Waorani, Ayore,…University?

30 September 2025

Is Charlie Kirk a martyr?

I’ve seen some well-intentioned brothers questioning whether “martyr” is the appropriate word for Charlie. The answer is a hearty and unequivocal yes. He understood — as many Christians do not — that loving your neighbor means seeking the common good. To that end he spoke on political matters, because seeking the common good is what politics is about (at least if you’re a discerning Christian). In the process, he publicly and unashamedly preached the gospel of Jesus Christ on college campuses across the country. He moved easily from discussions of homosexuality, gender, taxation, and family into the gospel, because he correctly saw that they’re very directly related. In this he was like the Apostle Paul, who also spoke to those topics and moved easily from them to the gospel and back.

And he was killed for it. That’s the definition of martyrdom, if St. Paul counts as a martyr.

If you think he should have stuck with just preaching about Jesus, heaven and hell, the promise of eternal life, the cross, and so forth…a lot of people agree with you. So you got that going for you. But that’s not what Jesus did, and it’s not what Paul did. So there’s that.

My first thought, when I heard the news, was “I hope they like those card tables and ‘Prove me wrong’ banners, because there’s gonna be a lot more of them.” To my eye, this is a moment analogous to the murder of Jim Elliot and his friends by the Waorani, or the five New Tribes missionaries by the Ayore. A whole generation of young men have just decided what they want to be when they grow up. The people who were rejoicing at Charlie’s death have no idea what they’ve unleashed.

You no longer need to go halfway around the world to some remote jungle to risk your life for your faith. You can do it at the university campus just down the street. So let’s get to it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Biblicist and Classical Theist?

29 July 2025

Ever since seminary, I’ve been suspicious of classical theism. Too many assertions that flatly contradict the Bible…or so I thought. To be fair, there was no shortage of classical theists who were happy to confirm my suspicions.

Of late, I’ve found myself in conversation with a biblically faithful classical theist that I respect: Chris Morrison. You can listen in on our first discussion here: “Is Classical Theism Biblical? Starting the Discussion.” Hope it’s helpful to you.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Anatomy of Apostasy

1 July 2025

When someone has–as far as we can tell–come into the faith, but then walked away again, it can be hard to tell exactly what happened. Three things are possible:

1) This person was hanging out with us, being a social chameleon to ‘try on’ Christianity, and never believed any of it. That’s certainly possible–it’s been a time-honored way to access a Christian dating pool, for example. (It’s also a little dangerous; people who start out like this have a way of meeting Jesus if they hang out for long enough.)

2) This person did not understand the gospel and was trying to work their way into being a Christian. Your group may present the gospel clearly, but as every preacher knows, people hear very selectively, and it can be hard to overcome their prior programming. The ‘folk Christian’ idea that good boys go to heaven and bad boys go to hell is very, very strong, and some people will hear absolutely everything you say through that filter. These folks leave because nobody can actually live the life they’re trying to live. They’re exhausted — of course they are! — and they don’t want to keep up the pretense anymore. Who could blame them?

3) This person understood and believed the gospel, and then left the faith for whatever reason. Often this is because Scripture told them a hard truth they didn’t want to hear. Sometimes it’s a costly moral demand, and they’d rather retreat from the faith than grow into obedience. For more status-conscious people, it’s often a realization of just how much their faith — if they take it seriously — will separate them from the cool kids. For prophetically gifted people, it’s often a preference for demonic lies over the hard truths of the Spirit. But then, sometimes it’s none of those things. Sometimes it’s exhaustion from faithfulness, as the readers of Hebrews were experiencing.

Happily, we don’t actually have to know which of these things happened to know what to do. Where this person belongs is back in the fold, walking with Jesus. No matter whether that will be a prodigal son returning or a fake believer becoming a real one, we preach the gospel to them and the goodness of God that calls them to repentance. Paul preached the gospel to the Romans (Rom.1:1-17) even when they were faithful. We can certainly preach it to the faithless, confident that it’s what they need to hear.

If it turns out this person actually grasped the gospel all along, great! This is an opportunity to help them see how the same truths they’ve already grasped work out in daily life. For MANY Christians, their honest answer to Paul’s question in Gal. 3:3 (“Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?”) would be “Yes, of course! How else would you do it?”

Anytime someone says “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” I always ask them what it was they were doing that they could no longer stand to do. Because, mark it down, they didn’t get sick of all the Spirit-produced love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control that was overflowing in their life, and wish instead for hatred, misery, conflict, short-temper, cruelty, evil, coarseness, betrayal, and impulsiveness.

But something happened. Listen. Find out what, if you can. But even if you never figure out what happened, bring them to Jesus. That’s always the answer.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

As Ideology, Useless

17 June 2025

As an ideology, an arrangement of mental furniture, Christianity is absolute trash. If all you’re after is a way to arrange your head, an “I like to think of things like this…” kind of thing, then save yourself a pile of trouble and just go Buddhist-lite. You’ll be a lot happier. Your ideology won’t comport with reality in spots, but you can always blame that on residual Western dualistic thinking, and just try to transcend the contradiction.

Christianity doesn’t claim to be an arrangement of mental furniture that will make you happier, more satisfied with life, or a better person somehow. That’s not the claim. The claim is that it’s actually true. God incarnate walked the earth in the Man, Jesus Christ. He lived in perfect harmony with the Holy Spirit, and empowered by the Spirit, He healed the sick, preached freedom to the captives, cast out demons, and was murdered by a coalition of the respectable people. When He died on the cross, every sin, every dark thing, every character flaw and sickness, everything that stands between you and God — it was all nailed to the cross with Jesus, died on the cross with Jesus, was buried in the heart of the earth with Jesus. And when God raised Him from the dead three days later, He did not come out of the grave dragging a Hefty bag of your crap. It’s all done, it’s gone, it’s taken care of.

Now as an ideology, that’s pretty useless. You can think of your unfortunate actions as sins, and your sins as forgiven, but that doesn’t really change anything much if it’s just a way of thinking about it. But if it’s true, then it’s a truth that remakes the entire moral and physical universe. If it’s true, then all the things you’ve ever done that make you just sick to think of them? There’s a medicine that cures that sickness. You need only accept the reality of what Jesus has done for you; you could be free today, and stay free for the rest of your life.

And it is true.

People often object at this point: “I did those things. If someone has to suffer for them, it should be me.” Sure. If God had consulted with you beforehand, you would be morally obligated to object, wouldn’t you? But He didn’t consult you. He just did it. He loves you that much, so He just conspired to pay all the costs on your behalf and set you free forever. And now it’s too late to object; it’s done.

You can either pretend He didn’t do it, or say “Thank you.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

De-Christianisation as Apologetics

20 May 2025

Rough way to find out, but here we go…

Watch the whole interview here. If you’re not familiar with her work, Louise Perry is the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and one of the more incisive commentators of our day when it comes to sex and gender issues. In this interview, she talks about her journey and why she intends to raise her children Christian even though she’s not a Christian (yet).

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Posted by Tim Nichols

What Would Jesus Doubt?

31 August 2014

So the other day a feller named David R. Henson delivered himself of the passing odd conclusion that God’s Not Dead is not a Christian movie. Here, from the horse’s mouth, is the critique:

I’m not going to mince words about this.

Heaven is For Real and God’s Not Dead are not Christian movies.
They are not even religious movies. They are schmaltzy, vacuous, “inspirational” movies.

If a film leaves viewers with a fist full of answers rather than questions, with declarative reassurances that heaven is real and God is alive, then it’s not really a movie about faith and it’s certainly not a Christian movie.

Those films are little more than mindless memes.

You can read the rest of the article here. I haven’t seen Heaven is for Real, so I’ll confine my comments here to God’s Not Dead.

Twenty years ago, I had a chance to hear Billy Sprague speak on the interaction of Christian truth and art. He told us about his own grief when his fiancee died, and how angry he was at God for allowing it to happen. He described his feelings when he got in his car one day and Twyla Paris’ song “God Is In Control” came on the radio.

God is in control
We believe that His children will not be forsaken
God is in control
We will choose to remember and never be shaken
There is no power above or beside Him, we know
Oh, God is in control,
Oh, God is in control

Furious, he turned the radio off. Of course God was in control, he thought. The problem was, God just didn’t seem to care.

Later, another song, “Show the Way” by David Wilcox, got his attention.

You say you see no hope
You say you see no reason we should dream
That the world would ever change
You’re saying love is foolish to believe

‘Cause there’ll always be some crazy
With an army or a knife
To wake you from your day dream
Put the fear back in your life

Look, if someone wrote a play just to glorify
What’s stronger than hate
Would they not arrange the stage
To look as if the hero came too late?

He’s almost in defeat
It’s looking like the evil side will win
So on the edge of every seat
From the moment that the whole thing begins, it is

Love who makes the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone

In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way

So now the stage is set
Feel you own heart beating in your chest
This life’s not over yet
So we get up on our feet and do our best

We play against the fear
We play against the reasons not to try
We’re playing for the tears
Burning in the happy angel’s eyes, for it’s

Love who makes the mortar
And it’s love who stacked these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone

In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love will show the way
Show the way, show the way

He sang the song for us. Then he said, “Did you notice that they both make the same point?” Both songs tell us that God is in control, that He cares about us, that it’s going to be okay in the end. But “God Is In Control” just says it straight out. It’s–Billy’s words–“a sermon set to music.” “Show the Way” isn’t. It’s a parable. It takes you down an indirect, more artistic path show the truth to someone who might not be ready to hear the sermon yet. Then he said something that I wrote down in my notebook, something I’ve never forgotten: “Art takes truth past doors where truth can’t go alone.”

Then he did something else I’ve never forgotten: he urged us not to be contemptuous of “God is in Control.” There’s nothing wrong with a sermon, he said. There’s nothing wrong with setting a sermon to music. It didn’t have the power to reach him in his deep grief, but that’s not a defect in the sermon. At that time, he needed a song that would take the indirect path, and help him to see God at work. “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.”

“God’s Not Dead” falls into the same category as “God is in Control.” It’s a cinematic sermon, and a bit of a heavy-handed one at that, telling rather than suggesting, driving home its point without a hint of self-doubt, posing questions only in order to answer them.

That’s what bothers Henson so much. “If a film leaves viewers with a fist full of answers rather than questions, with declarative reassurances that heaven is real and God is alive, then it’s not really a movie about faith and it’s certainly not a Christian movie.” In Henson’s mind, a proper Christian movie would make you struggle. It would leave you questioning, doubting.

Henson goes on in his article to talk about one such film, and I’m looking forward to watching it. I expect it to be a good experience. There’s certainly room for such films, and we could do with a few more of them.

Doubts and questions are okay–God can handle them. When we have doubts and questions, we certainly should be honest about that. And it’s true, sometimes good art can reach us in our doubts and questions when simple assurances leave us cold. Art takes truth past doors where truth can’t go alone. But it is possible to be too much the cynic, too enamored of the doubts and questions. It is possible to fall in love with one part of the process and forget the goal.

Isaiah had answers by the bucketload, not that anybody wanted to listen. Jeremiah’s answers were likewise unpopular. John the Baptist got himself tossed into jail for having one answer too many, and being a little too certain about it. If only he’d had some tolerance for ambiguity where Herod’s marital choices were concerned…. And what they did to him was nothing compared to what they did to Jesus for speaking out His answers a bit too loudly.

All these guys were sure–as God’s Not Dead is sure–that God really is not dead, that He really does sovereignly control events, that He really does find people in their time of need, and they really do respond–even people who hate Him, or think they do. Lots of answers there, no question.

That has its place. There’s a time for every purpose under heaven.

In ninth grade, I entered public high school academically well ahead of most of my peers (and lagging behind socially, just to complete the stereotype!) Predictably, I tested into honors classes in history and humanities. There were about 40 of us in my grade who were in all the same classes, and what a mad little coterie of brainy sophists we were! Now, we weren’t so far gone, back in those days, that we just celebrated all the different interpretations of a thing. We argued ferociously over whose interpretation was a better reading of the facts. But — sophisticates, we — we all understood that it was a conflict of interpretations. We would always say, “This is my interpretation,” never, “This is just how it is.”

So one day, the girl who sat in front of me in World History class–a gorgeous, willowy blonde named Danielle–turned around and said, “Tim, I have a question. What does the Bible say about having sex before you’re married?”

No rube I, I said, “I can tell you my interpretation.”

“I don’t want to hear another interpretation, Tim,” she said. “I want to know what it says.”

Now, a philosophy or a hermeneutics professor would be tempted to point out the inevitability of interpretation, and intellectually speaking, the prof would be right. Spiritually speaking, though, the prof would be an idiot to voice that notion at that moment. Danielle didn’t need a lecture on philosophy or hermeneutics. She had a boyfriend that she loved, she was making a really important decision, and she needed a clear word from God. She was asking me, as God’s representative, to give her one.
God be thanked, I was not too sophisticated to see that.

So I told her. “It says to wait until you’re married.”

She gave me a long look. “It’s that simple?”

“Yes.”

And it is.

God’s Not Dead isn’t high cinematic art. It’s direct, simple and straightforward. Perhaps even childlike. But unless you become like one of these, you will by no means enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Science: Universals and Particulars, again

11 October 2009

This universals and particulars thing just isn’t going away.

In this week’s tour (or more correctly, half-tour), Tackett said that philosophy’s task is to deal with the universals, and science’s task is to deal with the particulars, but science is now taking a more philosophical mode and trying to evangelize for materialistic Darwinian philosophy.

This is half true.  The institutions of modern science certainly do evangelize for Darwinian materialism.  But why should scientists stay away from the universals and stick to particulars?  And is that even possible?

No, it isn’t.  Psalm 19 — of which this tour has correctly made much use — works from particulars to universals.  The heavens declare the glory of God.  A scientist rightly studying the heavens will hear them declaring the glory of God, and he will, in turn, glorify God and be thankful.  God has so made the world that the particulars of it educate an observer in certain key universals — notably Yahweh’s eternal power and God-ness — and obligate that observer to worship Him.  When scientists don’t worship, it’s sin.

Moreover, the whole edifice of modern science rests on a Christian worldview to start with, as Pearcey and Thaxton show clearly in The Soul of Science.    The development and long-term support for science in Western culture depends on a series of Christian beliefs:  the material world is really there (Hindus and Buddhists, among others, take it as an article of faith that it isn’t); the material world is separate from God, and valuable, and behaves precisely in an extrinsic order that is comprehensible to man, and so on.  Most of the people in the world do not affirm these things even today, and very few cultures in the history of the world have ever espoused them. So universals and particulars can’t be separated in science because to even do science is to rest on a certain set of universals.

Since these beliefs are Christian, the implication is that science today is subsisting on borrowed capital and institutional momentum, and has been committing a slow and painful suicide for a century.  Exactly.

Everything is an echo of the Trinity.  In the Trinity, universals (one divine Nature) and particulars (three Persons) are equally ultimate.  Universals and particulars must ultimately must be understood together, and in terms of one another, and so it is in science.  Trying to separate universals from particulars is just absurd; we can certainly comprehend partially, but real separation can’t happen in the world God made.  Trying to keep true particulars, but build on false universals, is just as absurd.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Truth is a Person

4 October 2009

A further thought to add to the earlier reflection on universals and particulars:

Ultimate reality — truth — is a Person: “I am the Truth,” Jesus says. Because the Truth is also the divine Word, one expects propositions, and there are propositions. But because the Truth is a Person, one expects more than propositions: one expects acts in history, questions, commands, stories, emotions, all the true things of which a person is capable. And there they are. These lay claim to truth in the same way that propositions do: they are the derivative truth that comes from being a reflection of Truth, the Person.A life that honors God — “walking in the truth,” the apostle John calls it — derives its truth in the same way: by reflecting Christ.

This is another reason why universals and particulars are equally ultimate. When the divine Word is made flesh, when Truth is a person with hair of a certain length and eyes of a certain color, particulars and universals have met and kissed, and can never be separated.

Which leaves us with a burning question: how are universals and particulars related?  It’s a question that has plagued philosophers for centuries (again, see Rushdoony’s The One and the Many for details on the history).  Christians have an answer to this question: “The same way unity and diversity are related in the Trinity.”  We have a word for it: perichoresis, the mutual indwelling of the Persons of the Trinity in one another.  So we might say that in the world, universals and particulars are perichoretically related — each indwells the other, as in the Trinity.  Which is to say, we don’t understand the phenomenon in the world any better than we understand the Trinitarian phenomenon of which it is a reflection.  But since the world is created by the Trinity and reflects the Trinity, we expect to encounter a mystery on this point, and it should not surprise us that the answer is beyond our ken.

Discovering that the thing is, finally and forever, beyond our reach forces us to realize that we are not God, and never will be.  There are two possible responses to this: glorify Yahweh in gratitude, or be offended and ungrateful.  One of them is life, health and peace, and the other is struggle, sickness and death — the same two choices humanity has always faced, from the Garden right down to today.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Understanding God

29 September 2009

Early in this week’s Truth Project video, Del Tackett said

Nothing that is true contradicts the nature of God.

Amen and amen.  This is absolutely vital, especially in the sort of wide-ranging endeavor that Tackett is engaged in.  See some resources for a further exploration of its implications in different fields here under week 4.

Coming to grips with the truth of God is not the work of five minutes.  The effort is coextensive with sanctification, and it is, at very least, the work of a lifetime.  A couple of paragraphs down on this week’s handout, I find the following:

At the same time, there is no assignment more daunting, no task more demanding…than that of seeking to understand the being, nature, character and attributes of the eternal Creator, who is Himself the ultimate source of all truth (Colossians 2:3).  So impossibly huge is this endeavor that we could not hope to tackle it at all except for the fact that He has graciously revealed Himself to us in His Word.  Apart from this revelation, mankind gropes and struggles in the darkness to piece together even the most flawed and rudimentary concept of God.

A hearty “Amen!” to the first part, but there is a problem here, and the problem is the words “in His Word” at the end of the second sentence.  Apart from the Bible, Tackett says, we have to grope around to find anything of God.  There is a sense in which this is true, as Paul says on the Areopagus:

And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him…

Mankind is blind and in darkness, worshipping idols instead of the true God, Paul says, but God has so designed man’s existence that it points man to Himself, so that even in the darkness man might grope after Him.  But there’s a catch.  Paul continues in the same sentence:

…though He is not far from each one of us;  for in Him we live and move and have our being….

So why is it that man does not find God, if He is not far from any of us?  Paul tells us in Romans 1:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man — and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.  Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies among themselves,  who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

And herein lies the problem with the statement in the handout.  Even apart from the Bible, man does not have to hunt for the basic facts about God; we already have them.  The problem is not that men don’t know God, but that they don’t like Him. Because they refuse to glorify Him, their thinking grows futile and their hearts grow dark, and in their darkness they descend to the madness of idolatry.  It was precisely this madness for which Paul rebuked the Athenians.  Why are they in the dark?  Is it because they don’t have the Bible yet?  No!  It is because they fled from clear knowledge of God and did their best to suppress their knowledge of Him.  When Paul found them in their self-inflicted darkness, they were not groping after God, because they were afraid they would find Him, which, Paul says, they would have, because “He is not far from each one of us.”

Now of course, apart from God revealing Himself, we would not know Him.  But God is already revealed in the world that He made, and it’s not as if we can choose to live somewhere else.  So it is not true that mankind would know nothing of God apart from the Bible, because in the creation, God already confronts us always and everywhere with Himself.

So what?

So understand that when you take the gospel to an unbeliever, it is not the case that he has always been ready to believe, if only someone would give him the truth.  It is not true that he’s “never heard.”  It is not true that he simply lacks enough evidence. He is not a well-intentioned person who suffers in ignorance purely because nobody ever showed him a Bible.

He’s the very opposite.

He is a willing captive of the enemy.  He does not want to be freed.  In his heart of hearts, he knows God, and he has fled God, straight into the futility, darkness and madness that afflicts his life and his soul.  God gave him over to these things, and he’s glad; he accepts them because he prefers them; he would rather be futile, dark and insane than have to face the God of the universe.  (Hard to believe?  It’s what Romans 1 says.  If you want to see it in action, read Nietzche sometime; he’s clearer about the choices than most pagans.)

You take this person the Good News that God hasn’t given up on him as completely as he’d hoped.  In fact, he will one day face God regardless, and God has assured us of this by raising Christ from the dead.  No wonder he doesn’t like hearing it — as Paul says elsewhere, it is the aroma of death, leading to death for someone who does not want to face God.

Of course, the rest of the story is that the unbeliever need not wait until he is forced to reckon with God.  He can face God as a forgiven son rather than as a stubborn enemy, because Christ died for his sins, and because Christ was raised to a new life, he can enter into everlasting life in God’s presence without fear.

Every knee will bow.  You can go easy, or you can go hard.

As we share Christ with people, we would do well to remember that it’s not in human nature to want to hear this — but God made man for Himself, and by grace man responds to the truth anyway.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Universals or Particulars?

28 September 2009

In week 2 of the Truth Project, Tackett notes that many pagan philosophies attempt to begin with particulars and proceed thence to universals. Others, notably Plato, try to begin with universals and make their way to the particulars. Tackett contends that “Plato was right; he just didn’t know where to get” his universals. He goes on to say that God gives us the universals by which all the particulars make sense.

There is an element of truth there, but it’s too simple by half, and flies directly in the face of some of the Scripture he cited earlier. When we look at a sunset and see the heavens declaring the glory of God, we are learning a universal from the particulars. When Paul tells us that everyone in the world is without excuse because “since the creation of the world, His invisible things are clearly seen, being understood by means of the things that are made,” Paul is telling us that man knows the universals — particularly God’s eternal power and God-ness — because he sees them in the particulars.

On the other hand, in Genesis 1-2, we note that God speaks to man, and by that revelation gives the principles by which man and his place in the creation make sense. Genesis 3 provides us with a graphic lesson in what happens when man tries to start from the particulars without taking account of what God has already told him. (Even this is oversimplified — we’re equating verbal revelation with universals, which is a bit too facile, but let it pass for now.)

So which is it? Do we start with the universals, or the particulars? The Christian answer to this is “both,” and a brief reflection on the Trinity should be enough to teach us this point.

God is ultimate reality.  Where do we start in the Trinity: unity, or diversity?  Which is more important, more fundamental to the nature of God? Both are equally vital, you say? Exactly. For more on this, see The One and the Many (more demanding, but a great review or the relevant history) or Trinity and Reality (more accessible) and its companion piece, Paradox and Truth.

Does all this seem a little arcane to you?

That’s because it is. But pushed out into the corners, the thing has serious consequences. Rushdoony likes to talk politics, and goes to some trouble in The One and the Many to show how societies that take plurality as ultimate disintegrate into chaos, and how societies that take unity as ultimate trend toward totalitarianism. Since the trinitarian idea isn’t available outside Christianity, pagans find themselves oscillating forever between one pole and the other, unable to reconcile them.

At a simpler level, I’d leave it with this: Christians ought not to forge an alliance with Plato when Scripture has given us a much, much better answer.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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