity that has every feature except the one verb that made it transformative. Activity without killing. Worship without dying. A faith you can practice with enormous energy, as I did, while putting nothing to death — because there’s nothing left you’re willing to call dead.

Killing is only half

But here’s where Scripture refuses to let mortification curdle into something grim, and it’s the half that even the church that still preaches “put sin to death” most often forgets.

You are not only killing. You are being made alive.

The old tradition had two words for the one motion: mortification and vivification. The putting to death and the making alive. They aren’t two separate projects — a season of killing followed by a season of living — but two faces of a single turn, the way exhaling and inhaling are one breath. Paul’s own language insists on it. The same passage that says “put to death” also says “put on the new self, which is being renewed after the image of its creator” (Col 3:9–10).4 You strip off the grave-clothes, and you put on the clean garment. The killing is never the point. It’s the clearing of ground so something can grow.

This is why Paul can hold together two things that look contradictory — that you have already died with Christ, and that you must still, daily, put sin to death. The commentators call it the indicative and the imperative: be what you are.5 You are already, by God’s act, a new creation. Now — by the Spirit, never by raw willpower, never by gritted teeth — become in practice what you already are by grace.6 Mortification without that grace is just moralism, the exhausting religion of self-improvement. But grace without mortification isn’t grace at all; it’s the verb-less Christianity we’ve been tracing all month — the one I lived — the one that lets sin sit alive and unbothered while you call yourself forgiven.

What you’re killing toward

And here is the thing that makes the killing bearable — that makes it, finally, hope and not horror.

You are not putting sin to death so you can be a slightly better person. You are putting it to death because of where this is all going. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). That’s the destination. Not improvement — likeness. You will see Christ, and the seeing will finish the work, and you will be like Him.7

And John adds the line that turns the whole grim arithmetic of mortification into something with light in it: “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:3). The killing is driven by the hope.8 You don’t put sin to death out of fear or duty or self-hatred. You put it to death because you’ve seen where you’re headed — a face you will one day look full in — and you cannot carry the old corruption into that presence, and more than that, you don’t want to. The hope does the purifying. Without it, John says, life is empty. With it, every act of mortification is one more thing you set down because your hands are getting ready to hold something better.

So here is the whole method of this newsletter, landed on its final question. The culture says: become who you are. Find the self inside you and express it without apology. Scripture says something stranger and harder and infinitely more hopeful: die, and be made alive into who He is making you. The self you’re chasing isn’t behind you, waiting to be excavated and honored. It’s ahead of you, in the face of Christ, waiting to be revealed — and the only road there runs through a daily death.

Name what you’re killing

So I’m going to ask you the question the whole series has been walking toward, and I want you to actually answer it, not let it slide past.

What are you killing right now?

Not what do you feel bad about. Not what would you confess if pressed. What sin, specifically, are you at war with this week — named, hunted, actively dying at your hand? If you can answer that cleanly, then thank God and keep your blade sharp. But if you went quiet just now — if you scrolled back through the last month, the last year, and couldn’t find a single thing you’ve genuinely put to death — then I’m not writing this to shame you. I’m writing it because I lived in that silence for years and called it a ministry, and someone should have grabbed me by the collar.

So let me grab yours. Here’s what to do, and it’s painfully simple.

Pick one. Not all of them — you’ll do nothing if you try to do everything. One. The pet sin from a few paragraphs ago that you felt the heat on when I named it. The tongue, the offense you nurse, the self-pity, the envy, the thing you’ve been calling your personality. Pick the one you’d least like to give up, because that’s the one with its hooks deepest in you. That reluctance you feel — not that one — is the sin defending its own life. Listen to it. It’s telling you where to aim.

Then go to war with it. Specifically, concretely, this week. Name it out loud to one person who’ll ask you about it again — a real accountability you don’t lie to, which I know something about. Cut off whatever feeds it. When it rises, refuse it, and when you fail, get up the same hour and refuse it again. This isn’t a feeling. Feelings you already have in abundance; feelings are the loop you’ve been mistaking for repentance. This is an act, repeated, against something that wants to stay alive.

But hear the one thing that keeps this from being a self-improvement project — because if you miss it, you’ll just exhaust yourself building a better you and call it sanctification. You do not kill sin by raw willpower. Paul is explicit: it’s “by the Spirit“ you put the deeds of the body to death. The power isn’t yours, but the act is still required of you. Not “let go and let God,” as though you were a passenger. Not “grit your teeth and fix yourself,” as though you were alone. Both are counterfeits. The truth is stranger: you fight with everything you have, and the strength you fight with isn’t yours. You say a daily yes to a killing that God is doing in you and through you and will not do without you.

So stop waiting to feel sanctified. Stop running the loop — the conviction, the relief, the nothing-changes. Pick the sin you’re most fond of, and by the Spirit, start killing it today. Not because God will love you more when it’s dead. Because He already loves you, and He refuses to leave you cohabiting with the thing that’s killing you.

I told you at the start that my version of this was loud and obvious. I didn’t tell you how it ends.

It ends here — with me writing this. Restored. Years past the resignation and the lies and the cycle I couldn’t break on my own. I am not the man who lied to his accountability partner on a Thursday. That man, by the grace of God and a great deal of slow, unglamorous killing, is dead. I had to put him to death, over and over, for longer than I wanted to — and I didn’t do it alone, and I didn’t do it by feeling sorry. I did it by the Spirit, the same Spirit who would not let me stay in the grave I’d dug.

That’s the part the loop could never give me. The loop kept me feeling forgiven while leaving me exactly where I was. What actually saved me wasn’t softer than mortification. It was mortification — the real thing, the daily death — and on the other side of it, a life I could not have manufactured and did not deserve. The killing was never the end. It was the door.

Because here is what we are killing toward, and it’s the only thing that makes any of this bearable. “We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). That’s the destination. Not a tidier version of yourself. Not a respectable Christian who finally got the pet sins under control. Likeness to Christ — the actual face of God, seen at last, and the seeing finishing the work that every small death began. And the hope of that face is not passive: “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself” (1 John 3:3). The hope does the killing. You put the old self to death because you’ve glimpsed where you’re going, and you will not carry the corpse into that light.

This is where the whole series has been heading, all four weeks of it. We watched the church lay down judgment, and Scripture’s authority, and the very idea of a self that needs saving — and I told you those losses would converge somewhere. They converge here. Strip out everything that makes sin worth killing, and you don’t get a lighter, kinder faith. You get a faith with no verb, no war, no death — and therefore no resurrection, because resurrection is only ever on the far side of a grave. A Christianity that has nothing left to put to death has nothing left to be raised.

So this is the question the whole month was always going to end on. Not what do you believe — you believe plenty. Not how do you feel — you feel constantly. The question is: what are you putting to death, and who are you becoming as it dies?

The culture says become who you are. Scripture says something better, and harder, and truer than anything the age is selling: die, and be made alive into who He is making you. The self worth having was never behind you, waiting to be expressed. It’s ahead of you, in the face of Christ, waiting to be revealed.

Be killing sin. It was always the way home.

And I’ll see you there — both of us unrecognizable, both of us finally ourselves.

This closes the June series — four weeks on what the church loses, one doctrine at a time, when it trades hard truth for an easier peace: judgment, the authority of Scripture, the self that needs saving, and now the daily death that was supposed to change us. Thank you for walking the whole arc. If you came in partway, the four read best in order.

A note, because I told you a hard story, and I don’t want you to mishear the ending. I’m restored, not finished. The man who lied on a Thursday is dead, but staying dead is daily work — I still put things to death now, and some of them have my own name on them, as the last few weeks here have made plain. If you saw yourself anywhere in this series, you’re not too far gone, and you’re not behind. You’re just being invited, like I was, into the one work that actually changes anything. It’s slower than you’d like. It’s also the only thing that’s real.

→ If this series meant something to you, send the whole arc to one person. Not the timeline — one person you’ve watched get quieter in their faith, or louder in their activity with less and less underneath it. These four pieces were written for exactly that person, and they were written to be handed over, not broadcast.

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→ If you’re new here: Theologetics is a weekly Monday essay for believers who hold the right doctrine and can’t always connect it to the hard parts of being alive — and for the ones who walked away because the church couldn’t. Reading culture through Scripture, one question at a time. Subscribe and it lands in your inbox every Monday. Free, and staying that way.

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→ And one more thing, because the timing matters. Next Monday I’m writing something different — not an essay, a letter. About what this newsletter has become over the last year, who it turned out to be for, and something new I’m opening on July 7 for the people who want to go deeper than a weekly piece can. If these four weeks were worth your time, that letter is the one to read. I’ll see you there.

“Nothing Left to Raise” is the fourth and final piece of the June arc.

The series in order: [1 — judgment] · [2 — Scripture] · [3 — the self] · [4 — this one].

A fifth question — where all of this is finally going — comes after the launch.

At a stoplight. In the middle of dinner. With one hand on the door and the leash in the other, the dogs already pulling toward the night. In the middle of a meeting, phone in my lap, eyes down like I’m taking notes.

I tell myself it’s diligence. It isn’t. I’m checking the views. And what I’m really checking — though it took me a long time to say this plainly — is whether I’m any good.

Here’s how the math works in me. A good number is a hit. There’s no other word for it; it lands in the body like one, a clean little jolt of yes, it’s working, you’re working. A bad number isn’t information. It’s a verdict. A flat Monday doesn’t tell me the post underperformed. It tells me I don’t actually know what I’m doing — that the whole thing is a costume, and the numbers are the part of the day that knows it.

I can hide this well. I can go a whole evening without saying a word about it, present at the table, asking about your day. But it’s running the whole time, underneath — a quiet meter reading more, less, more, less.

A few months ago, a theologian I deeply respect — a man whose work I’d buy on sight — reshared something I’d written about his book. Put it on his Insta story. A screenshot with a markup circling something I wrote and some positive comments, which meant he’d actually read it.

I want to tell you it was gratifying. That’s too small a word. It was a hit of a drug. It lasted the rest of the day. I texted the friends who love his work. I read the screenshot again. And then — this is the part I keep wanting to leave out — I started wondering how to get him to do it again. The high had a half-life. By the next morning, it had burned off, and I was back at the meter. More, less.

I’ve called this a lot of generous names. Stewardship. Wanting the message to reach people and equip the everyday believer. Diligence about the work God’s given me.

Here’s where this gets real, and where it hurts. I debated whether to keep this paragraph while I edited, let alone write it. Someone asked me once whether I’d keep doing this if it never worked — if the platform never came, if I stayed where I am forever, unquoted, unbooked, unknown. The first thing that went through my mind wasn’t yes, of course, the work is worth it. It was: then what’s the point?

Which told me what the point had been all along. The point was never really just the teaching. It was showing off how much I know.

I’m a trained theologian writing a series about the ways we mistake our desires for our selves. And I’ve spent five months feeding a desire I dressed up as a calling, refreshing a page between tasks to find out if I’m worth anything yet.

I don’t think I’m the only one. I think most of us have a want we’ve quietly started calling who we are.

I don’t think my version of this is rare. I think it’s just mine — the particular shape of a thing everyone’s carrying.

Because we all do it. We take something we want, or something we feel, or something we’ve always been like, and at some point it stops being a thing about us and becomes the thing we are. The want graduates into an identity. And once it’s an identity, it’s protected. You don’t question an identity. You defend it.

We say it casually, all the time. That’s just who I am. I’m a blunt person — it’s just how I’m wired. I have a temper, always have. I’m an anxious person; I’m this type on this personality test; I’m just not built for that. We say it like we’re describing our eye color. And what we’re actually doing, underneath the shrug, is moving a sin out of the category of things-to-be-fought and into the category of things-to-be-accepted. We’re not confessing. We’re incorporating.

Or it’s a desire. A thing we want so badly that wanting it has become part of who we understand ourselves to be — so that if you questioned the want, it wouldn’t feel like a question about a desire. It would feel like a question about us. That’s the tell. When someone gets near the thing, and you jerk like they hit a reflex with a mallet — that’s not a preference they brushed up against. That’s a high place.

And we live in a moment that has made this instinct into a philosophy, even a psychology. The deepest wisdom of our age, repeated everywhere until it sounds like oxygen, is this: the truest thing about you is what you most deeply desire, and the bravest thing you can do is live it out without apology. Find it. Honor it. Become it. You already know how completely the water we swim in is made of this.

It’s easy to nod along at that as a cultural diagnosis — to see how other people have built their whole selves on a feeling.

It’s easy right up until you look at the want you’ve been protecting. The one you’d bristle to have questioned. The one you’ve quietly started calling who you are.

Start where the Bible starts, because the Bible answers the identity question before we’ve finished asking it — and it answers in a direction we’d never choose.

When God makes the human, He does something He does nowhere else in the creation account. Every other act is a word spoken outward — let there be, let the earth bring forth. Here, and only here, there’s deliberation first: “Let us make man in our image” (Gen 1:26). The human is the one creature preceded by a divine huddle, the pinnacle act, the only one God pauses over.1 And the thing that makes a human a human — the image — is not produced by the human. It’s conferred. You are an image-bearer before you’ve done a single thing, wanted a single thing, chosen a single thing. The identity is bestowed, not achieved, and it’s bestowed before you’re old enough to have an opinion about it.

Here’s the detail almost everyone misses, and it’s the hinge of the whole question. Genesis never tells us what the image is. It doesn’t locate the image in your reason, your will, your relationships, or your desires. The text is conspicuously silent on the contents; it moves straight from the bestowal to the consequence — you will represent God, you will rule as His.2 That silence is doing theological work. Scripture refuses to let you find your identity in any attribute you possess, because the moment the image is located in a trait, that trait becomes the thing you must perform, protect, and prove. The Bible won’t give you that. It says: you are God’s, made by God, for God, and the definition stays in His hands. Your selfhood is a gift held by Someone else.

This is the exact opposite of the air we breathe. The modern self is not conferred; it’s expressed. You are, we’re told, whatever is truest and deepest and most insistent inside you — and the highest moral act is to excavate that inner thing and live it out without compromise. Identity is desire, surfaced and honored. To question the desire is to attack the self.

Scripture has a name for that move. It isn’t “authenticity.” It’s older and darker, and it sits at the very center of the fall.

The exchange

Paul tells the story of how humanity went wrong, and he tells it as a story about worship — and underneath worship, about identity. People knew God, Paul says, and “did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Rom 1:21). What happened next is the engine of the whole human predicament: they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images” (Rom 1:23). The word exchange is load-bearing. The fall is a swap — trading the weight and splendor of God for something smaller you can hold and control.3

Don’t file this under ancient history, carved idols and pagan temples. Paul’s anatomy of idolatry applies to our moment exactly: his words apply as much to people who have made money, sex, or fame their gods as to anyone who ever bowed to wood and stone.4 Idolatry isn’t a phase humanity outgrew. It’s the permanent human reflex of taking some piece of creation and putting it where God goes. And Paul gives the reflex its sharpest definition one verse later: idolatry is “worshiping and serving the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25).5

Now hold that definition next to the modern self, and watch what it exposes. You are your desires is not a neutral theory of identity. It’s creature-worship turned inward. It takes a piece of creation — your own wants, your own felt intensities — and installs them in the Creator’s chair. The most natural spirituality of our age, the one that calls itself liberation, is the oldest sin in Scripture wearing new clothes: the creature, enthroned, demanding the worship that was never its to receive.

And here’s the part Paul insists on that we’d rather not hear. After the exchange comes the handing over. Three times in this passage God “gives them up” — and the first time, He gives them up “in the lusts of their hearts” (Rom 1:24).6 Read the order carefully, because the order is everything. The disordered desire is not the root. It’s the consequence. The runaway wants come second, after the worship has already been misplaced. Which means you cannot fix a disordered self by managing its desires one at a time. The desires are downstream. The problem was never first in what you wanted — it was in what you worshiped, and the wanting followed the worship over the cliff.

That’s why the modern project of self-actualization can never deliver what it promises. It treats the symptom as the cure. It says the way to become yourself is to honor the desires — when the desires are precisely the flood you were handed over to when the worship went wrong. You cannot drink your way out of a thirst that worship created. The creature in the Creator’s chair is a tyrant that can’t be satisfied, only fed — and the feeding has a half-life.

The self you do not invent

So if the self isn’t expressed, how is it recovered? Scripture’s answer is as concrete as a change of clothes.

Paul tells the Colossians they have “put off the old self with its practices” and “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Col 3:9–10). Two things in that sentence undo the entire expressivist program. First, the verbs: you put off and put on. The new self isn’t excavated from within; it’s received from without and worn — the way you’d strip off a filthy garment and dress in a clean one.7 You don’t dig down to the true you. You put on a true you that was given to you. Second — impossible to miss — the new self is renewed “after the image of its creator,” a deliberate reach back to Genesis 1:27.8 The arc closes. What was conferred in creation and defaced in the fall is restored in Christ — and restored as gift again, not as achievement.

This is the whole shape of it, and it runs exactly counter to the age. In Creation, your identity is bestowed — image-bearer before you wanted anything. In the Fall, you exchange the worship of God for the worship of the creature, and your desires are handed the throne your worship vacated. In Redemption, that old self isn’t coached or optimized; it’s crucified — “our old self was crucified with him” — and a new self is given, a new creation in which “the old has passed away” entirely, a completed act and not a renovation.9 In Restoration, that new self is brought home to the image it started with, “renewed after the image of its creator,” now in the face of Christ, the last Adam.10

Notice the vector, because it’s the whole method of Theologetics. This is Redemptive Correlation: the culture reads the self through desire — whatever you most deeply want, that’s who you are, and the work of life is to express it. Redemptive Correlation runs the other way. It reads desire through the self God made and is remaking. It doesn’t ask your wants to tell you who you are. It asks who God made you to be, and puts your wants under that — some to be honored, some to be crucified, none allowed to sit in the chair that belongs to God alone.

The modern world hands you a mirror and calls it a self. Scripture hands you an image you didn’t make, marred by a worship you misplaced, restored by a Christ you didn’t invent — and calls that the self, the only one that was ever really yours.

So name yours.

Not the desire you’d happily admit to. The protected one. The want you’ve folded so far into your sense of self that questioning it feels less like a question and more like a threat. You found it a few minutes ago, when you bristled. Go back to it.

Then do the thing almost no one does with it: stop asking whether the desire is good or bad.

That’s the wrong question, and it’s the one that keeps you stuck — because most of these wants aren’t even sins on their face. Mine wasn’t. Wanting people to be helped by your teaching isn’t a sin. Wanting your marriage to thrive, your work to matter, your name to mean something — none of that is wrong in itself. So you run the audit on the desire, find it basically wholesome, and conclude there’s nothing to deal with. And the whole time you’ve been auditing the wrong thing.

Because Paul already told you the desire isn’t the root. It’s the runoff. The disordered want is what you got handed over to once the worship went wrong upstream. So the question is never “is this desire acceptable?” The question is: what am I worshiping that this desire is serving? What did I put in God’s chair, such that this particular want now has the run of the place?

Run it on yourself. When the number is good, and you feel like a self, and when the number is flat, and you feel like a fraud — what god is being fed and starved by those swings? When the recognition comes, and it’s a drug, and when it’s withheld, and you’re nothing — who’s on the throne that your whole mood rises and falls with? Find that, and you’ve found the actual idol. The desire was just its priest.

Here’s the part that will cost you, because it cost me. You cannot simply moderate a desire that’s serving a false god. You can’t manage your way to freedom — that’s just tending the idol more carefully. The desire that sits on a misplaced worship has to die, and when it dies it will feel like you are dying. That’s not a sign you’ve gone too far. It’s the sign you found the right thing. Paul said it with no cushion at all: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). The old self doesn’t get optimized. It gets crucified. And the terror you feel at that — if this goes, what’s left of me? — is the most honest thing about you, because it’s the moment you discover how much of your “self” was an idol wearing your name.

But read the rest of what Paul said, because he doesn’t leave you in the grave: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” The self that comes out the other side isn’t a diminished you. It’s the first real one — the one that was always yours underneath the idol, received back as a gift instead of clutched as an achievement.

So stop managing the want. Find the worship under it. And let the thing on the throne be put to death, so the One who belongs there can finally have the seat — and give you back a self you never had to manufacture.

I’m not going to tell you I’ve stopped checking.

I checked the day I drafted this. I’ll probably check Monday, when this one goes out — at a stoplight, in the middle of something, with that same quiet meter running underneath. I’m not writing from the far side of this. I’m writing from inside it, with the page open in another tab.

But something has moved, even if the habit hasn’t. I’ve stopped calling the refresh me. I’ve stopped letting the number deliver a verdict it was never qualified to give. When the meter swings now, I can — sometimes, not always — catch it and name it: that’s the idol asking to be fed, and it is not my self, and it does not get to say whether I’m worth anything. The want is still there. It’s just no longer wearing my name.

That’s the difference the gospel actually makes here, and it’s less than you’d want and more than you’d think. It doesn’t hand you a self you finally got right. It hands you a self you didn’t have to get right at all — conferred in a garden before you’d earned a thing, defaced by every throne you built for something smaller, and given back to you in Christ, renewed after the image of the One who made it. You put it on like clean clothes over a body you couldn’t wash yourself.

We spend our lives mistaking our wants for our selves, defending the high places, refreshing the page to find out if we’re anything yet. And the whole time, the answer was never going to come from the thing on the throne. It was settled in the workshop where we were made, by a God who looked at an image that had done nothing yet and called it His.

You are not the sum of what you want. You never were.

You are what He made — and what He is, even now, remaking.

So go find the want you’ve been calling yourself. And hand back the throne.

This is the third piece in a June series on what it costs the church to relativize a hard truth, one doctrine at a time. We've looked at what happens when we lose judgment, and when we lose the authority to be told anything we didn't already believe. This week: what happens when we lose the ability to say what a person even is. One more to come.

If this named something true in you, send it to one person — the one whose “that’s just who I am” you’ve worried about, or the one you suspect is white-knuckling a want they’ve started calling themselves. This isn’t a piece for the timeline. It’s a piece for one quiet conversation.

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If you’re new here: Theologetics is a weekly Monday essay for believers who hold the right doctrine and can’t always connect it to the hard parts of being alive — and for the ones who walked away because the church couldn’t. Reading culture through Scripture, one question at a time. Subscribe, and it lands in your inbox every Monday. Free, and staying that way.

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And if you’ve been here a while: something is coming in July for the people who want to go deeper than a weekly essay can. I’ll say more at the end of the month. For now, just know the weekly will always be free — whatever gets built around it.

—

Next Monday closes the series: what happens when we lose the one thing that was supposed to change us — the slow, unglamorous work of being made new, and what's left of the Christian life without it. If you're catching up, the series reads best in order; start with the first.

I don’t say that the way you might expect — with heat, with a clenched jaw, with a story I’m itching to tell. I say it flatly, the way you’d report the weather. Because the truth is, I don’t think about him at all. I’ve gotten very good at not thinking about him. When someone brings his name up, I feel the irritation rise before anyone finishes the sentence, and I change the subject, and I go back to not thinking about him. That’s the whole of my relationship with him now. A practiced, deliberate forgetting.

I’ll spare you the full ledger, because the ledger isn’t the point.

You’ll have to forgive me for keeping the details at this high level moving forward. For many reasons, I’m intentionally being vague, because if I went into any further detail, then anyone with familiarity would instantly be transported into their place in this story.

The short version: years of addiction, and the theft that always rides shotgun with it. He stole from his family. He stole from strangers. He came, more than once, to my own door, for my own things. There was prison, and there was a long stretch of it. And there was the part of me — the honest part — that was relieved he was somewhere he couldn’t reach us. I had never resonated with the saying, “Out of sight, out of mind,” more.

Then he got out, and within a breath, he’d taken something that wasn’t his, wrecked it, and wrecked himself in the process. He lives now in such a way where he won’t recover from it. He can’t fully see what he did. He can’t fully see much of anything.

And here’s the thing I have to tell you, because the whole article falls apart if I don’t.

That should have softened me. A man who can no longer grasp his own wreckage is a man you pity, not one you guard against. But it didn’t soften me. It gave me a better exit. He can’t even understand it now, I tell myself, so what would forgiveness even accomplish? I found, in his brokenness, one more reason to keep not thinking about him.

I know the text. I’ve taught the text. Peter comes to Jesus and asks how many times he has to forgive his brother — seven? — and he isn’t really asking a question. He’s asking for the cap, the number that lets him stop. Jesus takes the cap off. Then He tells a story about a man forgiven a debt he could never have repaid, who walks straight out the door and grabs a man who owes him pocket change by the throat (Matt 18:21–35).

I have always known which man I am in that parable. I just found a way to read myself out of it.

Here is my exit, and watch how respectable it is. I tell myself that when I repented, I meant it — and I don’t think he ever did. I’ve quietly appointed myself the judge of whether his sorrow was real, ruled that it wasn’t, and that ruling is what lets me off the hook. The servant in the parable owed a real debt. That’s the part I skip past. His debt wasn’t fake. It didn’t matter. The man forgiven everything had no standing to start weighing what he was owed — and neither, it turns out, do I.

I’m a trained theologian. I can spot this move in everyone else. I can watch someone take a verse that costs them too much, find the reading that quietly excuses them, and name exactly what they did. And I have a verse I’ve been doing it to for years.

I don’t think I’m the only one.

I don’t think my exit is unusual. I think it’s the most human thing about me.

Everyone reading this has a person. And underneath the person, everyone has a verse — a line of Scripture that would cost too much if it actually applied, so we’ve quietly arranged for it not to. We don’t tear the page out. We’re more sophisticated than that. We develop a reading. A context. A distinction fine enough that the text stays in the Bible but loses its grip on us.

We tell ourselves we don’t make enough to give much. The verse about generosity is for people with real margin, not for us, not right now. Maybe one day.

We decide the Great Commission was written for city people. All that talk of going and telling belongs to crowded places full of strangers; out here, where everyone already knows everyone, it doesn’t quite fit. The Great Commission, we’ve concluded, has a zip code.

And we’re living in a moment that has turned this instinct into a public project. There’s a loud, ongoing argument in the church right now over which of Scripture’s hard texts still bind us and which were written for a world we’ve since outgrown. You already know the argument I mean.

It’s very easy — I find it easy — to watch that argument from the stands and shake my head at how plainly someone is reading their way out of a verse that costs them something.

It’s easy, right up until you remember the person you don’t think about. And the verse you filed under surely not him.

Paul tells Timothy something that sounds, at first, like a throwaway line of encouragement. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16). We tend to read it as a verse about the Bible’s reliability. It’s more than that. Paul’s word for “all” is pasa — the whole of it. Not the parts that have aged well. Not the parts that flatter us. The whole. He isn’t handing Timothy a Bible with a tiered table of contents, some texts load-bearing and some decorative. He’s handing him a single book that binds all the way through.

Hold that next to what he says one verse earlier. The sacred writings, Paul says, are “able to make you wise for salvation” (2 Tim 3:15). The function of Scripture is not to confirm what you already want. It’s to make you wise, which assumes you weren’t wise to begin with, that the text knows something you don’t, that it’s going to tell you things you didn’t bring to it. A book that only ever agreed with you couldn’t make you wise. It could only make you confident.

So here is the real question underneath every conversation about a hard text. Not “what does this passage mean?” That’s the question we say out loud. The question we’re actually asking is, “Who decides whether this passage still has a claim on me?”

The move underneath the move

Watch how the relativizing of a costly text actually works, because the mechanics matter more than any single verse.

It almost never begins with “the Bible is wrong.” That move is too obvious; nobody who loves Scripture would make it. It begins with distance. The writers couldn’t have known what we know now. They were addressing their world, their categories, their limited frame — and our world is different, our knowledge fuller, our categories more humane. The text, on this account, isn’t wrong. It’s simply addressed to someone else. Binding then. Timebound now.

It’s a careful move, and it isn’t stupid. There’s a real and necessary discipline of distinguishing what transfers across covenants from what doesn’t. We don’t stone adulterers; we don’t keep kosher; we don’t sacrifice pigeons. The hard work of reading Scripture has always included asking how a text binds, not merely that it does. No serious reader denies this.

But notice what the relativizing move smuggles in. It dresses a whether question in the clothes of a how question. It isn’t asking, in good faith, “how does this text bind a Christian today?” It has already decided the answer is “it doesn’t,” and it’s reverse-engineering a hermeneutic that produces that verdict. And the tell — the thing that gives it away every time — is which texts get reclassified as timebound.

They’re always the costly ones.

No one builds an elaborate cultural-distance argument to get out of “love your neighbor.” No one discovers that “be quick to forgive” was addressed to a context we’ve happily outgrown. The hermeneutic of distance is applied with remarkable precision to the very texts that ask of us something we’d rather not give, and it leaves untouched the texts that comfort us. A reading method that only ever frees you from your own discomfort isn’t a reading method. It’s a mirror with verses around the edge.

Where it goes

The reason this is worth an article, not just a footnote, is that the move doesn’t stay where you first used it.

A hermeneutic is a habit, not a one-time exception. Once you’ve taught yourself that a text that presses on you can be reclassified as time-bound, you haven’t resolved one hard passage. You’ve installed a mechanism. And the mechanism doesn’t check what it’s dissolving. It’ll run on the divorce texts when your marriage gets hard. It’ll run on the money texts when generosity gets expensive. It’ll run on “love your enemies” when you finally have an enemy worth hating. You built it to get past one verse. It will happily get you past all of them.

This is the real cost, and it’s why centering the argument on any single issue misses the point. The cost is not one doctrine. It’s the principle that lets you keep all the others. You haven’t lost an argument about one chapter. You’ve quietly relocated final authority — moved it out of the text and into yourself, into your own sense of what’s humane and livable and current. And a Scripture that can’t tell you anything you didn’t already believe has stopped being able to make you wise. It can only make you confident in what you walked in with.

Reading the culture through Scripture

Here’s where I want to name what’s actually happening, because it’s the whole method of this newsletter.

The relativizing move is itself a hermeneutic — a way of reading. And the instinct of the moment is to evaluate Scripture through that hermeneutic: to ask whether the Bible’s hard texts survive the bar contemporary moral intuition has set. Redemptive Correlation runs the other direction. It doesn’t bring Scripture down to be judged at the bar of the cultural moment. It brings the cultural moment up for judgment at the bar of Scripture. The question isn’t whether the Bible passes our test. It’s what our test reveals about us when we hold it up to the Bible.

And Scripture has a story for exactly this. Run it through the arc.

In Creation, the Word isn’t a problem to be managed; it’s the thing that makes a world. God speaks, and there is light. The first lie in the garden isn’t “God does not exist.” It’s “Did God actually say?” (Gen 3:1) — a hermeneutical question, the first one ever asked, an invitation to put the Word on trial and let the creature decide which part still applied. The serpent didn’t deny the command. He relativized it. He opened the distance between the speaker and the hearer and let Eve fill the gap with her own judgment. The oldest sin in the world is reading God’s word, looking for the exemption.

In the Fall, that instinct hardens into reflex. We don’t generally reject the Word outright. We edit it. We keep the parts that fund the life we already wanted and quietly retire the parts that would cost us. Every one of us runs a canon-within-the-canon — a personal lectionary of verses we live by and verses we’ve decided were for someone else. The relativizing hermeneutic isn’t a strange new heresy. It’s the most ordinary sin in Scripture, performed with footnotes.

In Redemption, we meet the one man who refused to do it.

Hand Jesus a hermeneutical question designed to get someone off the hook, and watch what He does. The Pharisees come to Him about divorce — “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” (Matt 19:3). It’s a how does this text bind question, asked in bad faith, fishing for the loosest available reading.1 And His first move isn’t to answer it but to indict the way they’re reading. “Have you not read,” He says — the same formula He uses every time He means to tell His interrogators they’ve studied the Scriptures and still missed them (Matt 12:3, 5; 21:16, 42; 22:31).2 The accusation buried in the question is precise: you’ve been reading the law looking for the rule that lets you escape, when you should have been reading it for the purpose of God.3

Then He shows them how. He goes behind Moses, all the way to the beginning: “He who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matt 19:4–5), quoting the creation account as the first principle that the later legislation never overturned. When they push back — “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce?” (Matt 19:7) — He draws the distinction that is the whole hinge of the passage. There are two texts in front of them, and the difference between them is not that one is God’s word and the other merely human. Both are Scripture. The difference is purpose. Genesis states God’s positive design; Deuteronomy is a concession — divine condescension to human hardness, legislation for a world where the design has already been broken.4 “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matt 19:8).

Slow down on that distinction, because it’s the exact opposite of the move we’ve been tracing. The relativizing hermeneutic demotes a costly text — files it under time-bound, addressed-to-someone-else, no-longer-binding. Jesus demotes nothing. He honors every word as God’s and orders the texts by their purpose, letting the first principle govern the later concession.5 The relativizing move says the hard text has aged out. Jesus says you’ve read the texts in the wrong order — you started from the concession and never asked what was true from the beginning. One reading lightens the load by subtracting from Scripture. The other refuses to subtract anything and gets heavier: Jesus tightens precisely where He was invited to loosen.

And this reaches far past divorce. The will of God is found not in the legal provision that manages a situation already gone wrong, but in the most fundamental statement available of what God intended.6 Handed a chance to relativize a costly command, Jesus grounds the harder reading in Creation and won’t move. The serpent opened the distance and let the creature fill the gap. The Son closes the distance and puts the creature back under the Word. These aren’t subtle variations. They run in opposite directions.

So the weight of it is this: to adopt the relativizing hermeneutic is not, in the end, to disagree with Paul about one chapter. It’s to read Scripture in the manner Christ Himself refused to read it.

In Restoration, the Word that judges us now is the Word that will one day be vindicated entirely — “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Matt 24:35). Every text we tried to age out, every command we filed under timebound, every Did God actually say we whispered to get free of a verse that cost us — all of it stands, and stands as kindness, because the God who spoke it is more trustworthy than the self we were protecting from it. The Word doesn’t bind us to a cage. It binds us to a Person we can trust with the parts of us we were trying to keep.

So let me ask you the question I’ve been avoiding asking myself.

What’s your verse?

Not the doctrine you’d defend in an argument. Not the thing you’d say if someone tested whether you really believe the Bible. I mean the line of Scripture you have quietly arranged not to obey — the one you’ve surrounded with enough context and nuance that it can sit in your Bible without ever reaching your life. You have one. I’ve shown you mine.

Go find it. Not the comfortable verses you’ve under-applied out of laziness — those are real, but they’re not what I mean. I mean the one you’ve worked on. The one you built a reading for. The one where, if you’re honest, the interpretive labor was suspiciously well-aimed at the conclusion that costs you the least.

Here’s the test, and it’s the same one the whole argument runs on. Look at the texts you’ve decided don’t quite apply to you. Are they ever the cheap ones? Has the verse you reasoned your way out of ever — even once — been a verse that would’ve made your life easier to obey? Or are they always, every time, the costly ones?

Because if every text you’ve reclassified happens to be one that asked something of you, then you haven’t been interpreting. You’ve been negotiating. And you’ve been negotiating with a Book whose entire usefulness, Paul told Timothy, depends on its freedom to tell you what you did not already want to hear.

I’m not saying every hard feeling about a hard text is faithlessness. Some texts are genuinely difficult, and wrestling honestly with how a passage binds is the oldest and most honorable work of reading Scripture. That wrestling isn’t the problem.

The problem is the wrestling that has already decided who wins.

And the cost of winning that match is higher than the one verse you win it over. Every time you teach yourself that a costly text can be managed, you strengthen the muscle that manages the next one. You’re not resolving a difficulty. You’re training a reflex — and the reflex doesn’t stay where you left it. It’ll be there, fully formed, the next time obedience gets expensive. You’ll have taught yourself, in advance, how to get free.

So don’t ask whether your reading is clever. Mine was clever. Ask whether it’s aimed. Ask what it costs you. And ask who, exactly, ended up with the final say — the Word, or you.

I told you I wouldn’t tie this up, and I won’t. I still don’t think about him. As I write this, the verse and I are still at an impasse, and I’m the one refusing to move.

But I’ve stopped pretending the impasse is the Bible’s fault.

That’s the only honesty I can offer you, and I think it’s the honesty the whole thing turns on. A Word we can’t edit isn’t a cage. It only feels like one from inside the negotiation. Step back far enough, and you can see what it actually is: the one fixed thing in a life where everything else — our own judgment, what we find livable and humane and current — keeps shifting under us. A Bible that only ever told us what we already believed could keep us company. It could never make us wise. It certainly couldn’t save us, because salvation, by definition, is being rescued from where we already were.

The Word stands because the One who spoke it is more trustworthy than the self we keep trying to protect from it. That’s the promise underneath the hard texts and the easy ones alike — that heaven and earth will pass away before His words do, and that the parts of Scripture we most want to age out are held there, unmoving, by a God who can be trusted with the parts of us we were trying to keep out of His reach.

I don’t have my impasse resolved. Maybe you don’t either. But I’d rather sit at a hard text I can’t yet obey than win an argument against it — because the text isn’t my opponent. It’s the voice of the only One who has ever told me the truth about myself and stayed anyway.

So go find your verse. Don’t negotiate with it.

Sit down across from it, and let it do to you what it was breathed out to do.

This is the second piece in a June series on what it actually costs the church to relativize a hard text — one doctrine at a time, through the lens of Redemptive Correlation. The first looked at what happens when we lose judgment. This one is about what happens when we lose the authority to be told anything we didn't already believe. More to come.

A note: since I made you sit with something unresolved, I meant it. As of this morning, the impasse in my own story is still an impasse, and I'm still the one refusing to move. I didn't write this from the far side of having figured it out. I wrote it from inside the negotiation, hoping that naming the move out loud might be the first thing that loosens my grip on it. If you're somewhere similar, you're in good and ordinary company. That's not comfort. It's just true.

If this resonated, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to one person — not to the crowd, to one person you suspect has a verse of their own. This piece isn’t built to go viral. It’s built to be handed across a table.

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If you’re new here: Theologetics is a weekly Monday essay for believers who hold the right doctrine and can’t always connect it to the hard parts of being alive — and for the ones who walked away because the church couldn’t. Reading culture through Scripture, one question at a time. Subscribe, and it lands in your inbox every Monday. Free, and staying that way.

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And if you’ve been reading a while: something is coming on July 7 for the people who want to go deeper than a weekly essay can. I’ll say more at the end of the month. For now, just know the weekly will always be free — whatever else gets built around it.

I don’t find it wise to read only books you agree with. There is caution in these words: you need to be secure and steadfast, convinced in your beliefs to the point where you can engage with opposing viewpoints without your world coming crashing down. Please be careful not to pursue such an endeavor, in any realm, unless you’re mature enough to exercise discernment.

The book I review in the words that follow, as you’ll see, is one I don’t agree with. And it’s one that I believe any orthodox, bible-believing Christian shouldn’t agree with either. You cannot read Scripture and come to the same conclusion that Brian Recker reaches, point-blank. However, when books like this gain the same kind of traction as this does, it tells us that our culture is either asking the same question or reaching for a deeper one.

A Story Told in Shares

Social media has a way of infiltrating and shaping a story without us realizing it. That story gets told through what we share, reshare, and like.

That’s what happened with someone who changed the way I did and thought about theology as I started on this journey to where I am today. He was the kind of ministry leader who set the standard for everyone around him. Spent over a decade shaping what student ministry looked like, probably for most of you. I watched him, learned from him, and believed — the way you believe things when you’re young and impressionable, and someone seems to have it figured out — that this is what faithfulness looks like.

That was a long time ago.

A few months back, I noticed him sharing content from Brian Recker. Not once. Repeatedly. Approvingly. The kind of sharing that says, “This person is saying what I believe now.”

I didn’t pick up Hell Bent because someone recommended it to me. I picked it up because I couldn’t avoid it. Recker’s content was what I was seeing my generation eat up and gravitate towards. I needed to understand what had happened — what arguments were landing, what emotional registers were working, what was pulling people I once trusted out of orthodoxy and into something else entirely. I’m a theologian. But I’m also a pastor at heart. And pastors don’t get the luxury of ignoring books that are discipling their people.

So I read it. And I want to tell you what I found.

The Vacuum We Created

Here’s what most evangelicals won’t admit out loud: we believe in hell, but we can’t explain it well.

Not because the doctrine is incoherent. But because most of us were never taught to hold the weight of it without either weaponizing it or quietly minimizing it. The default options are the fire-and-brimstone caricature you’re embarrassed by and the polite avoidance you’ve settled into because it’s easier. Neither is honest. And neither helps the person sitting across from you with real, aching questions.

When someone like Brian Recker comes along and names the emotional damage that bad hell-teaching has caused, it lands. Because the damage is real. The guilt cycles are real. The people spiritually formed more by fear than by love — they’re real. I’ve sat across from them.

The longing underneath Hell Bent isn’t for a world without justice. It’s for a God whose justice makes sense. People don’t want to erase hell. They want to understand it inside a story that actually holds together. And the church — too often — has not given them that story.

That’s not Recker’s fault. That’s ours.

But here’s the thing: diagnosing a problem correctly does not guarantee the right prescription. And this is where Hell Bent falls apart.

The Imagination Problem Behind the Hell Problem

Before we get to the book, I want to name the deeper issue — because it’s what made the book possible.

The church doesn’t have a doctrine problem on hell. It has an imagination problem. We’ve failed to teach the doctrine inside the full arc of the biblical story — Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration — and that failure has created a vacuum. Progressive theology fills that vacuum with sentimentality. And sentimentality feels like compassion until you follow it to where it leads.

What the person leaving over hell actually needs is not a revised doctrine. They need a bigger story — one where God’s judgment makes sense because sin is genuinely catastrophic, where the cross makes sense because the cost was genuinely real, and where Restoration makes sense because what is being restored is worth saving. They need the whole arc, not just the emotionally manageable parts.

Recker’s answer is to amputate the parts that hurt. What he doesn’t understand is that you can’t have Restoration without Fall, and you can’t have Redemption without the Fall’s consequences being real. When you remove hell, you don’t get a kinder gospel. You get a smaller one. A story where nothing is ultimately at stake is not good news — it’s a lullaby. And the people walking out of evangelical churches are not looking for a lullaby. They’re looking for a story big enough to be true.

That’s what the church hasn’t given them. That’s what books like this exploit.

What Hell Bent Actually Argues

Brian Recker is a former evangelical pastor with eight years in ministry before deconstruction. He now identifies as Christian but not evangelical. Hell Bent is published by TarcherPerigee, a secular Penguin Random House imprint, not a Christian publisher. That is not incidental. The editorial lens and the intended audience are shaped by it.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One, “A Spirituality of Hell,” argues that the doctrine of hell corrupts Christian spirituality, producing what Recker describes as “guilt, shame, judgment, alienation, condemnation, othering, superiority, and paternalism.”1 Part Two, “Deconstructing Hell,” argues that eternal conscious torment lacks biblical support, that Gehenna is not what evangelicals say it is, and that the scriptural trajectory moves toward universal reconciliation. Part Three, “A Spirituality of Love,” reimagines Christianity without hell — the kingdom as a this-world project, the cross as solidarity rather than substitution, radical inclusion as the gospel’s heart.

The animating conviction beneath all three: hell is the load-bearing wall of toxic evangelicalism. Remove it, and you can rebuild Christianity around love.

None of this is new. Readers with longer memories will recognize the architecture immediately: Hell Bent is, in essential structure, a generational repackaging of Rob Bell’s Love Wins (2011). The same kolasis-as-correction argument. The same “all in all” universalism. The same trajectory hermeneutic that reads judgment as always moving toward restoration. The same cross-as-solidarity framing that quietly displaces penal substitution. Bell ran this play for Gen Xers, whom the culture war church had burned. Recker runs it for Millennials and Gen Z who’ve been burned by everything that came after. The target audience has shifted. The playbook hasn’t.

The one meaningful difference: Bell at least attempted to argue from within evangelical bounds, however unsuccessfully. Recker doesn’t bother. He explicitly abandons biblical inerrancy mid-book,2 which means his exegetical case isn’t really exegesis — it’s autobiography in biblical dress. Bell tried to win the argument. Recker has already decided the argument doesn’t matter.

What He Gets Right

Credit where it’s due — and I mean it.

Recker is right that fear-based spirituality is real and damaging. His accounts of guilt cycles, weaponized evangelism, and families fractured in the name of hell are not fabricated. Many believers have been spiritually formed more by threat than by grace. The church needs to own this.

He’s right that we’ve often taught hell badly. When the doctrine is reduced to a conversion tool, it becomes something it was never meant to be. The problem isn’t that hell is taught — it’s that it’s taught without the full weight of God’s character behind it.

And his stories of spiritual abuse in the name of saving people from hell are not outliers. They are, in many contexts, a predictable fruit of a truncated theology.

But naming the wound correctly doesn’t mean the surgery is right. And Recker’s surgery amputates the wrong thing.

Where the Exegesis Collapses

Because Recker is running Bell’s play, the existing responses to Bell function as responses to Recker. The defense already knows this snap count. When Denny Burk demonstrates that kolasis never means “correction” anywhere in the New Testament or related literature,3 he is answering both men simultaneously. When Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle show that aionios cannot be read two different ways in the same sentence of Matthew 25:46,4 they are closing the door that Recker walks through fourteen years later, as though no one noticed. The exegetical arguments Recker presents as fresh are arguments that have already been answered. He’s not reopening a closed question. He’s reintroducing a debunked one to an audience that wasn’t there for the first round.

The core methodological problem is this: Recker’s hermeneutic is experiential. He moves from personal discomfort to theological conclusion without doing the interpretive work in between. When the text says something he finds emotionally intolerable, he reinterprets it until it doesn’t. This is not honest reading — it is theological wish-fulfillment. Three specific passages make this visible.

Matthew 25:46 — the aionios parallel. Recker, following Bell, treats kolasis as “correction” rather than “punishment,” importing a remedial sense that would make hell a temporary purging rather than a final retributive judgment.5 But kolasis carries no such meaning in the New Testament. The verb form kolazō appears twice (Acts 4:21; 2 Pet 2:9), and both uses clearly and unambiguously denote punishment. More decisive is the structure of the verse itself. In Matthew 25:46, aionios modifies both “life” (zōē) and “punishment” (kolasis) in the same sentence. Chan and Sprinkle put it plainly: because the life in the age to come will never end, the parallel demands that the punishment in that age will never end as well.6 You cannot take the adjective in opposite directions within a single verse. Recker never reckons with this.

The “all” texts. Recker cites Romans 5:18, 1 Corinthians 15:22, Colossians 1:19–20, and 1 John 2:2 as proof texts for universal reconciliation.7 But “all” in Paul is consistently qualified by context. Romans 5:17 — the immediately preceding verse — limits those who receive righteousness to those who “receive the abundance of grace.” “In Christ all will be made alive” (1 Cor 15:22) refers to those who are in Christ, a phrase that carries covenantal weight Paul never uses loosely. And Colossians 1:21–23 conditions the cosmic reconciliation of verses 19–20 on perseverance in faith — the paragraph Recker cites ends with a conditional clause he never quotes. His universalism requires ignoring the immediate context of every passage he invokes.

Revelation 22:17 and the “open gates.” Recker argues that the Spirit’s invitation at the end of Revelation — “Come. Let the one who desires take the water of life without price” — is extended post-judgment to the wicked, implying no judgment is truly final.8 But this misreads both the genre and the sequence. The invitation is the Spirit’s ongoing call within the narrative, addressed to the reader, not a post-mortem offer extended to those in the lake of fire. Reading it as a second-chance passage requires imposing a meaning on apocalyptic imagery that the text itself does not sustain and that directly contradicts the explicit finality of Revelation 20:11–15 and 2 Thessalonians 1:9.

The deeper irony is this: Recker accuses evangelicals of reading the Bible through the lens of hell. But he reads the Bible through the lens of his own deconstruction. He has traded one hermeneutical distortion for another. The questions he’s asking are legitimate. The reading he does to answer them is not.

The serious engagement with these questions — Chan and Sprinkle’s Erasing Hell, Dane Ortlund’s Is Hell Real?, and Four Views on Hell from the Counterpoints series — models what honest wrestling looks like. These scholars disagree on significant points. But they share one commitment Recker doesn’t: let the text say what it says, even when it’s hard. Ortlund frames the challenge at the outset: “The thought of never-ending torment for the impenitent goes against our immediate natural instincts — instincts reinforced in broader culture by notions of the basic goodness of humanity and misunderstandings of the nature of God.”9 The instinct is understandable. Recker indulges it. The alternative is to do the harder work of holding the doctrine inside the full character of God, which is exactly what Recker’s method cannot do.

The Story That’s Actually Big Enough

Here, the church keeps losing this argument, not because the argument is bad, but because it keeps showing up unprepared for a play it’s already seen. And Recker knows it. He’s published by a secular imprint precisely because he’s not trying to have that conversation. He’s writing past the church, to the people who’ve already half-left — to an audience that wasn’t there for the Bell debate and has no reason to know the responses exist.

The only long answer to that is to give people the full story.

Creation. God made the world good and made humans as image-bearers with genuine moral agency. Freedom is not freedom if consequences are fictional.

Fall. Sin is not a minor infraction against an arbitrary rule. It is the rejection of the source of life itself. Hell is not divine cruelty — it is the natural terminus of refusing the only source of flourishing in the universe. C. S. Lewis was right: the doors of hell are locked from the inside.

Redemption. The cross is God’s answer to hell — not by erasing it but by absorbing its cost. This is not, as Recker implies, a theory of divine violence.10 It is the claim that God loved the world enough to bear the judgment himself. That is the most radical love imaginable — not a God who pretends consequences don’t exist, but a God who takes them on himself.

Restoration. The story ends not with hell but with the New Jerusalem — a world where death, mourning, and pain are gone (Rev 21:4). But the New Jerusalem presupposes the final judgment of Revelation 20. You do not get Restoration without Redemption, and you do not get Redemption without the Fall being real and its consequences being real.

Recker wants Restoration without Fall. He wants love without justice. He wants a story where everyone is included, and nothing is at stake. But a story where nothing is at stake is not a story — it’s a lullaby. And you cannot have a rescue if there is nothing to be rescued from.

What You Should Do with This

If you’re reading this because Recker’s argument is attractive to you, I understand it. The questions are real. The pain behind them is real. But you deserve better answers than this. You deserve answers that take Scripture as seriously as they take your suffering. Not answers that flatten the hard parts until the story feels kinder.

Read Chan and Sprinkle. Read Ortlund. Sit with Four Views on Hell and watch scholars who actually disagree with each other model what serious engagement looks like. Let the Bible be difficult. Don’t settle for a theology that only tells you what you want to hear.

And if you’ve been in the pew for years but this topic makes you uncomfortable — not because you’ve wrestled with it but because you’ve never had to — hear this gently: the vacuum that books like this fill, the church helped create it. Not because the doctrine is wrong. Because we haven’t learned to carry it with both hands. Justice in one. Love in the other. Not as contradictions. As the same God, seen whole.

Do the work. Learn the doctrine. When the person across from you asks the question you’ve been avoiding, be someone who has already sat with it.

The Church We Could Be

Imagine churches that could teach the doctrine of hell without weaponizing it. Communities that held the weight of eternal judgment and eternal love in the same breath, and refused to let go of either one. Where the person in the back row with questions that are keeping them up at night found not a dismissal or a guilt trip, but a community that had already done the hard work, that could say: We’ve sat with this too. Here’s what we found. And here’s why it’s not the end of the story.

That is the church the Reckers of the world are looking for and not finding. And until we become that church, we will keep losing people — not to better theology, but to thinner theology that feels kinder.

The answer to bad teaching about hell is not no teaching about hell. It’s better teaching. Teaching that starts with the character of God, moves through the weight of sin, holds the full cost of the cross, and ends in a Restoration so comprehensive that the judgment is not the last word — just the necessary one before the first word of everything new.

That story is true. It’s also harder to tell than Recker’s version. But it’s the one people are actually hungry for. They’ve been given so little of it for so long, they’ve started looking elsewhere.

We gave them that hunger. We can also feed it.

This piece applies the Redemptive Correlation method to evaluate Recker’s argument — not just asking what the Bible says about hell, but whether his theology can hold the full weight of the biblical story. That framework is the spine behind everything I write at Theologetics. It’s explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

If this review helped you think more clearly about a hard question:

→ Share it with someone wrestling with the same one. The people in your life who are half-out-the-door over hell deserve better answers than Recker gives them. You might be the one who puts those answers in front of them.

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I want to tell you the rest of the story.

What I described last week happened in my adult life — not in childhood, not in some formative wound I’ve been carrying for decades. This was recent, but not the church I currently attend. Where we attend now is one I would consider a model for healthy operation, where we’re known and operates as described later on.

This church in question, though, hurt us. It took awhile for both of us to forgive them, to come to a place where we could tell this story objectively and without bitterness. This was a church my wife and I attended together, as adults who knew what we were looking for, who showed up ready to contribute, who gave it a real shot.

And we never knew who was actually in charge. As a matter of fact, I don’t think anyone really did.

There was a group of lay leaders designated to guide the church — that much I eventually pieced together. A select few who made the financial decisions, who set the operational policies, who functioned as the board of directors of the 501(c)3 to satisfy tax regulations. But no one would tell me their names. I asked. More than once. The answer was always some version of that’s not really information we share, or, you don’t really need to worry about that. Even so much as trust me, you don’t want to be part of that, when asking directly about joining. A governing body with no faces. Authority with no accountability. Power that existed, apparently, to protect the organization from the people inside it, especially since the congregants ended up having no say in how the church moved or functioned.

The pastoral staff ran everything else. And I use “pastoral” loosely, because at this church, everyone on staff in leadership carried the title — regardless of whether they preached, taught, or shepherded. It was a title that meant you work here. Which really means it meant nothing at all.

What I observed was what the staff actually did was produce Sunday, and it was of really high quality, too. Two services, every week, executed with precision. The meetings during the week were about Sunday. The energy during the week revolved around Sunday. Sunday was the product, and the product was good. The music was tight. The lights were right. The sermon was polished.

And, looking back, I could have gotten the same spiritual nutrition from a daily devotional or from YouTube-hopping like I mentioned I did in 2018.

When I published last week’s piece, someone left a comment that stopped me. A friend who’s been with me quite literally all my life, across all stages. He wrote — and I’m paraphrasing with his permission — that the way American churches hire shepherds who don’t know their sheep had been sitting with them for a while. That the sheer scale of the modern church, the number of people employed by it, the distance it creates between leader and congregation, felt like something worth naming out loud.

He’s right. And he put his finger on exactly what I experienced.

Like I mentioned, I’m no longer at that church, for deeper wounds and more personal reasons I’m not sure I’m ready to get into or share just yet; in due course, I will, as I know my story isn’t as unique as I once thought it was. I run into people from there occasionally — attenders who still call that church theirs — and half of them think I’m still there. The ones who don’t, they act like I’m someone they used to know in passing. The staff, on the rare occasion I cross paths with them, have treated me like a stranger.

Which, to be fair, after putting some time and distance between us, is what they made me feel like I was.

I was never a member of the body. I was a member of the audience, or free labor at best. And the difference between those two things is the entire argument of what follows.

I don’t think my experience is singular.

You might not have encountered a council or committee. But I’d be willing to bet you’ve felt the weight of what I’m describing — the low-grade loneliness that doesn’t make sense in a room full of Christians. The Sunday morning routine that’s full and somehow empty at the same time. The sense that you could quietly disappear and the machine would keep running.

Maybe you’ve been in a church for years and still feel like a stranger. Maybe you gave it everything — your time, your service, your money, your hope — and walked away with the creeping suspicion that none of it registered. That you were a body in a seat, not a member of a body.

Or maybe you’re still there. Still showing up. Still hoping the feeling will eventually go away.

What I want you to hear is that the ache you’re carrying isn’t a you problem. It’s not a faith problem. It’s not even a church problem, exactly.

It’s a structure problem. And it has a name.

To find that name, we of course have to look at the biblical story. And that’s exactly what Redemptive Correlation does — it doesn’t borrow from culture to interpret Scripture, it brings Scripture to bear on the cultural moment. The loneliness you’ve been carrying, the structure that failed to see you, the ache that doesn’t have a name yet — the Bible doesn’t just acknowledge those things. It diagnoses them. And the diagnosis is older than you think.

Because this time, unlike many of the writings I’ve shared previously, which start in Eden, the story actually begins in the wilderness.

Take a number, it’ll be a while

Moses is sitting from morning to evening, hearing every legal dispute in Israel. One case at a time. The line doesn’t end. His father-in-law Jethro watches this for exactly one day before he says something that should have been obvious to everyone: “What you are doing is not good” (Exod. 18:17 CSB).1

Not wrong. Not evil. Just — not good. Unsustainable. And the reason is simple: Moses is trying to shepherd an entire nation by himself.

Jethro’s solution isn’t to find a better Moses. It’s to put qualified men close enough to the people to actually see them. “Able men from all the people, God-fearing, trustworthy, and hating dishonest profit” (Exod. 18:21 CSB). Give them responsibility. Let them handle what they can. Bring the hard cases up to you. The burden gets distributed. The people get found.

That principle didn’t die in the wilderness.

Character over credits

Paul writes a letter to a young pastor named Timothy and gives him a list of qualifications for elders — episkopos in Greek, meaning overseer or bishop. Read the list slowly, because what’s on it will surprise you.

It says nothing about vision. Nothing about organizational skill, platform, or communication ability. What it says is: “above reproach, the husband of one wife, self-controlled, sensible, respectable, hospitable” — and that he must be “well thought of by outsiders” (1 Tim. 3:2, 7 CSB).2

These are not organizational qualifications but relational ones. Education, training, and experience matter, but only as much as they’re cultivating what already exists. They assume a community close enough that a man’s character — his marriage, his household, his reputation with his neighbors — is visible to the people he leads. As one ecclesiologist notes in his study of these pastoral epistles, pastor, elder, and bishop all refer to the same office — the terms are used interchangeably — and the role is defined not by title but by the observable character of the man who holds it.3

You cannot be hospitable anonymously. You cannot be well-regarded by outsiders from behind a title no one can name.

The episkopos is defined by being known.

To serve and direct

Then there’s the deacon. The office doesn’t exist because the early church needed an org chart. It exists because someone noticed that the Hellenistic widows, the Greek-speaking Jews who were in Jerusalem post-Pentecost when no one wanted to leave what was going on, weren’t being fed. They were being overlooked. Falling through the cracks.

So the apostles appointed men “of good reputation, full of the Spirit and wisdom” specifically to make sure that couldn’t keep happening — that the most invisible members of the body had someone whose job was to see them (Acts 6:3 CSB).4

My former professor, whose systematic theology course first prompted me to research this question formally, put it precisely: the elder serves by leading; the deacon leads by serving. They’re not redundant. One provides direction. The other catches what direction alone always misses.

Lost in translation

And then there’s Paul’s image in 1 Corinthians 12 — the one that cuts deepest. “The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Cor. 12:22 CSB). The whole architecture of the body metaphor is organized around the most invisible person in the room, not the most prominent one.

Here’s what all of this adds up to.

The biblical offices aren’t decorative. They’re not historical artifacts that the modern church has wisely updated for scale and synergized. They’re a deliberate structure for a community where everyone is accountable to someone, everyone is known by someone, and no one disappears unnoticed. When a church replaces that structure with a policy board nobody can name and a staff optimized for Sunday production, it doesn’t just lose terminology. In my own published research on this question, I concluded that policy-based governance has effectively "made the church a corporation rather than a body of believers.”5

It loses the mechanism by which people get seen.

When you stop using biblical titles as they were meant to be used, you erase the biblical job descriptions God wrote. The congregation no longer knows what to expect from their leaders because the categories that would define those expectations are gone. Pastor becomes a word that means you work here, or merely that you’re a department head. And a word that means everything ends up meaning nothing.

The corporate model doesn’t fail because the people inside it are bad. Most of them aren’t. It fails because it was designed for a different purpose. A board of directors exists to protect and grow an organization. The elder and deacon structure exists to know and keep its people.

You cannot optimize for both. The structures produce different outcomes because they were built for different ends.

Jethro saw it in the wilderness. Paul encoded it in the church. The question is whether we built something they’d recognize.

So let me ask you something directly.

Does anyone in your church have shepherding you as their actual job?

Not programming you. Not producing content for or entertaining you. Not organizing events you attend or services you consume. I mean — is there a person in your church’s structure whose role includes knowing whether you’re okay, noticing when you’re gone, showing up before you have to announce that something is wrong?

It might be your senior pastor. In smaller churches, it often is. But in most churches it won’t be — and it doesn’t have to be. I would go so far as to say that a senior pastor’s job isn’t to personally shepherd every person under his care, but to make shepherding structurally unavoidable at every level beneath him. The other pastors he hires, the deacons he appoints, the small group infrastructure he builds — these are all shepherding decisions, not programming or HR decisions. A senior pastor who understands his role doesn’t try to know everyone’s name. He builds a structure where someone always does.

That’s what vertical integration looks like in a healthy church. The senior pastor sets the culture. The fellow elders, or associates, carry it into their ministries. The deacons catch what the associates miss. The structure itself does the shepherding work — not because everyone is a superhuman, but because the roles were designed for exactly this.

Here’s the diagnostic question. It’s not about your senior pastor. It’s not even about your associate.

It’s about the structure.

When you were struggling — really struggling, not just having a hard week — did the church find out because someone in the structure noticed? Or did it find out because you told someone? And if you quietly stopped showing up, would the structure catch that? Or would the services keep running, the giving keep coming in, the meetings keep meeting — while you disappeared without a sound?

How you answer the former shows you how well you’ve let yourself be known. Sometimes we do have to tell people it’s been a week from the depths. Are you choosing to tell people those details? And are you embracing proximity to people so that someone can pick up on when you are struggling?

If the answer to the latter is that you’d disappear without a sound, that’s not a personnel problem. That’s a structural one. It doesn’t matter how gifted the people inside that structure are. A building with no load-bearing walls collapses regardless of how good the furniture looks.

The biblical offices exist precisely to be the load-bearing walls. Elders who shepherd. Deacons who notice. A structure that sees people not because the right individual happened to show up, but because seeing people is baked into how the whole thing was built.

You’re allowed to want that. You’re allowed to name it when it’s missing.

And if you’re a pastor reading this: the structure you build is a shepherding decision, whether you think of it that way or not.

We are not the first people to feel this.

The Hellenistic widows in Acts 6 were also being overlooked. Not maliciously. Not because anyone decided they didn’t matter. The structure just wasn’t built to see them — and so it didn’t. The apostles’ response wasn’t a sermon about community. It was a structural adjustment. They appointed men whose explicit job was to make sure no one disappeared unnoticed.

That’s always been the answer. Not better intentions. Better structures.

The church that sees people is not a fantasy. It’s not a return to some golden era that never existed. It’s the church the New Testament actually describes — elders known by their communities, deacons catching what the elders miss, a body organized around the indispensability of its weakest members.

We don’t have to accept less than that. We’re allowed to want it, name it, and build toward it — together.

The church was supposed to be the place where no one disappears.

It still can be. It still should be. And it must be something we advocate for so that we can make our churches feel more like a community than a corporation.

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My mom has been a member of Liberty Baptist Church since 1960. My parents adopted me at birth, and my brought me there every Sunday while my dad worked nights. She taught first-grade choir on Wednesday evenings and coordinated Sunday school, which meant I was there every time the doors opened. I didn’t choose the church. The church was just the water I swam in.

In fifth grade, I prayed the prayer, as all my friends did. Empty words. I knew it when I said them.

My dad died the following year. I was in sixth grade, just entering the rebellious years, and his death tipped me from nominal to hostile. I wasn’t an atheist — I believed God existed. I just hated him for what he’d allowed. My mom kept bringing me anyway, through more than a year of active rebellion, every Sunday, every Wednesday, because that’s who she was.

Towards the end of seventh grade, the church held a revival. I wanted nothing to do with it. I was in the overflow room with my friends, looking for any reason not to pay attention. Then something started happening to my friends. They wanted to respond. They wanted to go into the main auditorium. They wanted me to come with them.

I went begrudgingly. And in the hallway between the two rooms — not at the altar, not during the sermon, in a hallway — God got me. It was like an invitation I suddenly understood was addressed to me. I surrendered. For real, this time.

The church was the place where God found me.

I spent the next seventeen years giving the church everything I had. I began leading worship in 2008, moved into student ministry and production, and pursued staff roles. I earned a bachelor’s in biblical and theological studies in 2016. I left vocational ministry in 2018 — not because the calling left, but because something else did. I kept studying anyway. Last year, I finished a master’s degree in theological studies with a 4.0 and published my first two peer-reviewed articles.

The church didn’t get less of me after the wound. It got more.

Which is why what happened next cut so deep.

No matter how hard I strove to be part of the body, the body rejected me.

That’s the only way I know to say it. I showed up. I served. I contributed when asked and when not asked. I consulted, I forgave, I passed over things I had every right to name. Every time I put myself out there — every open door, every application, every moment I extended something of myself — I was stonewalled. The organ-rejection metaphor is the most accurate I have. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a single moment. It was a slow biological process. The body simply would not receive me.

I cannot recall a single time anyone on staff made me feel genuinely loved and cared for.

It took me a long time to say that without softening it. Not most of the time. Not especially in hard seasons. Every single time. The place that was supposed to be the body of Christ — the one institution on earth whose entire reason for existing is that people belong to it — made me feel like I didn’t belong.

That wound didn’t make me an atheist. It made me something possibly harder to recover from: a believer who stopped expecting the church to be what Jesus said it was.

You probably know the shape of that story, even if the details are different.

Maybe yours was the pastor who didn’t have time for you unless you were giving. Maybe it was the small group that welcomed you warmly and then gradually stopped texting back. Maybe it was the committee that made the decision before the meeting, and you sat there watching the conversation perform itself. Maybe it was something sharper — a real betrayal, a real injustice, a moment when the person who was supposed to represent Christ chose power over faithfulness and nobody said a word.

The fastest-growing religious demographic in America right now isn’t the “nones.” It’s the dechurched — people who believe something, maybe a lot of things, but have decided that organized Christianity costs more than it gives. Researchers estimate somewhere between 40 and 65 million Americans who once attended church no longer do. Most of them didn’t leave because of intellectual objections. They left because the body rejected them.

What’s interesting — and what I think we miss when we frame the dechurched crisis as primarily a doctrinal or cultural problem — is that most of these people are not angry at God. They’re angry at us. They wanted what the church was supposed to offer. They didn’t get it. And after a certain number of rejections, they stopped trying.

The question underneath all of that isn’t why did those churches fail? The question is: what was the church supposed to be in the first place? Because if we don’t know what it was designed to be, we have no framework for diagnosing what went wrong, and no vision for what we’re trying to rebuild.

That’s what I want to do here. Not relitigate the wound — yours or mine. But go back far enough to find out what the church God had in mind actually looks like, so we can name the gap honestly, and live toward something better.

What the church was meant to be

This is where Redemptive Correlation does its necessary work — not by accommodating the cultural wound to make theology more palatable, but by bringing the cultural wound under Scripture’s gaze and asking: what does the story say?

The method moves through four acts. Creation establishes what the thing was designed for. Fall diagnoses what went wrong. Redemption names what Christ has done about it. Restoration points toward where it’s all heading. Applied to the church, the arc is devastating in the most clarifying way possible.

The church was designed as a body, not a building.

Paul’s most sustained image for the church in 1 Corinthians isn’t an institution or an organization. It’s a body. “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12, CSB). He spends three chapters in the middle of that letter developing what this means, and the argument is more radical than most of our ecclesiology has room for.

In Paul’s vision, the foot cannot say it doesn’t belong because it isn’t a hand (1 Cor. 12:15). The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you” (v. 21). And in the most surprising move of the entire passage, Paul says the members of the body that seem weaker are actually indispensable, and the parts we think are less honorable are the ones we clothe with greater honor (vv. 22–23). The logic is inverted. The body functions not by elevating the visible parts, but by protecting and dignifying the ones nobody sees.

The church was designed so that “there would be no division in the body, but that the members would have the same concern for each other” (v. 25). The Greek word there is μέριμνα — anxious care. The same word Jesus uses in Matthew 6 about worry. The church’s structural DNA was supposed to produce mutual anxious care — members preoccupied with each other’s flourishing, not their own.

Before the Fall, this was the logic of the garden: every part of creation oriented toward the other, the strong serving the vulnerable, abundance flowing outward rather than hoarding inward. Paul’s body metaphor isn’t a metaphor about management. It’s a metaphor about the way things were meant to work before they broke.

The body began to consume itself.

But Paul’s body metaphor in 1 Corinthians isn’t describing a healthy church. It’s prescribing health to a sick one. The Corinthian congregation was marked by factions and favoritism, by status games and spiritual one-upmanship, by the wealthy eating their fill at the Lord’s Table while the poor went hungry (1 Cor. 11:21). The body was devouring itself from within.

The pastoral epistles tell the same story from a different angle. Paul writes to Timothy in Ephesus about elders who must be “not a lover of money, not quarrelsome” — because the church at Ephesus had elders who were (1 Tim. 3:3, CSB). He warns about those who “suppose that godliness is a means of gain” (1 Tim. 6:5). He tells Titus to appoint elders “not arrogant, not quick-tempered, not a drunkard, not violent, not greedy for money” — which means every one of those qualities was showing up in leaders somewhere (Titus 1:7, CSB).

The Fall didn’t leave the church untouched. It entered the body and replicated the same distortions it produced everywhere else: the love of power, the protection of status, the silencing of inconvenient people. The body that was supposed to be marked by anxious care for its weaker members became a place where the weaker members got pushed out.

Your wound — and mine — is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of the Fall working itself out inside the one institution that was supposed to be pushing back.

Christ gave himself for a people, not an organization.

Here is where the Gospel does something that no institutional reform can do.

In Ephesians 5, Paul calls Christ the head of the church and names what his headship actually looked like: “Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor” (Eph. 5:25–27, ESV). The head gave himself up for the body. Not to manage it. Not to use it. To sanctify it.

And in the Gospels, Jesus is relentlessly specific about who he came for. He eats with tax collectors. He touches lepers. He lets the woman with the alabaster jar wash his feet and doesn’t stop her, even when everyone at the table is embarrassed. In Mark 10, the disciples try to send away the children who are being brought to Jesus for blessing, and Jesus is indignant (Mark 10:14, CSB). The ones the institution wanted to turn away were the ones the head moved toward.

The church Jesus died for is not the polished version. It’s the one with the messy people in it. The head of the church has a demonstrated preference for exactly the kind of person the body keeps rejecting.

The church will become what it was always supposed to be.

Revelation 21 gives us the telos — the city of God, the new Jerusalem, the Bride made ready for the Lamb. And what’s striking about that image is that it is corporate. The final destination is not a collection of isolated souls with God — it is a city, a body, a community of people who have been made whole together.

The wounds that made you stop expecting the church to be what it was supposed to be are real. But they are not the last word. The head of the church is still sanctifying it. He has not abandoned the project. The body is still being healed — slowly, imperfectly, at great cost — toward the day when the bride is presented without spot or wrinkle.

That is not a reason to minimize the wound. It is a reason to hold onto the vision even when the institution fails to embody it.

The wound you’re carrying from the church is legitimate. I’m not here to talk you out of it, and I’m not going to tell you that healing means going back to the place that hurt you.

But here’s what I want to press on: there’s a difference between being done with a congregation and being done with the church. One is sometimes wisdom. The other is letting the Fall have the final word.

If you’re sitting outside right now — watching from a distance, attending somewhere with one foot out the door, or not attending anywhere at all — I want to ask you the question underneath the wound: what did you actually want from the church before it hurt you? Because the answer to that question is probably closer to what the church was supposed to be than anything it actually became. The longing is not a liability. It’s a compass.

You wanted to belong. You wanted to be known. You wanted a community that was preoccupied — Paul’s word is anxiously concerned — with your flourishing. You wanted the body to work the way bodies are supposed to work: with the stronger parts protecting the weaker ones, with no one told they don’t belong because they don’t look like the visible parts.

That longing is not naïve. It’s Edenic. It’s the design you were made to inhabit.

The church in your city will not be the new Jerusalem. Every local congregation is a broken approximation of a perfect thing. But the approximation matters. The attempt matters. The community of imperfect people trying to enact the body metaphor together — failing, repenting, trying again — is still the primary place where the Restoration presses into the present.

Don’t let the failure of a particular body convince you that the body itself was a bad idea. That’s not cynicism. That’s letting the wound do the theology for you.

Imagine a church culture that took Paul seriously — not as a distant first-century ideal but as a live diagnostic. Imagine congregations that actually asked: Are we treating our weaker members as indispensable? Are we clothing the less-visible parts with greater honor? Is the anxious care flowing in the right direction?

Imagine the person in the back row — the one who’s been hurt before, who showed up again anyway, who is one more dismissal away from leaving for good — finding in this congregation something they’d stopped expecting: a body that noticed them, moved toward them, made room for them at the weight-bearing level, not just the welcome desk.

That is not a utopian vision. That is an ecclesiological one. It is what the church was designed to be before the Fall got inside it. And it is what the head of the church is still, patiently, inexorably, healing it toward.

The wound is real. The design is realer.

We are not done with the church because the church is not done with us. The same Christ who died for a spotless bride is the one who keeps showing up for the spotted one. We can do the same — not because the institution deserves our loyalty, but because the vision does.

The church God had in mind is still the church we’re trying to become.

If you’re processing a church wound — or helping someone else through one — share this piece with them. Sometimes the most pastoral thing we can do is name the gap honestly and point toward the design together.

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I had issues reconciling my preoccupation with these things and my faith, especially growing up in the church at a time when no one liked to talk about the things that might go bump in the night. How could ghosts and God coexist? It was a non-starter for most of the years I was learning to study Scripture seriously. I came close to deciding the whole topic was just our minds reaching for an explanation of religion that wasn’t really there.

Then came Michael Heiser. And I think that name says all I need to say, both because of how much weight his work carries and for what follows in this article. I wrestled deeply to reconcile what the spiritual realm really was in tandem with the other theological convictions I held. Along with Heiser, the guys from Blurry Creatures cropped up and took over my podcast feed. I devoured their content, and still do. I couldn’t ignore that much had been buried — even demythologized — by the people who shaped most of modern theology.

I felt like I had a pretty settled notion and balance of the push and pull of the unseen realm: some things I knew for sure, some things I could acknowledge, and some things I just couldn’t. And I was okay with that. Bigfoot, mothman, and other cryptids are just fun to talk about, but aliens are something I often shy away from. Demons are real, I nerd out about the Nephilim, and I have the passages down pat that everyone who presses in on the topic cites.

And then this happened last week.

We had all been anticipating it, but something actually dropped. Disclosure. A website. UFOs. Files (and not the ones we really wanted). Aliens. And not just the government, but pastors and influencers touting all sorts of primary or secondary information about meeting on the subject of disclosure and how it could rock the Church.

And it occurred to me, somewhere between the third forwarded video and the second flinching pastor, that I was not the only one trying to figure out what to do with all of this.

You’re not the only one.

If you’ve spent any time on Christian Twitter, in church group chats, or on the back row of a small group this past week, you’ve watched the same two reactions play out on a loop. On one side, pastors flinching — it’s lies, it’s demons, it’s not worth your time, why are you even watching this stuff. On the other side, believers drifting — into Joe Rogan clips, into long YouTube rabbit holes, into Telegram channels run by men who claim to know what your pastor refuses to say.

Two reactions. One underlying problem.

C.S. Lewis named it eighty years ago, in the preface to The Screwtape Letters: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”1 Lewis was writing about wartime Britain. He could have been writing about your group chat last Tuesday.

The flinch is the first error. The drift is the second. Lewis’s twin errors are playing out in real time, on the same news cycle, often inside the same congregation. Underneath both is the same shrunken cosmos — Bibles we’ve flattened for so long that when something doesn’t fit the flat version, debunk or demonize is all we have left.

Buried in the war.gov release is a 2023 case file from the western United States. A woman with deep professional experience around military aircraft and drones reported seeing an oval metallic object hovering above a treeline. Multiple corroborating witnesses across two cars. Credible, specific, official. And then this line, in the Pentagon write-up:

“Several of her co-workers subsequently made fun of her due to her report.”

The file also notes she would not have reported the object had she seen it alone.

It’s hard to read that paragraph without thinking of the believer in the pew. The one who finally worked up the courage to bring a question they’d been carrying for months — about the nephilim, or the divine council, or what they’d watched on a podcast — and got back the same shape of response that woman got from her co-workers. A look. A laugh. A change of subject. A small but unmistakable signal that the question itself was the embarrassment.

She wouldn’t have reported it alone. The believer wouldn’t have asked alone. Both wounds have the same shape — a community that can no longer hold the weight of what it has actually seen.

The disclosure moment is not, in the end, about UFOs. It is about a culture searching for transcendence with a flattened cosmology — and a church that flattened its own cosmology first, and now has nothing better to offer.

The world we forgot we lived in

Here is the strange thing about reading Genesis 1 like a modern person: nothing in it surprises us anymore.

A spirit hovering over chaotic waters. A God who speaks worlds into being. A garden where the divine and the human meet. A talking serpent. A plural verb in the mouth of the Creator — let us make man in our image — like there were others in the room.

We’ve read those pages so many times, we’ve stopped noticing what they assume. Not a sterile universe with one God and one species, but a household with two families. A heavenly host that already existed when humanity was made. A meeting place — Eden — where the seen and the unseen lived together without friction.

Joel Muddamalle puts it this way in The Unseen Battle: “Eden was the place where God enjoyed the presence of both his human and supernatural family, all dwelling together.”2 Eden is not the start of a private relationship between God and humans. It is the introduction of a new family member into a household that was already full.

That’s the worldview the biblical writers had when they sat down to write. It’s not the worldview most of us have when we sit down to read. And the gap between those two is the reason a Pentagon press release can throw an entire generation of believers into a crisis their pastors don’t know how to address.

The Bible we made, and the Bible we received

This is where Redemptive Correlation does its work — not by bringing Scripture down to fit the cultural moment, but by bringing the cultural moment up under Scripture’s gaze. The disclosure files do not get to set the terms of the conversation. Genesis 1 does. Deuteronomy 32 does. Colossians 2 does.

What we are watching this week is not a crisis of theology. It is a crisis of cosmology.

Heiser named the problem this way: “Today’s Christian processes [life] by a mixture of creedal statements and modern rationalism.”3 We affirm the supernatural in the creed and then live as if it never breaches the wall between Sunday and Monday. Heiser called this the desupernaturalization of Scripture, and he meant it as an indictment.

We did not lose the supernatural worldview to liberal theology. We lost it to ourselves. We flattened the Bible because the flat version was easier to defend, easier to teach, and easier to live with. We kept the resurrection because we had to. We quietly retired everything else.

The result is a church that can recite the creed but cannot read its own Bible. When something appears in the world that doesn’t fit the flattened cosmology — an unmarked craft, a corroborated sighting, a 1948 intelligence memo describing phenomena “perhaps slightly beyond the scope of our present intelligence thinking”4 — the flinch and the drift are the only moves we know.

Three rebellions, not one

To recover the cosmology, we need to recover the story. Genesis does not give us one fall. It gives us three.

Most of us learned a single rebellion: Adam and Eve, the serpent, the fruit. The fall happened. Sin entered. End of cosmological action — on to soteriology. But Second Temple Jewish readers — the people whose worldview the apostles inherited — read Genesis as a sequence of three rebellions, each one extending the damage further into both the earthly and heavenly families of God.5

The first is the one we know. In Genesis 3, the nachash — translated as serpent but carrying the connotations of a divine throne guardian, a shining one — deceives the woman, and the human family rebels against the head of the household. Eden is closed. The earthly family is exiled.

The second is the one most modern Christians skip. Genesis 6 opens with four verses we have learned to read past — sons of God, daughters of men, Nephilim, the heroes of old, men of renown. The earliest Christian writers — Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen — read this as a second rebellion, this time in the heavenly family.6 Members of the divine council crossed boundaries they were not given, and the unholy union spread evil so far that the flood became the only response.

The third is the one almost no one connects. Genesis 11 — Babel — is usually taught as a story about pride and language. But Deuteronomy 32:8–9 is the commentary track:

When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance and divided the human race, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people; Jacob, his own inheritance. (CSB)

When humanity rebelled at Babel, God did not simply scatter them. He disinherited them. He handed the nations over to the sons of God and kept Israel for himself. The world was carved up between Yahweh and a constellation of lesser elohim who were given stewardship over the nations and almost immediately abused it.

Three rebellions. Three failures. Three judgments. And one running thread: the cosmos has been contested from the beginning, in both of God’s families.

This is the biblical story underneath every passage about principalities and powers. It is what Paul is talking about when he says we “do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness” (Eph. 6:12 ESV, emphasis mine). He is not being metaphorical. He is naming the disinherited gods of Deuteronomy 32 and saying they are still active.

Wherever you land on what is hovering above military airspace in 2026, the Bible has not been quiet on the question. Scripture describes a cosmos with categories of non-human intelligences operating in the created order, opposed to God’s purposes and contested by Christ. We just weren’t checking the Bible for them.

What the world calls “aliens”

Here is the part that surprised me when I read it.

In The Unseen Battle — published this past January, three months before the war.gov portal went live — Muddamalle includes a sidebar titled “Are There Aliens in This World?” It’s one of the most direct treatments of the question I’ve read in a popular-level theology book. And it landed in print before the moment we are now living through.

His answer:

I believe that what the world calls “aliens,” the Bible refers to as “spiritual beings” who reside in the “unseen realm.” At times, the unseen realm breaks through into the physical realm, and in those instances we may see glimpses of spiritual beings. What the mind can’t comprehend, we’ve labeled as aliens.7

He then walks the reader through 2 Kings 6 — Elisha at Dothan, surrounded by an enemy army, with a terrified servant who couldn’t see what Elisha saw. Elisha prays: “Lord, please open his eyes and let him see.” The servant suddenly sees the mountain “covered with horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (emphasis added).

Muddamalle’s pivot lands hard:

Imagine what someone in the twenty-first century would say about this situation. They might call this an “alien encounter” when in reality they had a peek into the spiritual realm described in the Bible.8

The category is not new. The phenomena are not new. The framework has been in our Bibles the whole time. What’s new is how completely we forgot we had it.

This is not a claim that every reported phenomenon is angelic — Muddamalle is careful to reject the ancient alien view that treats Scripture as one source among many about extraterrestrial visitors. The point is narrower and more disruptive: the Bible’s cosmos is already populated. You do not need to pick between the materialist’s “must be aliens from another planet” and the panicked Christian’s “must all be demons.” Scripture has been offering a third option since Genesis 1 — and that third option is the worldview the apostles assumed.

Christ over all of it

If the story stopped at three rebellions and a contested cosmos, the disclosure moment would be a reason for fear. It does not stop there.

Paul writes to a young church planted in the shadow of the Temple of Artemis — the most magnificent house of a rebel elohim in the ancient world — and says this:

He erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations, that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly; he triumphed over them in him. (Col 2:14–15 CSB)

Stripped. Disarmed. Disgraced publicly. Triumphed over.

This is the cosmic logic of the cross. Whatever is contested in the heavens — whatever rebel powers were given the nations at Babel — has already been defeated. Not subdued, not negotiated with, not appeased. Defeated. The crown of every disinherited elohim has been removed and placed at the feet of Jesus.

The household is being regathered. The nations are being reclaimed. The multiethnic church — the gospel arriving in every tongue at Pentecost, reversing Babel — is the visible evidence of an invisible victory.9 The unseen battle is not a battle to win. It is a battle that has been won. Our work is to live like it.

What restoration is for

The Bible does not end with souls evacuating a doomed cosmos. It ends with a cosmos restored. Heaven and earth reunited. A garden city descending. The dwelling of God with humanity, again — only this time forever (Rev. 21:1—4). All that is contested in the unseen realm is being brought under Christ’s feet, not sealed off from his rule. The cosmos belongs to him. The disinherited nations are being re-inherited. The household is being put back together.

This is the frame the disclosure moment fits inside. Not a panic. Not a vindication. A reminder that the Lord of a much larger world has already triumphed over everything in it.

You do not have to know what UFOs are to know what your Bible says about the cosmos you live in.

You do not have to choose between the people laughing at the woman in the September 2023 file and the people building cosmologies from Joe Rogan clips. Both have already chosen for you, and both are choosing too small.

What Scripture invites you into is something stranger than either: a worldview where the cosmos is full, the household is contested, the powers are real, and the King has already won.

If you’ve been the believer whose pastor flinched — who brought a question and got it’s just lies or it’s all demons and walked away with less than you came in with — hear this: your question was not the problem. The frame you were handed was. You weren’t asking too much. You were asking with a cosmology two sizes smaller than the one your Bible actually teaches. The recovery isn’t speculation. It’s reading your own book carefully.

If you’ve been the believer drifting toward the conspiracy corners — pulled in by podcasts that promise to take the weird parts of the Bible seriously when no one in your church will — hear this too: your hunger was right. The flatness was real. But the answer is not to trade one shrunken frame for another that’s just as flat in a different direction. The Bible isn’t a code to crack. It’s a story to inhabit. And the story is bigger, stranger, and more orderly than any conspiracy will ever offer.

The work is the same either way. Open the Bible. Read it like the people who wrote it. Let Genesis 1 be as wild as it was meant to be. Let Deuteronomy 32 say what it says. Let Colossians 2 do what it claims. The cosmos God made is full, the Christ who rules it is sovereign, and the household you’ve been adopted into is bigger than you knew.

You can hold the question without panic. Christ is already holding the cosmos.

The disclosure files will keep coming. The flinch will keep happening if we let it.

But we have an older and stranger book than the one our discomfort taught us to read. We have a cosmos with two families and one King. We have a Christ who has stripped, disarmed, and disgraced the powers — and a Spirit who is regathering the household one tongue, one tribe, one rebel-claimed corner at a time.

Whatever is in the unseen realm, Jesus is Lord of it.

Whatever the next tranche of files contains, our Bible has not changed.

Whatever the church forgot to teach us, the text is still there for the recovering.

The Bible was never flat. We made it flat. And the work in front of us — for the curious believer, the bristling pastor, the dechurched friend who quietly believes more than they would admit at a dinner party — is the same.

Open the book. Read it again. Let the cosmos be as full as it was always meant to be.

The light has already won.

This piece is part of the Reading ___ Through Eden series — applying Redemptive Correlation to cultural questions through Scripture’s four-act arc.

If this piece resonated, two pieces from the archive sit alongside it: The Vicarious Life walks the same Eden-shaped framework through atonement, and Why Content Can’t Replace Covenant addresses the same flatness problem from the ecclesiology side.

A few asks, if you have a minute:

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→Share this with one person. Specifically: someone who has been quietly carrying questions like these and doesn’t know who to ask. The friend in the conspiracy corners. The pastor who flinched. The dechurched coffee-shop friend who watches the same podcasts you do. This piece was written with all of them in mind.

→Comment. If your pastor spoke on it, what did he say (or refuse to say) about disclosure this week? What’s the question you’ve been carrying that you haven’t been able to ask out loud? The comment section is one of the few places we can still talk about this without flinching or drifting. Let’s use it.

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Not Day 50, when the podcasts started booking him. Not Day 95, when Isabel Brown called him the most effective evangelizer on the internet. Day 1. The first video, posted from somewhere in Vermont, showed a man who had spent a decade as Nicole sitting in front of a camera and saying that something had happened to him in the woods that he could not describe in any language other than Jesus.

I was in his corner. I rooted for him. I shared the videos. I sent them to friends. I told them, more than once, watch this — this is what God does.

I was skeptical, too. I want to be honest about that, because the skepticism is part of what indicts me. The growth speed bothered me. The constant filming bothered me. The way certain pieces of his old life never quite got laid down bothered me. The visible appetite for the spotlight bothered me most of all.

But I told myself a story about it. We live in a world of social media, I said. This is the medium through which young men are reachable. The constant filming isn’t exposure — it’s accountability. The viewers aren’t an audience — they’re a congregation. The platform isn’t a danger — it’s a discipleship tool.

I told myself that story for ten months. And I told it loudly enough to drown out the older, slower voice in the back of my head — the one that kept whispering Paul’s word into the noise.

Neóphytos.

The story I told myself wasn’t only about Neeza Powers. It was about us.

Something has gone wrong with the way the church meets new Christians online, and we are watching it unfold in real time.

Ten months ago, Neeza Powers was a viral phenomenon. Day 1 of being a Christian. Day 13. Day 50. First time at church, first men’s Bible study, first read-through of the Sermon on the Mount. Hundreds of millions of views. A clothing company with his sister. A partnership with the Hallow App. A Daily Wire interview where Isabel Brown called him the most effective evangelizer on the internet.

Last week, he showed up to Mass dressed as a woman. Posted a confession. Deleted it. Reposted defiantly. He’s getting married. He’s retransitioning. The OCIA confirmation (the Catholic version of baptism and membership class, which I didn’t know before watching his content) he was working toward will not happen — at least not the way it was being filmed.

Three months before that, a TikTok investigator demonstrated that almost every detail of his testimony — the puberty blockers at sixteen, the decade as Nicole, the iCarly childhood — was fabricated. He transitioned at twenty-nine. He’s nearly a decade older than he claimed. The platform that built him kept building.

His tradition is not mine, and that is not what this piece is about.

A real person is at the center of this. A real soul. Ryan Miller, who platformed him first and is now doing the hard public work of telling the truth about it, said it well: this is not about tearing someone down. It is, however, about telling the truth.

And the truth is this: Paul saw it coming.

What Paul Knew About New Christians

Paul wrote a letter to a young pastor named Timothy and gave him a list of qualifications for elders. Most of them are character traits. One of them is a clock.

“He must not be a recent convert,” Paul writes, “or he might become conceited and incur the same condemnation as the devil” (1 Tim. 3:6).

The word translated as recent convert is neóphytos. Literally, newly planted. It is the language of horticulture — a sapling, the kind of plant whose root system has not yet reached deep enough to hold it through a storm. Paul did not invent the word. Greek farmers already had it. He picked it up because it said something about new Christians that no theological vocabulary said quite as well.

The danger Paul names is not moral failure. It is typhōtheis — to be wrapped in smoke, fogged, puffed up. Not pride as a character flaw a person wrestles with. Pride as an atmospheric distortion around someone whose root system isn’t ready for the weight being placed on top of it. The new convert may be sincere. May be gifted. May, in many ways, be right. The problem is not the person. It’s the position.

Paul wrote this to govern who got to lead a local church in Ephesus. The category translates cleanly to our moment. The pace does not.

We have built a machine that takes the newest, rawest, most viral testimonies the church can find and grants them — overnight — the cultural authority Paul reserved for elders. We hand new believers podcast tours, partnerships, clothing company deals, and book deals before their own pastors have figured out their last names. Then we are surprised when the smoke comes.

This is what neóphytos was meant to prevent. And we have built an entire content economy that structurally cannot honor it.

What Apollos Got That Neeza Didn’t

There is a positive case in Acts that almost no one talks about anymore.

A man named Apollos shows up in Ephesus. Luke describes him in a string of compliments any algorithm would recognize: eloquent. Mighty in the Scriptures. Fervent in spirit. Teaching accurately the things concerning Jesus (Acts 18:24–25). By every metric the Christian internet measures, Apollos is a star.

And he is theologically incomplete. He knew only the baptism of John. He has the gospel half-built. The cross is missing.

What happens next is the line the church has forgotten how to read.

A husband and wife in the crowd — Priscilla and Aquila, tentmakers, no titles, no microphones — hear him speak. They do not interrupt him. They do not film a stitch. They do not take to social media to expose his theological gaps for the good of the flock. Luke uses one verb: προσελάβοντο (proselábonto). They took him to themselves. They brought him home. Privately. Off-platform. And there, in someone’s living room, they explained to him the way of God more accurately.

Then Apollos goes to Achaia, and Luke tells us he ministered there with greater power.

The private discipleship made the public ministry possible. The platform came after the formation, not before.

This is the pattern the church was built to run. A gifted, sincere, theologically incomplete believer is not muzzled. He is also not handed a microphone. He is taken into a home and walked through what he doesn’t yet know — by people whose names history barely remembers, who never wrote a book, who tentmade for a living and discipled apostles on the side.

Apollos had a Priscilla and Aquila. Neeza Powers had a podcast tour.

That is the whole story, in one sentence. And it is the indictment not of one man, but of the entire infrastructure that platformed him.

Reading the Moment Through Eden

This is where Redemptive Correlation does its work — not bringing Scripture down to fit the cultural moment, but bringing the cultural moment up under Scripture’s gaze. The internet age has its own questions about formation, visibility, and authority. The four-act story of Scripture answers them.

In Creation, image-bearing was always meant to be formed in proximity. Adam was named in a garden, not a feed. Eve was given to him as flesh, not followers. The first humans were known by God face-to-face, and they were known by each other in the same way. Formation was embodied, slow, and local. There was no shortcut to maturity, because there was no need for one.

In the Fall, the serpent’s first promise was visibility without formation: you will be like God, now, no apprenticeship required. Eat the fruit and skip the patience. The whole platform economy is structured around that same offer. Be known before you are formed. Speak before you are shaped. Grow your platform now; figure out the rest later. This is not a new temptation. It is the oldest one, with better lighting.

In Redemption, Christ called twelve men to be with him (Mark 3:14) before he sent them out. Mark gives the order plainly: with-ness, then sent-ness. The Son of God did not skip formation. He spent three years walking, eating, arguing, and sleeping next to twelve men before any of them were trusted with the gospel publicly. If Jesus would not shortcut formation for the men who would write the New Testament, the rest of us are not exempt.

And in the coming Restoration, the telos is not a bigger platform. It is a city in which we know as we are known (1 Cor. 13:12) — face to face, embodied, in communion. Every shortcut to that telos is a counterfeit of it. The viral testimony, the overnight evangelist, the new convert handed a microphone — these are not the Restoration arriving early. They are the Fall’s old promise, dressed in better clothes.

The story Scripture tells about formation has not changed. The internet has just made it easier to ignore.

To the believer who shared the videos

If you reposted a Neeza video — and I did, more than once — you didn’t do something evil. You did something instinctive. You saw a man who looked like he’d been pulled out of the fire, and you wanted to celebrate. That instinct is not the problem. The problem is what we do with it.

The next time a baby Christian goes viral, ask one question before you share: Who is in the room with this person off-camera? Not who’s interviewing them. Not who’s booking them. Who is sitting in their living room asking the questions Priscilla and Aquila asked? If the answer is I don’t know or probably no one — you have your answer about whether to amplify.

This is not gatekeeping, but rather an act of grace. The kindest thing you can do for a sapling is let it root.

To pastors, content creators, and platform-builders

If you are in the business of putting people on stages, microphones, podcasts, or partnerships — Paul’s word for you is neóphytos. Know it. Honor it. Build a question into your booking process: How long has this person been a Christian, and who is shepherding them privately? If the answer is months and no one specifically, the answer to the booking is no.

This will cost you. It will cost you content, revenue, virality, and the dopamine of being first. It will save other people what it cost Neeza Powers.

Ryan Miller, to his great credit, is publicly modeling what taking responsibility looks like. He is not the villain of this story. He may, in fact, be one of the only people in it telling the truth about what went wrong without flinching. That posture — telling the truth, taking responsibility where needed, calling all of us back — is the posture the rest of the Christian internet has refused to adopt. Adopt it.

Here is what we have learned, if we are willing to learn it.

The church is supposed to have living rooms before it has stages. It is supposed to have Priscilla-and-Aquila relationships before it has podcast bookings. It is supposed to honor the difference between a sapling and an oak, even when the sapling is photogenic and the algorithm rewards us for ignoring it.

We are not going to fix the Christian internet. But we can stop being surprised by what it produces. And we can build, in our own churches and homes and discipleship relationships, the patient kind of formation Paul commanded and Acts modeled — the kind that took Apollos from accurate-but-incomplete to mighty in public, but only after a private conversation in a tradesman’s home.

Pray for Neeza Powers. Pray for Ryan Miller. Pray for the people whose names you don’t know, who are about to go viral next.

And ask the Lord: Where, in my church and in my life, am I making room for what the algorithm cannot give?

This piece is part of Reading _____ Through Eden — a thread within Theologetics applying the four-act story of Scripture (Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration) to questions of visibility, formation, and authority in the internet age.

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And if you are a new Christian reading this who has felt the weight of being platformed too soon — or if you are the friend, pastor, or family member of one — please reach out. I will pray for you, be there for you, and gladly walk side by side with you in your new journey. Hear me one this: this piece names a real and painful pattern, and the last thing I want is for it to land as critique without care.

The church Alley and I were attending at the time had female pastors — in title, at least. The function was murkier. And I wanted the research to give me permission to stop worrying about it. I wanted Paul to be doing what a lot of scholars said he was doing: responding to a specific problem in Ephesus, not laying down something permanent. I wanted the text to be situational.

I read everything I could find. The egalitarian case is not a lazy case. Serious scholars make it seriously — Preston Sprinkle’s From Genesis to Junia is probably the most careful and charitable version of it I’ve encountered, and I’ll be reviewing it later this year. I followed every argument as far as it would go.

But Paul’s logic kept doing something I couldn’t account for. He didn’t ground his argument in Ephesian culture. He grounded it in Eden. The language he used wasn’t tied to the Ephesian story — it was tied to the biblical one. Creation. Design. The arc that started in a garden.

I finished that paper more complementarian than when I started. And something I didn’t expect: relieved. Not because I’d won an argument. Because I’d seen something — that God’s design for men and women isn’t a power structure. It’s a purpose structure. Equal in value, diverse in function. Higher than our intentions, and older than our debates.

That’s where this piece starts. Not with a position. With a question I genuinely wanted answered differently.

You’re not the only one who wanted a different answer.

The gender debate has produced two exhausted camps. On one side, people who’ve watched the church weaponize complementarianism — using headship language to cover abuse, silence women, and baptize control as theology. On the other, people who’ve watched progressivism dissolve the category of embodied sex entirely, leaving nothing but individual preference where design used to be. Both sides are reacting to something real. Neither has reached the people who are actually hurting.

Because the people who are actually hurting aren’t primarily asking about roles or pronouns. They’re asking something prior: Does my body mean anything? Does the way I was made — as a man, as a woman, as a creature with a particular kind of flesh — carry any significance? Or is it just a costume I happened to be born in?

That’s not a political question. It’s an anthropological one. And it’s the question the culture is answering loudly, the church is answering poorly, and Scripture has been answering all along — if we’d start reading it from the beginning.

The fault line isn’t where most people think it is. It doesn’t run between egalitarians and complementarians. It runs between everyone who’s building their theology of gender on Genesis 1 and everyone who’s — often without knowing it — building it on Genesis 3.

That’s the distinction this piece is about.

Equal Dignity, Shared Vocation

Genesis 1:27–28 does not say: “God created the man in His image, and gave the woman a supporting role.” It says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Both bear the image. Both receive the blessing. Both are given the mandate: be fruitful, fill the earth, subdue it, exercise dominion.

Genesis 2 adds differentiation without introducing hierarchy of value. The woman is called ezer kenegdo — a helper corresponding to him. The word ezer is used elsewhere in Scripture almost exclusively of God Himself (Psalm 33:20, 70:5, 121:1–2). This is not a term of subordination. It is a term of strength brought alongside. The garden mandate requires both. Neither can fulfill it alone. The design is complementary partnership, not command-and-obey hierarchy.

This is the creational baseline. Before the serpent, before the fruit, before the curse — there is equal image-bearing, shared vocation, and differentiated partnership. Any theology of gender that does not start here is starting in the wrong chapter.

Domination as Curse, Not Design

Genesis 3:16 is the hinge on which the entire gender debate turns — and it is almost universally misread by both sides.

“Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16b, CSB)

This is a description of the curse, not a prescription of the design. Read in context, this verse describes what the Fall introduced into the male-female relationship: a power struggle that was never part of the original architecture. The man’s “rule” here is not a divine mandate for leadership. It is the tragic distortion of what was meant to be partnership.

Here is where both camps get it wrong. When the “biblical masculinity” movement treats male authority as the central organizing principle of gender, they are building their theology on Genesis 3, not Genesis 1. They are calling the curse “design.” They are baptizing the power struggle as God’s intention.

And when the progressive response abandons complementarity altogether — erasing any meaningful differentiation between male and female — they are overcorrecting the curse by dismantling the design. The answer to Genesis 3 is not to pretend Genesis 1 and 2 don’t exist. It is to recover what was lost.

Christ Undoes the Curse

Galatians 3:28 is often drafted into the egalitarian argument as a proof text, but it is doing something more precise than that: “There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is not erasing the categories. He is announcing that in Christ, the curse-driven hierarchies those categories produced are dismantled. The Jew/Greek hostility, the slave/free power differential, the male/female power struggle — these are the fruit of the Fall. The gospel reverses them. Not by making everyone identical, but by restoring the dignity and partnership the Fall distorted.

Ephesians 5 — the passage I spent a semester with — holds both truths in tension. The husband’s headship is defined not by the Fall’s power dynamic but by Christ’s self-giving: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.” (Ephesians 5:25, CSB) This is not domination. It is cruciform leadership — authority expressed through sacrifice, not coercion. The mutual submission of verse 21 doesn’t erase the husband’s role; it defines how that role must be exercised.

The Bride, Not the Hierarchy

The New Jerusalem gives us the final image. Revelation 19 and 21 give us a bride — the whole church, male and female together — united with Christ in the most intimate relational language Scripture can offer. The power struggle of Genesis 3 is over. The design of Genesis 1 is fulfilled. The partnership that sin corrupted is healed.

If this is where the story ends, then any theology of gender that enshrines male dominance as permanent design is telling a story that contradicts the conclusion. And any theology that erases differentiation entirely is telling a story that contradicts the opening. The full narrative — Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration — holds what both sides are grasping at, without the distortions either side introduces.

What This Demands of You

If you’re a young man who came back to church through the masculinity pipeline — welcome. Genuinely. The hunger for purpose, identity, and transcendence that brought you here is real, and it is good. But test the framework that brought you. Is the “biblical manhood” you’ve been taught rooted in Genesis 1 or Genesis 3? Does it look like Christ washing feet or Adam naming and claiming? Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit or the posture of the conqueror?

If you’re a woman who’s walked away — or you’re standing in the doorway wondering whether to stay — hear this: the church that made you feel small was not preaching Genesis 1. It was preaching Genesis 3 and calling it God’s design. That is not the whole story, and it is not the end of the story. The God who made you as ‘ezer’ — the same word used for Himself — did not design you for subjugation. He designed you for partnership in the most consequential work in the universe.

For all of us: read Genesis 1–3 this week. Slowly. And ask yourself: which chapter is my theology of gender actually built on? The answer might surprise you — and it might set you free.

Imagine churches where the return of young men and the departure of young women were treated as the same crisis — because they are. Imagine communities where complementarianism meant genuine partnership rather than soft patriarchy. Imagine theological spaces where men and women could explore what Scripture actually says about gender without the conversation being hijacked by culture warriors on either side.

That’s the Edenic vision. Not egalitarianism that erases design. Not complementarianism that enshrines the curse. Something older and better than both — a partnership that begins in a garden, survives the worst the Fall could do, and ends at a wedding.

That’s what we’re reading toward.

This piece is part of the Reading ____ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of theologically grounded, culturally engaged thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

If this resonated with you:

→ Subscribe if you aren’t already — new pieces drop every Monday, and this is the kind of conversation worth being part of consistently.

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Not combatively. Not as a troll. I said I personally hadn’t witnessed what he was describing — that living in Bozeman, Montana, predominantly white and middle class, meant the algorithm hadn’t surfaced it for me. A simple reply. The kind of thing you’d say to someone’s face without thinking twice.

He replied in my DMs. Warm. Agreed with me. Said that’s exactly why he posts about this stuff — cultural awareness. Asked where in Montana. We talked. It felt like a conversation.

Then I saw it. My reply on his Instagram stories. Cropped. My name removed. His caption over it: part of the problem. He had 26,900 followers. I had quite a few less. Somewhere in those 26,900, people were now looking at my words — stripped of context, stripped of my name, stripped of the DM conversation that had just happened — and forming a verdict about a person they’d never meet.

I reached back out and called it what it was. He deflected. Acted like I was misreading the situation.

So I reached out to a mutual friend — someone I trusted, someone who knew him. I explained what happened and how it landed. His first response: I was reading the situation wrong.

That friend was part of the same circle.

I sat with that for a while. Three interactions. Three opportunities to say yeah, that wasn’t right. Three times the circle closed instead. And I kept coming back to the same question: why didn’t he just reply to me? The reply button was right there. We could have talked. I might have learned something. He might have.

Instead, he went to the audience first.

That’s not a hot take. That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s a method. And once you see it — really see it — you start recognizing it everywhere.

What happened to me wasn’t unique. I know that now.

The cropped screenshot, the public caption, the deflection when confronted, the friend who ran the same play — none of it was random. It was a pattern. And once you’ve been on the receiving end of it, you start recognizing the shape of it everywhere.

This week, a public theological debate lit up my feed. A ministry account with a significant platform published a multi-slide carousel arguing against two other Christian voices — sophisticated, theologically framed, historically sourced. The comments filled fast. One of the people being criticized showed up to engage the argument directly, carefully, with evident goodwill. What followed wasn’t dialogue. It was a dismantling. Ad hominem. Condescension. Not a single concession, not a single acknowledgment that the other person had a point worth considering. Just the performance of dominance dressed in theological vocabulary.

I went back and looked at the account’s broader history. Same pattern, over and over. Confident assertion. Dismissal of challenge. No ground given. Ever.

What struck me wasn’t just the conduct. It was the gap. The same account that quotes Augustine on their website — “unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, in all things charity” — couldn’t extend basic charity in a comment section. The mission statement claimed Augustine. The comment section revealed something else entirely.

A person I respect — someone with a front-row seat to the whole situation — said something to me privately I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

They saw it. They just don’t care.

That sentence isn’t cynical commentary on one bad actor. It’s a diagnosis. Because the issue isn’t that these people don’t know how to be corrected. The issue is that correction was never the point. The audience was always the point. And when the audience is always the point, truth-telling stops being alētheuontes — the living, embodied, body-building fidelity Paul describes — and becomes something else entirely. Performance. Dominance. A platform protecting itself from accountability by making accountability look like an attack.

I’ve been in that position. I know what it feels like when the circle closes.

The question underneath all of it isn’t who was right. It’s what got built.

The Way We Fight

There’s a word Paul uses in Ephesians 4 that usually gets translated “speaking the truth in love.” It shows up in verse 15, and the Greek underneath it — alētheuontes — is richer than that translation suggests. Some early manuscripts read it as “doing truth.” Because in the Old Testament, the phrase was used specifically for fidelity between two parties — the kind of truth that shows up not just in what you say but in what you do.1 Paul isn’t offering tone advice. He’s describing what healthy bodies do. They truth each other — in word and in action — and they do it in love.

The context sharpens this. Paul is contrasting this posture with something specific — the cunning schemes of people who exploit immature believers, using theological sophistication not to build up the body but to prey on it (Eph. 4:14).2 Alētheuontes en agapē is the antidote. And the goal of that antidote isn’t winning. It’s oikodomē — the Greek word for construction. Every true word spoken between believers is building material. It either goes into the wall or it doesn’t.

The verb Paul uses for the church’s growth — auxanō — is the same word used in Ephesians 2:21, where the church grows into God’s holy temple.3 The body that truths in love is being built into a dwelling place for the Spirit. That’s not a metaphor for inspiration. That’s the actual goal of the way believers speak to each other.

Which means when truth is deployed as a weapon — when the goal is position rather than construction — it has stopped functioning as Paul intends. The content might be accurate. The theology might be airtight. But if it’s cunning rather than constructive, it has already failed the test the apostle sets.

The second thing. Jesus, in Matthew 18, gives a pattern for what confrontation between believers looks like — and it’s almost universally misread in the digital age.

Go privately first. If that doesn’t work, bring one or two others. If that doesn’t work, bring it before the church. The movement is always private to public — never the reverse. France calls it the principle of minimum exposure: other people are only brought in when the private approach has failed. The goal throughout is pastoral, not judicial. The singular “you” in verses 15–17 is deliberate — one disciple, concerned about another’s spiritual welfare, taking personal responsibility for the relationship.4

Blomberg puts the failure mode plainly: how often personal confrontation is the last stage rather than the first in Christian complaints. It frequently seems as if the whole world knows of someone’s grievance before the person is personally approached.5

That is the entire ecosystem of Christian social media conflict. Broadcast first. Private conversation never. And France’s observation cuts deepest: when the private step is skipped, the method has already answered the question about motive more honestly than the content ever could.6

There is an exception. Doriani notes it: when a public person commits a public sin that touches the gospel itself, public rebuke is fitting. Paul rebuked Peter before everyone in Galatians 2 because Peter’s hypocrisy was public and its implications for the gospel were immediate.7 The exception is real — but narrow. The rule is always to go private first, to seek the person’s restoration before you seek the audience’s approval.

This matters for our witness and for the immature believers Paul is trying to protect. But naming what’s broken is only half the work. And the church has been doing only half the work for a long time.

Now What?

This section has two addresses. Because the challenge looks different depending on where you sit.

If you have a platform:

Let’s be honest about what happened in that comment section this week. A person showed up to engage the argument — carefully, charitably, on the merits. What they received in return wasn’t engagement. It was demolition. Ad hominem. Condescension. Not one concession. Not one acknowledgment that the other person had raised a point worth considering. Just the sustained performance of dominance in theological vocabulary.

That’s not prophetic boldness. That’s pride with a proof text.

So before you post, before you respond, before you screenshot — three questions worth sitting with:

Posture: Is the goal of this content to build up the body of Christ, or to establish your position within it? Paul’s criterion in Ephesians 4 is oikodomē — upbuilding. If the honest answer is that the content is designed to win rather than build, it has already failed the test — regardless of whether the theology is correct.

Method: Did this dispute begin privately? Because Matthew 18 isn’t just a church discipline protocol. It’s a revelation of what public theological conflict is actually for when the private route is bypassed. Broadcast-first engagement serves the platform. The person being addressed is not the real audience. When that’s true, the method has answered the question about motive before a single word of theology is spoken. And your followers can tell — even if they don’t have language for it yet.

Outcome: When this is over, what will have been built? Not argued. Not won. Built — in the person you addressed, in the people watching, in the body of Christ that was supposed to be served by this exchange? If the honest answer is nothing, then the argument functioned as noise. Loud, sophisticated, theologically fluent noise. But noise.

One more thing. If you can’t concede a point, can’t acknowledge validity in a challenge, can’t give ground when ground is warranted — that’s not theological conviction. That’s a closed system. And closed systems don’t build anything. They only protect themselves.

If you don’t have a platform:

The temptation for the rest of us is to perform the debate as spectators — share the takedown, add the comment, signal which side we’re on. Every share of content that wounds without building is a small vote for the method you just watched.

But there’s a more personal question underneath that. Have you been on the receiving end of this? A cropped screenshot. A public caption. A circle that closed when you tried to raise a concern. If you have — you already know what this method costs the person it’s used on. Which means you also know why it matters that someone names it.

Name it. Not to win. Not to perform your own version of the takedown. But because the body of Christ deserves better than this, and someone has to be willing to say so — privately, directly, in the right sequence.

That’s not weakness. That’s the method Paul actually describes.

Imagine a church where theological disagreement was actually dangerous — not because people got canceled for their views, but because the arguments were so good, so honest, so willing to concede what was true in the other position, that you couldn’t dismiss them. Imagine leaders with platforms who went private first, every time, without exception — not because they were weak, but because they understood that the goal was the person, not the audience. Imagine a comment section that looked less like a courtroom and more like a conversation between people who actually believed they were members of the same body.

That’s not a naive vision. That’s Ephesians 4. That’s Matthew 18. That’s what Paul means when he says the whole body builds itself up in love.

The watching world isn’t waiting for the church to win more arguments. It’s waiting to see if we actually believe what we say we believe about each other. Every exchange is evidence. Every comment section is a witness statement.

Make yours count for something.

This piece is part of the ongoing work at Theologetics — culturally engaged theological writing that takes orthodoxy seriously and asks what it actually looks like to live it out. The method behind this work, Redemptive Correlation, is developed fully in my forthcoming book, currently under proposal. If this kind of thinking is what you're looking for, you're in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

If this resonated with you:

→ Subscribe if you aren’t already — new pieces drop every Monday, and this is the kind of conversation worth being part of consistently.

Subscribe now

→ Share this piece with someone you know who’s been on the receiving end of this — or who you’ve watched do it. The conversation is worth having out loud, and it’s better had in community than in a comment section.

Share

→ Leave a comment or a like — I read everything. Tell me where you landed on this one. Have you been on the receiving end of broadcast-first confrontation? Have you done it yourself and recognized it later? The best theology happens in dialogue, not monologue.

Theology is all fun and games until someone hits you with the question across a lunch table.

If you’ve been reading along, you’ve met this friend before. He’s the one who sat across from me in high school and told me he wasn’t sure about the whole faith thing anymore. The one whose question started this whole series: Why would a loving God need to punish His Son?

I wrote about him in the first piece when we were in the middle of the Comer debate — when everyone was arguing about PSA and the people who actually needed the conversation were getting lost in the crossfire. And I wrote about the need for a bigger room in the second piece — the argument that both sides were ripping the cross out of the story it belongs to. Both pieces named the problem. Neither one walked through the door. This piece does.

I had the right belief when my friend asked his question. I just didn’t have a frame big enough to hold it when it came at me like that — from someone I cared about, in a place where I couldn’t hide behind technical language. What I felt wasn’t doubt. It was unpreparedness.

I spent years after that reading theology books. Better categories, sharper terminology — but here’s the thing about theology books. They hand you the vocabulary without always giving you the understanding underneath it. I could explain penal substitution. I could cite the texts. I still couldn’t answer my friend.

What actually changed things wasn’t a book. It was getting married. It was loving Alley in the specific, costly, irreversible way that marriage actually requires. It was, honestly, getting dogs — which I know sounds ridiculous, but if you have a dog you love, you know exactly what I mean. When you love someone that specifically — when you’ve moved across the country for them, absorbed real costs so they didn’t have to — sacrificial love stops being a theological category and starts being something you recognize from the inside.

That’s when the question my friend asked finally had an answer. Not a louder argument. A bigger story.

And here’s the story.

The Debate That Left Everyone Cold

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about the atonement debate: it didn’t fail because the arguments were wrong. It failed because it answered a question nobody was actually asking.

The people who watched it play out online weren’t sitting there wondering who had the better exegesis of Romans 3:25. They were wondering something prior and more personal: Is God the kind of God I can actually trust?

You can’t answer that with a louder legal argument.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Everything real costs something. Groceries cost money. A paycheck has to be earned. Trust has to be built through relationship — it doesn’t transfer on its own. Nothing of genuine substance is free — and the One who designed that rule didn’t exempt Himself from it.

What the Story Actually Says

The garden before the cross

Before there was a cross, there was a garden.

We have a tendency — understandable, but costly — to open the Bible at the problem and skip the context. We start with sin, guilt, the need for atonement. But Genesis doesn’t open with a courtroom. It opens with a God who plants things. Who speaks and creation answers. Who walks in the cool of the day with the creatures He formed from the ground and breathed into. The first frame Scripture gives us for who God is — before any law, any sacrifice, any doctrine of atonement — is a God who makes, tends, and dwells with what He loves.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)

That’s not the opening line of a legal document. That’s the opening line of a love story.

Hold that. We’ll need it.

What actually broke

Genesis 3 is the most consequential chapter in human history, and most of us read it too fast.

Slow down and follow the sequence. The serpent works methodically — breaking Eve’s trust in what God said, pulling Adam into the distrust, until the two image-bearers made to reflect God’s character into the world are doing something unthinkable. They’re hiding.

“They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” (Genesis 3:8)

Watch what the text shows you. The intimacy with God fractures — they hide. The intimacy with each other fractures — blame-shifting starts immediately, Adam pointing at Eve, Eve pointing at the serpent, nobody willing to stand in the rupture together. The vocation fractures — the ground now resists them, thorns and thistles where there was once abundance. The embodied peace fractures — the nakedness they wore without shame becomes something to cover. Everything that was whole is now broken — comprehensively, at every level, all at once.

And then God speaks. But here’s what stops me every time I read it. He doesn’t open with a verdict. He opens with a question.

“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9)

He already knows. He’s God. The question isn’t informational — it’s relational. Before the judgment comes the search. Before the sentence comes the pursuit. The One they’re hiding from is the One walking toward them, calling out, refusing to let the rupture have the final word.

That tells you something about what kind of God stands behind the cross. And it tells you something about what the cross was going to have to be.

The four words

Romans 5 is one of the most compressed and devastating passages in the New Testament. Paul names the human condition in four words, and they are not accidental.

“For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For rarely will someone die for a just person — though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die. But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How much more then, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.” (Romans 5:6—10)

Helpless. Ungodly. Sinners. Enemies.

These aren’t synonyms. They’re a sequence. Helpless is passive — the rupture was beyond our capacity to repair. Ungodly is a condition — we were oriented away from God at the level of our nature. Sinners is behavioral — we acted on that orientation, consistently, in every direction. Enemies is relational — we weren’t just passive sinners, we were actively opposed to the One still walking toward us.

And then Paul says this: God proves His own love for us.

Proves. Not declares. Not announces. Not suggests. Proves.

Because anything real puts up or shuts up. The cross is the moment when the God who was walking through the garden calling where are you absorbs — fully, finally, irreversibly — the entire cost of a rupture He didn’t cause, on behalf of people who were actively hiding from Him.

The penalty is real. The substitution is real. Christ bearing what we deserved is real and essential and cannot be softened. But it’s not the whole story — because the rupture wasn’t only legal. A comprehensive rupture requires a comprehensive repair.

That’s why Paul can write in Colossians:

“He erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations, that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it away by nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and disgraced them publicly; he triumphed over them in him.” (Colossians 2:14—15)

The legal debt canceled. The powers defeated. Both in the same passage, in the same act, because both dimensions of the rupture demanded repair.

That’s why he can write in 2 Corinthians:

“Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” (2 Corinthians 5:18—19)

The relational fracture that started in the garden — enemies reconciled, the hiding finally over — healed at the same cross where the debt was paid.

That’s why Isaiah could see it coming seven hundred years before it happened:

“We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way; and the Lord has punished him for the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6)

The iniquity of us all — every dimension of it — laid on Him.

Substitution sits at the center — it’s the load-bearing beam. But the cross is as comprehensive as the catastrophe it repairs. And the catastrophe, as Genesis 3 shows us, was total.

Where the story ends

Revelation 22 opens with a river and a tree.

“Then he showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city’s main street. The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations, and there will no longer be any curse.” (Revelation 22:1—3)

No longer any curse.

The tree of life guarded by cherubim after the Fall — access restored and exceeded. The curse on the ground, the vocation, the embodied life — gone. The hiding, the shame, the fracture — healed. The nations themselves — healed by leaves from a tree that death couldn’t hold. Everything Genesis 3 broke is not just repaired here — it’s gloriously, abundantly exceeded.

Every dimension of what Christ absorbed on that Friday was in service of this one ending — a garden-city where the curse is gone and the tree is open and God finally, fully, has His people back.

What to Do With All of This

I want to ask you something direct.

If you’ve been in the debate — defending PSA, getting frustrated at people who can’t see what’s obviously in the passage — when’s the last time the cross actually moved you? Not convinced you. Moved you.

Because here’s the thing about having the right doctrine with the wrong frame: you can win every argument and still leave the person across the table colder than before. Your friend isn’t asking about penal substitution. They’re asking if this God is worth trusting with their life.

The theologians have a word for what we just walked through together. They call it recapitulation — the idea, traced back to Irenaeus in the second century, that Christ retraced Adam’s steps through the whole human story and got right what Adam got catastrophically wrong. Where Adam hid, Christ presented Himself. Where Adam blamed, Christ absorbed. Where Adam’s disobedience unraveled everything, Christ’s obedience — all the way to the cross, all the way to the tomb, all the way to the empty grave — restored it. He didn’t just pay a penalty on our behalf. He lived the life we couldn’t live, died the death we deserved, and walked out the other side so that we could follow Him through.

You don’t need the Latin to feel it. But now you have the word.

Read Romans 5:6-10 again. Slowly. Let the four words land — helpless, ungodly, sinners, enemies — and sit with the fact that God proved His love anyway. Not after you cleaned yourself up. Not after you showed some good faith effort. While you were all four of those things at once. That’s not a doctrine to master. That’s a reality to be undone by.

And if you’ve been on the other side — if the language of wrath and penalty has always felt cold — hear this gently. The legal dimension isn’t the invention of angry theologians. It’s woven into the grain of the universe He designed. Groceries cost money. Trust has to be earned. The most consequential restoration in human history didn’t happen for free. God didn’t wave His hand and call it forgiveness. He absorbed the cost. Fully. In the body of His Son.

Both of you need the bigger story. The cross is big enough to hold every question your friend ever asked across a lunch table — you just have to read it from inside the whole narrative, from the garden where everything broke to the garden-city where everything is finally, permanently healed.

What the Church Could Be

Imagine a church that preached the cross in its full scope — not just the penalty paid, but the pursuit that preceded it. The powers defeated by it. The relational rupture healed through it. The road back to the garden opened because of it.

Imagine theological conversations where the goal wasn’t winning but wonder. Where Romans 5 was read slowly enough that the four words landed before anyone started arguing about them.

Imagine the person who watched the debate online and walked away colder than before — finally finding, in the story read all the way through, the answer that reached the place where the question actually lived.

The cross didn’t just mean love. It meant life.

Death didn’t get the final word. The empty tomb is the proof. The ascension is the confirmation. And Revelation 22 is the destination — a garden-city where the tree of life is open, the curse is gone, and the God who was walking through the garden calling where are you has finally, fully, brought His people home.

That’s what the cross actually accomplishes. Not a transaction. A restoration. The most vicarious act in the history of the universe — on behalf of people who were hiding in the garden.

And He came looking anyway.

This piece is part of the Reading ______ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

The hope of articles like this is to point you and others to a better way to view the world around you. I hope you find them beneficial and inspiring, ultimately pointing you to love Jesus more. If this piece did something for you, I’d love for you to do two things.

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I get it. Stay with me anyway.

There’s no fear-mongering here. No shame. What I do want is for you to reconsider where AI actually fits in the ordering of your life — because you’re already using it whether you’ve thought about it or not. Siri. Maps. Autocorrect. The calendar block your work app suggested before you asked. And more recently, tools like ChatGPT and Claude that made the whole thing impossible to ignore.

The question was never really whether to engage with AI. It’s always been what you bring to it first.

Force Multiplier

Here’s a question I’ve been sitting with: what does a force multiplier do when the foundation is zero?

The math is simple. Multiply anything by zero, and you get zero. A force multiplier doesn’t change that equation — it just runs it faster.

I’ve been thinking about technology this way for a while now, and it’s changed how I read the early chapters of Genesis. Not the dramatic moments — the serpent, the flood, the tower. The quieter ones. Cain bringing an offering. Adam and Eve in the garden, reaching for the fruit. What I keep noticing is that the catastrophes aren’t really about the act itself. They’re about the order of things. Someone deploying a capacity — a tool, a gift, an inheritance — before the foundation underneath it is built. Doing something in order to become something, rather than doing something because they already are something.

That inversion is everywhere once you see it. The prodigal son doesn’t just spend money badly. He asks for the inheritance before the relational and formational ground that would make it a catalyst rather than a grenade. He wants the force multiplier to generate the foundation, when the whole architecture of Eden runs the other direction — foundation first, then multiplication.

I’m interested in this because I think it’s the theological category underneath almost every hard question people are asking about technology right now. Not “is AI dangerous?” but something prior to that. Something about what we bring to our tools before we pick them up — and what happens when we bring nothing.

The Tool That Got Ahead

Most of us are living somewhere inside that inversion right now.

According to Barna, 1 in 3 adults trust AI spiritual guidance at roughly the same level as they trust their pastor. Four in 10 practicing Christians say AI has already helped them with prayer, Bible study, or spiritual growth. Only 12% of pastors feel equipped to address it from the pulpit.

We’ve moved fast. Faster, arguably, than we’ve thought.

The content lanes forming around AI in the church tend to go one of two directions: practical (”here’s how I use ChatGPT for my quiet time”) or alarmist (”the algorithm is your new pastor”). Both responses share the same problem — they’re reacting to the technology at the surface level, asking how to use it or whether to fear it, without pressing into the question that sits underneath both.

That deeper question isn’t really about AI. It’s about us. We’ve already outsourced navigation, memory, and social connection to algorithms. We’ve already trained ourselves to receive information without forming relationships around it, to consume theology without covenanting with anyone, to be shaped by what we scroll past in ways we don’t fully account for. AI-assisted spiritual formation isn’t a new development. It’s the logical next step in a pattern that’s been building for twenty years.

And the pattern isn’t primarily a technology problem. It’s an ordering problem.

Here’s what I mean. The question people are functionally asking when they turn to AI for spiritual guidance is: Can formation be primarily informational? If what I need to grow is better data — cleaner commentary, faster synthesis, more accessible theology — then the tool that wins is the one that delivers it fastest. And by that metric, AI wins. It’s not even close.

But that framing assumes formation is fundamentally about information transfer. And Scripture tells a very different story about what formation actually requires — one that begins not in Eden’s content, but in Eden’s order.

Before God gave Adam a command, He gave Adam Himself. Before the commission came the breath, the address, the garden walk. The first mode of formation wasn’t instruction — it was presence. Relation and formation preceding function, every time. The commission always following from a creature who was already grounded in something prior to it.

When the serpent offered Eve the fruit, the temptation wasn’t false information. It was a shortcut. Knowledge without the relational process of receiving it from God — autonomous knowing, grasped rather than given. The apple was information without a relationship. And we’ve been reaching for variations of it ever since.

The AI question isn’t new. It’s the oldest question in the book, running the same equation: what happens when the force multiplier gets deployed before the foundation is built?

What the Garden Was Built For

Presence Before Content

Genesis 2 doesn’t move from Adam’s creation to Adam’s commission. It moves through something slower and more deliberate first.

God forms Adam from the dust and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen. 2:7 CSB). This is the only creature in the entire creation account who receives the divine breath directly — not spoken into existence, but personally animated by contact with the Creator. Before Adam knows anything he is supposed to do, he knows whose he is. The relational constitution precedes everything else.

Then God speaks to him directly: “You may eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:16–17 CSB). This first address isn’t primarily a prohibition — it’s an orientation. Here is who I am. Here is who you are. Here is how life in my world works. God establishes the terms of relationship before He establishes the terms of vocation. The commission of Genesis 1:28 — be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it — follows from a creature who has already been grounded in something prior to it.

The pattern persists throughout Scripture. At Sinai, God doesn’t open with legislation. He opens with identity: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery” (Ex. 20:2 CSB). The law follows from the relationship, not the other way around. Even Deuteronomy, dense with instruction, opens with forty chapters of relational history before Moses calls Israel to obedience. The sequence is never arbitrary in Scripture: who you are to God always precedes what God asks of you.

This is the architecture of formation in Eden and beyond. Content serves formation, but presence is the soil in which formation takes root. God does not upload truth to Adam’s mind. He walks with him in the garden (Gen. 3:8 CSB), and the truth is received in the context of that walking.

An AI can deliver content with stunning accuracy. It cannot be present. It cannot walk with you. It cannot sit in silence when the theology stops making sense and the grief is too heavy for words. It cannot model repentance, because it has never sinned. It cannot model faith, because it has never doubted. These are not software limitations. They are categorical distinctions between a tool and a person — and Eden knew the difference before we had to learn it again.

The Inversion of the Order

The serpent’s move in Genesis 3 is precise. He doesn’t offer Eve false information. He offers her true information through a corrupted channel, framed as a shortcut around the relational process of receiving it from God: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5 CSB).

Notice what Eve does next. “The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it” (Gen. 3:6 CSB). The seeing comes first, then the desiring, then the taking. She is reaching for knowledge in order to become something rather than receiving knowledge from the God whose likeness she already bears. The force multiplier is deployed in service of constructing an identity rather than expressing one already given. This is the pattern Joel Muddamalle identifies in The Unseen Battle as the recurring grammar of rebellion: see, desire, take — a sequence that originates here and echoes forward through every subsequent rupture in the biblical story.

That echo arrives quickly. By Genesis 4, Cain’s lineage produces Lamech’s sons — credited with metallurgy, music, and livestock husbandry — and the unit closes with Lamech’s sword song, a celebration of technological violence: “I killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me” (Gen. 4:23 CSB). The Second Temple tradition preserved in 1 Enoch develops what the canonical text implies: that certain technological capacities arrived in human history through transgression rather than through God’s patient instructed unfolding — knowledge grasped rather than received, deployed in service of power rather than cultivation. The delimiting principle isn’t the technology itself. It’s the directional orientation. The same metalworking that forges a sword forges a plowshare. What determines which one you’re holding is what you brought to the forge — and whether relation, formation, and commission preceded the making.

When we turn to AI for spiritual guidance not as a supplement but as a replacement for pastoral relationship and communal discernment, we are not just making a pragmatic error. We are reenacting the Edenic inversion — reaching for knowledge outside the embodied, covenantal process through which God has chosen to give it. Paul reads this same pattern in Romans 1, where those who suppress the truth about God become futile in their thinking and exchange the glory of the immortal God for images (Rom. 1:21–23 CSB). The exchange isn’t primarily intellectual. It’s formational. What we attend to shapes us, and what we worship forms us, whether we intend it or not.

Tools for the Garden, Not Replacements for the Gardener

Scripture is not hostile to tools. The tabernacle required craftsmen filled with the Spirit of God — Bezalel and Oholiab — “with wisdom, understanding, and ability in every craft” (Ex. 31:3 CSB). The Psalms were set to music. Letters carried apostolic authority across the ancient world. Tools have always served formation when they remain downstream of the relational and formational ground that gives them direction.

The issue is never the tool. It is the order.

Proverbs 4:23 locates the center of formation not in information received but in a heart guarded: “Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life” (CSB). Formation is not data transfer. It is the slow, covenantal, sometimes inconvenient work of having your loves reordered by a God who insists on proximity, and by the community of people He has given you to be formed alongside. This is why Paul’s vision of maturity in Ephesians 4 is irreducibly embodied and communal. The church grows “when each part is working properly” (Eph. 4:16 CSB) — not when each individual has access to better content, but when the body is functioning as a body. The antidote to theological drift is not better information. It is “speaking the truth in love” within a community “joined and held together” (Eph. 4:15–16 CSB).

AI can assist the garden. It can help a new believer navigate Scripture’s complexity. It can help a pastor research a sermon. It can surface commentary that a small group leader didn’t know existed. These are good uses. They are tool uses. The line is crossed when the tool becomes the gardener — when AI replaces the pastor, the mentor, the friend who holds you accountable, the community that knows your name. That line is crossed not with a dramatic announcement but with a quiet drift: one more week where the AI devotional felt sufficient, one more month where algorithmic curation replaced the slow, costly process of being discipled by imperfect people in a real room.

The Telos Is Presence

The final vision of Scripture is not an information utopia. John sees the holy city descending and hears a loud voice from the throne: “Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God” (Rev. 21:3 CSB). The Greek word for “dwelling” is skēnē — tabernacle, tent, the same word John used when he wrote that the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (John 1:14 CSB). The arc of Scripture runs from the garden where God walked with Adam to the garden-city where He will dwell with His people face to face, with no interface, no mediation, no screen between.

Notably, John tells us there is no temple in the city — “because the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev. 21:22 CSB). Every tool of mediated presence that structured God’s relationship with His people throughout redemptive history — tabernacle, temple, priesthood, sacrifice — finds its completion and its end in the direct, unmediated presence of God with His people. The pattern that began in Eden reaches its telos here: relation restored fully, formation complete, the commission fulfilled in a people who bear the image of the one they have finally seen face to face.

This is the pattern the whole book of Scripture is tracing, and it has a structure: relation precedes formation, formation precedes commission, and technology has always been the force multiplier at the end of that chain — not the source of any of it. When the order holds, tools serve flourishing. When it inverts, you get Lamech’s sword song.

The individual version of this story is the prodigal son — a young man who extracted the force multiplier from the relational and formational ground that gave it meaning, ran the equation on a zero foundation, and ended up in a far country until he came to himself and returned to the father who reinstated him to the beginning of the process rather than the end of it. The communal version is King Josiah — a covenant people who had drifted so gradually from the ordering of Eden that the reordering instrument had been buried inside the institution itself, until one king tore his garments, sought outside accountability, and then went through the disordered house room by room until something faithful remained.

Both stories end not with the destruction of the tool but with the restoration of the order. The plow is still in the field. The inheritance can still be stewarded. The question in every generation, including this one, is simply whether the foundation comes before the multiplication.

If that is where the story ends, then every tool we build and adopt along the way must be evaluated by a single criterion: does it move people toward presence or away from it? Does it cultivate the embodied, covenantal, face-to-face life that the new Jerusalem perfects — or does it offer a photograph of Eden in place of the dirt?

The garden needs gardeners. The new Jerusalem needs citizens who have learned to dwell with one another, because the city’s defining feature is that God dwells with them.

The Diagnostic

If AI has become a meaningful part of your spiritual routine, ask yourself a diagnostic question rooted in the ordering logic of Eden rather than in a rule about technology: what came first?

Did the relationship, the formation, the communal accountability come before this tool entered your spiritual life? Is AI catalyzing something that’s already grounded — your engagement with Scripture, your conversation with a pastor, your accountability to people who know your name — or is it functioning as the foundation itself, generating the sense of formation without the prior conditions that make formation real?

There is nothing wrong with asking an AI to help you understand Romans 9. There is something deeply wrong with trusting an AI to be your shepherd. A simple test: could the source you consult for spiritual guidance rebuke you? Could it weep with you? Could it confess its own sin to you? If the answer is no, then what you have is a reference tool, not a spiritual authority. Treat it accordingly.

This week, take one question you would normally bring to an AI and bring it to a person instead. A pastor. A mentor. A trusted friend. Notice the difference. The answer might be slower, messier, and less polished. But it will come from an image-bearer — and that changes everything.

Gardeners, Not Algorithms

Imagine a church culture that understood technology not primarily as a threat to manage or a resource to optimize, but as a force multiplier — one that faithfully accelerates whatever we bring to it. Imagine communities that took the ordering logic of Eden seriously enough to ask, before adopting any tool: do we have the relational ground, the formational depth, and the vocational clarity to make this a catalyst rather than a substitute?

That’s the Edenic vision for technology. Every tool in the garden was given for cultivation, not for autonomy. The hoe doesn’t replace the gardener. The plow doesn’t replace the farmer. And the AI doesn’t replace the pastor, the community, or the God who insists on walking with His people face to face.

Build tools for the garden. But never forget: the garden needs gardeners.

This piece is part of the Reading ______ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

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Most of us know someone living it. Some of us have lived it ourselves.

When the Screen Felt Safer

I spent the better part of ten years dedicating my life to the local church. From volunteering and working in it vocationally, to literally majoring and minoring in it in college, I believed in the mission, vision, and primacy of the local church being the hope of the world.

That wasn’t a bumper sticker for me. I had organized my actual life around it. I’d logged the hours — Sunday school classrooms, elder meetings, student ministry on Wednesday nights, the unglamorous machinery that keeps a church running. Bill Hybels said it first, but I meant it personally: there is nothing like the local church when it’s working right.

And then 2018 happened.

I was a student ministry associate pastor at the time, and I was renting a room from the HR and payroll coordinator at our church — who happened to be the executive pastor’s daughter. It was a handshake deal. She wanted me to mentor her son, be a kind of big brother to him. I was just trying to save money and be close to the work I loved. When I didn’t meet expectations she’d never actually said out loud, things deteriorated fast. The personal bled into the professional. My hours got cut. My pay got docked, slowly, until I could see exactly where it was heading. I quit before the number hit zero.

The wound wasn’t theological. That’s the part I had to sit with. I still believed everything I’d always believed about the church. The doctrine was intact. But the people who were supposed to represent the body had hurt me through it, and so I did what most people do when the church injures them: I moved to the couch.

For a stretch, I hopped between churches on Facebook on Sunday mornings. Put a different congregation on the TV each week. I watched sermons from churches I’d never step foot in, in cities I’d never visit, from pastors who had no idea I existed. And I’ll be honest with you — it felt good to be anonymous. The screen couldn’t betray me. Nobody there knew what had happened or had a stake in my life. I could receive the content and give nothing back, and that felt, for a moment, like freedom.

But something was missing from the start. I couldn’t have named it right away, but it was there — a low-grade awareness that I was watching faith happen instead of living it.

What brought me back wasn’t an argument. It was people. Getting back into faith-adjacent work, being around people who made me want to be better. And then Alley and me finding a church together in Bozeman — sitting together, knowing people, being known by people. Having skin in the game. Having a spiritual family and a personal stake in other people’s lives. The other half of our faith getting lived out in public, not just processed in private.

That’s what I’d been missing on the couch. And here’s the tension I’ve never fully resolved: I now run a digital theology platform. I believe formation happens through embodied community, and I’m writing this to you on a screen. I’m not going to pretend I’ve got that perfectly sorted. But I’ve sat with the question long enough that I think I know what’s actually at stake in it.

Consuming Without Covenanting

You’re probably not that different from me.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely someone who cares about theology — maybe more than most people in your life. You’ve got a podcast queue, a Substack inbox, maybe a few Instagram accounts you follow that actually make you think. You know the difference between N.T. Wright and John Piper. You’ve formed opinions. You’ve been shaped, at least in part, by content.

And there’s a real question underneath all of that: Is this enough? Does the content do the thing?

It’s not a small question. According to Barna’s 2025 State of the Church research, even the most faithful young churchgoers — the Gen Z Christians leading what researchers are calling a post-pandemic attendance resurgence — are present at their local church an average of 1.9 times per month. That’s the highest frequency of any adult generation right now, and it’s still fewer than half the Sundays in a year. Among all churchgoing adults, Barna found an average of 1.6 times per month — roughly two out of every five weekends. Barna’s VP of Research noted that this helps explain the frustration pastors feel trying to build momentum: the congregation they preach to on any given Sunday is substantially different from the one that showed up two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the theological content pipeline runs every single day. And a growing class of influencer theologians — figures with no institutional ties, no congregational accountability, no one who knows their name or their sin — are shaping doctrinal formation among young believers at a scale that outpaces most pastors’ reach. Barna has also documented what they call “worship shifting“: 52% of practicing Christian Millennials say they regularly replace in-person church with digital options at least half the time. Not supplement. Replace.

The appeal makes complete sense. Digital theology has no potluck drama. It has no elder board conflict. It doesn’t ask anything of you except your attention, and in exchange it gives you access to the best theological minds in the world at no social cost. You can learn Bavinck’s doctrine of God on your commute. You can follow a Reformed theologian with 200,000 followers who has thought more carefully about the atonement than your local pastor has. The access is genuinely remarkable, and the quality is often genuinely high.

But here’s what I want you to sit with: the question was never whether the content is good. The question is whether content alone can do what the church was designed to do.

That’s the surface question — “do I need the institutional church, or just good theology?” But the root question goes deeper than the institution. What you’re really asking is this: Can I belong without being known? Can I be formed without being present?

That’s not a scheduling question. That’s an anthropological one.

What we’re experiencing isn’t primarily a church attendance problem. It’s a disembodiment crisis. The digital age has given us an unprecedented ability to learn theology without submitting to community, to receive teaching without accountability, to consume without covenanting. And we have discovered — quietly, without ever fully deciding it — that we prefer the frictionless version. We’ve learned to receive the benefits of Christian formation while opting out of the conditions that actually produce it.

The fig leaves are just higher resolution now.

The question Redemptive Correlation forces us to ask isn’t “is the church worth attending?” It’s “what kind of creature are you, and what does that creature actually need?” Because the answer to that question changes everything about how you evaluate what digital content can and cannot do for you.

The Garden Was Never a Lecture Hall

Creation: God’s First Gift Was a Place and a People

God’s first act after creating humanity was not to deliver a sermon. It was to place them. He planted a garden, set them in it, gave them each other, and gave them a shared vocation: tend this, keep this, be fruitful, fill this. The first context for spiritual formation was not content delivery — it was co-located, embodied, vocational community.

Eden was not a lecture hall. It was a garden with dirt under the fingernails. God walked with them in the cool of the day — present, physical, near. The pattern is set from the very beginning: knowing God happens in a place, with a people, through shared work. This is the original design for what we now call “church.”

Fall: What Isolation Actually Is

The first consequence of sin in Genesis 3 is hiding. Before the curse, before the exile, before the pain in childbirth or the thorns in the ground — Adam and Eve hide. From God. From each other. The Fall introduces autonomy disguised as freedom. They cover themselves. They blame each other. They are driven from the place God prepared for them.

This is not incidental detail. It is the architecture of the problem. Sin doesn’t just create guilt; it creates isolation. It severs the placed, embodied, communal life God designed. And every substitute we build — including digital community that offers theological stimulation without covenantal vulnerability — echoes the fig leaves of Genesis 3. It covers the problem without solving it.

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves.” — Genesis 3:7–8

Redemption: The Gathered Body as Restoration in Progress

When God begins rebuilding what the Fall destroyed, He does not send a curriculum. He calls a people. Abraham is not given a book; he is given a family and a land. Israel is not given a podcast series; they are given a tabernacle, a priesthood, feasts they must attend bodily, and a land they must cultivate together.

And when Christ comes, He does not upload content. He calls twelve men to walk with Him, eat with Him, fail in front of Him, and be restored by Him. The church that forms after Pentecost is described in irreducibly embodied terms: they broke bread together, shared possessions, met daily in the temple courts, ate together in their homes (Acts 2:42–47). Luke could not have been clearer: this is a placed, physical, covenantal community.

Paul’s ecclesiology reinforces this. The body metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 is not decorative. It is structural: you cannot be a hand without being connected to a body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” A Christian formed exclusively by digital content is like an organ receiving nutrients through an IV drip — technically nourished, but disconnected from the body it was designed to serve.

This does not mean digital theology is bad. It means it is incomplete. A sermon clip that convicts you on Tuesday is a gift. But without a community that knows your name, sees your sin, bears your burden, and holds you accountable through the mess of real life, that conviction has nowhere to go.

Restoration: The New Jerusalem Is Not a Livestream

Revelation 21–22 describes the telos of God’s redemptive work as a city. Not a cloud. Not a library. Not a content platform. A city — the most concentrated form of embodied human community imaginable. The nations bring their glory into it. God dwells among His people, face to face. The tree of life stands in the middle of it, accessible to all.

If this is where the story ends — in a placed, physical, communal dwelling of God with humanity — then the church is not an institution we attend. It is the imperfect, in-progress preview of God’s final design. To opt out of embodied church in favor of digital theology is to choose content about the garden over life in the garden. It is to prefer a photograph of Eden to the dirt.

Gardeners, Not Spectators

If you’re reading this on your phone while skipping church for the third week in a row — this is not a guilt trip. Guilt doesn’t produce covenant. But it is an honest question: what is forming you? The algorithm that feeds you content calibrated to your preferences? Or a community of imperfect people who know your name, disagree with you sometimes, and show up when your life falls apart?

The church is inconvenient by design. It is supposed to be. You cannot love your neighbor in the abstract. You cannot practice forgiveness with people who never offend you. You cannot learn patience from a comment section. The friction of embodied community is not a bug — it is the mechanism by which God forms you into the image of Christ.

This week, do something that digital theology cannot do: sit across from another believer — not a screen, a person — and confess something real. Share a meal. Pray out loud, awkwardly, with someone who can see your face. Let yourself be known. That is the garden. That is where formation happens. That is what no content platform, including this one, can replace.

WE (Closing)

Imagine churches that didn’t compete with digital theology but completed it — communities where the sermon clip that convicted you on Tuesday became the small group conversation that changed you on Wednesday. Imagine a generation of Christians who consumed theological content ravenously AND showed up to their local church faithfully — not because they had to, but because they understood that a garden needs gardeners, not spectators.

That’s the vision of Redemptive Correlation applied to ecclesiology. The church is not an institution in decline. It is the preview of the garden-city, and it has always been messy, always been imperfect, always been the place where God insists on forming His people through the inconvenience of proximity. The digital tools we build — including Theologetics, including every sermon clip and theological carousel — are seeds. But seeds need soil. And the soil is the local church, with all its dirt and all its life.

We are building toward a New Jerusalem. You cannot livestream your way there. You have to walk in together.

This piece is part of the Reading ______ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, which is currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of culturally engaged, theologically grounded thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.

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It’s arguably the question I hear the most when I talk to people who are either going through a crisis of faith or who have walked away altogether. The atonement, the punishment necessary for the wrong things we’ve done, is in and of itself a messy topic because it stirs up the inference that we’re bad people, and no one really wants to do business with that fact in the first place.

Someone near and dear to me (who will remain anonymous for this piece), who I grew up with and went to church with from elementary school through high school, sat down with me right before we graduated high school, and then we went our separate ways: me to college, him to the military. Towards the end of our junior year, he dropped the bomb that he didn’t really think the church thing was for him. He just didn’t feel it anymore and was going to take a break. No worries, I thought. He’ll come back.

But he didn’t. We sat next to each other in most of our classes, and I would ask him periodically when he would be at Wednesday night services. “Um, I don’t know.” I didn’t think much of it.

But a few months before graduation, he finally had a real conversation with me. “Jacob, I just don’t get it. I can’t get past why a loving God would kill His Son. Why He didn’t just stop the whole sin thing from happening. He can’t be a good God, if He even is real.”

I never did give him a good answer. Not because I didn’t believe one existed, but because the answer I had, which was more procedural and sterile in nature, didn’t seem to reach the place where the question actually lived. That gap between the answer I had and the question he was asking? Last summer, it became the biggest theological controversy on the internet.

In August 2025, John Mark Comer, arguably the most influential Christian voice among Gen Z and younger millennials, posted an Instagram story endorsing Andrew Rillera’s book Lamb of the Free as the “final biblical/exegetical knockout blow” to penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), which is simply “[t]he view of the atonement that holds that Christ in his death bore the just penalty of God for our sins and did so as a substitute for us.”1

If you’re not terminally online in theology circles, it’s hard to overstate how fast that detonated. Within days, Owen Strachan had published a lengthy Substack rebuttal. Denny Burk went after Comer directly on X/Twitter. Derek Rishmawy wrote a more irenic response for The Gospel Coalition. While not my preferred source, Allie Beth Stuckey dedicated a full podcast episode to it (it’s a long one, but I’ve linked it if you really want to watch). I wrote my own piece at the time, and I stand by every word of it.

But here’s what I’ve sat with since: almost every response (including mine) was a legal defense. We defended the courtroom. We cited Isaiah 53 and Romans 3:25. We clarified propitiation. We were technically and categorically right. And we mostly talked past the very people we were trying to reach.

Because this debate didn’t happen in a theological journal. It happened on Instagram Stories. In tweet-length hot takes that reduced 2000 years of atonement theology to a team sport. Pick a side. Repost. Move on. The medium didn’t just carry the conversation; it deformed it. Everything became position and counter-position, and the people who needed the conversation the most — the ones actually wrestling, actually asking — got lost in the crossfire.

And that’s the part that haunts me. The real audience in this debate was never the theologians. It was the 23-year-old who saw Comer’s post while scrolling before bed and thought, “Maybe I was right to be uncomfortable with the cross.” It was my friend from high school — ten years later, a million times over — still carrying the same question and still not finding an answer that lands anywhere deeper than a legal brief.

The surface-level question in this whole controversy is straightforward enough: Is PSA true? And the answer is yes. I believe that with my whole chest, and the biblical witness is clear. But that question — “Is PSA true?” — is not actually the question most people are asking. The question underneath, the one my friend was asking at that lunch table, the one Comer’s audience resonates with, whether they can articulate it or not, is this: Is God violent? And if He is, can I trust Him?

That’s not an exegetical question, but a character question. It’s a question about what kind of God stands behind the cross — and whether that God is someone you’d want to spend eternity with. You cannot answer a character question with a louder legal argument. You can be right about propitiation and still miss the person sitting across from you who needs to know that the God who demanded the penalty is the same God who paid it, and that He did it not because He is violent but because the rupture was that deep and His love was that relentless.

And here’s what I think both sides of this debate are getting wrong — and I include my earlier self in this. Both camps are extracting the cross from the larger story and arguing about an isolated event. Comer and Rillera strip away the legal dimension — the penalty, the wrath, the substitution — and reduce the cross to solidarity and example. The Reformed response strips away everything else — the victory, the reconciliation, the cosmic restoration — and reduces the cross to a courtroom verdict. Both sides are arguing about a single scene as if it were the whole movie. And neither side is asking the most important question: what story does the cross belong to?

Because the cross doesn’t appear in a vacuum. It appears inside a narrative that starts long before Calvary and ends long after it. And when you rip the cross out of that narrative — whether you’re deconstructing it or defending it — you lose the very thing that makes it make sense.

What if the atonement debate doesn’t need louder voices? What if it needs a bigger room?

The Cross Starts in a Garden, Not a Courtroom

Before there was a cross, there was a garden. Before there was wrath, there was abundance. Before there was a debt to pay, there was a world given freely — an act of sheer, unconditioned generosity.

Genesis 1–2 gives us a God who creates not out of need but out of overflow. He doesn’t build a courtroom; He plants a garden. He doesn’t issue a legal code; He gives a vocation. He places humanity in a world of staggering abundance and says: tend this, name this, enjoy this, do this together. The first divine act toward humanity is a gift.

This matters enormously for how we read the cross. If the story of God begins with a legal transaction — with obligation and penalty — then the cross becomes the resolution of a contract dispute. But if the story begins with intimate, generous, relational abundance, then everything that follows, including the cross, must be read inside that frame. The question isn’t whether God’s justice is real. It’s what kind of story God’s justice belongs to.

What Actually Broke

When Adam and Eve eat the fruit in Genesis 3, something ruptures, but the rupture is far more comprehensive than a legal violation. Yes, a command was transgressed. But look at what actually breaks: intimacy with God (they hide), intimacy with each other (they blame), their relationship to creation (the ground is cursed), their vocation (toil replaces cultivation), and their future (death enters the story).

The Fall is not merely guilt before a judge. It is the shattering of an entire relational ecosystem — cosmic, vocational, interpersonal, and spiritual. Guilt is real, and it is part of this. But guilt is one dimension of a multidimensional catastrophe. When we reduce the Fall to a legal problem, we inevitably reduce the cross to a legal solution. And when we do that, we lose the very thing that makes the atonement breathtaking.

“And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’” — Genesis 3:8–9

Notice: God’s first response to the Fall is not a verdict. It’s a question. It’s pursuit. The judge is searching for the defendant — not to condemn, but to find. This is the heartbeat of the atonement long before Calvary.

The Cross as God Entering the Rupture

Here is where Redemptive Correlation reframes the entire debate.

If the Fall shattered an entire relational ecosystem, then the cross must repair an entire relational ecosystem. Penal substitutionary atonement is not wrong — it is essential. The legal dimension is real because the transgression was real. The penalty is real because the rupture between a holy God and sinful humanity demands a cost that we cannot pay. Christ bore that penalty in our place. This is the clear teaching of Isaiah 53, Romans 3:25, 2 Corinthians 5:21, and 1 Peter 2:24.

But PSA is not the whole cross. It is the legal dimension of a multidimensional act of restoration. The same cross that satisfies divine justice also defeats the powers (Colossians 2:15 — Christus Victor), reconciles enemies to God and each other (Ephesians 2:14–16 — reconciliation), exemplifies the pattern of self-giving love we are called to follow (1 Peter 2:21 — moral influence), and accomplishes the ransom that liberates captives (Mark 10:45).

Herman Bavinck said it well: the work of Christ is so multifaceted that it cannot be captured in a single word or summarized in a single formula. That is not theological weakness. That is theological precision. A multidimensional rupture demands a multidimensional repair.

This is what both sides of the current debate are missing. Comer’s camp reduces the cross to solidarity and example, stripping away the legal dimension that Scripture clearly affirms. The Reformed polemicists reduce the cross to penal substitution, treating every other dimension as secondary decoration. Both are extracting the cross from the story it belongs to. Both are reading one facet of a diamond as though it were the whole stone.

Redemptive Correlation says: go back to Eden. Read the Fall in its full scope. And then let the cross answer everything the Fall broke — not just the legal violation, but the relational rupture, the cosmic disorder, the vocational collapse, and the existential despair.

Where the Story of the Cross Is Heading

The cross is not the end of the story. It is the hinge of the story. And where the story is heading tells us what the cross was ultimately for.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” — Revelation 22:1–2

The end of the biblical story is not an eternal courtroom where the acquitted sit in rows. It is a garden-city where the tree of life reappears, the river flows again, the nations bring their cultural goods in, and God dwells with His people face to face. It is Eden restored, expanded, and consummated.

If that’s where the story ends, then the cross was never merely about canceling a legal debt. It was about opening the road back to the garden. The penalty had to be paid — yes. The powers had to be defeated — yes. The example had to be set — yes. The ransom had to be given — yes. All of it, together, because all of it was broken, together.

This is why penal substitution is central but not sufficient as a standalone framework. The penalty satisfies the justice dimension of the rupture. But God is not merely just. He is the God who planted the garden. And He is making all things new — not all things legally acquitted.

So where does this leave you?

If you’re in the Reformed camp, and you’ve been defending PSA by shouting it louder — stop. Not because you’re wrong about PSA, but because you’ve been defending one facet of the diamond while the person across from you is asking about a different facet. When someone says, “I can’t worship a God who would pour out wrath on His own Son,” they are not asking a legal question. They are asking a character question. And the answer to a character question is not a louder legal argument. It’s a bigger story — one that starts with a generous God planting a garden, and ends with that same God wiping every tear from the eyes of the people He fought to bring home.

If you’re drawn to Comer’s instincts — if the language of wrath and penalty has always felt cold to you — hear this gently: the legal dimension is not an invention of angry Calvinists. It is woven into the fabric of the narrative. Isaiah 53 says He was crushed for our iniquities. Paul says God put Christ forward as a propitiation by His blood. You cannot strip that out without leaving a wound in the text that will not heal. But you can situate it. You can see it as one dimension of a love so comprehensive that it addresses every single thing the Fall destroyed.

Either way, here is the invitation: stop reading the cross in isolation. Read it inside the story. Start in Genesis 1, and let the sweep of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration show you a cross that is bigger, more costly, more beautiful, and more healing than any single theory can contain.

Read one of the atonement passages you’ve been arguing about — Isaiah 53, Romans 3:21–26, Colossians 2:13–15, 1 Peter 2:21–25 — and before you form an opinion, ask: what dimension of the Edenic rupture is this passage addressing? You may find that the text is doing more than you thought.

Imagine a theological conversation about the atonement where Reformed believers didn’t treat PSA as the whole story — and where those questioning PSA didn’t treat it as the enemy. Imagine a church where the cross was preached in its full scope every Easter: the penalty paid, the powers defeated, the pattern set, the captives freed, and the road to the garden reopened. Imagine an Instagram feed where the theology wasn’t team sport, but exploration — where the goal wasn’t winning but wonder.

That’s what happens when you read the cross through Eden. You stop defending your theory and start worshiping a Savior whose work is so vast that no single framework can exhaust it. You stop reducing the most consequential event in human history to a debate point and start letting it reshape everything — how you pray, how you suffer, how you forgive, how you hope.

The goal of Redemptive Correlation was never to settle the atonement debate. It was to give the debate a bigger room to live in. The room is as big as the story of God — from Eden to the New Jerusalem, from a garden to a garden-city, from the first “Where are you?” to the final “Behold, I am making all things new.”

“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” — Romans 11:33

The cross is not a problem to be solved. It is a mystery to be inhabited. And it is deep enough to hold all of us.

The hope of articles like this and the few that follow is to point you and others to a better way to view the world around you. I hope you find them beneficial and inspiring, ultimately pointing you to love Jesus more. If you enjoyed reading this, I’d love for you to do two things:

Share this with someone who’s tired of searching. You probably know exactly who needs to read it. Send it to them.

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Subscribe if you haven’t. Every week at Theologetics, we do this same work — taking the real questions of our cultural moment and letting Scripture reframe them from the ground up. That’s Redemptive Correlation in practice, and there’s a lot more where this came from.

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And if something in this piece sparked a question or pushed back on something you believe — I want to hear it. Drop it in the comments. That’s what this space is for.

Somewhere along the way, self-discovery became a spiritual practice.

I don’t mean that as a metaphor. I mean it almost literally. We have “sacred texts” — the Enneagram, the Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, the DISC profile. We have rituals — the online assessment, the results page, the slow read-through where you find yourself nodding, thinking yes, that’s exactly me. We have communities built around shared types. We have the language, the vocabulary, the inside references. We have the converts who can’t stop talking about what they’ve found.

And we have the ongoing hunger that no single test ever quite satisfies, which leads us to take one after another.

I’ve done most of them. And I’ll be honest: there’s something genuinely illuminating about a well-constructed personality framework. You learn something real. You get language for things you’d felt but couldn’t name. You understand yourself a little better, and sometimes you understand other people a little better too. It’s been a truly helpful tool as a starting point to learning people’s communication styles, motivations, and draining factors both personally and professionally.

But here’s what I’ve noticed. You take the Enneagram, and you feel seen — for a while, until you start working somewhere that that test doesn’t really help you thrive. Then the questions come back. So you take the Myers-Briggs. Same arc, maybe a different environment. Then StrengthsFinder. Then DISC and Working Genius. Then you take enough to start stacking them, building a composite picture that you think will transcend dimensions: I’m a Type 2, ENFJ, High I, Empathy-leading, Adaptable Designer. You’ve assembled a detailed portrait of yourself. You can describe yourself with more precision than any generation before you.

And you still don’t feel settled. You feel almost seen.

That’s not a flaw in the tools. That’s a signal about the project itself.

The Question Underneath the Question

As a recap, since this is the method that I think best tackles the cultural climate in which we find ourselves, here’s what Redemptive Correlation asks us to do: before we let culture hand us an answer, we need to interrogate the question.

Redemptive Correlation is a method of reading culture through Scripture — not the other way around. The typical move is to start with what culture is asking and then look for biblical resources to answer it. That’s correlation — meeting people where they are, speaking their language, addressing their felt needs. It’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. Because culture doesn’t just ask questions — it smuggles in assumptions. And if we only answer the question without examining the assumption underneath it, we end up baptizing a framework that Scripture would actually dismantle.

The cultural assumption underneath the identity crisis is this: the self is a source. Identity is something that exists inside you, waiting to be found. The work of your life is excavation — go deep enough, be honest enough, get the right framework, and you’ll finally arrive at the real you.

Scripture doesn’t just answer that question differently. It exposes the question itself as the problem.

I AM WHO I AM

Moses wasn’t having an identity crisis when he stood at the burning bush. His question in Exodus 3:13 isn’t existential — it’s pastoral. “If I go to the Israelites and say ‘The God of your fathers has sent me,’ and they ask what his name is — what do I tell them?”

He’s asking a missional question on behalf of a people who had been living inside a polytheistic world for generations. Every nation had gods. Every god had a name. Names weren’t incidental — they were handles for worship, credentials for authority, identifiers in a crowded spiritual marketplace. Moses needed to know which God he was dealing with.

In the patriarchal era, God had revealed Himself through names that described His actions and attributes — El Shaddai, God Almighty; El Roi, the God who sees; El Elyon, God Most High. These were names about God — windows into what He does, how He acts, who He is toward His people.

But here, something different happens.

“I AM WHO I AM. Tell them: I AM has sent you.”

The Hebrew behind this — ehyeh asher ehyeh — is built on the verb hayah, to be. Scholars have debated its precise meaning for centuries. Some read it as sovereign freedom: I will be whoever I will be — no one and nothing can limit or define me. Others read it as an ontological declaration, almost thunderous in its simplicity: I am — I really, actually, fully am. Either way, the point converges: God is naming Himself from the inside out. He is not defined by anything external to Himself. He is self-existent. Unborrowed. The only being in the universe whose identity is not derived from anything else.

He simply is — and everything else exists because He does.

That’s not a description of one attribute among many. That’s the architecture of reality. As Jay Sklar observes, God “is in a way that other gods are not, and he is while other gods are not.” There is one self-existent being. Everyone and everything else is, in the most fundamental sense, derivative.

And then God ties this name to His people — “This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation” (v. 15). As Sklar puts it, “If he had autographed the tablets with the Ten Commandments, he would have signed ‘Yahweh.’ He is not some nameless power. He is a divine person who acts sovereignly on his people’s behalf.“ He signed His name. And He signed it to a covenant.

This is also why Jesus’s use of the same name is so explosive. When He tells the Pharisees in John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I am,” He isn’t making a grammatical error. He is reaching back to the burning bush and claiming the name for Himself. The Greek ego eimi — I am — is the same declaration Moses heard in the desert. The Jews understood exactly what He was saying, which is why they immediately picked up stones. Jesus wasn’t offering a new theology of identity. He was revealing that the I AM of Exodus had taken on flesh — and that everything true about who God is, and therefore who we are, is now fully disclosed in Him.

You Are a Derivative — and That’s the Good News

Now here’s where Redemptive Correlation does its work.

Before we get to application, we need to sit with one more observation. Kevin Vanhoozer notes that the name YHWH demonstrates that God is “a ‘who,’ not simply a ‘what.’” That matters enormously for our question about identity. Because if God is a who — a personal, self-existent being — then identity is first and foremost a relational category, not an internal one. You don’t find yourself by going deeper into yourself. You find yourself by being rightly related to the One who is.

Culture starts with the self and asks: who am I? Scripture doesn’t just answer that question — it reframes the entire project. Because once you understand that God is the only self-existent being, the self-discovery project doesn’t just get supplemented. It gets exposed. The assumption that identity is something you find inside yourself only makes sense if you are your own origin. But you’re not. None of us are.

You are a creature. And rightly understood, that is the most liberating thing anyone has ever called you.

To be a creature means you have a Creator. To have a Creator means your identity precedes your awareness of it — precedes your personality tests, your therapy sessions, your most honest moments of self-reflection. You were named before you named yourself. Made in the image of the God who said I AM, which means your identity flows from Him, was declared by Him, and is secured in Him in a way that no framework, however accurate, can touch.

The self-discovery project rests on a premise that sounds humble — I’m just trying to understand myself — but is quietly the opposite. It positions the self as the source. Scripture positions the self as a response — a reflection, a derivative, an image-bearer. That’s not a demotion. That’s freedom from the burden of being your own foundation.

You don’t have to construct yourself. You were already made.

The Rest That Comes From Receiving

So what do we do with this?

We don’t throw away the tools. Self-knowledge has genuine value. And these assessments were designed with purpose to unlock some insights about who God created us to be. But we stop asking it to do what it was never designed to do, which is tell us who we fundamentally are and whether we ultimately matter.

We trade the question who am I? for whose am I? — and we let the answer to the second one do what the first one never could.

The burning bush didn’t hand Moses a personality profile. It gave him a God. A God who is, so completely and self-sufficiently that everything else — including Moses, including us — derives its existence and identity from Him. And that was the only thing Moses needed to know who he was and where he was going.

Identity isn’t something you find at the bottom of yourself. It’s something you receive from the God who is — the I AM — who made you, named you, and has not changed His mind.

Before You Close This Tab

Here’s the posture shift: stop asking who am I and start asking whose am I. That’s not a semantic game — it’s a reorientation of the entire project. You are not the starting point. You never were. And the sooner you stop trying to be your own origin, the sooner you can rest in the identity that was given to you before you had any say in the matter.

Here’s the concrete anchor: this week, when the self-doubt creeps in — when you feel undefined, unsettled, uncertain of whether you matter — don’t reach for the enneagram. Reach for Exodus 3. Read it slowly. Let the I AM be bigger than your questions.

If this reframing is hitting something real for you, two things would mean a lot:

Share this with someone who’s tired of searching. You probably know exactly who needs to read it. Send it to them.

Share

Subscribe if you haven’t. Every week at Theologetics, we do this same work — taking the real questions of our cultural moment and letting Scripture reframe them from the ground up. That’s Redemptive Correlation in practice, and there’s a lot more where this came from.

Subscribe now

And if something in this piece sparked a question or pushed back on something you believe — I want to hear it. Drop it in the comments. That’s what this space is for.

Most of us carry a vague sense that something is wrong. Not just with the world in general, but with the world as we experience it — the relentless pull toward distraction, the exhaustion of trying to do good in a world that seems to reward the opposite, the quiet suspicion that we are caught up in something bigger than ourselves but can’t quite name it.

Joel Muddamalle, PhD wants to help you name it.

The Unseen Battle: Spiritual Warfare, the Three Rebellions, and Christ’s Victory Over Dark Powers is one of the more important books I’ve read in the past year — not because it says things no one has ever said, but because it says things most believers desperately need to hear, and says them in a way that actually lands. Muddamalle, who serves as director of theology at Proverbs 31 Ministries and was a student of the late Dr. Michael Heiser, has written something that sits in a rare category: genuinely scholarly and genuinely readable. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds.

In full transparency, Muddamalle is by far my biggest theological influence. I first learned about him through the Blurry Creatures podcast and was excited to listen each time he was a guest. Knowing he was a student of Heiser’s and knowing he had a theological leaning I resonated with more than most in the space where his research hits, I do my best to model the way I approach the messier and more complex topics after his methods: with a humble heart, an open hand, and a hungry mind.

I had to read this book twice — once as a theologian and once as a person sitting in the mess of ordinary life. Both readings were worth it. This review is written from the second posture. If you want the full academic treatment, I hope to share my professional book review after it’s published in the journal to which I’ve submitted, if that’s something you’re after and interested in. What I want to do here is tell you why this book matters for the way you actually live.

What Is the Divine Council Worldview?

Before we get into the themes, you need a concept. Muddamalle builds his entire argument on what scholars call the Divine Council Worldview — and if that phrase makes you nervous, stay with me, because this isn’t as strange as it sounds. In all honesty, you probably already are familiar with it, because I’ve spoken with so many people about the concept who I never would’ve imagined would’ve affirmed it.

The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, describes a heavenly court. Psalm 82 opens with God standing in the “divine council,” rendering judgment among the “gods.” Job 1 depicts a scene where “the sons of God” present themselves before Yahweh. Daniel 10 references a cosmic being called “the prince of Persia” who resisted the angel sent to Daniel for twenty-one days. Deuteronomy 32:8 describes Yahweh dividing the nations and assigning them to lesser divine beings, while keeping Israel as his own inheritance.

Most of us were never taught what to do with these passages, so we quietly skipped over them. Muddamalle doesn’t let you do that. He argues — compellingly — that these texts aren’t embarrassing relics of ancient mythology that snuck into your Bible. They’re load-bearing walls. Strip them out, and the architecture of the whole story collapses.

The Divine Council Worldview simply means this: God, as King, rules over a cosmic household that includes both human and supernatural members. The Bible’s drama — from Genesis to Revelation — is the story of what happens when members of that household rebel, and what God does to put it right. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. The “weird” passages stop being weird and start being windows.

Three Themes Worth Your Time

1. The Three Rebellions Are the Backstory to Everything

Muddamalle organizes the Old Testament around three cosmic rebellions, and this is where the book earns its keep.

The first rebellion is Eden. The nachash — the serpent of Genesis 3 — wasn’t just a talking snake. Muddamalle, following Heiser, identifies this figure as a divine throne guardian who used his access to distort truth and entice humanity toward autonomy from God. The fall wasn’t just Adam and Eve eating fruit. It was a cosmic coup attempt.

The second rebellion comes in Genesis 6, where “the sons of God” — supernatural divine beings — transgressed their boundaries by intermingling with human women, producing the Nephilim and spreading corruption that eventually required a flood to address. This is strange territory for most Western Christians, but Muddamalle handles it carefully and anchors it in Second Temple Jewish readings of the text that would have been well-known to the New Testament authors.

The third rebellion is Babel — and this one reframes your entire Old Testament. When God scatters the nations in Genesis 11, Muddamalle connects this to Deuteronomy 32:8-9, where those nations are “allotted” to lesser divine beings to administer. These beings subsequently accept worship as the “gods of the nations” and become the cosmic powers behind the empires and idolatries of the ancient world. This is why the Old Testament is so relentlessly concerned with idolatry — it isn’t merely bad religion, it’s defection to an enemy power.

Understanding these three rebellions doesn’t just answer background questions. It tells you what the Bible is fundamentally about: a cosmic conflict over who will claim the human household, and a God who refuses to abandon his children to the enemy.

2. The Prize Has Always Been People

This is where the book becomes personally arresting rather than academically interesting.

Muddamalle is clear throughout: the unseen battle is not primarily about territory, political power, or religious institutions. It is about people. Every rebellion — in Eden, in the days of Noah, at Babel — had humanity at its center. The enemy’s aim, in each case, was to corrupt, enslave, or scatter the human family that God loves.

This reframes spiritual warfare in a way that is both sobering and stabilizing. You are not a bystander to some abstract cosmic struggle. You are the prize. Which means the spiritual pressure you feel in your life — the pull toward cynicism, the weight of shame, the exhaustion of trying to live faithfully in a world that rewards the opposite — isn’t random. There’s a reason the enemy works so hard at discouragement and division. He knows what’s at stake.

But there’s a flip side. If you are the prize, then God’s pursuit of you is not incidental either. The whole of redemptive history — the call of Abraham, the Exodus, the prophets, the Incarnation — is God relentlessly moving to reclaim what the enemy has tried to steal. You are not caught in the crossfire. You are the point.

3. The Church Is a Weapon, Not a Refuge

This might be the most countercultural idea in the book, and it’s one I keep thinking about.

Muddamalle argues that when Paul says the church makes known the “manifold wisdom of God” to “the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10), he means it literally. The multiethnic unity of the church — Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, male and female — is a visible demonstration to the defeated cosmic powers that their authority is broken. The church doesn’t just talk about the victory of Christ. The church is the announcement of it.

This reframes what you’re doing on Sunday morning. When the church gathers across lines of ethnicity, class, and background and refuses to fracture, it is participating in the cosmic reclamation of the nations that began at Pentecost and will culminate at the return of Christ. Spiritual warfare, then, is not primarily about seeking out demons. It’s about maintaining unity, resisting idolatry, and proclaiming the gospel — because those acts declare to the powers that their time is up.

What This Book Does Well

Muddamalle’s greatest gift here is accessibility without cheapness. He takes passages most believers skip and makes them livable—not by dumbing them down, but by showing how they fit into the larger story. By the time you finish, the Old Testament feels less like a collection of disconnected episodes and more like a coherent narrative building toward a single climax.

He also resists the twin errors that plague most books on spiritual warfare. He won’t let you be obsessed with demons (one error), and he won’t let you pretend they don’t exist (the other). C.S. Lewis put both dangers in the mouth of Screwtape, and Muddamalle navigates them with a steady hand. The result is a spirituality that is honest about the unseen world without being controlled by it.

Where It Could Go Deeper

Two honest observations. First, readers already familiar with Heiser’s The Unseen Realm will find significant overlap in the foundational material. Muddamalle is transparent about his dependence on his mentor — the dedication alone makes clear this is a labor of love, not just scholarship — but those coming from Heiser’s work will spend the first half on familiar ground before finding the book’s distinctives.

Second, and this is a minor thing: the book’s pastoral application is strongest at the end, which means you have to work through substantial biblical-theological groundwork to get there. That’s not a flaw exactly—the groundwork is necessary—but readers looking for immediately practical guidance on spiritual warfare may feel the payoff comes late.

Why You Should Read This

Here’s the honest case: most of us are losing a battle we don’t fully understand. We feel the weight of it — the spiritual fatigue, the cultural pressure to abandon faith, the sense that something malevolent is organized against ordinary human flourishing — but we lack a framework for understanding what we’re up against.

Muddamalle gives you that framework. And more importantly, he grounds it in the story of a God who saw what the enemy was doing, and entered the battle himself.

The cross isn’t just forgiveness. It’s victory. The resurrection isn’t just resuscitation. It’s the decisive moment where the powers were stripped, disarmed, and publicly defeated. You live in the aftermath of that victory — which means you don’t fight for victory, you fight from it.

If you want a book that makes your Bible bigger, your enemy less mysterious, and your calling as a member of Christ’s church more urgent and more beautiful — read The Unseen Battle. Keep it close.

Before You Go

If this kind of thinking is useful to you — theology that takes the whole Bible seriously and tries to make it livable — that’s exactly what Theologetics is for. Every week, I’m working to make big things small and muddy things clear, because I believe the church deserves rigorous theology that actually serves ordinary life.

If you’re not subscribed yet, it’s free to join.

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And if you found this review worth your time, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who would benefit — a pastor, a small group leader, a friend who’s been asking hard questions about spiritual warfare, or anyone who’s ever felt like they’re losing a battle they don’t fully understand.

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And if you pick up The Unseen Battle, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think. Drop a comment below or reply to this email. Good theology is better in conversation.

We had one guy who didn’t always agree with us.

During those years, the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement was in full swing. Calvinism versus Arminianism dominated every late-night conversation. But here’s what I noticed about this friend: he never actually let the text shape his theology. Instead, he let his feelings about exclusion and punishment drive the interpretation. He couldn’t accept that God might choose some and pass over others. So rather than wrestling with what Scripture actually said, he worked backward — reshaping the text to fit his emotional comfort.

At the time, I thought he was the outlier.

Years later, I realized he was just doing openly what all of us do quietly.

The Gap Nobody Talks About

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the American church has more theological resources than any generation in history — more commentaries, more podcasts, more seminary access, more study Bibles — and yet we are not being noticeably transformed by any of it.

We have orthodoxy. We can articulate the doctrines. Many of us could pass a systematic theology exam. But our lives look functionally identical to the culture around us — the same anxieties about money, the same reflexive tribalism, the same addiction to comfort, the same quiet compromises we’d rather not name. We have right belief without right practice. Orthodoxy without orthopraxy.

James saw this coming: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like” (James 1:22–24).

We look into the mirror of Scripture constantly. We write about what we see there. We argue about the mirror’s frame and its proper angle. Then we walk away unchanged.

Why?

Because somewhere along the way, we learned to use theology as a shield against transformation rather than a means of it. We spend more time debating and defending theological positions than we do actually being shaped by them. And often — more often than we’d like to admit — we’re not even defending what Scripture says. We’re defending what we’ve already decided we want it to say.

Same Method, Different Directions

The examples cross every tribal line. Take churches, for example.

On one side, progressive churches have spent the last two decades reinterpreting Scripture’s sexual ethics. They begin with a cultural conviction — that affirming LGBTQ+ identity is morally necessary — and then work backward through the text. They reframe what Paul meant in Romans 1. They contextualize Leviticus as an irrelevant cultural artifact. They find theological language to justify what the surrounding culture has already decided is true. The text gets bent to fit the conclusion.

On the other side, conservative churches have baptized nationalism. They begin with a cultural conviction — that national strength, sovereignty, and greatness are ultimate goods — and then work backward through the text. They quote 2 Chronicles 7:14 as if it were addressed to America. They ignore the prophetic warnings about trusting in chariots and horses (Ps. 20:7), about the nations being “a drop from a bucket” before the Lord (Isa. 40:15). They use theology to sanctify what culture has already decided is true. The text gets bent to fit the conclusion.

Same method. Different directions.

And here’s what should haunt us: both sides are convinced they’re letting Scripture speak. Both sides think they’re being faithful. Both sides have PhDs, commentaries, and hermeneutical arguments to support their readings.

The problem isn’t intelligence. The problem is direction.

Why We All Do This

The deeper pattern emerges when you stop asking which side is doing this and start asking why we all do it.

The answer is simpler and more uncomfortable than we’d like: we want God and His commands to conform to our cultural moment. We want theology to validate what we’ve already decided. We want Scripture to bless the life we’re already living.

Think about your own life for a moment — not the hot-button culture war issues, but the ordinary ones. What convictions do you hold most fiercely about money? About success? About comfort? About security?

Now ask honestly: Did you arrive at those convictions by letting Scripture shape you? Or did you absorb them from your culture, your family, your class — and then find the theological language to justify them afterward?

Most of us, if we’re being honest, did the latter.

We debate predestination when what we’re really defending is our need for control. We argue about church authority when what we’re really protecting is our autonomy. We construct elaborate biblical defenses of wealth accumulation while Jesus’ words sit in the Gospel of Luke like a live grenade: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation” (Luke 6:24).

We think we’re defending Scripture. We’re actually defending ourselves.

Let me pause here. To put it plainly, what follows is a little more theologically dense. It’s also a lot more than I usually write in general. I want you to keep reading, because it was this research that sparked the whole concept of redemptive correlation.

However, I realize this may not be for every reader. If that’s not your cup of tea, that’s okay. Scroll down to the heading, “The Reversal,” and you can pick up on the train of thought without missing a beat.

Tillich’s Shadow

There’s a theological name for this pattern, and understanding it will help you see the mechanism at work — and where it leads.

Paul Tillich, the twentieth-century German-American theologian, gave us the most rigorous and consequential version of this error. Near the end of his life, he described his life’s work this way:

My whole theological work has been directed to the interpretation of religious symbols in such a way that the secular man — and we are all secular — can understand and be moved by them.1

Read that carefully. It is not a statement about defending the faith or proclaiming the gospel. It is a statement of apologetic translation: the guiding criterion for Tillich’s entire theological output was the comprehension of the secular man. The question was always in the driver’s seat. This confession makes explicit what his formal methodology only implies.

The Method of Correlation

Tillich called his approach the “method of correlation.” Its stated purpose was to “unite message and situation” — to correlate “the questions implied in the situation with the answers implied in the message … human existence and divine manifestation.”2 On the surface, this sounds eminently reasonable. The theologian meets people where they are. He speaks to real human concerns. He doesn’t preach into the void.

He described the method in practice this way: “it makes an analysis of the human situation out of which the existential questions arise, and it demonstrates that the symbols used in the Christian message are the answers to these questions.” His central illustration: humans experience what he called the “anxiety of nonbeing” — the existential dread of finitude, of death, of the threat that life might be meaningless. And “God,” in Tillich’s framework, is the answer: “the infinite power of being which resists the threat of nonbeing,” what he calls “the ground of being” or “being-itself.” The cultural question (anxiety about nonbeing) shapes the theological answer (God as ground of being).3

Tillich was explicit about the formal structure of this dependency: “In respect to content the Christian answers are dependent on the revelatory events in which they appear; in respect to form they are dependent on the structure of the questions which they answer.”4 Content from revelation, form from the question. He believed this distinction would protect the gospel’s integrity while making it intelligible.

That distinction does not hold. And Tillich’s own body of work — across two decades and three volumes of Systematic Theology — is the proof. There are three problems with the method, each more serious than the last.

1. The Form/Content Distinction Collapses in Practice

Tillich’s categories — “ground of being,” “ultimate concern,” “New Being” — are not biblical concepts translated for a modern audience. They are drawn directly from Heidegger and existentialist philosophy, imported wholesale into Christian theology. Tillich acknowledged the framework openly: the analysis of human existence is done “in terms which today are called ‘existential’ … the immediate experience of one’s own existing reveals something of the nature of existence generally.”5 The questions — finitude, anxiety, nonbeing — didn’t arise from Scripture. They arrived pre-formed from a philosophical tradition.

The critic Robert Olson puts the principle plainly: for Tillich, “the question must precede the answer and determine its form.”6 Not merely influence. Not merely shape the presentation. Determine the form. And when the questions come pre-formed from a philosophical tradition, the answers get bent to fit them, even when the theologian insists the content stays pure.

The consequences are concrete. When Tillich applies the method to the doctrine of God, this is what the questions produce:

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.7

This is not a translation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into modern idiom. The question — “what is the ontological ground that overcomes the threat of nonbeing?” — has produced a God who cannot be said to “exist” in any meaningful sense because existence, for Tillich, is a category of finitude. The question has not merely shaped the form. It has reshaped the content.

When pressed on whether this God is personal, Tillich produced what Olson correctly identifies as a paradox that satisfies neither reason nor religious experience: “Personal God does not mean that God is a person. It means that God is the ground of everything personal and that he carries within himself the ontological power of personality. He is not a person, but he is not less than personal.”8

Tillich himself seems to have understood where this leads. He reportedly said that he did not pray to being itself, the ground of being — he only meditated on it.9 That is the pastoral endpoint of a method that redesigns God to fit the question of ontological anxiety: a God you can contemplate but cannot address. A presence you can feel but cannot name.

2. The Method Forfeits Scripture’s Power to Interrogate the Questions Themselves

This is the part most readers miss. The Bible doesn’t only answer the questions we bring to it. Sometimes it tells us we’re asking the wrong thing entirely — and that the question itself reveals a disordered heart. Jesus does this constantly. “Which is the greatest commandment?” He answers, then adds a question none of them asked. “Who is my neighbor?” He tells a story that dissolves the questioner’s self-justification before offering any answer. “Are only a few people going to be saved?” He redirects to the urgency of personal repentance.

Scripture doesn’t always meet us where we are. Sometimes it relocates us. But when the cultural question controls the agenda, theology is only permitted to answer — never to interrogate. The method is structurally incapable of producing the kind of reversal that genuine encounter with the living God actually produces.

3. The Method Cannot Sustain the Scandal of the Gospel

If theology’s task is to demonstrate that Christian symbols are “the answers to these questions,” you will inevitably sand off whatever is strange or offensive about those answers. Watch how this plays out systematically in Tillich’s treatment of the historical particulars of the faith.

Begin with the fall. For Tillich, the Genesis account is not a historical event but “not an event in time and space but the transhistorical quality of all events in time and space” — a symbol for the universal human predicament.10 This is not an incidental hermeneutical decision. It is what the existentialist question requires. If the question is “what is the structure of estrangement in human existence?” then the fall must be a description of that structure, not an event that introduced it.

Continue with the resurrection. Rather than defending bodily resurrection as a historical event, Tillich treats resurrection as one of several “christological symbols” that must be “understood as symbols,” insisting they “lose their meaning if taken literally.” What the disciples called the resurrection of Christ was, for Tillich, an encounter with “the New Being” — a category drawn not from biblical eschatology but from his existentialist ontology.11 The resurrection becomes a transformative experience of new existential possibility. The question has determined what kind of answer is permissible.

Then arrive at the most unsettling destination: the person of Jesus. For Tillich, the name and historical details of Jesus’ life are theologically dispensable. He stated this directly: “Participation, not historical argument, guarantees the reality of the event upon which Christianity is based. It guarantees a personal life in which the New Being has conquered the old being. But it does not guarantee his name to be Jesus of Nazareth.”12

He went further. Any Christianity that clings to the historical Jesus as the center is, in Tillich’s words, not merely incomplete but a “perversion”: “A Christianity which does not assert that Jesus of Nazareth is sacrificed to Jesus as the Christ is just one more religion among many others. It has no justifiable claim to finality.”13

This is the logic of the method carried to its conclusion. The existentialist question requires a universal, abstract principle of essentialization — a “New Being” that can overcome estrangement in general. A particular man from Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, resurrected on the third day, whose name you call on for salvation — that man is an obstacle to the universality the question demands. So the name dissolves. The history dissolves. What remains is the principle.

The Terminal Destination

By 1952, in The Courage to Be, Tillich was confronting what he called the defining anxiety of the twentieth century: not the fear of death, but the anxiety of meaninglessness — the sense, post-Nietzsche, that God is gone and with him every framework for significance. What does the method of correlation produce when confronted with that question?

This: “The faith which creates the courage to take [meaninglessness] into itself has no special content. It is simply faith, undirected, absolute. It is undefinable, since everything defined is dissolved by doubt and meaninglessness … The content of absolute faith is the ‘God above God.’”14

The endpoint is faith with “no special content.” Tillich describes absolute faith — the final form of authentic religious existence in his system — as existing “without the safety of words and concepts … without a name, a church, a cult, a theology.”15

Without a name. Without a church. Without a theology.

This is not a movement toward greater transcendence. This is what happens when a method that begins by asking “how can the secular man understand?” follows its own logic faithfully to the end. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God who raised Jesus from the dead, whose name you can call on, to whom you can pray — has been dissolved by the question that was supposed to make him intelligible.

Tillich himself closes The Courage to Be with the sentence that most honestly captures what the method produces: “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”16

The God who appears when God has disappeared. The question generates the God. The anxiety of doubt is doing the theological work. This is not a Christian answer to an existential question. It is an existential answer wearing Christian vocabulary. And it is the terminal destination of any method that lets the cultural question set the terms.

We do the same thing — less elegantly, but just as thoroughly — every time we start with what our cultural moment already values and search Scripture for support. We’re not running Tillich’s full philosophical program. But we are running his logic. The question is in the driver’s seat. The answer conforms. And when the question comes from the culture rather than from God, the God who answers will always look remarkably like what the culture already wanted.

The Reversal

Last week, I introduced what I’ve been calling Redemptive Correlation — a four-step method (Listen, Distill, Reframe, Respond) for meeting the hard questions of life and culture with the full weight of Scripture’s story. I showed you how it works with the question of online church.

But here’s what I want you to see this week: Redemptive Correlation isn’t just an apologetics tool for answering other people’s questions. It’s a self-diagnostic tool for uncovering where you’ve been doing Tillich’s method on yourself without realizing it.

The core reversal is this: Tillich reads Scripture through culture. Redemptive Correlation reads culture through Scripture.

Tillich asks: “What is the world asking? Let’s find a Christian answer.”

Redemptive Correlation asks: “What does God’s story reveal about reality? Now let’s look at our lives through that lens.”

When you apply that reversal to other people’s questions — as I did last week with the online church example — it produces winsomeness and pastoral depth. But when you apply it to yourself — to the assumptions and desires you’ve never thought to question — it produces something even more important.

It produces repentance.

Turning the Method Inward

Let me show you what I mean with an example that hits closer to home than the culture war issues: money.

Most Christians I know — myself included — have a functional theology of money that was shaped far more by American culture than by Scripture. We believe in financial security. We admire wealth. We plan for retirement. We measure success partly by income. And if you pressed us, we’d find the verses to justify all of it: “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance” (Prov. 21:5). “If anyone does not provide for his relatives... he has denied the faith” (1 Tim. 5:8). God “richly provides us with everything to enjoy” (1 Tim. 6:17).

There. Biblical. Settled.

But watch what happens when we stop using Tillich’s method — starting with our cultural question (”How can I be financially secure and honor God?”) — and use Redemptive Correlation instead.

Listen. What’s the question behind the question? The surface question is about stewardship and responsibility. But listen to the ache underneath: What are we actually afraid of? What does our financial anxiety reveal about where our trust is placed? When you listen carefully, the real question isn’t “How should I manage money?” It’s “How do I protect myself from a world that feels scarce and threatening?” That’s not a stewardship question. That’s a worship question.

Distill. What’s theologically at stake? This is not merely a question about financial ethics. It’s a crisis of anthropology and soteriology. It asks: Are we self-sustaining beings who must secure our own futures, or are we creatures dependent on a Provider? It asks: Has Christ’s redemption actually freed us from the anxiety of provision, or have we quietly decided that part of the gospel is decorative? The doctrine being distorted is providence — and behind that, the sufficiency of God Himself.

Reframe. Place it inside the story.

• Creation: God provided abundantly and placed humans in a garden of plenty. Work was good. Provision was a gift. There was no anxiety because there was no scarcity in God’s economy.

• Fall: Scarcity entered through rebellion. And with it came hoarding, anxiety, the desire to store up “many goods” for ourselves (Luke 12:19), and the deep-seated terror that we won’t have enough — that God won’t come through. The fall didn’t just distort our morality. It distorted our relationship to provision itself. We became people who trust barns more than God.

• Redemption: Jesus directly confronted this distortion — not gently. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth,” He said, “but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven... For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:19–21). He told a rich young ruler to sell everything (Mark 10:21). He pronounced woe on the rich (Luke 6:24). He said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom (Matt. 19:24). The early church — reading Jesus correctly — responded by holding goods in common (Acts 2:44–45). And Paul told Timothy to “charge the rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God” (1 Tim. 6:17). Notice: the same verse we used to justify enjoyment of wealth, in its full context, is actually a warning against trusting it.

• Restoration: In the new creation, provision is total, scarcity is abolished, and the nations bring their glory into the city of God (Rev. 21:24–26). Kingdom economy is generosity without limit, which means our current economy of anxiety and accumulation is not just imperfect; it is fundamentally flawed. It’s passing away.

Respond. Here’s the truth that is both accurate and, I think, beautiful: You don’t need to be afraid. Your anxiety about money is not a problem to be solved with better budgeting — it’s a symptom of the fall that Christ is calling you to repent of. Your instinct to accumulate is not necessarily wisdom — it may be the very thing Jesus warned would keep you from the kingdom. But the God who clothed Adam and Eve after their rebellion, who fed Israel in the wilderness, who said “consider the lilies” — that God has not changed. The invitation isn’t to be reckless. It’s to be free. Free from the tyranny of needing to secure your own future, because your future is already secured by someone better than your 401(k).

That’s the difference. Tillich’s method, starting with our cultural question about financial security, gives us a theology of stewardship that lets us keep living exactly as we were. Redemptive Correlation, starting with God’s story, gives us a diagnosis — and then a gospel invitation to live differently.

One confirms. The other converts.

Why This Matters for All of Us

Here’s the hard part, and I need to say it directly: this applies to everyone reading this, including me.

Not just progressives. Not just conservatives. Not just the obviously compromised. All of us have places where we’ve bent Scripture to fit our lives instead of bending our lives to fit Scripture.

The pastor who can articulate the doctrines of grace with precision but whose life is driven by ambition and platform-building — he has orthodoxy without orthopraxy. The charismatic worship leader who sings about surrender every Sunday but won’t surrender her financial comfort — she has orthodoxy without orthopraxy. The seminary student who can parse Greek verbs but hasn’t let the Sermon on the Mount disrupt his actual life in a single concrete way — he has orthodoxy without orthopraxy.

All of us are doing what my dorm mate did. Just with different vocabulary and different blind spots.

Paul warned the Corinthians about exactly this: “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2). You can have the theology perfect and still be nothing — because the theology was never meant to be an end in itself. It was meant to form you into the image of Christ.

An Invitation, Not an Indictment

I want to be careful here, because I know how this can land. It can feel like I’m saying your theology doesn’t matter or that everyone is equally wrong. That’s not what I’m saying.

Theology matters immensely. Getting the text right matters. Orthodoxy is not the enemy of orthopraxy — it’s the foundation of it. The demons believe orthodox theology, and they shudder (James 2:19). The Pharisees had the most rigorous doctrinal precision in Israel, and Jesus reserved His harshest words for them. Right doctrine was never the finish line. It was always the starting block.

What I’m inviting you into is not a different set of doctrines but a different direction of engagement with the text. And it’s the same direction I’ve been building this entire project around.

Instead of coming to Scripture asking, “How does this support what I already believe?” — come asking, “Where does this story confront what I’ve been too comfortable to question?”

Instead of reading the Bible as a resource for your cultural battles, read it as a narrative that has its own battles to wage — including battles against the idols you didn’t know you were carrying.

That’s what Redemptive Correlation does when you turn it inward. It doesn’t just help you answer other people’s hard questions. It helps you face your own. And when you face them honestly — when you stop defending yourself long enough to let the story diagnose you — something shifts. You stop performing orthodoxy and start inhabiting it. Right belief starts producing right practice. The mirror of James 1 stops being a glance and starts being a gaze.

Where We Go from Here

This is what I’m building with Theologetics, and what I’m writing toward in Reading the World Through Eden. Not a system for winning arguments. A method for being transformed by the story of God — and then helping others find their place in it.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll keep doing what I did last week and what I did today: taking the questions your coworkers, kids, neighbors, and your own restless heart are asking, and walking them through Listen, Distill, Reframe, Respond. Sometimes the method will face outward, toward the culture. Sometimes — like today — it will face inward, toward us.

But it starts here. With honesty about where we’ve been doing Tillich’s work without knowing it. With the willingness to let Scripture read us instead of the other way around.

Sit with that. Not as a guilt exercise — guilt alone doesn’t transform anyone — but as the beginning of something better. Because when you let the text read you, it doesn’t just expose you. It heals you. It shows you where you are in the story — fallen, yes, but not abandoned. Broken, yes, but not beyond the reach of the God who has been restoring broken things since Eden.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

That invitation is still open. But you have to put down the shield first.

Three things you can do right now:

1. Subscribe. I publish weekly. Each piece takes one real question — the kind people are actually losing sleep over — and walks it through Redemptive Correlation. If you’re tired of theology that informs but doesn’t transform, this is what I’m building. Hit subscribe below, and you won’t miss what’s next.

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2. Start from the beginning. If this is your first time here, last week’s post introduces the full Redemptive Correlation method — the four steps, the logic behind them, and a complete worked example. Read that first, and today’s piece will land even harder.

3. Share this with one person. Not to win a debate — to start a conversation. Think of the friend who has all the right theology but still feels stuck. The parent who doesn’t know how to answer their teenager’s questions. The person who left the church because nobody took their doubts seriously. Send them this and say: “This helped me. I think it might help you, too.” That’s it. That’s enough.

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A friend going through a divorce asks where God is. A coworker asks why Christians seem so angry about politics. A cousin says she left the church because nobody could answer her questions. And every time, I watch good, faithful people either retreat into clichés or just go silent.

Unfortunately, this is sadly the product of the state of the modern American church. The church has two default modes for engaging culture — fight it or copy it. On one side of the pendulum, we become culture warriors, seeking to isolate and insulate away from the “evils” of society. Parents take their kids out of public schools on principle. Nothing but the Christian alternative.

And on the other side of the pendulum, we make seeker-sensitive accommodators. Everyone’s allowed, included, celebrated, and promoted. What the world around us says is okay is what dictates the moral, aesthetic, and organizational makeup of the church.

Neither one works. Culture warriors close their doors and ranks and become extremely conservative, both theologically and socially. Seeker-sensitives rarely take a stance on anything and become liberal, theologically and socially.

We need a third way.

Redemptive Correlation: A Better Method To Use

Here’s the simplest way I can describe what I’ve been building.

Life is messy, and it’s often hard to figure out how to make sense of it all. What I’ve done with Redemptive correlation is provide a blueprint to disentangle the clutter and give a better way through which to view the hard things we have to handle. It takes the gospel and asks you to view everything through it, yet not making light of what we look at. We first listen to what’s really being asked, not just the basic question. We name what’s really at stake theologically, then place it inside Scripture’s story (creation, fall, redemption, restoration), often called “the gospel in the air”, where it finally makes sense. Ultimately, it points towards heartfelt, genuine worship filled with awe-stricken wonder at who God really is.

Enter the redemptive correlation method. It’s a four-step, memorable, and portable way to meet anyone anywhere anytime with anything.

• Listen: Hear the question behind the question. When someone asks about identity, meaning, suffering, or church, the surface question is rarely the real question. We’re not listening to formulate a rebuttal. We’re listening for the ache beneath the words, so we can bring the right word to the right wound.

• Distill: Name what’s theologically at stake. Move from the cultural vocabulary to the theological vocabulary. Every cultural question has a corresponding doctrine being distorted — whether it’s anthropology, ecclesiology, justice, or vocation. The discipline is precision without reductionism: naming what’s at stake without flattening the person standing in front of you.

• Reframe: Place it inside Scripture’s story: creation, fall, redemption, restoration. You don’t have to be a bible scholar to know how to do this; you just need to know the Gospel and be willing to learn. This fourfold narrative is a diagnostic tool, not a checklist. Different questions have different gravitational centers in the story. And sometimes Scripture refuses to answer the question as posed. Instead, it reframes the question entirely before giving an answer.

• Respond: Offer truth that is not only accurate but beautiful. We don’t scold people for asking hard questions; we invite them into a better story. The goal isn’t winning an argument but reawakening wonder by showing people that the God of Scripture is already speaking into the very questions they can’t stop asking.

The Method In Action

Here’s how this plays out, in real time with one of the many real questions we face today:

“Why do I need to go to church when I can watch it online? Isn’t it just about the message?”

Since the introduction of live-streaming into the digital landscape, churches have adapted to employ timely means to share an timeless message, which is a great thing. However, when 2020 happened and everything about life shifted from solely embodied to optionally present, church followed suit out of necessity. You could go to as many church services as you want just by scrolling your Facebook news feed or YouTube home page.

As life in the post-social-distancing world has returned to some kind of normal, it also has seemed normal that the way we do church hasn’t returned back to an in-person-first model, which comes with its own problems (I do plan on writing on this in the near future, so I’ll leave this point alone).

Using redemptive correlation, we can biblically, faithfully, and winsomely address the issue without capitulating to the culture narrative.

Step 1: Listen

Hear the Question Behind the Question

We start by listening to the cultural mood. The shift to digital life isn’t just about laziness; it’s about a new definition of existence. We are listening to the “logic of convenience” that runs counter to the “logic of incarnation.”

• The Surface Question: “Why drive 20 minutes when the livestream is high-quality?”

• The Ache: The desire for a “frictionless existence.” Digital life allows us to edit out the awkwardness of other people. It offers connection without the “messy, inconvenient, and sanctifying” reality of being physically present.

• The Cultural Liturgy: We are being formed by a medium that values “content over covenant.” The screen teaches us that we can be observers of a community without being subject to it.

Step 2: Distill

Name What’s Theologically at Stake

Now we switch to the theological diagnostic. We must name the categories being distorted. This isn’t just a preference issue; it is an anthropological and ecclesiological crisis.

• Anthropology (Body vs. Soul): The digital argument assumes we are essentially “brains on sticks” — that as long as our minds receive the information (the sermon), we have worshipped. This is a modern form of Gnosticism, treating the body as incidental to spiritual life.

• Ecclesiology (Event vs. People): It redefines church as a “content provider” rather than a “covenantal community.” If church is just content, Spotify is better. But if church is a people, pixels cannot carry the weight of that identity.

• The Core Distortion: We are exchanging holiness (which requires friction) for efficiency (which requires distance).

Step 3: Reframe

Place it Inside the Story

We map this tension onto the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to see the full picture.

• Creation (Embodiment is Good): God didn’t create a cloud server; He created a garden. He made us from dust and breath. Adam and Eve walked with God in the cool of the day. Presence was the original design for flourishing.

• Fall (Hiding and Disconnection): Sin introduced the impulse to hide — to cover ourselves and avoid being truly seen. Digital anonymity is often just a high-tech fig leaf. It allows us to curate a projected self rather than exposing our true self to the gaze of others.

• Redemption (The Incarnation): This is the pivot. When God moved to save us, He didn’t send a broadcast; He sent a Body. The Incarnation is the ultimate argument against “virtual” religion. Jesus did not save from a distance; He came, dwelt, and touched. He ate with sinners, touched lepers, and washed feet. You cannot wash feet over Zoom.

• Restoration (The Gathered City): The end of the story isn’t a disembodied heaven but a physical city (Revelation 21). We will see Him face to face, not through a glass darkly. The gathered church today is a dress rehearsal for that physical, eternal reality.

Step 4: Respond

Truth That Is Beautiful

We don’t scold them for watching YouTube; we invite them to something better.

• The Invitation: “You were made for more than pixels. You were made for presence.”

• The Beauty: Digital content can inform you, but only presence can transform you. There is a beauty in the “slow, formative tension” of sitting in a row or pew next to someone you didn’t choose, hearing a baby cry, and singing in a room of imperfect voices. This is where the mask comes off.

• The Holy Resistance: In an age of endless connectivity but deep loneliness, the gathered church is a “holy resistance.” It is a declaration that real life happens in 3D. We invite you back not to a meeting, but to a body — where you are known, held, and loved in a way a screen can never offer.

The Invitation

This is what I’ve been building. And I’m just getting started.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to be doing exactly what you just watched — taking the questions your coworkers, kids, neighbors, and your own restless heart are asking, and walking them through this method. Not to win arguments. Not to hand you talking points. But to show you that Scripture is already speaking into the very things keeping people up at night.

I’m also developing this into a book. Reading the World Through Eden (what I’m tentatively calling it) will be a field guide for ordinary believers who want to think theologically about the world they actually live in — without needing a seminary degree to do it. Every article here is a chapter in that larger project.

So here’s my invitation: subscribe, pull up a chair, and come along.

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Not because you need more content. You have plenty of that. But because the questions aren’t going away. Your friend going through that divorce is still going to ask where God is. Your cousin who left the church is still waiting for someone to take her questions seriously. The coworker who thinks Christians only know how to be angry hasn’t stopped watching.

You don’t need more clichés. You need a method. And you need to see, over and over, that the God of Scripture is not threatened by hard questions — He’s been answering them since Eden.

The goal of all of this isn’t winning.

It’s wonder.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! — Romans 11:33

If that’s what you’re after, you’re in the right place.

If you’re one of the 34 people who subscribed to Theologetics over the last year, you might have noticed. Or maybe you didn’t; I wouldn’t blame you. The internet is noisy, and one more silent voice in the theological corner of Substack isn’t exactly headline news.

But I noticed. And if I’m honest, the silence has been eating at me.

Not because I don’t have things to say. I have a draft folder full of half-written essays on ecclesiology, cultural commentary begging to be filtered through Scripture, and reflections on texts I can’t stop thinking about. The problem isn’t a lack of content. The problem is that I’m exhausted.

I’m a trained theologian working in church relations—spending my days recruiting churches for evangelistic festivals. It pays the bills, but if I’m honest, I’m struggling. My MTS sits in a drawer. My published articles in Themelios and Journal of Theological Studies gather digital dust. Every day, I’m using skills I have (talking to people, building relationships, problem-solving) for work that doesn’t align with what I’m actually called to do.

And that calling? It’s the thing I can’t shake, no matter how tired I am.

The Calling I Can’t Shake

I‘ve known what I’m supposed to do for a long time.

Not in some mystical, burning-bush kind of way, but in the quieter, more persistent way that callings often work—a steady pull toward something you can’t quite articulate but also can’t ignore. It started in high school when I couldn’t stop reading theology books. Continued through college when I changed my major to biblical and theological studies. Grew stronger through my MTS program when I realized I didn’t just want to know theology—I wanted to give it away.

The calling is this: preach, write, teach, and travel.

Perhaps not settle into one pulpit for thirty years (though I respect those who do). Nor build an academic career publishing articles for scholars (though that’s important too). Instead, serve the church in various contexts through itinerant teaching, guest preaching, writing for believers seeking theological depth, teaching adjunct classes, and eventually speaking at conferences and retreats. Go wherever needed to help believers think deeply about Scripture and live faithfully.

The problem is, I’m not doing that right now.

I’m doing sales. Church relations, technically, but let’s be honest—it’s sales. And while there’s nothing wrong with this as a vocation, it’s not my vocation. Every day I spend recruiting churches to participate in evangelistic festivals is a day I’m not preaching, writing, teaching, or serving the church in the ways I’m actually equipped and called to do.

It’s like being a classically trained violinist working at a call center. The job is fine. It pays. But it’s not what your hands were made for.

I’m tired. Spiritually tired. The kind of tired that comes from spending your energy on work that doesn’t align with your calling. And yet, the calling hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s gotten louder. More insistent. Less patient with my excuses about debt, timing, and waiting for the “right opportunity.”

So here I am, writing again. Not because I’ve figured it all out or because the circumstances have magically aligned. But because I can’t not write. I can’t keep ignoring what I know I’m supposed to be doing with my life.

That’s the calling I can’t shake. And it’s why, even after a month of silence, I’m back.

What I Want This To Be

So let me tell you what I’m actually trying to build here. I started Theologetics with a simple conviction: make big things small, and muddy things clear.

Theology is often presented as either inaccessibly academic (reserved for those with degrees and a taste for footnotes) or watered down to the point of uselessness (bumper sticker spirituality that says everything and nothing). I don’t want to do either.

I want to write theology that bridges the gap between the academy and the church. Theology rooted in serious biblical and historical work, yet accessible to anyone without a seminary degree. Theology that equips believers to think deeply, live faithfully, and reclaim wonder in a world that’s increasingly disenchanted.

Because here’s the thing: the Bible isn’t boring. The gospel isn’t boring. The doctrines that have shaped Christian faith for two thousand years aren’t boring. If they feel that way, it’s because we’ve either made them inaccessible or we’ve stripped them of their power by reducing them to propositions we affirm but don’t actually live.

I care deeply about orthodoxy and right belief. But orthodoxy without orthopraxy—right practice—is hollow. It’s the kind of faith James warns against: all talk, no walk (James 2:14-26). My goal with Theologetics is to help believers connect what they believe with how they live. To show that theology isn’t just for the classroom or the ivory tower; it’s for Monday mornings, difficult conversations, life decisions, and the mundane rhythms of daily faithfulness.

How I’m Trying To Do It

I write in what I call “mixed voices.” Sometimes I’m academic—drilling down into a text, interacting with scholarship, building arguments with footnotes. Other times I’m pastoral—storytelling, application-focused, speaking directly to the heart. I don’t want to pick one lane. Both are necessary.

One week I might walk you through the Greek syntax of John 1:1-18 to show why the prologue matters for how we read the whole Gospel. The next week I might tell you about a conversation with a struggling believer and what it taught me about grace. Both are theology. Both serve the church. The church needs scholars who can handle the text carefully, and it needs pastors who can make that scholarship breathe with life.

I’m also developing a theological method I call redemptive correlation. It’s a twist on Paul Tillich’s method of correlation, but with a crucial difference: instead of interpreting Scripture through culture, I want to interpret culture through Scripture. I want to read the world—movies, social media, political movements, our anxieties and hopes—through the lens of the biblical story. Not to baptize everything we see, but to discern what’s true, good, and beautiful, and what’s distorted, destructive, or empty.

I’ll unpack that method more in future essays (it deserves its own deep dive), but the heart of it is this: Scripture is the light by which we see everything else, not the other way around. In an age where it’s tempting to make the Bible bend to our cultural moment, I want to do the opposite: let Scripture interrogate, challenge, and redeem how we see the world.

The Invitation

So why am I writing this now, after a month of silence?

Because I need to own what I’m building. I need to stop apologizing for the fact that I have 34 subscribers instead of 3,500. I need to stop waiting for the “right time” when I’m not exhausted from my day job. I need to stop hiding behind the fear that no one cares.

Here’s the truth: I’m building an itinerant teaching ministry. I want to preach, write, teach, and serve the church in multiple contexts—not tied to one congregation or one institution, but free to go wherever there’s a need for theological depth paired with pastoral care. This Substack is one piece of that. So is guest preaching when churches invite me. So is adjunct teaching (which I’m pursuing). So is, eventually, speaking at conferences and retreats.

I don’t have it all figured out. I’m in a transition season—trying to get out of a job that’s crushing me, trying to find work that aligns with my calling, trying to build a platform and a reputation while also paying off debt and being a good husband. It’s messy. But I’m done waiting for it to be tidy before I start.

This is me starting.

If you want to follow along on this journey, subscribe. I’m committing to publishing weekly for the next twelve weeks. Some essays will be academic. Some will be pastoral. Some will be raw and vulnerable. But all of them will be aimed at the same goal: helping you think deeply, live faithfully, and reclaim wonder.

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If you know of opportunities to preach, teach, or write, reach out. I’m learning to ask for help, which is harder for me than it should be. But I’m realizing I can’t build this alone.

And if you’re on a similar journey—trying to figure out how to use your gifts for the kingdom while navigating the realities of bills and debt and uncertainty—let’s connect. Comment on posts. Email me. Let’s learn from each other.

Why I Write

The church needs theologians who love her. Not theologians who hide in the academy and critique from a distance, but theologians who are in the trenches—preaching, teaching, counseling, suffering alongside the people of God.

And theologians need the church to keep them honest. To remind them that theology isn’t a game of intellectual gymnastics, but a tool for transformation. To show them that the doctrines they study have names and faces attached—real people trying to follow Jesus in a complicated world.

I want to be both—a scholar and a servant. Someone who can handle the biblical text with care and precision, but who also knows what it’s like to sit across from someone in pain and point them to the hope of the gospel.

That’s why I write.

Because the Bible isn’t boring. The gospel isn’t boring. And the work of making big things small and muddy things clear is worth every ounce of effort, even when I’m tired, even when the audience is small, even when I’m not sure what comes next.

Thanks for being here. Let’s reclaim wonder together.

P.S. If this resonated with you, share it with someone who might need to hear it.

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And if you haven’t subscribed yet, now’s the time. Let’s do this.

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