Explore " collin hansen" with insightful episodes like "Collin Hansen & Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra (Editors at The Gospel Coalition)", "The Bible You Never Expected", "What We Can Learn from Unlikely Converts", "How to Prepare for the Most Intense Opposition We've Faced" and "An Emotional History of Doubt" from podcasts like ""Mere Christians", "Gospelbound", "Gospelbound", "Gospelbound" and "Gospelbound"" and more!
Jordan Raynor sits down with Collin Hansen & Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, Editors at The Gospel Coalition, to talk about the debate about what the “whole self” movement will mean for Christians in the workplace, the incredibly practical implications of the theological truth of “inaugurated eschatology,” and 3 problems with “following your passions” in your career.
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“Nothing we expected, yet everything we need.”
That’s what Michael and Lauren McAfee suggest you’ll find when you read the Bible for yourself. That’s their charge to the millennial generation in their new book, Not What You Think: Why the Bible Might Be Nothing We Expected Yet Everything We Need, published by Zondervan.
Michael and Lauren write this book to millennials, those born between 1980 and 1995. Believe it or not, this is the largest generation in American history: 78 million, or one in three adults today. Within five years this generation will account for 75 percent of the U.S. workforce. Michael and Lauren write to their millennial peers, which includes me, born in 1981.
In Not What You Think, Michael and Lauren are honest about themselves and Bible. Which is appropriate, since unpolished honesty is what you get in the Bible. They write:
“The Bible is a unique source of comfort because, compared with all the other books on the market today, the Bible is the most honest about the failures of humankind. . . . You will not find a more authentic ancient religious text than the Bible.”
You may think Job is about finding a job, as Michael’s friend did. Well, you’re in for a rude awakening. But the story of might be just what God intends to carry you through crisis.
The McAfees join me on Gospelbound to discuss happiness, authority, suffering, and the surprises we find when we read the Bible for ourselves.
I don’t know that any religious conversion is more unlikely than another. After all, we’re only born again because a perfect man who is God died on a cross and rose from the dead on the third day. That’s not a likely story. We’re all equally dead in our transgressions before Jesus saves us.
But I know what Randy Newman means in his new book, Unlikely Converts: Improbable Stories of Faith and What They Teach Us About Evangelism [Read TGC's review], published by Kregel. We all know someone who’d really surprise us if he or she professed faith in Jesus Christ. And his book draws lessons for our evangelism from those stories.
Newman is a senior teaching fellow with The C. S. Lewis Institute in Washington, D.C., author of the bestselling Questioning Evangelism, and veteran of more than 30 years in campus ministry. He writes that coming to Christ takes time, that people tend to come to faith communally, that they come to faith variously, and that nothing is too difficult for God. And he joins me on Gospelbound to discuss more observations from these unlikely converts as we seek to share Christ in a contentious age.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a changing ministry landscape, Southeastern’s four-year master of divinity and master of business administration program was built on a foundation of rigorous theological training and practical vocational training. Learn more at sebts.edu.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better. We’re facing opposition far more intense than anything Christians in the United States have experienced in the last century.
That’s the message from Luke Goodrich in his new book, Free to Believe: The Battle Over Religious History in America, published by Multnomah. Goodrich, the leading religious-freedom attorney at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, has fought and won in the Supreme Court. But he’s concerned that we’re not prepared for the changes that now confront us.
He writes: “We’ve long lived in a country where religious freedom was secure, and we didn’t need to give it much thought. Now we’re realizing the country is changing and we might not enjoy the same degree of religious freedom forever. If we don’t start thinking about it now, we’ll be unprepared.”
Goodrich joins me on Gospelbound to help us get ready. We discuss how we can suffer with joy, what we can learn from the Quakers, why some courts seem so incredulous about Christians acting as Christians, and more.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a changing ministry landscape, Southeastern’s four-year master of divinity and master of business administration program was built on a foundation of rigorous theological training and practical vocational training. Learn more at sebts.edu.
Everyone agrees that we’re drowning under a rising tide of atheism. Right? Actually that’s how author Alec Ryrie describes early 17th century Europe. We’re talking about the century following the Protestant Reformation, a century marked by wars of religion fought between Protestants and Catholics, and civil war in England. It’s the century that gave us these words: “What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever” from the Westminster Shorter Catechism. What seems to us as an era defined by religion seemed to many at the time to be marked instead by unbelief.
Atheism and religious skepticism has a long history in the West, as Ryrie shows in his new book, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, published by Harvard University Press. Ryrie is professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University and president of the Ecclesiastical History Society. He traces doubt from the blasphemous lips of gamblers to the poisonous pen of Nietzsche. He identifies anger and anxiety as the emotional hallmarks of doubt, through a massive transformation effected by World War II until our own day.
Ryrie joins me on Gospelbound to discuss doubt, Reformation-induced incredulity, and how Hitler became the potent moral figure in Western culture and the swastika overtook the cross as packing the biggest emotional punch.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a changing ministry landscape, Southeastern’s four-year master of divinity and master of business administration program was built on a foundation of rigorous theological training and practical vocational training. Learn more at sebts.edu.
Tim Challies visited 25 different countries in his memorable year. And I think he may have even eaten McDonald’s in each of these countries. He attended worship services on every continent. He searched high and low for the artifacts that would help him tell the story of 2,000 years of Christian history. And he brings us along that journey in his new book, Epic: An Around-the-World Journey through Christian History, published by Zondervan.
I loved following along on social media as he traveled north and south, east and west. I admire his zeal to introduce us to long-lost heroes of the faith, and even to warn us against some wrong turns in the journey. This book matches what we’re doing with Gospelbound, searching for firm faith in an anxious age. Because he looks back on God’s faithfulness even as he looks forward to what God might yet do before Jesus returns.
Challies writes, “If I learned anything from my journey around the world, it’s the simple truth that the Lord is always at work.”
Indeed, he is. Challies is the noted blogger of challies.com and author of several books, including Visual Theology and The Next Story. He joins me on Gospelbound to share more about this remarkable journey around the world and how we might grow in faith by learning from the past.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a changing ministry landscape, Southeastern’s four-year master of divinity and master of business administration program was built on a foundation of rigorous theological training and practical vocational training. Learn more at sebts.edu.
I don’t know how exactly to describe Jamie Smith’s new book, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts, published by Brazos. I just know I recommend it.
Smith himself describes the book as one last take at Christianity for someone tempted to leave the faith behind. Augustine is the guide—so ancient he’s strange, so common in his experiences that he feels contemporary.
Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin University and author of many thought-provoking books. And he is himself an excellent guide to Augustine. Yet in this book he goes beyond telling us about Augustine. Smith uses Augustine to help us answer our deepest questions and satisfy our deepest longings.
“Humans are those strange creatures who can never be fully satisfied by anything created,” Smith writes. “Though that never stops us from trying.”
Smith joins Gospelbound to discuss conversion as compass, authenticity as loneliness, and ambition as bottomless.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a changing ministry landscape, Southeastern’s four-year Master of Divinity and Master of Business Administration program was built on a foundation of rigorous theological training and practical vocational training. Learn more at sebts.edu.
We may not agree on much any longer. But this we seem to share in common: we don’t trust institutions. Just the drop in Americans’ confidence in organized religion should concern us: from 65 percent expressing a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in organized religion 40 years ago down to 38 percent in 2018.
Less trust in institutions means fewer close friends. We spend less time with others and feel more disconnected. Through online media we’ve never been exposed to so many competing views, and yet somehow we’ve never been so ignorant of what others believe. The old men who used to volunteer with the Lion’s Club now sit home alone at night watching Fox News.
Yuval Levin argues that we thrive inside institutions where we develop relationships of commitment, obligation, and responsibility. And he sees a particularly important role for churches. He writes this in his new book, A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream, published by Basic Books: “A recovery of the ethic of community also stands the best chance of beginning in the kinds of communities that first form out of common religious convictions.”
Levin is the founder and editor of National Affairs and has written for many prominent publications. I previously interviewed him on his excellent book The Fractured Republic. He joins me on Gospelbound to discuss a wide range of topics: how populism combines with identity politics to resist restraint, the lure of cynicism and outsider politics, our pervasive culture war, the culture of celebrity as the enemy of integrity, and much more.
This episode of Gospelbound is sponsored by Southeastern Seminary, equipping today’s ministry leaders with the Word of God, a philosophical foundation, and care for the lost through their Masters program in Ethics, Theology, and Culture and the Ph.D. in Public Theology. Learn more at sebts.edu.
Jasmine Holmes has been called everything from a cultural Marxist to an Uncle Tom. And other derogatory names I can’t repeat on this podcast. Thus is the fate of anyone who seeks to transcend our cultural, religious, political, and ethnic tribes.
She lays out a gospel-centered, transcendent agenda in her timely new book, Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy on Identity and Hope, published by InterVarsity Press. If I had to select a representative quote from the book, it might be this one: “The lure of relevancy is strong in any clique, but when it comes with a gag order on truth it isn’t worth it.”
The book compiles letters written by Holmes to her first-born son, Wynn. She frames the book theologically by the already/not yet. You see that perspective in her hopes for Wynn. She writes:
Though this life will sometimes make him feel less than human, he is more than a conqueror through his Savior. Against all odds, we want to raise an optimist. Someone who knows that he might receive the worst that this world has to offer and still believes the best. Someone who cultivates glorious respites from the cruelty of the world by the grace of God.
Holmes contributes to The Gospel Coalition among other publications. She teaches Latin and humanities in a classical Christian school in Jackson, Mississippi. And she joins me now on Gospelbound to discuss all the easy topics from politics to race to police brutality to abortion and everything else you’re not supposed to bring up in polite company.
This episode of Gospelbound is sponsored by Southeastern Seminary, equipping today’s ministry leaders with the Word of God, a philosophical foundation, and care for the lost through their Masters program in Ethics, Theology, and Culture and the Ph.D. in Public Theology. Learn more at sebts.edu.
Harold Senkbeil has the secret of sustainable pastoral work: “You need to realize that you’ve got nothing to give to others that you yourself did not receive.”
That’s his main message in a new book called The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastor’s Heart [read TGC’s review], published by Lexham Press. Senkbeil is an executive director of DOXOLOGY: The Lutheran Center for Spiritual Care, and a veteran of nearly 50 years in parish ministry, seminary teaching, and parachurch leadership.
Senkbeil argues that we’ve focused so much on winning souls that we’ve neglected to keep them. Just look at the attrition rates for people who grew up in the church but drifted away. He advocates for a priority, then, on pastoral care against models of pastoral ministry as activity manager, CEO, or unlicensed therapist.
Nevertheless, he recognizes that many pastors lack spiritual depth and awareness to take up the challenge of pastoral care. We try to give ourselves, but we quickly run low on our own resources of empathy.
He writes: “No matter how compassionate and empathetic a pastor is, there’s just no way he can come up with what it takes to feed the sheep of Christ effectively, much less tend to their spiritual heartaches, bruises, and injuries.”
Senkbeil joins me on Gospelbound to discuss how he learned these lessons the hard way, why Christian living is more caught than taught, and what he’s seen as the biggest change in pastoral ministry over the last half-century.
This episode of Gospelbound is sponsored by Southeastern Seminary, equipping today’s ministry leaders with the Word of God, a philosophical foundation, and care for the lost through their Masters program in Ethics, Theology, and Culture and the Ph.D. in Public Theology. Learn more at sebts.edu.
Whether Rachel Gilson is a hero or villain depends on your perspective. Her remarkable story doesn’t leave much room in between.
“When pursuing your desire for same-gender sex and romance would publicly mark you as a hero—brave and strong—denying it makes you a villain.”
So Gilson writes in a new book, Born Again This Way: Coming Out, Coming to Faith, and What Comes Next, published by The Good Book Company. Gilson serves on the leadership team of theological development and culture with Cru and lives in the Boston area.
Her book takes on several of the most controversial issues of our time. Her story encourages Christians in holiness and obedience, and challenges those who do not yet believe to trust in Christ. She writes that, “A crucial ministry of same-sex-attracted Christians is to point to the validity of God’s word over our deep feelings.” And that’s why I so appreciate this book, not only for readers who can identify with her particular story. It challenges the rest of us to follow Christ, even when we don’t feel like it.
Gilson joins me on Gospelbound to discuss when she changed her mind about Christianity being stupid and cruel, how she found acceptance and joy in Christian community, and her views on campus evangelism today.
This episode of Gospelbound is sponsored by Southeastern Seminary, equipping today’s ministry leaders with the Word of God, a philosophical foundation, and care for the lost through their Masters program in Ethics, Theology, and Culture and the Ph.D. in Public Theology. Learn more at sebts.edu.
How likely are you to contract the coronavirus? To die of it? Or at least to know someone who does?
Even if you knew those odds, such knowledge would bring little comfort. In these uncertain times you need something more solid that you can trust. You need a foundation you can stand on. In this pandemic, God is inviting us to build our lives on the solid foundation of Jesus Christ. God is good, and he is in control.
In a new book, Coronavirus and Christ, John Piper writes, “The coronavirus is God’s thunderclap call for all of us to repent and realign our lives with the infinite worth of Christ.”
John Piper is the founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and the chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. He is also a Council member of The Gospel Coalition. The ebook and audiobook for Coronavirus and Christ are available for free at desiringgod.org, and you can also purchase the book, published by Crossway, on Amazon.
John Piper joins me on Gospelbound to discuss what God is doing in the coronavirus, how we can persevere in prayer for an end to this pandemic, and why the health-and-wealth gospel must be exposed as impotent and dangerous.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a disenchanted world looking to themselves for answers, Southeastern’s three-year Doctor of Ministry in Faith and Culture plants graduates at the intersection of theology, culture, and church to bring the world a better story—the gospel. Learn more at sebts.edu.
It’s the tale of two crowns: the so-called coronavirus that looks like a crown under the microscope and Jesus Christ as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Can God be good when thousands around the world get sick and die from something they cannot even see? Where is he, and what is he doing?
John Lennox poses these and other good questions in a new book, Where Is God in a Coronavirus World?, published by The Good Book Company. John Lennox is professor of mathematics at Oxford University (emeritus), and an internationally renowned speaker on the interface of science, philosophy, and religion. He is senior fellow with the Trinity Forum and has written a series of books exploring the relationship between science and Christianity. You may also know him from his debates with noted atheists Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer.
In this book he points out how the coronavirus exposes our vulnerability, when we expend so much energy pretending that we are immortal. And yet the relationship between creator and creation is disordered. All is not well. Perhaps this epidemic will make it impossible to avoid the fact that we will all die.
What, then, can Christians say to an anxious world? Can we solve this problem? Lennox doesn’t go that far. He writes that “a Christian is not so much a person who has solved the problem of pain, suffering and the coronavirus, but one who has come to love and trust a God who has himself suffered.”
Lennox joins me on Gospelbound to discuss the God who wears the crown and why we can love and trust him.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a disenchanted world looking to themselves for answers, Southeastern’s three-year Doctor of Ministry in Faith and Culture plants graduates at the intersection of theology, culture, and church to bring the world a better story—the gospel. Learn more at sebts.edu.
The church will always face external threats. The gospel will always incite opposition. What if our biggest problem, then, isn’t hostility from the world but instead compromise inside the church?
Gerald Sittser marshals that argument in his new book, Resilient Faith: How the Early Christian ‘Third Way’ Changed the World, published by Brazos. Sittser is professor of theology at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington.
He writes: “The problem we currently face is not primarily political or ideological. The problem is the compromised identity of the church itself and the compromised message of the gospel.”
Sittser joins me on Gospelbound to explain how this “Third Way” in the early church attracted attention not for being loud and obnoxious, but by being different. We’ll also discuss why millennials drift away from the church, how to change a church culture of entertainment, the high price of fighting for power and privilege, and more.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a disenchanted world looking to themselves for answers, Southeastern’s three-year Doctor of Ministry in Faith and Culture plants graduates at the intersection of theology, culture, and church to bring the world a better story—the gospel. Learn more at sebts.edu.
If Erik Larson writes the book, I read the book. It's one of my simple rules of life. All the more so when he writes about one of the most dramatic periods of history, the so called London blitz of 1940 and 1941 when Great Britain withstood aerial bombardment by Nazi Germany. Larson's latest book is The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, published by Crown. Larson is also the number one New York Times bestselling author of two of my most memorable reads The Devil in the White City and also Dead Wake among other titles. If you're looking for an engrossing read during the coronavirus quarantine, I recommend this book.
You'll be engrossed in the life and death struggle of a nation and its dynamic leader in their confrontation with Nazi tyranny. I read the book before the world stopped spinning, but recent events gave me a new perspective on the timeliness of this work and it even made me wonder about the role of religion or lack thereof in this and in that previous crisis. So that’s why we've invited Erik Larson to speak on Gospelbound.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a disenchanted world looking to themselves for answers, Southeastern’s three-year Doctor of Ministry in Faith and Culture plants graduates at the intersection of theology, culture, and church to bring the world a better story—the gospel. Learn more at sebts.edu.
Now here’s a good question: “How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?”
That we take for granted this enduring influence is the main point of Tom Holland’s new book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, published by Basic Books.
Holland is an award-winning historian of the ancient world and regular contributor to the Times of London, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He observes that Romans saw worship of the crucified Jesus as scandalous, obscene, and grotesque. And yet this same Roman Empire would eventually come to worship Jesus as God. Holland writes:
The relationship of Christianity to the world that gave birth to it is, then, paradoxical. The faith is at once the most enduring legacy of classical antiquity, and the index of its utter transformation.
In our own day Holland finds pervasive Christian influence everywhere he looks in the West. The self-evident truths of the American Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are not remotely self-evident to a student of antiquity or other world religions. But that’s the genius of this Christian revolution, Holland argues. He writes, “The surest way to promote Christian teachings as universal was to portray them as deriving from anything other than Christianity."
Holland joins me on Gospelbound to discuss why Christianity is the most difficult legacy of the ancient world to write about, and why this Christian revolution is the greatest story ever told.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a disenchanted world looking to themselves for answers, Southeastern’s three-year Doctor of Ministry in Faith and Culture plants graduates at the intersection of theology, culture, and church to bring the world a better story—the gospel. Learn more at sebts.edu.
I don’t know what vision the term “decadence” conjures up for you. Some advertising campaign years ago implanted an association for me with chocolate cake. But Ross Douthat sees a rich and powerful society no longer going anywhere in particular. We’re stuck with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline.
He writes: “For the first time since 1491, we have found the distances too vast and the technology too limited to take us to somewhere genuinely undiscovered, somewhere truly new.”
That line comes from his new book, The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success, published by Avid Reader Press. Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times and author of the book Bad Religion, for which I previously interviewed him. The last time we talked was spring of 2016. A few things have changed since then. But not Douthat’s abilities as a must-read writer. I could do an entire podcast just reading my favorite lines from this book. As a former Methodist, I especially liked how he described “thin cosmopolitanism that’s really just the extremely Western ideology of liberal Protestantism plus ethnic food.”
This is a serious book, though, and it deserves serious attention. What’s next when there are no more unexplored frontiers or fresh discoveries? What’s the point of life if there are no more worlds to conquer? Douthat says we see a world in turmoil, but it’s more like we’ve lulled ourselves to sleep.
Douthat writes:
If you want to feel like Western society is convulsing, there’s an app for that, a convincing simulation waiting. But in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is really learning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.
Yet Douthat does envision a possible renaissance for the West, an escape from our cultural malaise. That’s part of what we discuss in this episode of Gospelbound.
This episode of Gospelbound is brought to you by Southeastern Seminary. In a disenchanted world looking to themselves for answers, Southeastern’s three-year Doctor of Ministry in Faith and Culture plants graduates at the intersection of theology, culture, and church to bring the world a better story—the gospel. Learn more at sebts.edu.
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