An Origin Story

It started a long, long, time ago in a galaxy far, far away… Okay, maybe not a different galaxy, but there was a desert and one possessing something more intriguing than Jawas and sand people. Around the year 270, a young man in Egypt slipped into the back of a church service after it had started. He was around twenty and his parents had recently died; leaving him a large piece of farmland and a younger sister to raise. As he sat down the Gospel was being read aloud, and a line surged to the back and grabbed him by the tunic, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”1

His name was Antony. We know the story because Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, wrote it down not long after Antony died, in a short book called the Life of Antony.2 The story unfolded like a movie scene, instead of going home to mull it over, he walked out of that service, gave the farmland to his neighbors, found a home for his sister with a community of Christian women, and kept a small portion of the money back. Then a few days later he heard another verse read, this one about not worrying over tomorrow,3 and he gave the money he kept back away too. He went to live in the desert dunes and stayed there, more or less, until he died at over a hundred. That is the famous part of the story, the one who gave everything away, and went off in infamy to become one of the great desert fathers. But there is something else in the story of equal interest—the act that made it all happen.

When Antony walked into that church in 270, he had no CSB study Bible on his knee, no YouVersion app open, no Moleskin journal and a pen. All he had were the few lines of Scripture spoken in a small room. He heard those words like they were spoken directly to him, for that particular morning, meant to be received in the present tense. 240 years earlier, on the road to Emmaus, two disciples turned to one another after a seven mile walk and said, “Were not our hearts burning within us while He talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”4 This was how the desert Christians approached the Scriptures and it’s not the way many of us were taught to read the Bible.

The Practice of Lectio Divina

I grew up in church, did the Bible drills, knew the catchy songs, and was trained to read Scripture the way you are taught to prep for an exam. Find the main idea, note who wrote it and why. Then get the interpretation right so you do not embarrass yourself in front of people who know more than you do. And you have to keep moving, because there is a reading plan to complete and you are two days behind—bless your heart. Now, that is not necessarily wrong, I have to confess in my hermeneutics course I teach some of it for a living. But reading the Bible this way does put you in a particular posture. You sit above the text with a highlighter and the Scriptures sits below you, like a puzzle needing to be solved. In the Egyptian desert, folks like St. Antony had the posture turned upside down. The monks sat under the text and waited and waited, allowing it to work on them.

30 years before Antony’s experience, Origen of Alexandria had written to a former student named Gregory and urged him to give himself to what he called divine reading, attending to Scripture with prayer and the expectation that God would meet him there.5 The desert father took this as their modus operandi. The monks memorized enormous stretches of the Bible, often the entire book of Psalms, and spoke it under their breath, slowly, while they wove rope and baskets through the long hours of manual labor.6 They would read a short passage aloud, slowly, then read it again. The Latin word associated around this was meditatio, which comes from meditari (to rehearse, turn over), the monks paired this with ruminatio which is where we get the image for what a cow does when it chews the cud.7 You take a small amount in, you keep working it over, and you do that until it becomes a part of you.

Evagrius, a brilliant monk who died in 399, taught the brothers to answer their worst thoughts with specific lines of Scripture, the way Jesus answered the tempter in the wilderness.8 A sand storm of despair would roll in and the monks would have a verse ready, learned by heart, fixed in their mind to say back. Scripture was food, it was life, and when needed a spiritual weapon kept within tongues reach.

Centuries later, around 1150, a Carthusian prior named Guigo II wrote a brief letter that gave this approach to reading the Bible a process anyone could follow. He pictured it as a ladder with four rungs. (1) You read a passage of Scripture. (2) You meditate on it, chewing it the way the monks in the desert did. (3) You pray and listen, answering God out of what you have just read. (4) Then you rest, staying in his presence with nothing left to say, no agenda; attuning your presence to God’s presence.9 Reading, meditation, prayer, rest, four rungs on a ladder. Guigo gave us a process and shape to what the desert monks had been practicing eight centuries earlier.

This method goes by a Latin name that we still use today: Lectio Divina (pronounced: lex-see-oh dih-vee-nah). It is simple and beautiful; you take a small (at most one chapter, but normally a pericope10) piece of the Scriptures and you move through it slowly. No rush, no goal, no completion waiting for you at the end with a check off list. You take that one piece of scripture and turn it over and over in your mind with the belief that God intends to say something to you through his Word today.

Here is what it changed for me, I am a type A, D on the DiSC, Enneagram 3, I eat goals for breakfast and tasks for lunch, type of achiever. I used to measure a morning by how much ground I covered in the Bible. Three chapters was the minimum acceptable amount. But today, I will take four or five verses and stay put. I will normally read them out loud, because when you read it out loud you hear things that reading in your mind will miss. Then I wait to notice which word or turn of phrase grabs me by the collar, and I have learned to trust the snag instead of hurrying past it, worrying I am going to miss something else. Then I talk to God about what pulled me, usually I say something short, I am not trying to impress Him, I just want to sit and receive from my Father, “God I don’t know what it is about this phrase here, but I think you want it to say something to me today.” After I talk to God about the word, phrase, or verse that arrested me, I just sit still. What I have learned, is the sitting still is the most meaningful part, the minutes I used to treat as a turning toward my day and moving on, have now become the point. Sitting and waiting, I place no expectations on myself, no set agenda, I wait in stillness and silence for God as I turn what grabbed me in the Scriptures over and over again in mind.

A note for those of us on the Protestant side of the family, since this practice grew up through the desert and monasteries and has been carried mostly by Catholic and Orthodox hands. Antony walked into the desert two full centuries before anything resembling our current divisions existed. Origen wrote his letter to Gregory more than twelve hundred years before Luther was born. This way of reading was held in common long before anyone thought to split up. Recovering this way of reading the Bible is closer to coming home than trying something new.

Moving Forward

The desert fathers did not leave us much of a method. They left something better: an expectation. They saw the opening of scripture as the opening of a door to an expected guest waiting to come in and speak their name. Practicing Lectio Divina is learning to see the Word like Antony experienced it 1,700 years ago. Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us.

Kings wrote back. Emperors wrote back. The pope read her work aloud to a room full of bishops and told her to keep going.

Hildegard of Bingen shouldn’t have had the influence she had. By every rule her world recognized, she was outside the circle of people who got to speak. She had no theological degree, no political office, no inherited title. She had visions she’d been quietly carrying since childhood—and eventually, she stopped keeping them to herself.

What followed was one of the strangest careers in church history: composer, scientist, preacher, prophet, and one of the most widely consulted voices in medieval Europe.

This episode is about Hildegard—but it’s really about influence. How it moves. Where it comes from. And why the people who aren’t supposed to be heard are sometimes the ones nobody can stop listening to.

Theology Made explores the ideas, figures, and moments in Christian history that still have something to say. New episodes every week.

The Rail and the Bread

She comes forward for communion with her hands cupped, the way she was taught as a girl from her grandmother, and somewhere between the rail and the bread an unwelcome, yet familiar, thought arrives, “Does this count for me anymore?” Her first husband is alive. He lives forty minutes south in Fort Mill with someone new. She has been married to her second husband for eleven years, it’s not a perfect marriage, but by most measures it is a good marriage, gentler and slower than the first. Yet, the question waits for her at the rail like it has a reserved seat each Sunday.

If her first marriage was real, and the church keeps telling her marriage is forever, then what is the thing she goes home to every night?

She has wanted to ask the pastor about this, but hasn’t found the courage yet to do it. Divorce carries a raw shame; a mix of regret, loss, and brokenness. And unlike the internal battles of the soul, this is visible to all, a scarlet D she carries wherever she goes. And as a faithful Christian there is the question that is always lingering; the one she can’t avoid.

Is my remarriage an offense to God?

Let me be upfront, I have been married to my beautiful wife for 15 years, far from perfect, but she is perfect for me. My story here is not of my own divorce, but one of coming from a broken home, and then being graced with a step-dad, who became my dad. I have sat across the table as a pastor with so many humble Christians who wrestle with this question. If divorce has not lived on any street in the neighborhood of your life, it is easy to dismiss the question as having a simple answer. The Christian church however has not spoken with one voice on the topic of divorce and remarriage. The reason is that Scripture itself hands us a knot that theologians have pulled at for two thousand years without agreeing on how exactly it comes loose. I am not claiming this article will give the definitive answer on divorce and remarriage, rather, it will provide a way to wrestle honestly and humbly with the text.

The verse that may not say what you think

Almost everyone who worries about this question lands first on a line from the prophet Malachi, “I hate divorce, says the Lord.”1 It gets printed on Free Will Baptist wedding programs, quoted in pre-martial counseling sessions, and sometimes used as a moralistic Whac-A-Mole. God hates divorce. End of conversation, let’s go get fried chicken.

There is a problem though, the Hebrew in that verse is a bit knotty. The older renderings of the verse made God the speaker who hates the act. A number of recent translations however, read the same consonants differently. The 2016 revision of the English Standard Version (no one's idea of a liberal text2) turns the line toward the man who hates and divorces his wife, the one who covers his garment with violence (following the Hebrew, which the ESV's main text softens to "does not love his wife but divorces her"). On that reading the verse is not God announcing a moral policy related to marriage. It is God taking the side of a discarded woman against the husband who threw her away. In this view, the thing God hates is the betrayal of the vulnerable one, which is close to the opposite of how the verse usually gets deployed against a divorced person in a pew. I am not here telling you which translation is right. I am telling you that the single most quoted proof text in this entire conversation rests on a disputed line, and how you read the dispute changes who the verse is for. Keep that in your pocket. We are going to come back to it in a bit.

Read more

We turned him into a hero.

This episode traces the Faust legend from its historical roots in the Holy Roman Empire to Christopher Marlowe’s stage, to Goethe’s radical reinvention of the character — and then straight into the present. Because the Faustian bargain didn’t end in the 16th century. It just changed address.

Ray Kurzweil wants to live forever. Peter Thiel is transfusing young blood. Silicon Valley is building what it openly calls a god. And the ancient heresy the early church spent centuries arguing against is back — this time wearing a lab coat.

This is an episode about the deal modern civilization is making. What it’s trading. What it’s losing.

How to Read Jürgen Moltmann

Moltmann’s theology was forged in a British POW camp after WWII, where he wrestled with despair, guilt, and the question of whether hope was still possible after the devastation of Europe.1

His big idea? Christianity is all about hope.

Ironically, most people lose hope trying to read him.

Moltmann’s one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the late 20th century, particularly related to eschatology and political theology.2 His theology reshaped how we think about the future, the cross, and why Christianity isn’t just about waiting around for heaven. But his writing? Not exactly light reading by the pool. In this article, is a step-by-step guide to reading Jürgen Moltmann without getting lost in the complexity.

STEP 1: Don’t Start With Theology of Hope

If you are just getting into his work, do not start with Theology of Hope. Unless, of course, you enjoy dense German academic writing, long sentences, and well, the fact that he isn’t writing in a vacuum. He’s arguing with the biggest voices of modern thought: Hegel on the meaning of history, Marx on social transformation, Nietzsche on the death of God, and Ernst Bloch, whose massive work explored humanity’s longing for a better future.3 In Theology of Hope Moltmann is asking a question colossal in size:

If the modern world is searching for hope in politics, progress, or human potential, what does the resurrection of Jesus actually offer that those visions can’t?

Once you realize he’s writing theology and engaging the entire modern search for hope, the density crammed into 344 pages makes a whole lot of sense.

I made this mistake when I first graduated seminary. I thought to myself, “I have a theology masters, a graduate degree, I wrote a thesis no one will ever read. Why not dive into his most famous book, how hard can it be?” Turns out, very. But it’s not because Theology of Hope isn’t great (it really is), but it’s a lot if you’re not already familiar with his ideas and a working knowledge of the philosophers he is engaging in. However, once you understand his core ideas you find there’s a better path to take.

STEP 2: Get His Big Idea

Here is Moltmann’s big concept.

Christianity isn’t about escaping this world, rather, it’s God’s future breaking into the present. And that future? It’s good. So good that it redefines how we live right now.

Think like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When Aslan returns to Narnia, winter starts to thaw before the final battle is won. His coming signals that the old order of endless winter is breaking; even though the fight isn’t over yet. That’s Moltmann’s theology. Christianity isn’t about escaping to a better world later, it’s about God’s future breaking in now, bringing hope, renewal, and transformation before the final victory.

The resurrection of Jesus is like Aslan’s return: a sign that the new world has already begun.

Here are the three primary themes for Moltmann related to this.

1. The Future: Christianity moves forward

Most theology starts with the past—what God has done. Moltmann flips it. He says the real story of Christianity is about where we’re headed. We’re not just looking back at the cross; we’re looking ahead at resurrection, restoration, and God making all things new. Christianity then isn’t just about personal salvation, but a cosmic level renewal. Eschatology isn’t the end of the story, for Moltmann it is the story itself.

2. The Cross: God suffers with us

Moltmann wrote a book called The Crucified God, and if that title sounds intense, it’s because it is. His argument? The cross isn’t just about Jesus dying for sin, it’s about God choosing to suffer with the world.4 God enters into human pain, Jesus statement in John 10:18 takes on a whole new meaning, no one would take Jesus’ life, he would lay it down, to suffer for and with His people. For Moltmann, this means Christianity isn’t a quick escape from suffering, it is the faith that allows us to meet suffering head-on. If God suffers, then pain and injustice can’t be ignored, avoided, or forgotten; they’re seen and central to the story.

3. The Resurrection: The future starts now

If the cross is God stepping into suffering, the resurrection is proof that suffering doesn’t win. And here’s one of Moltmann’s biggest points: the resurrection isn’t just about Jesus coming back to life, it’s the beginning of a whole new creation. It’s not just proof that life continues; it’s proof that the future is breaking into the present. Through this perspective, the church isn’t a waiting room for heaven, but where we live out the coming kingdom now.

STEP 3: Read With a Plan

Alright, you’re ready to actually read him. But going in blind is a mistake. Moltmann layers his arguments like a theological version of Super Mario Brothers: The Lost Levels, here’s how to get started without getting lost.

Level 1: Jesus Christ for Today’s World (Easy Mode)

If you read one Moltmann book to get your bearings, start here. This is Moltmann at his most accessible. It’s shorter, clearer, and written with the average (okay theologically minded average) reader in mind. This book gives you the framework for most of what he writes. As you read, three themes will emerge.

1. Jesus is the center of hope

For Moltmann, Christianity isn’t built around abstract ideas about God. It’s built around the living Christ; the one who died, rose, and is bringing the future of God into the present.

2. Salvation is bigger than individuals

Salvation isn’t just about getting your soul to heaven. It’s about the renewal of the world, relationships, creation, justice, and life itself.

3. The church lives from the future

The church doesn’t just remember what God did. It lives in light of what God is going to do.

For Moltmann, this book presents the idea that the Christian faith is forward-looking. Hope is not optional. It’s the engine of the Christian life.

Level 2: Theology of Hope (Intermediate)

This is the book that made Moltmann famous. It’s also the one most people start with and then quietly abandon around page 40. The reason it feels difficult isn’t just the writing. It’s the shift in perspective Moltmann is asking you to make. When you first read Theology of Hope you experience cognitive reappraisal. Our brains run on mental frameworks called schemas, which are existing patterns for how we understand theology, God, suffering, hope, and so on. Moltmann isn’t just adding information (that would be one thing), rather he’s asking you to reorganize the framework itself.

Which is why if it feels hard to read the book even if the sentences make sense, it is like your brain is having to rewire the map, and not just add a new street. So, if you are reading Moltmann and feeling mental fatigue that is normal and probably showing you are truly engaging with his work.

Again, most theology starts with the past: creation, the cross, and what God has done. Moltmann starts with the future, that Christianity is defined by promise, not memory. The resurrection of Jesus isn’t just proof that the past event worked. It’s a preview of what God is going to do for the whole world. As you read through the book, notice a few things.

1. Eschatology isn’t the last chapter

This is the main storyline. For Moltmann, the future shapes everything; mission, ethics, worship, to how we face suffering.

2. Hope is not optimism

This isn’t positive thinking, or those cheesy motivational posters that were in your High School gym locker rooms. Christian hope is grounded in a real historical event; the resurrection, that guarantees the future belongs to God.

3. The church is a sign of the coming world

The church isn’t a waiting room for heaven. It’s meant to live now in ways that reflect the future God is bringing.

Level 3: The Crucified God (Boss Fight)

If Theology of Hope shows you where history is going, The Crucified God shows you where God meets us right now; in suffering. And this book on the surface can feel easier to read, but, Theology of Hope gives the framework to fully understand The Crucified God.

This is Moltmann’s most powerful work emotionally and theologically. Written after his experiences as a German soldier and POW, the book wrestles with a question that easy theology avoids: Where is God when the world is full of suffering?

For Moltmann God is not distant from suffering. God enters it. Here are the key ideas of the book:

1. The cross reveals the heart of God

The crucifixion is not just a transaction for sin. It shows that God chooses solidarity with the suffering, the abandoned, and the broken.

2. God suffers with the world

For Moltmann, the cross means God is not detached or indifferent. Divine love is willing to bear pain, loss, and even death.

3. Hope comes through suffering, not around it

Resurrection does not ignore suffering. It comes after it, through it, and because of it.

If you work in a ministry context, if you’ve sat with grief, injustice, or unanswered prayers, if you’ve ever wondered why hope feels fragile, this book will stretch your theology and deepen it.

The Path in One Sentence(ish)

Start with Christ and the future (Jesus Christ for Today’s World). Then learn to see the future as the center of theology (Theology of Hope). Then wrestle with how that hope survives suffering (The Crucified God).

STEP 4: Don’t Go It Alone

Look, Moltmann isn’t a solo read. If you try to go through his work alone, you will hit a wall. Find a reading group, listen to podcasts, or grab a study guide. Even theologians Google his stuff—well at least pastors in their late 30s, who still occasionally listen to Creed. Moltmann’s not casual reading. His theology is weighty, but if you stick with it (I think it’s worth it), you’ll start seeing hope everywhere; in the Bible, in the world, and even in suffering.

Moltmann didn’t write theology for comfortable Christians. He wrote it for people who aren’t sure hope is still possible.

Most people do.

But the truth is, cults don’t prey on stupidity, they rely on something far more dangerous: intelligence, commitment, and the human need for certainty.

This piece explores why smart people aren’t immune to manipulation, how belief systems become self-sealing, and why the real threat isn’t deception from the outside; but the stories we learn to defend from within.

Pharaoh and the Freedom

Exodus has a problem.

Actually, it has the same problem playing on repeat.

Cue up Val Kilmer, “Let my people go.”

God tells Moses to go to Pharaoh and demand the release of the Israelites. Moses goes and Pharaoh refuses. A plague comes and Pharaoh promises to let the people go. The plague lifts and then before Moses is barely across the palace courtyard Pharaoh changes his mind; this happens repeatedly. And at least half of those times, the Bible doesn’t say Pharaoh was stubborn by nature or that he was a hard man to convince. It says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart and then punished him for it.

Exodus 4:21 is where this begins. Before the plagues have started, before Moses has arrived in Egypt, God says to him, “When you go back to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.” The apostle Paul picks this up in Romans 9:17. He quotes God saying to Pharaoh: “I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” Then Paul writes: “Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.”

Thud.

If God hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that Pharaoh would refuse to release the Israelites, how is Pharaoh responsible for refusing? And if Pharaoh is not truly responsible, how is it just that Egypt suffered ten catastrophic plagues as a consequence? Here are three answers that take the question seriously.

The Reformed or Compatibilist View

One of the consistent answers in church history runs like this: God genuinely hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and Pharaoh is fully guilty, and those two things are not in contradiction. This position is called compatibilism. The argument is that human freedom doesn’t mean freedom from your own nature. You do what you want to do. The problem is that sinners desire to do sinful things. God doesn’t force Pharaoh to choose against his own desires. He governs the desires of a man whose proclivity was already bent toward cruelty.

John Calvin argued this view. His reading of Exodus was that Pharaoh was not an innocent man who got unlucky. He was a ruler who had enslaved a people group who had been enslaved for four hundred years and had ordered the murder of their infant sons. God’s hardening was not the installation of wickedness into a good man. It was a judicial act; directing existing wickedness already in that man toward a particular end. Calvin was careful to show God is not the author of sin, but He governs all things, including the consequences of sin.1 R.C. Sproul made the same argument, drawing a distinction between God hardening someone and God creating the hardness. The hardening of Pharaoh, Sproul argued, was a form of judgment, the removal of restraining grace from a man who had already chosen his path.2 John Piper developed it further, his exegesis of Romans 9 is that Paul is not embarrassed by the hardening. He is using it as evidence that God’s purposes in history cannot be frustrated by human refusal. The hardening is proof of sovereignty.3

The most common objection: If the outcome was settled before Moses walked into the throne room, what was the point of the confrontation? The compatibilist answer is that the point was exactly what Romans 9 says: the display of God’s power and the proclamation of His name throughout the earth. The hardening produced a story that became the defining event of the Old Testament. A heart left to its own devices does not turn to God, a heart changes when something outside makes new what is inside. The story foreshadows the redemption arc to be fulfilled in the New Testament.

The Arminian or Free Will View

In this perspective, it’s believed that if you look at the particular sequence in the text a different picture forms. The first several occurrences in Exodus do not say God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. They say Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Exodus 8:15, after the plague of frogs lifts: “when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart.” Exodus 8:32, after the flies: “Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also.” Exodus 9:7, after the cattle plague: “the heart of Pharaoh was hardened.” God’s hardening appears explicitly beginning around Exodus 9:12, after the sixth plague. Pharaoh makes choices first, repeatedly and freely. God’s response then was judicial. He confirmed and intensified what Pharaoh had already set in motion.

John Wesley read it this way in his sermons and notes on the New Testament.4 Roger Olson pressed the same argument in Against Calvinism (2011), and Craig Keener takes a similar line in his commentary on Romans.5 The case made here is that God does not create the stubbornness from nothing and plant it in Pharaoh’s heart. He ratified what had already developed; meaning he allowed it to become fixed. The hardening was a response to human rebellion. There is also a linguistic argument to be made. The Hebrew word used for hardening in several of the early plague narratives is חָזַק, which means to strengthen or firm up. Some scholars read this as God strengthening what is already present, in the same way that sunlight hardens clay and softens wax using the same heat. The same divine patience that gives Pharaoh repeated opportunities and lifts the plagues each time Pharaoh pleads for relief is the patience that eventually, in its withdrawal, becomes a hardening.6

Where do the Reformed and Arminian readings agree?

Both traditions agree that by the later plagues, God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is a judicial act. The dispute is whether Pharaoh ever had a genuine, unencumbered moment of real choice that he threw away, or whether the outcome was fixed before Moses was born. The Arminian says yes, Pharaoh made real choices badly. The Calvinist says yes but with a caveat, Pharaoh’s choices were real, but they were never outside the scope of what God had ordained.

The Ancient Near Eastern or Narrative View

There is a third reading that reframes the question entirely by asking what the Hebrew words actually meant in their original world and to their original audience. John Walton, in The Lost World of the Old Testament (2020) and his earlier work The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015), argues that modern readers consistently import philosophical categories onto ancient texts that were doing something different.7 The ancient Near Eastern world did not organize its thinking around free will in the way post-Enlightenment readers do. When the biblical narrator says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, this was less about an argument around human psychology and more about history.

In Egyptian royal theology, Pharaoh’s heart was the seat of wisdom and cosmic order. His decisions were, in some sense seen as divine decisions. When the Exodus narrator says God hardened that heart, he is speaking the language of Egyptian royal ideology and turning it around. The God of Israel, not the gods of Egypt, is controlling what happens in Pharaoh’s throne room. The hardening language is a sovereignty claim, written in a way the surrounding culture would recognize immediately.

Peter Enns makes a related point in his Exodus commentary.8 The function of the hardening is to establish, for ancient readers, that the contest between Moses and Pharaoh was never really between Moses and Pharaoh. It was between the God of Israel and the gods of Egypt. Exodus 12:12 says this directly: “I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt.” Pharaoh is not a man being prevented from making a wise choice. He is the representative of a divine order being dismantled. The hardening is the narrator’s way of telling the reader from the opening scene: no matter what Pharaoh says, this will run its course.

Does this let Pharaoh off the hook?

Not really. The text presents Pharaoh as genuinely culpable throughout. He enslaved people. He ordered infant boys drowned in the Nile. He broke every agreement he made the moment the immediate pressure lifted and before the sweat on his brow had dried. The narrative view doesn’t eliminate his guilt. It shifts the burden of the question away from free will and towards who is running history, and to what end.

Now What

What you do with the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart depends on which question you think the text is answering. If the question is about human freedom, you end up in the Reformed or Arminian camps, working out how divine sovereignty and human accountability can coexist without one consuming the other. If the question is about divine power over history, you end up in the ancient Near Eastern camp, where the hardening is a declaration rather than a dilemma.

Regardless of which view you take, Pharaoh never stops being a real person who makes real choices with real consequences. He is not a puppet in any of them. He is a man who becomes the stage on which a larger argument is made visible. Whether that comforts you or raises harder questions probably tells you something about how you read the rest of the Bible.

Enjoy the Bible’s “wait… what?” moments?

Here are three more puzzles to put together:

• Where Did Cain’s Wife Come From?

• Was Noah’s Flood Global or Local?

• The Nephilim: The Bible’s Most Mysterious Plot Hole

But that story isn’t history. It’s a myth.

In this episode, we break down the real relationship between science and Christianity—unpacking the famous Darwin debate, the origins of the “science vs religion” narrative, and why historians now reject it.

You’ll discover:

• Why the Darwin vs Christianity conflict is largely invented

• The truth behind the 1860 Oxford debate

• Famous Christian scientists you’ve never heard about

• What Darwin actually challenged (and what he didn’t)

• Why evolution doesn’t disprove God

From Gregor Mendel to Francis Collins, from Augustine to modern theology—this episode explores how faith and science have always been more connected than we’ve been told.

Reading N.T. Wright

My first encounter with N.T. Wright’s work was as a college senior in my Romans course. Since then, I’ve made it a goal to read one Wright book a year. Here’s a path to reading him well.

If you’ve spent any time around modern theology, you’ve run into N.T. Wright. He’s written more than eighty books. He’s a New Testament scholar, a former Anglican bishop, and one of the most influential Christian thinkers alive today.

He’s also easy to misunderstand. Some people think Wright is just about history. Everyone's heard him talk about the Kingdom, but a lot of folks aren’t sure what he means by it. Then of course his work on justification has generated significant debate, especially regarding Paul and covenant identity (I won’t be “piping” up about that in this article). The problem however isn’t that Wright is confusing. You just have to know what questions he is asking, understand his big idea, and then everything he writes starts to make sense.

Step 1: Start with the Big Idea

Here’s the key to Wright’s theology: The gospel is not about how individuals go to heaven when they die. The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is king and God is putting the whole world right.1

That’s it. Everything for Wright connects to this.

If you read him looking only for personal salvation language, you’ll miss what he’s doing. Wright is a “zoom-out” theologian, helping readers see the Bible’s story at its full scale.

Step 2: Understand What He’s Reacting Against

Wright’s work makes more sense if you know what he’s pushing back on. Since the revival era of the 1800s, much of Western Christianity reduced the gospel to this: Humans are sinners. Jesus died so you can go to heaven.

That became the entire message.

Wright isn’t denying that salvation is personal (an accusation that gets lobbed his way), he’s saying that view is too small. The New Testament, he argues, is about something bigger. God fulfilling his promises to Israel, Jesus defeating the powers of sin and death, God becoming king through the Messiah, and the beginning of new creation. For Wright, salvation isn’t rescue from the world but the renewal of it.

Step 3: The Three Themes That Unlock Wright

1. The Kingdom Is the Center

When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God, Wright takes that seriously. The Kingdom means primarily three things: (1) Jesus is becoming king, (2) His rule is breaking into history, (3) the world is being set right.

2. The Resurrection Changes Everything

For Wright, the resurrection isn’t just proof that Jesus is divine (while it certainly is that), it’s the beginning of new creation.2 If Jesus is risen, then death doesn’t win, the future has already begun, and what we as Christians do now matters. This is why Wright frequently talks about justice, beauty, and mission. If God is renewing creation, the church should live like that renewal has already begun.

3. Justification Is About Identity

This is where the most confusion happens. When Wright talks about justification, he’s asking, how do you know who belongs to God’s people?

His answer is that justification is God’s declaration that someone is part of the covenant family through faith in Christ. They are people under the king’s reign; this includes both covenant membership and a forensic declaration.3 He’s not denying forgiveness or grace. He’s putting justification inside the larger story: God’s promises to Israel, the creation of a worldwide family, and the church as the people of the Messiah. If you read him expecting a purely individual framework, it can feel like he’s changing the doctrine of salvation. But when you zoom out with him, you see he’s expanding the context.

Step 4: Read Wright in the Right Order

One of the biggest mistakes people make with N. T. Wright is starting with his academic work. He writes at three different levels:

• Popular (Simply Christian, Surprised by Hope)

• Pastoral (How God Became King, The New Testament for Everyone series)

• Academic (Jesus and the Victory of God, Paul and the Faithfulness of God)

If you start at the academic level, you’ll assume he’s dense and overly technical. If you start where he intends most readers to start, you’ll discover something different. His writing is clear, practical, and deeply hopeful. Here’s the path that helps his ideas build instead of overwhelm.

Level 1: Start Here (Best Entry Point)

Simply Christian

If you want Wright’s big-picture vision in one place, start here. This book answers a simple question:

What is Christianity actually about?

Instead of starting with doctrine, Wright starts with the human experience. Our longing for justice, desire for beauty, and that internal sense that something in the world is broken and fractured. From there, he walks through who Jesus is, what the cross and resurrection mean, what the church is for, and how Christians live in the world now.

Or: Surprised by Hope

If you want the core of Wright’s message in one area, read this. This book also focuses on one question:

What happens after we die and why does it matter now?

Wright challenges two common assumptions: that Christianity is about going to heaven forever and that the physical world doesn’t really matter. Instead, he argues that the Christian hope is resurrection—not escape. God’s aim is not and was not to abandon creation but to create it anew. Therefore, what Christians do now actually matters for the future God is creating. This is the book when read carefully many readers discover that Wright isn’t revising Christianity, but helping people recover the New Testament’s original hope.

Level 2: Core Wright

How God Became King

Once you understand Wright’s focus on the Kingdom and new creation, this book pulls everything together.

Why do the Gospels tell the story they do?

Wright’s argument is that many Christians read the Gospels like this; Jesus came to die for our sins and the rest is background. But that’s not the story the four Gospels present. They are historical narratives telling the story of Israel’s long-awaited king, God returning to rule His people, the defeat of evil and launch of new creation. Which means the Gospels aren’t just how we are introduced to the cross (while that is true) they are the heralds that God has become king through Jesus.

Level 3: Advanced Wright

Jesus and the Victory of God

If you want to see Wright’s full case for what Jesus believed and what He was actually doing, this is the book. Here Wright does his extensive historical work on Jesus. He steps into the world of first-century Judaism and examines what Jesus thought his mission was. Wright’s argument is that Jesus wasn’t just teaching timeless spiritual truths. He believed Jesus was acting within Israel’s story bringing its long crisis to a climax. Here are three key elements you will find.

1. Jesus saw Himself as announcing the end of exile

Even though Israel was back in the land, Wright argues that spiritually and politically, the exile wasn’t really over.4 Jesus’ message of the Kingdom was a declaration that God was finally returning to put things right.

2. His actions were symbolic, not random
Healings, parables, table fellowship, even the cleansing of the temple, Wright shows how these were deliberate signs that God’s rule was breaking in.

3. The cross was the climax of His mission
For Wright, Jesus believed His death would be the moment when Israel’s story reached its turning point; where the powers of sin, judgment, and exile were dealt with once and for all.

This book helps you see that the Kingdom of God isn’t a vague spiritual idea that sounds better in an South African accent. It was the story Jesus believed He was living out and the one we participate in today.

A quick note

Wright’s most technical academic work is Paul and the Faithfulness of God, a massive, two-volume study of Paul’s theology. It’s brilliant but, unless you’re working at a graduate level, it’s not the best starting point.

The Path in One Line

Start with the vision and mission (Simply Christian or Surprised by Hope). Then understand the story of Jesus (How God Became King). And, if you want the deeper historical case (Jesus and the Victory of God).

That progression allows Wright’s big idea to come into focus; God became king through Jesus and new creation has already begun.

Step 5: Don’t Read Wright Like a Systematic Theologian

This is where many readers get frustrated. Wright isn’t writing a traditional systematic theology. He writes primarily as a historian of early Christianity. He certainly touches on systematic theology, but it’s not the focal point (nor is it fair to say he is strickly a New Testament scholar). He’s asking questions like: What did first-century Jews expect? What did Jesus actually claim? How would Paul’s words have sounded in their world?

If you read him through modern theological categories, it is possible you will miss the point. He’s trying to help you read the New Testament in its original story. However, if you stick with Wright (and I hope you will), here’s what changes: The gospel gets bigger. The resurrection gets more central. The church gets a mission. Christianity stops feeling like an escape plan and starts looking like what the New Testament actually describes: God becoming king. New creation beginning and the future breaking into the present.

He isn’t trying to make Christianity more complicated. He’s trying to restore its original scale.

This episode looks at how the earliest church related to power, not by ignoring it, but by operating on an entirely different logic. We trace what it meant to call Jesus “Lord” in a world that already had one, why political strategy wasn’t the church’s instrument of change, and what got quietly lost when the faith began to assume that influence and control were the same thing.

You learn one new thing about theology and suddenly you feel deputized. Someone says Gnosticism and you slide in with, “I’m your huckleberry.”

When you begin to really study good theology, you start seeing bad theology everywhere. The worship leader’s offhand comment (sermonette) between songs. Your aunt’s Facebook post with the praying-hands emoji at the end like that sanctifies it (the equivalent of I said with all due respect). The bestselling book your whole small group is obsessed with, but you know not everyday is Friday. Feels sus, you look around and seem to be the only person in the room who caught it, so the theology cop comes out and before you know it you’re quoting Augustine and accusing folks of Pelagianism.

Or maybe you go the other way. You see something that sounds wrong and stay quiet, because who are you to say anything? You don’t have the seminary degree. You don’t have the verses memorized. So you swallow it and feel vaguely uneasy but you move on.

Here’s the thing, those are two versions of the same issue. Both are what happens when you have strong feelings about truth but not the skill to handle it. That ability is not a super theological power for those with plenty of initials after their name. It’s having Biblical discernment, and to be fair a lot of churches talk about it, but often don’t teach people how to do it.

Paul walked through this two thousand years ago. He wrote to a church full of people who knew a lot and loved poorly, and he gave them one sentence that should be tattooed on the inside of every theology nerd’s bicep instead of γνῶσις in a font they had to ask three people to verify.

“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”1

The danger Paul is addressing isn’t ignorance, but the danger of knowing enough to feel superior to others. And the more you grow in your theological knowledge, the closer you walk along that edge.

Why getting smarter makes you worse at this

There’s a reason the smartest person in the room is so often the most insufferable, and part of it has to do with their actual brain. As you learn, your brain builds shortcuts. Psychologists call them schemas. They let you sort good theology from bad fast, without rebuilding your whole framework every time. That’s an important feature; we need this.

However, the same brain that sorts quickly also wants to be right, so it goes looking for evidence that you are correct. It’s what we call confirmation bias. You notice the article that agrees with you. You skim past the one that doesn’t. Over time you mistake the feeling of being confirmed for the fact of being correct.

You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect too, the idea that people who know a little overestimate how much they actually know. Fair warning: this one is contested now. Some researchers argue the original 1999 Cornell study captured a statistical quirk more than a law of human nature.2 But strip away the famous name and there is a humbler version you have experienced. The first time you read a real theology book, you felt like you cracked the code. Ten books later however you realized how little you actually understood and might even be more confused than before. When it comes to growth there is something we know, but we don’t live like it should be true and it’s that learning is never linear; up and to the right. What we actually experience when we learn is a map that seems to be growing in size with every new thing we discover.

While this is plainly true we keep handing the insight to our smartest people, as if it took a genius to notice them. Socrates gets, “I know that I know nothing.” Aristotle gets, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Einstein gets, “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” Same insight from three famous signatures. And almost none of it is real.

Socrates never said his version. It’s a compression of something in Plato’s writing, where Socrates decides he is wise only because he refuses to pretend he knows what he doesn’t. Aristotle’s line shows up nowhere in anything he wrote. Einstein’s has no source at all. Someone just needed a brilliant name to sign the receipt. So ask why you believed them anyway? You believed them because they sounded right, and a famous name turned “sounds right” into “must be true.” You probably didn’t check, because you felt confirmed.

Which means the most quoted lines about how little we know are themselves proof of how little we check. That’s the whole trap. Confidence rises faster than competence, and when it comes to studying theology if nobody warns you, you start cutting people with a tool you’ve barely learned to hold.

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The Bible and the Razor Blade

In 1820, Thomas Jefferson sat at his desk with a razor blade and a Bible and started cutting. He removed the miracles. He removed the resurrection. He removed most of the Epistles. What he was left with, he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,1 and he considered it in his most astute and demure opinion a more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I do not know. Jefferson was cutting Paul out on purpose.2 His argument was that Jesus taught ethics and Paul invented a religion about Jesus that Jesus himself never authorized.

Did Jefferson have a point?

Before the struggle is real became a slogan for the drone of corporate cubicle culture the struggle was real in interpreting Jesus and Paul. Jesus preached the Kingdom of God. Paul preached the cross. Jesus kept the Torah. Paul argued that the Law, while holy and good, became a curse for sinners, because nobody fulfills it perfectly.3 Jesus emphasized the arrival of the Kingdom of God; Paul spent more time unpacking the meaning of Jesus’s death and resurrection. It’s true that the difference in emphasis between Jesus and Paul is real; even if the categories overlap more than critics sometimes admit. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says live this way. In Romans 7, Paul says I cannot live that way. Friedrich Nietzsche’s (never one for diplomacy) most provocative line about Christianity isn’t the God-is-dead one. It’s from The Antichrist: “the only real Christian died on the cross.”4 He meant it as an insult. Scholars took it as a question. The question of whether Paul invented something Jesus never intended, has driven serious historical research for nearly two centuries.

So which is it? Here are three serious answers to the tension of Jesus and Paul. The struggle is real.

The Hijacking Thesis: Paul Made It Up

This is not to be dismissed as a fringe position. In the nineteenth century, F.C. Baur and the Tübingen school of German scholarship argued that the New Testament itself records a doctrinal fracture.5 Paul’s law-free Gentile gospel versus the Jerusalem church under James and Peter, who stayed Torah-observant. The smoking gun6 for this position is found in Galatians 2. Paul confronts Peter to his face in Antioch because Peter stopped eating with Gentiles when Jewish Christians arrived from Jerusalem. That is not a minor disagreement about who sits at the cool table at lunch.

That is a split over the fundamental question of who belongs to the people of God. Baur read it as evidence that early Christianity was two movements both bearing the same name.

In the twentieth century, Hyam Maccoby pushed further. Paul, he argued, was not a trained Pharisee at all, and that the Acts account was an invention.7 The work of a Gentile convert importing pagan categories into a Jewish movement and calling the result Christianity. The dying-and-rising savior, the blood atonement, the cosmic Christ; none of that is in the Gospels. Jesus says follow me, repent, the Kingdom is near. Paul says, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”8 One is a way of life. The other is a claim about what happened on a single weekend in Jerusalem, and what that death and resurrection bought for humanity.

Theologically we would say Paul is showing us where the front door to the kingdom Jesus offers is. But in Maccoby’s reading, that door opens into a different house entirely: a religion of largely Gentile making, with Jesus’s name set over the foyer, like a live, laugh, love sign.

The fair pushback against the hijacking thesis is the issue with timing. Paul wrote his letters within twenty years of the crucifixion.9 He met Peter. He met James, the brother of Jesus. He explicitly claims to have received his gospel from the risen Christ directly and then cross-checked it with the Jerusalem apostles. If Paul invented it, he did so while eyewitnesses were still alive. The book of Acts records the crisis openly. In Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council debates whether Gentile converts must fully adopt Torah observance. The fact that such a council happened at all shows the tension was real. But the outcome matters just as much: Peter, James, and the Jerusalem leadership ultimately affirm Paul’s Gentile mission, even while important disagreements and cultural tensions remained. Christianity did not erase the conflict. It worked through it. That is a significant problem for the hijacking theory.

More importantly, the resurrection itself appears to be the moment the earliest disciples began interpreting Jesus in ways that already sounded Pauline. The Gospels do not end with Jesus saying “be nice to each other.” They end with the risen Christ explaining how the Scriptures pointed to his suffering and vindication all along. At the Last Supper, Jesus speaks of his blood as covenantal. In John’s Gospel, He is already the Lamb of God and the eternal Word made flesh. Whatever one thinks of Paul, the movement toward a theological reading of Jesus begins early, inside the apostolic community itself.10

The Translation View: Same Gospel, Different Audience

Here the argument is that Paul is not contradicting Jesus. He is translating him. Jesus was a Jewish rabbi speaking to Jewish peasants in Galilee about a Jewish God keeping Jewish covenant promises. Paul was primarily writing letters to Gentiles in Corinth, Rome, and Ephesus who had little to no Torah background, no temple, no covenant history. In this reading, the Sermon on the Mount and Romans are not doing the same thing. One is kingdom ethics for disciples in first-century Galilee. The other is a forensic argument about how people with no covenant standing can become part of this covenant.11 You cannot fault a French-to-English translator for not sounding exactly like the French original (but they better pronounce croissant correctly).

N.T. Wright has made this case at length.12 Paul’s justification language, Wright argues, is not about individual sinners getting right with God in a private transaction. It is covenant language. Justified means declared a member of God’s people, which is exactly what Jesus was arguing about with the Pharisees. Who belongs? Whose sins get forgiven? Whose dead get raised? Same fight, just a different vocabulary being used. To further support this, Paul also quotes Jesus more than he is usually credited for. In 1 Corinthians 7, on divorce, he writes “not I but the Lord.” In 1 Corinthians 11, on the Eucharist, “I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.” He knew the tradition, and saw himself as a translator for the Gentiles, putting it in the language they would understand. In his letters, Paul deliberately flagged when he was adding his own voice to it.

The fair pushback on this view is Paul’s silence. The parables get almost no treatment in his letters. The Lord’s Prayer, nowhere. The healings, the Beatitudes, the rich young ruler: Paul mentions almost none of the concrete content of Jesus’s ministry. That is a strange gap for someone who is supposedly translating rather than creating. A translator leaves the meaning intact but changes the language so that the hearer/reader can understand. At this point, it is necessary to remember what Paul’s letters actually are. They are not biographies of Jesus. They are occasional letters written to churches already formed by oral teaching and apostolic preaching. Paul may not repeat many sayings of Jesus precisely because his audiences likely already knew them. His letters are addressing crises, not attempting to retell the story from the beginning each time. Which means he wasn’t purposely leaving out key aspects of the kingdom but was zeroed in on addressing local issues.

The Canonical Answer: The Tension Was the Point

Every tradition that has tried to resolve the Paul-Jesus tension in one direction has produced a known distortion. Push too hard toward Paul, you minimize the Gospels, and end up with antinomianism: the idea that grace makes ethics, meh, not that important. Marcion went exactly there in the second century. He dropped the Old Testament, kept a stripped-down Paul, and built a Christianity with no moral demand and no earthly stakes.13 The church spent a generation refuting him. Push too hard the other way, toward Jesus’s reframed Judaism with no Pauline theology underneath and you get moralism. A religion that is essentially the Sermon on the Mount with the resurrection removed, which is what Jefferson ended up with. It is admirable but insufficient. You get the teacher but not the gospel. The early church saw the failure when you begin to lean so hard in one direction, the other is no longer in view. Its response was to canonize the tension.

James 2:24 says, “a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” Paul says in Galatians 2:16, “a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.” At the surface level, those statements pull in genuinely different directions. Martin Luther called James “an epistle of straw” in 1522 and tried to push it to the back of his New Testament.14 He never formally removed it. The reason is that by Luther’s own era, the church had spent over a thousand years treating both texts as Scripture, and removing one would have required admitting that the canon was wrong. So, Luther held it in by doing that slow blinking thing folks do, when they can’t actually do or say what they feel.

This is what Brevard Childs argued across his career: the shape of the canon is itself a theological act. The early church was not simply collecting whatever manuscripts survived. It was making a claim about how these texts should be read: in conversation with each other, each one qualifying and sharpening the others.15 On that reading, the Jesus of Matthew 5 and the Christ of Romans 8 are not two competing portraits that someone failed to reconcile. They are two panels of the same image that only resolves when you hold both in view.

Most traditions have tested this by picking a center text or texts and reading everything else through them. Catholics tend to lean towards James and the synoptics. Lutherans tend to lean towards Romans and Galatians. Calvinists tend to lean towards Romans 9. Pentecostals we run (pun intended) to Acts. In each case, the tradition has to do interpretive work on the texts it de-emphasized. That work never fully succeeds. The de-emphasized texts keep pushing back. Which is precisely what the canonical argument tells us: the tension is not a problem waiting for a solution. It is the purposeful structure.

The fair pushback is that this can become a way of avoiding hard questions. Meaning it is a satisfying answer until Thursday, when someone has to make an actual decision and needs to know what Christianity requires of them, not what it holds in tension. And it still does not explain why Paul never mentions the prodigal son and a number of other core elements in the Gospels.

So Which Question Are You Actually Asking?

The hijacking view is asking a source question: did Paul have legitimate access to Jesus, or did he build a religion in his name? The translation view is asking a context question: does the same truth look different when spoken to different audiences in different centuries? The canonical approach is asking a hermeneutical question: what does it mean that both voices ended up in the same book?

What you make of Paul depends a lot on which of those questions you think is primary. The irony is that the New Testament itself seems aware of the danger from the beginning. In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul is already frustrated that Christians are splitting into camps: “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos,” “I follow Cephas,” “I follow Christ.” His response is that the cross reframes all of them. Christianity did not preserve the Gospels and Paul’s letters because the early church failed to notice the tension. It preserved them because it believed the tension revealed something true: that the Kingdom Jesus announced and the cross Paul preached were not rival messages but inseparable realities. The difficulty is not making them agree perfectly. The difficulty is that both refuse to let the other become simplistic.

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For most of Christian history, almost no one read the Bible alone. Scripture was heard and read aloud in packed rooms, interpreted together, argued over in real time by people who shared a life, not just a reading plan.

This episode traces how the Bible moved from the ear to the eye, from the community to the individual, and what quietly shifted when it did. We look at first-century literacy, the oral culture behind Paul’s letters, and the centuries-long transformation that turned a communal text into a private devotional and ask what that change might still be costing us.

If you’ve ever felt like theology is harder than it should be, you’re not alone and you don’t have to stay stuck there.

I created a short workshop called “Faith Without Fear: Learning Theology with Confidence” to help you finally make sense of it all. In just under an hour, I’ll walk you through a simple framework that makes theology click—without the overwhelm.

https://theologymade.mykajabi.com/offers/RqeAzfaY

A Walk in the Park

I’m walking thinking about what to write when I come upon this tree and pause to admire the Spanish moss as it sways in the breeze. If you are not from Florida, don’t touch it, that’s a tale for another day. As a young pastor, whenever I was stuck in a sermon, not sure how to land the plane or how to decipher a bewildering part of the text, I would go on a walk, and within 10 minutes the answer normally emerged as clear as a Magic Eye image where you pause just long enough to wait for the reveal.

Walks have created space for my creative, thinking, and writing process to breathe. They have set the pace of my spiritual formation. In this article, let’s trek together through a theology of walking.

A Brief History

In 1 Kings 19, Elijah is done, he is scared and burnt out. He called fire from heaven, slaughtered 450 prophets of Baal, and outran a chariot in a rainstorm. Then Jezebel sends a single threatening message and he falls apart. He flees to the wilderness, sits under a broom tree, and asks God to let him die. What does God do? He sends an angel with bread and water. Then God says, “get up and eat, for the journey is too great for you.” God’s prescription for a broken prophet was food and a long walk.

We’ve largely forgotten how to walk (at least in the US). Consider the numbers; Americans average about 2.5 miles a day, roughly 5,000 steps. That’s technically the threshold for “sedentary.”1 The Hadza of Tanzania, one of the last hunter-gatherer populations on earth, walk 6 to 9 miles daily, just to eat.2 Even our modern obsession with 10,000 steps goal isn’t science.3 A Japanese company invented it as a marketing slogan for a pedometer they were selling before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The device was called the Manpo-kei: “10,000 steps meter.” We’ve been running after a number a copywriter invented 60 years ago (the power of manufactured consensus).

At a spiritual level we’ve forgotten walking as a practice, as a theology. It’s been reduced to exercise and commuting, the thing you do to get somewhere before the real activity begins. We’ve loaded it with podcasts, audiobooks, and step-counters. Walking sacrificed on the altar of the wellnessmaxxing protocol.

A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

Eugene Peterson spent the last decade of his life writing and revising what became his memoir, The Pastor.4 He describes walking the trails around Flathead Lake in Montana. He walked to pray. He walked to think. He’d come to believe pastoral life required a particular pace, and that speed was approximately 3 miles an hour. Peterson was drawing on ancient tradition as he walked his glacial till trails.

The desert fathers and mothers of 4th-century Egypt walked constantly. Their days were built around manual labor, Scripture, prayer, and walking. Abba Moses, one of the most celebrated of the desert teachers, was known for long predawn walks in the dark. Abba Bessarion was described as wandering the desert “like a bird” with no fixed cell or settled place.5 He walked through the desert for weeks on end with no destination. When asked why he had no cell, he essentially said the cell would be a kind of grasping. The wandering was the release and the walk was the prayer.

Throughout the redemptive story of the people of God you find walking. Enoch walked with God, and was not, for God took him. That’s the entire biography. Just a man who walked with God so intimately that the distance between earth and heaven eventually faded away. Abraham walked out of Ur without knowing where he was going. One of the remarkable statements in Genesis, easily read past, but the implications of this walk would affect all of humanity. The life of faith began with a single step, on a walk, in an uncertain direction. Abraham walked the length of Canaan, north and south, and God kept saying: look, everything you can see, I’m giving to you. The seeing required the walking. Moses spent 40 years walking the backside of a desert before he was ready to lead anyone anywhere. David walked the hills of Judea as a shepherd and learned something about vulnerability and provision that became the theological marrow in the bones of the Psalms. Jeremiah walked through the rubble of a crushed Jerusalem and wept what he saw onto ink and papyrus.

On the Emmaus road, two disciples were depleted, distraught, and devastated. They were walking away from Jerusalem on resurrection day. They were processing grief at 3 miles an hour. Jesus fallen into step beside them. He walked with them, asked questions, He listened to what stirs within them. He opened the Scripture slowly, over the course of seven miles, and something started burning in their chest, mile by mile. By the time they reached Emmaus they were different people than when they had left Jerusalem. The road created the opportunity for encounter.

The Science

It turns out the desert fathers were doing neuroscience. They just didn’t have the vocabulary for it. Walking, specifically bilateral rhythmic movement, does something unique to the brain. Andrew Huberman’s research shows that the optic flow generated by walking directly suppresses amygdala activity.6 Meaning we are less anxious when we move. A walk allows the nervous system to exhale. Walking generates a similar bilateral rhythm that underlies EMDR therapy.7 It’s why a long walk after a hard conversation does more than an hour of sitting still. The body processes what the mind can’t hold. A Stanford study from 2014 found that creative output increased by 60% or more while walking and stayed elevated afterward. The effect held even on treadmills facing blank walls. The movement opens the mind to new possibilities.

Recovery of the Slow

Peterson had a distrust for any spirituality that wasn’t physical, local, and slow. That the spiritual life was meant to be like farming not managing. Showing up in the same place, in the same body, in all types of weather, over long stretches of time, without much visible result. That’s what walking is. It places you in a specific stretch of ground, under a specific patch of sky, in a specific season of weather. It forces you to move slow enough that you can’t help but notice things. The way light falls between Live Oak branches in the late afternoon. The smell of rain on asphalt. The neighbor who waves from the same porch every Tuesday. You can’t catch any of this at driving speed.

The recovery of walking as a spiritual practice is a form of resistance. We live inside an attention economy designed to capture and monetize every available second we own. The scroll, the autoplay are labyrinths of distraction, designed to keep us simultaneously stimulated and sedentary. Walking is the body asserting its creatureliness against the machine. Not everything can be downloaded and formation happens in the body, on the road, at 3 miles an hour.

Enoch walked with God. Jesus walked with his disciples. The disciples walked to Emmaus and met the risen Christ on the road. The Christian life has always been called the Way: a path walked together, in a body, over time.

So here’s my prescription: walk somewhere this week without your phone (or silenced and in your pocket if you need it for safety). Walk slowly enough to notice things. Walk long enough for the first wave of boredom to pass and watch as you come out from the breaker to the other side into something quieter, clearer, and unexpected. Pray if you know how. If you don’t, just walk and pay attention, which is, as the desert fathers would tell you, more or less the same thing. Elijah walked 40 days to Horeb and heard God in the still small voice. The walking prepared him for the silence. You can’t rush to that kind of quiet.

So what were the first Christians actually doing?

In this episode, we step into the world of the early church and uncover how something that started in homes and shared meals eventually became something very different. Because the real surprise isn’t that church looked different back then.

It’s how much our assumptions about it have changed.

BTW: I was the Pentecostal.

At the time I am a young guy on staff, still finishing up my undergrad degree in practical theology, opening the service in prayer. This is before I knew the difference between the PCA and PCUSA and thought infralapsarianism was a System of a Down lyric.

I was raised in and around church. As a child, we went up and down Pacific Coast highway attending charismatic church after charismatic church with revivals in between (the amount of church ceiling tiles I have counted). Because we were in so many churches as a kid, I experienced a wide variety in the way people prayed. From the men who would clear their throat, start praying and suddenly turn into a founding father. The Pentecostal who when they spoke in tongues raised their voice as if louder made it clearer. The prayer circle where every other word was, “Father God, thank you Father God, Father God, Father God…” Imagine doing that in normal conversation? “Steve, how you doing Steve? Steve, good to see you Steve.”

You’re not a barker. What are you doing?

Here’s what I’ve found: a lot of people find prayer hard. I often find prayer hard. One of the reasons we find it difficult is the tendency to overemphasize the model of prayer as a conversation with God. Impromptu prayer is good, conversational prayer is important. But when it’s all we have, at times it can feel like a conversation with ourselves. If I ask you a question, you respond. There’s a back and forth. With God there is too, but it’s categorically different. It’s impressions. Feelings. A sense of His presence. When impromptu conversational prayer is all we practice, it’s easy to get stuck.

The Bible presents us with another alternative. Within the architecture of scripture, there are different prayer tracks. They are like rails that you can put your prayer train on and ride. One of those tracks is the Tabernacle Prayer.2

Seven Stations

At the center of the Old Testament was the Tabernacle. The dwelling place of God, built to exact specifications. When the Israelites entered, they walked through seven stations, that followed God’s instructions to experience His presence.

We don’t need a physical tabernacle anymore. But these same seven steps form a helpful prayer model. It’s not meant to be a script. It’s a track that teaches you how to move from gratitude to petition, in a way that isn’t forced but meaningful.

1. The Outer Court (Thanksgiving and Praise)

When the Israelites entered the tabernacle, they would enter through the gate into the outer court with singing and thanks. Psalm 100:4 says, “Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise.”

As a model for prayer, here’s what I’ve found helpful: I will begin in prayer by taking my thanks as high as it can go. Before I thank God for my wife, my daughters, or that the Dodgers are not the Mets, before any of that, I start thanking at a cosmic level. Throughout this post are examples of how I pray like the one below.

I take my praise and gratitude as high as it can go. As I am praying I’m asking myself: where at the cosmic level have I not really thanked God? Where do I need to behold his glory anew? Once I have gone as high as I can go, I start to bring my thanks down, for my family, friends, my church, community, and so on.

I don’t have a natural bent towards gratitude, I can be very impatient with myself, others and God, in my spiritual formation this is a place my desires need to be reordered. One of the practices towards that takes places in this prayer. When I pray through this model and I start at the outer court, I will look to thank God for something I’ve never thanked Him for before. Something that I have never expressed appreciation for. It doesn’t matter how small or off the wall it may be.

As an example, I love Mexican food. I grew up in California. I don’t look it, but I’m a quarter Mexican, my last name would have been Valdez but the name was changed a number of years before I was born.

Which means yes, I appreciate good Mexican food but occasionally I want to live más.

And you don’t go to Taco Bell because you want Mexican food. You go to Taco Bell because you want Taco Bell. Same thing can be said about coffee. I’m a bit of a snob.

But sometimes I just want a little Dunkin. I don’t go to Dunkin because I want a good cup of coffee. I go to Dunkin because I want Dunkin.

What does that have to do with thanks?

When I am praying through this model, I want to end this portion by finding something I have never thanked God for.

When I dropped my girls off at school last week, the jasmine by their walkway was blooming and smelled idyllic.

When we start with thanks in prayer our heart grows three sizes that day. We will realize that perhaps our lives are better than we think. Maybe we (certainly me) need to complain less and stop being like Job. Take notice, as we begin to pray this model we don’t start with “God, help me.” We start with “God, let me glorify you for all you’ve done.” Let me begin in thanks.

2. The Brazen Altar (The Cross)

The brazen altar was where Israelites sacrificed animals for the atonement of sins. It was the first thing they’d see walking in. We don’t sacrifice animals anymore; our sins have been paid once and for all on the cross. In this prayer model the brazen altar becomes the cross. Psalm 103 says, “Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your sins, heals all your diseases, redeems your life from the pit, crowns you with love and compassion.” At this station, I’m not offering a sacrifice, but I am thanking God for the gift of Jesus. For His sacrifice. For His love. I’m opening myself to receive the power of the cross. Here are the five aspects of the cross I pray through.

At this stage of the prayer I am reminding myself that I am not a victim of my circumstances, and I return my mind, my heart, and my posture to the finished work of Jesus.

3. The Laver (Cleansing)

The laver was a bowl of water where people were reminded of their sinfulness and the need to be cleansed. Take notice where this comes in the prayer: it is not first. We didn’t jump right away into confession. We first made our thanks big and wide, then we focused on the cross; returning our gaze to the finished work of Christ, and now we come to the laver. Romans 12:1 says, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” At the third station I’m humbly praying, God, search me, know me. During this part of the prayer, I will bring to God things I am aware of that I need to repent.

And I will stay in silence for a couple of minutes. A lot of times God brings things to my attention, things I stuffed down or things I wasn’t aware of. Sometimes He is quiet and I don’t hear anything. I have found to not worry about the silence, sometimes He leads through impressions of things that must be surrendered and other times He doesn’t. And when God does feel silent to me in that moment, it doesn’t mean He’s gone. After sitting in silence and allowing the Spirit to reveal what needs to change in my heart. I then offer myself up to Him by offering each part of my body.

I will end this portion by praying through the fruit of the Spirit, specifically walking through each aspect.

4. The Candlestick (The Holy Spirit)

Now we come to the fourth station, a seven-branched candlestick, that burned continuously in the temple as a sacred light symbolizing Gods presence. The fire today represents the Holy Spirit. In the book of John, Jesus says something Savannah Bananas wild, “I have to go, because greater things you’ll do.”

Greater. Things.

If we really believed what Jesus said in His farewell discourse how differently would we live? How differently would we pray? How differently would we show up in our marriages, our jobs, in our relationships? At this stage in the prayer, I’m asking the Holy Spirit for more of His presence and work in my life. In Isaiah 11:2 there is a prophecy describing Jesus, it says, “The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord.” Isaiah expands the work of the Holy Spirit into seven expressions (they are in bold above), the number symbolizing completeness in Hebrew thought. Here I am welcoming the Holy Spirit and praying these seven expressions over myself.

As a quick aside, “let go and let God” is not good theology. Surrender matters, yes, but God isn’t asking us to go limp. He’s asking us to participate. To walk with Him. To be transformed into the likeness of Jesus. There’s a difference between giving up and showing up. This stage of the prayer is critical, we need the empowering presence and work of the Holy Spirit to guide us. To be reminded of what Jesus said in John 14.

5. The Table of Showbread (The Word)

In the tabernacle there was a table with twelve loaves of bread, representing the importance of God’s Word as daily sustenance. Joshua 1:8 tells us, “Keep this book of law always on your lips. Meditate on it day and night.”

Here’s what I’ve found: the more I’m saturated in the Word, the more the Word shows up in my prayers. I don’t have to force it. It just comes out. It becomes the language I think and pray in.

6. The Altar of Incense (Worship)

A small altar of burning incense stood at the entrance of the Holy of Holies. The people entered God’s presence by worshiping His name. Proverbs 18:10, “The name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous run into it and are safe.” (If you grew up in church in the ‘90s, you just started singing that song. IYKYK)

At the altar, I’m thanking God that His presence is available and I’m praising His names. In Ancient Near Eastern culture, to have someone’s name meant to have a level of access and control.3 We see this when God first reveals His name at the burning bush: I am who I am. Throughout the Old Testament we learn more names of God. These names don’t mean we control God. Rather God has chosen to reveal himself to us and I can declare His names over my life. Over my situation. Bringing myself under His good reign.

7. The Ark of the Covenant (Petition)

The final place in the tabernacle was the Holy of Holies; where God’s presence dwelt. The priest would intercede there, praying on behalf of the people. And at His ascension, Jesus went to the right hand of the Father to pray and intercede for us.

In 1 Timothy 2 we find this, “I urge you, first of all, that petitions, prayers, and intercession be made for all people, for kings and all those in authority.” Here I’m joining with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, in petitioning for others. At this part of the prayer I will start broad and then move in more narrow as I go.

Authority. World governments. The United States. Other countries. Then I move local to my mayor, my county, my city. What principalities and powers are over these cities? God, I want to be aware, I want see darkness pushed back in my city, I want to participate in your light shining forth, Jesus you are the king.

The marginalized. Who around me is suffering injustice? Who are the poor, widowed, and weak? Where am I missing an opportunity to be the Good Samaritan because I’m too busy? I am asking God to reveal that to my heart.

My family. Immediate and extended. Praying blessings over my wife, over my children; that they’d dwell in the house of the Lord forever. That their future husbands would be men of God who would walk with Him all the days of their lives.

My church. That we’d have boldness. Be a house of encouragement and love. That God would be exalted.

My adversaries. And listen the adversaries that take space in our thoughts probably aren’t trying to kill us. It’s Sharon at work or the neighbor who doesn’t mow their lawn as often as we want.

Why This Works

Notice how we move through six stations before we ask for anything, before we make a request; we stir up our hearts. We are positioning our desires towards God. This is a prayer model you can pray in three minutes or thirty and it’s not about the time, it’s about having a track. And if you pray it today, then pray it tomorrow, and pray it in three weeks, you will find it’s not the same prayer. You’re not repeating something rote, but bringing God in, following a model in Scripture, saying: Lord guide me through this.

Outer Court. Brazen Altar. Laver. Candlestick. Table. Altar of Incense. Ark.

Thanks. Cross. Cleansing. Spirit. Word. Worship. Petition.

Try the track. See what happens.

In 1206, a wealthy merchant’s son stood in a public square in Assisi, handed back every possession he owned—including the clothes on his back—and walked away smiling.

This is not a story about poverty. It’s a story about what happens when someone decides the thing everyone is chasing isn’t actually the thing.

Francis of Assisi was charming, comfortable, and on track for exactly the life his world said he should want. Then something shifted—a war, a prisoner-of-war cell, a leper on the road—and he started asking a question most people never let themselves ask.

What if security isn’t safety? What if accumulation isn’t freedom?

What he found on the other side of that question became one of the most disruptive spiritual movements in church history. And it still has something to say to anyone building a life they’re not entirely sure they want.

This episode is about Francis—but it’s really about what we hold onto, and why.

In the second century, a wealthy shipowner from the Black Sea almost split Christianity in two. He read the Old Testament, then the New Testament, and reached the conclusion that these two books couldn’t possibly be describing the same God.

His name was Marcion and he had a point.

The God of the Old Testament commands Abraham to murder his son, drowns the entire world, and orders Joshua to kill every man, woman, child, and animal in Canaan. In Exodus, He personally hardens Pharaoh’s heart, then punishes Pharaoh for having a hard heart. Then you open the New Testament and Jesus says: “Love your enemies.” “Blessed are the merciful.” “God is love.”

So which is it? Here are three distinct answers to the question is the God of the Old Testament the same as the God of the New Testament?

The Marcionite Solution: Two Different Gods

Marcion’s answer (at least in his mind) was the cleanest possibility: they’re not the same God. The God of the Old Testament, he argued, was the Demiurge, a lesser creator-deity, powerful but cruel, obsessed with law and ethnic favoritism. The God Jesus called Father in the New Testament was a completely separate being, a higher hidden God of pure love, previously unknown to humanity, who sent Jesus to rescue us from the Demiurge’s world.1

The picture often painted of Marcion is one of a fringe lunatic; a wealthy man who got obsessed with some radical ideology (glad rich dudes don’t do that anymore) but that was not the case. He was educated, theologically serious, and yes—well-funded. His version of Christianity spread at a swift pace; within a few decades, Marcionite communities existed across large portions of the Roman Empire. By the time the early Church condemned him as a heretic around 144 AD, his movement had spread east and west through the empire's trade routes and urban centers. What makes this wild is the math. Christianity was barely a century old, still small, still decentralized. Yet somehow Marcion created a network with bishops, congregations, and his own canon of scripture. That last part is particularly significant because those who opposed him realized they’d never formally defined what the canon actually was. Marcion had forced them to. The Bible as a bound collection exists partly in response to him, though it would not be formalized until centuries later.2

The Biblical evidence he gave to support his perspective was real. He looked to Galatians 3:19, where Paul said the law was “ordained by angels,” not given directly by God. He pointed to Matthew 5, where Jesus repeatedly says “You have heard it was said… but I say to you,” as evidence that Jesus was overriding the old commands. A God who regrets creating humanity3 and a God who is love4 were two different beings in Marcion’s perspective.

The early Church's counter-argument was that if you cut the Old Testament, you lose the framework that makes Jesus make sense. There would no prophecy, no temple, no exile, and no covenant promise that these are my people and I will be there God.5 The cross would have nothing to do with the eternal promises of the triune God and instead be a tragic execution, rather than the climax of redemption. Further, you end up with a God who appeared out of nowhere in 30 AD, with no history and no reason to be trusted. Marcion solved the problem by amputating half the patient. Most Christians refused the surgery, but the question never went away.

The Progressive Revelation View: Same God, Different Classroom

In this view, the Old Testament and New Testament present the same God, but He reveals himself in stages, as humanity matures enough to receive him. Think of it like teaching a child to read. You don't sit a five-year-old down with War and Peace and expect them to track 1,200 pages of Russian aristocracy and Napoleonic warfare. You obviously start with Crime and Punishment. I'm kidding. You start with a Bluey picture book and work up from there.

Within this view, the Old Testament violence reflects God meeting people where they were. The surrounding cultures of Canaan practiced child sacrifice and ritual prostitution. Against that backdrop, the Torah was a dramatic moral upgrade; don’t sacrifice your children, care for the widow and orphan, free your slaves every seven years. So, to an ancient Canaanite, the Torah would have looked like radical mercy. The Old Testament scholar John Goldingay argues that if you read the Old Testament as a story in motion rather than a static rulebook, you can see God consistently pushing Israel toward a larger, more inclusive vision.6 Abraham is called to bless all nations. Jonah gets sent to Nineveh, Israel’s hated enemy. Ruth, a Moabite outsider, becomes the grandmother of David. The story keeps expanding its definition of who belongs and what love looks like. By the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus isn’t contradicting the Old Testament, He is fulfilling it, “You have heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” That’s the early understanding, but here’s a fuller revelation, “But I say to you, love your enemies.” That’s where the spiritual formation arc was heading in God’s plan. He was taking a nation as His own, one that was to be different from the others: counter-cultural, holy, mature, set apart. That type of development takes time.

The objection to this view is this: if God’s character is perfectly good and unchanging, why does the revelation appear to change? The God of Judges and the Christ of the Gospels look like different gods to the modern reader (which is the wedge Marcion drove down the middle of the church).

The response of this view would be that God's character didn't change, but the way He taught met people where they were. The same way a parent tells a four-year-old the truth at a four-year-old's level, then tells more of it as the child can handle more. The revelation given to Israel was complete for that stage. Theologians call this divine accommodation. Calvin called it God’s “lisping,” speaking baby-talk to us so we could hear anything at all.7 To use a a different analogy, prescribing penicillin to someone in 1200 BC doesn’t make you a better doctor. It makes the medicine useless. There’s no germ theory, no sterile technique, no diagnostic language to make the dose make sense. The patient dies confused, holding a pill he had no framework to use. Revelation in this view works in a similar way.

The Christological Rereading: Jesus is the Lens

The third view is the most demanding, and for many modern biblical scholars, the most persuasive. In this perspective Jesus doesn’t complete the Old Testament or simply build on top of it. He reinterprets it from the inside, and in doing so, reveals the aspects that we have been misreading. The starting point is John 5:39, where Jesus says, “You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me.” When He speaks this, there is no New Testament. Jesus is talking about and describing the Old Testament. In Luke 24:27, after the resurrection, Jesus walks for seven miles with two disciples and goes through the entire Hebrew Bible showing how all of it points to Him. For theologians like N.T. Wright and Scot McKnight, this means Jesus is the interpretive key to the whole library of God.8 You read the Old Testament through Jesus. He becomes the lens that brings the rest of Scripture into focus, and passages are read in light of the whole canon with Christ at the center. Theologians call this the Christological hermeneutic. A fancy phrase for a simple idea: Christ is the key that unlocks the rest of the Bible.

Augustine put it like this, “the New Testament is hidden in the Old, the Old is unveiled in the New.”9

Here are a few examples of this. In Matthew 5 Jesus quotes Exodus 21, “an eye for an eye,” then carries it forward to its full conclusion, pushing a principle that already limited retaliation all the way to non-retaliation. In Mark 7, He reframes the Torah’s food laws around inner purity, a reframing the apostles later finalize in Acts 10 and 15. In Matthew 19, the Pharisees cite Moses’ allowance of divorce as God’s word; Jesus replies that Moses allowed it “because of the hardness of your hearts,” implying that even parts of the Law were concessions to human failure, not eternal commands. This means not every statement in the Old Testament carries equal divine authority. Some texts reflect where God was leading Israel. Others reflect where Israel actually was. The way you tell the difference, in this view, is by running the text through the filter of the cross. Does it look like Jesus? Does it fit a God who’d rather be crucified than retaliate?

Here’s the fair pushback on this view that you may be thinking, if Jesus overrides Moses in some places, what stops anyone from overriding the parts of the Bible they find inconvenient (Jefferson party of two, anyone)? Proponents of this view spend real effort explaining why the Christological filter is principled rather than a convenient option (done correctly it is anything but convenient). Their claim is that Jesus explicitly said He is the lens, the work is on us to have Him be our hermeneutical filter for the Bible.

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The Same Question, Three Different Shapes

All three views are arguing about different things underneath this question. Marcion was asking a character question: is the God of Joshua the same person as the God of the Sermon on the Mount? The progressive revelation view is asking a pedagogical question: is God’s teaching method consistent with how moral development actually works? The Christological rereading is asking a canonical question: which texts within Scripture get to interpret and define all the others?

What you make of God in the Old Testament depends on which question you think matters most. You won’t find a flat, simple answer. The texts are too strange and the distances too large. The God in the dock resists being managed neatly. But the question itself produced some of the most important developments in historical theology. It gave the Church its biblical canon. It gave theology the doctrine of progressive revelation. It gave Christian thought the discipline of hermeneutics. Not bad for a problem that started with one shipowner deciding the Old Testament didn’t count.

No letters. No books. No firsthand account.

And yet, billions of people trust what was written about Him.

So why?

In this episode, we explore one of the most overlooked questions in Christianity—and why the answer challenges how modern people think about truth, history, and credibility. Because the real issue isn’t that Jesus didn’t write anything.

It’s why no one thought He needed to.

I am in 8th grade, Fort King middle school. And I did it. I committed the one sin the youth pastor warned about (or at least I think I did). I was at my locker, before the next period when Trey asked if I believed in God? I froze, choked, closed the locker and sheepishly said no. I said no. The kid who grew up in church, read the Bible and served on Saturdays denied God. I lay in bed that night thinking to myself, did I just commit the unforgivable sin?

Right now someone is lying awake at 3 a.m. fixated on the spinning blades above convinced they have committed it. It’s the doubt that never disappeared, is God really out there, this can’t actually be true? It’s the sin that has tendrils suffocating their heart; they wonder, “is it too late for me?” Or perhaps they read the verses and saw their name written in the white ink.

The verses in question are Mark 3:28-29. Here is the context, Jesus has just cast out a demon. The Pharisees, unable to deny the miracle, explain it the only way that lets them clutch at the illusion of control: “He is possessed by Beelzebul. By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.” Jesus responds by saying what has lead to more sleepless nights than any sentence in the Bible: “Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.”

Every sin and every slander can be forgiven, but not this. The God who said He would leave the ninety-nine to find the one lost, has drawn a single line in the sand (maybe that is what He was writing in John 8:61). When Jesus spoke, He intentionally used the introductory clause that carried the most prophetic weight: “Truly I tell you.”2

What exactly is the unforgivable sin? Can you commit it by accident? Have you already done it? Does the God of love place someone beyond His forgiveness? Here are three serious answers that wrestle with this question; don’t panic.

The Specific Context View (It Was One Particular Moment)

The first view argues that much of the anxiety surrounding this verse comes from ripping it out of its original context. Look specifically at who Jesus is talking to, He is not responding to a confused seeker, someone deconstructing faith, or an individual in crisis. He’s talking to the Pharisees. These were trained religious experts, who knew and taught the miracles of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). They had just watched Jesus perform an undeniable miracle, and their public theological verdict was: that power came from Satan.

New Testament scholar D.A. Carson argues that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit in this passage is specifically the act of consciously, willfully, and publicly attributing the clear, undeniable work of God to the devil.3 This act doesn’t come from a place of confusion or spiritual weakness, but is a sober minded choice to attribute the work of the Kingdom of God to the work of darkness. In this case, it was a deliberate act of hardened, eyes-wide-open rejection, performed by teachers of the law who had every possible evidence in front of them and chose to call it evil. Under this view, the sin is not something anyone stumbles into accidentally. It requires three things to take place:

This is why, proponents argue, the person lying awake at 3 a.m. almost certainly has not committed it. The Pharisees didn’t lose sleep over their verdict. The very fact that someone is terrified of having crossed a line reveals a conscience still alive and responsive to the Spirit, which is the opposite of what this sin requires. There is also a grammatical clue, though it's not in the word “blasphemes” itself. That verb in Mark 3:294 simply marks out the category of the person in view. The interpretive key comes one verse later. Mark 3:30 tells us Jesus issued this warning, “because they were saying, 'He has an unclean spirit.'” The verb “they were saying” (ἔλεγον) is imperfect, denoting ongoing, repeated speech, not a single outburst. The book of Mark frames the offense as a pattern. This is not the Pharisees having a one-time slip of the tongue, but is a sustained, settled posture of rejection. A life of looking at God's work and calling it demonic.

Now the challenge with the specific context view is that it can make the sin sound so rare and specific that it no longer carries any real weight. If the main theological context was the Pharisees in that moment, why does Jesus frame it as a general warning? The specificity is reassuring for sure, but it raises its own questions.

The Hardened Heart View (The Point of No Return)

The second view takes a longer view of the sin, not seen in a single moment or a few dramatic ones, but as a process. This perspective, held by theologians including John Calvin and more recently Scot McKnight, argue that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the final state of a heart that has spent a lifetime resisting the Spirit’s invitation until the capacity for repentance no longer functions.5

During Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed return from the South Pole, Captain Lawrence Oates developed severe frostbite in his feet. Initially he complained of the pain, then grew silent as the days passed. By the end, he could barely walk, but stopped mentioning the agony. His famous last words before walking out into the blizzard to die were, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”6 Oates suffering had gone silent before his body gave out. This is the hardened heart view. Like the effects of frostbite if exposure is repeated and ignored, the tissue gradually loses sensation. The damage is real, but the warning system is gone. Every time a person knowingly suppresses the Spirit’s conviction, the next suppression becomes easier, until they are completely numb to the process.

The sin, under this view, is not a dramatic single act. It is the accumulated result of ten thousand smaller choices to harden. The Pharisees of Mark 3 had not committed this sin in that one moment, but through years of building a theological system specifically designed to resist Jesus and the kingdom at every turn. Their public verdict was not the cause of their condition; it revealed the symptom of it.

This framework draws on several other passages for support. In Romans 1, Paul describes God “giving people over” to their desires, not as punishment, but as a consequence of sustained rejection.7 In Hebrews 6:4-6, the author warns of those who have “tasted the heavenly gift” and yet fallen away, suggesting that proximity to grace, if repeatedly refused, can harden into something irreversible.8 The danger is greatest for those who have been closest to the Truth, the ones who have felt the weight of it, who have seen it work in the lives of others and have spent years choosing deliberately, to look away.

The difficulty with this perspective, is that it can create a level of theological vertigo. If the line is drawn not by a single act but at the end of a long process, how does anyone know where they are in that process? What assurance can be held in the present?

The Paradox View (If You’re Asking, You Haven’t Done It)

The third view does not contradict the first two so much as it answers a slightly different question; not what is the unforgivable sin, but who has committed it?

Its answer: nobody who is worried about it.

Augustine was one of the first to articulate this clearly. The person who has truly blasphemed the Holy Spirit, he argued, is not anxious about forgiveness, because the defining feature of this sin is the complete absence of the desire for it.9 The Pharisees of Mark 3 were not wracked with guilt. They were not lying awake questioning themselves; but were satisfied with their verdict.

The troubling anxiety that drives people to this question is evidence they have not arrived at the answer they fear. This view draws its force from the broader New Testament picture of what the Holy Spirit does. In John 16:8, Jesus says the Spirit “will convict the world of sin.” The Spirit’s job is to create precisely the awareness and discomfort that drives people toward repentance. If you feel convicted, the Spirit is working. If you are asking whether you can be forgiven, you are demonstrating that the door is still open, because the desire to walk through it is still alive.

Charles Spurgeon, put it like this, “The sin against the Holy Ghost does not lie in a fear that you have committed it.”10 The person who has hardened past repentance does not fear they have done so—they have stopped caring. For Christians, this is not a permission slip to stop taking the warning seriously. The verse exists for a reason, and its weight is real. But the Paradox View reframes the question. Instead of asking have I committed the unforgivable sin? The more useful question is am I currently resisting the Spirit’s work in my life? That is something anyone can answer honestly.

The limitation with this view if taken too far it can flatten the warning entirely. If the mere act of worrying proves you are safe, the verse loses its sharp edge. The best version of this view holds both things at once; the genuine danger is real, and the anxiety about it is evidence you have not arrived there.

What the Question Reveals

The unforgivable sin is not a theological technicality designed to trap the careless. It is a description of what a human soul looks like when it has spent long enough moving so far from God, they can’t recognize His work even when it is in front of them. The Specific Context view says: it looked like Pharisees calling the Holy Spirit demonic. The Hardened Heart view says: it looks like years of deliberate resistance compounding into permanent blindness. The Paradox view says: it looks like a complete absence of the desire to come home.

What all agree on is this: it does not look like the person asking the question.

The fact that the verse disturbs you means the Spirit it describes is still at work. You do not mourn a door you never wanted to walk through. Which means the piece of theology that has haunted more Christians than almost any other is evidence that the door is still open.