Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, March 1, 2024
As with the exodus, the cross is proof that God is real and powerful. He moved history in exactly the way he promised (see Isaiah 53). He raised Jesus from the dead! More than that, if he was willing to give his own Son for our good, we can trust that he is for us. He loves us. The objective evidence of his love is right there on the cross, and we can argue for the cross with objective evidence.

In a society that’s hostile towards Christian morality, how should we go about teaching our children God’s commands so that they’ll desire to follow him rather than the culture surrounding and pressuring them?
Not a God of Blind Faith
The first thing to remember is this: Our God is not a God of blind faith. As our Creator, he knows we are beings who need reasons for what we do, beings who are rational and who love, beings who are motivated by a desire to seek our good and the good of our loved ones. Of course, our sin distorts these qualities, even at the best of times, and we can be deceived about what actually is good for us (see Eve). But at root, our rationality and our desire to pursue what’s good for us are both good aspects of our humanity that God repeatedly appealed to when revealing his commands to his people.
We see a clear example of this approach in Deuteronomy 6:20–25, where God instructs the Israelites as to what they should emphasize when teaching their children his commands:
When your son asks you in time to come, saying, “What do the testimonies and the statutes and the judgments mean which the Lord our God commanded you?” then you shall say to your son, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us from Egypt with a mighty hand. Moreover, the Lord showed great and distressing signs and wonders before our eyes against Egypt, Pharaoh and all his household; He brought us out from there in order to bring us in, to give us the land which He had sworn to our fathers. So the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God for our good always and for our survival, as it is today. It will be righteousness for us if we are careful to observe all this commandment before the Lord our God, just as He commanded us.”
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Saturday, July 29, 2023
There are two related principles in Challies’s illustration and Habermas’s story for us to grasp and learn to live by. Don’t try to bear all the griefs and sufferings ahead of you all at once—especially not the imagined ones. Trust that God will give you what you need to bear your grief and suffering on the day when you need it.

I don’t need to tell you that life is hard. The older you are, the better you know this. The heavy burdens of past grief, present suffering, and anxiety about the future can easily overwhelm us, but they don’t have to. There’s wisdom about handling suffering to be learned from those who have gone through it before us.
Tim Challies, who wrote about the unexpected loss of his only son in Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God, had this to say about how to bear crippling grief:
My father was a landscaper, and he used to take me to work with him from time to time. I remember one day when he brought me with him to be an unskilled but low-cost source of manual labor. He showed me a skid of bricks that had been delivered to the end of a client’s driveway and then a walkway he was building to the front door. My job was to get the bricks from the first spot to the second. I remember gazing at that giant pile with despair. How could I, at twelve or thirteen years of age, possibly move what looked like a literal ton of bricks? I realized I would have to do it in the only way I could. Piece by piece, brick by brick, step by step, I carried each one to my father. He laid them as quickly as I could bring them to him until a perfect path led to the entrance of that beautiful home.
And just so, while God has called me to bear my grief for a lifetime, and to do so faithfully, he has not called me to bear the entire weight of it all at once. As the pile is made up of many bricks, a lifetime is made up of many days.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Thursday, June 1, 2023
Nothing that’s happening now is surprising to Christians who argued for keeping the opposite-sex definition of marriage. We had principled reasons for opposing same-sex marriage that had nothing to do with hate and everything to do with truth and the good of our society. This will become more and more clear over time, but that’s cold comfort in light of all the suffering queer theory will cause before it’s finally crushed under the weight of reality.

Andrew Sullivan has an article titled “The Queers Versus the Homosexuals” that’s insightful about the destructive danger of queer ideology but blind to the role he and other same-sex marriage advocates played in its rise to power.
Here’s what he says about his earlier advocacy for homosexuality and same-sex marriage:
Its case for equality was simple and clear: including us in existing institutions needn’t change anything in heterosexual life.
But of course it changed everything. It denied the objective truths our bodies speak about sexuality and marriage, and it denied the existence of a grounded standard we ought to conform ourselves to. Queer theory simply takes those ideas to the next level, as we can see from Sullivan’s description in the article:
The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. Because heterosexuality is the overwhelming norm, and homosexuality the exception, and because society is nothing but a complex of oppression, homosexuals are defined by their rejection of heteronormativity. To be queer is inherently to exist on the margins; to be odd, peculiar, weird, queer, hated, oppressed, and in revolt and rebellion. To be queer is to be dedicated to subversion, to mock conventions, to deconstruct language, to dismantle the human body, to defy “nature” and, above all, to liberate humankind from the prison of gender.
Sullivan doesn’t like where his advocacy ultimately led.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, May 19, 2023
First, if you are in a similar situation, please know you’re not alone. There are many others who are putting their jobs on the line for the sake of truth, the good of their neighbor, and the glory of God. Take courage from their courage. Second, speaking the truth might not be as scary and/or as final as you think. It could be that a simple explanation of why you’re declining to display your pronouns or use pronouns that don’t match a person’s sex will be accepted by your employer. Third, I think this man’s response could serve as an excellent outline for you as you plan your response to an employer’s pronoun request.

In the past, we’ve talked about why a request for pronouns is not a neutral request. It reflects a false and damaging worldview—one that’s contrary to Christianity—and we’ve encouraged Christians to decline to engage in exchanges of pronouns for this reason. But of course, it’s easy to give that advice. It’s much more challenging to live it out, which is why I pray for courage and wisdom for all those who suddenly find themselves in a situation where choosing to speak the truth could possibly cost them their job.
I recently spoke to a Stand to Reason supporter who received a company-wide email saying leaders were expected to display their pronouns. After considering the cost and thinking carefully through his response, this is what he told his employers:
I appreciate the goal of mutual respect and creating a welcoming environment for everyone. My desire is to be respectful of everyone. The expectation to display my pronouns asks me to accept a premise that I can’t accept—namely, that my pronouns could be different than he/him. It’s an ontological claim about the nature of reality, and I hold a different view. I’m not asking those that are transgender to accept my view of reality, but I’m being asked to accept theirs.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, March 17, 2023
Don’t confuse grace for others with inaction. Don’t confuse treating people with dignity with avoiding loving confrontations. Be strong in your convictions, be open about the truth, and be faithful in your work, knowing that the reason you’re responding to others with grace rather than hatred is not so that people won’t hate you. Even Jesus was hated. That can’t be avoided. Rather, you’re responding like Jesus because you’re called to “proclaim his excellencies” by reflecting his character to others.

This is a difficult time. Evil is called good, while good is called evil. Objective truth is disdained. Feelings are divinized. God is mocked.
If you’re feeling outraged, you’re in good company. Lot “felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds.” Jeremiah, who watched his beloved, unrepentant nation crumble under God’s judgment, is known as “the weeping prophet.” Elijah begged God to take his life when he thought all had forsaken God. Paul cried out when he was unjustly struck, “God is going to strike you, you whitewashed wall!” And who can forget the prophet Micaiah’s angry words towards those who would not listen: “Mark my words, all you people!”
It’s not wrong to be outraged by evil. Our desire for justice flows directly from our love for God and our knowledge of his magnificent, righteous, beautiful character. Because he is the standard of all justice, we likewise love justice. Because he is the Creator, all truth is valuable. And because we love the truth, lies are maddening. Because he has explained what it means to love, we know how to truly help people. And because we love people, injustices infuriate. God himself is angry at evil because evil destroys human beings, who are created in his image, so our outrage is understandable.
But how should we handle these feelings of outrage? Should we act on them, and if so, how?
Fortunately, the Bible doesn’t just say, “Be angry, and yet do not sin” (Eph. 4:26); it actually 1) describes what life in an unjust world should look like for Christians, and 2) explains the reason why we can respond to a fallen world as Jesus did without betraying justice.
What Should Living in an Unjust World Look Like for Christians?
First Peter is the go-to book for figuring out how to behave in an unjust world where you are “slandered as an evildoer,” where “they malign you,” where “you do what is right and suffer for it.” Peter tells us that even when we suffer under unreasonable people, we are to 1) patiently endure it, 2) continue to do what is right, and 3) respond as Jesus responded to those who maligned him.
God called us “out of darkness into his marvelous light” so that we might “proclaim the excellencies of him who has called us,” and, in part, we proclaim his excellencies by reflecting his character to the world—speaking the truth, being honest, treating human beings made in the image of God with dignity, “putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.” No matter how we’re treated as we work for the good of the people around us, we are to continue to act in the ways God has called us to act.
More specifically, we are to imitate Christ:
If when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God. For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in his steps, who committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in his mouth; and while being reviled, he did not revile in return; while suffering, he uttered no threats, but kept entrusting himself to him who judges righteously. (1 Pet. 20–23)
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Saturday, February 18, 2023

Nothing God does can be rightly understood apart from his being, character, and authority. We have to start there, interpreting his actions in light of who he is, not interpreting his character in light of how we would perceive a fallen human being who illegitimately took those same actions.

Many people misinterpret God’s character when looking at his demands and actions in history because they imagine what they would think of a fallen human being who did the things God has done, and they recoil. Failing to picture God as he is, they picture instead what they’re familiar with—a sinful, human tyrant imposing his preferred laws on people by force, destroying nations, or demanding worship.
But a fallen human being who has illegitimately grabbed power over others in order to use them for his own selfish purposes and vain ego is simply not analogous to a perfectly good being—a perfectly just and righteous Creator and Judge with legitimate authority over all, a God who sought the good of his enemies at his own expense, a loving Father of his people.
God, as the perfectly good and just Creator—the very standard of morality—has the kind of authority no fallen human being could ever rightly have, and so he can rightly do things no fallen human being could ever rightly do. That might sound odd to you at first, but the idea that a particular action can be wrong for one person but right for another is not a foreign concept to us. In our everyday life, we all live according to the understanding that the acceptability of a person’s actions can depend on his authority and role. For example, if I were to lock you in a building for a decade, my action would be morally wrong—even if you were, in fact, guilty of something. But if the government were to rightly convict you of a crime and lock you in a building for a decade, its action would be good and just. The difference in the morality of our actions—though it’s the same action in both cases—is determined by the authority and role of the government and my lack of those things.
Now apply that principle to God. Just as there are ways the government can act that are good and just that would not be good and just if I were to act in those ways, so there are things the ultimate being in the universe can rightly do such that if any fallen, finite human being did those things, we would rightly recoil.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Saturday, August 6, 2022
This is what pro-lifers do. They usually do not make religious arguments when making their case publicly. Instead, they reason from widely-accepted moral/philosophical principles (e.g., murder should be illegal and every human being should have equal protection under the law) and scientific principles (e.g., a human being is the same kind of being from conception to death). Because both Christians and non-Christians share the ability to recognize basic moral truths (regardless of how those truths are actually grounded), and because the case against abortion can be made by arguing from these basic moral truths to pro-life conclusions, you will rarely (if ever) hear pro-life advocates appeal to their specific theological doctrines or cite the Bible to argue publicly against abortion. They have no interest in imposing their religion on others. They merely want the laws of our land to protect the lives of innocent unborn human beings just as they protect the innocent born ones.

The accusation that Christians have been “imposing their religion” on everyone through the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade has been widespread. Leaving aside the relevant point that the Supreme Court has not imposed a view of abortion on society but has merely returned abortion legislation to the states (since there is no actual right to abortion in the Constitution), is there any merit to the idea that the pro-life argument is religious? Well, yes and no. I do think the pro-life view is ultimately grounded in the Christian view of human beings, but not in the way most people think (and not in a way that would justify calling the argument “religious,” but we’ll get to that in a moment).
The pro-life argument, in its foundational form, is simple:

It’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings.
Abortion intentionally kills innocent human beings.
Therefore, abortion is wrong.

The first thing to do when someone accuses you of making a religious argument against abortion is to clearly state the premises and conclusion of the argument and then ask, Which premise of this argument is religious?
I suspect most people’s answer will be #2,* but that is incorrect. The second premise depends on scientific reasons, not religious ones. It’s a biological fact that human beings are the same kind of organism from the moment they begin to exist, throughout every normal stage of development. Any embryology textbook will explain this. There’s no scientific reason to think we start out as some other kind of being and then become human at a later date.
The scientific truth is that the unborn is a living, growing, developing, very young human being. Abortion intentionally kills that human being. So no, the second premise is not where uniquely religious truth is hiding. (Incidentally, only those who argue for the mystical view that the unborn is later infused with a soul, or value, or whatever are making a “religious” claim about the unborn when it comes to this premise. Pro-lifers do not argue this way.)
Why Human Beings Have Equal Value and Equal Rights
That leaves the first premise: It’s wrong to intentionally kill innocent human beings. Here is where Christianity (and Judaism before it) is informing the view that human beings are intrinsically valuable (having equal rights because all equally share a valuable human nature made in the image of God), not merely instrumentally valuable (with unequal rights earned as a result of individual characteristics), and that it’s wrong to end the lives of those who are inconvenient, or damaged, or unwanted. That religious idea utterly revolutionized the world over the last 2,000 years as Christianity spread—ending slavery in the West, fighting racism, making infanticide unthinkable, and more.
At each point in history when these evils were first opposed by those who believed in the Christian idea of intrinsic, equal human value, the Christians were ridiculed, but since the Christian view of human beings is actually true and beautiful, it has, by the mercy of God, prevailed. Thankfully, today in the West, Christians are no longer ridiculed for being against infanticide. Instead, most people are horrified by the very idea of it. But please hear me when I say you should not imagine you would have been against infanticide then if you are for abortion now. The same reasoning—a lack of belief in intrinsic human value, a belief that one’s convenience, economic situation, desires, etc. justify disposing of your children—has undergirded support for both practices.
So yes, it is very Christian to think human beings are valuable and should not be disposed of—no matter their characteristics, no matter the care they require from others, no matter whether or not they’re wanted by the world—and it is indeed lurking behind the first premise of the pro-life argument. After all, even our own founding documents here in America recognize the fact that our unalienable natural rights come from our Creator, who endowed them.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Thursday, July 28, 2022
He’s saying his authority is backing them in their judgment, something that God promised in the Mosaic Law. So does this apply to us today? Yes! When church discipline is done, Jesus still backs the authority of those he has put in place to judge, and no one in that position should forget who they’re representing and the gravity of their judgments.

Since we have spoken in the past here at Stand to Reason about the fact that not every promise made in the Bible applies to us today, I received a question about whether the promise Jesus made to his disciples in Matthew 18:19–20 is a promise we can claim. Here are Jesus’ words:
Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.
Since this seems to be a confusing passage for many (and it’s also an important one since—see below—it’s likely an example of Jesus claiming to be divine), I thought it would be worth sharing my response here.
The Context for Matthew 18:19–20
As always, when we’re trying to understand the meaning of a verse, we need to start with the context around that verse, and what we find here is that these verses are in a passage about church discipline. Here they are in context:
If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven.
Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, April 1, 2022
Christians must love the Bible. It is absolutely crucial that we, as believers in a transcendent God and standard, fully submit ourselves to the revelation he’s given us. Again, this is extremely countercultural in a society that values creating our own identities and “truths,” but the difference between our worldview and the culture’s goes right down to this root: Is there a God we ought to submit our lives to in order to flourish, or does our flourishing depend on our creating ourselves according to our own desires? 

I’ve been reading Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview by Gene Edward Veith, and it details the worldview of fascism, an ideology respected—and even popular—among Western intellectuals in the 20th century before Nazism revealed the horrors it can unleash.
The book was written 30 years ago (thankfully, untainted by today’s political controversies and biases), so it’s shocking to discover that not only is it relevant to our situation today, but also the ideas central to the fascist worldview have filtered down from the 20th-century intellectuals and gained a great deal of ground in mainstream, popular thought—just not under the proper name of “fascism.”
Veith sums up the central idea of the fascist worldview this way:
Fascism can be understood most clearly in terms of its archenemy, the Jew. Just as the Nazis sought to exterminate the Jews, fascism sought to eliminate the Judeo-Christian tradition from Western culture.
Ernst Nolte has defined fascism as “the practical and violent resistance to transcendence.” Whereas the Judeo-Christian tradition focuses on a transcendent God and a transcendent moral law, fascist spirituality is centered upon what is tangible. Nature and the community assume the mystical role they held in the ancient mythological religions. Religious zeal is displaced away from the transcendent onto the immanent: the land, the people, the blood, the will.
Fascists seek an organic, neomythological unity of nature, the community, and the self. The concepts of a God who is above nature and a moral law that is above society are rejected. Such transcendent beliefs are alienating, cutting off human beings from their natural existence and from each other.
Specifically, such transcendent beliefs were condemned as being “Jewish.” Fascist anti-Semitism was not merely racial—despite the biological race theory that dominated National Socialism. The rationale for anti-Semitism was also the ideas of the Jews. According to fascist theorists, the Jewish influence—that is, the idea of a transcendent religion and a transcendent moral law—was responsible for the ills of Western culture.
Because fascists rejected the transcendent, they were hostile towards Bible-centered Christianity (and the Judaism that birthed it). They also rejected the idea of knowable, objective truth and viewed the academy as a way to indoctrinate people into the “correct” (that is, their preferred) ideas. Here, Veith explains Heidegger’s argument against academic freedom:
Academic freedom as the disinterested pursuit of truth shows “arbitrariness,” partaking of the old essentialist view that truth is objective and transcendent. The essentialist scholar is detached and disengaged, showing “lack of concern,” missing the sense in which truth is ultimately personal, a matter of the will, demanding personal responsibility and choice. In the new order, the scholar will be fully engaged in service to the community. Academic freedom is alienating, a function of the old commitment to moral and intellectual absolutes.
The concept that there are no absolute truths means that human beings can impose their truth upon an essentially meaningless world. There are no objective, essentialist criteria to stand in the way of united, purposeful scholars forging their new intellectual order and willing the essence of the German people. What this meant in practice can be seen in the Bavarian Minister of Culture’s directive to professors in Munich, that they were no longer to determine whether something “is true, but whether it is in keeping with the direction of the National Socialist revolution.”
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Sunday, March 13, 2022
The lack of belief in objective morality—something that can only be grounded in the character of an objective God—is a poison that will ultimately destroy the ability of ideologically diverse people to live together. If this is to turn around, it must do so one person at a time, at the worldview level.

In R.C. Sproul’s Surprised by Suffering, he comments on the implications for justice when a society rejects objective morality:
If there is no such thing as right and wrong, if there is no such thing as moral obligation, then there is no such thing as justness. If there is no such thing as justness, then ultimately there is no such thing as justice. Justice becomes a mere sentiment. It means the preferences of an individual or a group. If the majority in one society prefers that adultery be rewarded, then justice is served when an adulterer receives a prize for his adultery. If the majority in a different society prefers that adultery be punished, then justice is served if the adulterer is penalized. But in this schema, there is no such thing as ultimate justice because the will of an individual or of a group can never serve as an ultimate moral norm for justice. It can reveal only a preference.
And of course, this subjective view of “justice” as preference is exactly what many people assume these days when they accuse those who argue in terms of objective principles of making power plays—that is, they accuse them of hiding their true goal (i.e., maintaining the structures of power from which they benefit) behind nice-sounding words and “principles” that are merely being used to manipulate people into going along with their preferences.
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