Orthodoxy Needs a Discipline
The church has plenty of doctrine. It's missing something else.
I started this Substack to share my academic papers.
That’s the honest version. I had a stack of work from seminary — the major papers, the exegetical pieces, the stuff I’d poured months into — and a Substack seemed like the place to put them where someone other than a professor might read them. So that’s what it was at first. A repository. I published finished things.
Somewhere in a seminary class, I’d gotten this idea about blending head and heart — that the doctrine I was learning wasn’t supposed to just sit in my notes, that it was supposed to land somewhere in a life. I didn’t realize I would enjoy apologetics as much as I enjoyed theology, yet there I was devouring works that made me want to shape the message of our faith into something more than a pastoral message or a good blog article. But I’ll be honest: I didn’t do it well at first. The conviction was there. The execution wasn’t.
Then I ran out of papers.
I’d shared all the major work, and suddenly I was writing without a finished thing to lean on. Winging it. I started recording videos on YouTube alongside the writing, and it began to feel more like the beginnings of a money grab and brand building maneuver than really putting something together that would benefit everyone involved. Looking back, I can see what was happening that I couldn’t see then: I was reaching for something I didn’t have the language for yet. The head-and-heart idea was still pulling at me. I just couldn’t deliver on it.
The click came at my last job.
I travelled almost every other week to talk with pastors and cast vision for a unified effort to share the gospel with their city, and to equip their people to participate in that work. I talked about Jesus’ high priestly prayer and the well-worn stump speech points our organization had used for over 60 years. These pastors were on board, and they knew they couldn’t do it without their congregations getting on board too. However, the same language I used with them couldn’t be the same language we used when we talked to the school teachers, plumbers, bankers, and business owners in their churches.
And somewhere in watching that, it landed on me: there had to be a way I could do the same thing with what I was doing. Those pastors were taking the deep things and putting them in the hands of people in the pew. That was the whole point. That was what I’d been circling since that seminary classroom.
Those everyday believers the pastors were equipping are the same people who long for more than just existing in their faith. I saw myself in them. We were asking the same two questions: so what? now what?
So what? Now what?
If you’ve spent any time in church, you know those questions. Maybe you’ve never said them out loud. Maybe you’ve felt them in the pause after a sermon you agreed with completely and walked out of unchanged. You believe the right things. You could pass the doctrine test. And still, somewhere underneath, there’s a question you’re almost embarrassed to ask: is this it?
But that question isn’t a sign your faith is weak. It’s a sign your faith is looking for something the church hasn’t always known how to give it.
We have no shortage of doctrine. Walk into most churches, and you’ll find people who can tell you what they believe about Scripture, about the cross, about the Trinity — and they’re not wrong. We’ve gotten good at orthodoxy. What we haven’t gotten good at is the bridge: the practice of taking what we believe and bringing it to bear on the questions an actual life actually asks. The teacher’s question. The plumber’s question. The banker’s question. Yours.
That’s the gap. Not a gap in what we believe — a gap in the discipline of living inside it, out loud, in front of a watching world that’s asking us harder questions than our stump speeches were built to answer.
And the strange thing is, most of us have been working in that gap for years without a name for it. Reaching for it. Circling it. Doing the work before we had a word for it.
Walk into Athens with Paul and watch what he doesn’t do.
He doesn’t torch the place. He’s provoked — Luke says his spirit was being provoked within him as he saw the city full of idols (Acts 17:16) — but provocation doesn’t become a tirade. Neither does he go quiet and accommodating, soft-pedaling the offense of the gospel to win a hearing. He does something harder than either. He looks. He walks the city, reads its altars, and finds the one inscribed To an Unknown God (17:23). Then he stands up in the Areopagus and says: that One you’ve been groping after in the dark — let me tell you his name.
That’s the whole posture in a single scene. Paul listens to Athens on Athens’s terms. He distills the longing underneath the idols — a city so hungry for the divine it builds altars to gods it can’t even name. And he reframes that longing under the true God, quoting their own poets back to them, not to flatter but to redirect. In him we live and move and have our being(17:28). He takes what Athens reached for and shows them Who was standing behind the reaching the whole time.
This is Redemptive Correlation before it had a name. Listen, distill, reframe, respond — read the culture through Scripture, not Scripture through the culture. I’m not the first to notice Paul doing this. A whole stream of thinkers has been circling the Areopagus lately, and they’ll tell you plainly that the practice is old even where the label is new — that what looks like a recent move “finds precedent,” as one recent volume on the subject puts it, “in significant apologists within the Christian tradition.”1 The instinct has always been there. What it’s lacked is a name and a discipline to hold it.
Tillich developed a method that ran in the opposite direction, letting the culture set the questions Scripture had to answer on the culture’s terms. Paul reverses the vector. He lets Athens ask, but he doesn’t let Athens decide. The altar names the hunger; only the gospel names the God.
But here’s what Acts 17 gives you and doesn’t give you. It gives you the posture — a way of standing before a culture without either burning it down or bowing to it. What it doesn’t give you is a way to keep standing there. The Areopagus is a moment. A discipline is a life.
For that, go to Paul's older writing to a younger man, he’s handing something to.
Pay close attention to your life and your teaching; persevere in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and your hearers (1 Timothy 4:16).
Read that slowly, because it refuses the split we keep trying to make. Life and teaching. Orthopraxy and orthodoxy. Paul doesn’t let Timothy choose. He doesn’t say guard the doctrine and the living will sort itself out, and he doesn’t say live well and the doctrine is negotiable. He fuses them and tells Timothy to persevere in the fusion — present tense, ongoing, a practice you stay in, not a position you take once.
Kevin Vanhoozer spent a whole book refusing that same split, arguing that doctrine — far from the dusty thing we’ve made it — is “the stuff of life” itself, the script we’re meant to live and not just shelve.2 He’s right. And it’s worth saying that a systematician of his weight needed four hundred pages to land what Paul hands Timothy in a single verse: the teaching and the life were never two things.
That’s the word the church keeps losing. Not doctrine — we have doctrine. Not technique — we have apologetic technique, debate scripts, a hundred ways to win an argument with an atheist. What we keep losing is the discipline: the sustained, named practice of holding life and teaching together and bringing both to bear on the questions the culture is actually asking.
Run it through the arc and watch it hold. In creation, life and doctrine were never two things — to know God truly was to live rightly before him; the knowing and the living were one motion. The fall split them, and we’ve been paying for the split ever since: orthodoxy that doesn’t touch the ground, orthopraxy unmoored from truth. Redemption is God refusing to leave the two apart — the Word made flesh, doctrine that walked and ate and bled, truth you could touch. And restoration is where Paul’s “save both yourself and your hearers” is pointing: a day when knowing and living are seamless again, when no one has to be reminded to watch their life and their teaching because the two will finally be one thing.
A method gets you through the Areopagus. A discipline gets you through the Christian life. Redemptive Correlation is the method.
And here I want to be careful, because what I’m describing has cousins. There’s a rich conversation happening right now under the banner of “cultural apologetics” — making the faith plausible, beautiful, and desirable to a watching world — and I’ve learned from it. But that work aims mostly outward, at the skeptic at the city gate. What I’m after runs the other direction too: inward, at the believer in the pew who already affirms the creed and still can’t feel the floor under it. Not just commending the faith to outsiders. Forming it in insiders.
The discipline I’m describing — theological apologetics, the practice of holding doctrine and life together and reading the culture through the gospel — needs a name too.
I’ve been calling it Theologetics for two years. I’m only now telling you it was a discipline the whole time.
So let me talk to you — the one still sitting with so what, now what.
I want you to hear that your question is not a problem to be solved. It’s a calling to be answered. The ache you feel when the doctrine doesn’t reach the ground isn’t your faith failing. It’s your faith refusing to settle for less than what it was made for. You were never meant to just hold the truth. You were meant to live inside it — to bring it to the desk, the job site, the dinner table, the friend deconstructing everything you still hold.
That’s not a job for pastors and scholars. The plumber doing this in his shop is doing theology. The teacher doing it in her classroom is doing theology. You, doing it wherever you actually are, are doing the thing this whole discipline exists to name and train and sharpen.
So stop waiting to be qualified. You already have the doctrine. What you’ve been missing is the discipline — and the discipline can be learned. That’s what this is. That’s what it’s always been.
Here’s what I’m building, and here’s how you can be part of it.
Theologetics is becoming more than a place I post. It’s becoming the work itself — the sustained practice of holding life and teaching together and reading the culture through the gospel, done out loud, every week, where you can watch it and learn it and do it yourself. The founding member tier is how that work gets resourced and how you get the most of it: an additional long-form piece every month, the full Phase 2 archive organized so you can actually use it, and a permanent seat at $5 a month or $50 a year, locked for as long as you stay.
When you click the button above, you’ll have the option to still subscribe for free, or select the paid option.
I’m not asking you to support a brand. I spent a season tempted to build one of those, and I walked away from it on purpose. I’m asking you to join a discipline — to put your money where your so what is, and help build the thing you’ve been circling all along.
Picture the city Paul walked around in.
Altars everywhere, to gods with no names — a whole culture aching toward something it couldn’t quite say. That city is still here. It’s the one outside your window, the one your coworkers live in, the one you and I were aching in not long ago. Full of people building altars to unnamed things, asking so what and now what into a silence they assume is all there is.
We have the Name. That’s the thing. We’re not standing in the Areopagus empty-handed, hoping to win an argument. We’re standing there knowing the One the altars were always reaching for — and the only question left is whether we’ll learn to say so, in a language the teacher and the plumber and the deconstructing friend can actually hear.
That’s the discipline. That’s the work. And it’s not finished in any of us — Paul told Timothy to persevere, present tense, because the day it’s fully formed in us isn’t a day we reach by ourselves or arrive at this side of restoration. We’re being made into people whose lives and teaching are finally one and the same. We’re not there. We’re on the way.
So come build it with me. Not because I’ve got it figured out — you’ve read far enough to know I don’t. But because the gap is real, and the work is good, and the city is still full of altars.
Let’s go learn to name the God behind them.
If this named something you’ve been circling too — the gap between what you believe and how you live it — then subscribe and stay. This is the work, every week.
And if someone came to mind while you read — the believer who can pass the doctrine test and still feels the floor missing — send this to them. That’s how this grows: not by going viral, but by going to the right person.
Joshua D. Chatraw, “A Framework for Retrieval,” in The Gospel After Christendom: An Introduction to Cultural Apologetics, ed. Collin Hansen, Skyler R. Flowers, and Ivan Mesa (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2025), 44–45.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), xiii.