Category: Theology

They want to shoot you, not refute you. The distractive nature—and ultimate futility—of political struggle.

Rioters cause havoc in Los Angeles as they rail against the US Government
Protesters hold up foreign flags during protests after a series of immigration raids on June 8, 2025 in Los Angeles. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

(Also on Substack)

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. (1 Timothy 2:1-2 ESV)

In my ultra-“progressive” neighborhood, tragically represented in Congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, soon in Gracie Mansion by Zohran Mamdani, I noticed flyers taped to the public-facing windows of storefronts. One of them, directed at I.C.E., shouts:

Get the f— out of our city! You f—ing monsters!

Like Christmas, I.C.E. is coming to New York City with lawful orders to remove, as they have from Chicago and other cities, illegal aliens convicted of horrific crimes. Those behind the flyers, however, do not reserve “monsters” for those child predators and sex-traffickers. The tone of the flyer communicates an unwillingness to debate. The offer of debate would only reveal oneself to be an enemy. They have proven willing to act violently on that predicate.

The prospect of removal warms my heart, but it will happen only because of who won the presidency last November (but not, I remind my readers, with a 90% majority). Many who had voted for Trump now voted for Mamdani.

There will be riots. Now, how much time and other precious resources should I allocate to politics, electoral or any other? This question all Christians must answer for themselves. Trump’s victory only shifted probabilities, not the anti-Christian, anti-civilizational center of gravity.

The spiritual rot has set in all over. Culturally, the kids who were under my feet in the Nineties, the grandkids of the antinomian screwballs I knew in the Seventies, are now running things, only they read even less, emote even more.

Turning Point USA loves to debate. God bless them and keep them safe, but we saw what that got Charlie Kirk. That’s their answer. What’s our rebuttal?

The civil war is no longer a cold one. The emotional answer of shit-for-brains brats to Charlie’s “Prove me wrong” challenge is “F— you” and the like, etched on bullet casings. They want to shoot you, not refute you.

If, however, we could not only pray for what Paul urged us to pray for, but also influence the process that determines who will wield that authority, how much time should we spend trying to influence that process? For if hearts and minds are not changed, something only God can bring about, what does it profit us to be sucked into the endless dialectical whirlwind? For those who name the name of Christ, I deem it a distraction from our duty to feed on His Word and adjust our living accordingly.

I’m convinced we’re living in the last days of this dispensation (2 Timothy 3:1-9), a topic I will return to. Those with different convictions may prepare to mobilize troops, Lincoln-like, in response to the Fort Sumter-like attack that’s coming. I will spend the time I have left studying and sharing the Word.

Christian Individualism: a sneak-peek at the cover!

Also on Substack—please consider subscribing!

What I love about this cover—designed by Kevin Stone at the direction of Atmosphere Press’s art director Ronaldo Alves—is that it pits an abstract “ism” against two images, taken 60 or so years apart (1921-1981?), of a concrete historical individual. By itself, the former might trigger a yawn, but not the pix. “Who’s this?” is immediately followed by “What the heck is ‘Christian individualism’?”

The portraits’ similar orientation is fortunate. The earlier photo’s shadowy air brings out the later one’s brightness. I had feared having to settle for a cold, academic look, or a goofy, on-the-nose “religious” one. No, Kevin got it right: a warm, chocolatey hue (throughout the wraparound cover) showing a man in his element (his study and his studio), a man I knew and whose story I tell in the book.

There is yet no launch date, but at last we have a vivid symbol of what will be set out into the world in (God willing) the first half of 2026.  Between now and then I will explore issues that the book could only touch on, specifically “what it means to embrace Christian Individualism in a world where most people, even most Christians, see things differently.” (From the “Acknowledgements” of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, forthcoming 2026.)

Stay tuned!

The Reformation of Philosophy: Ordering Philosophical Questions in the Light of God’s Eternal Decree. A Christian Individualist’s Reformation Day Meditation, Dogmatically Expressed.

[View on Substack]

God has worked all things according to the counsel of His will.[1]

How do you like them apples, O Man?

Every breathtaking sunset, every animal-immolating forest fire.

Beethoven’s Fifth. Auschwitz’s gas chambers.

The regeneration of every healthy cell, the proliferation of every tumor.

Every orgasm, every rape.

Five hundred eight years ago today, Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic monk of the Augustinian order, proposed to debate in public certain theological propositions, 95 in all. He famously listed them on paper affixed (probably not nailed) to Castle Wittenburg’s door, the German farming town’s bulletin board.

Thus began the “Protestant Reformation,” without which there would be no Christian Individualism. The latter is downstream from the Reformers’ (partial but significant) work of recovering Biblical truth.

As a Christian Individualist, I do not subscribe to any Reformed ecclesiology,[2] yet I happily adopt the motto of Reformer Jodocus Van Lodenstein (1620-1677), semper reformanda.[3]

The object of continuing reformation, however, is not the society we call a “church,” but the individuals whom the Holy Spirit is progressively conforming to Christ through their obedience to His Word. Continue reading “The Reformation of Philosophy: Ordering Philosophical Questions in the Light of God’s Eternal Decree. A Christian Individualist’s Reformation Day Meditation, Dogmatically Expressed.”

Christian Individualism: A Substack for the book

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1902). 1921, the year he attended Moody Bible College (not Institute).

It’s a work in progress. It won’t replace this site but instead will anticipate next year’s publication (God willing) of Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers. The goal is to address questions that arose since I finished the 106,000+-word draft that finally found its way to the publisher. (It’s in the proofreading stage.)

I’ll discuss the book here on the way to its 2026 launch, but not in the detail you’ll find there; nor will I go into the finer points of Christian apologetics and “church history” as I might here.

So, please let me know what you think of that site’s very first “publication,” dated today: Christian Individualism: A way of life and, next year, a book and consider subscribing and spreading the word. Thank you!

Marking seven years, clarifying this site’s future course

This site was launched on October 3, 2018, seven years ago this month. In the future, I will focus on next year’s (God willing) publication of Christian Individualism and dedicate its posts to developing my understanding of Christian Individualism.

That understanding is not necessarily shared by anyone else, not even those who, like me, agree with the Biblical ecclesiology and eschatology of Otis Q. Sellers and the Word of Truth Ministry he founded in 1936. (Search his name on this site.)  Sellers didn’t found, lead, or belong to a “denomination,” and neither do I. I’m a sinner saved by grace. Period.

Overall, I’m pleased with this site’s more than 300 mini-essays, many being ancestors of book chapters. Now, however, in the time left to me, I will more sharply define the course of this site. It won’t be devoid of politics, history, and philosophy, but I will interpret all things, including those topics, through the lens of Scripture. I will ask those who disagree what their lenses are.

There will be more apologetics, that is, the defense of the Gospel. That will require making clear what I mean by that term as well as what it means to defend the hope that’s in me (1 Peter 3:15) and the peace that comes with being justified by faith and believing the Gospel (Romans 5:1). My intellectual world is centered on, revolves around, that.

I will give Christ the pre-eminence He’s always been due. Not C. L. R. James. Not Herbert Aptheker. Not Susanne Langer. Been there; done that. I will box up my books on, say, the history of communism and crack open more on the history of Christians living in the Dispensation of Grace, a.k.a. “church history.”

The logline of this site has been, “Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days (2 Tim. 3; Eph. 3:2). I will do a better job of living up to that implicit promise.

“. . . for the young man shall die a hundred years old.”

Yes, but because of the eonian (“eternal”) life flowing from the King—from Him Who is Life itself—to His subjects . . . not by organ transplants!

No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days, for the young man shall die a hundred years old, and the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed. Isaiah 65:20 (ESV)

The fiend in the Kremlin—the KGB alum who, we’re told, was “caught” the other day in a “hot mic” moment—fantasized to his equally fiendish Beijing host that “human organs can be continuously transplanted” and “the longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.”

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.” Genesis 3:4 (ESV)

In the future manifest Kingdom of God, the divine dispensation that will follow the present dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2; KJV), death will no longer be an enemy that eventually catches up with you, no matter what you eat, how much you exercise, or how many organs are transplanted from someone else’s body into yours. No infant will die prematurely, and centenarians will be considered boys and girls. If you die, it will be because something you do earns God’s wrath, as Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11), who lived in the “ear stage of the Kingdom” (Mark 4:26-29), earned that wrath by lying to the Holy Spirit. The present dispensation is a “parenthesis,” a regnum interruptum, if you will, between that stage and the “full grain in the ear stage,” the manifest Kingdom of God. Disease and death are outworkings of the curse of the Fall of man, not particular judgments. When God acts today, He acts only in grace.

Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers will, God willing, be published in 2026. In the meantime, searching <Otis Q. Sellers> on this site will provide answers to many of the questions that my dogmatic assertions above may have occasioned. But you can always ask one below.

Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.

That’s the question underlying my current project. Answering it might explain why I was drawn to revolutionary Marxism (of interest at least to me, if not to you).  Youngsters can be at once hypercritical and credulous. Revolutionary rejecters of the existing order, they fall for one or another “explanation” hook, line, and sinker.

Rummaging through the lives of Marxist intellectuals is no mere romantic, antiquarian interest of mine (although it is partly that). I will draw upon but not add to the biographies already written. I’m trying to understand, to the extent it is intelligible, the demonic madness we see on college campuses, draped in the language of moral outrage. (“F—  finals! Free Palestine!,” announced one savage disrupting  Columbia University students who were trying to use the main library to prepare for final exams, to cite only one example. I find the categories of intelligibility in Christian theology, specifically anthropology.

Created in God’s image and living in His world as (we all are), the miscreants have a sense of moral outrage (however misinformed), but they have nothing in which to ground it. On Monday, they’ll affirm that it’s wrong to starve children; on Tuesday, that an unborn child’s natural protector has the right to procure the services of an abortionist to destroy that child chemically, or cut him or her to pieces, or leave him or her to expire on a metal table. Most of them, if pressed, will say that, strictly speaking, we don’t know that we have more moral dignity than that of “evolved,” i.e., rearranged, pond scum. They merely dogmatize that we do.

I’m stepping back from the news and noise of the day to reflect on more civilized specimens of humanity, however much their careers betrayed the civilizing impulse. I want to explore why they thought Marxist revolution adequately addressed the moral outrage of interracial subjugation, cruelty, and savagery, evils that energized them? That it was such an answer is the conclusion at which my three very different intellectuals arrived.  It all starts with outrage at one or another fact in one man’s experience: colonialism, imperialism, slavery, peonage, Jim Crow.

I will also ask whether these men, if they were alive today, would embrace today’s savages. I fear they would have, as counterintuitive as such a conclusion might strike some. Continue reading “Whence “revolutionary” moral outrage? An attempt at a biblical answer.”

Christ Crucified, the death penalty, and the abolition of death

“Saint Dismas the Good Thief.” Icônes arabes : art chrétien du Levant, France: Institut du monde arabe (Public domain)

One of the criminals alongside whom Jesus was crucified said that while He had done nothing to deserve capital punishment, they had. That malefactor said they had received it justly (δικαίως, dikaiōs) and prayed He would remember him when He comes into His kingdom, implying that He is a King.

Jesus then spent what little energy He had left to promise the penitent one life in that Kingdom—but not to correct his penology (Luke 23:39-43). He had no reason to. As God (אֱלֹהִ֔ים, Elohim) warned Noah, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6).

This imperative is honored in many places in the Law of Moses, which He came to fulfill. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish (καταλῦσαι, katalysai) them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). His dying, however, would abolish (καταργήσαντος, katargēsantos) death itself (2 Timothy 1:10).

This week especially, those of us who by His grace identify with the penitent malefactor embrace that truth.

 

On dogma and dogmatism

William F. Vallicella,Ph.D.

Bill Vallicella, a friend and philosophical sparring partner of two decades, recently discussed another thinker’s argument from design to God.[1] Since my interest lies in biblical rather than “classical” theism, I will not engage with the argument itself or his discussion of it. Instead, I want to examine the presuppositions of philosophical theology general and a thesis of Bill’s in particular.

The presupposition of philosophical theology is that it is licit for a human being to suspend his knowledge of יהוה (Yahweh)—the God of the Bible—in order to explore the limits of philosophical inquiry with respect to God’s existence. From time to time, Bill revisits his thesis that there are no rationally compelling (“knock-down”) arguments for or against any metaphysical position. He did so again in his recent post, providing an opportunity for me to restate my position.

I was reminded of an essay I reposted in 2023, which first appeared on my old site twenty years earlier. In it, I critique “Dogmatic Uncertainty” by the British libertarian classicist and novelist Sean Gabb.[2] Both Gabb and Bill implicitly rely on the contrast between δόξα (doxa) and ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē)—that is, between “mere” opinion and certain knowledge. I presume that Bill, an expert in argumentation, has not ruled out the possibility that we are within our rights to claim ἐπιστήμη about God without supporting argumentation. But if I make that claim, am I being necessarily “dogmatic” in the pejorative sense? Continue reading “On dogma and dogmatism”