Baptists

As I followed links looking for something I eventually didn't find, I happened upon "Why I Am a Baptist" by Albert Mohler. Mohler is a Southern Baptist; in fact, the president of their largest seminary, but I found his description of what makes Baptists distinct completely unobjectionable (however argumentative we Baptists may be). Some excerpts from a much longer, but very readable article:

Every great movement probably begins in an argument of some sort, and the Baptists emerged in the context of an argument that was intense, significant, and sometimes deadly. Luther had started it. The Calvinists believed he had not taken it far enough. The English Puritans likewise became convinced that the moderately reforming Church of England was not taking the argument far enough. The Separatists (who would include Congregationalists and Presbyterians) believed that the Puritans who remained in the Church of England were not taking it far enough. The Baptists then separated from the Separatists because they were not taking it far enough. Since then, Baptists have not stopped arguing. They often argue among themselves, but more urgently, they argue for the necessity of conversion, for the believers’ church, for the baptism of believers alone, and for liberty of conscience.

The Baptists did not claim to have reestablished Christ’s church, but instead saw themselves as continuing the process of reforming the church through the establishment of true and godly congregations of visible saints—each entering into the covenant fellowship of the congregation by personal testimony of faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and personal commitment to obey Christ in baptism and faithful discipleship. ....

In 1646, Baptist churches in London defined saving faith in these terms:

Faith is the gift of God, wrought in the hearts of the elect by the Spirit of God; by which faith they come to know and believe the truth of the Scriptures, and the excellency of them above all other writings, and all things in the world, as they hold forth the glory of God in his attributes, the excellency of Christ in his nature and offices, and of the power and fulness of the Spirit in his workings and operations; and so are enabled to cast their souls upon this truth thus believed.

Such saving faith, the Baptists continued, “is ordinarily begotten by the preaching of the gospel, or word of Christ.” When you find real Baptists, you will find the preaching of the gospel—the declaration of the great good news that salvation and the forgiveness of sins are bestowed upon all who hear the word of Christ and believe, who rest from their labors to make themselves worthy of salvation and by grace through faith receive the mercy of God, by the merits of Christ alone. ....

The definition of Christ’s church as wholly regenerate is perhaps the most radical of all Baptist doctrines. The necessity of conversion leads to the affirmation of the church as the body of those who are converted, who have heard the gospel and been saved. Others among the Puritans and Separatists approached this affirmation, but the Baptists plowed right through the arguments, insisting there could be no other notion of Christ’s church than that it comprises the twice-born, regenerate believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, who have individually professed their belief in Christ and demonstrated their regeneration through obedience to Christ and his commands. ....

The rightly ordered church is a body of regenerate believers, gathered by common faith and common confession and a church covenant that defines the commitments of church membership. This rightly ordered church appoints the elders and pastors needed for its ministry and organizes its work on its own authority.

One of the most venerable of our Baptist church covenants explains:

As we trust we have been brought by divine grace to embrace the Lord Jesus Christ, and by the influence of his Spirit to give ourselves up to him, so we do now solemnly covenant with each other, that, God enabling us: we will walk together in brotherly love; that we will exercise a Christian care and watchfulness over each other, and faithfully warn, rebuke, and admonish one another, as the case shall require; that we will not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, nor omit the great duty of prayer, both for ourselves and for others; that we will participate in each other’s joys, and endeavor, with tenderness and sympathy, to bear each other’s burdens and sorrows; that we will earnestly endeavor to bring up such as may be under our care in the nurture and admonition of the Lord; that we will seek divine aid to enable us to walk circumspectly and watchfully in the world; denying ungodliness and every worldly lust; that we will strive together for the support of a faithful evangelical ministry among us; that we will endeavor by example and effort to win souls to Christ; and, through life, amidst evil report and good report seek to live to the glory of Him who hath called us out of darkness into his marvellous light.

As others have noted, the Baptists have not been ardent ecumenists. But they have always recognized that there are true Christians in other churches and communions. ....The practice of baptizing only those persons who personally profess faith in Christ became the defining issue for Baptists. Reading the New Testament, they concluded that infant baptism was no real baptism and that baptism, like the Lord’s Supper, was not a sacrament but an ordinance—an act commanded by Christ. The new believer, having given evidence of saving faith and a commitment to follow Christ, is baptized into the fellowship of the church, with the waters of baptism the context for the believer’s profession of faith. Baptism is also the ordinance of entry into the membership and fellowship of the congregation. .... (more)

R. Albert Mohler Jr., "Why I Am a Baptist," First Things, August 1, 2020.

"But like a child at home"

Challies, quoting from Brett McCracken's The Wisdom of Sleep:

As we lie down to sleep, we give our mental anxieties and physical exhaustions to God, trusting him to tend to our burdens and restore us in the death of night, reviving us every morning. Every lying down to sleep is an enactment of the death and resurrection cycle of our salvation. We give up any notion of saving ourselves as we drift off to sleep. We can only trust that God will preserve us through the night, as he did the Israelites behind the bloodstained doors in Egypt through that terrifying night of wailing (Ex. 12:1–30). And we must trust not only that God will get us through night’s death but also that he will deliver us to new life in the morning, as he did for the Israelites in their exodus out of Egypt and eventually to the promised land. “The Lord kept vigil that night to bring them out of Egypt” (Ex. 12:42), and he keeps vigil every night, the sovereign author and perfecter of our faith.

Do we sleep well and rest easy as an outgrowth of our trust in God, calmed by the internalized, embodied knowledge that God reigns and keeps watch over our every breath?

Maybe we should strive to be more like a sleeping baby at peace in a parent’s arms. ....

Chesterton:

The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection. (G.K. Chesterton, "The Meaning of Dreams" in Lunacy and Letters [pdf]).

A children's prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep;

And if I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

"At a particular time and in a specific place"

Yesterday I quoted from Paul Johnson's Modern Times. Johnson was an historian, a graduate of Oxford, a student of C.S. Lewis, and a Christian. The quotations below are from two of his essays I once posted here, neither of which I could find online when I searched today. If anyone does find the sources, please let me know where.

From "A Historian Looks at Jesus":

Christianity, like the Judaism from which it sprang, is a historical religion, or it is nothing. It does not deal in myths and metaphors and symbols, or in states of being and cycles. It deals in facts. It presupposes a linear flight in time, through a real universe of concrete events. It sees humanity as marching inexorably from an irrecoverable past into an unprecedented future. The march is not haphazard. It proceeds according to a divine plan, in part revealed to us. Christians believe that certain specific, historical events occurred, and that, in time, certain other specific historical events will occur, bringing humanity’s sojourn in this world to a climax. Then, to use Shakespeare’s phrase, “time must have a stop." There the Christian’s perception of the timeless world of eternity—the nonhistorical afterlife—is much less clear. But the Christian notion of historical time is very definite, and central to the faith.

Jesus, the Son of God, was born of a virgin, at a particular time and in a specific place. He was God and man. He was crucified for our sins, but rose again the third day. The incarnation and the resurrection are not metaphors but actual, historical events. A man or woman cannot reject their historicity and remain a Christian. To accept the message of Christ, the teaching, the ethics, the example, the human perfection of Christ, is not enough. It is necessary to accept the Godhead as well as the manhood, to believe that the incarnation and the resurrection actually occurred. Without them, Christianity is nothing; it becomes a mere fantasy, a delusion. .... (more)

And from one about Evelyn Waugh:

The truth is that all of us are Jekyll and Hyde creatures, part saint, part beast. The great strength of Christianity is that, while insisting that man is made in the image of God, it accepts that there is a radical flaw in the reproduction. From time to time, God's image is reflected in man's face as in a hideous distorting mirror. Theologians call this the doctrine of Original Sin. But this is merely to rationalize what we can all observe but cannot explain. Shakespeare, in his marvelous play Hamlet, in which he tried to pour everything he knew of man's ambivalent nature, has his hero say: 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a God!' And yet, he adds, man is the quintessence of dust. Man can be, and often is, the most destructive, cruel and malicious of creatures. When Dr. Samuel Johnson was touring the Scottish Highlands with James Boswell, Lady Macleod of Dunvegan Castle asked him if no man was naturally good. He replied: 'No madam, no more than a wolf!' Boswell: 'Nor no woman, Sir?' Johnson: 'No, Sir!'

Dr. Johnson's listeners were shocked by his rigor, but what he meant was obvious enough. We have a propensity to evil in our natures which cannot be entirely corrected from our own resources. We need external help to keep our dark side under control.... (more)

Paul Johnson's approach reminds me of Dorothy L. Sayers.

God is God, and I am not

I was recently reminded of Ben Patterson's Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent, a book that has been important to my understanding, so I repost this from "The Epilog" of that book:

Does it strike you as odd that a book on waiting has scarcely mentioned the word patience? Or perseverance? Aren't those the virtues that we are to exercise when we are forced to wait? They are, but they are secondary to what really is needed to wait with grace. More basic than patience or perseverance are humility and hope. These two are the attitudes, the visions of life, that make patience possible. Patience is a rare and lovely flower that grows only in the soil of humility and hope.

Humility makes patience possible because it shows us our proper place in the universe. God is God, we are his creatures; he is the King, we are his subjects; he is master, we are his servants. We have no demands to make, no rights to assert. I can be impatient only if I think that whatever it is I want is being withheld or delayed unfairly. As Chuck Swindoll put it, "God is not in your appointment book; you're in his." His superiority is not only in power and authority, it is in love and wisdom as well. He has the right to do whatever he wants to do, whenever he wants to do it, but he also has the love to desire what is best for all his creatures and the wisdom to know what is best. He is superior to us in every conceivable way—in power and love and wisdom. To know that is to be patient.

Hope makes patience possible because it gives us the confidence that our wait is not in vain. Hope believes that this God of love, power and wisdom is on our side. It exults in the knowledge that, in the delays of life, he knows exactly what he is doing. If he moves quickly, it is for our good; if he moves slowly, it is for our good. No matter how things look to us, God is the complete master of the situation. There is an old theological word for this—providence. The venerable Heidelberg Catechism defines God's providence as:

The Almighty and everywhere present power of God; whereby, as it were, by his hand, he upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures; so that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea all things come not by chance, but by his fatherly hand.

There are no accidents, no glitches with God. He does all things well. Everything that comes to us comes by his hand and through his heart. He provides for our needs and fulfills our deepest desires in the fullness of time, not a moment too late, nor a second too soon. Hope assures us that in all things, even in the delays of life, God is working for our good. To know that is to be patient.

One of the surprise "goods" that God is working for us as we wait is the forging of our character. What we become as we wait is at least as important as the thing we wait for. To wait in hope is not just to pass the time until the wait is over. It is to see the time passing as part of the process God is using to make us into the people he created us to be. Job emerges from his wait dazzled and transformed. Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah.

Hope invites us to look at our waitings from the grand perspective of God's eternal purposes. In fact to be a believer is, by definition, to be one who waits. When Jesus won his victory over sin and death, he ascended into heaven, promising one day to return. We Christians wait for that return, poised between the times, in the "already, but not yet." We look back to his victory and strain forward to see its consummation.

The apostle Paul says the pain of our waiting is like the waiting of childbirth. It is the tension and groaning of labor (Rom 8:22-25). I attended my wife in the births of each of our four children. One thing struck me as odd about each event: that the time when she was required to exert her greatest effort and push the baby out was the time when she was least able. She was exhausted from hours of labor and now she was to summon all her strength and push. How could she? Hope made it possible: the hope of giving birth to the child. When human strength was gone, something beyond the purely human took over and gave her the strength she needed.

The Bible said it would be this way for those who hope in God. "Those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint" (Is 40:31). Likewise for our Lord Jesus and his cross, "who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him...so that you will not grow weary and lose heart" (Heb 12:2-3).

My wish is that we might gain the humility and hope to not grow weary and lose heart. I hope that you and I might be able to say, with full hearts, what Henrietta Mears said near the end of her life. This wonderfully eccentric and indefatigable saint accomplished great things for God in her life. When asked if there was anything she would have done differently, had she her life to live over, she said without hesitation, "I would trust God more."

Ben Patterson, Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent, 1989, pp. 167-170.

Though the fig tree do not blossom,
nor fruit be on the vines,
the produce of the olive fail
and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold
and there be no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the LORD,
I will joy in the God of my salvation.  (Hab 3:17–18)

Something deeper

English vicars have noticed increasing numbers of young people in their congregations. The Church of England commissioned a report to discover "what was drawing 18 to 30-year-olds to it. .... It investigated those who had come to Christianity from lapsed or atheist English upbringings, and also from migrant backgrounds and other faiths." It was released with "a lack of fanfare," perhaps because it wasn't really what they wanted to hear. From The Telegraph yesterday:

.... It is clear that the spiritual needs of the young, as articulated in the report, are in severe tension with the Church’s own direction.

One notable finding is that many of the young were prompted to start their journey towards Christianity by its literary and intellectual heritage.

Respondents described encounters with C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dostoyevsky, and David Bentley Hart, the Orthodox theologian. One 28-year-old, who had not been to university, was engaged by his interest in J.R.R. Tolkien, when he came to understand the role that Christian thought played in The Lord of the Rings. ....

The report dismisses the idea that the young will be attracted simply by slick visuals and hollowed-out presentations of the faith. They are looking for a rigorous understanding of life and morality. Many are put off by the shallowness of modern secular culture and are looking for something deeper.

The beauty of the Church’s artistic heritage was for others the first hint of this deeper world. One 21-year-old spoke of visiting a church in York and finding the light “streaming through” the ancient stained glass windows “and casting rainbows everywhere” as being “the most beautiful thing” he had ever seen. The historic buildings, for the young, can be a powerful form of evangelism.

It is likewise for the centuries-old Book of Common Prayer. “You have a connection to something that…however many generations of your ancestors would recognise and understand, the same liturgy that you’re reading. [It’s] immensely powerful,” said one 25-year-old. ....

These findings are almost a complete catalogue of what the Church is moving away from. .... (more)

Bijan Omrani, "Gen Z craves full-fat religion while the Church acts like a secular NGO," The Telegraph, July 26, 2026.

Drifting away

Ryan Burge, who does statistical research about religion in America, was curious about why individuals become "nones." Once it seemed politics was the most important reason, but now not so much. The quotations below are from his conclusions based on the research. The article includes statistics and additional charts like the one above. Burge:

In the late 1990s, about 15% of liberals were nones compared to 5% of conservatives—a clear divide, but not an impassable chasm. That’s no longer true. Now, 43% of ideological liberals say they have no religious affiliation compared to just 12% of conservatives. A ten-point gap has tripled in size, and there’s no evidence these trend lines will converge anytime soon. ....

Among Catholic “stayers,” 39% are Republicans and 36% are Democrats. For Protestants who stuck around, those numbers are 47% and 29%, respectively. But among those who switched from Protestant to Catholic or Catholic to Protestant, a clear pattern emerges: switchers inside Christianity are consistently the most Republican of any subgroup examined here. ....

And here’s where I had a “holy cow” moment. The types of nones who are the least Democratic are those who have been non-religious their entire lives. Only 38% say they are Democrats, 42% identify as politically Independent, and 20% align with the GOP. In contrast, among ex-Christians who become nones, roughly 45% say they are Democrats—seven points higher than the “always nones.”

This is fascinating because it suggests a mismatch between what drives people to leave Protestantism or Catholicism and what it means to have never been religious at all. People who actively exit a faith tradition aren’t just drifting; they’re making a decision, and that decision appears correlated with a particular political worldview. Leaving a church isn’t religiously neutral; for many people, it seems to be a political act.

The “always nones” tell a different story. They weren’t pushed out of anything; they simply never had a religious identity to begin with. Without that experience of exit, there’s no corresponding political signal. They’re secular by default rather than conviction, and their politics reflect that—more Independent, less reliably Democratic, and harder to categorize. ....

...[A]mong those born in the 1990s and 2000s who left Christianity behind, only about a third identify as Democrats. The political premium that came with religious exit has nearly vanished. These younger “dechurchers” don’t look like political refugees; they look more like people who simply stopped going—gradually, quietly, without it meaning much ideologically one way or the other. ....

The story of the nones, in other words, has changed. The first wave left with conviction. The second wave just drifted out the door. (more)

Ryan Burge, "The First Wave Left with Conviction. The Second Wave Just Drifted," Graphs About Religion, July 16, 2026.

Mistaking suspicion for sophistication

Bryan A. Garner agrees that conspiracies do happen, but:

For some people, a bad outcome is never just a bad outcome, and a coincidence is never just a coincidence. There must always be a hidden hand behind it, coordinating events that, on the surface, look random or trivial.

Not long ago, this instinct seemed like harmless eccentricity. Conspiracy theorists lived at the margins, alongside doomsayers and end-time prophets. Most people treated them as curiosities rather than participants in serious argument. Today, though, that boundary has eroded. Conspiracy thinking hasn’t just survived into the present — it has moved into the mainstream of political and cultural life, shaping how large numbers of people interpret ordinary events. ....

Conspiracy thinking didn’t become mainstream because people suddenly became irrational. It became mainstream because habits that once signaled intellectual seriousness — skepticism, independence, distrust of authority — have mutated into forms that are less disciplined and less self-correcting.

Consider skepticism in its healthier forms. A skeptic is supposed to withhold belief until evidence justifies it. But conspiracy thinking often inverts that discipline. Official explanations are treated as suspect by default, while unofficial ones are treated as credible precisely because they’re unofficial. The burden of proof is quietly upended. Instead of asking what would make a claim true, people ask what would disprove it — and the claims are structured to resist disproof.

A healthy mind doesn’t begin with suspicion; it arrives there. It starts with a provisional willingness to accept ordinary explanations, then shifts toward doubt only when specific features of the evidence justify it — persistent anomalies, independent corroboration of misconduct, patterns that resist simpler accounts. Suspicion is an earned response, not a default posture, and it remains tethered to standards that allow it to be revised or abandoned when contrary evidence appears. Conspiracy thinking breaks from this discipline by treating suspicion of traditional sources as the starting point and then insulating that mindset from the kinds of evidence that would ordinarily dispel it.

What makes this especially strange is that conspiracy thinking often presents itself as the most skeptical stance available. Yet it routinely demands greater leaps of faith than the explanations it rejects. ....

Conspiracy thinking isn’t going away. It’s too deeply rooted in how human beings respond to uncertainty, scale, and loss of control. The real question isn’t whether it will persist but what conditions we might normalize around it. A society that mistakes suspicion for sophistication, and disbelief for intelligence, may feel more critical, but it’s actually becoming easier to persuade with less and less evidence. (more)

Bryan A. Garner, "The Heart of Conspiracy," National Review, June 11, 2026.

"Back when I didn’t believe in God..."

I found this book review very much worth reading. David Brooks:

Back when I didn’t believe in God, I did a lot of church shopping. I was trying to figure out which denomination of atheism I could have faith in. There were so many to choose from! Marxists, Freudians, existentialists, the hard-core science types like Richard Dawkins, and the rationalist philosophers like Bertrand Russell. In my Fatherless mansion, there were many rooms.

As I looked across all these different flavours of atheism, I think I intuited something that Christopher Beha makes explicit in his book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. Beha argues that it is a fallacy to define atheism as simply an absence of belief.

Atheists sometimes like to portray themselves that way. They like to tell what philosopher Charles Taylor calls subtraction stories: Over the last thousands of years, religious people built up all this mumbo-jumbo about the supposed supernatural world. The job for any reasonable person is to strip all that away and get down to reality itself—the stuff we can see, feel, and measure. In this telling, atheists don’t subscribe to a creed or a faith; they are just taking a neutral, objective look at empirical reality and following the evidence.

Beha counters that this is nonsense. In fact, atheists have a worldview just like anybody else. A worldview is a system of belief that describes the underlying nature of reality, a theory of how we ought to act, and a theory of knowledge, where we should go for wisdom. ....

Humans are structured in such a way that it is hard for us to feel content unless our mess of desires is drawn by something outside ourselves, some supreme love that harmonizes them. Humans were built in such a way that it is hard for us to find peace through self-analysis, as the rationalists might suppose, or self-creation, as the Romantics argue, but only through the self-emptying love that flows from a sanctified soul.

The second advantage of the religious worldview is that it provides a structure for that yearning; it provides a way. Many secular worldviews are neutral about ends. It’s up to each person to define the goal of their life. (This is not true of Marxism, which is a religion without God.) Many secular worldviews have failed to come up with compelling systems of morality precisely because, without a concept of what life is for, it is hard to come up with justifications that separate right from wrong. .... (more)

David Brooks, "More Than Evolution Requires: Christopher Beha’s journey out of atheism," Comment

"I know that my Redeemer lives..."

In 1988, I gave my pastor, Rev. Kevin Butler, a sealed envelope containing my "Funeral and Burial Instructions." Recently, his wife, Janet, came across that envelope in his desk. I was curious about my thoughts on such matters almost forty years ago, so I asked if it could be mailed to me. It came today (thanks, Janet). Not much has changed, although my hymn selections might vary a bit. Following the burial instructions, I wrote:

3. I am a Christian. I believe that I will live eternally in the presence of God. I wish a service that reflects that fact. If possible, I would like the following elements to be a part of that service:

• "The Order for the Burial of the Dead" from The Book of Common Prayer, 1559. I do not want a modern language version.
• Hymns: "Amazing Grace," especially the verse: "When we've been there ten thousand years..." Isaac Watts' "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" to St Anne's tune.
• If possible, a soloist and choir to sing "O Taste and See" by Ralph Vaughan Williams from the Sacred and Secular Songs.
• Only the barest and briefest eulogy, or none at all.
• No choruses and as little sentimentality as possible.

4. The service must be conducted by someone who is orthodox in Christian doctrine and who believes the words he will say or read.

Today, I might add or substitute the hymn "How Firm a Foundation." The Vaughan Williams is probably a bit much to ask (see below). I would change the Prayer Book selection for the scriptures, prayers, and readings to the 1662 version of "The Order for the Burial of the Dead." By and large, though, it was fine — just a description of the ordinary elements of a Christian funeral with some personalization. I won't mind if the need for such instruction is postponed for a while.

“Either Jesus never was or he still is"

From "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief":

Muggeridge was one of the top journalists of his time. A British newspaperman who became an influential television broadcaster, he was a natural skeptic. This trait served him well in the Soviet Union, where the Manchester Guardian sent him in the fall of 1932. Like many young socialists, the 29-year-old Muggeridge was drawn to the supposed warmth of collectivism. In the cold of winter, however, he heard rumors of deprivation. During Lent in 1933, he defied a travel ban on journalists, sneaked aboard a train and searched for the truth in Ukraine.

As Easter loomed, Muggeridge observed the horror of the Holodomor, a famine imposed by Stalin through state-run farming and the seizure of harvests. He witnessed starving peasants, empty villages and “hard-faced” soldiers. Years later, in his autobiography, he called it “a nightmare memory.”

Then came the wonder. On a Sunday morning in Kyiv, acting on an impulse, Muggeridge entered a church. “It was packed tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar,” he wrote. The devotion of the people amazed him. “Never before or since have I participated in such worship; the sense conveyed of turning to God in great affliction was overpowering . . . I felt closer to God then than I ever had before, or am likely to again.” ....

His moment of conversion came in 1967, while filming a BBC program on the Holy Land. It happened in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

As at the church in Kyiv, the faith of others stirred him. “Seeing a party of Christian pilgrims at one of these shrines, their faces bright with faith, their voices as they sang so evidently and joyously aware of their Saviour’s nearness, I understood that for them the shrine was authentic,” he wrote. “I, too, became aware that there really had been a man, Jesus, who was also God.” His faith was still a work in progress. It “remained rather abstract, a useful counterpoint to his attacks on secular liberalism,” wrote his definitive biographer Gregory Wolfe. ....

In his last years, Muggeridge wrote about his deepening faith, culminating in the 1975 publication of Jesus: The Man Who Lives. The frontispiece of the original edition is a photo from a Spanish abbey of what may be a touchstone image for Muggeridge: doubting Thomas touching the wound of Christ in a stone bas-relief.

The Resurrection “seems to me indubitably true,” wrote Muggeridge at the book’s end. “Either Jesus never was or he still is. As a typical product of these confused times, with a skeptical mind and a sensual disposition, diffidently and unworthily, but with the utmost sincerity, I assert that he still is.” .... (more)

John J. Miller, "Malcolm Muggeridge’s Journey to Christian Belief," The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2026.

"Why do you hide your face from me?"

From "The World Needs to Recover True Lament. Christianity Can Teach It"

In the psalms, lament is a structured form of prayer that follows a discernible pattern: crying out to God, complaining, requesting, remembering God’s works, and—perhaps most surprisingly—often ending in praise of God. And for much of contemporary American Christianity, which we know best and have been studying for years, it has quietly disappeared. ....

...[O]nly about 4 percent of contemporary Protestant Christian worship songs reflect the kind of lament modeled in the psalms, despite the fact that nearly 40 percent of the biblical Psalter consists of laments. The hymnal of Israel was saturated with honest complaint. Ours largely is not. At some point—and this has been well-documented by theologians like Soong-Chan Rah, Todd Billings, and Walter Brueggemann—much of American Christianity internalized a triumphalist posture toward suffering: one that emphasized victory, gratitude, and praise, and grew increasingly uncomfortable with the raw petition and protest that fill the psalms. ...

When churches ask suffering people to outwardly project trust rather than speak truth, they are asking a particular kind of thing from a particular kind of person: the person for whom Sunday morning is often the loneliest hour of the week. The cancer patient. The grieving parent. The one whose life has come apart. Even if unintentionally, they are often the ones being asked to manage their presentation, to signal resilience, to express gratitude before they have had space to grieve. When we silence the pain of our most vulnerable members, we are telling them that their full reality does not belong in the community of faith. ....

The psalmists knew the value of inconvenient honesty. The two fundamental questions of lament, as musician and author Michael Card has written, are “God, where are you?” and “God, if you love me, then why?” Jesus prayed a lament psalm (Psalm 22) from the cross, crying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These are not questions the psalms treat as spiritually dangerous. They are questions that Scripture itself models—and models prolifically. Lament is not the opposite of faith. It is one of its most ancient expressions. To deprive suffering people of this practice is to withhold from them a resource that Scripture provides precisely for moments like theirs. ....

There is a difference between complaining to God and complaining about God. The psalms of lament do the former. They bring honest anguish, protest, even anger—directly into the presence of God. This is not the same as griping about God to others. The counterintuitive truth is that complaining to God can be an act of faith: It demonstrates that you still believe God is present, that God hears, that the relationship can bear the weight of honest expression.

This is what lament does. It does not offer an explanation for suffering. It does not promise that circumstances will change. It offers something more basic: a structure for telling the truth about pain in the presence of a God who, the psalms insist, does not despise or ignore the cry of the afflicted. .... (more)

"The World Needs to Recover True Lament. Christianity Can Teach It," The Dispatch, March 22, 2026.

What about evolution?

A recent article at Mere Orthodoxy describes the results of a "Pew Religious Landscape Survey" on American beliefs about evolution. The choices offered were:

1. Humans have evolved over time due to processes such as natural selection; God or a higher power had no role in this process. (“pure evolution”).
2. Humans have evolved over time due to processes that were guided or allowed by God or a higher power. (“intelligent design”).
3. Humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. (“creationist view”).

Breaking it down:

The article, "What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism" intends to be read as analysis rather than advocacy. But it does advocate tolerance among Christians of varying views:

It seems that a central argument of some young-earth creationists is this: “If you deviate from the panoply of interpretations we offer on Genesis 1-11, it is because you are succumbing to secularism and downgrading the authority of the Bible.” But, as soon as you find Christians who deviate from their interpretation, but have demonstrably not been animated by secular science nor have abandoned their high view of Scripture’s authority or the historicity of the miraculous…then the argument starts to fall apart. If young-earth creationists want to regain ground on this issue with the wider culture, it might, paradoxically, come from being more open-minded towards other Christians who disagree with them.

When Copernicus and Galileo strove to demonstrate that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, the church was able to provide sophisticated (if not convoluted) Biblical and naturalistic arguments to refute the claim. But they were wrong. And, in time, the Church realized this and adopted heliocentrism. This wasn’t a concession that science had more authority than God's Word, but an admission that they had simply interpreted the Bible incorrectly.

This realization did not diminish what God’s Word told us about the rising and setting of the sun or the foundations upon which the earth rested, but it moved us closer to seeing what the author originally intended when he used those word pictures. Similarly, if we approach Genesis 1 assuming that its primary function is to refute figures like Darwin, we will miss the meat and marrow of what the Divine Author intended for us to receive from His Word and therefore may fundamentally misunderstand His world. (more)

Marc Sims, "What to Learn from the Decline of Young Earth Creationism," Mere Orthodoxy, March 6, 2026.

"Yet I will rejoice"

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines,
The produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food,
the flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls,
Yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength; He makes my feet like the deer’s.
He makes me tread on high places. 

Habakkuk 3:17-19 [ESV]

The final verse of Cowper's hymn is based on that passage from Habakkuk. It is a favorite hymn of mine, although several others of Cowper's are, too.

Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings;
It is the Lord who rises with healing in His wings:
When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain.

In holy contemplation, we sweetly then pursue
The theme of God’s salvation, and find it ever new.
Set free from present sorrow, we cheerfully can say,
'E'en let th' unknown tomorrow bring with it what it may.

It can bring with it nothing, but He will bear us through.
Who gives the lilies clothing will clothe His people, too;
Beneath the spreading heavens, no creature but is fed;
And He Who feeds the ravens will give His children bread.

Though vine, nor fig tree, neither, their wonted fruit should bear,
Tho' all the field should wither, nor flocks, nor herds, be there,
Yet God, the same abiding, His praise shall tune my voice
For while in Him confiding, I cannot but rejoice.
(William Cowper, c. 1779)

Poets' Corner - William Cowper: Olney Hymns

A journey to faith

From another review of Charles Murray's Taking Religion Seriously:

At the heart of Murray’s argument are two points that I find particularly compelling. Like Cardinal Newman and C.S. Lewis (from whom Murray draws abundantly), Murray believes that there is a nonarbitrary “Moral Law” manifest in human conscience that reveals the nature of good and evil and encourages us to “do the right thing.” With Lewis’s help, Murray sees through facile moral and cultural relativism. Even in the midst of genuine diversity of mores and practices, what Lewis called “the Tao” can still be seen. Where on earth have an entire people or culture esteemed in principle faithlessness over loyalty, murder over the obligation not to kill, falsehood over truth, cowardice over courage, rank selfishness over the common good? No, all human cultures at their core see themselves as morally bound and morally guided. ....

Murray has therefore arrived at a position that is not merely theistic but genuinely Christian. With due modesty, he has come to believe that we live in an “intentional universe” and have access to a binding “moral bedrock” amid the chaos of “tumultuous changes in the secular received wisdom about what is right and wrong, good and evil.” He has also come to believe in the reality of sin, as well as in the life-transforming “forgiveness of sins” through the offices of a just and merciful God as proclaimed and made manifest by Jesus Christ. Given Murray’s personal starting point and scientific credentials, the witness of his journey to faith is all the more winsome. One could see him as the antitype and antidote to those, like Richard Dawkins, who speak of a “universe of ‘no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.’” (more)

Daniel J. Mahoney, "Charles Murray, in Good Faith," National Review, Dec. 18, 2025.

From agnosticism to belief

From Barton Swaim's review of Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously:

.... A Christian friend, asked by Mr. Murray how he had come to faith, named C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity (1952). Lewis’s argument that Jesus couldn’t have been a “great moral teacher” if he wasn’t the Son of God, as he claimed to be, grabbed Mr. Murray’s attention. The usual response—that the Gospels don’t record what Jesus said and did, and that belief in his divinity was a much later invention—led Mr. Murray to read an array of books on the four Gospels’ origins. (In a series of vignettes, Taking Religion Seriously lists all the books the author read in his journey from agnosticism to belief.)

One of those books on the Gospels’ formation is perhaps the greatest of them all: Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), a densely researched and dispassionate argument that the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are more or less what they present themselves to be: accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, compiled from the testimonies of eyewitnesses. Mr. Murray also read prominent critical accounts of the Gospels—books by Bart Ehrman, among others, that reject all supernatural claims—and wasn’t so impressed.

These latter accounts, Mr. Murray concludes, falter under the weight of unanswered questions. Among those questions: If the idea of Jesus’ divinity was so late an invention, as all critical biblical scholarship must assume, how is it that not a single New Testament book so much as alludes to the most cataclysmic event of ancient Judaism, the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70? Jesus foretells its destruction in the Gospels, and this has been interpreted as a later insertion to make him sound prophetic, but are we to believe that any mention of the temple’s actual destruction never found its way into any New Testament book?

And why does the Acts of the Apostles end with the reader wondering what became of its two most important characters, when we know they were martyred? “If people kept augmenting and altering the books of the New Testament as the revisionists insist,” Mr. Murray wonders, “why wouldn’t someone have added a few lines at the ending of the Acts mentioning the deaths of Paul and Peter?” The most plausible answer, of course, is that Luke’s account was finished before their deaths and no one in subsequent decades felt sufficiently bold to tamper with it. And most puzzling of all: Why did Jesus’ disciples go to their deaths insisting he had been raised from the dead when they had neither hoped for nor expected such a thing in the first place, if they knew it never happened? .... (more)

Barton Swaim, "Taking Religion Seriously Review: Faith Makes a Comeback," Oct. 17, 2025.

Sons of the Father

From the final chapter of John R.W. Stott's Basic Christianity, "Being a Christian":

We saw earlier that our sins had alienated us from God. They had come as a barrier between us. Put differently, we were under the just condemnation of the Judge of all the earth. But now through Jesus Christ, who bore our condemnation and to whom by faith we have become united, we have been "justified," that is, brought into acceptance with God and pronounced righteous. Our Judge has become our Father. "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are," wrote John. "Father" and "Son" are the distinctive titles which Jesus gave to God and to himself, and they are the very names which he permits us to use! By union with him we are permitted to share something of his own intimate relation to the Father. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage in the middle of the third century AD, well expresses our privilege when writing about the Lord's Prayer:

How great is the Lord's indulgence! How great are his condescension and plenteousness of goodness towards us, seeing that he has wished us to pray in the sight of God in such a way as to call God Father, and to call ourselves sons of God, even as Christ is the Son of God—a name which none of us would dare to venture on in prayer, unless he himself had allowed us thus to pray.

Now at last we can repeat the Lord's Prayer without hypocrisy. Previously the words had a hollow sound; now they ring with new and noble meaning. God is indeed our Father in heaven, who knows our needs before we ask and will not fail to give good things to his children.

It may be necessary for us sometimes to receive correction at his hand, "for the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives." But in this he is treating us as sons and disciplining us for our good. With such a Father, loving, wise and strong, we can be delivered from all our fears.

John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity, Eerdman's Publishing, 1974.

Questing

An appreciation of Christianity is not enough. To be saved requires faith. From The Telegraph on "cultural Christianity":

Being a Christian, I suppose I should prefer Christian jokes about religion, but I often find the Jewish jokes have more bite. Here is one.

The boy who is about to be bar-mitzvahed approaches his instructor with a troubled expression: "Rabbi, I have to tell you something important. You see, I don't believe in God. The rabbi stares at the sad youth with scorn, and replies, "Do you think He cares?"

Even as a joke, it is unimaginable that a Christian priest could speak like that. He would have to tell the equivalent boy that he could not be confirmed without faith. He would probably add, by way of consolation, something like "God loves you all the same."

For Christianity, faith is the thing without which, nothing. Faith is not sufficient — hope is equally great, says St Paul, and love is the greatest — but faith is necessary. The Nicene Creed, 1,700 years old next month, is a statement of what a Christian must believe. This requirement, this "I believe...", spoken by each individual, is something that a great many well-disposed people, especially in the modern Western world, cannot conscientiously say.

Hence the existence of what are known as "cultural Christians". These are people who like the tenor of Christianity, its moral norms, its tenderness towards the poor and weak, the beauty of its liturgy and art, its civilisational benefits, but do not in fact believe that, as the Nicene Creed puts it, Jesus is "the only begotten son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds" etc. ....

Dr [Rowan] Williams is surely right that cultural Christians, because they do not believe, are not fully experiencing the life that is Jesus. There is the world of difference between, as he puts it, admiring Christianity and being "called on to love God". But what I think he fails to recognise is that most cultural Christians know that.

They are not in a steady state of contentment about where they are. They may well be, as the Archbishop thinks Jordan Peterson is, "sad and angry". After all, nearly 2,000 years after Jesus was unjustly killed, the number of things to be sad and angry about seems greater than at any time since 1945. The point, however, is that they are questing. They need help in that quest. ....

But faith, in any case, is not something human beings can create for themselves.

All we can try to be is in the right place at the right time. Cultural Christians do at least recognise that they may be in the right place, which probably means they are looking for the right time. (more)

Charles Moore, "Cultural Christians already know what they are missing from religion: faith," The Telegraph, April 18, 2025.

"He is not here..."

Some years ago, when a family in his community had suffered a terrible loss, a Lutheran pastor preached an Easter Vigil sermon:

.... For almost two thousand years, humans have heard this story and for almost two thousand years we have been coming up with reasons not to believe it. Perhaps Jesus' body was stolen, it is argued, and the appearances to his disciples were the work of an imposter. Perhaps the appearances were a mass hallucination by the disciples, unresolved grief expressing itself as a sort of denial that he was even dead. Maybe the empty tomb is a later addition to this story. Maybe the whole thing is a metaphor for the power of Jesus' teaching. Maybe it is an echo of the stories of the pagan gods of the ancient near east, who go to the underworld for a season and then come back, bringing spring with them. The sun will come up tomorrow and life will renew itself.

These arguments are, briefly, all balderdash. Yes, the stories are strange and filled with mystery. No, they do not create one consistent picture of that morning and the days that follow. But the doubt and confusion are written into the story from the start. This is not a confidence game or a fraud or a metaphor. The stories would look totally different if they were. The people who were there believed this had happened. What and how, exactly, they couldn't say. But it was unbearably, unbelievably real to them. ....

Yet there it was, and there it is: a tomb with no corpse. A door opening to a possibility we may not even want to entertain. That there is something beyond the grave—not in our warm, rose-tinged memories, not in some distant shore where the souls of the righteous congregate, not in the recurring cycle of nature, spring following winter and day following night, not in our plucky human desire to go on living despite it all—but in the love shown to a broken body as it is knitted back together. In the care shown to a dead body as it is revived to life. In the promise of salvation and in-gathering of all the peoples that is initiated by this one lonely empty tomb. In a new age that begins now, in the devil being cast out from this one cranny of earth, hell being crushed under this one foot, death being deprived of its spoils in this one corpse. .... (more)

Benjamin Dueholm, "Preaching the Easter Vigil," The Parish Bulletin, April 17, 2025.

The day in-between

From "Sitting, Waiting, and Hoping in the Tomb of Jesus" by A.J. Swoboda:

.... Martin Luther said himself that Saturday was the day that God himself lay cold in the grave. Friday was death, Sunday was hope, but Saturday was that seemingly ignored middle day between them when God occupied a dirty grave in a little garden outside Jerusalem. Saturday is about waiting, about uncertainty, about not knowing what’ll happen. ....

So much of Christian faith is Saturday faith. ....

A medieval theologian, Anselm, once described the kind of faith that comes with Saturday—fides quaerens intellectum: “faith seeking understanding.” By that, he meant that faith isn’t something that arises after moments of understanding. Rather, faith is something that you cling to when understanding and reason lay dead. We don’t believe once we understand it—we believe in order to understand it. Saturday’s like that: offering a day of waiting, a day of ambiguity, a day when God is sovereign even if our ideas and theologies and expectations about him are not. It is the day that our ignorance is our witness and our proclamation. Truth is, our intellect will always be one step behind in our love of God. We don’t love God once we understand him; we love God in order to understand him. ....

At times, we are all like the two disciples on their way to Emmaus who were really close to Jesus but didn’t always know it. In Luke 24, two disciples walked away from Jerusalem, where they’d just seen their Lord and Master die on the cross. Leaving, dejected, upset, hopeless, and broken, to find the next stage in their lives and careers. Unbeknownst to them, Jesus had been resurrected and was actually walking alongside them on their way to Emmaus. The hope of Sunday hadn’t dawned on them yet. The Gospels tell us that, on their way to Emmaus, the disciples were “downcast.”

That experience is the kind of experience Saturday is all about. .... (more)

This is from A.J. Swoboda's A Glorious Dark: Finding Hope in the Tension between Belief and Experience, excerpted in Christianity Today.

Sitting, Waiting, and Hoping in the Tomb of Jesus | Christianity Today

"All-or-nothing"

Michael at Shadow to Light usually takes on the arguments of atheists. This time, he posts on a subject that will annoy some Christians: "The First Chapters of Genesis":

There are many Christians who argue that the first chapters of Genesis must be read as literal history. What’s more, if you refuse to embrace such an interpretation, you are rejecting the Bible, therefore rejecting Christianity. I don’t agree. In fact, when I read the first chapters of Genesis, it’s seems clear (to me) that we are dealing with a significant amount of symbolism. In other words, Genesis reads more like symbolic history, an allegory that is conveying deeper truths about our past and who we are. The literalists would disagree, arguing that unless Genesis is literal history, describing things as they happened, it’s nothing more than a fantasy. And of course, atheists everywhere are happy to weigh in and agree with this all-or-nothing thinking. ....

He intends to do a series on the subject: "First, I want to lay out some of reasons I think Genesis is meant to be interpreted as symbolic history. Second, consider some of the truths that Genesis is conveying. Finally, consider what would be the historical truths."

Michael, "The First Chapters of Genesis," Shadow to Light, April 6, 2025.