Gospelbound

In this episode of Gospelbound, Collin Hansen and Jeremy Treat discuss Treat's new book, The Atonement: An Introduction, exploring how the cross of Christ defies worldly expectations and fulfills humanity's deepest desires. They discuss the inseparable link between the cross and the kingdom, the dynamics of the Trinity in the work of salvation, and how Christ's crucifixion addresses both our guilt and shame. They end their conversation on the transformative power of Christ's atonement and how it equips Christians to suffer well.

Collin Hansen and Jonathan Leeman discuss the complex nature of authority within both the church and broader society, highlighting its significance for protection and flourishing, while also addressing the challenges it presents in today's world. They draw on Leeman's book, Authority: How Godly Rule Protects the Vulnerable, Strengthens Communities, and Promotes Human Flourishing, to discuss how godly leadership, exemplified by Jesus, can lead to strengthened communities and serve as a beacon of hope and guidance.

You probably consider yourself a Christian, if you listen to this podcast. But I can bet that you have questions about Christianity. You might even doubt aspects of Christianity. If not, then you definitely know someone who does. And maybe you’ll want to share this podcast with them.

Whether you’ve believed for as long as you can remember, or you’re doubting right now, it can be comforting to know that the faith journey rarely looks simple. The journey is full of twists and turns. Politics, sexuality, family, and religious experience all push us to and fro, especially in the critical years of maturation in adolescence and early adulthood.

Over 40 years, Randy Newman has heard hundreds of stories about people coming to faith. He brings that experience to bear in his new book, Questioning Faith: Indirect Journeys of Belief through Terrains of Doubt, published by Crossway with The Gospel Coalition. Randy is senior fellow for apologetics and evangelism at the C. S. Lewis Institute. He was formerly on staff with Cru, ministering in and near Washington, DC. He joined me on Gospelbound to discuss motives, plausibility, certainty, and doubt, among other topics.

In this episode of Gospelbound, Collin Hansen and Brad Wilcox discuss Wilcox's new book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. They delve into the topic of the role of churches in reinforcing the values and virtues of good families, the modern priority on money and free time, and the two-parent privilege, among other subjects.

Join Collin Hansen and Melissa Kruger for their annual discussion as they look back on the most impactful stories of 2023. They'll also share projects they're working on, books they're reading, and what they're each looking forward to in ministry and life in 2024.

Episode time stamps:

• Tim Keller's legacy and impact on the church (0:00)
• Women in ministry in the Southern Baptist Convention (4:57)
• Dechurching, its reasons, and hope for the future (10:57)
• Disillusionment with secularism and its impact on Gen Z (17:44)
• The relationship between Christianity and gender roles (25:05)
• AI's impact on work and discipleship (31:12)
• Spiritual engagement and conflict resolution in Israel and Palestine (39:52)
• Current events, theology, and hope in the face of evil (48:52)
• Women's ministry, book recommendations, and conference experiences (57:27)
• Books, conferences, and Elizabeth Elliot (1:05:52)
• Parenting teens, trusting God in suffering, and addressing objections to Christianity (1:11:39)
• The Gospel Coalition's recent activities and future plans (1:17:55)
• Parenting, marriage, and sharing the gospel. (1:23:55)

Read Collin Hansen's article, "My Top Theology Stories of 2023."

The birth of Christ from Mary's womb assured justice for the world. Collin Hansen reflects on the hope this gives us at Christmastime.

Read the full meditation transcript, here. 

What if the best way to defend our faith can be found by visiting premodern North Africa?

That’s the premise of the latest book by the dynamic apologetics duo of Josh Chatraw and Mark Allen. It’s called The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for the Church’s Apologetic Witness, published by Baker Academic.

This is a special episode of Gospelbound. I normally record remotely from my office at Beeson Divinity School, where I co-chair the advisory board and serve as adjunct professor, but in this episode, I was in studio, at beautiful Samford University, with Beeson’s newest professor, Josh Chatraw. He serves as the Billy Graham chair of evangelism and cultural engagement. Josh is also an inaugural fellow with TGC’s Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics.

We discuss the The Augustine Way and one of Josh's newer book, Surprised by Doubt: How Disillusionment Can Invite Us into a Deeper Faith.

Both books explore themes that not everyone would associate with apologetics. We often think of apologetics as rational, logical, individual proofs of Christian truth. But Josh Chatraw argues that today, the question of Christianity’s truth is closely bound up with the question of Christianity’s goodness. He also builds on the Augustinian theme of love—we desire to love and be loved, and our reason works toward what we think will make us happy.

Josh also casts a vision for churches as places where we can work through doubts. Churches should nurture apologists of virtue and skill through the ordinary means of grace. I love this quote from The Augustine Way: “The church counterforms us and re-aims our hearts toward the kingdom that is to come, equipping us with the diagnostic tools to see into a society’s idolatry and forming us into a source of healing and hope for our neighbors.” 

If you know Justin Brierley, it’s probably for the debates and interviews he hosted for many years with the Unbelievable? radio show and podcast. He interviewed some of the most outspoken atheist critics of Christianity and convened some of the most intense debates of recent memory.

During that time, however, Justin noticed a shift. The conversations changed in tone and substance—dramatically so. The bombast began to disappear. Secular guests opened to Christianity, at least its cultural and social value if not always its literal truth. They expressed concern over cancel culture and identity-based politics. Some of them made common cause with Christians. Some of the atheists even became Christians!

He tells their stories in a new book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again, published by Tyndale Elevate. Until April 2023 Justin was theology and apologetics editor for Premier Christian Radio and hosted the Ask N. T. Wright Anything podcast. He was also editor of Premier Christianity magazine from 2014 to 2018.

You can tell from the title that The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God is an optimistic book. Justin writes, “New Atheism gave the Christian church a kick up the backside that it desperately needed. Arguably, the last two decades have seen the greatest revival of Christian intellectual confidence in living memory as the church has risen to the challenge.” You know I love the sounds of that revival.

N. T. Wright wrote the foreword. He asks, “What if the Christian story is poised to come rushing back into public consciousness in our day? Could it once again nourish the hearts and minds of people who have been starved of meaning and purpose for so long?”

How amazing that would be! We discussed this, and more, on this episode of Gospelbound.

“Jesus hears and cares about the things that make your heart heavy and your cheeks wet.”

That was perhaps the most moving line in Alistair Begg’s new book, The Christian Manifesto: Jesus’ Life-Changing Words from the Sermon on the Plain, published by The Good Book Company.

It’s a challenging book. It’s a sensible book. It’s a book about how we approach the world, how we engage the culture in truth and love. Above all it’s a biblical book all about Jesus.

Core to Begg’s manifesto is a contrast between the teaching of Jesus and the way of the world. The Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke isn’t the kind of speech that gets you elected to public office today. Jesus didn’t flatter. And he didn’t compromise. His ways are not always our ways. Begg argues:

The biggest reason for the ineffectiveness of contemporary Christianity is a failure to take seriously the radical difference that Jesus calls for as we follow him as King. The 21st-century Western evangelical church has too often given in to the temptation to soft-pedal Jesus’ words—to find caveats and loopholes in what he says—in order to offer the world something that sounds more palatable and less demanding. We have spent decades congratulating ourselves for being able to go among our non-Christian friends and say, “You know what? We’re just the same as you.” And they’ve said, “You know what? I think you’re absolutely right!”

So what’s the alternative? The kingdom of Jesus! Followers of Jesus don’t get happy and sad about the same things as the rest of the world. Christians pursue ambition in ways the world regards as weak. Sometimes Jesus’s commands won’t make sense to others. Sometimes they don’t even make sense to his followers! And yet, we trust him and obey. We’ve tried just about everything else in our changing world. Maybe we should try doing what Jesus says. Here’s Begg again:

I’ll show you how to make an impact on the culture, says Jesus. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who ill-treat you. If we chose to live this out, it would cause a revolution in our culture. It would prompt a complete change in the tone that many of us adopt on social media. It would open doors of homes and make them places of welcome and restoration. It would cause bridges to be built across political divides that have caused disagreements (or worse) in the past, and it would transform relationships in the workplace into ones of collaboration and forgiveness rather than self-promotion and grudge-holding. In other words, if we chose to live this out, it would show what our Father is like: merciful.

Alistair Begg is senior pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bible teacher at Truth for Life, which is heard on the radio and online around the world. He joined me on Gospelbound to talk about Jesus, true gospel-centered living, and more.

There’s one big idea at the heart of Andrew Wilson’s remarkable new book, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West, published by Crossway. He argues that more than any other year in the last millennium—the last 1,000 years—1776 made us who we are today in the West.

I suppose many American listeners now are thinking, Of course! The Declaration of Independence! Ron Swanson says history began on July 4, 1776. But wait: didn’t Andrew just say the post-Christian West? What does he mean about that?

Andrew demonstrates a lot of courage writing about 1776 as the teaching pastor of King’s Church London. But one of the most important points of his book is that the American Revolution was just one of many world-changing events and ideas crossing and recrossing the Atlantic in and around 1776. In fact he argues the battles were less important than the words. Human rights, free trade, liberal democracy, religious pluralism; the preference for authenticity over authority, choice over duty, and self-expression over self-denial—Andrew traces it all back to 1776.

Ron Swanson might not be right that history began on July 4, 1776. But Andrew does argue that 1776 separates us from the past. He writes, “The vast majority of people in human history have not shared our views of work, family, government, religion, sex, identity, or morality, no matter how universal or self-evident we may think they are.”

In Andrew’s telling, the West is full of Protestant pagans, and Christians are victims of our own success. He joined me on Gospelbound to talk about his favorite stories and his fervent hopes.

Jen Wilkin and J. T. English have given you an invitation—they want you to know and love God well. Sounds good, right? It’s hard to imagine any of us turning down that offer. There’s just one catch. You need to become a theologian.

But you can do it. You were built for it! That’s their theme in a new book, You Are a Theologian, published by B&H. They’re bringing theology to the masses, something they’ve been doing together for many years. You know Jen Wilkin as a Bible teacher from Dallas, Texas, and author of many books, including Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds. Like Jen, J. T. is a repeat Gospelbound guest. He’s a pastor in Colorado and author of Deep Discipleship: How the Local Church Can Make Whole Disciples.

This paragraph sums up their work in You Are a Theologian:

Theology is not done exclusively or even primarily in the classroom. It is done in everyday life, every minute of every day. We are doing theology when we preach, pray, and sing, but we are also doing theology when we go to work, when we take a vacation, as we care for an aging parent, as we fight sin, as we raise kids, as we mourn the loss of a loved one, as we spend our money, and as we grow old. You are a theologian, and you are always doing theology.

They deliver on the premise in this book that I think works well in Sunday schools, youth groups, college discipleship, leader training, and more. Jen and J. T. joined me on Gospelbound to talk about misunderstood doctrines, favorite doctrines, favorite theologians, theological training in the church, men and women working together in the church, and more.

Jesus was and is a genius. Have you ever thought of him that way? We know him as a friend, Lord, healer, and teacher. Of course, Son of God, true God from True God. But genius? Einstein was a genius. Hawking was a genius. Men of science. Men of modernity. Men who created our world.

Jesus? He’s a religious figure. And we don’t associate religion with genius. Even when we confess with Hebrews 1:3 that Jesus “upholds the universe by the word of his power.’

Peter Williams, however, wants you to consider The Surprising Genius of Jesus in his new book from Crossway. He shows readers what the Gospels reveal about the greatest teacher, and he wants you to see the cleverness and wisdom of Jesus.

Williams is the principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, and chair of the International Greek New Testament Project. He’s also the author of an excellent little book, Can We Trust the Gospels?, which is similar to The Surprising Genius of Jesus.

In this episode of Gospelbound, Collin Hansen talks with Peter Williams about The Surprising Genius of Jesus as well as the mission of Tyndale House, Cambridge.

He calls abortion the “spiritual battle of our lives.” And he firmly believes that abortion will end when men make it so. Roe v. Wade has been overturned, but this former football star says the fight for life has only reached halftime.

He is Benjamin Watson, author of The New Fight for Life: Roe, Race, and a Pro-Life Commitment to Justice, published by Tyndale Momentum. You may already know quite a bit about abortion. But you may have never seen the subject explored from this angle.

Watson argues, “Ignorance of or disregard for racial justice— especially by some white pro-life evangelicals—has been a hurdle to unifying and expanding the movement.” He’s not content to pass legal restrictions or even ban abortion. He describes a “higher, more complete calling” to “to address the factors that drive abortion decisions.”

And he comes prepared with an array of statistics that may surprise you. Surveys show that 76 percent of abortive mothers would prefer to parent the child under different circumstances. Forty percent of the women who abort their children attend church regularly. Watson describes a “crucible of susceptibility” that helps explain why 40 percent of women seeking abortion are Black. Compared to White women, Black women in the United States are four-times more likely to have an abortion. Black women are also three-times more likely than White women to die from pregnancy-related causes. He explains that Black women have been warned that if abortion is restricted or banned, more of them will die in childbirth.

Watson isn’t afraid to step on toes or tell Christians they need to step up in the fight for life. He sees hope in the gospel and in the church. He writes, “As a church, we need to become a safe haven, a refuge, a place where the most vulnerable can turn—not just for spiritual help, but for emotional, material, and financial support too.”

Watson joined me on Gospelbound to discuss the role of men in the pro-life cause, the relationship between history and agency, and the responsibility of parents to talk to their kids about sex, among other subjects.

It’s been dubbed the Gender Revolution. And if you’re listening from anywhere in the West, you see it everywhere. Gender identity has been disconnected from biology. What you feel about your body matters more than what you can see and touch. Even children, encouraged to believe they were born into the wrong-gendered body, now expect and even demand support from parents and other authorities as they seek life-altering drugs and surgeries to “confirm” the gender with which they identify.

For almost a decade, I’ve fielded questions from concerned parents, friends, and pastors about this Gender Revolution. That’s why I’m glad Samuel Ferguson has written the booklet Does God Care about Gender Identity?, one of the first in a new series from TGC and Crossway called Hard Questions. The other new titles are Why Do We Feel Lonely at Church? by Jeremy Linneman and Is Christianity Good for the World? by Sharon James. You can buy these short booklets in bulk for your church at just $7.99 apiece right now on Amazon. But you’ll get the best deal at the TGC Store, where you can purchase 3 copies for the price of 2.

Samuel Ferguson has been the rector of The Falls Church Anglican in Falls Church, Virginia, since 2019. I first saw him writing on gender dysphoria in a 2015 book review for TGC. He also contributed to our 2022 article “Transformation of a Transgender Teen” by Sarah Zylstra. He joined me on Gospelbound to discuss this cultural revolution and address everything from parents to pronouns to the distressing experience of gender dysphoria. 

“The gospel is not just the diving board off which we jump into Christianity—it’s the swimming pool in which we swim.”

That’s a line from J. D. Greear’s new book, Essential Christianity: The Heart of the Gospel in Ten Words, published by The Good Book Company. Greear is pastor at The Summit Church in North Carolina and the author of many books. He served as the 62nd president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant church network in the United States.

His book Essential Christianity works through Romans, the apostle Paul’s magnum opus. Based on Romans, Greear defines the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, this way: “God, in an act of grace, sent his Son, Jesus, to earth as a man so that through his life, death, and resurrection he could rescue us, reign as King, and lead us into the eternal, full life we were created to enjoy.”

Greear writes not only to encourage believers in Jesus but also to challenge non-Christians. He aims to show how gospel defies many modern expectations. For example, he writes, “The cross yields a radical inclusiveness that welcomes anyone, celebrates everyone, and looks down on no one.”

J. D. joined me on Gospelbound to talk more about Romans, the human condition, leadership, and maybe even the SBC. 

Sometimes advice isn’t just bad. It’s delusional.

That’s what Jean Twenge writes in her new book, Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future. She makes this comment about “the most optimistic and self-confident generation in history.” My generation. The Millennials.

Here’s the advice we heard over and over growing up: “just be yourself,” “believe in yourself and anything is possible,” “express yourself,” and “you have to learn to love yourself before you can love someone else.” Her counterpoint: what if you’re a jerk? Or even a serial killer? No, not anything is possible. You’re delusional. She writes, “People who really love themselves are called narcissists, and they make horrible relationship partners.”

That's tough medicine for us Millennials! But she’s right. I felt understood in this book. And it helped me to understand other generations both older and younger. Because in many ways we have less in common with each other than ever before. Dr. Twenge, writes, “The breakneck speed of cultural change means that growing up today is a completely different experience from growing up in the 1950s or the 1980s—or even the 2000s.”

Twenge is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and widely published researcher. The book is full of important insights. She describes same-sex marriage as the most rapid change of public opinion on a social issue in history. Not coincidentally, she says all signs point to further retreat from religion. In place of religion we get politics. She warns, “World history suggests that transferring religious beliefs into politics will not end well.”

I had to agree with her sense that optimism has been lost in the United States since the Great Recession. And that our society—built on abstract ideas—depends on trust and truth that we don’t often enjoy today.

Generations is a bracing book, and an important one, whether you’re a parent or pastor or politician or just want to learn more about yourself and your neighbors. Jean joined me on Gospelbound to discuss how generational differences might be shaping America's future, why technology isn't all bad, and more. 

“For as much as I'll miss, [Tim Keller] gave so much more—by God's grace—that no one or nothing can ever take away from us.” – Collin Hansen

Melissa Kruger hosts a special edition of Gospelbound where Collin Hansen reflects on the life and ministry of Tim Keller. Hansen talks about the first time he met Keller, his experience writing a book on Keller's spiritual formation, discovering how important prayer was in the latter part of Keller's spiritual journey, and more. Through Hansen's reflections, we gain insight into the profound impact Tim Keller has left behind.

For 20 years, I’ve felt like Molly Worthen and I have lived parallel lives. We graduated college the same year. We wrote for some of the same publications, on some of the same subjects. But I chose to head into church ministry, while she settled into the academy and earned her PhD from Yale.

Molly is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You may have read her work in The New York Times, Slate, or Christianity Today.

She is perhaps best known for her award-winning book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2014.) In that book, Molly wrote that evangelicals “craved an intellectual authority that would quiet disagreement and dictate and plan for fixing everything that seemed broken with the world. They did not find it, and are still looking.”

In his critical review for The Gospel Coalition, Al Mohler wrote, “This is a book to be reckoned with. In terms of its comprehensive grasp of the evangelical movement, its detailed research, and its serious approach to understanding the evangelical mind, Apostles of Reason stands nearly alone in the larger world of academic publishing. Any serious-minded evangelical should read it.” He also described the book as infuriating and described Molly’s work as sometimes snarky toward evangelicals.

Well, much has changed in a decade. Molly joined me on Gospelbound to discuss her scholarship, as well as her experience in the church and academy. 

The Gospel Coalition’s Foundation Documents include a “theological vision for ministry,” originally drafted by Tim Keller. I had never heard of theological vision before I read this statement in 2007. Soon I learned that the concept originated by Richard Lints in his book The Fabric of Theology. Theological vision is the space between your doctrinal beliefs and your ministry programs. Theological vision helps you adapt your ministry to changing conditions while keeping centered on the unchanging gospel.

Richard Lints has published a new book, Uncommon Unity: Wisdom for the Church in an Age of Division, which includes a foreword from Keller. In this book Lints exposes problems with the inclusion narrative of democracy and offers a better way forward to find unity amid unprecedented cultural diversity in our day.

He writes, “The main thing I want to do in this book is to view the gospel story as the interpretive lens through which we best understand the telos of creation as a rich, deep, and complex unity-in-difference.”

In this special season of Gospelbound, we’re exploring in depth several key influences that appear in my book Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. Lints is himself one of those influences. He is senior consulting theologian at Redeemer City to City in New York City. Previously, he served as Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, alma mater of Tim and Kathy Keller. I was grateful for this chance on Gospelbound to talk with him about unity, diversity, theological vision, and much more.

Bill Edgar began his career as professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1989 and retired last year in 2022. But his Westminster roots run even deeper than his 33-year tenure. Edgar’s great-great-grandfather, an elder at First Presbyterian Church in New York City, helped endow Princeton Seminary in 1811. In 1929, Westminster was founded in response to Princeton’s liberal drift. By 2017, Princeton Seminary had drifted so far that the school revoked Tim Keller’s Kuyper Prize over his views on women’s ordination and homosexuality. For more than two centuries, the Edgar family has been wrapped up in the drama of doctrine in Presbyterian seminary education.

In this special season of Gospelbound, we’re exploring several key influences that appear in my book Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation. Tim Keller taught at Westminster from 1984 to 1989 and earlier earned his doctor of ministry through the school. Edgar’s career has intersected with Keller’s at numerous points, from Francis Schaeffer to Ed Clowney to Cornelius Van Til and the work of cultural apologetics. We discussed these topics and more in this episode of Gospelbound.