The author is Professor of New Testament & Greek, University of Northwestern—St. Paul Cultural Marxism, a designation Leftist advocates despise and naïve evangelical proponents reject, has always exploited Orwellian Newspeak to identify itself lest its origins with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels be exposed. It began long ago after Marxism’s failure to achieve worldwide revolution Continue reading

“Liberal” has become a dirty word in the last few decades, so liberals have latched onto “progressive.” After all, who’s opposed to progress except hillbilly fundamentalists and head-in-the-sand technophobes? But behind the moniker “progressive” are also deep worldview assumptions. When candidate Barak Obama warned his Democratic audience that the Republicans would “take [them] back to Continue reading

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Theological development is largely an exercise in reaction and compensation. Theological emphases come along and respond to other, different or competing, emphases. This has happened over the last 30 years or so with the doctrine of justification among conservative Protestants. It has been known to Lutherans as the article of faith on which the church Continue reading

The pressure rises on campus, in the public square, and in the church:  Use someone’s “gender affirming” pronoun or be deemed “offensive” at best or a bigot at worst.  And, in the Christian milieu, this is often seen as providing “passport” to affirm the trans-challenged individual or else risk permanently severing a [hypothetical subsequent] “gospel Continue reading

The Christian Faith is marinated in optimism because the Bible is hopeful from cover the cover. The biblical worldview is based on creation-fall-redemption. The catastrophe of sin is bookended by a hope-drenched creation and the restored and enhanced creation known as redemption. God created a lush, splendorous world of hope and joy and optimism. Right Continue reading

I’m surprised and disappointed at how many Christians, including Christian leaders, accept the status quo as the decretal will of God. They compound this tendency by suggesting it is an act of piety. They select Paul as an example, in that he submitted to his famous thorn in the flesh. They do not mention the Continue reading

I am increasingly using the expression “Cultural Marxism,” and it occurred to me that I shouldn’t simply assume readers and listeners know what it means. I will try here as simply and briefly as I can to explain the basics. If you have questions, please pose them in the comments section or on Facebook. Karl Continue reading

Both classical Marxism (Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin) and cultural Marxism (Gramsci, Lukács, Sartre, and Marcuse) assert that social progress is the result of conflict between humans. Man is a product of nature, “a three-dimensional lump of flesh, blood, and bone,”[1] on which the iron laws of nature do their irresistible work. The difference between humanity Continue reading

We live in transformational times for the Christian faith. The last vestiges of Christian culture are waning. Until recent decades, Christianity shaped the West. This doesn’t mean all or even most people were Christian; it means that the basic Christian gospel and ethic had historically rooted society’s institutions, and were recognized by most people (including Continue reading

Dear —–, I agree with you, of course, and find little in this article to commend it. I do not reflect on the author’s sincere intentions. I also agree with much of his diagnosis, and his description of the church as prideful and prayerless, e.g. But here are a couple things to consider. Why adopt Continue reading

The heart of our Christian Faith is this momentous fact: God saves sinners. This Holy Week, we memorialize the historic events that make that salvation possible. Because Jesus Christ’s death is the “crux” (Latin for “cross”) of that salvation,[1] we rightly focus attention on him, our Savior and Lord. But we dare not lose sight Continue reading

If you wonder why too many evangelicals are caving in to same-sex “marriage,” surrogacy, “gender fluidity,” and transgenderism, part of the fault lies in the DNA of Evangelicalism itself. Evangelicals champion the biblical evangel, the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead so that sinners can be saved. Continue reading

One of the leading American theologians of the 20th century was J. Gresham Machen. One of his most famous books was Christianity and Liberalism. He argues that theological liberalism, sometimes called modernism at the time, isn’t a new version of Christianity. Rather, it’s not Christianity at all. It’s another religion altogether.   Liberalism consisted of Continue reading

This is a response to a dear Christian friend asking about her church’s policy concerning same-sex attraction:   Dear —–:   The article was absorbing, and the writer is truly gifted. Even though he writes through the lens of his own homosexuality, the picture he presents of [your church] is largely commendable. Make no mistake Continue reading

The evangelical church in 19th century England and the United States saw the rise of dispensationalism.[1] It constituted a comprehensive hermeneutics (way of interpreting the Bible), but for our purposes it’s important to understand that it divided the Bible into two separate messages:[2] one message to the nation of Israel, and another message to the Continue reading

Eric Voegelin once identified “the prohibition of questioning” as a chief mark of old-time Marxism: “Shut up and follow us enlightened Communists.” The new Cultural Marxists are worse than the old-line Communists ever were. The latest Marxists (leading our major universities and influencing mainstream media and Hollywood and the legal profession) don’t want to reengineer Continue reading

Richard Niebuhr’s minor classic Christ and Culture posits five paradigms for how Christians have related the Christian Faith to culture, but today’s environment largely reduces to two: transformationism and privatism. Transformationism sees the task of Christians as gradually influencing society with Christian truth in the hope (and certainty) that all of life will eventually be Continue reading

As we noted in part 1, God as the person of Jesus Christ reconciles the world. Theologians are fond of considering how the members of the Trinity covenanted in eternity to accomplish man’s salvation. They sometimes call it the “covenant of redemption.” But the Bible doesn’t quite call it that, and in fact says very Continue reading

David L. Bahnsen’s counternarrative (p. xx) of both the 2008 financial housing crisis and the 2016 populist political upheaval links both to a single source: a crisis of responsibility, a lack of which infects not just economics and politics but the entire culture. His nearly unprecedented thesis identifies culprits almost everywhere, and not just, as Continue reading